Chapter 10

1970s Fashion and Women: Finding the Everyday at the Intersection of Image, Archive
and Oral History

Alexis Romano

Perhaps more than any other era, the 1970s has provided ample fashion stereotypes, its more

outlandish looks preserved and passed down in photography, films, and television. Scholars too

view it through a lens of postmodern anti-fashion. According to Valerie Steele, “As the rules of

taste and propriety were deliberately violated, the fashion system spawned crushed vinyl

burgundy maxi-coats, avocado-green ultrasuede pant-suits, electric blue lycra ‘second-skin’ body

stockings and silver lurex halter tops. Polyester shirts were open to the waist, and dresses were

slit up to the crotch.”1 Yes, the U.S. fashion industry had become a sophisticated machine of

manufacture and advertising, by this time capable of producing the material to cater to a range of

identities, or at least it purported to do so. “The changing consumer,” as laid out in a 1971

Fashion Group Bulletin (based on the comments of Elyse Riley of Gimbels), “wants clothes that

emphasize her personal identity in a world that often seems computerized, mechanized,

dehumanized.”2 The influential trade organization went on to describe a more measured albeit

individualized fashion market than Steele’s characterizations, who had matured into a

sophisticated, professional yet still dynamic woman:

“Gidget is gone. The Youthquake girl of the 60’s. Replaced by the woman of the 70’s. A
member of the fast-growing 20-34 year old group. Married and a working woman who’s
already changing the composition of the American working force.”3

With a focus on this general age group, this chapter addresses American fashion of the

1970s, a historical moment of national attention on women’s political and social states, and a

shift into postmodern modes of dress- and image-making. It questions what a history of fashion,
or history through fashion, might look like when we include, even foreground, the anonymous

everyday practitioner. To this end, it adopts a methodology that cross-analyzes garment, image

and oral history. Based on the early findings of this ongoing research project, this chapter

foregrounds the oral history portion, and tests the potentialities and pitfalls of this integrative

approach.4 I ask how museum clothing archives,5 and the femininities depicted in advertorial and

editorial images resonate with lived experiences. Museum collecting practices have tended to

privilege the rarefied designer label, and expensive fine craftsmanship. This focus on the rare,

extraordinary and elite is often aligned with fashion’s mediation in photography and magazines.6

As Ellen Sampson and I have written elsewhere, “The monographic imagining of fashion in

museums sits in contrast to fashion as bodily and lived; the everyday experience of wearing

clothes. We produce our clothed identities through acquiring, styling and collating clothes from

multiple sources.”7 As such, this research maps a fuller picture of women’s visual and material

experience of dress in a specific historical context, which encompasses the social and subjective

practices of getting dressed, wearing clothes and looking at fashion. I also seek to gauge oral

history subjects’ sensory and anecdotal notions of images and museum artifacts. Thus in addition

to locating gaps and overlap in collecting and representation, I explore how the wearer’s

perpsective amalgamates layers of meaning into established narratives as told by such sources.

Oral History and Women’s Everyday

In a 1972 essay the feminist poet and writer Adrienne Rich described politics, not as “something

‘out there’ but something ‘in here’ and of the essence of my condition.”8 Rich did not include her

dress process within literary meditations of her everyday gendered life. But how would this

information have enhanced her narratives? How might she have described the choice and feel of
the body-hugging t-shirt and mini shorts she wore, for instance, as a sitter for Alice Neel’s 1973

drawing?9 In retrospect, how might she unpack the relationship between her embodied and

pictured self? In asking these questions, everyday fashion and our dress practices function as

tools to uncover the “political significance of our personal experiences,”10 as Cheryl Buckley and

Hilary Fawcett have written. This thinking chimes with Rich’s statement, and the advocacy of

consciousness raising – based on the belief that the personal is political – by feminist groups

such as the tellingly named Redstockings. Founded in 1969 and mainly active in early 1970s

New York, Redstockings addressed the gamut of women’s experience, and was particularly

known for its work in abortion rights. Debates on consciousness have extended to fashion and

appearance, as scholars including Betty Luther Hillman have noted, generally relegating these

time-consuming practices as patriarchal prescriptions. She writes that “Women’s liberationist

and lesbian feminist writings encouraged women to discard their makeup, high heels, skirts, and

dresses, opting for the mobility and comfort provided by pants and blue jeans.”11

Thinking beyond reductive parallels between fashion and feminism, this chapter starts

from the idea that fashion is a signifying element of one’s gendered experience. Oral testimony is

viewed as a means to refocus fashion studies through the lens of the everyday as discussed

above, both to connect personal and wider historical narratives, and position everyday wearers as

agents and fashion authors. Among methodologies of studying dress history, Lou Taylor wrote

that “The essence of oral history is that it can catch hold of people’s memories through their own

voices, a quality that is especially relevant for those marginalised by or exluded from ‘big’

history.”12 This chapter argues that ‘big history’ is incomplete without these voices. Further, as

Linda Sandino pointed out in an oral history themed issue of the Journal of Design History,

“memories evoked in interviews demonstrate the connections as well as the gaps between
representation and experience.”13 So then how does the the narrative voice of women – a means

of access to the everyday – aid in or complicate our understanding of “period eyes,” or the ways

in which a contemporary consumer might have viewed or interpreted a fashion image, as well as

a fashion object in this case. How might it challenge 1970s stereotypes held today? How does it

animate the image and object archives that document this decade? What problems occur at the

level of interpretation when these worlds meet?

