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As Vogue celebrates its 125th year, we look back at the history of fashion, and the magazine, in a series of “five points” videos by decade, narrated by the stylish Sarah Jessica Parker.
Age yielded to youth and beauty in the ’60s as the Youthquake erupted, upsetting the status quo. The new generation grooved to new sounds in swingy, leggy new clothes that delivered maximum impact despite having mini proportions.
HEROINES ENTERVogue, founded by members of capital-S society, remained fascinated with the doings of the well-born, wealthy, and well-married, known, in the ’60s as the Beautiful People or BPs. Their homes and likes and styles were studied as if they were hothouse flowers. More vital, and growing fast and wild, was a new generation of Youthquakers—“under 24 and over 90,000,000 strong in the U.S. alone,” as Vogue reported in 1965, to whom increasing coverage was given. Time has shown that women like Brigitte Bardot, Jane Birkin, Catherine Deneuve, and Françoise Hardy, and Penelope Tree deserved the cultivation.
TAILORINGThe placement of an armhole, the perfection of a seam were obsessions with the designers who mattered most in the ’60s. Coco Chanel was famous for continually tearing her work apart in search of a perfect fit, as was Cristóbal Balenciaga, mentor to Hubert de Givenchy and André Courrèges, whose abbreviated “cookie-cutter” A-line shifts became a symbol of an era in which tailoring and the structure and discipline associated with it, would give way to more swinging impulses.
NEW FRONTIERS“Pre-Space is over. Man-in-Space is here,” declared Vogue in 1961. Woman in leg-freeing space-age looks soon followed. The future, to designers like Courrèges, Pierre Cardin, and Paco Rabanne, was clean-lined and borrowed from modern architecture, and it exposed, and freed, the body. “People should understand that they cannot dress in a normal, traditional way,” explained Cardin. “We are entering the world of tomorrow.”
DIANA VREELAND’S TRAVELING SHOWNot all of the out-of-this-world fashions that appeared on the pages of Vogue were futuristic. The exotic is what appealed to Diana Vreeland, who became Editor-in-Chief in 1963, and sent her photographers and models—among them the leggy Veruschka and wide-eyed Penelope Tree—far afield with cloth of gold, pounds of Dynel, lengths of fabrics, and a poetic brief that yielded unforgettable results.
TALKIN’ ’BOUT MY GENERATIONWhile Vreeland was preoccupied with art- and literature-inspired flights of fantasies, many young women were searching for utopias here on Earth. Their tickets to ride were often chemical. While the make-and-mend hippie ethos didn’t always jive with fashion, its bohemian and folkloric aesthetic did, appearing, in elevated form, on the glossy pages of the magazine.