Sixties Fashion

Tracing the couture revolution of the 1960s through the fashion photography of the era’s virtuosos

Miniskirts, jeans, flares, pantsuits and Asian clothing--the fashion revolution of the 1960s has not yet ceased to reverberate, returning year after year to reinvent the discoveries of that decade. It was in the 1960s that London took over Paris’ long-held crown as the trend-setting capital, as Britain’s teen culture exploded amid the birth of rock music and the sexual revolution, with pantsuits, denim, various types of Asian garb and the scandalous mini-skirt becoming accordingly ubiquitous. This decade also saw a boom in European tourism, as Germans gravitated en masse to Italy for the first time and beach and bathing wear became more revealing and casual than ever before. All of these seismic shifts in the (literal) fabric of everyday life were of course amplified by an increasingly powerful global media network, leading to an attendant explosion in the practice and popularity of fashion photography and illustration, and to the phenomenon of the ＂it girl＂ and the supermodel. This book traces the couture revolution of the 1960s across 12 thematic sections, building its portrait of the decade through the fashion photography of the era’s virtuosos--among them Guy Bourdin, Hubs Flöter, F.C. Gundlach, Ursula Knipping, Helmut Newton, Rico Puhlmann, Regi Relang and Jeanloup Sieff--and fashion illustrations by the likes of Antonio, René Gruau, Lilo Kittel, Trude Rein and Walter E. Voigt.