Twenty years after Taylor wrote her text, it is still true that “within oral history little

focus has yet been placed on recollection of garments and appearance.”14 In the field of fashion

studies specifically, this method is also seldom utilized, both in research that conducts new

interviews or that draws on existing ones.15 There is a longstanding tradition in museum

accessioning practice whereby curators solicit donors’ object-based memories, but these efforts

come up against the reality of lack of time and resources.16 Examples of its use in exhibition-

making around fashion and dress are rarer still.17 And while many repositories hold oral histories

recovering the stories of fashion industry professionals, the everyday consumer is rarely

represented.18 Recent scholarship within design history and fashion and cultural studies includes

Alison Slater’s work on 1940s dress, and Sara Chong Kwan’s research into fashion and the

senses.19 They build on the ethnographic and human interest approaches of cultural anthropology

and sociology and material culture studies, seen notably in Sophie Woodward’s study of women

dressing.20 As a whole these growing examples prioritize materiality and the sensory over the

visual, and the affect, phenomenology and perspective of the (female) wearer; and can be seen as

a part of the material, subjective and everyday ‘turns’ in critical thinking.21

To date I’ve interviewed ten women for this research project located around the country,

from Louisiana, Texas, and New York to Berkeley, with one example in Toronto. A teacher
turned homemaker, costume designer, bank professional, patternmaker, writer, marketing

director turned educator, teacher turned architect, and an art historian, the interview subjects, or

narrators, experienced the 1970s during their twenties and thirties (mainly). Taking into account

differences of race, class and geography, their testimonies emphasized, in the words of Raphael

Samuel, “both the variety of experience in any social group, and how each individual story draws

on a common culture.”22 For some this was a period of “absorbing second wave feminism”23; the

shedding of fashion’s gender rules; for others a period of motherhood and thus considered as

antithetical to fashion. Our discussions broached difficult topics too, failed marriages, eating

disorders, family deaths, and financial problems. This chapter takes fragments of my

conversations with Cricket, Joyce, and Joan who were born in the 1940s, and Andrea and Mary

Jo in 1952 and 1958 respectively. I’ve connected these narrators around themes that emerged –

namely creativity, fashionability, comfort, control, and negotiations – and, where I could,

integrated established narratives, fashion imagery, and clothing archival research undertaken.

The task at hand, interpreting testimonies and reconciling them with other narratives, proved a

constant challenge. So too was making meaningful connections between the experience of dress

and life events, big and small, and constructions of identity. There were moments where memory

faltered or romanticized, and when the 1970s became lost in a sea of a life lived and

indistinguishable from other periods.

Mary Jo and Andrea: Creativity and Reinvention

I began all interviews by situating narrators in their earliest memories of dress to map a

continuum of fashion and life experience in which to connect various points. Many relayed

similar accounts of home sewing and shopping with female family members: Mary Jo’s mother
(“a seamstress par excellence”), Andrea’s Aunt Helene; Joyce’s grandmother; Cricket’s mother

and grandmother, and Joan’s female relatives in neighborhood “sewing circles.” In speaking,

they relived the unbridled joys of having doll clothes made, sometimes followed by their creative

awakening in home economics sewing classes. This laid the groundwork in conversation to view

fashion as material, expressive and social practice. Many continued to use dress creatively into

their adult years, largely up to the 1970s and 1980s when other endeavors vied for their time,

when children were getting older, or in the case of Joan, to focus more on “intellectual work”

over the “manual” labor of sewing. Others went on to work with clothing professionally, Cricket

as a pattern cutter and Mary Jo a costume designer.

Mary Jo (b. 1958) sewed from around the age of eight, and modified her clothes as a teen

in Ontario, often using denim as a starting point: she crafted skirts out of jeans, or slashed the

side seam, adding a gore to construct a huge flare, during which time she also experimented with

tie dye, latching on to the last legs of the flower child movement into the 1970s. “My entire life I

felt like an outsider,” a sentiment she associated to moving several times before settling in the

provincial Port Elgin, where she felt a disconnect between her urbane family - her engineer

father from Slovenia and her “highly educated,” fashionable mother. Fashions filtered to her

town slowly, and fabrics were subpar, so she was constantly “elevating what was available to

me,” through garment reinvention. Overall, making was a means of elevation for Mary Jo – of

materials, skills – to bridge her outsider sense of self.

A bit older, Andrea (b. 1952), who was also skilled at sewing from a young age, once

combined her denim Wrangler jacket with her mother’s old furs, an act of bricolage that merged

her American and Russian heritage, and her utilitarian and luxury sides. Her immigrant parents,

of Russian, Italian, and French descent, were constant style exemplars, and the aim to impress
 them informed how she styled herself, to project

a sophisticated, cultured image. In one 1972

photograph she is at the stables in a tweed and

leather riding jacket she designed and made,

posed with her leg extended to display her go-to

booted silhouette (Fig. 1). Andrea’s glamourous

pose matches her privileged setting, and her role

as maker underlines her self-styling and

representation, while the image marks a subtle

tension between her new and old worlds.

Figure 1. Andrea at Riding Academy,

Rockville Centre, New York, 1972. Image
courtesy of A. Andrea Licari-LaGrassa.

