Book Review with Fashion Rant: The Book of Looks

Title: The Book of Looks

Author: Lorraine Johnson

Date: 1983

Publisher: Johnson Editions (UK), Plume/Signet (US)

ISBN: 0-452-25441-8

Length: 191 pages

Illustrations: full-color drawings by Neil Greer

Quote: “[O]nly after studying the original look can you begin to be creative...”

“...and communicate the 1980s fashion statement you want to make” is unstated, but true.

The Book of Looks is a celebration of a tentative step toward fair treatment for women. In the 1980s as now, few fashion designers were women, or were married to women. Women had, however, said no to truly dysfunctional fashions long enough, firmly enough, to rein in the basic misogyny of Madison Avenue. Designers, regrouping, had given up pushing just one fashion for each season and tried marketing different collections for all the different lifestyles out there, pleading with the generation that had rejected them that they’d acknowledge that whatever we wanted to wear could be considered “fashionable” if it was done right.

This was a delectable moment in the history of fashion, savored by women around the world. Office dress codes might still order us to keep dancing with the woman-haters in New York, but at least we were calling the tunes. Telling them to forget about stiff ugly shoes and back zippers was within sight.

What my generation wear hasn’t changed much since 1983. Those of us who can still get into them are likely to be wearing some of the same clothes. It takes a sharp eye for fashion, like Johnson’s, to direct our eyes to the differences. Even then...fashions are constantly recycling themselves, and New York can only keep pushing revivals of the dowdy 1970s look for so long. We’re due for a 1980s revival so this nostalgia trip for baby-boomers may be timely for young women too.

Four to six pages are devoted to each “look,” including a big full-page picture. These were the styles being marketed in London. A few of them never made it across The Pond, and still look odd today. Others became popular in the 1980s but faded out; watch for those to be the ones New York tries to dig up as “the 1980s look,” suggesting that they’re what everyone was wearing—they’re not. Then there are the looks that haven’t changed; components of “The Sportswoman,” “The Classicist,” and “The Innocent” still appear in U.S. store ads every year.

Chapters about “The Forties” and “The Fifties” may help predict the eventual fate of The book of Looks. If you don’t remember those years firsthand, you can find pictures of what actual humans wore to work, school, church, or parties. There were fads that lasted for one season, but basically a lot of what people wore in the 1940s and 1950s could still be worn today without calling much attention to itself. What changed was the perception of the appropriate levels of formality for the different looks. In the 1940s even boys were embarrassed if they “had to” wear jeans to school; some schools banned jeans. In the  1980s jeans were fashion statements worn at all schools and some offices; what people wore only for exercise or grungy jobs, removed immediately afterward, and were sort of embarrassed to be seen wearing, were sweats. Now we see adults wearing sweats all day, in town, in winter, and hardly anyone blinks an eye...The “casual” button-down shirts and skirts or slacks that teenyboppers wore to school, in the 1940s when business or party wear was much dressier, now seem “dressy” enough for work, church, or a daytime party. But as for the actual clothing...if a T-shirt from the 1940s is still intact, you can still wear it.

You can still wear the looks described as “The Worker,” “The Horsewoman,” “The Sportswoman,” in The Book of Looks, too—but nothing screams “1980s” quite so loudly as the self-consciously bizarre styles described as “The Futurist.”

In the U.S., as I recall, what Johnson describes as “The Schoolgirl” look never sold well and still looks avant-garde today. “The Fair Islander” never quite diverged from “The Sweater Girl” (non-knitters may need Johnson’s explanation of what made those two different looks). If people wore “The Pirate” and “The Castaway,” they wore them at the beach. “The Punkette” and “The Futurist” are the chapters to study if you’re going for a “lost in the 1980s” look today.

With most of the other looks...a big selling point for new clothes in the 1980s was “wardrobe engineering.” In theory, once we’d “invested” in the good-quality shirts, skirts, trousers, coats, and dresses that suited us, we’d be able to wear them until they wore out and still be considered well dressed. And I think most of us have borne this in mind. Now that we’re the employers and customers young people need to “dress to impress,” we’re much more practical than the older generation were with us. Office dress codes that used to mandate neckties for males and nylon stockings for females have dwindled to cautious “guidelines” that the more sensitive parts of the body should generally be covered; uniforms that used to involve starched collars and fitted waists now consist of smocks or T-shirts. Outfits that were considered quite “casual” office attire in 1983 might raise eyebrows as being “dressy” today.

