The 45-rpm dress revolution: Competing temporalities in 1960s fashion

Perhaps no artefact is as evocative of temporality (i.e. the lived experience of time), as fashion and, arguably, no other period in history represents such a marked change in our notions about the relationship between the two as the 1960s did. In contrast to the Platonic-Apollonian fashion ideals of the 1950s, as exemplified by Dior’s New Look, the mod and the hippy came to represent competing bodily ideals. Their Dionysian fashions aestheticized time in three complementary ways: first, the celebration of the now, with its emphasis on the ephemeral, the physically pleasurable and the situated body in motion; second, the re-appropriation of the past, which involved the postmodern rejection or subversion of grand historical narratives that privileged certain iterations of race, class and gender and touted imperialism and cultural hegemony; and third, a utopian optimism about the future based on a belief in the increased possibilities of individual human potential as well as the prospect of societal transformation into a post-bellum, post-racial, post-classist, post-gender ‘Age of Aquarius’. These aesthetic values had political implications. Although the most radical of street fashions was worn by comparatively few 1960s youth, the deeper reasons why they came to be viewed with suspicion and outright anger were not so much due to particular styles, but rather what they revealed about our changing relationships to temporality and the postmodern fracturing of metanarratives concerning the proper existential comportment towards tradition and change, while laying the symbolic groundwork for what would later be referred to as the ‘culture wars’ in popular media.

Beautiful Beach Bodies and Muscle Heads

Uneasily situated between counterculture images projected by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and the dawning of the “Age of Aquarius” a decade later, there emerged a motion picture interlude of innocence on the beaches of Southern California. It was fostered by Gidget (1959) and then thirty “surf and sex” movies that focused on young, attractive bodies and beach escapades rather than serious social causes.The films, argues Kirse May, “created an ideal teenage existence, marked by consumption, leisure, and little else.” Stephen Tropiano explains how their popularity helped shape “the archetypal image of the American teenager” and, reinforced by the surfin' sounds of Jan and Dean, the Beach Boys, and other recording groups, “turned America's attention to the Southern California coastline,” where “those who never set foot on its sandy shores were led to believe that life on the West Coast was a twenty-four-hour beach party.” This study examines a notable film of this genre to determine how musclemen were exploited to exhibit this playful spirit and how their negative reception reinforced an existing disregard toward physical culture. Muscle Beach Party illustrates how physical culture served other agendas, namely the need to address American fears of juvenile delinquency and to revive sagging box-office receipts within the guise of the “good life” of California.