One (re)fashioned item with lived experience she fondly recalled was the fur coat that she

had made for a large sum in New York, where she grew up, from which she removed some fur to

trim a dress. She wore the coat to her brother’s wedding, and to go out dancing – like to the

Hippopotamus (the Hip) on 62nd street. This jogged the memory of the night it got raided and her

precious coat had to be thrown through the window from the coat check during her escape. I

asked her what else she wore to the clubs and she vaguely recalled trousers, high heels, and

feathery tops, while dancing the “Hustle.” Whilst the denim, homemade, and unlabeled garments

discussed above would not typically elicit high museum interest, they illustrate how clothing

functions as holders of memory, through the input of the wearer.

 Disco also featured into Mary Jo’s conception of the decade, which she divided into two

sartorial periods: disco and punk. When she first traveled to Europe in 1976 it was the disco

period, she explained. This trip was highly anticipated, as she had aspirations of locales (and

lifestyles) beyond Canada, many of which were formed reading Vogue. She therefore needed to

fashion her own wardrobe, to surpass what Port Elgin retailers could offer her. This included

pencil skirts, which rode up and were uncomfortable, and pencil leg trousers. When, not long

after, she moved to Toronto to attend the Ontario College of Art, she was still dressing to appear

elegant and well off.

But this changed once there, when Mary Jo rebelled against this look and what it

signified.

Well I came from a small town in Ontario to live in Toronto… when I first arrived I was
still thinking probably disco […] Trying to be … It was kind of a snooty time, people
always wanted to look rich and so I was still probably trying to come off as a privileged
kind of a person […] And then it did not take long, it was by the sort of middle of the first
year that I was starting to get influenced by punk and then of course you’re sneering at all
that stuff. […] Trying to look anti-establishment as much as possible.

It was as though this transition to punk was inevitable: she laughed and said, “what else would

you do at art college.” Her younger age in relation to the other respondents also factors in to this

fashion shift. Mary Jo’s style became about the “street” and she started to wear vintage – she

saved her favorite piece, a 1940s grosgrain dress with a tight fitting bodice. Otherwise, she

dressed in a “uniform” of oversized men’s blazers over jeans, largely influenced by musicians

like Lou Reed and those she knew as friends such as Martha and the Muffins.

Mary Jo was always on the hunt for black clothing during this period, which she said was

hard to find. She wore a black turtleneck and bandana, in one image from 1978, the year she

turned twenty, after transferring to the Banff School of Fine Arts (Fig. 2). She is captured at a
drafting table lost in the creative process, in parallel to her thoughtful styling, the contrasting

light-colored skirt, complete with jewelry and oversized glasses. Like her teacher alongside her,

her image is one of sophistication, a merger of her disco and punk eras. This was the moment

Mary Jo embarked on costume design studies, and began to think critically about the “language”

of dress as it related to character construction, which she furthered the following year, in New

York at Julliard’s costume department. In her personal life she likewise used clothing creatively

to delineate shifting identities and worldviews –

and her social difference. Yet she learned this

language at an early age, thanks to her mother.

As this section illustrates, making connections

between various periods of a respondent’s life,

informed understandings of her 1970s

experience. It also presents examples, which are

disconnected from museum artifacts but

informed by pictured fashion, of creative agency

bridging aspects of one’s identity across

geographic locales.
Figure 2. Mary Jo in drawing class with her
professor, Madame Wibaut, Banff Centre for the
Arts, Alberta, Canada, 1978. Image courtesy of
Mary Jo Pollak.

Joan and Cricket: Inside and Outside Fashion

Even before our conversation, Joan (b. 1947) communicated her negative views of 1970s

fashion. When we spoke she said in reference to its more exaggerated styles, “Fashion got so
much more out there in the ‘70s, it was so absurd.” Yet, like the majority of testimonies which

contained hesitant, ambiguous, or even contradictory ideas, hers encompassed alternative

examples of her engagement with the decade’s fashion culture. Views of what it meant to be in

fashion and how that affected conceptions of self, were not straightforward for most respondents.

Many shied away from the marker of being trendy, but prided themselves on having fashion

knowledge. In their words, they dressed according to their individual tastes, regardless of trends,

and this was the case for Joan, whose comment illustrates a sense of ambivalence vis a vis group

identity: “I knew what I liked and I knew what I didn’t like… I’m not sure many of us had a

sense of fashion, I mean maybe it was just me, maybe I was just oblivious…”

Looking further back, she recalled not possessing many clothes as a child – she doesn’t

know whether this was financial, or because her single mother didn’t have the time to take her

shopping. Or was this a way shrugging off fashion, which wouldn’t have been valued growing

up in the bohemian Portland, Oregon college town? In high school Joan wore A-line skirts,

which she explained befit her thin, curvaceous frame, even though straight skirts were in style,

highlighting her individuality, in relation to trends. Of the 1970s Joan said, “There were various

fashions that came and went and some of them I was very glad to see go.” She disliked in

particular tailored shirts with very pointy collars, yet wore them out of necessity – as they were

what was available in shops. Early in the decade she stopped wearing miniskirts and transitioned

to trousers: “I remember being at a faculty party and sitting down and thinking that if the skirt

were any shorter everything would be exposed [she laughs]. I had that experience and I thought,

you know, why am I doing this? This is absurd, I don’t really need to look like everybody else.”

