Bohemian style
She wore them at breakfast, despite being asked by her husband not to do so, a gesture of defiance, at a time of growing crisis in their relationship, that came to the critical notice of Florence Nightingale[12] (who tended to regard others of her sex with "scarcely concealed scorn" and was generally unsympathetic towards "women's rights"[13]).
[19] Queen Victoria's precocious daughter Princess Louise, an accomplished painter and artist who mixed in bohemian circles, was sympathetic to rational dress and to the developing women's movement generally (although her rumoured pregnancy at the age of 18 was said to have been disguised by tight corsetry).
But in the summer you know, we don't",[30] while in Agatha Christie's thriller, The Seven Dials Mystery (1929), the aristocratic heroine, Lady "Bundle" Brent, wore only "a negligible trifle" under her dress; like much real life "it girls" of her class, she had been freed from the "genteel expectations" of earlier generations.
However, he "gave the impression that going without was a vital sign of a man's virility"[34] More generally, the adoption by the American movie industry of the Hays Production Code in the early 1930s had a significant effect on how moral, and especially sexual, issues were depicted on film.
[37] Katherine Everett, née Olive, a former student of the Slade School of Art in London, has described McNeil's "tight fitting, hand-sewn, canary colored bodice above a dark gathered flowing skirt, and her hair very black and gleaming, emphasizing the long silver earrings which were her only adornment".
By contrast, short bobbed hair was often a Bohemian trait,[29] having originated in Paris c.1909 and been adopted by students at the Slade[41] several years before American film actresses such as Colleen Moore and Louise Brooks ("the girl in the black helmet") became associated with it in the mid-1920s.
This style was plainly discernible on a woodblock self-portrait of 1916 by Dora Carrington, who had entered the Slade in 1910,[42] and, indeed, the journalist and historian Sir Max Hastings has referred to "poling punts occupied by reclining girls with bobbed hair" as an enduring, if misleading, the popular image of the "idyll before the storm" of the First World War.
For many years trite assumptions were often made about the sexuality of women with cropped hairstyles; a historian of the 1980s wrote of the Greenham Common "peace camp" in England that it "brought public awareness to feminist separation and even to lesbianism, hitherto seen in the mass media – when acknowledged at all – either in terms of Eton-cropped androgyny or of pornographic fantasy".
[21] Trousers for women, sometimes worn mannishly as an expression of sexuality (as by Marlene Dietrich as a cabaret singer in the 1930 film, Morocco, in which she dressed in a white tie suit and kissed a girl in the audience)[50] also became popular in the 1920s and 1930s, as did aspects of what many years later would sometimes be referred to as "shabby chic".
[56] In 1947, Samedi-Soir lifted the lid on what it called the "troglodytes of Saint-Germain",[57] namely bohemians of the Parisian Left Bank (Rive Gauche) district of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, who appeared to cluster around existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.
These included Roger Vadim (who married and launched the career of actress Brigitte Bardot in the 1950s), novelist Boris Vian (since described as "the epitome of Left Bank Bohemia, standing at the center of its postwar rehabilitation")[58] and singer Juliette Gréco.
At the liberation of Paris in 1944, the American journalist Ernie Pyle observed that the women were all "brightly dressed in white or red blouses and colorful peasant skirts, with flowers in their hair and big flashy earrings.
The aroma of Gauloises and Gitanes was, for many years, thought to be an inseparable feature of Parisian café society, but the owner of Les Deux Magots, once frequented by Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and other writers, observed that "things have changed.
[69] As measures of changing attitudes to cuisine and fashion, by the early 21st century 80% of French croissants were being made in food plants, while, by 2014, only one factory continued to manufacture the traditional male beret associated with printers, artists, political activists and, during the inter-war years, the tennis player Jean Borotra.
[70] The bohemian traits of post-war Paris spread to other urban parts of the French-speaking world, notably to Algiers, where an underground culture of "jazz clubs, girls and drugs" grew up – in the words of punk rock producer Marc Zermati, who was in the city at the height of the Algerian war in the late 1950s, "all very French".
In 1968 major industrial and student unrest in Paris and other parts of France came close to ousting the government of President Charles de Gaulle, who, after leading the Free French during the Second World War, had returned to power at the time of the Algerian emergency.
