Betty Luther Hillman. Dressing for the Culture Wars

Anyone who lived through the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s will recall the fierce affinities and divisions generated by the hairstyles and dress of American youth. Long neglected by historians, this topic has finally received its due. In six tightly constructed, completely captivating, and impeccably documented chapters, Betty Luther Hillman details how self-presentation was both an essential tool of the era’s social activists and a flashpoint for those who wanted to maintain the gender, sexual, racial, and class status quo. Rather than simply adding fashion to the existing sixties narrative, the author builds a compelling case that hair and clothing “operated as symbols of the divides in American culture—what some have called the ‘culture wars’—that have come to define American society in the decades following the 1960s” (xvi). It all began innocently with the British Invasion of the mid-1960s, a transatlantic cultural exchange that brought miniskirts and Beatles-style haircuts to American youth. Along with the introduction of pants and pantsuits as everyday women’s wear and unisex fashions, these new styles raised concern among older, more conservative Americans who feared the erosion of traditional gender norms and notions of respectability. As parents and school administrators enforced grooming and dress codes, youth fought back with the all-American rhetoric of the individual’s right to freedom of expression.

Art · Clothing · Culture of the United States · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Sociology · Status quo · Style (visual arts) · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies