Croppy Bootsboy Bloom

Yesterday I got in a long discussion with a friend about living in Cambridge in the late 60's.  I was staying in a temporary apartment where my 'room' was actually the stairwell that the guys upstairs used to get home.  To say the least it was inconvenient.  My Saturdays were busy though with cruising through Design Research in Harvard Square and fondling all the things I couldn't yet afford.  My goal in life was to own a Marimekko dress, but at that time a bit of food was higher on the list.  I could still visit them!

Then, today I got my McSweeney's Newsletter in my email box and found this excerpt that made me slap my head and wonder about the fates out there again closing up my open circles!  

A   N E W   E X C E R P T   F R O M   M c S W E E N E Y' S   3 9

I was somewhere in a big room in an old apartment in New York. The room was in a brownstone, or limestone, and had what appeared to be twenty-foot-high ceilings. There were baroque moldings around the ceilings, around the tops of the radiator covers and on the mantelpiece. The apartment was on the fifth floor and there was no elevator, but it was near Gramercy Park.

This was during the era when very young women could afford such places with a roommate or two. The roommates in this apartment were happy that they'd found this great deal. I was so young that I lived in a much-worse situation, which I didn't notice at the time but now look back upon with horror and disbelief. I accepted the fact that graduate students lived in better circumstances than high school or college students did. This was before the arrival of the yuppie generation who thought they could have everything they wanted immediately, and proceeded to get it.

We all wore Marimekko cotton dresses—not by plan, or necessarily at the same time. I myself had at least five or six, or seven or ten. What does it matter now? Who cares about our Marimekko dresses? Sleeveless for summer, long-sleeved for winter, short-sleeved for spring. They were the only clothes that were desperately wanted by artistic, intellectual, highbrow or hip girls and young women. We were called girls at the time. One of the highbrow girls in the apartment happened to have an actual low brow—a monkey's low brow, even though she was highly intelligent.

Each dress was a work of art. Some were Op Art. We knew the fabric had originally been painted by Finnish women artists—we knew some story like that. We were too crazed by the dresses to care much how they came to be. One design was striped, thin stripes, as if painted with a watercolor paintbrush so that the lines were all in uneven waves. One line was the blue the sky sometimes turns right before the sunset, the other was green, the color of lichen growing on a tree. This was one of the best. The style of the dresses was almost completely plain—as plain and simple as a dress a child would draw. Just two lines like a capital A. The neckline would be round and high, or maybe a small V-neck, or thin, silver-looking buttons going up to a little stand-up collar.

The Marimekko design came right after the completely opposite kinds of designs, designs of the neat and perfect fifties. No one's form was visible under the loose A of the dress—so unlike today's tramp-ware—all that was seen was a face, a head of hair, and the personality and brain behind the face. Then the dress, and the legs. The legs didn't have to be perfect legs. The person counted.

People met, went out, fell in love, or not; some got married and lived happily ever after, or not. All the girls looked like adorable girls from a child's book. Even those who were not that adorable. How much fun were the end of the sixties and part of the seventies, when girls and women were people. Most men were still what were later called sexist pigs, but they didn't need to know exactly what was under the dress at first glance. In present times we know this is a must—seeing everything on everyone all the time.

In a documentary about Bob Dylan, Joan Baez can be seen singing at the Newport Film Festival. She's wearing a plain white sleeveless dress with a high, round neck. The dress has no shape, but her shape is visible when she moves. Her long dark hair is hanging down and around her shoulders, just natural and plain—she could have been anyone. A college student, or a teacher, or even a librarian. Only her arms are bare and the hem of her dress is just below her knees, not much different from a dress Jacqueline Kennedy might have worn.

I recently read that Jacqueline Kennedy owned eight Marimekkos, which she wore during the summer of the 1960 presidential campaign. Since I read it on Wikipedia the information was suspect. She would have had many more than eight. Maybe eighteen or eighty.

(Sandy again-  Yup, here she is in her Marimekko! Now back to the scheduled programming.)

The mania and fascination with Marimekkos began with student-girls at Radcliffe. In the beginning, Cambridge was the only place to get the dresses. Design Research on Brattle Street was a holy shrine. Next there was Design Research on East Fifty-seventh Street in New York, but that was less holy. We'd been told that some architect, Ben Thompson, was the store's founder, and that he was responsible for bringing all this stuff here—Finnish dresses, Scandinavian furniture, glasses, everything from these superior-design countries. We didn't wonder about him, we cared only about the dresses. We didn't understand that all the designs were part of a revolution. We were so young we didn't have the experience of buying things. We didn't know how ugly things had been before.

Every day, the song "Get Off of My Cloud" was played on speakers throughout the store in New York. It got us all high—all of us who were lucky enough to be working there instead of Max's Kansas City. We were too high to have been working in this shrine. The Rolling Stone-induced madness wasn't right for staring at fabric in the fabric-bolt area—a short, wide, light-wood stairway open to the space of the whole store, going up to a small second floor of a wall of shelves and floor-to-ceiling bolts of too many colors to take in. A specially designed, beautiful, light-wood rolling ladder was used to reach the bolts on the top shelves.

* * *

The dresses were not short enough, so we shortened them.

—from Julie Hecht's "They All Stand Up and Sing," in McSweeney's 39! To read more, subscribe right here.

These last two images are contemporary, not vintage, but you can see how the styling hasn't changed.

Fast forward a few years to the early 70's when I could afford my own apartment finally, though a one room studio that I had some pals build a platform over the kitchen and bathroom for a bed.  There were huge floor to ceiling windows right on the street level so anybody could see me no matter where I was in the apartment.  My solution was to buy yards and yards of this:

And I made roll up window shades 9' long for each of the three bays.  Overpowering?  Nah. i painted the wide beautiful window moldings red to match.  And never let the landlord in!  That got me over the Marimekko-thing.  And I never did get a dress.