Hippy

One of the most important movements of the 20th century for its fans and social contribution. It touched not only the world of fashion, but also those of culture, music, and art, and society in its complexity. Its roots could lie in the beatnik ideology. The birth of the hippy movement can be placed between 1966 and 1967 in San Francisco. In the Bohemian neighborhood of the Haight Ashbury, the first group of Flower Children, the so-called representatives of the hippy people, came to light. The flower was chosen as symbol of freedom and innocence, while the hippy expression seemed to come from ‘hip’ or ‘free’ ‘in the wind’ (the etymology is controversial). In the late 1960s, the hippy movement became politicized. In the USA it was connected with the protest movement against the war in Vietnam, while in France in May 1968 it animated students’ protests. In the 1970s it increasingly transformed at political-ideological level, developing the idea of giving life to a society parallel to that of the bourgeoisie in which to live following one’s desires and inspirations, without taboos and sexual inhibition, with a full behavioral freedom. The hippies’ commandments influenced young kids in a lingering way, who, in the full blossoming of the movement, were still children. It was through them that the hippy philosophy surfaced in the 1980s, which generated the New Age, one of the fashion’s trends of the 1990s. If pop music and underground display the roots of the hippy universe in music and art, the elements that characterize fashion for the hippy movement are long hair and the basic clothes, an answer to the bourgeois clothing style. Jeans, simple tunics in natural cotton, bare feet, no make-up on women’s faces, sandals, low-waisted and loose skirts and pants (hipster) are some of the most evident elements of this period’s fashion, born, above all, from the desecration of wardrobe. This non-dressing led to a total diffusion of jeans. All of these elements returned in the fashion of the 1970s, with a triumph in patchwork. They were to have a new moment of glory in the Collections on the eve of the new Millennium. The fashions were created by the most famous international designers, who offered an extremely decontextualized interpretation on a political level, seen as an extreme freedom in behavior, dressing, and showing oneself.