Hippie chic at home in festival fashion

I watched Glastonbury from the comfort of my sofa, with a glass of wine and a Magnum ice cream. It’s quite a few years since I decided I was too old for the hustle and bustle of a festival but maybe I’m wrong. While I was singing along, I observed that in recent years, Glastonbury's audience has been getting older. 

It got me thinking about festival fashion. Many of the older members of the audience would have been around for hippie chic the first time. It occurred to me that hippie chic is perfect for festivals and I wondered if the style that originated at Woodstock in 1969, has found an enduring home on the UK festival circuit.

Here’s a few reasons why I think hippie chic fits perfectly into festival fashion.

Festival clothing needs to look good crumpled as irons and tents don’t go together well. It needs to be easy to store as space at a festival is at a premium. It needs to be made for layering as the British weather is so changeable, and it needs to encourage creativity because it’s hard to be unique in a crowd of 175,000.

Hippie styled clothing is ideal for festivals. Items can be picked up for a few pounds at charity shops so it doesn’t matter if they get covered in tomato ketchup, clogged with mud or ripped by an enthusiastic rocker.

   

An emphasis on multiple colours and textures and a tendency towards DIY encourages creativity and makes it easier to be unique.

Hippie chic lends itself brilliantly to layering which makes it ideal for unpredictable weather. A good boho hat will keep most weather at bay and even if it doesn't, hippie hair involves lots of plaits and curls which are perfect for damp and dirty festival hair.

I decided to trawl Pinterest for great images of hippie chic at UK festivals over summer 2013 and this is what I found.

 The original image can be found at http://www.pinterest.com/duneshoes/style-notes-festival-style/

The original image can be found here http://www.elleuk.com/style/street-style/glastonbury-street-style-2013#image=35

The original image can be found here http://www.oxfam.org.uk/fashion-blog/2013/07/womad-street-style-part-one

The original image can be found here http://www.elleuk.com/style/street-style/glastonbury-street-style-2013#image=24

Want me to add your hippie chic festival photos to this blog? Comment below and send your image to angela.synclair@gmail.com.

East Meets West in UK Fashion

Middle Eastern style is establishing itself within mainstream fashion in the UK. Shelves in UK clothing stores are awash with the sequins, patterns, modest necklines and flowing styles that characterise Middle Eastern clothing.

Middle Eastern inspired clothing not only caters to Muslims living in the UK anymore, it is also finding its way into high street shops such as Selfridges and Next. These outlets have adopted the modest necklines and flowing shapes of the Middle East and fused them with the shorter lengths and sleeveless styles that UK women love.

Middle Eastern designers such as Ellie Saab, Robert Abi Nader Abed Mahfouz and Walid Attalah are catching the eye of celebrities and whatever the celebrities wear, we are sure to follow. Their interest in the East/West fusion will ensure that the blending continues until we are all wearing something with a touch of the East.

Haute Arabia, a fashion incubator with a social conscience, is helping to propel new Middle Eastern designers onto the world stage. As more and more new designers enter the market, we are likely to see clothes inspired by their creations finding their way onto the high street in ever more exciting ways.

Here are just a few examples of East meeting West:

This Eastern inspired dress can be found at Selfridges 

Shopstyle UK stock this Ellie Saab dress

The jewelled cuffs and high neckline give this shift dress from Next an Eastern look

I've only included one image of a maxi dress on here because there were too many to choose from and this blog would have become far too big if I had allowed myself to indulge any more. The maxi dress seems to be where the mixing and blending of East and West works best. This is where the fusion of modesty and temptation really come together into something fabulous.

A dress by Ellie Saab

Here at Pink Parrot we love Eastern inspired clothing and we'll be watching to see how the fusion of East and West develops over the coming months and years. 

What is a kaftan?

When I buy clothes for my Pink Parrot range I usually make my choices based on what I think my customers will like or what I find interesting. I look at the clothes people have pinned onto Pinterest, or I visit fashion sites like Chictopia where real people post images of their favourite outfits, to get a feel for what people want to wear. I don’t usually think about the traditions that might have inspired the items or the cross-cultural influences that have gone into the design, but I did when I bought this purple ‘Adini’ kaftan top. It occurred to me that the kaftan has been a clothing staple for centuries and it has a fascinating history.

So I did a bit of research and this is what I found out. The kaftan originated in Persia as a floor length garment with buttons down to the waist. It was worn by high ranking court officials where the fabric and intricacy of the design indicated the rank of the officer. From the 14^th to the 17^th century kaftans were worn by Ottoman sultans and were made from velvet or brocade with silver or gold metallic threads interwoven into them. Some of these kaftans survive today and are so expensive and luxurious that they are kept in a collection at the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul.