Joan’s individualism also translated to her college plans, opting to forego the Reed

College family tradition for Swarthmore, a school on the other coast of the country in
Pennsylvania. In 1969 she and her husband moved to Berkeley for graduate school one year after

their marriage. The same ambivalence about fashion was present: “I don’t remember thinking

about clothing at all during this period.” She was busy with her studies and preoccupied with the

war in Vietnam. It also conflicted with her academic identity (“academics aren’t really into

fashion”), budget and lifestyle, needing to be comfortable while “researching in libraries.”

It was abundantly clear, however, that Joan delighted in her clothing in hearing her

recount stories of shopping in the boutiques near campus. She dressed in ways she felt suited her

appearance. She loved color, especially blue and autumnal shades, but also found it necessary to

mention those she perceived as unflattering on her. One trend she embraced were the peasant

blouses, Indian, and other bright “ethnic” prints, which were (often) inexpensive and

comfortable. Similar styles connected various points of her life and her art studies – from the

blue wool skirt, with Guatemalan embroidery, she shared with her mother as an adolescent, to

her current collection of Kashmir scarves, which counts as one of the best in the world.

In 1974 Joan relocated to Princeton, a move which came with a new elevated identity –

that of professor’s wife – which perhaps contradicted her own status as a graduate student,

although advancing in her career and scholarly pursuits. This sort of limbo had a parallel in

fashion. She laughed at the idea of donning a black blazer, the working woman’s accessory of

the moment. She deemed them uncomfortable and out of sync with her personality. Whereas she

related to fashion much better in the following decade, when she would have been in a different

place professionally and personally. In revealing stories of personal aversion, body image and

identity, her testimony added meaning to archive objects that document historical trends.

At the outset of the 1970s Cricket (b. 1941) launched her career as a patternmaker in the

fast-paced New York garment industry. Before that, in the exact opposite direction to Joan, she
attended Reed College in Portland, far from her east coast upbringing. She was orphaned during

university, so the subsequent period was one of transition, trauma and reinvention. She left this

and the “radical West Coast politics” behind, and threw herself into travel and work, living in

New Zealand, Bermuda and Concord, Massachusetts where she even opened her own business.

Perhaps fashion work suited this mental need for constant activity. But her self-fashioning was

highly considered, in relation to her tastes, comfort and work-led lifestyle.

After these experiences she landed in New York to study at the Mayer School of Fashion

Design to get a “hands on” education in illustration, sewing, draping and patternmaking, as she

already had a degree in philosophy. This was the only design school located in the garment

center, and after a ten-month course she had acquired the skills to find work there. She changed

jobs often, a reflection of the dynamic yet dying fashion industry. For her it represented raw

capitalism, and international access through immigrant colleagues: “It was so fun. It was the

world, people from all over the world.” She even became the president of the Craftsmen of

Ladies Apparel in 1977, only three years after it opened up membership to women. Much of

Cricket’s wardrobe revolved around her physical job, which entailed standing, handwork and

reaching across a big table.

Comfort prevented Cricket from wearing on-trend knitwear, as it made her too warm. She

learned her lesson after the purchase of a knitted dress at Henri Bendel, which she first saw in a

magazine. Because of its physical effect on her, she wore knitwear as outerwear in the instance

of a long, olive-colored sweater with a cuff neck by Sonia Rykiel. It was a splurge and she even

called her friend beforehand to ask if she should buy it, then added a lining to transform it into a

coat. It also paired well with her colorful ethnic clothing, like her ikat scarf in aqua, fuchsia and

gold, which her good friend brought back from her travels to the Soviet Union. Cricket too loved
to travel and had ikat coats from central Asia, and one from Iceland, one of her favorite places to

visit. Similar to Joan, her “street clothes” were embroidered Indian tunics (kurtas) in cotton or

silk, which she had in all colors, cut with a high arm hole therefore comfortable.

After working for a sportswear company at 1407 Broadway, she moved into more formal

clothing at Muney Design. The firm made clothing in jersey only, matte in the summer and wool

jersey for the winter season, which Cricket normally couldn’t afford herself. In 1977 however

she bought an outfit to wear to her aunt’s anniversary party, at a discount: a taupe-colored blouse

and skirt with an elastic waistband, and a band edging the neckline in a glossy satin-like fabric.

She described it as her most trendy 1970s look, as “matte jersey was very big in those days.” The

popularity of jersey is well represented in museum archives, where I viewed, for example, high

end Norma Kamali and Holly Harp dresses, trousers by Bonnie Cashin, and at a lower price

point, a matte jersey wrap skirt by Bonnie August for the dancewear company Danskin.

