1968 vs. 2018: Why Love, Peace, and Flower Power Still Matter Today
Big Data tells us that the ’80s, ’90s, and, ’00s are trending; still, many of the forces driving fashion forward concept-wise in 2018 are akin to those that were relevant 50 years ago, in the tumultuous year of 1968. Even news headlines eerily echo those heralded in the faraway hippie era. “It’s almost beginning to feel as if the history of ’60s and early ’70s counterculture is replaying itself before our eyes,” wrote Vogue Runway’s Sarah Mower. “Since the election of Trump in 2016, the radical impulses of angry ‘wokeness’ have started to metabolize, among some, into a search for inner peace and spiritual enlightenment.” Millennials, it seems, have tweaked Timothy Leary’s motto: “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” to “Turn on, tune in, stand up.” Activism has worked its way into fashion, as has wellness, mysticism, and conservation. Think: Jeremy Scott’s “Call Your Senator” tee, Balenciaga’s World Food Programme shout-outs; sound baths and incense; healers and eco-conscious upcycling. All were present in the recent round of shows.
Here, 10 trippy points of connection between 1968 and 2018.
Higher Frequencies
Music, chemicals, and mysticism were some of the means by which people tried to access the love and connectedness at the core of the hippie ethos. Though it was with a sense of play that Penelope Tree donned a “black satin Lady Vampira wrap with silver roses and a witch’s dazzle-them, wow-them headdress” for Vogue in 1968, fashion then, as now, could be used to signal one’s belief systems, as the Costume Institute exhibition “Heavenly Bodies” demonstrated. The 2019 collections, perhaps not coincidentally, were infused with spiritualism, in varieties other than Roman Catholic. Gucci presented a show in an ancient burial ground; Rodarte chose a cemetery as a location; and sound baths, incense, and healers made appearances through fashion month. Where is this all coming from? Probably from a desire to find a way to move forward and away from the upheaval and divisiveness of the current political climate.
The Young and the Restless
“Gone is the once-upon-a-daydream world. The dreams, still there, break into action.” These are the words Vogue used to introduce the youthquake to its readers in 1965. Thus was the Silent Generation eclipsed by the Baby Boomers. Now, as then, big business is trying to connect with the new gen through influencers and other hit-or-miss strategies like collaborations. In contrast, designers like Grace Wales Bonner (who coincidentally referenced hippie-era mysticism in her Spring 2019 collection) are finding success with authentic voices and messages that speak to their peers.
Flower Power
Though Vogue didn’t join the hippie caravan, it wasn’t above elevating bohemian trends. Less than a year after Scott McKenzie released the single “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),” “the unofficial anthem of the counterculture movement of the 1960s,” according to The Telegraph, Lauren Hutton appeared on the January 15 cover wearing a coif “with more than a hint of romance about it.” With a ’do arranged by stylist Yusuke Suga of the tony Kenneth salon (where Jackie Kennedy was a regular), there was no chance of anyone mistaking Hutton for a barefoot and muddied festival girl. Similarly, Kate and Laura Mulleavy avoided an artsy look when flower-dressing their Spring 2019 Rodarte show. Rather than use the humble wildflowers associated with the boho look, they opted for luscious roses and exotic orchids. These enhaloed the heads of models who led the audience down a garden path in New York’s Marble Cemetery into a romantic realm of fairy tale and fantasy.
The High Life
A 1968 picture of Vogue editor Caterine Milinaire, taken at home, “looking as splendid as the setting, Woburn Abbey, where she was staying with her mother, the Duchess of Bedford,” suggests that fashion’s fascination with the world of interiors is not a recent development. Lifestyle might not have been a buzzword in fashion back then, but the “beautiful people” the magazine followed offered a complete aspirational package: looks, locations, and lots of great clothes. Golden girls Giorgia Tordini and Gilda Ambrosio, the founders of the buzzy and niche line Attico, clearly understand the importance of context. They usually show their collections, and photograph them, in the kind of elegant, magazine-ready living spaces their clothes are destined to be worn in.
