The Peacock Revolution |
3 |
Journalist George Frazier is credited with popularizing the phrase “peacock revolution” to describe the styles coming from London’s young Carnaby Street designers, which promised to restore the lost glory of flamboyant menswear.1 Frazier was describing the explosion of choices that were suddenly available to men, ranging from Romantic revival (velvet jackets and flowing shirts) to a pastiche of styles borrowed from Africa and Asia. Expanded color palettes, softer fabrics, and a profusion of decorative details represented a direct challenge to the conformity and drabness of menswear at mid-century. For critics of the new men’s fashions, flowered shirts and velvet capes raised the specter of decadence and homosexuality, a fear that was reinforced by the emergence of the gay liberation movement. Just as women’s unisex styles had to balance being sexy and liberated, men’s styles tended to navigate the territory between expressiveness and effeminacy. But like many revolutions, the peacock revolution ended in repudiation and regression. Although fashion prognosticators in 1970 were predicting the demise of neckties and gray flannel suits, within ten years the pendulum had swung back with a vengeance. John T. Molloy’s Dress for Success, in 1975, had codified a return to conservative dressing for business. Within a few years the more flamboyant styles of the late 1960s and ’70s had been relegated to the back of the closet, if not the thrift shop.
Part of the reason for this stylistic whiplash is that the impact of the peacock revolution was exaggerated at the time and seems only to have grown in the popular imagination. The reality is that many men, even young men, did not succumb to the trend, and few of those who did adopt the new styles continued to experiment with new expressions of masculinity for long. To understand what was going on beneath the surface of men’s fashions, we need to enter relatively unexplored territory: the masculine mystique.
Multiple competing models of masculinity and femininity characterize modern culture. Girls and boys are presented with an array of options as to what kind of men and women they will be, and they are also aware, through photography, movies, television, and the millions of images on the Internet, that these models have changed. Anytime a boy reads, watches movies or television shows, sings along with rock lyrics, or engages in a dozen other popular culture activities, he is aware of his options (and of the models he must avoid). Men’s fashions enclothe these different choices, or, more exactly, allow men to clothe themselves in just the right masculinity for the moment or the company. After all, they’re just the costumes that men use when they are playing different roles: suburban dad barbecuing on the weekend, young man on a date, businessman at a meeting, hip-hop fan at a concert.
Isn’t this just what women do? Superficially yes, but men’s and women’s fashions differ significantly, from design and distribution to the psychological impact they have on wearers and viewers. In a consumer society the advertisements in magazines and television and the other cultural products that surround us are what communicate the ideal patterns and the desired effect. If, as Betty Friedan argued, women’s magazines shaped our cultural expectations of women, then men’s magazines—Playboy, Esquire, Gentleman’s Quarterly, and, beginning in 1965, Penthouse—wielded similar influence in men’s consciousness. Like the women’s magazines, men’s lifestyle magazines dispensed visions of modern gendered consumerism tailored to their respective demographic. Instead of the housewife in her kitchen, the Playboy archetype was the swinging bachelor in his penthouse, packaged for a readership that was young and educated (more than half of Playboy subscribers were college graduates or still at university). Members of Esquire’s target audience were somewhat older and more established in their careers. Penthouse sought readers who were more affluent than Playboy’s and even more engaged in the hedonistic lifestyle of the late 1960s. Gentleman’s Quarterly (or GQ), a spinoff from Esquire, originally aimed at the menswear industry insider, by the 1960s and 1970s was appealing to the clothes-conscious male consumer in a range of professions.
The vivid, revolutionary nature of young men’s clothing in this period is evidence that the time was ripe for a rejection of the masculine mystique along the same lines of second-wave feminism. At the very least it’s worthy of an analysis similar to Freidan’s: an examination of the underlying fantasies, desires, and aspirations embedded in their articles and advertisements. A few scholars have paid attention to masculinity as a cultural artifact—very few, compared to the huge numbers who have examined women and the media. In this chapter I take a look at the myth and reality of the peacock revolution and its unisex aspects and set them against a backdrop of what we know about men and masculinity. Too widespread to be a fad but falling short of the predicted paradigm shift, the experimentation and conspicuous outrage of this period offered men, particularly white men, an escape into alternate lives. There were some permanent changes, though not the “revolution” predicted in the 1960s. By the 1980s, grooming products and cosmetics for men were a large and permanent addition to the American scene, and “casual Friday” had expanded to “business casual,” weeklong and year around. Options for casual clothing, whether active sportswear or leisure styles, were much greater than before the 1960s. The peacock revolution was no more a failure than women’s dress reform in the era of the Bloomer costume, and in subtle ways it was much more of a success.
It’s always been a puzzle to me why more dress historians don’t study men’s clothing. Even when they are outwardly drab, men’s suits are a marvel of construction, requiring vastly different skills than are required for women’s clothing. Neckties have to be the most tenacious vestigial appendage outside the human body; now, there’s a story! It seems to me that the relationship between men’s sexuality and homophobia is at least as interesting as the cycling male gaze between women’s legs and breasts. (Admittedly, women’s clothing lends itself to more visually exciting museum exhibits, but must cultural history always be about pretty things?) Men’s fashions have their own stories to tell, and the 1960s and ’70s are rich with them. What was changing during this era was not masculinity in isolation, but masculinity as it related to the feminine, which was also in a state of rapid change.
More than femininity, masculinity in America had acquired a uniform—the business suit. Introduced in the middle of the nineteenth century, the boxy “lounge” or “sack” suit had originally been intended for casual wear at a time when the well-dressed man had a wardrobe of jackets, each appropriate for a specific time of day and occasion. (As any fan of Downton Abbey knows, the phrase “dressing for dinner” in period dramas refers not just to ladies; gentlemen, too, were expected to exchange “daytime” frock coats or cutaways for dinner jackets and white ties.) A well-fitting morning coat or cutaway was the work of a tailor, whereas the less structured sack coat could be presentable off the rack with perhaps just a few alterations. By the mid-twentieth century this style of suit had dominated the American office for three generations. There were trends in details such as lapel width and fit (tight or loose), but these tended to be subtle and slow-moving, compared with women’s fashions. A good, basic, neutral-colored sack suit could last a man for many years, because it could be trusted not to go out of style.
The image of “the man in the gray flannel suit” is one of the most enduring icons of masculinity: the organization man, struggling to maintain his identity while conforming to professional standards. But it was not the only brand of masculinity available. Like women, men could choose among a range of myths and media images to emulate, from working-class hero to dapper aristocrat. Nor were they wedded to a single image: the man in the gray flannel suit could be a frontiersman in rugged jeans on weekends or indulge his love of color in a Hawaiian shirt. Men’s departments before the peacock revolution were not completely devoid of color or frivolity; however, the colorful, fun clothes were consigned to a very restricted set of occasions. Vintage photographs of men on city streets, in offices, and even at sporting events in the 1950s are striking in their uniformity. Hats, suits, and overcoats are so similar in appearance as to make the gathering look like a military muster. The changes that took place in the 1960s and ’70s added variety to “office clothing,” limited the most formal elements to fewer settings, and opened the door to more individual expression.