The same prevalence marks visual culture, as 1971 campaign imagery for Royal Robes

by Adri attests (Fig. 3). In the photographs by Barbra Walz, one model engages with her

anonymous loft-like interior space sparsely in a wardrobe made up almost entirely of jersey,

including blousey dresses, skirts, and trousers. Adri, or Adrienne Steckling (1934-2006),

frequently worked in jersey at this time. She graduated from Parsons School of Design in 1958,

and worked at B. H. Wragge and Anne Fogarty before establishing her own lines in the late

1960s and throughout the 1970s, including Sportsthoughts and Royal Robes. Another photo

campaign of models on Manhattan streets and alleyways, dressed in the Spring 1972 collection

for Clothes Circuit (a division of Anne Fogarty), further connected the fabric to urban life. In a

wide-legged stance with hands touching her body, framed by a wooden fence, and the rear views

of brick buildings, one model shows the flexibility and sensuality of her ensemble: a cardigan
and tube top over a matte jersey skirt, with a matte jersey turban, wedge sandals and a two-tone

belt (Fig. 4). These brand photographs were disseminated to the press, including regional papers

across the country, for potential wide viewership. From jersey ensembles to miniskirts and

blazers, according to interviews, the visually omnipresent, fashionable garments of the decade

were considered but often impeded by financial constraints, ambivalence to trends, or a

disconnect to body image or identity construction.

Figure 3. Barbra and Kevin Figure 4. Publicity photograph for the

Walz, Publicity Poster, Adri Spring 1972 Clothes Circuit collection
for Royal Clothes, c. 1971. by Adri. Adri fashion design business
Adri fashion design business records, The New School Archives and

Joyce and Andrea: Comfort and Control

Touch and comfort are central threads in Joyce’s (b. 1948) sartorial recollections. This was

apparent from a childhood memory in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, of the difficulty of walking in

hand-me-down shoes, with another person’s “creases” already embedded. It also factors into her
love of trousers in the 1970s (and today), as a reaction to earlier life experiences. She described

the containment and fuss of the “girly” dresses with starched slips and frilly details, which her

mother and grandmother would make for church or other special occasions for her and her

sisters. They were worn with lacy socks and hats that didn’t sit right on her head – something for

which she was poked fun at. Perhaps due to the centrality of the Baptist church in the Black

south, or the sensory dimension of the experience, these memories were strong for Joyce. She

still doesn’t like to wear dresses.

In grade and high school she wasn’t allowed to wear pants, which meant that her legs

were out and she was cold. The constraints of wearing skirts further contrasted the liberating

transition to trousers in college. And although she didn’t pursue her dream of military training,

which went against her father’s wishes, she had more freedom in fashion at Southern University

as a Fine Arts major, when she could wear pants and go sockless. There she was free from the

hand-me-down clothes so necessary in a household with many children. In college she also

started wearing an Afro, a cutting-edge and symbolic fashion choice which connected to the

“Black is Beautiful” movement and, according to Tanisha C. Ford, “the language of soul.”24 Ford

writes how “Collegiate spaces became important sites for soul style innovation and cultural

discourse about blackness.”25 Continuing in this avant-garde mode Joyce wore a lime green

minidress to her wedding in 1971. This overall sartorial freedom was tempered by the constraints

of marriage within which Joyce continued to test the boundaries of her independence.

The materiality of dressing “down” resonated strongly for Joyce, and she wanted to keep

her old jeans to the point that they were worn out enough to be soft against the skin. According

to her mother, however, they were no longer new and needed to be thrown away. Her mother

criticized her casual style, and perhaps this influenced how Joyce characterized herself, not as
fashionable, but as a “tomboy,” “simple” and true to self. Other items she recalled from her

college years into her twenties were her burgundy corduroy jacket and a crocheted grey poncho.

They felt good to the touch, and she felt like herself wearing them.

One image from the 1970s shows the seamless connection between her body, self and

environment – through comfortable dress. Seated on a sofa, she poses glamorously with one

hand grazing her face and the other holding a camera (Fig. 5). She is wearing wide leg pants, in

the fashionable 1970s silhouette, a fitted striped sweater over a buttoned shirt, paired with gold

hoop earrings, glasses, and a watch. Her eyes meet the lens, while three other female relatives in

the scene look in

a different

direction caught

in a candid

moment. She

authored other

photos taken that

day, the proof in

her hand, but she

is undoubtedly
Figure 5. Joyce surrounded by her
grandmother, mother and daughter this picture’s focus. Joyce recounted how she preferred
after Christmas dinner, Baton Rouge, c.
1975. Image courtesy of Joyce Square.
taking pictures to being in them, and fondly remembers

her childhood Brownie Starflash camera. The remnants of Christmas wrapping paper, and traces

of decoration hint at the date of the event. The accessories she wore reappeared in another photo

with a very different setting, where she is depicted confidently at the bank where she had a long
career from 1974, but she traded her sweater for a jacket and soon after discarded her Afro (Fig.

6). To dress up she wore pantsuits and other pant ensembles. Trousers bridged Joyce’s leisure

and work worlds. They meant freedom, independence, maturity and professionalism.

Figure 6. Joyce at work at the copy center, Baton Rouge, 1975. Image courtesy of Joyce Square.

By 1973 Andrea had a career in marketing at TWA, which led her to Wall Street later on.

Working so young as a woman in a powerful position left her feeling vulnerable so she wore

long coats, trousers, blazers and menswear fabrics. She made sure to assert her confidence to me,

however, adding that she did not “emulate” men’s dress to give them the power, but to wear

them “like a woman.” Several years into her career, in 1977 John T. Molloy published The

Women’s Dress for Success Book in which he outlined the sartorial formula to aide women in

moving up the corporate ladder and the ways they needed to align to and distinguish themselves
from their male counterparts. A skirted suit was optimal and the jacket, as Patricia A.

