One of the most intriguing requestions I’ve gotten for interviews and Q&As was from Moya Stone, whose website, the wonderfully titled Overdressed for Life, focuses on what Moya calls “providing the scoop on offbeat fashion.” One of her repeated riffs is on “Mom’s Closet,” and, given that her mom was of my generation, I shouldn’t have been surprised when Moya contracted me. She wanted to talk about “counterculture fashion” and sent a list of questions that got me thinking about the role of clothing in Part of the Solution and in culture more generally. Since my sense of style is probably best defined as aging hippie academic chic (see the Prologue to PotS on the grown-up Jennifer’s latest conference garb), I wasn’t sure how much I could contribute. But I figured it was worth a try. Moya’s first question about clothing was to ask how I would define “counterculture fashion.” I realized that, before I could answer that, I needed to think about what we mean by “fashion”. It’s a complicated word. What’s the difference, for example, between `fashion’ and `the clothes that a lot of people wear’? Is any popular way of dressing `fashion’? What’s the difference between `fashion’ and a `fad’? The ways of dressing that evolved during the counterculture began in opposition to what was fashionable. Starting in the ‘50s with the Beats, the whole point was a rejection of mainstream clothing. The clothes we wore were meant as political and cultural statements which separated the wearers from the American norm. They were instead expressions of identification with groups who were marginalized in mainstream American culture. It seems odd to call that `fashion’. Let’s take jeans as an example. For much of history, dress was aspirational. That is, people tried to dress like those above them in the social hierarchy. The impulse was so marked that laws called sumptuary laws were enacted to make sure that people didn’t mimic the dress of their “betters”. Only the nobility could wear certain fabrics. Only royalty could wear purple. In more recent centuries, with those laws no longer in effect and mass- produced clothing being sold, the cultural impulse was to use what we now think of as cheap knockoffs to try to look like the wealthy and fashionable. Jeans were, as far as I know, the first mass fashion statement through which anyone tried to look like people below them in the social hierarchy. Levi Strauss made his original jeans during the California Gold Rush, having realized that miners and other workers needed durable clothing – hence the copper rivets, double seams, and tough denim fabric. They became what you might call fashionable among people who identified with workers and didn’t in the least want to look like members of the upper class. In that sense, jeans were an anti-fashion, as were the other clothes worn in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s by those in rebellion against the status quo. As I experienced it at the time, the same was true of a lot of what was worn by the counterculture. We wore embroidered peasant blouses, feathered earrings, sandals, work boots, clogs, and other clothing that came originally from poor communities and indigenous cultures. We bought clothes second hand and wore them proudly as a rebellion against consumerism. We went back to making our own clothes – I remember crocheting vests, sewing headbands, tie-dying t-shirts, etc. Or we bought them in thrift shops and Army-Navy stores, which we also saw as a rejection of consumerism. If we wanted to wear something fancy, we would wear something like velvet bell bottoms, a flowing cotton maxi-dress, or a faded brocaded jacket meant to be a kind of mock elegance. We tapped back into the clothing of earlier eras – long Victorian skirts, flowing medieval capes and dresses, cavalier capes and shirts. We aimed for extravagance – bright colors, flowing fabrics, multiple layers, big jewelry, and lots of scarves and hats. I should say that the trends I’m talking about originated largely among white people in the counterculture. There was also a change in the ways in which socially engaged African Americans dressed. The clothes they wore included the things I’ve just been saying, but they were often focused on celebrating the beauty of Black bodies and hair and on affirming a positive identity through African and African-inspired clothing like dashikis. I’m not saying anything new here – there are lots of similar descriptions of hippie dress in our shared cultural memory. But my point is to complicate the question of what `fashion’ is. In the ‘60s, most Americans didn’t dress at all in the way I’m describing. Later, what is now dubbed “’70s fashion” consisted of things that the counterculture itself wouldn’t have been caught dead in. We didn’t wear little mini-skirted dresses with short sleeves. We didn’t wear business suits with bell bottoms. We didn’t wear white plastic belts. We didn’t wear sequenced pant suits. Look on the internet for images of ‘70s fashion, and what you largely see are the ways in which designers of mainstream clothing adapted a few themes from counterculture dress and made them acceptable to a mass market. So much for counterculture fashion. Anti-fashion perhaps? And what about the clothing wore by the various characters in Part of the Solution? How, Moya wondered, had I determined what various characters would wear? I realized that the ways the characters dress is one of the ways the novel reflects the multiplicity of what we now refer to singularly as the counterculture, the contending trends within it that were often in direct opposition to each other. Zach, for example, is very much part of the serious political left – he’s a radical historian who went to jail for draft resistance. His clothes when we meet him are typical of people like him: work shirts, jeans, and work shoes. Wendy, on the other hand, is part of the New Age branch of the counterculture, and her clothes reflect that. The narrator compares her to a pre-Raphaelite painting, and at one point Jennifer says she looks like a little girl dressed up as Eleanor of Aquitaine. To take another example, David identifies with the origins of the counterculture in the 50s Beat generation, and he dresses accordingly in all black. Each character’s style is reflective of that and fell into place naturally as I was writing the characterizations. In truth, when I think about it, it still seems to be that none of them could possibly be wearing anything else. The characters in Part of the Solution are very aware of the symbolic role of the clothes they wear. They actually talk about it. There’s an extended discussion, for example, about whether people should wear clothes that help them to fit in and the degree to which we are being essentially dishonest by changing the way we dress. It’s not a co-incidence that the culminating scene in the novel is a Halloween party in which everyone purposefully and with deliberation wears a costume that isn’t a masquerade at all but a revelation of a core identity. Moya was also curious about my retrospective sense of the clothing of the ‘70s. What ‘70s trend, she asked, would I like to see return, and why? I realized that I have two answers to that. One is that I loved the flowing velvets, lace, and silk that we wore in ‘70s. I’d happily go back to dressing up like a medieval lady or a character in a 19th century novel. I loved the creativity and imaginativeness of what we wore and the permission to put together whatever mismatched articles of clothing we could think of. Dressing was a form of play, and I’d love to see that flourishing again. My other answer concerns a trend that we saw in the ‘70s but has even greater importance now, namely, attention to how the clothes we wear impact the environment. People are becoming more conscious of how “fast fashion” made from petroleum-based fabrics by exploited offshore workers is contributing to the global environmental crisis. People now buy used and repurposed clothing, not just as a symbolic identification with marginalized communities, but as a very concrete commitment to a more sustainable way of life. The same is true of the return to natural fabrics. This development is complicated, because natural fabrics can be more expensive, and we need to make sure that sustainable clothing isn’t just a new form of fashion that only the rich can afford. But I think it’s very important that some people in the textile and clothing industries are taking the needs of the environment to heart. Finally, Moya asked what she called the random fun question, which was: “You have time traveled back to 1978 for one day. What are you wearing and how are you spending the day?” When I first read the question, I looked down at what I was wearing: blue jeans, a t-shirt that read “foment a revolution“ in Spanish, a cotton jacket that I bought in a thrift shop, long earrings, a scarf and leather sandals. On a peg waiting for me to leave the house, I had a Guatemalan bag that was made from an Indigenous Mayan embroidered blouse. Go to a dinner party in my world – or any blue-bubble, aging hippie haven like the one I live in near Woodstock, NY — and people my age are pretty much wearing what we wore in 1978. Much of what’s changed is attributable to the fact that our bodies are very different than they were in the 70s. (When miniskirts came back into style, someone gave a very good piece of advice: if you wore them the first time around, don’t.) I had no trouble showing my belly button in 1978. These days, I wouldn’t dream of it. All that said, if I time-travelled back to 1978 for one day, it would be to a Greek island as they were before so many of them became over-touristed. I’d be wearing Greek sandals and an Indian-print cotton pullover shirt with wide, rolled-up sleeves over a two-piece bathing suit of Aegean blue. I would have multiple beaded macramé bracelets around my wrists and ankles. I’d have on long silver earrings and an ornate necklace with a pendant representing a goddess. When evening fell, I’d add a long cotton skirt that flowed around my legs and billowed when the wind flew. When night fell, I’d drape a flowing batik shawl around my shoulders. I wouldn’t have to buy any of that. I have all of it at home. Thank you, Moya, for giving me a chance to think about what, at base, are really interesting questions. Here is the post of the interview on Moya’s websiteOne of the most intriguing requestions I’ve gotten for interviews and Q&As was from Moya Stone, whose website, the wonderfully titled Overdressed for Life, focuses on what Moya calls “providing the scoop on offbeat fashion.” One of her repeated riffs is on “Mom’s Closet,” and, given that her mom was of my generation, I shouldn’t have been surprised when Moya contracted me. She wanted to talk about “counterculture fashion” and sent a list of questions that got me thinking about the role of clothing in Part of the Solution and in culture more generally. Since my sense of style is probably best defined as aging hippie academic chic (see the Prologue to PotS on the grown-up Jennifer’s latest conference garb), I wasn’t sure how much I could contribute. But I figured it was worth a try. Moya’s first question about clothing was to ask how I would define “counterculture fashion.” I realized that, before I could answer that, I needed to think about what we mean by “fashion”. It’s a complicated word. What’s the difference, for example, between `fashion’ and `the clothes that a lot of people wear’? Is any popular way of dressing `fashion’? What’s the difference between `fashion’ and a `fad’? The ways of dressing that evolved during the counterculture began in opposition to what was fashionable. Starting in the ‘50s with the Beats, the whole point was a rejection of mainstream clothing. The clothes we wore were meant as political and cultural statements which separated the wearers from the American norm. They were instead expressions of identification with groups who were marginalized in mainstream American culture. It seems odd to call that `fashion’. Let’s take jeans as an example. For much of history, dress was aspirational. That is, people tried to dress like those above them in the social hierarchy. The impulse was so marked that laws called sumptuary laws were enacted to make sure that people didn’t mimic the dress of their “betters”. Only the nobility could wear certain fabrics. Only royalty could wear purple. In more recent centuries, with those laws no longer in effect and mass- produced clothing being sold, the cultural impulse was to use what we now think of as cheap knockoffs to try to look like the wealthy and fashionable. Jeans were, as far as I know, the first mass fashion statement through which anyone tried to look like people below them in the social hierarchy. Levi Strauss made his original jeans during the California Gold Rush, having realized that miners and other workers needed durable clothing – hence the copper rivets, double seams, and tough denim fabric. They became what you might call fashionable among people who identified with workers and didn’t in the least want to look like members of the upper class. In that sense, jeans were an anti-fashion, as were the other clothes worn in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s by those in rebellion against the status quo. As I experienced it at the time, the same was true of a lot of what was worn by the counterculture. We wore embroidered peasant blouses, feathered earrings, sandals, work boots, clogs, and other clothing that came originally from poor communities and indigenous cultures. We bought clothes second hand and wore them proudly as a rebellion against consumerism. We went back to making our own clothes – I remember crocheting vests, sewing headbands, tie-dying t-shirts, etc. Or we bought them in thrift shops and Army-Navy stores, which we also saw as a rejection of consumerism. If we wanted to wear something fancy, we would wear something like velvet bell bottoms, a flowing cotton maxi-dress, or a faded brocaded jacket meant to be a kind of mock elegance. We tapped back into the clothing of earlier eras – long Victorian skirts, flowing medieval capes and dresses, cavalier capes and shirts. We aimed for extravagance – bright colors, flowing fabrics, multiple layers, big jewelry, and lots of scarves and hats. I should say that the trends I’m talking about originated largely among white people in the counterculture. There was also a change in the ways in which socially engaged African Americans dressed. The clothes they wore included the things I’ve just been saying, but they were often focused on celebrating the beauty of Black bodies and hair and on affirming a positive identity through African and African-inspired clothing like dashikis. I’m not saying anything new here – there are lots of similar descriptions of hippie dress in our shared cultural memory. But my point is to complicate the question of what `fashion’ is. In the ‘60s, most Americans didn’t dress at all in the way I’m describing. Later, what is now dubbed “’70s fashion” consisted of things that the counterculture itself wouldn’t have been caught dead in. We didn’t wear little mini-skirted dresses with short sleeves. We didn’t wear business suits with bell bottoms. We didn’t wear white plastic belts. We didn’t wear sequenced pant suits. Look on the internet for images of ‘70s fashion, and what you largely see are the ways in which designers of mainstream clothing adapted a few themes from counterculture dress and made them acceptable to a mass market. So much for counterculture fashion. Anti-fashion