Just as Freudian psychology contributed to popular attitudes about women and femininity, it also shaped beliefs about “normal” expressions of masculinity. The main problem with the psychoanalytic approach to gender was the failure of Freud and his followers to realize not only that was there culture at work in attitudes and behavior but also that there was culture at work in the environments in which attitudes and behaviors were learned and even in their own research. What psychologists in the 1950s attributed to the subconscious human mind was not as universal as they thought, but shaped by unique circumstances of society and culture. That included their own professional worldview, their assumptions, and even their research design and conclusions, which were far from being objective science.
One of Freud’s most powerful legacies is the idea that masculinity is fragile and subject to “corruption.” This is behind modern efforts to protect boys by shielding them from imagined threats ranging from exposure to feminine-stereotypical activities to mere knowledge of the existence of homosexuals. We also have Freud to thank for the idea that children are born as sexual beings, although most of us no longer believe those feelings are attached to our mother or father. Part of the problem is that when the science of psychology is translated into pop psychology, it is out of the scientists’ hands, subject to the whim of cultural expectations. There’s no way for the experts to steer it as it works its way through our culture and back into our attitudes and behavior. There’s no peer review, no public discourse. The concepts, images, and discarded truths take on a life of their own and are passed on from one person to another as common knowledge or urban legend. Yesterday’s “discoveries” live on, infecting new minds and seemingly immune to correction or retraction.
So despite post-Freudian psychology and second-wave feminism, the notion persists that femininity is not only the opposite of masculinity but also its inferior and its enemy. The fear of the feminine goes back to ancient Greece, which combated this threat by developing a culture in which boys were mentored by older men (including homosexual intercourse, which was considered masculine for the older man). What has changed in three thousand years is mainly what comprises appropriate “feminine” activities and expression (education, work outside the home, domesticity, sexual freedom—and, of course, modes of dress), but because masculinity is defined in terms of what is considered to be unique to men, nearly every expansion of the feminine has initially been considered a threat to masculinity. The exception is the nineteenth-century invention of the “separate sphere” for middle-class women. One reason this ideology has been so enduring is that it protected male occupations and territories from female encroachment.
What happens in the 1960s when teenage boys and young men begin to adopt seemingly feminine traits? The reactions of the menswear industry and various subsets of American society are one way to discern the masculine mystique. Another is to examine the fashion trends through the lens of the some of the most popular arbiters of men’s consumer culture: men’s lifestyle magazines such as Playboy and Esquire.
Modern men’s dress is a paradox: dull but interesting. For at least the past 150 years it has been conservative and resistant to change. This contrasts with the ornate and expressive dress worn by men at other times and in other cultures. Considering the dominant role of men in most aspects of American life, this situation should strike most of us as strange. Many scholars have tried to explain it, beginning with cultural Darwinists of the nineteenth century, who saw loose-fitting male dress as evidence of Western man’s position at the top of the evolutionary ladder. Comparing a man in business dress to the more flamboyantly dressed man of earlier times and unindustrialized societies seemed to prove that the business suit represented the triumph of intellect over emotion or civilization over primitivism. For those who believed that men were more highly evolved form of humans than women, this also explained why women’s clothing was more ornamental than men’s: either women were less evolved than men (which left open the possibility that someday they, too, might eventually adopt more rational dress), or they had been selected to be ornamental as a means of fulfilling their own biological destiny to attract a mate and produce offspring.
This evolutionary view of clothing makes some superficial sense. The males and females of most species have an array of markers that help them find each other and choose among potential mates. Human primary sex characteristics (our genitals) are visible at birth, but our secondary sex characteristics (pubic and facial hair, breasts, vocal changes) appear at puberty. Nearly from the beginning of human history, we have used various means to emphasize and amplify sexual, age, and status differences, including body paint and clothing and a wide variety of modifications and accessories, both temporary and permanent. These artificial secondary sex characteristics not only express biological sex but also communicate the attributes and behaviors associated with masculinity and femininity.
Of course there were huge flaws in these early evolutionary theories of dress. The first is that nineteenth-century humans were not a different species from Etruscans or Tang dynasty Chinese. Another is that neither males nor females of the same species are more highly evolved than the other. Lastly, describing societal or cultural change as “evolution” is metaphorical. It should come with a disclaimer like those found on the printed labels of herbal remedies: “This conclusion has not been validated by empirical study and is not intended to be used to justify the present or predict the future.” Primary and secondary sex characteristics in their natural states are biological realities; everything we do to enhance, hide, emphasize, or otherwise modify them is cultural. That goes double for most of our everyday attempts to explain differences between men’s clothing and women’s.
British essayist Harold Nicholson expressed the dilemma of men’s clothing as “the problem of how to be individual without being funny.”2 Interestingly, and probably not coincidentally, this concept of vulnerability to ridicule also appears in the psychological research on modern male sex roles. In one of the earliest studies of clothing and human behavior, “fear of ridicule” was given as a motive in clothing selection more often than any other motive by men. For women, however, it fell below reasons such as “to appear attractive,” “to impress others,” and “to express myself.”3 Later studies suggested that men were more conforming than women and more likely to bow to peer pressure about dress.4 The blossoming of masculinity studies after 1970 provides us with more insight into men’s behavior. James Babl found that highly sex-typed men (that is, men who scored in the high masculine/low feminine quadrant on the Bem Sex Role Inventory) responded to an audiotape on the decline of masculinity by behaving in a more masculine manner and scoring even higher on masculinity scales. (Androgynous men did not.)5 Educational researchers Jean Grambs and Walter Waetjen found that school-age boys were especially vulnerable to the accusation of effeminacy or homosexuality, adding, “The most powerful word in the English language is ‘sissy.’ Within a group males dare to be nonconforming only when there is no sex-linked factor in the behavior or attitude. If there is any element suggesting that something is masculine or feminine, males will adhere to the ‘male position.’”6
The dominant style in business wear in the early 1960s was an off-the-rack version of British menswear: white dress shirt, a suit in a dark neutral color (usually black, gray, or navy blue) and a rep tie—ribbed silk, with diagonal stripes. Casual clothing might include sport shirts (plaid, striped, or even Hawaiian), knitted polo shirts, or sweaters, and could be more colorful. The main deviations in color and cut came from society’s margins: jazz musicians and beatniks with their turtleneck shirts, generously cut suits, and loud ties, or fashion-forward sophisticates who favored the new “Continental Look”—slim jackets with side vents (or no vents at all) paired with tight trousers with beltless waistbands, like Sansabelts.