Cunningham wrote, would fill the need for women’s appearance of authority.26 This strategy

differed widely among narrators, thinking back to Joan who was uncomfortable in black blazers:

“I always thought it was odd that women who were feminists were starting to dress like their

male counterparts. And I really kind of rebelled against that.” The divergence perhaps also owed

to their respective professional milieu: the corporate office, the university, the fashion and

theatre industries.

For Andrea, fashion was also about control. An adept seamstress with New York’s

resources at her disposal, as discussed above, she felt in control having the knowledge to make

things. This was the case leading up to the 1970s. From her mid-teens in 1967 until her early

twenties Andrea modeled, mainly for her aunt’s Madison Avenue shop. Here too, she sought

control of the image, to see and comment on the male photographer’s work. This same impulse

was perhaps behind her professional wardrobe.

Like most of the narrators, Andrea considered herself to be “ahead” of feminism, alone in

her sex in both school and at work. She jumped between gender “worlds,” where she could

present herself differently. The established high-end sportswear firm Anne Klein provided

clothes to negotiate these worlds, often selling blazers with both skirts and trousers during the

1970s, several examples of which are evident in the collection of The Costume Institute.27

Klein’s eponymous label, which was run by Donna Karan and Louis Dell’Olio after her death in

1973, targeted female professionals who sought streamlined clothing, and was widely pictured in

the fashion press. This consumer market, representative of most respondents, also grew up with

skirt dress codes and matured into a society that was still unclear about these terms. Joan even

noted a job in the late 1980s, that only allowed skirts and sheer pantyhose. In most
conversations, the subject of trousers triggered a thoughtful and animated reflection,

demonstrating its contentiousness. While many archives contain Anne Klein garments to

illustrate the work woman’s wardrobe of the 1970s, just as they symbolized this ideal for

consumers including those interviewed here, they remained financially inaccessible for many.

Further, our conversations unpacked the various topics layered into the construction of

professional identities, not limited to comfort, control and consciousness.

Negotiating the Gaze

“I’m trying to reach women who are committed to a contemporary lifestyle which, at
times, approaches the paradoxical,” Adri says. “‘My’ woman lives a life which is both
fast and relaxed, casual and elegant. She needs clothes that can keep up with all the
changes her fast-paced existence calls for.”28

That clothing needed to mediate and facilitate the complete lives of women – from work to

leisure, “single working woman” to motherhood, from morning to evening – was still a central

message in the 1970s fashion press, as well as in commentary from the growing group of women

designers such as Adri. As seen above, this was a moment of ambiguity for women, given more

opportunities yet alert to the reality of their second-class rights, within the context of feminism’s

“second wave.” As Joan remarked to me, “Our antennas were up as we were learning more and

more about our place in the world.” That the decade began with real legislative steps taken to

approve the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution (according to which, “Equality

of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on

account of sex.”) which ended in failure after years of campaigning, helps us situate it as a period

in limbo, caught between the ideals of liberalism and the New Right.
 Speaking with Andrea in particular underscored the various, divergent roles women

played, in relation to their clothing choices. One was the conservative and refined image she

upheld when working, in contrast to dressing “provocatively,” in for instance the low-cut black

dress she made with a high slit, with a thick gold trim around the center seam, which she was

photographed wearing in 1975 for an evening out (Fig. 7). She also spoke, as mentioned

previously, of dressing elegantly to impress her parents. She dressed with “the ambient gaze,” in

mind, defined by Chong Kwan as “how the wearer experiences the gaze and, moreover, how

they might employ individual agency to negotiate this disciplinary gaze,” based on a “social

system that constructs and disciplines the body” to act (and dress) according for various

situations.29 Andrea characterized her dressing strategy as “design and management,” a way of

demarcating and negotiating her creative

expression and professional life. Long wrap

dresses, she cites Diane von Furstenberg’s

design, functioned as the perfect negotiation, as

they were suggestive but not flashy, of a simple

cut but a colorful motif, and which could be

dressed up or down (with boots). Every archive I

visited to date regardless of collecting aims had

several models of von Furstenberg’s dresses, and

many more designers had their own versions.

This remarkable commonality attests to this

adaptable garment’s popularity.

Figure 7. Andrea at the Law School Prom, St.

John’s University, New York, 1975. Image
courtesy of A. Andrea Licari-LaGrassa.
 For Andrea, they were “Clothes you can count on,” as one of Harper’s Bazaar’s regular

sections was titled. It provided support during a period of anxiety and choice, in guiding readers

through garment options that would work for them. Andrea had the means to afford “go-to”

pieces which allowed her to travel lightly for her job: a blazer (Ralph Lauren’s in particular), a

trench coat, and a scarf, and the colors black or navy. For Joan and Joyce this meant soft and

comfortable clothing, simple cuts and minimalism: Joan used word “flouncy” to describe what

didn’t work for her. As Fig. 1 illustrates, Mary Jo relied heavily on bandanas, which she could

wrap and style in a number of ways: “It was also a way of coping with my crappy hair [which] I

tried to wear long […] so if I wrapped it up in a bandana it would look good.” In another

Harper’s Bazaar example, in 1976 and 1977 it featured the section, “Nobody is Perfect: How to

make the most of what you’ve got,” which instructed the right garment silhouette according to

body type. Respondents had precise ideas of what didn’t what didn’t work for them. For Joan it

was pastels, straight skirts and blazers, while, according to Mary Jo, “I’m tall and I’ve got big

hands and big feet, so I could never really pull off the totally delicate styles.” These ideas were

formed out of comfort, visual perceptions of self, and the potential gaze of the onlooker. In

parallel, the magazine’s section allowed for imperfections, yet it also encouraged readers to

compare themselves to an ideal, in a social framework of looking at female bodies.

