Fashion?

[UstadKhanAli]

[blue2blue]

How sad to be lost in a big city without your dominatrix.

[Vito Corleone]

Beards DEFINATELY seem to be back in a big way. I was watching some music-awards show a couple months ago and found it funny how virtually every guy that came on stage all had the same stubble/growth look.

 

[UstadKhanAli]

 

Ken, you always have a way of being able to distill complex subjects down to essentials.

 

 

T'anks Craig!!!

 

I wonder if I've achieved that with my photos of fine fashion and hipster chic apparel?

[blue2blue]

[UstadKhanAli]

Beards DEFINATELY seem to be back in a big way. I was watching some music-awards show a couple months ago and found it funny how virtually every guy that came on stage all had the same stubble/growth look.

 

Absolutely. Been a popular thing here on the West Coast for a few years now.

 

[UstadKhanAli]

 

How sad to be lost in a big city without your dominatrix.

 

 

But I like the big boots, perfect for loft living and navigating that urban jungle.

[Vito Corleone]

 

The outfits and haircuts look different -- but if you know your fashion, you can see it's the same culture segment: shop boys.

 

 

That's why I chose those two pics--to show that even within the same culture segment, the fashion changes are fairly significant.

 

 

 

I watch a lot of movies from across the decades. (I particularly like the early 30s/pre-Hayes Code jazz era films but I'm a big fan of the 40s/swing movies, too.) Of course, coming of age in the 60s, I watched all the 60s and many of the 70s films. As many great films as there were in the 60s, it seemed like there were just as many total stinkers in the 70s. I think the movie making establishment just couldn't get their bearings and kept throwing money around frantically -- like a degenerate gambler looking for the big score that will help him pay his hotel bill and get out of town on both legs. Interestingly, though, as bad as things got in the 70s, in terms of both style and artistic content, the mainstream movies and TV of the 80s were almost uniformly gawdawful in terms of not just content but the utterly hideous clothes and hair fashions and the insipid music that was often glued onto the soundtracks. Without question in my mind, the 1980s mainstream culture had, hands down, the ugliest, most grotesque visual style of any decade in my awareness since the bizarre excesses of the 1890s.

 

 

Interesting. I see the 70s as the high-point in American cinema and the low point in American fashion. 70s movies were the era of Clockwork Orange, Taxi Driver, The Godfather, The Conversation, Chinatown, Jaws, Annie Hall, Close Encounters, Network, The French Connection, Deliverance, Dog Day Afternoon, Five Easy Pieces, Alien, Manhattan, Last Picture Show, Mean Streets, Deer Hunter, Apocolypse Now, One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest, etc etc. I personally don't believe any decade delivered so much boundary-pushing AND quality film-making at the same time as we saw in the 70s.

 

80s fashions were certainly more extreme in many way, but at least there was a purpose behind them. They were TRYING to be extreme and push the boundaries of fashion while in the 70s it was somewhere between hanging onto the 60s counter-culture fashion and rebelling against it. The 80s were full-on "we're NOT hippies" statements for the most part. And then, of course, the 90s were all about rebelling against the ultra-fashion of the 80s.

 

Just all my opinion, of course. And, as with all of us, probably largely reflective of my own age (51) and cultural influences.

[blue2blue]

That's why I chose those two pics--to show that even within the same culture segment, the fashion changes are fairly significant.

Hems go up, hems go down. To me, the outfits look almost interchangeable -- I mean, they're mall clothes. For mall people.

 

 

 

Interesting. I see the 70s as the high-point in American cinema and the low point in American fashion. 70s movies were the era of Clockwork Orange, Taxi Driver, The Godfather, The Conversation, Chinatown, Jaws, Annie Hall, Close Encounters, Network, The French Connection, Deliverance, Dog Day Afternoon, Five Easy Pieces, Alien, Manhattan, Last Picture Show, Mean Streets, Deer Hunter, Apocolypse Now, One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest, etc etc. I personally don't believe any decade delivered so much boundary-pushing AND quality film-making at the same time as we saw in the 70s.

