She is now playful, tomboyish, smart and wryly gifted at playing both sheet music and musical sheets with Mick and Warren and Sweet Baby James. She is flower-power frilly in post-hippie hues evoking the clothesline-bleached quality of ’70s film stock, with just enough dusty mauve leather to invoke decaffeinated lite-rock hits. She is effortless pleasure in shredded jeans, butterfly tops and birth control pills. The new role-goddess seems to be Carly Simon, circa 1972, in a haze of hemp and freshly liberated sexual delirium. She is now her own vulnerable summer of sexual awakening, wobbling on tall wooden heels, trying to figure out how to use powers she forgot, or never knew she had. Frail Rosemary has given birth to her new self. Clothing, in a symbiotic reflection of the times, told us that the men were to have their way.īut the guard has changed, and sunshine is slowly being let back into women’s wear again. Men’s wear, in the meantime, flew its most ruthless semiotic pirate flags: pinstripes and camouflage merciless prints altogether deaf to feminine pleading and blind to the suffering of tots. Child-women were bowed and baby-dolled up to resemble decorative Easter eggs: newly and uptightly pregnant (a paragon of marital fidelity), half-crippled by feminine weakness and excess luxury, declawed and wholly dominated by the unstoppable twin libidos of war and Wall Street.

Fashionwise, the prevailing goddess has been voted out and replaced by a new one.ĭuring the Dark Side years, I believe women’s fashion rotated around a particular unmoved mover: Mia Farrow in “Rosemary’s Baby.” Retail inventories seemed to come right out of Sunday school, in tiptoe-quiet ballet shoes and little pastel smocks. It was quite clear in the meatpacking district last week. IT was clear as early as November from the windows at Barneys.

Zadig and voltaire dress