But the first signs of change were already visible in England, where young working-class men were emerging from the wartime rubble looking like Edwardian dandies. These “Teddy Boys” adopted a blend of Continental and American elements—tight Italian-style trousers worn with a flowing zoot-suitish drape jacket and “duck’s arse” hairstyles, with echoes of their grandparents’ day—the Edwardian era had been just forty years earlier—such as long, double-breasted jackets with velvet collars. Demand for these styles, and modifications of them, influenced staid Saville Row, which responded with their own touches of Edwardian elegance. The Teddy Boys were succeeded by the Mods and Rockers, rival subcultures with their own distinctive uniforms. The Rockers were the British counterparts of the American “greaser”—working-class toughs in jeans and leather jackets, whose lives centered on motorcycles and rock ’n’ roll. The more fashion-conscious Mods, who favored American blues and Continental-style clothing and scooters, were the leading edge of what would become the peacock revolution.7
The changes already simmering in Great Britain barely stirred the surface of American menswear in the early 1960s. Esquire was reporting on the Mods as an interesting novelty but for the most part offered its readers a choice of Saville Row (traditional English) or Continental (recommended only for the slimmer man, ideally in the creative department, not accounts). Playboy, with its younger readership, touted the Ivy League style—a slightly looser, younger version of Saville Row—as the preferred mode of dress. This was evidently the influence of the magazine’s fashion director Robert L. Green, since Hugh Hefner himself had been known to prefer jazz-influenced drape suits when he launched the magazine.8 Sears echoed these suggestions, with English and Continental styles for adult men and Ivy League for teens and young men. The range of colors was limited, although more leeway was allowed for leisure wear, with golf shirts, cabana sets, and sport shirts available in a range of hues and patterns.
But beneath the surface there was a desire for change. Fashion historian James Laver, best known for his theory of “shifting erogenous zones,” predicted in 1964 that men would soon start dressing more for physical attraction and become more erotic.9 His reasoning echoed other evolutionary/cyclical theories of fashion change, including the idea that one of the drivers of innovation was sexual display, but that the focus of the display must shift from time to time as the imagination becomes bored. His reasoning was that men had suppressed their desire for display so long that they were way overdue for a change. Elaine Kendall, writing in the New York Times, reasoned along the same lines and came to the same conclusion: “Women’s fashions through the ages have reflected social conditions. Have men’s fashions done so, too? Well, the case is harder to prove, but the evidence is there—if the observer is in the right place at the right time.”10 Men’s outward appearance may have been conformist and conservative, but underneath rebellion was simmering. Marylin Bender noted a few years later that this may have been connected to women “rethinking their place in society . . . the respective roles of men and women . . . [are] . . . revised.”11
Credit for launching the revolution in menswear was claimed by many designers and probably belongs to many more. Individual designers certainly played a role—a number of them the same innovators who transformed women’s fashions, including Courrèges and Cardin. But neckwear designer Michael Fish is perhaps the most overlooked actor of the 1960s. It was his brightly colored neckties (dubbed “kipper ties” as a play on his last name) that made the revolution palatable to men who wanted to appear “with it” but still had to maintain a mainstream businesslike appearance. While other designers were reinventing the jacket or discarding it altogether, Fish was offering a few square inches of liberation, noting, “Fashion, you see, is in the mind. You have to think differently before you can dress differently. By changing their clothes, people risk changing their whole lives and they are frightened.”12
Kipper ties made their first appearance at the venerable British outfitter Turnbull and Asser in 1965, where Fish was employed as a designer. In some ways they represented a revival of a style from the not-too-distant past: the so-called “Bold Look” neckwear of the postwar era, which had featured colorful geometric and scenic designs displayed on a generous five-inch-wide canvas. The Bold Look had been replaced by conformist restraint to the extent that by the early 1960s some men’s ties were reduced to 1–2-inch strips of solid blue, gray, or black adorned with a single tiny embroidered motif. Michael Fish reintroduced polka dots, bright colors, and prints and made the ties wider, growing from 3 inches to 5 inches by the late 1960s. Through his own store, called Mr. Fish, he sold ties, shirts, suits, and dresses (women’s and men’s) to the trendiest Brits and tourists from all over the world from 1966 to 1973. Name a style icon from this era and Michael Fish dressed him, from Sean Connery as James Bond to Mick Jagger and David Bowie.
Across the Atlantic a young tie salesman named Ralph Lauren, having tried unsuccessfully to introduce wide neckties to his company, set off on his own in 1966. He hit the jackpot with an order from Neiman-Marcus for one hundred dozen ties and was able to open his own store in New York in 1967, establishing the Polo brand with its nostalgic English vibe but a young, American tilt. The drawn-out progress of the new tie styles in the national marketplace suggests something less than a revolution. Although 3-inch-wide ties made their debut in Esquire in fall 1967 and in Playboy one year later, the more mainstream Sears catalog held off on the trend until spring 1970. Similarly, while Esquire reported a trend for patterned shirts worn with a patterned tie (a striped shirt with a floral tie, for example) in 1968, they did not appear together in Sears until spring 1970, and even then just combined two different stripes in shirt and tie. Of course, catalogs don’t tell the whole story; men could mix shirts and ties to accomplish a range of looks, from fairly conservative to maniacally mod.
The high-water point for the British mod influence on American fashion was 1965–1966, before the “summer of love” introduced West Coast hippie styles to the mix. Even Playboy’s Robert L. Green featured “modified mod” in the September 1966 issue,13 with a photo of “two urban guys” dancing at a go-go, wearing American adaptations of English mod attire. One man sports a herringbone tweed double-breasted jacket with epaulets, a cotton floral shirt with solid-color long-point button-down collar and a polka-dot tie. The other has a three-piece suit with a double-breasted short vest cut straight across and a paisley tie. To the modern eye the look is conservative—after all, they are both wearing suits—but in 1966 the suits they wore were an exciting departure from the style of just a few years earlier. Epaulets? A floral shirt with a tweed suit? A wide paisley tie in green and blue? If Michael Fish was right, there was just enough fashion difference to suggest a difference in thinking.
