The Fashion of the 1960s. A New Power Shaping the American Image

Abstract

After WWII, the US emerged as a major world-economic and cultural power. At the same time, it was producing a specifically American fashion, reinventing itself and its image, and channeling the critics. With new styles and new economic forms emerging in the 1960s—as the US, eager to expand its mass consumerist model, pushed ready-to-wear, replacing European couture—American fashion became as a new power, intertwining economic and political, social, and cultural stakes. Thus, fashion helped design a dominant model of a wealthy, free, and seductive country, able to better itself, even though reality was still far from this idealized image.