Is it anymore that kids that ware shorts that come down to their ankles. We would’ve called them floods in the 70s. We laughed at anyone wearing shorts to their knees that was for old men and Wally Cleaver.
Everything looks odd when you look back at it. Until the late 90s straight hair on women was out. I recall in the early 70s my sister actually taking an IRON on hers to get ti straight. Then from the mid 70s to the late 90s it was all curly hair. Even men got perms from Mike Brady to Dan Connor (“Roseanne”).
Mustaches look really weird today. Just as weird as a goatee would’ve looked in 1977. For women Bangs went in an out from year to year.
Disco wasn’t all 70s. The first disco #1 wasn’t till 1975 more than 1/2 way thru the decade and it was pretty much over before 1979 ended. The Two biggest male artists of the 70s are Elton John and Rod Stewart. How much of there stuff is disco? For females Karen Carpenter (adult contemporary) and Olivia Newton-John were the biggest females. And Olivia was all country and A/C till 1978. But no one associates the 70s with soft or adult rock, which is what it really was. For every BeeGees Disco you had the Eagles that weren’t.
Remember a lot of that 70s stuff didn’t happen at once. When you see shows like “That 70s Show,” the often combine fads from the early and late 70s together. The fads never existed together. Like Eric Forman saying “I want a cassette not an Eight Track.” No one had cassette players till the Sony Walkman came down to $150 and popularized the format.
The Brady Bunch was always about a year behind the times for clothes and styles.
The Two most realistic shows in terms of timely fashion were “That Girl” and Lucie Arnaz Jr on “Here’s Lucy.” There clothes were pretty darn close to what appeared in the nation.
Trends are great when they happen, but you don’t want your friends to see it when it’s done. Every decade goes through trends, and it’s ulgy later. You won’t find a trend that you like better as it ages. You have to be in the correct mindset for a trend to make since.
Here role the tape.
New art types
Drugs like LSD and Mushrooms
Sexual revelution “Free love”
Mini skirts
Black lights and wild psycadelic flourescent posters
Smilely faces and peace signs all over
Long bell bottom jeans worn by hippies with long hair and afros.
Pasley shirts, and flared bottom pants
Polyester lesure suits
Tank tops, and holter tops without bras, the more boobs and butt cheeks the better.
Jeans with patches all over
Gold fish heel shoes, and platform shoes
High unemployeement and high inflation.
The electronic transtor revelution brought musical experimentation, and people got tape recorders and 8 track, reverbs.
Add in the live life now, because tomorrow you go to vietnam. That was a big drive in pushing cultural shocking changes. The man don’t like it, so lets do it.
The every day thought of Nucular Annihilation
The gas shortages and price hikes.
I see it about the same as a Goth decor or gangsta styling. They just don’t have the “graduate and go directly to die in a war thing” going on to unite them in a bigger movement.
I think that movie Dazed and Confused is a pretty good look at the time with muscle cars, keg parties, hip huggers and killer rock. IIRC it was set in about 1977 and was like a segment of my life.
People refer to “The 60’s” but the age in question actually ran from about the middle of the sixties to the mid to last half of the seventies.
I read somewhere that cultural decades run about four years offset to calendar ones. 9/11 might have made this one an anomaly, but looking back, the theory seems to hold.
Sure we did. They were the size of medical tricorders. They were used in schools (old people: Remember watching film strips?), but we had them at home as well. Right next to the 8 track, which was considered to be an improvement.
Plastic furniture covers
2 - 3 foot stuffed aligators in the living room, that they brought back from Florida.
Latch Hook rugs on the wall
Bleach bottle wirly things on a stick in the front yard
Crocheted beer can hats, for all outdoor events.
Crocheted Barbie Doll toilet paper cozies.
Every bathroom had a sign on the door saying "When you tinkle, wipe the sprinkle!
A crocheted afgan on every chair and couch.
Houses were a pale yellow, pink, white, or turquoise blue.
About cassette machines, I’ve been using them since 1968. They developed some seriously high fidelity ones by the mid-'70s, by which time I had hundreds of tapes.
About disco, which sucks, “The Sound Of Philadelphia” by MFSB came out in March 1974. That song doesn’t suck, but a lot of what it spawned, did.
But it’s the perfect age for a retro-fashion recrudescence.
