Street fashion
When Pierre Bourdieu contends that taste always trickles downwards from the ruling classes to the masses, he forgets about street fashion, which has trickled upwards in the case of mod fashion, punk and hip hop, first attested in the streets of large European cities and which have since influenced haute couture. [Oct 2005]
Compare with: haute couture or high fashion
Street fashion or street style
Eventually, haute couture was forced to imitate popular clothing in a reversal of the usual 'top downwards' movement of fashion. Courrèges, Cardin and Yves Saint Laurent were among those who adapted brilliantly to these new circumstances. Most well-known designers started to sell their own off-the-peg ranges through department stores. --http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1211_sixties/history_page.htm [Oct 2005]British fashion
The rise of British fashion in the mid-sixties and designers such as Mary Quant and Betsey Johnson signalled the end of French dominance. Taking their cue from street fashion, these designers catered to a younger consumer and offered retailers a new source of inspiration. Vivienne Westwood's street-inspired styles "created” the image which is now generally considered as Punk. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashion_designer#Post-War_fashion [Oct 2005]
Miniskirt
Las Nenas del mini-mini (1969) - Germán Lorente
The miniskirt is a skirt whose hemline is way above the knees (generally 200-300 mm above knee-level). Its existence is generally credited to the fashion designer Mary Quant, who was inspired by the Mini Cooper automobile, although André Courrèges is also often cited as its inventor, and there is disagreement as to who got there first.
Quant ran a popular clothes shop on Chelsea, London's Kings Road called Bazaar, from which she sold her own designs. In the late 1950s she began experimenting with shorter skirts, which resulted in the miniskirt - one of the defining fashions of the 1960s.
Owing to Quant's position in the heart of fashionable Swinging London, the miniskirt was able to spread beyond a simple street fashion into a major international trend.
The miniskirt was further popularised by the French designer Andre Courrèges, who developed it separately and incorporated it into his Mod look. By introducing the miniskirt into the haute couture of the fashion industry, Courrèges gave it a greater degree of respectability than might otherwise have been expected of a street fashion.--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-skirt [May 2005]
See also: Pierre Bourdieu
Streetstyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk (1994) - Ted Polhemus
Streetstyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk (1994) - Ted Polhemus [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Polhemus provides an informative, concise, lively rundown of all its major substyles, from those of zooties and hip cats to those of New Age travelers and acid jazz fans. They're all here, fully illustrated and, best of all, fun. So set aside personal prejudices, pretend you're from another planet, and marvel at the human ability to express individuality. --via Amazon.com
Synopsis
This is an up-beat look at street fashion from 1940 to today, celebrating some 40 different styletribes, which will accompany a major exhibition on Streetstyle at the Victoria and Albert Museum in November 1994. We see how the styletribes interweave and evolve - the American Modernists of the early 1950s living on in the English Mods of the early 1960s, who became the Hard Mods, then the Skinheads, then the Ois!; while the 1950s Folkies became first the 1970s Hippies and then the New Age Travellers of the 1980s and 1990s. But for today's fashion-conscious young people, this is not all ancient history: Streetstyle offers the 1990s fashion world a supermarket of styles from which to pick and mix. Anyone is free to be part Beatnik, part Raver, or part Punk, part Grunge; Goths one day and Indie Kids the next. More than 200 illustrations, including 100 in colour, document the styles and their wearers - on the street, but also on the high-fashion catwalk, to which streetstyle has made an enormous, if perhaps unwilling, contribution. Ted Polhemus's many books include "Fashion and Anti Fashion", "Popstyles", "Social Aspects of the Human Body", "Bodystyles" and "Rituals of Love". He is the external curator of the Streetstyle exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. --via Amazon.de
see also: style - clothing - fashion
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