I don't mean to suggest there weren't some good movies in that decade (although they mostly got hipster/freak fashions totally wrong -- like the utterly goofy clothes and look of Peter Fonda in Easy Rider -- technically a 60s movie -- but the prototype for a bajillion crappy and totally phony 70s 'counterculture' movies that followed). You did some good work cherry picking the decade's barely arguable highlights -- but, as someone who was seeing 3-5 movies in theatres in the period, I have to say that there was just an extraordinary amount of utterly clueless crap as Hollywood elites tried to figure out the sea changes that that so imperfectly viewed as outsiders in the 60s. In the 70s, as bizarre commercial takeoffs on counterculture fashions permeated the mainstream (hence the awful fashions you mention), the Hollywood phonies flailed about trying to capture the zeitgeist and mostly failing miserably.

80s fashions were certainly more extreme in many way, but at least there was a purpose behind them. They were TRYING to be extreme and push the boundaries of fashion while in the 70s it was somewhere between hanging onto the 60s counter-culture fashion and rebelling against it. The 80s were full-on "we're NOT hippies" statements for the most part. And then, of course, the 90s were all about rebelling against the ultra-fashion of the 80s. Just all my opinion, of course. And, as with all of us, probably largely reflective of my own age (51) and cultural influences.

Hmm. I just thought the purpose was to make all mall fashion folk look like new wave poodles.

 

[Vito Corleone]

 

Hems go up, hems go down. To me, the outfits look almost interchangeable -- I mean, they're mall clothes. For mall people.

 

 

Yes, but you can say the same thing about any subculture. The only REAL fashion changes are when a new subculture emerges: the hippies of the 60s, the punks of the 70s, the hip-hoppers of the 80s, etc. Fashions change and evolve and circle around within these subcultures now just as they always have.

 

So maybe the real question that should be asked in this thread is not whether fashion has become stagnent, but whether our society is no longer producing new and significant subcultures?

 

 

 

 

I don't mean to suggest there weren't some good movies in that decade (although they mostly got hipster/freak fashions totally wrong -- like the utterly goofy clothes and look of Peter Fonda in Easy Rider -- technically a 60s movie -- but the prototype for a bajillion crappy and totally phony 70s 'counterculture' movies that followed). You did some good work cherry picking the decade's barely arguable highlights -- but, as someone who was seeing 3-5 movies in theatres in the period, I have to say that there was just an extraordinary amount of utterly clueless crap as Hollywood elites tried to figure out the sea changes that that so imperfectly viewed as outsiders in the 60s. In the 70s, as bizarre commercial takeoffs on counterculture fashions permeated the mainstream (hence the awful fashions you mention), the Hollywood phonies flailed about trying to capture the zeitgeist and mostly failing miserably.

 

I'd argue the same could be said of ANY decade. When HASN'T the Hollywood elites put out mostly utterly clueless crap in pursuit of dollars? Did I cherry-pick the best of the 70s? Sure. But I'd venture you're doing the same thing when you're looking back across the decades. Only difference might be that most of the cherry-picking has already been done for you. You grew up in the 70s, so you watched ALL the movies---good and bad. You didn't watch 3-5 movies a week in the 1930s and see all the crap. Most of the pre-Hayes code crap has long since combusted or turned into vinegar.

 

I'm just saying that if you had to cherry pick the 50 or 100 best movies of each decade? I think the 70s is a VERY strong contender for having the best list.

[blue2blue]

Oh, there were rivers of crummy movies made in the 30s. After all, it was the first decade of talkies coupled with a depression that made movies one of the few affordable entertainments. (Not everyone was prosperous enough to own a radio.) That said, there were a huge number of truly great -- as well as simply entertaining -- movies made in that decade. As with so most other decades.

 

Except the 80s.