Pop Sensation
“Death, sex, money, and fame were the main themes of the ’60s and they have been Warhol’s themes, also,” wrote art critic Jean Perrault in Vogue on the eve of the artist’s 1970 retrospective. Warhol, whose work is currently on show in a crowd-drawing blockbuster exhibition at the Whitney, remains as elusive now as he was back in 1968, the year he was shot. He’s certainly just as relevant. The artist’s obsessions with technology, documentation, and fame, seem to have anticipated the digital age. “I want to be a machine,” he stated long before the birth of Grimes, who this month released a single about AI. We are still catching up with Warhol, who understood, wrote Perrault, that the “truth is too hard to take. It has to be distanced or framed by dumb repetitions.” Just as Andy furiously silk-screened, taped, filmed, and collected, editing his reality and keeping the world at bay, we scroll, swipe, and recharge ad infinitum, and reality becomes ever more dissociated from materiality.
Men in Vogue
This year saw not only a groundswell of interest in menswear as old houses were revived by new creative heads, but also a further crumbling of the gender divide. It’s a process, suggested Norma Kamali in an interview with Vogue, that began in the late ’60s and ’70s, but was cut short by AIDS. Today there’s room enough in fashion for unisex and androgynous looks as well as for male peacocking.
Paris Is Burning
Maria Grazia Chiuri recognized the anniversary of Mai 68 in her Fall 2018 collection for Christian Dior. The set, reported Nicole Phelps, “elaborately reproduced magazine covers and protest art of the late 1960s,” and the opening look, an intarsia sweater read: “C’est non non non et non!” It’s a message that needs no translation; left-leaning activists are saying the the same thing stateside. Enough is enough.
The White Album
Valentino, “pouring out all this beauty, romance, and perfection, has become an idol of the young, a new symbol of modern luxury,” Vogue wrote in 1968. Swap Pierpaolo Piccioli’s name in for the house founder’s, and the statement remains on point. Fifty years after the triumph of Valentino’s white-on-white collection, Piccioli is on now top, wowing at every turn with glorious, extravagant, and truly luxe ready-to-wear and couture collections that are grounded by his belief in the importance of craftsmanship. “Beauty is close to the idea of grace,” the designer told Vogue. “I think it’s important to give dream to reality and not to escape.”
Wedding Belles
On October 20, 1968, among a small group of friends and family on the groom’s private island, Skorpios, Jacqueline Kennedy became Jackie O. The “miniskirted bride” as she was described at the time, wore a short pleated number with a romantic long-sleeved blouse with lace inserts and a white ribbon in her combed-back hair. The dress, pulled from her closet, was from Valentino’s famous white collection from earlier in the year. Though this union of jet-set “royalty” was meant to be a low-key affair, it was big news, especially for Valentino. “There’s an old saying,” The Boston Globe later commented, “that wherever Jackie goes, fashion goes—and it’s true.” The “Meghan Effect” went into overdrive in 2018 when the divorced American actress married Prince Harry. The wedding of the year, beamed out to the world, was anything but an intimate affair. The bride wore a dress designed by Givenchy’s Clare Waight Keller that was devoid of embellishment (that was reserved for the veil) and a distinctive boatneck, or Sabrina, neckline, named for the character played by the French house’s muse, Audrey Hepburn, in a 1954 rom-com.
Body Positive
“More Skin, More Everything in Movies,” was the title of a story that appeared in a 1968 issue of Vogue. The fashion of the times were also revealing; the bikini came into its own in the ’60s and Rudi Gernreich debuted his daring monokini in 1964, a breast-bearing, and nipple-exposing design that could be banned from Instagram more than 50 years later. There was a certain earthiness to the ’60s ethos that connected to anti-commercialism and to the philosophy of the Maharishi who said: “Enjoy what you are! The natural state of [wo]man is joy.” Jean Voigt, a Paris-based Dane, seemed to take that advice and run with it when he designed the assemblage-style bathing suit at left. While Voigt’s work is clearly sensational, Gypsy Sport’s Rio Uribe is sincere in commitment to finding beauty in difference. His Spring 2019 show was a celebration of Mother Nature as expressed through the heavenly bodies of his diverse cast. Preach.
