Wry Martinis by Christopher Buckley Read Free Book Online

résistance.
    1943: The jitterbug craze creates the need for more leg room.
    1947: Dior unveils his controversial New Look: ballerina waists, broad shoulders, and longer skirts. Men howl angrily over “those petticoats,” but the fashion catches on and hems remain at midcalf through the 1950s.
    1957: Balenciaga sets fashion back fifteen hundred years when he introduces the chemise. It is quickly nicknamed the Sack and bombs. Christian Dior dies. Jack Kerouac publishes
On the Road
, paving the way for the black-turtleneck boom of the 1960s.
    January 20, 1961: Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy becomes the most glamorous woman in the world. Youth is the determinant in fashion for the first time since the 1920s. The hem of Kennedy’s inaugural skirt, designed by Oleg Cassini, goes up all the way to midknee, causing inaugural poet Robert Frost to faint.
    1962: The restaurant La Grenouille—“The Frog”—opens in New York City and becomes the gastronomic center of the fashion world.
Women’s Wear Daily
will refer to it simply with the code letter X. The Frog’s stylish, trendsetting clientele will eventually tire of dropping gloppy food on their ten-thousand-dollar dresses and start demanding tiny portions of food without sauce on it, creating the need for
cuisine minceur
, literally, “minuscule portions of astronomically expensive food.”
    1963: Da Vinci’s
Mona Lisa
is exhibited in New York and Washington, D.C. Halston’s pink pillbox hat is seen by hundreds of millions following the tragic event in Dallas on November 22.
    1964: The watusi, the frug, and other modern dances resembling grand mal seizures cause people to frequent discotheques, where go-go (a corruption of
gaga
) dancers gyrate in cages while wearing
couture minceur
, literally, “next to nothing.”
    1965 to 1966: London designer Mary Quant invents the miniskirt, changing history forever and not a moment too soon. Parisian designer Courrèges knows a good thing when he sees it and puts women in short white shifts for the space age.
    Late 1960s: The microskirt, an abbreviated miniskirt, makes it difficult for women to sit down. Women, tired of standing, revert to the mini.
    1967: British fashion model Twiggy becomes a hit in the United States, popularizing the flat-chested look, making many women grateful.
    1968: Jacqueline Kennedy, wearing a miniskirt, marries Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis. Peggy Fleming, wearing the skater’s version of the miniskirt, wins an Olympic gold medal.
    1971: Hot pants, microshorts for women who want to be able to sit down without having to do things with their legs difficult even for Hindu contortionists, appear and disappear.
    1972: Mao jackets, designed to keep you warm and looking exactly like one billion other people, appear in the West after Nixon opens China. After the Mao jacket phenomenon breaks out at home, Nixon tries to close China, but it is too late.
    1973: The rise of blue jeans continues as U.S. textile mills produce 482 million square yards of cotton denim (originally
de Nîmes
, or “from Nîmes,” a city in France that has not been heard from since).
    1974: Heiress Patty Hearst is kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army; she makes a fashion statement in a ransom photograph wearing a striking
militaire
black jumpsuit, prefiguring the rise of The Gap.
    1976: Yves Saint Laurent stuns the world with his Ballets Russes collection, designed to make women appealing to defecting Soviet ballet dancers.
    Late 1970s: Embarrassed by the male-created Vietnam and Watergate debacles, American women decide they can do better and enter the work force in severe-looking suits.
    1980: Franco-Tunisian designer Azzedine Alaïa, taking his cue from women’s athletic fabrics, produces stretch wear, in some cases so tight that women cannot even wear panties underneath. Alaïa’s fashions emphasize the inherent exquisiteness of the female form and bring about the return of bosoms, or, as it is called, the “full-bodied