One of the most striking features of the peacock revolution is the success of women’s fashion designers in entering and transforming the menswear industry. Some of the most iconic brands in menswear—including Pierre Cardin and Bill Blass—made their debut during this era and rode to success by tapping men’s desire for fresh design. French designer Cardin was the more revolutionary of the two, having already earned a reputation as a bit of a rebel within the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture (the venerable French trade union of high-fashion designers) by showing a ready-to-wear collection in 1959. (For his transgression, he was promptly expelled from the Chambre Syndicale but reinstated soon after.) His women’s fashions and entrepreneurial innovations were equally avant-garde, as described in chapter 2, and he had been producing some menswear since 1957. When his styles first became available in the United States in 1966, they had an immediate impact, and many imitators. Introducing his Paris couture collection in July 1966, he announced, “You are going to see some slightly strange boys and girls,” accurately predicting how disruptive his designs would be.14 His solution to the tie problem was to eliminate them altogether; he declared neckties “bourgeois” in 1967 and offered scarves and turtlenecks instead. Cardin offered other forms of unconstructed and innovative suits, including vest suits, tunic suits, and shirt suits (matching trousers and shirt worn with no jacket, a precursor to the 1970s leisure suit). He is also credited with the revival of wider jacket lapels. In 1968 Playboy highlighted the new cut associated with Cardin’s designs: higher armholes, narrower sleeves, and longer, shaped jackets. Like women’s clothing, menswear was not only changing the look of men’s bodies but also requiring that men reshape their bodies to a younger, slimmer version in order to wear fashionable clothing.
The Nehru jacket was just one of a number of tie-free options that Cardin popularized. Worn by celebrities ranging from Lord Snowdon (with a silk turtleneck) to Sammy Davis Jr., the Nehru jacket with its stand-up collar and soft construction did not originate with Cardin. It was based on a style created in the 1940s and associated with Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964); the Beatles wore matching jackets in this style for their 1965 Shea Stadium concert, two years before Cardin’s interpretation in gray flannel. But it was Cardin’s version that launched the real craze, which peaked in the fall of 1968. Although it was to become a symbol of middle-age wannabe swingers, the Nehru jacket represented a powerful desire at the time to hang on to the idea of a jacket but open it up to the possibility of greater self-expression and comfort. Accessorized with beaded necklaces or medallions dangling on chains or fabricated in traditional suiting materials, the Nehru jacket appealed—just briefly—to a wide swath of American men. Its heyday was short, however; after a slow ascent (in various forms but without the “Nehru” label) beginning in 1965, it was hailed by both Esquire and Playboy as the big news of fall 1968. Reception by mass merchandisers was mixed. Sears never bothered with it for adult men; their spring 1969 catalog featured Nehru jackets for boys 2–6x and 7–14 only. In contrast, J. C. Penney took a gamble and embraced the style, offering for boys and men from size 6 through adult not just Nehru jackets but a coat and shirt in the same style as well. As it turned out, Sears was right. Many Nehru styles were purchased, but few were worn much if at all. The Fashion Archives and Museum of Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania has a brilliant red-and-gold print Nehru shirt. In his letter the donor of the garment admitted, “I bought this Nehru shirt in 1968 at Hutzlers Department Store in Baltimore and I have never worn it. I was going with a woman at the time who had worked at Hutzlers and was certain that the Nehru look was for me. It wasn’t.”15
Nehru shirt, 1968.
By fall 1969 the Nehru fad was over, and the American menswear industry moved in a slightly different direction: a cautious blend of traditional and modern, epitomized by the designs of Bill Blass.
Like Cardin, Indiana-born Bill Blass had already made his name as a women’s wear designer, but the similarity ends there. While Cardin had found a niche with the jet-set avant-garde, Blass’s work for Maurice Rentner Ltd. was later characterized as “trim social-circuit luncheon uniform—a crisp suit worn with a good set of faux pearls.”16 His blend of classic tailoring and updated features made him popular with younger socialites, however, and his work appeared regularly in Vogue, modeled by the emerging “new” models such as Jean Shrimpton and Penelope Tree. In 1967 he began to design menswear for Rentner, and by 1968 he had earned a Coty Award for menswear—the first such award given by the organization. Nora Ephron interviewed Blass and his customers to find out his secret and revealed a rather conservative designer who understood just how far middle-class, middle-aged American men were willing to go to stay abreast of their sons and younger brothers. He recognized that the Nehru jacket was about rejecting neckties but believed that most men were more interested in wider, more colorful ties than a complete overthrow of the suit. Gray made him “sad,” so he made lots of suits in shades of brown, which he felt was more flattering to most men. Turtlenecks were all right in their place (“the country”) but not for formal wear. His large-scale plaids were a bit of a shock to conservative men but a welcome shot in the arm to the most adventuresome.17 As Playboy noted in 1969, Blass and Ralph Lauren offered just the right blend of traditional English styling and a dash of hipness, without venturing too far into the land of Mod, or worse yet, hippieness. Leaping “fashionably forward by way of the past,” the menswear of Lauren and Blass was reminiscent of English landed-gentry life between the wars, all Norfolk jackets and heathery tweeds.18
What was clear to some observers was that the shift in men’s appearance was neither trivial nor superficial. Just as some women were challenging societal and cultural conventions that limited their educational and career aspirations, some men were finding the masculine mystique inhibiting. No less a cultural critic than Marshall McLuhan noted that men and women were beginning to share experiences and communicate as equals, which included granting men the freedom to express themselves through dress.19
Caftan pattern, 1976. McCall’s M5354.
Image courtesy of the McCall Pattern Company, 2014.
Nor was fashion just a means of self-expression. After all, the peacock’s display has a purpose beyond vanity or self-expression: to attract admiring peahens. The new clothing was supposed to be sexy, in stark contrast to the business suit, which projected an image of a reliable breadwinner. In fact even the definition of “sexy” was in flux. Women’s Wear Daily noted that the girls were all crazy for “fragile, unmasculine” men—slender, longhaired boys in their romantic velvets and ruffles.20 Rudi Gernreich offered futuristic menswear that was abbreviated, tight-fitting, or both, asking, “Why should the male not also be a sexual object?”21 Rather than simple polar opposites, masculine and feminine clothing began to intermingle along a continuum. Cardin, Gernreich, and Fish offered skirts, dresses, and caftans for men; eventually caftans were acceptable enough for men that mainstream companies offered patterns for home sewers.