Many narrators discussed the sexual objectification they encountered in life, often in

relation to clothing. Mary Jo noted the attention and rules surrounding women’s bodies. In a

waitressing job interview she was asked to “twirl” in her uniform. More generally, “It was hard

walking down the street anywhere, it wasn’t just catcalls and whistlers there were gross

comments being made, graphic and everything.” While, as mentioned previously, Joan remarked,

“I hated the miniskirt… Even though I probably looked… well I got flattering comments
wearing them you know that was the other thing [..] clothing was very sexualized I think
 at that point with the miniskirt and the tights and men seemed to… felt they could make
more commentary about your clothing as a result of that so um I wasn’t really interested
in having that kind of commentary.”

They discussed learning to negotiate the male gaze, to divert attention, through appearance

choices. Andrea trained herself to downplay (during choice moments) her beauty and her

femaleness through dress, or by hiding her long blond hair.

Indeed the press disseminated mixed messages and a multi-directional gaze, so that

sections on practical and reliable clothing or those addressing “working women,” were read

alongside images of sexualized bodies. Mary Jo was the most avid magazine reader of this

group, and the others vaguely recalled consulting them without clear recollections of titles or

particular images, with the exception of Joyce who didn’t read them and Cricket who discussed

one post-magazine garment purchase. Conversely she also described magazines as reminders of

the “patriarchal culture we were leaving.” Mary Jo was 16 or 17 when she got her Vogue

subscription, which provided access to a wider world: “I was looking at all the fabulous clubs in

Paris and New York and looking at what the women were wearing there.” Ideological changes

stemming from feminist discourse influenced how she looked at models represented in imagery,

pushing her to cancel her Vogue subscription in the 1980s. These were the very concerns of The

Task Force on the Image of Women, created in 1966 to “change the stereotyped image and

denigration of women in all the mass media.” This was one of the seven task forces set up by the

National Organization for Women (NOW) the year it was established. Yet by the early 1970s it

deemed fashion codes as open to interpretation. According to a 1972 memo, “more and more

women are making a free choice of what to wear and how to look based on what is uniquely

suited to their personal style and individual lives.”30 As we saw from the 1971 FGI Bulletin

quoted at the start of this essay, industry leaders were adopting a language of choice and
individuality, which paralleled the centrality of ‘choice feminism’ to the women’s movement by

the mid-1970s, according to Hillman. 31 Despite moments of ambivalence or hesitation, all

narrators clearly communicated to me their perceived sense of authenticity and individuality vis

a vis self-fashioning. It was as Andrea recounted: “I dressed for me.”

Conclusion

Downstairs at the Fashion Archives and Museum of Shippensburg University there are racks of

garments, divided by period. They are not stored according to their illustrious maker as

elsewhere in the archive, in fact, many have no labels. Repositories such as these are where we

inch closer to finding the ‘everyday.’ Very few designer names came up in the oral testimonies

discussed, and probing narrators to remember them often cut off conversation. This proved

similar in discussions of magazine imagery. Whereas the Fashion Archives racks resemble the

ordered chaos of personal closets, a mixture of styles and quality, that seem to contain the

imprint (and experiences) of the wearer more than they operate as exemplars of workmanship,

trends or designer genius. Experiential testimony supplements and animates what is held within

archives, including as we’ve seen here, knitwear, jeans, wrap dresses and the “professional”

woman’s wardrobe, whilst shedding light on what is missing. This chapter contends that ‘big

history’ is incomplete without women’s voices, which expose fashion narratives, such as those

explored here regarding creativity, fashionability, feel, control and negotiations. The

inconsistencies which occur at the intersection of image, object and voice when these worlds

meet is a good place to begin our study of history.

Acknowledgments
This research was made possible thanks to a 2020-21 postdoctoral fellowship at the Costume
Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I wish to thank the staff there as well as at the
following institutions where additional research was undertaken: The New School Archives and
Special Collections, Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library, de
Young Museum, FIDM Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum at FIT,
Fashion Archives and Museum of Shippensburg University and Robert and Penny Fox Historic
Costume Collection at Drexel University.

Author Interviews
Mary Jo Pollak, 24 February 2021
Cricket Giese, 17 March and 23 March 2021
A. Andrea Licari-LaGrassa, 24 March and 31 March 2021
Joan Hart, 12 May 2021
Joyce Square, 14 August 2021

Works Cited

Buckley, Cheryl and Hilary Fawcett. Fashioning the Feminine: Representation and Women’s
Fashion from the Fin de Siecle to the Present. London: I.B. Tauris, 2002.

Chong Kwan, Sara. “The Ambient Gaze: Sensory Atmosphere and the Dressed Body.” In
Revisiting the Gaze: The Fashioned Body and the Politics of Looking. Bloomsbury Visual Arts,
London, 2020.

_______. “Making sense of everyday dress: integrating multi-sensory experience within our
understanding of contemporary dress in the UK” (PhD Diss., 2016).

