The Ugly Fashion Editorial
The smock! The colours! The hair! The horror!I spotted this fashion story in the August 1975 issue of Australian Vogue a couple years ago, and while I found it very amusing, I seemed it unworthy of SNAP’s pages. That is, until today, in this week of celebrating dowdiness.
It hits every note on my list of Seven Ugly Sins, and yet Vogue is touting it as an elegant look: ‘One of the simplest, most becoming dresses you can wear is the one with full smock … Proportion has much to do with its charm, the length of the skirt above a pretty shoe, your head wrapped small.’
It would be easy to protest, ‘Oh it wouldn’t be too bad if only it was belted,’ but Vogue is expressly advocating loose and voluminous smocks.
‘One of the simplest, most becoming dresses you can wear is the one with full smock …’
Even the shoes they call pretty are very dowdy, and the open-toed sandals are worn with beige pantyhose, a look that has quite rightly been banished from fashion horizon for decades. The overall apricot and terra cotta colour palette is repellent too. And the hair! Those fluffy curls are overwhelming, and as a friend observed, we are more used to seeing headscarves worn like that by cancer sufferers, so it just seems strange.
Though a coverline declares Spring/Summer 1975 the best fashion season for years, I can’t find a single redeeming feature – except perhaps that this dress shape would be a comfortable style for a heavily pregnant lady at the height of a stinking hot summer. While I like the atmospheric grainy black and white photographs by Dieter Muller, I cannot imagine these garments featuring in a current issue. We’ve seen plenty of challenging volume in recent years certainly, but styled in quite a different and more appealing way.
I wonder what Anna Wintour would say?
Click images for larger versions.
Here’s an extra spread from a different shoot in the same magazine as a bonus. Still on the billowing theme but with added extras: some hideous patterns, brighter colours, tacky accessories and the OTT 70s makeup we all know and love: baby blue eyeshadow and frosty lips.