Besides the Nehru jacket and pantsuits, which were worn by both men and women, the most newsworthy innovation of the late 1960s was luxury fur coats for men. These were not a revival of jazz-era raccoon coats; these were expensive full-length seal, beaver, or mink coats worn by wealthy and prominent men, including Interior Secretary Walter J. Hickel and star quarterback Joe Namath.22 Namath was not the first professional athlete to embrace the new masculine glamour; that was Joe Pepitone, first baseman for the New York Yankees, who grew his hair long and favored skinny, mod-style suits. Pepitone is credited with breaking the hair barrier in baseball, being the first player to bring a blow dryer into the clubhouse.23
At the extreme fringes of male style of the late 1960s lay the hippies, who embraced a do-it-yourself, anything-goes aesthetic that mixed thrift-store finds, military styles, and exotic cultural appropriation. As the inheritors of the freedom injected into menswear by the British Mods, members of the 1960s counterculture represented an effort to break with mainstream culture altogether—to drop out of the system and forge an entirely new path. Although associated with the United States, there were similar movements in other countries. British peer Mark Palmer, who dropped out of the upper class to travel in a caravan with various pop stars and dress in Druid robes, offers a succinct explanation of the appeal of the hippie culture: “It is not escapism leaving a bad scene to start a new one.”24
How widespread was this revolution? Certainly it varied by region, class, and race. Playboy’s fashion director Robert L. Green inserted none-too-subtle criticisms of both mod and hippie “excesses” in his seasonal updates. Selected styles were acceptable; the September 1965 issue of Playboy featured both a mod-influenced Chesterfield overcoat and a short red jacket with a stand-up collar, along with pages of very traditional Ivy League tweed jackets and loose trousers.25 By the next year it was clear that mod influences were encroaching on Ivy-style dominance, with the appearance of large-scale plaid trousers, worn with Ivy League–inspired natural shoulder, three-button jackets. Slimmer trousers were growing in popularity, Green acknowledged, but he warned that Playboy readers should “leave the skintight styles to high school dropouts.”26
Playboy’s sartorial conservatism is not surprising; menswear manufacturers and retailers were major advertisers. Just as editorial and advertising content in women’s magazines reinforced the feminine mystique, the financial realities of publishing demanded congruence between advice and commerce in Playboy and Esquire. In the same issue where Robert Green threaded the needle carefully between good mod and bad mod, major advertiser h.i.s. (which usually occupied six full pages toward the front of each issue), ran an ad depicting a very Ivy League–looking young man carrying a hand-lettered sign advocating rebellion “against non-conformity,” and a few pages later an ad for Jayson shirt company enthused, “Mod shirts are here,” showcasing their new collection by Harvey of Carnaby Street.27
By 1967 the “Back to Campus” issue could no longer ignore youth fashion or dismiss it as the purview of “high school dropouts.” Jazz critic and civil libertarian Nat Hentoff contributed an article detailing the harassment of young men based on their “long hair, sandals, [and] other markers of rebellion” and indicting the older generation for “trying to enforce and preserve their own values, which are among the reasons the young are rebelling.”28 Nor was Hentoff a lone voice; he also cites two other recent articles on the generational divide. Marya Mannes of the New York Times had observed that America had become “a society grown set in its ways: resistant to changes, hostile to difference.” And according to a New Yorker writer, “smooth men represent modern interchangeable machine-ready” masculinity, and “individuality is threatening to gum up the works of the machine.”
With so many of its readers matching the college student or recent graduate demographic, Playboy needed to tread carefully in its criticism of the younger side of the generation gap. The magazine’s September issues for the next few years document the march of the male rebellion across the nation’s campuses. In 1967 one group photo includes a bearded student in the shadowy background wearing tight jeans, a turtleneck sweater, and sandals.29 By the following year Green was reporting an “explosive assortment of revolutionary attire,” including Nehrus, tunics, shaped suits, wide ties, and medallions. Even in the traditionally conservative South, more colors and patterns were worn. Unsurprisingly, the West Coast schools were the most “far out,” with floral bell-bottoms, ponchos, and meditation shirts (loose, light-weight Indian cotton tunics). Turtlenecks were ubiquitous, as were wider lapels and ties expanding to five inches.30
In the 1969 “Back to Campus” issue the cultural fault lines among the young are clearly revealed. According to Southern Methodist University junior Tim Kelleher, two factions had emerged: ultraconservative (Ivy) and fashion liberals, the latter being “quick to try something new if it turns them on.”31 New trends included facial hair of all kinds, bell-bottoms (worn by 20–30 percent of males and increasing), opera capes from the Salvation Army, six- and eight-button double-breasted jackets, huge loud plaids, and billowy sleeved tapered shirts in voile and crepe. The peacock “revolution” was turning into a civil war.
Of course trend-setting magazines are not the only windows into mainstream adoption of fashion. For comparison, let’s examine how mass merchants like Sears, Roebuck and Company incorporated various innovations and when. The mod look made a tentative and late appearance in the menswear section of the company’s catalogs. This aligns with Esquire’s and Playboy’s reluctant embrace of British influence after a few years of resistance and a clear preference for Ivy League styles. Just as mod styles for women appeared in Vogue and Seventeen long before they were promoted by men’s magazines, Sears introduced Carnaby-inspired collections for Junior Misses years before its King’s Road line for young men debuted in winter 1968. “King’s Road” was code for mod-influenced British styling, since King’s Road in west London was the center of innovative male fashion in the mid-1960s. J. C. Penney’s equivalent, also appearing in 1968, was “The Inn Shop.”
Unisex in the world of catalogs translated into “his ’n’ hers” styles, not gender-bending menswear. Beginning in spring 1967, Sears highlighted matching shirts, sweaters, and casual outerwear for men and women in a section of the men’s department, as did J. C. Penney and Montgomery Ward. Penney’s fall 1968 catalog featured sixteen pages of identical designs for men and women—shirts, sweaters, and casual jackets—shown on models whose poses and expressions suggested they were couples. These “his ’n’ hers” sections continued through the late 1970s. Similarly, the more daring men’s styles in knitting and crocheting pattern books were modeled by men with women (girlfriends? wives?) leaning against their manly chests or holding their hands. Another version of the couples motif was family styles, which appeared toward the front of the catalog or even on the cover. Though sized according to sex and age, the fabrics, colors and decorative details were identical. The underlying message seemed to be strictly heteronormative: it’s okay to wear this flowered shirt, crocheted vest, or poncho, because the model is a bona fide straight guy.
His and hers crocheted ponchos, Ladies Circle Knitting and Crochet Guide, Fall 1975.
Other important trends appeared in the fashion press and the catalogs with a slight lag. Turtlenecks were reported to be the next big thing in Esquire and Playboy in 1967 and appear all over Sears by the fall-winter 1968 catalog. The main distinction was that although fashion editors were reporting the acceptability of turtlenecks for evening and in posh clubs and restaurants (even in Playboy Clubs), the Sears versions showed casual clothing and sport jackets at first, not suits. The vest suit (matching vest and trousers worn without a jacket, as opposed to the venerable three-piece suit) was reported as a trend in Esquire in 1967 but not carried by Sears until 1971. My fashion-forward husband wore a rust-colored suede cloth vest suit, purchased at a menswear shop in Syracuse, New York, to our wedding in 1970.
Bold madras plaids and paisleys had popped up in London in 1964 but moved more slowly into the American mainstream. Esquire and Playboy were featuring both of these patterns approvingly by 1966, and madras jackets, ties, trousers, and shorts were abundant in the retail catalogs. Paisley (beyond small prints on neckties) took a bit longer to break into the mass market but then arrived with a bang; in addition to shirts and ties, Sears offered a large-scale dark blue paisley suit in 1969. The introduction of innovative fibers and fabrics, especially polyester double knits, was quickly embraced in the menswear universe. They were featured in Esquire and Sears practically simultaneously in the fall of 1969. Between 1968 and 1973 it seemed that the once conservative American male was ready to blossom in glorious color and style.