One look that’s not in The Book of Looks, although I see a fair bit of it in the catalogues these days, is what the fashion industry was not trying to bring back in 1983—“The 1970s”! By persuading people to discard their 1970s fashion clothes, designers hoped to create a 1970s revival fad and persuade people to toss their 1980s clothes and buy more of “The 1970s Look” by now.

Has not happened. What I see going on in the stores these days is that most women are remembering what we learned about wardrobe engineering in the 1980s, about sticking to looks that work for us.

The thing about 1970s fashions, apart from the pre-AIDS-awareness culture miniskirts suggested (if anybody didn’t want to hear constant references to sex, the thinking was, they would’ve stayed home)...1970s fashions were for Twiggy, for Karen Carpenter. All the fashions between about 1965 and 1975, if distinctive enough to be recognized now, made most women look fatter than necessary. Early 1980s fashions set by Diana Spencer and Nancy Reagan weren’t a great improvement, but late 1980s and early 1990s fashions, set by Sarah Ferguson and Barbara Bush, were designed for the majority of women who, at or below our healthiest weight, have curves.

In the 1990s some designers were already trying to bring the 1970s look back. (They’d been trying to bring miniskirts back for at least one season of every year since 1976, when they first acknowledged that miniskirts were over.) Women saw those old familiar bell bottoms in the stores and said, “Meh...those looked good on Twiggy,” and, if we bought new jeans, we bought straight-leg styles. We saw the muddy colors that were fashionable in the 1970s and said, “Ah yes, the ‘autumn’ colors look great on brown-eyed redheads,” and since most of us are not brown-eyed redheads we continued wearing the colors that suited us. The 1970s look has thus remained very trendy, for those who do choose to wear it, for about twenty years. Designers have continued pushing it and women have, by and large, continued not buying it, so it always looks “different.”

I’m dismayed, though, by indications that at some schools young women are letting themselves be bullied by Madison Avenue Misogynists again. Last winter a Cracked.com writer admitted to being bullied into buying “girly” T-shirts in the “current fashion,” meaning shirts that looked like shrunken hand-me-downs, because if girls she knew wore normal, functional-looking T-shirts they were accused of wearing men’s shirts. Oh please...T-shirts are part of a “Sports” or “Worker” look. Basically they are unisex, and though women can get away with a scooped-out neckline or a stretch-to-fit T-shirt if we want to wear one, we’re entitled to fabrics as solid and durable as men’s. You have to let the stores figure out what they want to do with the “girly” T-shirts that look as if they’ve already been worn out, girls. I’m sure the quality of the fabric will give them the right idea when they think about it.

Notice, especially, the skirts in The Book of Looks. Yes, short skirts are mentioned...but most of the skirts are described in terms that specify “long enough to cover the curve of the leg.” Skimpy skirts create a visual illusion. They draw a heavy line across the knee, making a woman’s legs look shorter and fatter. In the 1960s some women let New York tell us that the solution to this problem was the micro-mini-skirt that needed constant tugging to keep it below the panty line. Then the discovery that frequently wearing short skirts signals the body to lay an extra coat of fat on the upper legs brought us back to our senses, and now we as a demographic say to the young, “Of course you can wear skirts that cut you off at the knees, if you want. We won’t leap to conclusions about your sex life. We’ll just enjoy looking as if we might be taller and thinner than you when, in fact, we’re the same size, or slightly shorter and fatter.”

After thinking about this you probably won’t be paying for any new skirts that don’t cover the curve of your legs, with ample room for long strides, too. At this level of liberation you may even start telling the fashion industry, “The solution to the problem of miserly little pockets creating bulges around the hipline is deep, roomy, man-sized pockets, with room to carry a tablet computer and a water bottle, down below the hipline.”Admit it: setting fashions rather than following them feels good.

We have to keep our eyes on these people. Never take Madison Avenue’s word on anything. There’s really only one fashion rule for women these days, and that rule is, “Remember that we rule fashion.”

Next question: Is this A Fair Trade Book? Lorraine Johnson may still be a living writer, though Amazon lists only one other fashion book with that author name. A lot of people are currently using the name "Lorraine Johnson," in cyberspace. Disambiguation won't be easy. If, however, you buy The Book of Looks here, for $5 per book plus $5 per package (four books of this size per package, maybe five) plus $1 per online payment, this web site will find the time, somewhere, to identify which Lorraine Johnson wrote this book and send $1 to her or a charity of her choice.