October 2013 Notable review - Hippie Chic

Lauren D. Whitley

Hippie Chic

By Lauren D. Whitley
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (July 2013)
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Reviewer: Book Board member Norman Weinstein (ArchNewsNow.com)

Hippie Chic by Lauren D. Whitley, 2013 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Perhaps the most discerning and fair-minded reviewer of this exhibition catalogue for the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston’s wildly popular textiles and fashion exhibition “Hippie Chic” would be someone who didn’t actually experience that decade wearing some of the clothing represented in this show. On the other hand, this reviewer, having been there and done that, is quite enthusiastically willing to deal with the multiple virtues and vices of this catalogue, facets that might be overlooked by those who have simply studied the era with a degree of scholarly detachment and generational distance.

As curator of the MFA Boston’s impressive collection of 45,000 textiles and costumes, Lauren D. Whitley brings a generous awareness of the forerunners of sixties garb, particularly the sinewy Art Nouveau roots of the wildly patterned, shockingly colorful, psychedelic dresses, blouses, suits, and robes of the time. She is equally sensitive to the DIY trends in which those without fashion design training reconfigured indigenous people’s clothing designs that soon became appropriated by mainstream fashion houses and publications. Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and The Beatles, familiar musical icons of the hippie era spanning the mid-1960s to early ’70s, appear in their rainbow-hued and dazzling splendor, along with many obscure and forgotten figures. Swirls of radiantly layered leathers, beads, and fringe, often on shirts and jackets androgynously contoured, emphasize the era’s spirit of surrealistically exotic hedonism.

Where Whitley trips (sorry about that!) herself up occurs through her questionable categories of “Trippy Hippie,” “Fantasy Hippie,” “Retro Hippie,” “Ethic Hippie,” and “Craft Hippie.” In actuality, the designs inspired by drugs, music, and indigenous peoples, and neo-Art Nouveau accents constantly intertwined, and were juxtaposed as well as even superimposed on one another in both individual and group wardrobes. Although Philippe Garner in Sixties Design (TASCHEN) puts sundry varieties of hippie fashion under one sprawling chapter heading of “Pop Culture – Pop Style,” an arguable category, I think it does less harm to the anarchistic spirit of hippie chic than Whitley’s hair-splitting that fragments a complexly knotted zeitgeist into sentimental moments of fad fashion.

Dress designed by Thea Porter (English, b. Jerusalem, 1927–2000), about 1970 Printed silk plain weave, cotton embroidery. Gift of Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf. Photo © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. From Hippie Chic, courtesy of Fine Arts, Boston

Hippie clothes were about shout-out abstract color masses with Pop Art sinewy typography in motion. This was clothing intended to dance in when going to a Joplin or Hendrix concert—not clothing worn to emulate the look of musical stars. To dance in hippie clothing was to become a human kaleidoscope. Seeing it on pale white mannequins enervates instead of stimulates.

But I’m holding on to my copy of Hippie Chic nevertheless. It makes me wish I had never given away my purple velvet cowboy shirt or my Peruvian poncho that seconded as a dandy’s cape.

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