The seeds for the end of the peacock revolution were sown in 1967 with the release of Bonnie and Clyde, director Arthur Penn’s groundbreaking film about the Depression-era outlaws, starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.32 The movie not only ushered in a new era of on-screen sex and violence but also struck a chord with fashion designers looking for fresh inspiration. Theodora Van Runkle won an Oscar for the costumes—Dunaway in slender, mid-calf skirts and Beatty in chalk-stripe, double-breasted suits—and some menswear designers took note of the film’s romantic aesthetic. Baby boomers had heard plenty about the Great Depression from their parents, and it seemed an unlikely source of nostalgia, but emerging American designers Ralph Lauren and Bill Blass both rode to their early successes on ’30s-inspired clothing.
From the vantage point of the early 1970s, the future of men’s fashions seemed both clear and confusing. On the one hand, the drab, conformist model of menswear had apparently been shoved to the back of the closet. Even bankers and politicians wore sideburns and had hair curling over their shirt collars, and someone must have bought all those plaid trousers and leisure suits. Once Pandora’s box had been opened and men had become accustomed to expressing themselves through clothing, could they turn back? On the other hand, the road ahead was far from clear. The new expectation was not only for more color and pattern or innovative designs but also for more expressive forms of masculinity. Men, like women, were supposed to dress according to their fashion “personality,” to follow trends and care about hairstyling, not just a haircut.
Predictions abounded. Penthouse fashion editor Rodney Bennett-England included several pages of fashion predictions from various designers in his 1968 book, Dress Optional. The designs range from fairly tame—pants with no creases or cuffs, collarless unstructured jackets—to molded plastic clothing and space-age jumpsuits that resemble Star Trek uniforms. Of course there were no neckties at all, just turtlenecks and scarves.33 Rudi Gernreich’s predictions, commissioned for Life for its January 1, 1970, issue, offered unisex in the form of near-nudity—just miniskirts and wigs—for youthful men and women and neck-to-toe caftans for the old and unattractive.34 In 1972 the Journal of Home Economics posed the provocative question, “What will happen to the gray flannel suit?” The answer, the author argued, was obsolescence, as men’s fashion would become more globalized and the industrial-revolution-fashion lost its relevance.35 The reality, of course, was just the opposite. Within a decade, men were investing in “power suits” and the Ivy League style was rebranded as preppy and sweeping the country. Let’s untangle the ’70s to see what changed, how much, and for whom.
Men’s hairstyling guide. Brylcreem ad, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, September 1974.
Amid the visual cacophony of the late 1960s and early 1970s, trends were sometimes difficult to detect, but a return to quieter elegance was certainly in the air, and it hit full swing with the release of The Godfather (1972) and The Sting (1973). That same year saw a flurry of publicity around the filming of The Great Gatsby (1974) in Newport, Rhode Island, over the summer; Esquire waxed eloquent about the “Newport Look,” a sort of hybridized version of the Gatsby style that mashed up the 1920s and ’30s and incorporated linen suits, country tweeds, and vintage-y sweaters. The death of onetime king the Duke of Windsor, who was also a well-known fashion icon, in 1972 also generated quite a bit of nostalgia in the fashion press for the elegance of bygone days. The eccentricity of the mod and hippie era was gradually replaced with trends that often broke as many rules, just not all in a single outfit. The leisure suit offered an alternative to jacket and tie for the new, more casual lifestyles of the 1970s.
After several years of long, unkempt, and unstyled hair, men turned to hairstylists, who gave them a neater, well-groomed appearance. The prices were higher than in a barbershop, and he might find himself in a chair next to a women having her hair cut in the same manner, or even with a woman styling his hair. But unisex salons were a booming business, and even today they are one of the locations where the “unisex” label persists. Hair-care products made a comeback, promising men that their expensively styled hair would be both long and neat.
The transition from barbershops to unisex salons was not easy, particularly for barbers. Barbershops felt the immediate effect of this trend; haircuts went from a weekly ritual to an occasional, do-it-yourself task. Barbers were flummoxed. They felt the economic effects almost immediately, not only from teenagers but also from boys as young as four and five, all of whom were demanding Beatles styles. Some of this stemmed from hero worship, but there was also an element of rebelling against a ritual—the weekly or biweekly trip to the barbershop. The barbers’ initial reaction, to complain and ridicule the hirsute young, was not likely to win them customers.
When men finally returned to regular styling, they tended to patronize “unisex salons,” not barbershops. An entire new industry was born in the mid-1970s as the once-modest market for male grooming services and products expanded. This was not easily accomplished; many state regulations had separate licensing rules for barbers (whose clients were mostly men) and hairdressers (who cut and styled women’s hair). Barbers naturally resisted efforts to revise the regulations; hairdressers, who had been seeing more and more men in their salons, welcomed the change.
The old regulations required shops to have separate entrances or separate hours for men and women. Early unisex salons had ignored these rules, and so had the law. Barbers were incensed. They were losing business at an alarming rate, and the number of licensed barbers and apprentices was declining. In New York State between 1964 and 1971 there had been a decrease of 2,183 barbers at a time when the male population was increasing. In comparison, the number of cosmetologists (who were licensed to work on women’s hair) had gone up by 21,810. The new licensing requirements, approved in July 1972, were still rather restrictive; a barber could cut women’s hair, but a hairdresser would need a barber’s license as well as a cosmetology license in order to work on men. Unisex salons were also required to have a separate area for customers who wanted privacy.
Angela Taylor of the New York Times described an early “his ’n’ hers” salon in Greenwich Village that opened in 1968. The cosmetologist owners were skirting the New York law, since neither of them had a barber’s license and they failed to provide separate entrances or spaces for male and female customers. There is no indication that having their establishment featured in the city’s major newspaper created any legal repercussions.36
It wasn’t just style that was affecting demand for barbers’ services. Many barbers, especially the older ones, had strong ideological reactions to longhaired men. In a small town in Nebraska an elderly barber refused to allow young men with long hair to come into his shop and then began complaining about how bad business was. An article from 1970 described the experience of one customer who noticed the barber roughly pushing his head as he was trimming his hair and protested, “Hey, what’s going on?” “You fags with your long hair, you’re the kind of guys that are ruining the country,” the barber reported angrily. The customer got up and walked out.37
Besides his-and-her salons, new men-only establishments began appearing across the country. In many cases these were run by barbers who had been able to make the transition from clippers and shears to razor cuts and blow dryers and were beginning to offer additional services such as manicures and facials. Many of the men’s styling parlors had some kind of private or semiprivate cubicle available for customers who did not want to be on display.