Cunningham, Patricia A. “Dressing for Success: The Re-Suiting of Corporate America in the
1970s.” In Twentieth-Century American Fashion, edited by Linda Welters and Patricia A.
Cunningham (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005), 191-208.

Ford, Tanisha C. Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul.
Chapel Hill: The University of North Caroline Press, 2015.

Guy, Ali, Eileen Green and Maura Banim, eds. Through the Wardrobe: Women’s Relationships
with Their Clothes. Oxford: Berg, 2001.

Hillman, Betty Luther. Dressing for the Culture Wars: Style and the Politics of Self-Presentation
in the 1960s and 1970s. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2015.

Linthicum, Liz. “Integrative Practice: Oral History, Dress and Disability Studies,” Journal of
Design History 19/4 (2006), 309-18.
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Samuel, Raphael and Paul Thompson, eds., The Myths We Live By. London: Routledge, 1990.

Sandino, Linda. “Introduction. Oral Histories and Design: Objects and Subjects,” Journal of
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Slater, Alison. “Wearing in memory-materiality and oral histories of dress.” In Critical Studies in
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_______. “Listening to Dress: Unfolding Oral History Methods.” In Mundane Methods:

Innovative Ways to Research the Everyday. Manchester University Press, 2020.

Steele, Valerie. “Anti-Fashion: The 1970s,” Fashion Theory 1/3 (1997): 279-296.

Taylor, Lou. “Approaches using Oral History.” In The Study of Dress History. Manchester and
New York: Manchester University Press, 2002, 242-71.

Wilcox, Claire. “Covering Up.” In Oral History in the Visual Arts, edited by Linda Sandino and
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Woodward, Sophie. Why Women Wear What They Wear. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007.

Notes
1
Valerie Steele, “Anti-Fashion: The 1970s,” Fashion Theory 1/3 (1997): 279-296.
2
“The Changing Consumer,” Bulletin, The Fashion Group, Inc., October 29, 1971.
3
Ibid.
4
The wider research project examines women designers as well as consumers in its aim to
expose various modes of female creative participation that have remained largely absent from
history annals.
5
I’ve conducted research at the following archives: Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Fashion Institute of Design and
Merchandising Museum, Los Angeles; Fashion Archives and Museum of Shippensburg
University, Shippensburg; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; The Museum at
FIT, New York; Robert and Penny Fox Historic Costume Collection, Drexel University,
Philadelphia.
6
This research project has studied the magazines Harper’s Bazaar, Essence and Vogue, as well
as campaign imagery from a number of brands they disseminated to the national presses and
used in advertising.
7
Alexis Romano and Ellen Sampson, “The Auteur is Alive and Well Dressed,” Vestoj, 2018.
8
Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” 1972, 44.
9
Ink on paper, collection of Doug Woodham and Dalya Inhaber.
www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/835039
10
Cheryl Buckley and Hilary Fawcett, Fashioning the Feminine, 2002, 2.
11
Betty Luther Hillman, Dressing for the Culture Wars, 2015, 71.
12
Lou Taylor, The Study of Dress History, 2002, 242.
13
Linda Sandino, “Oral Histories and Design,” 2006, 278.
14
Taylor, The Study of Dress History, 242.
15
For the latter see Evan Casey and Deirdre Clemente, “Clothing the Contadini: Migration and
Material Culture, 1890-1925,” 2017.
16
See, for example, Claire Wilcox, “Covering Up,” 2013.
17
A notable exception is “Memory of Clothes,” by Helen Barff and Suzanne Joinson at
Worthing Museum (2019). See also Svetlana Kitto, Sara Penn’s Knobkerry: An Oral History
Sourcebook (Sculpture Center and New York Consolidated, 2021).
18
See, for instance, “Ebony Fashion Fair Oral History Project,” Minnesota Historical Society;
“Oral History Project,” Gladys Marcus Library, Fashion Institute of Technology; “Fashion
Group International St. Louis Oral Histories,” Washington University in St. Louis; “An Oral
History of British Fashion,” British Library; and “Garment Industry Oral History Collection,”
Kansas City Public Library.
19
See Alison Slater, “Wearing in memory-materiality,” 2014; Alison Slater, “Listening to
Dress,” 2020; Sara Chong Kwan, “Making sense of everyday dress,” 2016; Sara Chong Kwan,
“The Ambient Gaze,” 2020. See also Liz Linthicum, “Oral History, Dress and Disability
Studies,” 2006.
20
Sophie Woodward, Why Women Wear What They Wear, 2007.
21
This growing body of work includes Lucia Ruggerone, “The Feeling of Being Dressed,” 2017;
and Ellen Sampson, Worn, 2020.
22
Raphael Samuel, The Myths We Live By, 1990, 2.
23
Author interview, Cricket Giese, March 2021.
24
Tanisha C. Ford, Liberated Threads, 2015, 102.
25
Ibid., 95.
26
Patricia A. Cunningham, “Dressing for Success,” 204.
27
1977.362.26a–c; 1977.362.28a–h
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/96824
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/96825
28
Press release, Adri for Clothes Circuit, Spring 1972, Adri Fashion Design Business Records.
29
Chong Kwan, “The Ambient Gaze,” n.p.
30
Image of Task Force News, July 1973 memo, box 30, folder 65, series VIII, NOW records.
Cited in Hillman, N99209.
31
Hillman, Dressing for the Culture Wars, 82.