Woodstock Was the Birthplace of Festival Fashion

It embraced denim, the hallmark of the revolution and the youth movement. As William S. Burroughs once said of Jack Kerouac, his book “sold a trillion Levis and a million espresso coffee machines, and also sent countless kids on the road.” And that, apparently, led many of them straight to Woodstock, the better to show off jeans faded and ripped; worn on the tip of the hip bone purposely to expose the midriff and belly button; held on with rope or big, leather belts.

It championed the hippie trail: the fabrics that could be found while backpacking from Kathmandu to Pokhara, Rajasthan to Kerala, tapestries transformed into sarongs with a knot and a needs must; napkins tied into halter necks tops; colors and patterns that mapped out the search for enlightenment through cultures and communes and the back of one’s hand.

[See all of our coverage of Woodstock at 50.]

This was long before anyone began thinking about issues of cultural appropriation, of course, since easily half the attendees at Woodstock would have been guilty as charged. Not only in their assimilation of ethnic styles, but in their apparent obsession with the fringing and beadwork of Native American dress: swinging from halter tops and suede vests over not much else at all, blowin’ in the wind, all of it meant to connect their pledge of harmony, personal and musical, to the mythic stereotypes of indigenous people and living in alliance with nature. To set this ideal in contrast to the false promises of the besuited patriarchy, just as the protest politics implicit in taking Old Glory off its pedestal (or to be literal, pole) and making it into shorts (the kind you sit on) and backpack coverings (the kind you sleep on) were their own form of sartorial heresy. It wasn’t flag-burning, but it was close.

Source: The New York Times

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