"When you dress up you feel good": Counterculture Fashion & Rags

As I was putting together my talk on the counterculture fashion magazine Rags for a symposium tomorrow (in conjunction with the book launch of the new academic volume, Fashion in American Life), I reread the publisher’s letter in the first issue and felt it was rather prescient.

While beads, afros, painted leather jackets, and jeans were all signs used by the counterculture to signal their dissent and allegiance against the status quo, they were not written about in the underground press. As I was writing my chapter for Fashion in American Life, I undertook a study of underground periodicals in order to better understand their thoughts on fashion. Careful analysis of over thirty papers presents a counterculture absorbed in its various obsessions—LSD, meditation, revolution, Vietnam—yet unwilling to speak about the clothing that signaled their beliefs to the wider world. The first publication to look at fashion within the counterculture was Rags.

Making its debut in June 1970, Rags looked to the street for its content rather than couture or Seventh Avenue. Published by Baron Wolman (one of the co-founders and the chief photographer of Rolling Stone magazine) and edited by Daphne Davis and Mary Peacock (both former editors at Harper’s Bazaar), it sought to explicate the changes going on in American society by illustrating real people’s dress.

In his publisher’s letter, Wolman lays out why fashion is important to talk about, even or especially, during a time of political unrest and societal change. The political news in America has been so dire for the last week, sometimes it feels frivolous to be thinking and talking about fashion—but it is always good to remind oneself how integral dress is to daily life, to history—and “because, simply, when you dress up you feel good.”

In future issues this space will be used for letters from you to us. If they are particularly brilliant, we'll let them run on, page after page. For now, a few words from our side.

We hope you can get behind our attempt to bring a little joy into our lives. If this appears a curious goal in times characterized by serious unsolved social problems, we appreciate your skepticism. But it's not our idea to be frivolous, to ignore the troubles—we're not hiding our heads in the sand. We just feel there must be an occasional relief from the weird number life is doing on us these days. We've chosen the clothes route as a safety valve because, simply, when you dress up you feel good. It doesn't matter how little or how much your threads cost—the local Salvation Army racks might have as wide a selection as the downtown salon. What does matter is letting your imagination take over for a while, giving yourself some time to relax and charge up emotional and psychological batteries. How nice it is (admit it) to quietly parade around in some new duds and be noticed. It's an ego boost, it satisfies your vanity, it makes you feel good, it makes you smile. And smiles is what we're kind of short of lately.

So all of this rap is just to give you a small idea of what we're up to, how we think we fit into the changes that are going down in America. You've already noticed that we're printed on "junky" paper, as someone kindly dubbed our newsprint.

That's cool though, because we feel it's not the quality of the paper that counts, it's what's on that paper. Established slick fashion magazines bear about as much relationship to reality as toothpaste does to sex appeal. Today's fashion is something else entirely: it's a fantasy thing, an opportunity for self-expression, fulfillment of little head trips, a chance to break tradition and stereotype. It's beautiful.

And, while fashion is the main reason we're here, we are going to photograph and write about anything that moves us, anything that seems relevant, anything that brings us all some smiles and some joy. Be sure to let us know how we're doing ...

B. W.

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