Retro Style Dresses Are Back Thanks To AMC’s Mad Men
Fashion can be influenced from a lot of different places, but more often than not, those influences seem to come from whatever’s hot in pop culture.
We’ve seen this happen time and time again, where a cultural phenomenon plays a major role in what trendy dresses and outfits become popular. This can occur when celebrities are seen wearing something, and it can also occur with the right kind of marketing campaign.
However, as seen at this Fall’s Fashion Week in New York City, it occurred because of a television show.
That’s right. The American dramatic television series Mad Men on the cable network AMC is bringing 1960’s retro style dresses and clothing back into popular culture, and nowhere was this more obvious than the runway of New York City’s most recent fashion week.
The television show, which is based in the 1960s and started its fourth season in July this past summer, offers a reformed, lady-like style that shares both classy and sexy qualities. The style for these vintage style dresses has been influenced mostly by the character Joan, a bombshell secretary in Mad Men played by Christina Hendricks. According to NeonTommy.com, Joan is constantly seen “showing off her hourglass frame with low dcolletage and solid pencil-skirted dresses in bright turquoise, pink, and cherry red,” and it is her image that should be most credited with the increase in the 1960s style in current fashion.
And for all you keeping score at home, Alison Brie, one of the female characters in the show, was spotted at several NYC Fashion Week events wearing “a retro lilac dress with pleating and floral detail and a draped nude long-sleeved mini-dress.”
What perhaps makes this jump back to vintage style dresses and clothing even more remarkable is how pop icons like Katy Perry, Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears and Lady Gaga have done everything they can to send the fashion world in the opposite direction. With shock-value outfits and mini-skirts the size of rubber bands, the trendy dresses worn by these pop-icons are about as opposite as the retro style dresses seen in Mad Men as could be. Just a few weeks ago Lady Gaga went to the VMAs wearing a dress entirely made up of red meat. Yes, REAL meat.
And yet, its AMCs Mad Men that is setting the fashion trends…. not the barely dressed pop-singers. In a recent poll on AskMen.com, Mad Men fictional main character Don Draper was voted America’s most influential man, (beating out Usain Bolt, President Obama, and Mark Zuckerberg). Who knew this meant in the world of fashion as well?
