All Dressed Up for the Youthquake

March 20, 2006 issue - The snow's melting, the first bulbs are popping, and it's time to see what's in the closet for spring. OK, miniskirt—check. Baby-doll dress—check. Bubble skirt—check. Platform shoes—check. A Pucci print for fun. A Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress to go out in. But wait a sec—if design is a reflection of its time, what the heck year is this, anyway? It's hard to believe we're in the 21st century when the fashion runways are jammed with ideas from the 1960s and '70s, from Calvin Klein's little white baby dresses to Balenciaga's latest take on the pantsuit. Yes, trends cycle in and out, but the decades when baby boomers came of age still cast a gigantic shadow on fashion. This year especially, it's deja vu all over again.

In fact, women's fashions changed more radically in the years from World War I to the end of World War II than they have since the end of the pivotal baby-boom decades, from the Vietnam War to the 1980s. The boomer era started with a bang, when the counterculture crashed the lawn party of ladylike tradition, epitomized by Jackie Kennedy's couture chic of the early '60s. Hippies wore jeans, boots and cheap Indian tunics, and they brought with them the British invasion, not only the Beatles but mod fashion. Designer Norma Kamali recalls zipping off to London on $29 weekend flights, starting in 1964. In the little shops around the Kings Road, she says, "I saw these amazing clothes, things I'd never seen before. Back in New York, people screeched to a halt when I first wore a miniskirt." The shift in the way people dressed was so seismic that the legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland dubbed it the youthquake.

In fashion as in music, England was the cutting edge. "A lot of notions of Englishness in the '60s were channeled through street style," says Andrew Bolton, curator of "Anglomania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion," opening at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in May. Music, says Bolton, "brought together the ideas of mods and rockers, the revolution of Carnaby Street, the coolness of London." In the '70s, music-linked street style grew even stronger with punk, a scene Vivienne Westwood mined in creating outfits—ripped, layered T shirts printed with upside-down crosses—that truly shocked the mainstream. "What Vivienne did was politically driven," says Bolton. "She articulated this trend for deconstruction, tribalism, androgyny. It changed the face of fashion forever." On both sides of the pond, the supremacy of France's haute couture waned as designers took to the streets. For a while, even underwear was superfluous.

Yet the '70s also ushered in a different kind of revolution as vast numbers of women entered the workplace. Was mainstream fashion's growing conservatism a feminist reaction against sexy, clingy, girly clothes? Well, in part. But women also just needed something nice to wear to the office. It was time to bring on androgyny, in the form of the pantsuit. This key fashion innovation of the late '60s was introduced by the French designer Yves Saint Laurent, a couturier who heard the drumbeats of popular culture and was inspired to create clothes both relevant and beautiful. (Who can forget his sumptuous Russian-peasant look?) Still, pantsuits took a while to catch on; they were barred for years from certain upscale restaurants, and it wasn't until the 1990s that a First Lady, Hillary Clinton, regularly wore them on official occasions.

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