As the Swinging Sixties turned into the 1970s, the influence of boutique stores and diffusion lines made ready-to-wear clothing increasingly accessible. New synthetic fabrics meant that fashionable styles could be bought at any price point.
So pervasive were these materials that the seventies became known as the “Polyester Decade.” The decade saw a wide range of popular styles: from the early prairie dresses influenced by hippie fashion, to the flashy party wear worn to disco nightclubs, to the rise of athletic wear as the decade looked towards the 1980s, the seventies was a decade that explored fashion, but also looked back.
Seventies fashion began with a continuation of the late 1960s hippie style. In the early 1970s, this meant an emphasis on handmade materials and decorations. While the hippies of the sixties had embraced these items as a way of rejecting mainstream fashion, designers in the early seventies began to incorporate them into their high fashion collections. Patchwork, crochet and knitting, embroidery were among the details used by designers.
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