 

 

 

(I'm kind of kidding, but when I'm prowling Netflix, I'm continually reminded how utterly lame the 80s were in terms of movies and TV. As lame as the rock and pop music of that sad era. But garbage like Top Gun, Return of the Jedi, the American version of Three Men and a Baby, Back to the Future, etc, ad nauseum? Yuck. OK... I got a couple chuckles out of Beverly Hills Cop. I'd give it a C+ -- although when I went back to try to watch it a while back I couldn't get through ten minutes.)

[UstadKhanAli]

I know you're kidding (sort of) about the '80s, but:

Raging Bull, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Blade Runner, My Left Foot, Gandhi, The Empire Strikes Back, The Killing Fields, A Passage to India, Ran, Kagemusha, Blue Velvet, the Shining, Scarface, etc. as a few highlights is not a bad decade, despite what VH1 "Top _____ of the '80s" lists would have you believe (which I think are some of the insidiously worst things for how one paints a decade. Get a bunch of B comedians, have them all agree on a viewpoint, and get them to pick the most ridiculously overtly obvious things and run it into the ground as if everyone believed this to be true back then).

 

Oh, yeah, and to cap off this movie decade, we mustn't forget "Fast Times at Ridgemont High"!

[Folder]

 

Without question in my mind, the 1980s mainstream culture had, hands down, the ugliest, most grotesque visual style of any decade in my awareness since the bizarre excesses of the 1890s.

 

 

I distinctly remember a holiday gathering in the mid-eighties when family members were sitting around looking at pictures from the early seventies. Everybody was appalled at the tacky clothes and hair styles that they were wearing just fifteen years earlier.

 

Of course now when I look at family photos from the eighties all the guys were wearing their neon plaid shirts and mullett haircuts while the gals had huge hair and shoulder pads.

 

And we thought we looked tacky in the seventies?

[Vito Corleone]

I know you're kidding (sort of) about the '80s, but: Raging Bull, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Blade Runner, My Left Foot, Gandhi, The Empire Strikes Back, The Killing Fields, A Passage to India, Ran, Kagemusha, Blue Velvet, the Shining, Scarface, etc. as a few highlights is not a bad decade, despite what VH1 "Top _____ of the '80s" lists would have you believe (which I think are some of the insidiously worst things for how one paints a decade. Get a bunch of B comedians, have them all agree on a viewpoint, and get them to pick the most ridiculously overtly obvious things and run it into the ground as if everyone believed this to be true back then). Oh, yeah, and to cap off this movie decade, we mustn't forget "Fast Times at Ridgemont High"!

 

Those VH1 lists are obviously geared towards a specific audience. i.e.---if you're 40 something AND watching VH1, that probably IS your rememberance of the 80s. Having said that, as time goes on, decades get distilled more and more into cliches, and stuff like that is probably how it starts. There was certainly a lot more to the 1950s than what things look like via "Happy Days", but what is history going to remember?

 

But yes, there were a LOT of good movies in the 80s as well. Cinematically though, it was a transitionary era that probably isn't going to age well. It was the age that took us from Star Wars in 1978 to Jurassic Park in 1993 and there was a lot of very primitive experimentation with technology during that time.

 

It was also the era where it seemed that every movie had to have the "music video" montage section just before the start of Act 3.

 

The 80s were unique in being the first fully nostaligia-driven decade. Much of the fashion was 50s and 60s based. Much of the music was throwbacks to those eras as well. Those Boomers who were creating the culture were the first generation at least as obsessed with their own past as they were their own future. Blondie and the Go Gos reminded us of 60s pop. Pee Wee Herman, based on any number of 50s/60s TV characters was 'hip'. Madonna obviously watched way too many Marilyn Monroe movies. And the younger Gen X kids consuming most of that stuff were the first latch-key kids who were babysat by TV and thought afternoon reruns of the Brady Bunch were the families they never had.

 

Which brought us the 90s and an even WORSE distillation of culture in many ways.