With the renewed popularity of classic tailoring, menswear in the mid-1970s divided along several lines. One strand continued along the colorful alternative trends; another followed the practical, outdoorsy styles of L. L. Bean and Eddie Bauer, the bicoastal leaders in flannel shirts and khakis. Conservative business clothing made a resurgence, buoyed by economic need; inflation and higher unemployment made conformity to office standards more popular and “investment dressing” more attractive than rapidly changing trends. Gentleman’s Quarterly illustrated this variety in its winter 1974–1975 issue with a spread featuring twenty men divided into four groups based on their “look”: classical, experimental, eclectic, or free.38 Those in the classic, “no flash, no fuss” group are all in suits and ties, with an assortment of trendy details (wide lapels, mustaches, a vintage-looking double-breasted jacket). “Experimental” men also wear suits (four of the five) or sport coats but wade a little deeper into the style waters with less-traditional fabrics and accessories. No suits for the “eclectics”; their outfits are a mix of separates in more casual materials. The avant-garde “free” group—the only men shown smiling broadly—sport even more colorful and casual-looking styles and intentionally break the soberness of suits by pairing them with scarves and graphic T-shirts. Art director Nick Peters gets a full-page spread for his unstructured black cotton Italian suit worn with a white silk scarf—and no shirt.
There is one noticeable commonality in these photographs: the vivid flamboyance of previous years has virtually disappeared. There are no awning stripes, no giant plaids. If the shirts and ties have overall designs, they are small and appear in low contrast, because they really don’t show up in the photographs. Two of the four group photos are in color, and the palette is fairly neutral, except for a yellow sweater and a dull red shirt. Only the “eclectic” plaid shirt and the moon face in a graphic T-shirt disturb an otherwise calm tableau. The color choice may be strategic, as the black-and-white photos make those two even more “classic” and timeless.
The menswear press had been predicting the end of the peacock revolution for several seasons, even for traditionally lively resort clothing, which had been moving toward subtler colors and a return to neutral classics such as white linen suits. “Gentlemen should look like gentlemen, not bougainvilleas,” Esquire counseled its readers in March 1974.39 Popular youth culture was once again at cross-purposes with this segment of the fashion industry. In September 1973 Rolling Stone ran a story about an underground trend called “disco”; eventually the popularity of the music—and its body-conscious, colorful fashions—exploded after the release of Saturday Night Fever in 1977.40 Even mainstream retailers such as Montgomery Ward and Sears included a few pages of polyester open-necked shirts and tight knit pants, even as their business suit selection calmed down in the late 1970s.
Another powerful influence on business clothing in the mid-1970s was John T. Molloy’s Dress for Success, which was based on extensive research into American corporate culture. Molloy’s underlying message was that men who dressed according to the unwritten dress codes of business would be more successful than those who attempted too much expression or experimentation, especially at a junior level. Dress for Success hit a nerve in the shaky economy, and millions of copies were sold. Today Molloy’s observations offer an interesting insight into the realities of how much freedom men enjoyed if they worked in a business environment. He noted regional variations in the rules that are reminiscent of the landscape described in Playboy’s college fashion issues: avoid pink or lavender shirts in the South and suits and ties in California. He found generational differences in how men judged appearances as well: men over 48 were likely to make “moral judgments,” men 34–48 were more aware of class implications of dress, while the youngest men (28–34) were the most open, as they seemed to have no significant prejudices against any patterns or colors. Nor did Molloy shy from controversy; he included advice aimed directly at men of color and at homosexuals. He did grant exceptions to the otherwise conservative rules for men in three categories: athletes, musicians, and black men all had permission to be flamboyant. The role of race in determining the parameters of masculine expression is complicated; Monica Miller attributes the greater leeway to a tradition of dandyism dating back to the liveries of slaves used for display in England and America.41 One of my more uncomfortable discoveries in conducting this research was noticing that just as African American models appeared in the pages of Sears, Ward’s, and other mainstream catalogs, they were usually used to display the most colorful or exotic styles. Leopard-print underwear? Probably on the black model.
Men’s disco-inspired fashions, Montgomery Ward catalog, Fall/Winter 1974.
Male vanity and display were especially acceptable for athletes, and advertisers sought out these familiar faces to promote products that might otherwise seem effete. Jockey featured Baltimore Orioles star Jim Palmer in a series of underwear ads beginning in the late 1970s that are now legendary. Joe Namath wore fur coats on the sidelines during games, inspiring many imitators until the NFL ruled that only official uniform gear could be worn on the field. Off the field, of course, full-length coats in mink, fox, beaver, and other luxurious furs became status symbols for players and fans alike. Both Esquire and Playboy routinely featured athlete models in editorial fashion spreads.
Is men’s clothing sexy? The sexual messages of much of men’s clothing of the 1960s and ’70s are hard to miss. Jeans, worn tight and low around the hips, are sexy. Many reasons are given for the popularity of jeans after the war, but whether the models are cowboys, motorcycle toughs, or teenage rockers, the common denominator is clear: jeans aren’t just denim pants; they’re sexy pants. Open-front shirts (with or without chains) are sexy. And then there’s the entire question of underwear. Once strictly utilitarian, men’s underwear during the 1960s and ’70s became more varied in cut, color, and pattern and, even if not visible, part of the public consciousness. Penthouse editor Rodney Bennett-England drew not only on his own fashion experience but also on many letters that readers contributed to the magazine about what women did and did not consider sexy in a man. His opinion was that the late 1960s were clearly years devoted to reviving sexuality in male dress. He also notes that the fewer differences there are between men’s and women’s clothing, the more important it is for men to pay attention to those elements of his clothing that are masculine.42
The problem is that male sexuality, prominently displayed, carries with it ambiguity of sexual orientation. After all, a sexy male should be attractive, but according to the dominant culture he should be attractive only to women and oblivious to his own gorgeousness. A character like James Bond, whose impeccable clothing, whether formal wear or swimsuits, was clearly intended to be sexy but needed to be assertively—even aggressively—heterosexual in order to carry it off.
