The miniskirt is a mandatory part of any “those were the days” 1960s montage. Somewhere between footage of The Beatles disembarking at JFK Airport and splayed tendrils of white and orange curling through Palm Trees you’ll get a shot of a pixie-cut model with a hemline way above her knees. The miniskirt has become a symbol of the “youthquake” — greater permissiveness in the public square, the liberation of the female body from enforced modesty and passivity, and an explosion of youth-driven counterculture that would define the coming decades.
On a cultural level, of course, much of this is nonsense. As historian Pauline Hastings points out in her talk “The Miniskirt and the Unravelling Rag Trade” — held as part of Melbourne Fashion Week and drawing on research for her PhD — the vast majority of kids in the 1960s, particularly in Australia, didn’t form part of any counterculture movement. They had work in the morning.
As Hastings sketches, what was aimed at young women in the early 1960s was largely “what your mum wears, but smaller”. Gradually, the youthquake found its way to Australian shores, firstly via The Beatles’ visit in 1964 and — more momentously for the purposes of fashion — British model Jean Shrimpton’s then scandalous appearance at Derby day in 1965 wearing a skirt above the knee and no hat. Within days copies of Shrimpton’s dress were appearing in Australian department stores.
The push for greater individuality of clothes and for higher turnover swelled the number of clothes factories, particularly those opening in regional areas, led by financial incentives as the government pushed for decentralisation and tried to keep young people from drifting away from the regions.
Work and production are the focus of Hastings’ talk. By the early 1970s, she tells us, the textile, clothing and footwear industry employed somewhere between 165,000 and 200,000 people (the number of outworkers makes the exact numbers tough to calculate) who were predominantly women and often scattered through the regions.
In interviews, Hastings describes work that was hard and frequently poorly paid, but a source of pride. And it’s crazy what a safety net more or less full employment provides. Parental leave may have been an unimaginable step in the late 1960s (women in the Australian public sector could still be fired for getting married when Shrimpton so scandalised Melbourne in 1965), but if you were an experienced clothes factory worker in the late ‘60s you could quit your job to raise kids and return with very little trouble when you wanted.
Then over the ‘70s and ‘80s protectionism fell away, trade was liberalised and the cheaper labour of the developing world became increasingly available. Local fashion production was diffuse, subdivided and reactive, and soon, almost as quickly as it had sprung up, it collapsed.
So Hastings’ explication of the miniskirt, and the industry that bloomed and withered around it over the course of a mere 20 years, is a glimpse into a vanished world. Broadly, the cultural settings have been retained — the veneration of and aggressive marketing to youth, the sometimes empty nods to certain kinds of social progress. But the material conditions are collapsing: say, the ratio of annual income to house prices veering away from one another for decades, the slow then sudden erosion of job security, the end of regional hubs organised around manufacturing.
One of the major players in 1960s fashion, Maurice C Dowd, was slowly bought up by other companies, and its workforces sent overseas. Its old factory in Warragul is now a community health centre. Hastings closes by noting the symmetry — it’s where the largely female local workforce is now primarily engaged, and the demand is driven by the same generation that caused the building to spring up in the first place.
