Capes and Mini-Skirts in 1967, or The I-Lost-My-Pants Look: Simplicity 7262
Capes are a perennial style dating back centuries and reappearing in different forms every few decades. This one from 1967 fascinates me because it straddles the period when official dress rules got tossed aside. (Unofficial dress rules persist, but that is a topic for another post).
The idea of a harmonizing outfit puts this on one side of the dress rules. Here, we have a cape and skirt that match in fabric, and even the plaids match up and down and across. Yes, the skirt pattern came with the cape pattern. This would be informal wear done up in a woolen meant to be worn in the countryside, before suburbia blurred country and city lines. Notice the practical, laced Oxford shoes ready for a ramble in the grass. The skirt is above the knee, the length that most women wore in the 1960s.
The other two capes are presumably also worn with a mini-skirt but it is so short that it doesn’t show beneath the longer version of the cape. Which is such an odd look as it makes look like the women lost some clothing somewhere. The red cape outfit somehow looks more finished than than the camel one to my eye. Is it the boots, the brass buttons, and the epaulettes which give it a military bearing? I am not sure. But many people at the time would have been taken aback by both long cape looks. First, because of how much more bare skin was shown when women wore mini-skirts. Second, because the mid-thigh or high-thigh hemline in a skirt had been restricted to girl toddlers for decades, so there was something weirdly infantile about the mini-skirted look.
And yet notice the accessories. Everyone wears gloves, there are hair ribbons, and umbrella, earrings and harmonizing footwear. All part of the older dress rules that the whole outfit should come together. Yes, the late 1960s, a weird and wonderful time.