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| Fashion’s victims through
the years |
Prepare to cringe as you remember the hideous
fashions you sported in your youth writes Ruth Gorb
Worst Fashions by Catherine Horwood
Sutton Publishing, £9.99
|
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YOU may not wish to be reminded of this, but do you remember
wearing hot pants? Or power shoulders? Or if you are a man, kipper
ties? Prepare, then, to cringe. Catherine Horwood has gathered together
in one book the ugliest and most embarrassing fashions of the last
50 years. You will recognise them, because you wore them. This is
What Not To Wear writ large, grotesque and in everyone’s photo
album.
Dr Horwood, who is a dress historian at Royal Holloway College,
starts her graphically and horrifyingly illustrated book with a
quotation from Oscar Wilde: “Fashion,” he wrote, “is
a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every
six months.”
Not strictly true, of course, but the passage of time does do terrible
things to the way we see ourselves. The more recent time, that is;
the little slip dresses of the 1920s look charming to modern eyes
but no-one, at any time or ever again, will ever look good in a
shell suit.
Dr Horwood, who at home in Primrose Hill is a model of timeless
elegance (now), bravely starts her new book with a photograph of
herself in the 1970s wearing Bermuda shorts and clumpy white patent
leather platform shoes. So there you go, she says; platforms are
back in fashion. The fake fur coats of the 1970s are back, and there
were on the catwalks recently a sprinkling of those lamentable puff-ball
skirts.
So has the cycle of fashion accelerated? Dr Horwood thinks it is
happening because there are fewer and fewer truly new fashions around.
There is also the comforting truth that details such as the width
of trouser legs and the length of skirts no longer matter. Fashion
has never been so eclectic.
Look back 40 years ago, however, and there was far more tendency
to conform. All women shortened their skirts – even the Queen
was seen to reveal her knees – but the mini is one fashion
Dr Horwood has refused to make mock of in her book: “Because
I was a mini-skirt babe.”
The really big change, she thinks, came with the decline of haute
couture influence, and the arrival of cheap street fashion. With
the 1960s came Carnaby Street and Mary Quant, and in the 1970s,
tartan trousers, knitted trousers, shorts with long socks and huge
bow ties.
We all have memories of uncles in those dreadful patterned jumpers.
Val Doonican was to blame, but Dr Horwood could only track down
one picture of this malign influence on men’s woolies –
“he must have purged all the photographs.”
The memories come flooding back. There’s Joan Collins in the
biggest shoulder pads in the business – and yes, we did all
look that silly. One dedicated follower of fashion was seen, when
the shoulder pad bubble burst, to shamefacedly pop into the dustbin
two bulging carrier-bags of pads, wrenched from the shoulders of
all her clothes.
Not many of us can swear that we didn’t go in for back-combing
and lacquer – another photograph of the author shows her resplendent
in big flip-ups. There are the flares and the ground-length maxi
skirts that got caught in the escalator, the paper knickers (no,
never), the flowered smocks and the leg-warmers, the scratchy silver
lurex – “lurex was to evening-wear what Babycham was to
champagne,” says Dr Horwood sternly.
This is all very much the lighter side of her preoccupation with
what we wear. Her latest book, Keeping Up Appearances, was the result
of serious research into how, between the two world wars, the clothes
people wore reflected their place in society, and more importantly,
their aspirations. How sober, and how respectable, that seems compared
with the fads and excesses of the past 50 years.
It was, says Catherine Horwood, great fun to research, although
she had trouble finding photographs from personal albums. Perhaps
we have all done a Val Doonican purge and torn up the more embarrassing
pictures.
Or perhaps we never looked that bad. It is the famous who seem to
have gone for what was, briefly, high fashion, and who have fallen
flat on their faces. Enjoy the image of Elizabeth Taylor in the
briefest of hot pants, of dear old Wilfred Bramble, Steptoe Senior,
in a hideous patterned shirt and of a “royal redhead”
seen from the back in flowered Lycra leggings. Will we ever learn
from past mistakes? Never. Biba had women falling off their five
inch heeled platform boots in the 1960s, and in 1999 a Japanese
student fell off her platform shoes and fractured her skull.
Some things, lets face it, never go away because we like them. What’s
wrong with a nice warm padded jacket, you hear yourself say, or
those jolly camouflage trousers from Laurence Corner in Hampstead
Road. Let us just avoid the puffball skirts, at all costs. |
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