1960s Fashion

The early 1960s look is essentially mid-century elegance refined to its tightest form. Sheath dresses in heavy silk shantung, knee-length skirts, white gloves to the elbow for evening, the Jackie Kennedy pillbox hat (originally made by Halston, then head milliner at Bergdorf Goodman, for the 1961 inaugural). The aesthetic was deliberately conservative in a way that reads now as a final concentrated statement of mid-century formality before the youth-driven looks of the mid-1960s replaced it. The defining American couture of this period was Norman Norell, James Galanos, Pauline Trigère, and Mainbocher in retirement. The defining Paris couture was the late Balenciaga (he closed the house in 1968), Givenchy (the Audrey Hepburn relationship was at its peak), and Yves Saint Laurent (whose first independent collection was in January 1962 at 30 bis rue Spontini, after his expulsion from Dior in November 1960).

The mini-skirt did not have a single inventor; the design floated in London and Paris simultaneously from about 1964. Mary Quant from her shop Bazaar on the King's Road, Chelsea, was the most visible commercial source. André Courrèges showed knee-length skirts in his Space Age collection of spring 1964 and went above the knee in 1965. The British and French versions had different aesthetics — Quant's were playful, in cotton and PVC, marketed to teenage girls; Courrèges' were architectural, in white wool and vinyl, marketed to adult Paris clients. Both were called 'mini-skirts' and both shocked the same older audience. Paco Rabanne (1934–2023) presented his '12 Unwearable Dresses' collection in 1966 — pieces made from chain-mailed metal disks, plastic sheets, and aluminium plates. The technical content was real (Rabanne had trained as an architect), and his pieces from 1966–1970 are now in major museum collections. Pierre Cardin developed his Space Age silhouette in parallel, with helmet-shaped hats, vinyl boots, and bullet-point chest detailing. The Cardin licensing strategy from this period (he licensed his name aggressively for everything from clothing to luggage to pens) eventually destroyed the brand's couture credibility, but the 1965–1968 original pieces are technically interesting.

Saint Laurent's career is mostly seen as a 1970s and 1980s story, but his foundational work was 1965–1968 at the 5 avenue Marceau house. The Mondrian dress collection of autumn 1965 (six dresses with Piet Mondrian colour-block patterns), the Pop Art collection of 1966, Le Smoking of August 1966 (the tuxedo for women, an idea that took twenty years to be socially accepted), and the safari jacket of 1968 each made the news cycle for weeks. By 1968 Saint Laurent was the most influential designer in Paris.