WEBVTT - Short Stuff: The Paper Dress Fad 0:00:04.120 --> 0:00:06.360 Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and 0:00:06.400 --> 0:00:10.559 there's Chuck. And this is short stuff stuff stuff about 0:00:10.960 --> 0:00:13.840 a really amazing fad that I hadn't heard of until 0:00:14.040 --> 0:00:17.880 fairly recently. