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The decade that
style forgot won’t go away. Both big department stores — eatons and The Bay
— reach back to the 1970s for their spring fashion advertising.
You’d think that
was where they were reaching, provided you knew or remembered nothing about
the actual ’70s.
The Bay, in fact,
is reaching back to 1994, specifically to the Spike Jonze video for the
Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” which it replicates without the deliberate cheese
or humor. That’s not a bad place to steal from. Jonze directed last year’s
Being John Malkovich and has been creating state-of-the-art music
videos for about a decade. He’s also the heir to the Spiegel catalogue
business (say it with me now, “Spiegel, Chicago, Illinois, six-oh-six-oh-nine”)
and, seen that way, the choice makes even more sense — catalogue, retail, po-mo
hipster cachet. The main difference between The Bay and the Beasties is that
Jonze, Diamond, Horovitz and Yauch were being funny. The Bay and the Wolf
Group probably aren’t.
If the Bay wants to
get down with its bad self, as it were, why not go one step further and
actually replicate the wretched clothes from the decade instead of just some
of the marginal pop culture filigree? Bring back the polyester leisure suit,
that horrible belted thing with the too-wide lapels and the “all wrong” cut
that looked good on no known terrestrial human body type. Bring back immense
pants — not the “county lock-up” capacious pants-and-a-half so popular with
the kids today, but Seafarer Fats: high-waisted, with the ridiculously tight
pelvic area and the immediate vast flaring that made the wearer appear
footless — not a bad outcome when you’re wearing shoes Ian Dury described as
resembling “dead things’ noses.” Or how about the Angels Flight polyester
incipient disco trouser mutation? Again, the top of the pants offers a
too-small fit that permanently bent people out of shape, widening from
mid-thigh to spinnaker-size flappage at shoe level. If you care for neither
denim nor petroleum-based drapery, there’s always wide-wale corduroy. Or
rayon. Or some kind of space-age two-way stretch crimpelene.
If you’re female,
you might consider gaucho pants, the bold below-the-waist option that
combines the butch authority of a skirt with the femininity of partial pants
while offering the practicality and esthetic appeal of neither.
Yes, there was
widespread casual drug use at that time. Denis Leary posited Quaaludes as
the only possible explanation for the prevailing esthetic and what
constituted acceptable attire in the 1970s: “The only way you could be a
cooler guy was to get bigger bell-bottoms.”
For your top,
you’ll want rayon or polyester, perhaps in a print: soft-focus greeting-card
stock photography, motor sports, soft-core pornography or nausea-inducing
optical illusion abstract. Consider a sweater: body two midriff-baring sizes
too small, arms cut for some kind of lower primate. And of course it’s knit
from tomorrow’s wool substitute, acrylic fiber. Please appreciate how
alarmingly the shirt’s eight-inch collar flops out of the sweater’s low-cut
neck-hole.
Of course,
everything here comes in the approved ’70s palette: pea-soup-vomit greenish,
burnt orangy, bile kinda-yellow, the wrong shade of brown, hospital-corridor
blue or mud.
The 1970s was the
first time capitalism embraced its built-in obsolescence and stopped even
pretending that anything should last more than about eight-and-a-half
months. That went for clothes, music, movies, cars, buildings and culture.
It’s a glorious irony that 25 years later, all that hideous stuff, conceived
as so disposable, won’t go away.
If you want to sell
clothes, why would you deliberately invoke an era that defined capital-U
ugly for subsequent generations? Neil Fedun, The Bay’s senior marketing VP,
told Marketing it’s a fiscal/emotional thing: “If you look at the
economy, you see it’s flattened out. And we wanted spots that make you feel
good, that inspire and are fresh.” The economy is in the tank again, just
like it was for much of the 1970s, so we’re being reminded that the last
time we were all poor, we dressed badly, too? Thanks.
Who’s this meant to
appeal to? Youngsters won’t get the references. Their elders have spent 20
years trying to forget they ever wore anything that ugly, and destroying any
photographic evidence they ever did. “Our target is baby boomers,” Fedun
said. “And it’s a style of retro today.” Or yesterday’s tomorrow, if you
prefer, or perhaps a Phillip K. Dick-like alternative history where the
1970s wasn’t a sinkhole of craptacular ephemera.
Trying to
differentiate The Bay’s spots from eatons’, Fedun pointed out, “Ours have a
whole different feel. Ours are more friendly and approachable.”
Provided you can
get past the initial impulse to laugh, scream and run away. |
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