Word: victorian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...stores with dusty windows. Normally San Benito Street is dark by 9 o'clock, except for the glare of neon from car dealerships and fast-food kiosks. Two blocks away, in a tree-shaded neighborhood of modest bungalows, is the new county administration building. The old building, a Victorian pile put up in 1886, was destroyed in 1961. You guessed it: an earthquake and 400 aftershocks did the damage...
Those early minis were also something of a joke, of course. Some Quant creations consisted of less material than a Victorian hanky and-at eleven inches above the knee-barely covered the area once reserved for underwear. On the way up from the pert Chelsea shopgirl look, the ultrashort skirt was given the imprimatur of couture by Parisian Designer André Courrèges in the middle '60s. The mini's bon voyage across the Atlantic was largely the work of Enfant Terrible Rudi Gernreich, who was not only the first U.S. designer to bare the thigh...
...conclusion has the weight and shape of Waugh, the critic of modernism and the Age of the Common Man: "He was aware of a new voice in his inner counsels... a voice, as it were, from a more civilized age as from the chimney corner in mid-Victorian times there used to break sometimes the sardonic laughter of grandmama, relic of Regency, a clear, outrageous, entirely self-assured disturber among the high and muddled thought of her whiskered descendants...
...open physical defiance of prevailing fashion form. The usual course around these dire sartorial straits has been to sail into great billowing garments of soft prints that try to exalt maternity by sentimentalizing it. The expectant mother, shrouded in a calf-tickling Laura Ashley fantasy, becomes a late-Victorian artifact, like a sprite from a Julia Margaret Cameron photograph. A woman who wanted a certain modernity of fashion to complement a contemporary pregnancy, who wanted to be comfortable with her appearance and her condition, pretty much had to improvise, scrounge or raid her husband's wardrobe...
California gets a big Victorian bang for its buck