[Vito Corleone]

 

I distinctly remember a holiday gathering in the mid-eighties when family members were sitting around looking at pictures from the early seventies. Everybody was appalled at the tacky clothes and hair styles that they were wearing just fifteen years earlier. Of course now when I look at family photos from the eighties all the guys were wearing their neon plaid shirts and mullett haircuts while the gals had huge hair and shoulder pads. And we thought we looked tacky in the seventies?

 

 

No more tacky than we think people today will look 15 years from now, I imagine.

 

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

[blue2blue]

Originally Posted by guido61

No more tacky than we think people today will look 15 years from now, I imagine.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I'm actually a bit taken aback by some of the supposed-hipster uniforms of this era.

But I absolutely must say that I had some really awful clothes in the 70s. I painfully remember a striped 'Wallace Beery' long sleeved undershirt type thing (collarless, button neck) that disgraced a number of the pics my GF or others took of me on my '71 backpacker through Europe.

And, at one nasty point around the middle of the decade, I ended up with a pair of two inch heel and fat soul shoes -- not quite platform -- actually they were the lowest I could find -- and a pair of those high wasted slacks that made people look like toreadors. Or maybe gay gigolos. You know, the ones where the belt line comes up almost to your ribs and there's about two and a half feet between that belt line and the crotch. The people who created those fashions clearly despised the human form. (But I ended up with them because I made a trip to the mall on a lunch hour to get clothes for a wedding and those were the best I could come up with.) I also had a couple of those strange, crepe-like shirts in plaid -- but unlike the plaid flannels that have been a So Cal staple since I was a little kid, these were flimsy and clingy and 'French-cut.'

And, speaking of that '71 Europe trip, I was utterly amazed by what the French young people were wearing at that point. Most of the guys had scalloped shag hair and would dress way up -- in heavily tailored jackets (skinny waste, huge hip flare) with these utterly wild peaked shoulder seams -- right out of the '37 movie version of Wizard of Oz.

[blue2blue]

Originally Posted by UstadKhanAli

I know you're kidding (sort of) about the '80s, but:
Raging Bull, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Blade Runner, My Left Foot, Gandhi, The Empire Strikes Back, The Killing Fields, A Passage to India, Ran, Kagemusha, Blue Velvet, the Shining, Scarface, etc. as a few highlights is not a bad decade, despite what VH1 "Top _____ of the '80s" lists would have you believe (which I think are some of the insidiously worst things for how one paints a decade. Get a bunch of B comedians, have them all agree on a viewpoint, and get them to pick the most ridiculously overtly obvious things and run it into the ground as if everyone believed this to be true back then).

Oh, yeah, and to cap off this movie decade, we mustn't forget "Fast Times at Ridgemont High"!

Let's hope there would be at least 13 pretty decent movies in a decade. (I'll stretch to include Raiders in there. I enjoyed it the first time but I subsequently found it tiresome and a bit shrill and turned it off in the middle. I am a fan of Harrison Ford, though, as a pop movie hero. But he has been in some just plain terrible movies. Mostly. I mean, it was barely the end of the 80s before he was able to make a hilarious send-up of his own image and typical roles. I can't remember what it was called, but he was the two fisted POTUS who, if memory serves, resorted to fists and guns to save the free world as we know it. I don't recall it as anything vaguely like a good movie, but I loved the concept.

PS... I must finally be mellowing out a little today as I seem oddly reluctant to pick a fight about including a few movies from 1980. I'm one of those iconoclasts who insists that, since there was no year 0, that centuries and decades must end on a 0 and begin with a 1. After all, the first year of the 21st century was 2001. Not 2000.

[Vito Corleone]

Originally Posted by blue2blue

Let's hope there would be at least 13 pretty decent movies in a decade.

Amadeus. Brazil. Cinema Paradiso. Do The Right Thing. Airplane! Das Boot. Blood Simple. Raising Arizona. Full Metal Jacket. A Christmas Story. This Is Spinal Tap. Crimes and Misdemeanors. Sex, Lies and Videotape. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Hannah and her Sisters. The Right Stuff. Tender Mercies. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Missing. A Fish Called Wanda. The King of Comedy. Stand By Me. Lost In America.

