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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

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.
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