Its students were more modish and "trendy" than those of the Sorbonne in the city's Latin Quarter, being described at the time in terms that typify more generally the styles and attitudes of young people in the late 1960s: It is the girls that give the show away – culottes, glossy leather, mini-skirts, boots – driving up in Mini-Coopers ...
[76]In the United States adherents of the "beat" counter-culture (probably best defined by Jack Kerouac's novel, On the Road, set in the late 1940s, written in 1952 and published in 1957) were associated with black polo-neck (or turtle neck) sweaters, blue denim jeans and sandals.
The influence of this movement could be seen in the persona and songs of Bob Dylan in the early- to mid-1960s, "road" films like Easy Rider (1969) and the punk-oriented "New Wave" of the mid-1970s, which, among other things, produced a boho style icon in Deborah Harry of the New York band Blondie.
The Monterey Pop Festival was a major landmark of that year, which was associated with "flowerpower", psychedelia, opposition to the Vietnam War and the inventive music and flowing, colorful fashions of, among others, Jimi Hendrix, the Mamas & the Papas, Jefferson Airplane and the British group, The Beatles, whose album, Sgt.
[82] Among other things, the wearing of male neckties, which, in the mid-1960s, had often drawn on 19th century paisley patterns,[10] declined as muttonchop whiskers and teashades (sunglasses) came in: by the time of the Chicago 7 trial (late 1969), hair over the collars had become so commonplace that it was beginning to transcend Bohemian style, taking on mass popularity in the 1970s.
The London art dealer Jeremy Maas reflected in the mid-1980s that: there [was] no question that the Hippy [sic] movement and its repercussive influence in England owed much of its imagery, its manner, dress and personal appearance to the Pre-Raphaelite ideal ...
[90] In 1960 the future author Jacqueline Wilson, who, as a teenager, lived in Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey, captured this look after spotting two acquaintances in a record shop "in turquoise duffle coats, extremely tight jeans and cha-cha shoes being cuddled by a group of horrible spotty teddy boys".
However, as Britain emerged from post-war austerity, some Bohemian women found influences from continental Europe, adopting, for example, the "gamine look", with its black jerseys and short, almost boyish hairstyles associated with film actresses Audrey Hepburn (Sabrina, 1954, and as a "Gréco beatnik"[92] in Funny Face, 1957) and Jean Seberg (Bonjour Tristesse, 1958 and A bout de souffle, 1960), as well as the French novelist Françoise Sagan, who, as one critic put it, "was celebrated for the variety of her partners and for driving fast sports cars in bare feet as an example of the free life".
[93] In 1961 Fenella Fielding played "a mascara-clad Gréco-alike" in The Rebel with comedian Tony Hancock,[92] while, more recently, Talulah Riley replicated the look for scenes in ITV's 2006 adaptation of Agatha Christie's The Moving Finger,[94] set in 1951.
[98] The latter coincided with the revival of the bobbed style for women, promoted in London by hairdresser Vidal Sassoon,[99] initially for actress Nancy Kwan, and adopted by, among others, singers Cilla Black,[100] Billie Davis and, in America, Bev Bivens of We Five and Tammi Terrell, fashion designers Mary Quant and Jean Muir, American actress Barbara Feldon in the TV series Get Smart, and, in the form of a longer bob, Cathy McGowan, who presented the influential British TV pop music show, Ready Steady Go!
[103] Beatlemania did not of itself create the apparent iconoclasm of the 1960s; however, as one writer put it, "just as Noël Coward and Cole Porter reflected the louche, carefree attitude of the [Nineteen] Twenties, so did the Beatles' music capture the rhythm of breaking free experienced by an entire generation of people growing up in the Sixties".
[116] At around the same time too, and into the 1970s, the brassière (or bra), which, as noted, had been seen as a liberating innovation in the early part of the century, came to be regarded by some women, such as the Australian academic Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch, 1969), as an unduly restrictive symbol of traditional womanhood.
"[119] Claire Perry, who became a Conservative Member of Parliament in 2010 and later a government minister, reflected that, as a "women's officer" at Oxford University in the early 1980s, she was "a bra-burning feminist with a hideous new-romantic haircut", but that her feminism had, in her view, matured.
In the mid-to-late 1980s, variants of the short and fundamentally un-Bohemian rah-rah skirt (which originated with cheerleaders) were combined with leather or denim to create a look with some Bohemian or even gothic features (for example, by the singing duo Strawberry Switchblade who took inspiration from 1970s punk fashion).