PS... I must finally be mellowing out a little today as I seem oddly reluctant to pick a fight about including a few movies from 1980. I'm one of those iconoclasts who insists that, since there was no year 0, that centuries and decades must end on a 0 and begin with a 1. After all, the first year of the 21st century was 2001. Not 2000.

I'm not feeling so mellow. I'd argue that "the 80s" is different from when a decade officially begins and ends. It's not the same thing as saying "the 20th Century". It's simply a name for all the years that had an "8" as the third digit.

[Folder]

Originally Posted by Ernest Buckley

the goatee was a recent look for men which turned into a beard for many... I see that a lot more now than ever before.

Gosh, I remember the goatee making a come back about twenty years ago.
I was thinking that came in with the whole grunge look.

[UstadKhanAli]

Originally Posted by guido61

Amadeus. Brazil. Cinema Paradiso. Do The Right Thing. Airplane! Das Boot. Blood Simple. Raising Arizona. Full Metal Jacket. A Christmas Story. This Is Spinal Tap. Crimes and Misdemeanors. Sex, Lies and Videotape. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Hannah and her Sisters. The Right Stuff. Tender Mercies. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Missing. A Fish Called Wanda. The King of Comedy. Stand By Me. Lost In America.

Thank you! You saved me the trouble of typing more titles!!!!

I thought it was all in all pretty good for movies, probably not any better or worse than other decades.

[Vito Corleone]

Originally Posted by Folder

Gosh, I remember the goatee making a come back about twenty years ago.
I was thinking that came in with the whole grunge look.

Goatees aren't beards. Not that Kurt Cobain was selling fashion or anything, of course. And actually, those aren't goatees. Those are Van Dycks.

THIS is a goatee:

[nat whilk II]

Well which way is it going to be? A democratic, lowbrow fashion that is redundant, uncreative, yet unthreatening, or a highbrow, haute fashion that is intimidating, aggressive, and elitist???

I sat at a restaurant many years ago with a college roommate of mine from my UT days, who had moved out of Austin to go pursue his journalism graduate degrees at Syracuse. He was back in town for a visit, and we were at a Mexican restaurant, catching up, and arguing about just about everything.

He held his right hand out flat in front of him and moved it from far left of his body to far right like a car moving along a horizon. He said, "This is the stream of actual events, moving along." Then he repeated the motion, but halfway through, he stuck one of his fingers from his left hand up through the fingers of his right hand, pointing in the opposite direction of his "actual stream of events" right hand, and said,

"This is News."

Fashion is News in the world of design. By the time you can buy something that is "fashionable" at [name anyplace any of us shop at]..it's not Fashion anymore. It's a mass produced consumer good.

What 99.9999% of us do when we "keep up with fashion" is to imitate something that's already History as far as Fasion is concerned. We all live at the other end of things where it's all fed to us as end product - mass-produced, pre-processed, media-broadcast, shipped by the megaton, and for all practical purposes, on close-out as far as Fashion is concerned.

Fashion is an artform, I do have to agree with that. But it's about as corrupted and ephemeral an artform as the human race has been able to conceive. So I write it off, but not without a vague feeling of regret. On the face of it, I find Fashion pretty fascinating.

Ask Ras about Fashion - he's the go-to guy around here on this, I guarantee.

But it's art at the lowest common denominator of artistic values....it's innovation without the slightest regard or respect for anything someone might dare to call "progress". It's value-null, except for the occasional tip of the hat to Beauty. But Beauty is pretty out of Fasion, too. Very sad that so many brilliant artists spend themselves creating things that evaporate as soon as they are recognized as "successful".

nat whilk ii

[Lee Knight]

Originally Posted by nat whilk II

Well which way is it going to be? A democratic, lowbrow fashion that is redundant, uncreative, yet unthreatening, or a highbrow, haute fashion that is intimidating, aggressive, and elitist???