Persian officials and Ottoman sultans would often give elaborately made kaftans as ‘robes of honour’ (hilyat) to foreign dignitaries and state officials, or they would give them to local officials as rewards.

The Kaftan was, and still is to some extent, viewed as an Islamic garment but it has been worn throughout the centuries by muslims and non-muslims.

West Africa and Morocco adopted the kaftan and it is still worn in both countries today. They wear it in very different ways though. In West Africa both men and women wear brightly coloured kaftans but in Morocco it is only worn by women and the colours tend to be slightly more muted than in West Africa.

In Russia the word ‘kaftan’ has a different meaning and relates to a suit with tight sleeves which was worn by peasants in the 18^th and 19^th centuries as a tunic over their clothes.

People in South East Asia wear the kaftan on a daily basis but they wear it as a casual garment which keeps them cool on hot days.  South East Asian kaftans are usually made of Batik fabric.

Kaftans didn’t make it to Western culture until the hippie era in the 1960’s and 1970’s when young people wanting to rebel against capitalist values looked to the East for inspiration. The kaftan was the perfect symbol of their rebellion as it was so different to the more formal fashions of the 1950’s that their parents were wearing. The hippie era changed the kaftan’s future and catapulted it onto the world’s fashion stage where it has remained.

Today kaftans have a multitude of uses from every day wear to beachwear to special occasion wear and they are popular across the world. 

Got anything to add? Please leave a comment.

A Short History of the Gypsy Skirt

The Gypsy skirt has many names, broomstick skirt, peasant skirt, hippie skirt, Indian skirt and crinkled skirt and boho skirt. For the purposes of this blog I will stick to Gypsy skirt.

The first people to wear a long, flowing circle skirt, similar to what we now call the Gypsy skirt, are the Rom or Roma ‘Gypsies’. Rom society believed in wuzho (purity) and marime (impurity) and women wore long skirts to cover their lower half which was considered impure because of its associations with menstruation and pregnancy.

It is thought that Rom society emerged in India and then spread out across Europe and later, America.  Early records of Indian history mention the bhairnivasni, a skirt that developed from a tube like piece of clothing called an antariya. The antariya  was sewn on one side only and held in place by a girdle.  This garment was originally an underskirt but eventually developed a drawstring, changed its name to ghaghri and became an outer garment. The ghaghri was made from five and a half metres of fabric and its flare was celebrated in poetry and art, although as in Rom society, the ghaghri was intended to preserve a woman’s purity and modesty.

As the Roma migrated, they joined other communities and the Gypsy skirt diversified in length, colour and pattern. Eventually, the comfort and ease of movement inherent in the Gypsy skirt captivated women outside Roma society. I found it difficult to track the history of the skirt during this time as not much appears to have been written about it, but then the 1960s arrived and with it, a revival of the Gypsy skirt.

The 1960s hippie movement began as a youth movement but eventually, it was recognised as a cultural revolution.  It changed the face of fashion forever. Hippies broke the conventions of the time and embraced alternatives ways of thinking and living. They embraced the Gypsy skirt for three reasons.

• As part of a rebellion against big corporations and capitalism, hippies chose natural, comfortable clothing that they could find in second hand shops or make themselves. Gypsy skirts fit the bill perfectly.
• Hippies wanted fashion that was unique and allowed them to express their personalities. The fabric used to make Gypsy skirts was easy to tie-dye so women could create one-off designs and use a multitude of colours and patterns to suit their unique style.
• Hippies held anti-war views and promoted peace and love.  They expressed these views by wearing flowers and other symbols of peace in their hair, on their clothes and painted on their faces. Gypsy skirts made an ideal canvas.

The hippie movement ended in the early-mid 1970s when punk and disco began to emerge and the Gypsy skirt’s popularity waned until 2005 when a retro-hippie revival began. This revival was very different to the original hippie movement though as the Gypsy skirts of 2005 were not purchased from second hand shops or handmade, they were being sold by high end designers to career women looking for something feminine and colourful to offset their corporate suits and dresses.

This revival has continued and the Gypsy skirt is now a staple item in wardrobes around the world. It is available in different lengths and in a seemingly unlimited array of patterns and colours and has become more affordable. Indeed, as the global recession continues, women are even going back to hand-making them, as women throughout the ages have always done.

It definitely looks like the Gypsy skirt is here to stay.

Referenced websites:

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/hippy-clothes-19602-hippy-clothing.html

http://womens-fashion.lovetoknow.com/1960s_Women_Fashion - Danielle Jennings – Guide to 1960s Women’s Fashions

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-boho-chic.htm

http://www.calameo.com

http://www.goodmagic.com/carny/gypsies.htm - Wayne N. Keyser 

Do you have any more information to add to this blog. Please leave your comments below.