As the wheel of fashion accelerates, though, the 80s are already edging out the 70s as the nostalgia du jour (has there ever been a generation as collectively nostalgic as the current 20somethings?). Napoleon Dynamite was a turning point, and if you look through the clothing selections at Target, you’ll see quite a lot of apparel that wouldn’t have been out of place in the video for “Let’s Get Physical.”
Addendum: CB and walkie talkies were available to everybody, and you didn’t need to pass a test and be licensed to use them. Only licensed Ham operators with large units could talk on the air before. America moves into the truckers and convoy fad. Search: (convoy song movie) Truckers started blocking the roads at the time to protest wages and diesel prices. Big Foot, UFO’s, and Pyramid Power books are readily available in large quantities in most libraries. National Geographic was printing pictures of naked aboriginals on the front cover, and inside. Did you know a pyramid frame over your bed restored your vitality and youth. A razor kept in a pyramid shape was always sharp, even ones that went in dull. It was a period when mysticism crossed America. American’s were starting to interface with world cultures, instead of sticking only to local traditions and beliefs.
Now for the old people in the seventies.
Plastic furniture covers
2 to 3 foot stuffed alligators in the living room, that they brought back from Florida.
Latch Hook rugs on the wall
Bleach bottle wirly things on a stick in the front yard
Crocheted beer can hats, for all outdoor events.
Crocheted Barbie Doll toilet paper cozies.
A crocheted afghan on every chair and couch.
Every bathroom had a sign on the door saying "When you tinkle, please don’t sprinkle. Be a sweety, wipe the seaty.”
Houses were a pale yellow, pink, white, or turquoise blue.
Another Addendum: The first wireless networking for the general public was by Ham Operators sharing programs and data with their Tandy Radio Shack Color Computer. I know there was a network for that computer out there, some other’s may have also done it. “I think we took a wrong turn at Albacurky.”
I dunno–I was born in '64 and while my hair was too straight and thick to do something with (worst I had was a Dorothy Hamill wedge from 12-14, which actually wasn’t too bad) I got the impression it was a time when Middle America sort of acted out the hippie stuff via clothes and decor in a leftover spasm of wildness. People in my neighborhood had been too patriotic or unlucky to avoid Vietnam, too poor to avoid work and bum around the country for years, too scared of the human debris and crime around them to get into drugs, and didn’t have parents willing to subsidize a hippie lifestyle. But they could wear geometric prints, and have innocent little boys wear matching cowboy outfits and jeans that made them look like tiny Gay Bob dolls.
It was a scary and ugly time in the world, too, at least in the Bronx, where I could watch the fires burn in the graffiti-ridden, dirty subway on the way downtown, where abandoned buildings, garbage, and the de-institutionalized mental patients were driving people away from the city in droves. Son of Sam might come after me, ghetto blasters would assault my ears on every other corner, and we even were the last generation to learn the “duck and cover” stuff in school. Our “young adult” stories weren’t about kids whining wondering if they were pregnant or if Muffy didn’t like them, they were about population explosions and the energy crisis–everybody knew that if the Russians didn’t bomb us, we would have no electricity by 1990!
So, yes, I wore rainbow-striped shirts with my lime-green polyester pants (at least people weren’t too fat in those days) but I had to inject some color into my life somewhere! And I fell in love with cities anyway, even at their nadir.
That 70s Show also uses a lot of phrases that we really didn’t use back then, at leats not in my neck of the woods. “Hot” meaning sexy and good looking wasn’t really popularized until much later.
When we said someone was good looking, at least as teens, they were either “cute (kee UTE)” or a “fox”. Gay rights and acceptance were WAY out of whack. That 70s Show makes it seems as if it were a happening social topic and that most folks were understanding and with it.
Yeah, right.
It was either ignored, or vilified, or thought of as some bizarre avante garde artsy thing ala “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”. They bring up a lot of social issues as if they were thought of back then, the same way they are today. Not so at all.
FTR, even as a teenager, I HATED the oranges, browns and avacado. I hate any shade of brown to this day.
I burst into hysterics now whenever I see one of those young men with a pair of those “toddler with a poopy diaper” pants on trying to step up onto a curb. Or heck, just walk for that matter.
Those have been around since at least 1995, and they’re funnier than ever. It really cracks me up when they have to hold up the crotch as if they were little old ladies of the old south holding up a hoop skirt!