I sat at a restaurant many years ago with a college roommate of mine from my UT days, who had moved out of Austin to go pursue his journalism graduate degrees at Syracuse. He was back in town for a visit, and we were at a Mexican restaurant, catching up, and arguing about just about everything.

He held his right hand out flat in front of him and moved it from far left of his body to far right like a car moving along a horizon. He said, "This is the stream of actual events, moving along." Then he repeated the motion, but halfway through, he stuck one of his fingers from his left hand up through the fingers of his right hand, pointing in the opposite direction of his "actual stream of events" right hand, and said,

"This is News."

Fashion is News in the world of design. By the time you can buy something that is "fashionable" at [name anyplace any of us shop at]..it's not Fashion anymore. It's a mass produced consumer good.

What 99.9999% of us do when we "keep up with fashion" is to imitate something that's already History as far as Fasion is concerned. We all live at the other end of things where it's all fed to us as end product - mass-produced, pre-processed, media-broadcast, shipped by the megaton, and for all practical purposes, on close-out as far as Fashion is concerned.

Fashion is an artform, I do have to agree with that. But it's about as corrupted and ephemeral an artform as the human race has been able to conceive. So I write it off, but not without a vague feeling of regret. On the face of it, I find Fashion pretty fascinating.

Ask Ras about Fashion - he's the go-to guy around here on this, I guarantee.

But it's art at the lowest common denominator of artistic values....it's innovation without the slightest regard or respect for anything someone might dare to call "progress". It's value-null, except for the occasional tip of the hat to Beauty. But Beauty is pretty out of Fasion, too. Very sad that so many brilliant artists spend themselves creating things that evaporate as soon as they are recognized as "successful".

nat whilk ii

Really cool post^^^. But one thing rubs me a little. Well, not rubs me but more I feel that your notion of us chasing fashion and the act of becoming fashionable, those are not the only ways to interact with fashion. There is also the way I've always looked at.

Like music. To take pockets of past influence, combine them in personal, intuitive ways that create something, if not new... at least unique to yourself.

Fashion is not restricted to the "fashion Industry", just as music isn't restricted to the "Music Industry". There are plenty of musicians creating their work based on personal choice, based on personal past and experience and influence. Look at...

...Bowie, Dylan, Madonna, Patti Smith... on and on. These were and are unique creators of unique music. And, in addition, or rather as part of that art, they are unique creators of fashion. Patti's white, crisp men's shirt, no makeup, tussled hair. That was fashion but it certainly wasn't dictated to her from the fashion industry. It worked the other way round.

And still does.

[thankyou]

The Jazz Age.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyuRT-ExzuQ

[nat whilk II]

Originally Posted by Lee Knight

Really cool post^^^. But one thing rubs me a little. Well, not rubs me but more I feel that your notion of us chasing fashion and the act of becoming fashionable, those are not the only ways to interact with fashion. There is also the way I've always looked at.

Like music. To take pockets of past influence, combine them in personal, intuitive ways that create something, if not new... at least unique to yourself.

Fashion is not restricted to the "fashion Industry", just as music isn't restricted to the "Music Industry". There are plenty of musicians creating their work based on personal choice, based on personal past and experience and influence. Look at...

...Bowie, Dylan, Madonna, Patti Smith... on and on. These were and are unique creators of unique music. And, in addition, or rather as part of that art, they are unique creators of fashion. Patti's white, crisp men's shirt, no makeup, tussled hair. That was fashion but it certainly wasn't dictated to her from the fashion industry. It worked the other way round.

And still does.

All agreed. I was thinking more of the big clothes Fashion industry. Still, your examples could also be looked at as exceptions that prove the rule, 'tho.

In simpler terms, I just don't like the illusion of thinking one is hip or creative or innovative when all one is really doing is buying mass-produced consumer goods. The Fashion world is a weird world unto itself...why should we let that dog wag us??

nat whilk ii