Printed Pattern 4614: It’s the 1960s and Things Are Getting Wild
The Youth Quake of the 1960s shook up fashion, sending some daring looks into the fashion world. You see here one of the midriff tops and skinny pants looks made even wackier with by adding over it a top made out of netting. Kind of a go-go-girl meets mermaid look.
Skinny pants became a casual look in the 1950s when women wearing pants in public only happened on very young women, or on beaches or resorts or other sporty settings. Midriff tops actually existed far earlier as some of my 1940s beachwear patterns attest. There is even a bare midriff in an evening outfit in Notorious from 1946 with Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant. She plays a supposedly bad girl, the American daughter of a convicted Nazi spy, who has slept around, but who is patriotic at her core and traumatized by what her father did and acting out because she was so unhappy. In any case, her outfit signaled her supposed badness, just as this pattern seems to say, “Hi there, you can see through one top and may be able to see up the other one. Who knows?” Way beyond flirty.
Notice that there was a much more staid version of the sleeveless top worn with skinny pants. But whoever first purchased this pattern cut out the crazier version and pasted it to the envelope. Clearly, she had some crazy plans.