1977 SPECIAL REPORT: "BLACK WOMEN'S FASHIONS"

As the Swinging Sixties turned into the 1970s, the influence of boutique stores and diffusion lines made ready-to-wear clothing increasingly accessible. New synthetic fabrics meant that fashionable styles could be bought at any price point. So pervasive were these materials that the seventies became known as the “Polyester Decade.” The decade saw a wide range of popular styles: from the early prairie dresses influenced by hippie fashion, to the flashy party wear worn to disco nightclubs, to the rise of athletic wear as the decade looked towards the 1980s, the seventies was a decade that explored fashion, but also looked back.

Seventies fashion began with a continuation of the late 1960s hippie style. In the early 1970s, this meant an emphasis on handmade materials and decorations. While the hippies of the sixties had embraced these items as a way of rejecting mainstream fashion, designers in the early seventies began to incorporate them into their high fashion collections. Patchwork, crochet and knitting, embroidery were among the details used by designers. The silk evening gown by Zandra Rhodes shows how patterns and the loose, flowing quality of the hippie style crept into high fashion. “Quilting, felting, dyeing, beading, smocking, leather craft and hand-painted fabrics were also reclaimed from craft fairs for the fashion world,” says Daniel Milford-Cottam in Fashion in the 1970s. The styles from Seventeen magazine show an influence from homemade crafts in the embroidered patterns while being made in the decade’s signature polyester.

Along with an emphasis on handmade crafts, seventies designers looked to the past for inspiration. A pervasive style of the early 1970s was the prairie dress. Midi-length with flounces and delicate floral patterns, these dresses were popularized by designers and retailers like Gunne Sax and Bill Gibb. The style bore a resemblance to Victorian styles while also feeling not dissimilar to some of the hippie styles of the late 1960s

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