Fashion.  I think you're right.  Take Miles.  Re 'Mad Men', when the writers want to present a 'radical', they give him a beard and slightly more outlandish clothing - oh, and a pipe.  Isn't Campbell's tailoring Anglo-influenced?

I think there is a strong case for saying that the MJQ, oft ignored here I think, were playing with modes of dress and music not really meant 'for the likes of them'. Their sobriety startles, yet I always detected a twinkle in Milt Jackson's eye, taking deep pleasure in their subversion.

Not sure Hepcat. EVERYONE went mental in the late 60s. It changed within a year. Bill Evans in 66 looked cool. By 68 he was a yeti. Things are so fragmented today we have no sense of these huge shifts in taste that swept everybody up. If you had a side-parting and straight trousers on in 1970 you did not get laid. The fear of being 'straight' was all pervasive. The culture we all love was all but wiped out by the hipster notion of being an outsider, rejecting the mores of 'the man', not looking like a suit etc..

I also think DD wears a half-sleeve plaid weekend b/d in one of the first two series, perhaps while working the BBQ and chatting up that foxy teacher he ends up banging?

I don't recall Don wearing a button-down, but I was drinking too much whisky when I watched the first couple of series, so I'm probably wrong.

Aye, there's no real common culture now as regards fashion, music and taste. Remember when a Bond film on television or what was on Top of Pops would illicit conversation the next day? Back when there was only three channels and everyone had access to the same thing. It's difficult for anything to have such an impact today, as everyone is busy cutting their own swathe through the forest.

I remember an old boss of mine saying it was great when the hippy movement came, as to him, it liberated fashion from the suit and tie. Here's a very Ivy Buckley and a very drunken and close to the end Kerouac disowning the hippies:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaBnIzY3R00&feature=related

Last edited by 4F Hepcat (2012-06-18 04:59:49)

Piety, purity and - I'm afraid, according to at least one of his biographers - paedophilia, as he attempted to lighten his mood by screwing twelve-year old Mexican girls.  That said, I would give a finger for that exquisite old Pan copy of 'On The Road'.  Maybe - just maybe - what the hippies cared about was articulated by Adlai Stevenson round about the time of the '52 Election (though he was, in some respects, a reactionary).  Watching 'Mad Men' led me to 'Madison Avenue USA', the works of Vance Packard and - key - Betty Friedan's 'The Feminine Mystique'.  I also delved back into 'Esquire'.  Anyone recall just what Pete Campbell's old man was wearing?

Sounds right.

Don Draper is seen at one point wearing my burgundy Robert Bruce pullover.

There's a few errors in the series as well on the watch front. Don starts off wearing correct vintage of the era: Omega and Jaeger Le Coutre. But I read with horror in the later series he is wearing a Rolex Explorer with a steel bracelet which was a definite no-no in the US at the time amongst the middle classes and above. It gets worse as the Explorer he sports is not even genuine vintage, it is the new version which is substantially redesigned and larger than the 60s version.

^I can never get enough of Joanie myself......