Of course James Bond was fictional, as were all the hard-boiled detectives and rugged cowboys that littered the popular landscape at mid-century. Psychologists were interested in examining the real American man, especially the suburban species, to determine why so many men seemed to have trouble adapting to their prescribed role. According to common psychological wisdom in the 1950s, just as the natural state for adult women included marriage and motherhood, being a breadwinner was the natural, desired state for men. A man who remained single into his thirties was suspect. If he was clearly straight—that is, if he dated many women but avoided commitment—he was immature. If he appeared to have no social life and, heaven forbid, showed too much interest in the arts or was too carefully dressed, he was suspected of being homosexual. Some of the once mainstream beliefs about homosexuality from this era are astonishing now, and most have been abandoned, at least by professionals if not by the general public. With no clear understanding of how homosexuality was “caused,” psychiatrists and psychologists seemed free to speculate to their hearts’ content, based on Sigmund Freud’s culturally limited view of the subject. For example, one of the most common reasons once given for homosexuality was immaturity, a kind of arrested development. The sexually promiscuous playboy was also failing to grow up; he was just stuck at a different stage. A man’s failure to mature into a breadwinner, or his insistence on avoiding the role, was a symptom of misdirected sexuality. In the same way that “normal” woman should desire motherhood, a “normal” male should desire to be the head of a household. Note that the desire was not necessarily to be a dad; it was the breadwinner role that was important. This masculine mystique was just as much a trap for men in the 1950s and early 1960s as the feminine mystique described by Betty Friedan was for women. There were attempts at alternative lives: the Beats lived lifestyles that were intentionally non-suburban, non-procreative, and nonconformist. But popular criticism of the Beats and their transformation into the caricatures known as “beatniks” in the humor pages and television skits were either effeminate arty types or overgrown adolescents, reflecting the notion that a man who objected to the breadwinner role was either an infantile sissy or a hormone-driven teenager in a man’s body.
Small wonder, then, that the first restless movements of the peacock revolution and the youthful rebellion in the 1960s raised the specter of homosexuality among its critics. The irony was that at that time true homosexual men tended to be purposely invisible, except when it was safe to be noticed. As Russell Lynes observed in 1967, it was highly unlikely that the longhaired young men appearing on America’s streets were all homosexual, because for the most part homosexuals did not advertise so conspicuously.43 To do otherwise was to risk one’s career or even being arrested.
With all the emphasis on apparent sexuality, what did gay men think of the peacock revolution? As I completed this book, the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City had launched a major exhibit, A Queer History of Fashion, exploring topics that have often been the subject of whispered conversations and crude humor but are long overdue for serious treatment.44 Fashion is about sex and sexuality as much as it is about gender, and human sexuality is varied and complex. That many of the leading designers associated either with unisex clothing or with the peacock revolution were gay should not come as news. Rudi Gernreich was openly gay, as were Pierre Cardin, Saville Row icon Hardy Amies, and Yves Saint Laurent. When I read interviews with them about the changes in menswear or the new sexuality in fashion, it is hard to envision them as disinterested observers. What they could not be was completely open participants in the public conversation.
Shaun Cole provides a detailed look at the urban worlds of gay men in the early twentieth century, worlds that were hidden from the eyes of the mainstream public and carefully coded to be visible only to each other. Stereotypes could work in one’s favor; if effeminacy was assumed to be a sign of homosexuality, cultivating a stereotypically masculine image could provide effective armor.45 Certainly it worked for Hollywood stars such as Rock Hudson and Raymond Burr, among others. Passing as a straight playboy was probably even easier once Hugh Hefner provided such a popular template. A powerful and publicly flaunted (straight) sex drive could inoculate a man from the suspicions that often greeted sophisticated taste in music, art, and theater. In gay bars and nightclubs the impact of the adoption of flamboyant, gender-bending styles by straight men resulted in a hyperbolic “macho” image, iconically represented by the members of the disco group Village People. The original ad recruiting performers for the group specifically called for “macho types” with mustaches. Their appearance reflected a “virilization” trend in gay presentation that has been noted by several historians of the period—boots, beards, denim, and leather replacing earlier Continental or mod styles.
The boundary between the straight and gay world was being crossed and even erased in both appearance and behavior. Sexual practices such as anal sex, fellatio, and cunnilingus, which once were strongly associated with homosexuality, became less taboo for heterosexual couples. Nor was it necessary to pair off to engage in sex: from Hair and Oh! Calcutta! to Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, popular plays and movies explored the idea of polyamory and group sex.46 Once a straight couple added a third (or more) person to the mix, homosexual activity was practically a given. Men and women who could “swing both ways,” in practice and in appearance, found themselves very popular. This openness, in turn, made it easier for people who saw themselves as sexually liberated to adopt unisex, androgynous, or ambiguous fashions. Clara Pierre described this moment in 1976: “But with that uncertainty past, and the fear of sexual ambivalence reduced by our knowing that we are all ‘a little bit both,’ clothes no longer have to perform the duty of differentiation and can relax into just being clothes.”47
In her view the sexual revolution produced a culture that was more comfortable and open about sex, which led to greater comfort with homosexuality and androgyny. With the clarity of hindsight we understand that the world Pierre described was limited and eventually doomed, in the short run. Not everyone was comfortable with the idea of sexually aggressive women, unmarried couples cohabiting, or nudity in the movies, much less open marriage, discussions of homosexuality, or swingers clubs. The frightening appearance of AIDS in the early 1980s put a damper on the sexual revolution and slowed the progress of gay men’s liberation. People are still arguing whether bisexuality is an orientation—the way some individuals experience sexual attraction—or an opportunistic preference, a position between the closet and complete openness. Unisex and androgynous clothing, far from being proof of more relaxed attitudes toward gender and sexuality, now appear to have been just the opening salvos in our own cultural Hundred Years’ War.
So what did change in men’s clothing? The late 1970s return to safer, classic styles did not mean a complete rollback of every innovation. Just as women’s hemlines became a matter of taste, with lengths varying based on the occasion and the wearer’s own preference, men’s clothing had permanently negotiated some flexibility. The suit was less important, replaced in many workplaces and previously formal situations by separate trousers and sport jackets. Beards, mustaches, and long hair (or shaved heads, for that matter) are unremarkable variations. Men’s casual and active sportswear may lack the blinding colors and patterns of the 1970s but still offer many options, sometimes more color options than in women’s clothing. A recent Lands’ End catalog lists men’s pima cotton polo shirts in twenty-five colors (including pink) and women’s in only fourteen. The demand for men’s cosmetics, grooming products, and even cosmetic surgery has been well documented for decades. Like their baby boom sisters, the young men of the 1960s helped establish a cult of youth and a desire for eternal fitness that has pursued them into retirement age. When these men were in their youth, the menswear industry satisfied their demand for body-conscious styles that emphasized their slim hips and tapered torsos—styles that could not be sustained as they reached middle age.
Sociologist Joseph Pleck observed in 1981 that stereotypical gender roles are not only impossible to live up to, but they also impose psychological strain when they are not achieved.48 Like women, men were affected by the feminist movement and the sexual revolution, and like women, they were left to shape new roles without a clear sense of direction. The peacock revolution was an attempt to shake up the culture, to ask “Why not?” and to challenge the prevailing masculine myths. It succeeded in upsetting the applecart, and men are still searching for the answers.
