My grandfather never threw anything away, figuring that if he held on to something long enough it would come back in fashion. This was fine with books and clothes and hats and ties, but didn’t work so well with wedding cakes.
I was reminded of him when I read recently about the great bell-bottoms revival. Bell-bottoms, for those who were not around in the 1970s on account of their parents not yet having met, were — it was thought then — the greatest thing in trousers. Everyone wore them to show how unique he or she was.
Take a look at old photographs of people of a certain age (I have through hard work and by accident become a person of a certain age myself). If they considered themselves hip, they wore bell-bottoms. It was fashionable. It was what movie stars were wearing, and in the disco age, it fit in neatly into the zeitgeist. John Travolta looked about 10 feet tall in the posters of Saturday Night Fever thanks to his bell-bottoms which were shot from a low angle.
Eric Clapton sang about it ( Bell bottom blues, you made me cry…). Later, Arundhati Roy evoked the period in her novel with “Little angels were beach-colored and wore bell-bottoms”. Contemporary artists who deal in nostalgia paint pictures called “Bell Bottoms” and “I am a 70s Girl”.
Like all fads, however, it looks terrible in retrospect. The trousers began as all trousers must, but by the time they went past your knees and reached your ankles, they had billowed out into something awful. You could hide a mid-size animal — a sheep, perhaps — in the bell part of the bottoms. I can’t imagine why anyone thought that was cool (another word from that period).
And yet, here we are. Another generation which believes bell-bottoms are cool is upon us. They probably think too that it is — another 70s word — “groovy”. Perhaps the Bee Gees will be back in fashion too. Sometimes it is hard to keep up with the past.
One generation’s “cool” is another generation’s “yuck”. I mean, can you imagine wearing see-through shirts that were, briefly, the rage in the 80s? One store advertised its fashion for women thus: “Bell bottom trousers to make you feel like a man, see-through shirts to prove you are not.” It probably drove people away from both trousers and shirts for life.
There was an accessory to bell bottom trousers — the broad belt. You were not complete till you had an outsize belt, long hair and a drooping moustache. Respectable parents who have destroyed photographs of themselves from the 70s won’t thank me for dredging up these memories. But we have to face our mortifications in order to get over them.
Psychiatrists have traced many conditions to the trauma of the growing up years. “Did you wear bell-bottoms?” they ask, and nod sagely when the answer is “Yes”. Freud was wrong. It wasn’t our parents who were at fault. It was the bell-bottom trousers.
(Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu)
