You may not know it, but your new boss, the fashion victim, is part of a springtime trend. In fashion magazines and women’s departments, models and mannequins are stepping straight out of the 1960s in puffy party dresses and brightly decorated minishifts. Women are dressing like little girls again. Or, at least, designers and retailers are conspiring to encourage them to dress that way. Flowers in primary colors are printed on dresses, blouses and skirts. Huge plastic daisies sprout from headbands and drip from jewelry. Colorful patent leather glimmers from shoes, bags and raincoats. And remember those short, short dresses with an empire cut and bouffant skirt that used to be called “baby dolls” - once a popular look for nightgowns? Now they’re everywhere.
Baby-doll dresses? After 25 years in the trenches of the women’s movement? The development doesn’t build confidence in the practicality of modern designers. It’s hard to imagine where a mature woman would wear most of these styles. Somehow that little white shift emblazoned with giant ladybugs (by the young design team Mancuso-Witkewicz) doesn’t seem appropriate for a mother attending her 8-year-old’s school conference - unless she wants to join the class. And it’s not easy to envision the perfect customer for Carolyne Roehm’s $3,000 baby-doll evening dress. Made of silk satin in a brown and white ribbon-stripe pattern with an enormous bow in the back, the dress is a vision of childlike femininity. Does some killer executive who fired 10 people last week really have a yen to be Daddy’s little girl when she goes out at night?
The mysterious reappearance of styles from the 1960s - which hardly provided fashion’s greatest moment - probably reflects desperation more than anything else. Designers are trying to cash in on the optimism of those times to counter the grim recession realities of the 1990s. And some of it works. The brightly colored vinyl trench coats are upbeat, even if eerily reminiscent of a Barbie doll’s wardrobe.
But the stretch backward can reach too far. Bloomingdale’s has even unearthed the ’60s star Andre Courreges and opened a special boutique for him in its New York store - no doubt hoping to spawn a Puccistyle revival. It’s stocked with those simple, stark white minidresses that seemed so orderly and futuristic a quarter of a century ago.
Today it just seems naive. “Courreges used to look like the future,” says Lynn Manulis, president of the upscale specialty-store Martha. “Now we’ve been there and it doesn’t look like that.” The clothes, for all the hype about reinterpreting old styles in a modern idiom, look like what they are - dated. The fabrics are less stiff and structured than they were 30 years ago, but the effect remains what designer Michael Kors calls “retro rehash.” Young designers who parody the past aren’t much better. Canada’s Jeanette Kastenberg makes $800 sequined minidresses adorned with yellow cartoon Tweety birds. Are the women who wear them supposed to lisp, like little Tweety?
Maybe the styles aren’t meant to be taken so seriously. But what we wear says a lot about how we see ourselves. Ruth Rubinstein, a sociology professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, says that women’s clothes express the general Zeitgeist. “Facing the economy, homelessness, AIDS, the threat to the environment, people feel vulnerable,” she says. “These youthful styles reflect that.”
But today’s women are also aware of the role they play in society. “In the ’60s women weren’t empowered,” says New York writer Leslie Garis. “They were just pretty things next to a man. The clothes infantalized and sexualized you at the same time. That’s why I hate them when I see them now.” While today’s women might cast a nostalgic eye on the simple ’60s elegance of Babe Paley or Jackie Kennedy, they have, apparently, outgrown the need to pass themselves off as wide-eyed children. The word from the sales floor is that the cutie-pie styles aren’t doing so well at the cash register. “The kids like the ’60s look,” whispers a saleswoman at Macy’s. “They buy the cheap knockoffs. But most people over 30 are looking for something else.” Grown-up clothes, perhaps.
