1960s Mod Silhouette

The 1960s move through three distinct silhouettes fast enough that dating a reproduction by shape alone is genuinely useful. The decade opens with fitted skirt suits still close to the 1950s in spirit; by the middle of the decade the miniskirt - credited most often to Mary Quant, though the attribution is genuinely disputed, with André Courrèges and others having real claims to it too - and simple, mix-and-match shift dresses had taken over, alongside the "space age" looks of Pierre Cardin and Andre Courreges - white and silver PVC, sharp geometric seaming, almost no reference to the body's actual curves; and by the end of the decade hemlines had dropped again into the maxi-skirts of the emerging hippie movement. Construction shifted just as fast as the silhouette did, leaning hard on newly available synthetics - acrylics, polyesters, and shiny PVC - that behaved nothing like the natural fibers most of this site's earlier decades were built from.

The shift dress is the shape I'd point to as most representative of the mid-decade look, and it's almost aggressively simple to construct compared to nearly everything covered elsewhere on this site: a waistless, unfitted tube with darts doing minimal shaping work, if any. That simplicity is the point - it's a garment designed to be quick to produce and easy to wear, which lines up with how fast ready-to-wear was expanding as a category through this decade. Synthetic fibers matter more here than in almost any other era on this site; PVC and bonded synthetics hold the crisp, geometric shapes the "space age" designers wanted in a way natural fibers just don't.

It's a whiplash decade to sew reproductions from chronologically - structured suit, to unstructured shift, to flowing maxi, inside ten years - and it sets up the loosely eclectic 1970s that follow it directly.