Clothing

In the long hot summer of 1968, the ordinarily staid Saturday Evening Post published this astonishingly risqué cover.  (The Post was by now several  years into its attempt to re-brand itself as just the four-letter “Post,” to compete with Life, Look, and Time; it would change back to the full title in 1968 in a logo re-design, but the entire magazine folded in 1969.)   For most of the 20th century, the Post was famed for commissioning wholesome, high-quality (read: expensive) illustrations for its weekly covers.  Norman Rockwell was only the most famous (and probably the most wholesome) of the commercial artists who worked for the Post.  By the 60s, most of this had gone by the boards, though the Post continued to turn to Rockwell occasionally, at least until December 1963; his last cover for the Post was a memorial portrait of president John F. Kennedy.

Even Playboy cover girls in the 1960s were a lot more covered up than this model–the 23-year-old (maybe 24; accounts vary) Lauren Hutton, already a Vogue cover favorite.  (Ms. Hutton is probably not crazy about the nearly universal Internet descriptor of herself as the “gap-toothed supermodel.”) The model (unidentified in any way inside the magazine) displays a lot of midriff and a provocative decolletage while modeling what appears to be some art director’s idea of the garb of a Middle Eastern concubine.  ”What they’re wearing instead of clothes,” the headline says: “The Big Costume Put-on.”  ”They” in this sense is clear: “they” is not “us,” the middle-class, more than a little conservative grown-ups who read the “Post.”  ”They” is, simply put, “American youth.”  As the magazine’s editor, Bill Emerson, explains:  ”The turned-on people of today wear all sorts of extraordinary things instead of clothes. . . . You can very easily think . . . of clothing as weaponry. . . . It looks as if that curious subculture known as youth has ambushed us fogy-boppers with their costumes and is firing away.  The ammunition is not deadly, but it does make you feel angry and 150 years old.”
Buttressed by a photo essay deeper in the magazine, featuring numerous young people bedecked in slightly Edwardian or Indian or Elizabethan or military surplus or even vintage American fashions, Emerson waxes anthropological:  ”Man is changing his attitude about himself . . . This mind-boggling costume party has a much more serious message than simple disguise.  It may well be a part of a ritual effort to isolate a personality, and there is some question as to what will emerge.”

This cover story belongs to a genre that would by now be quite familiar to readers in 1968.  It might be called “Look at what those kids are (fill in the blank) now!”  The blank could be filled in with: wearing, saying, listening to, smoking, drinking, watching, listening to.  Magazine editors and photographers loved the so-called “counterculture.”  ”Those kids” made great pictures, they made great copy, and they sold magazines.  And if you could layer onto this head-shaking voyeurism a veneer of scholarly perspicacity, all the better.  Here that’s provided by none other than Marshall McLuhan (”maestro of media,” as SEP calls him), quoted extensively in this “Fashion” section.   A little McLuhan goes a long way, so here’s a little (we’ll revisit him again in a later post):  ”The mini-skirt, of course, is not a fashion.  It is a return to the tribal costume worn by men and women alike in all oral societies.  As our world moves from hardware to software [Ed. note:  This is 1968!], the mini-skirt is a major effort to reprogram our sensory lives in a tribal pattern of tactility and involvement.”

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