Trends & Genres

A noteworthy event of 20th century American fashion was the emergence of the film costume designer as an influence on everyday fashion. Prior to the 30s, Hollywood imported European fashion designers to bring some much needed style and class to their offerings after the excesses of the 20s. When the Paris designers returned home, Hollywood designers came in to their own designing both period epics and modern fashion features.

Due to the success of both the film industry and the untiring efforts of the studio publicity departments, many costume designers became house hold names and used this recognition when they made the shift to fashion design. They were certainly helped in the USA by the absence of French and English fashion during the war years. By the time their houses closed in the 50s and 60s, the influence of film designers on retail fashion had begun to fade. Today even most fashionistas can’t name a film costume designer. And yet in their day designers such as Howard Greer, Adrian, Irene, Helen Rose, Edith Head and Travis Banton were as well known in the US and even internationally as many Couture designers.

The greatest of them all was possibly Adrian, whose work in film and fashion influenced much of American fashion in the 1940s. His fashion work commands serious attention to this day. Greer was an earlier star, but his work went on for years, and was seen as recently as 2005 when Sarah Jessica Parker wore a black and pink Greer dress to the CFDA awards. Both Irene’s and Helen Rose’s work continues to be highly collectible. Banton and Head, while influential, never attempted their own wholesale houses.

Read more about notable designers in the film industry

British Boutique movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
My name is Liz, a.k.a Emmapeelpants, and I will try to introduce you all to the vibrant design movement as much as I can. Obviously it is an enormous subject, so I have chosen some select designers and boutiques to concentrate on.

The emergence of youthful and ambitious British designers in the 1960s was a revolution in the fashion world. Quite apart from the front-runners enabling lots of other young designers to feel that they too could start their own boutique, it forced the other fashion capitals to change their outlook and methods. So radical was the new look of the era, Britain became the focus of the world, and thus its leader. For once, New York, Paris and Milan were looking to quirky old England for inspiration. British designers headed out on PR tours of America, pushing the Swinging London lifestyle and expanding their empires. It would end, in the great scheme of things, almost as suddenly as it began. Failing economy in Britain in the 1970s increased overheads and reduced sales for these designers, and as the other fashion capitals of the world fell out of love with the London look, most British designers floundered. I will try to give you a flavour of the designers involved and, within their stories, the eventual decline.

British Boutique Movement: burning brief and bright.

To start, I have put the designers and labels I know of into a tier system, which make it easier to digest and remember all the major and minor players in the vibrant British fashion scene in the 1960s and 1970s.

Fashion trends of the mid 1960s

I’m known as Senti (a nickname with a long history) and I am totally stuck in a 1960s timewarp. I missed the 1960s myself – being born in 1979 – but developed a love for this decade very early on, and now live in a 1960s house decorated with the appropriate vintage wallpaper and furniture, wear mainly 1960s clothes, am a self confessed knee-high boot addict.

Not having lived through the fashions at the time, I’ve discovered them via films from the era and stacks of 1960s fashion magazines… so I can usually pin down each look to a specific season and know what hairstyles and accessories would have been worn with it when it first came out.

My particular fashion idol of the era is Beatle girlfriend, model Pattie Boyd – so you’ll be seeing quite a lot of her here – and I have a love of the Dollyrockers range that Samuel Sherman created.

I will start with the earliest use of paper in fashionable dress and that is with fans in the 17th century. The idea of the folding paper fan was brought from the Far East and became a fashionable accessory in the early 1600s!

In the late 18th century a cardboard impressed and glazed to look like fancy straw work was used to make hats and bonnets. This example is from 1812.

Just what IS rockabilly? Well, according to Wikipedia, “Rockabilly is one of the earliest styles of rock and roll music, and emerged in the early-1950’s. The term “rockabilly” is a portmanteau of “rock,” from rock and roll, and “hillbilly”, the latter a reference to the country music (often called “hillbilly music” in the 1940s and 1950s) that contributed strongly to the style’s development. Other important influences on rockabilly include Western Swing, blues music, boogie woogie, and Jump blues. Although there are notable exceptions, its origins lie primarily in the Southern USA.”. Rockabilly is generally considered to have been popular just from the early 1950’s to early 1960’s, though once its influence reached the mainstream it never truly went away. Several rockabilly revivals have taken place within the music industry over the years, most notably in the 80’s with the popularity of the Stray Cats.

But why does rockabilly matter to fashion? What is the rockabilly “look”? That’s a question often pondered by both sellers and buyers of vintage clothing, and the answer is a little more complicated than the one above. As any genre of music has done over the years, rockabilly had a strong influence on fashions on the 50s to early 60s which have evolved into a more complex definition in today’s fashion world.