Historic Fashion: 1970s-1980s

Fashion in 1970-1979

With flowers in their head , Jesus sandals on their feet, and a smile on their lips, the happy young idealists of the 1960s walked into the century’s seventh decade. Their dreamland seemed to have appeared: the future belonged to young people and to their “love and peace” philosophy. The youth trendy did indeed stay alive, but the young people who brought it into being were getting older. Nature, at whose bosom they had sought fulfilment and illumination, turned against them. The gentle hippies with their beards and long hair aged quit quickly and it was not long that their motto “never trust anyone over 30” appeared. The next wave of young people did not regard the delay of their birth as a blessing. They suffered from unemployment, inflation, and boredom, and in no time at all the simple fact of youth could no longer automatically pledge idealism and optimism. The hippies high love of peace was soon substituted by the belligerence, always intensified by tough drugs, of the political activist. Terrorism became part of life. At the same time the Vietnam War was approaching its better end, the winter of 1972/73 brought the oil crisis and with it the debasement of the dollar.