Soft, flouncy dresses and embroidered peasant tops were all over the runways for the Spring/Summer 2017 season, but if you’re planning on donning any of these hippie-inspired pieces, you should know that “real” hippies believe you’re appropriating their culture.
According to an op-ed in The Diamondback, the student paper at the University of Maryland, the hippie movement was an important driver of social change, against conformity and capitalism, and the mere fact that hippie clothes are for sale is a slap in the face of values hippies hold dear.
The student author contends that the “hippie style of dress” is synonymous with the Vietnam War era rebellion, which shed the conservative, well-cut, traditional clothes of the post-WWII era for flowy fabrics and bright, bold, even clashing prints that epitomized their derision for commercialism and social conformity.
By paying money to pretend you’re a hippie, you’re not just violating their commitment to socialist economics, but attempting to join a culture that really doesn’t believe in joining anything, man.
It’s clear the author really wants to believe she would have been happier at the corner of Haight and Ashbury some time in the summer of 1968, but she seems to conflate the anti-war movement (and the cultural change that came from widespread unrest) with the hippies who populated San Francisco and introduced Pantone to Harvest Gold and Avocado.
She also seems to forget that the hippie era somehow came and went, and that the guy selling you grilled cheese from his VW van in the parking lot of a Phish concert is still living out the 1970s in perpetuity, not living out his values in the context of the modern world. Or that the hippie generation didn’t ultimately morph into the “Me generation,” going from teens who eschewed social climbing to adults who were driven by public consumption.
Never mind that, though, that if you purchase hippie-looking clothes, and put photographs of yourself wearing the clothes in hippie-like surroundings on Instagram, you’re committing a deep offense against the Flower Children.
The good news is, this most affects the Millennial class of supermodels and everyone who holds a ticket to Coachella, so they won’t be bothered.