perhaps? And what about the clothing wore by the various characters in Part of the Solution? How, Moya wondered, had I determined what various characters would wear? I realized that the ways the characters dress is one of the ways the novel reflects the multiplicity of what we now refer to singularly as the counterculture, the contending trends within it that were often in direct opposition to each other. Zach, for example, is very much part of the serious political left – he’s a radical historian who went to jail for draft resistance. His clothes when we meet him are typical of people like him: work shirts, jeans, and work shoes. Wendy, on the other hand, is part of the New Age branch of the counterculture, and her clothes reflect that. The narrator compares her to a pre-Raphaelite painting, and at one point Jennifer says she looks like a little girl dressed up as Eleanor of Aquitaine. To take another example, David identifies with the origins of the counterculture in the 50s Beat generation, and he dresses accordingly in all black. Each character’s style is reflective of that and fell into place naturally as I was writing the characterizations. In truth, when I think about it, it still seems to be that none of them could possibly be wearing anything else. The characters in Part of the Solution are very aware of the symbolic role of the clothes they wear. They actually talk about it. There’s an extended discussion, for example, about whether people should wear clothes that help them to fit in and the degree to which we are being essentially dishonest by changing the way we dress. It’s not a co-incidence that the culminating scene in the novel is a Halloween party in which everyone purposefully and with deliberation wears a costume that isn’t a masquerade at all but a revelation of a core identity. Moya was also curious about my retrospective sense of the clothing of the ‘70s. What ‘70s trend, she asked, would I like to see return, and why? I realized that I have two answers to that. One is that I loved the flowing velvets, lace, and silk that we wore in ‘70s. I’d happily go back to dressing up like a medieval lady or a character in a 19th century novel. I loved the creativity and imaginativeness of what we wore and the permission to put together whatever mismatched articles of clothing we could think of. Dressing was a form of play, and I’d love to see that flourishing again. My other answer concerns a trend that we saw in the ‘70s but has even greater importance now, namely, attention to how the clothes we wear impact the environment. People are becoming more conscious of how “fast fashion” made from petroleum-based fabrics by exploited offshore workers is contributing to the global environmental crisis. People now buy used and repurposed clothing, not just as a symbolic identification with marginalized communities, but as a very concrete commitment to a more sustainable way of life. The same is true of the return to natural fabrics. This development is complicated, because natural fabrics can be more expensive, and we need to make sure that sustainable clothing isn’t just a new form of fashion that only the rich can afford. But I think it’s very important that some people in the textile and clothing industries are taking the needs of the environment to heart. Finally, Moya asked what she called the random fun question, which was: “You have time traveled back to 1978 for one day. What are you wearing and how are you spending the day?” When I first read the question, I looked down at what I was wearing: blue jeans, a t-shirt that read “foment a revolution“ in Spanish, a cotton jacket that I bought in a thrift shop, long earrings, a scarf and leather sandals. On a peg waiting for me to leave the house, I had a Guatemalan bag that was made from an Indigenous Mayan embroidered blouse. Go to a dinner party in my world – or any blue-bubble, aging hippie haven like the one I live in near Woodstock, NY — and people my age are pretty much wearing what we wore in 1978. Much of what’s changed is attributable to the fact that our bodies are very different than they were in the 70s. (When miniskirts came back into style, someone gave a very good piece of advice: if you wore them the first time around, don’t.) I had no trouble showing my belly button in 1978. These days, I wouldn’t dream of it. All that said, if I time-travelled back to 1978 for one day, it would be to a Greek island as they were before so many of them became over-touristed. I’d be wearing Greek sandals and an Indian-print cotton pullover shirt with wide, rolled-up sleeves over a two-piece bathing suit of Aegean blue. I would have multiple beaded macramé bracelets around my wrists and ankles. I’d have on long silver earrings and an ornate necklace with a pendant representing a goddess. When evening fell, I’d add a long cotton skirt that flowed around my legs and billowed when the wind flew. When night fell, I’d drape a flowing batik shawl around my shoulders. I wouldn’t have to buy any of that. I have all of it at home. Thank you, Moya, for giving me a chance to think about what, at base, are really interesting questions. Here is the post of the interview on Moya’s website