The Lookbook · Era 06 of 10
The 1970s
Expression over fitting in
On the record
For fifty years clothing said you belonged. Now it said who you were.
What the room read
As photographed
- AColour. He is telling you something about himself
- BHand in the pocket. Ease is the message now
- CRaised heel. Height was worth the effort
How it was built
As drawn
- 1Peak lapel taken to the shoulder seam
- 2Waist suppressed hard. The jacket is fitted, not draped
- 3High rise. The trouser starts above the natural waist
- 4Flare opening from the knee down
What the decade expected
Six statements
What the room wanted
To hear what you actually felt
How men addressed each other
First names, everyone, immediately
What effort looked like
Repression, if you held anything back
What got you excluded
Very little, and that was the problem
What the clothes were doing
Announcing who you personally were
Cost of getting it wrong
Nobody agreed there was a wrong
What it looked like
Era 06 of 10
Wide everything. Lapels, ties, collars, trouser legs. Colour that had no precedent in menswear: rust, mustard, olive, burgundy, worn together. Texture got loud, polyester double-knit went everywhere, and the leisure suit peaked around 1974 to 1977. That was a matching jacket and trouser set cut like a shirt, with a big collar, patch pockets, contrast topstitching and no tie, and it was worn to places that would have refused a man at the door twenty years earlier.
The point of clothing had flipped. For fifty years, dressing well meant signalling that you belonged in the room. Now it meant signalling who you personally were, and the room was expected to accommodate that.
Some of it was genuinely good. Tailoring in the mid-seventies, cut properly, is stronger than its reputation. Most of it was not, and the decade has been used as a punchline ever since, which has made men suspicious of colour for fifty years.
What it sounded like
Era 06 of 10
Candour as a value. Saying what you felt, in rooms where nobody previously had, became a sign of health rather than a lapse. Therapy language entered ordinary speech and stayed there.
That's a real gain and it's worth saying plainly. Men in 1950 had almost no permitted vocabulary for anything difficult. Men in 1975 had some.
The cost was that restraint got reclassified. What the thirties called dignity, the seventies called repression, and a man holding something back was now assumed to be damaged rather than composed.
What it felt like
Era 06 of 10
Like the code was over and good riddance. Decorum was read as an inheritance from the people who had run the previous forty years, and those people had lost their authority, so their rules went out with them.
Almost nobody noticed the distinction that got destroyed in the process: the difference between expressing yourself and simply doing whatever you want in a room full of other people. Those were treated as the same act for about a decade.
What we kept
That a man is allowed to be a person, and that a room can be told the truth.
What we lost
The line between self-expression and self-indulgence, which nobody has successfully redrawn since.
On the pictures
Read this before you cite anything
Every photograph in the Lookbook is generated. None of it is archival. Where a plate states something as fact, the claim points at the historical record, which is checkable, and never at the picture above it.