- Not Only Dressed but Dressing: Childhood, Clothing, and Play Introduction to a Special Issue of Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures
In 1972, Times women’s editor Moira Keenan (1933–72) selected the winner of the Dress of the Year award given by the Museum of Costume in Bath, United Kingdom.1 All previous choices for the award had been women’s clothes, beginning in 1963 with a Mary Quant dress in grey wool.2 For a number of reasons, 1972 was different. Keenan’s choice marked the first incorporation of masculine clothing. It was also the first multiple selection: she chose three outfits. But most importantly, for our purposes, 1972 was the first time children’s clothes were featured in Dress of the Year.
Keenan’s regular column for the Times, “Growing Point,” focused on parenting and family life, and in an April 1972 story, she writes of being invited by Doris Langley Moore (1902–89), the collector who inaugurated Dress of the Year and whose collection formed the basis of the Museum of Costume, to select children’s clothes for that year’s award. The first of Keenan’s three outfits is a teenage girl’s outfit by Biba (Figure 1). This is notable for its bold polka-dot pattern, babydoll style dropping from an unusually high bust, and gauntlet sleeves with finger loops. The dress has a matching floppy-brimmed hat, with Keenan wryly observing how the accessory reflects shifting fashion mores: “Only a girl of this age, who has grown up without the restriction of having to wear [a hat], would willingly do so” (6).
The Biba dress, then, reflects style trends of the period and anoints an important designer, in the manner of many Dress of the Year choices. The girl’s and boy’s outfits, from Bobby Hillson and Orange Hand by Burton, respectively, do something different. According to Keenan, Hillson’s dress and pinafore gesture to the Edwardian revival in 1970s’ Britain, specifically Lionel Jeffries’s film The Railway Children (1970), where ruffles and intricate broderie anglaise pinafores feature heavily (Figure 2). At the same time, they bring this up to date in the choice of a checked fabric in “muted” hues (Keenan 6; Figure 3). The boy’s outfit, comprising a navy turtleneck sweatshirt, flared navy cords, and two-tone Kickers boots, is suited to the increasingly prevalent type of the “young peacock” (Keenan 6; Figure 4). According to Keenan, boys of the age, even more than [End Page 136] their female counterparts, “know the brand names of the shirts they want, which firm cuts the best jeans and whether the shoe of the moment is a Tasselled Loafer or an American Brogue” (6). Keenan also points out that the “healthy and beautiful” children of 1972 do not like to dress up and that they are “far too free and independent to suffer any kind of restrictions imposed by impractical or unnecessary clothing” (6). Keenan moves easily from the details of particular garments to the social and cultural manifestations of particular childhoods: here, the values of freeness, independence, and practicality that mark out 1970s children from their forebears.
Click for larger view
View full resolution
Biba, red-and-white-spotted girl’s dress, hat, and over-the-knee boots, 1972. Bath: Fashion Museum. Courtesy of Fashion Museum Bath.
The trends of selecting multiple outfits and menswear for Dress of the Year have persisted in subsequent years, perhaps most notably in the seven-outfit [End Page 137] selection made by fashion editor and curator Iain R. Webb in 2020, which included women’s, men’s, and gender-neutral outfits. Did Keenan’s choice also herald a sea change in the status of children’s dress in the Dress of the Year initiative? In short: no. That first selection of children’s wear has—to date— turned out to be its last. Moreover, fifty years after Keenan selected girl’s and boy’s clothes for Dress of the Year, the Fashion Museum Bath displays only the Biba dress from 1972 on its web gallery, as though the children’s outfits were supplementary to the more mature choice (“Dress...