1960's Paper dresses

The paper garments are as stable as the synthetic nonwoven fabrics, mostly spun-bonded polyesters. Those are often so thin that they were dangerously flimsy, although that may have been part of the point in the swinging 60s.

The metallic nonwovens, "Space Age" style garments made of thin foil fused to plastics or synthetic fabrics, seem much more fragile. They may not last too many more years,

Industrial designer and Milwaukeean Brooks Stevens coined the term "planned obsolescence" in 1954. He conceived of the concept as instilling in a consumer the design to buy something newer, better and sooner than might otherwise have been necessary.

No doubt Stevens, who died in 1994, would have nothing but applause for this exhibition. The ultimate in easy care, the garments were inexpensive, fashionable and made excellent conversation starters. They were sold conveniently in drug and grocery stores as well as department stores and boutiques. Consumers often could buy matching paper party decorations right along with the disposable clothes. Clowes says that the disposability of the garments and their expedient purchase implied modernity and leisure, extremely appealing notions in the 1960s.

The dresses projected a playful, daring, mod attitude she says. Their flimsiness made wearing them an adventure. They also were very sexy you could cut them to any length with scissors. They were perhaps the most "pop"; of the Pop Art Movement.

However, their day passed by 1970. Their short life is a poignant reflection of how swiftly mainstream culture changed in the 1960s. It was not just annual fashion changes; disposable garments could have run with that. Paper dresses did not stand a chance against the advent of environmental consciousness and the counterculture's disdain for commercial fashion

Taken from http://www.news.wisc.edu/13367
by Barbara Wolff