Sunday, August 22, 2010

A flash to the Sixties

Here's a 1960s flashback: Jennifer Anniston does a turn as Barbra Streisand on the current issue of Harper's Bazaar. The catch is you won't see this cover on the newsstands, since it's only on the subscriber edition.

I think Jennifer is awfully cute and the Streisand image they chose to replicate is the one from 1963-64, the Streisand of Funny Girl and the famous TV special, My Name Is Barbra.

I went to the original article and on Google Books found this cover of Life from May, 1964, as well as the first page of their article.


I hadn't really thought about it, but up until that point in American popular music the female stars presented on TV were almost always the "All-American Girl" types, with bobbed noses and blonde hair. Nothing against those girls, but Streisand's ethnicity caught my eye when I first saw her. She used to make jokes about her nose, but once I read she didn't get it fixed because a doctor had told her he couldn't guarantee her voice would be the same. So she kept it, and good for her.

Speaking of the sixties...

It was a time when girls and women went nutty for fashion, and we guys really enjoyed watching how far up those hemlines would go! Here's a picture of some folks from Swingin' London. The mod in the middle is quite the natty dresser, like the Kinks song, "A Dedicated Follower of Fashion." ("He flits from shop to shop just like a butterfly..." A gay reference, I believe.) The gals are dressed to be looked at. Stopping traffic, from the picture.

I found these patterns in a thrift store and picked them up for their artwork. I noticed something...they are all made to fit a woman size 14, bust size 36. I assume they came from the same person. The first two are from '67, the last two are from '69, maternity fashions. So what happened in between? Ah, you figured it out, didn't you.





2 comments:

Kirk said...

The 1950s and 1960s were so different from each other. For that matter, the early '60s and late '60s seem so different from each other. I was born in 1961, so I only really know this from the various media images from that era, but has there ever been that much cultural change is that short of time?

Going from the 1910s into the 1920s, maybe. That's the only time I can think of that comes close.

Postino said...

Kirk, you make a really good point. I believe what we commonly think of now as the Sixties really began after the Kennedy assassination in late '63, and didn't end until our country was out of Vietnam.

Lots of people think of the Sixties in terms of hippies and Woodstock, but they came late in the decade. It had to do with my generation, the Baby Boomers, growing up, becoming college age (or in my case, draft age). In 1970 50% of the population of the U.S. was under 25 years old. So the Sixties was really two decades: the tail end of the Fifties when we were young teens, and then as we got older the decade of protest, civil rights, drugs, sex, rock 'n' roll! You know, the important stuff.