Women's 1960s Fashion Guide

Women’s 1960s fashion was extreme style and attitude from the start of the decade to the end — but the start and the end barely resemble each other. The reason has a name: the counterculture of the 1960s, the anti-establishment cultural phenomenon that developed first in the United Kingdom and the United States and then spread throughout much of the Western world between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, with London, New York City and San Francisco as hotbeds of early activity. As the era unfolded, new cultural forms emerged — experimentation, modern incarnations of Bohemianism, and the rise of the hippie and other alternative lifestyles — and every one of them had a wardrobe.

The ‘60s started out fairly conservatively, but as rock ’n’ roll grew in popularity it began to influence the fashion of the kids who listened to it. The “Generation Gap” — the perceived divide in worldview between old and young — was perhaps never greater than during the counterculture era, and a large measure of that chasm was born of rapidly evolving fashion and hairstyle trends: readily adopted by the young, often misunderstood and ridiculed by the old. Few decades let you read a social revolution straight off a hemline the way this one does.

The Early 1960s: Tailored, Ladylike, Influenced by the ’50s

Fashion in the early ’60s was still heavily influenced by ’50s fashion. Women wore calf-length skirts with a cinched waist and a pleasing printed pattern; hemlines were seldom above the knee and were mostly modest, and gathered and pleated skirts were fashionable. The fashion idol of the early years was Jackie Kennedy, with her perfectly white pearls and tailored suit dresses — and the pillbox hat she made famous, one of the decade’s signature accessories.

Teenage girls dressed like ladies for school throughout much of the ’60s: knee-length, pleated wool skirts in dark colors or patterns such as navy or plaid, worn with conservative white blouses with rounded Peter Pan-style collars. In the early 60s women wore either skirts or dresses for just about everything — pants were worn only for ultra-casual settings — and day dresses were popular until about 1964. As the decade went on, skirts became shorter, collars on dresses widened, and large, bold flowers and bright colors became popular.

Mod, the Mini Skirt and the British Invasion

The break with the ’50s came from Britain. Trends from Great Britain, known as “mod style,” were particularly influential during the decade: clean geometric shapes, bold color blocking, and above all the mini skirt, the garment that defined the generation gap in a single hemline. Popular clothing styles of the 1960s include pillbox hats, mini skirts and bell-bottom jeans — a list that spans the decade’s whole journey from tailored to rebellious. Carefree styles dabbled in rebellion, and the donning of revealing clothing by women in public became mainstream for the first time.

Women did not abandon trousers to the revolution, either. Women of the 1960s wore pants made of fabrics such as jersey, satin and cotton velvet, worn in combination with garments like suit jackets and tunics — attire that was in some cases suitable for the professional setting and sometimes even considered fit for evening wear. The pantsuit path that the ’70s would pave starts here.

The Hippie Closet: Bell-Bottoms, Paisley and Tie-Dye

Bell-bottom jeans are the counterculture’s most durable gift to the wardrobe. Bell-bottoms (or flares) are trousers that become wider from the knees downward, forming a bell-like shape; in the 1960s they became fashionable for all genders in Europe and North America. Often made of denim, they flared out from the bottom of the calf, had slightly curved hems and a circumference of 18 inches (46 cm) at the bottom of each leg opening, and were usually worn with Cuban-heeled shoes, clogs or Chelsea boots. Toni Basil, a go-go dancer when the 1964 concert film The T.A.M.I. Show was released, appeared in it wearing bell-bottoms with a baby doll blouse.

Paisley became identified with psychedelic style through a resurgence in the pattern’s mainstream popularity in the mid- and late 1960s, partly due to The Beatles — and the style was particularly popular during the Summer of Love in 1967. Tie-dye t-shirts carried the same message in cotton: the process of tie-dye consists of folding, twisting, pleating or crumpling a garment and binding it with string or rubber bands before applying dye; the manipulations before dyeing are called resists, because they partially or completely prevent the dye from coloring the fabric. Band shirts completed the uniform — the Grateful Dead, formed in 1965 in Palo Alto, California, fused rock, folk, country, bluegrass, blues, gospel, modal jazz, reggae, experimental music, psychedelia and space rock, and their t-shirts became folk art. Corduroy pants — corduroy is a textile with a distinct “cord” or wale, and both velvet and corduroy derive from fustian fabric — rounded out the texture story.

Ultimately, practical and comfortable casual apparel — updated forms of T-shirts (often tie-dyed, or emblazoned with political or advertising statements) and Levi Strauss-branded blue denim jeans — became the enduring uniform of the generation. The fashion dominance of the counterculture effectively ended with the rise of the Disco and Punk Rock eras in the later 1970s, even as the global popularity of T-shirts, denim jeans and casual clothing in general has continued to grow ever since.

Wearing the 1960s Today

Modern ’60s style works best one signal at a time. A mini skirt with a fine knit and loafers reads mod; a pair of true flares with a tucked tee reads late-decade; a pillbox-style hat or a string of pearls over a tailored shift reads early-decade Jackie. Mixing all three decades-in-one on a single outfit turns homage into costume. Vintage shopping follows the same split: early-’60s pieces are structured (wool skirts, suit dresses, pearls) and survive well, while late-’60s pieces are fragile by nature — check tie-dye and band tees for thinning cotton, and bell-bottom hems for the wear that 18 inches of dragging denim guarantees.

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