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'Peak of Chic'--Revised
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16562 |
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LIFE
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11 / 1989 |
1,702 Words |
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Wendi Winters
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Hot pants. Mood rings. Nehru jackets. Platform shoes. Leisure suits. Op art-patterned A-line dresses. Day-Glo T-shirts. Love Beads. Peace symbol pendants. Bell-bottoms. False eyelashes. Popcorn bodysuits. Bonnie and Clyde gangster suits. The Annie Hall Look. Mini-, maxi-, midi-, and microskirts. John Travolta's three-piece white suit from Saturday Night Fever. Nik-Nik shirts. Batman memorabilia.
What is this? An inventory of a Vogue fashion editor's closet? Perish the thought! It's a three-hankie stroll down fashion's memory lane, a promenade past racks of clothes and accessories that, once, the fickle fashion aficionado had to have or die of fad famine. Once heralded as the peak of chic, they are now relegated to the compost heap of Failed Fashion.
"It's tacky!" That's the kiss of death for any fashion trend. For the most part, tackiness titles are reserved for anything that's several years off the style track. If hindsight is 20/20, we must have been blind the day we brought some of these things home. Others we purchased under the assumption they were "timeless fashions"--yet in the fashion world, nothing is timeless for more than two seasons.
Some fads speed through life faster than a fax transmission--they're out of style before they even arrive in the stores. For example: two or three Hollywood "notables" wear "the look" to an after-hours disco; soon it appears on Entertainment Tonight and every tabloid cover; Elle does a story on the hot new look; designers scramble to copy it; then, once it hits the racks eight weeks later, it dies. You don't hear of it again until you read year-end retrospective articles like "Memorable Moments in Fashion: Cher's Wardrobe 1989."
But the truly tacky fashions never go away. Like a rubber tire buried in the county dump, tacky trends reemerge on the fashion scene repeatedly. Among some of the golden oldies that scream "They're Ba-a-a-ack!" more often than a Poltergeist sequel:
· Miniskirts--Though commonly believed to have appeared in the early 1960s, costume research reveals Cleopatra premiered the look for Mark Antony. ("You'll make an asp of yourself," he warned.) Since London designer Mary Quant sent the world into a tizzy of hem hacking in this century, the look has never really died for those with cellulite-free thighs (and those who mistakenly think they have cellulite-free thighs.) The mini took a hiatus from '73 to '81 and has hovered since. Two years ago, it attempted a serious comeback but was severely trounced in the stores. (Actually, women were so shell-shocked by the hemline issue in '87 that they refused to buy anything at all, sending retail sales plummeting and a number of high-fashion heads rolling.) Bottom line, the miniskirt exists today to remind those who wore them the first time around that they would now look too old and too ridiculous if they attempted to wear one again.
· Bodysuits--Halston made them acceptable in the 1970s--but he never had to maneuver in the ladies' room with one. Soon, everyone had a closetful of the things; they were cheap, body-hugging, and tended to pill. They were thrown away by the millions when less body-conscious fashions appeared on the scene. Four years ago, designer Donna Karan put them back on the map as the "base" for all her widely copied rich working-woman clothes. This time around, they
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