The Way We Wore

There’s a cycle clothes go through: unwearable, daring, fashionable, everywhere, sooo last year, grotesque, interesting, stylish, revival (but never quite accurate), museum piece. According to fashion historian James Laver, the declension reads: indecent, shameless, daring, smart, dowdy, hideous, ridiculous, amusing, quaint, charming, romantic, beautiful.

At various points in history, fashion has evolved extreme costumes or hairstyles that everybody thinks they must follow (crinolines, beehive hairdos, skirts that trail along the ground) until one day everybody quietly drops it. It goes with a kind of official myopia, an inability to see that women don’t really have 17in waists, or sloping shoulders, or eyebrows half-way up their foreheads.

More examples: wearing thin, fragile nylon stockings in all weathers, as we did in the 50s and early 60s. The thin stockings were worn with indoor shoes – in the winter. My mother recalled that you put cardboard in your shoes to try and keep your feet warm, but it wasn’t very effective.

Nylon stockings became 15 denier tights circa 1967. Tights were cold in winter, but hot in summer. Bare legs were just about OK as long as you dyed them orange. Around 1980 we gave up on the QTan and we were fine. Tights manufacturers even come out with a “white leg” shade (ecru).

Society became very conservative between 1950 and 1965. Somehow this went with the rigid hairstyles, constricting suspender belts and pinching pointy shoes. In the 50s women wore a suit, hat and high heels to go shopping – or to travel by train or air, or go up to "town" (London). My mother had beautiful tweed suits made for me and my sister, and we wore them once, to travel to Ireland by boat. If you didn’t have a hat, you wore a headscarf. In the early 60s, you wore a light chiffon scarf that wouldn’t crush your beehive.

White gloves were a must in public – from the late 19th century until the 50s. Gloves made sense when heating and cooking relied on coal, and the air in cities was full of “smuts” and every surface was dirty. An upper-class girl recalls being forced to carry a pair of “slimy, nylon” gloves whenever she went out in the 60s.

By the late 60s, hats and gloves were no longer obligatory, so manufacturers made gloves “fun” with cutouts and bright colours. Hats became big, with scarves round the crown. Headscarves vanished – and if it rained we just got wet.

Setting your hair on rollers and then back-combing it was time-consuming, sleeping in rollers was painful, and the resulting hairstyles suited nobody. Rollers lasted from the late 50s to the late 60s, but when young people dropped them older generations were shocked. They were convinced our long, limp hair was “dirty” – but we washed it far more often when we didn’t have to “set” it afterwards.

Cotton shirts, blouses, handkerchiefs, napkins, tablecloths, sheets, aprons, summer dresses – they were all starched. A stiffening of manmade fibre made this unnecessary – but had it ever been necessary?

In the early 20th century, some rabbis in the UK wore dog collars and birettas. About 30 years ago there was a lot of fuss about what women priests were going to wear (cassocks with darts!?). Now rabbis and priests sport ordinary clothes, business suits or smart workwear.

At our convent school we wore lisle stockings and pinafores, and veils in chapel. City men wore bowler hats or trilbies. Men junked the hats circa 1970 – the convent probably updated the uniform around the same year.

Barbara Cartland froze the image she adopted as a young woman in the 30s (when hundreds of men proposed, according to her). The Queen Mother and Queen Mary both stuck to the styles of their youth. When Twiggy was having tea with Noël Coward one day, a visitor arrived and: “It was Merle Oberon. It’s funny how people get stuck in the era when they were at their most glamorous. She was wearing a big black polka dot chiffon dress, with a big black bow around her waist.... with high, high heels. But she looked gorgeous.” (Twiggy in Black and White) Men get stuck with teenage rebel hair: Nigel Kennedy, Gary Rhodes, Simon Rattle.

You know you’re old when they start reviving the clothes you wore when young. When they start reviving the clothes they were reviving when you were young...

More clothes here, and links to the rest.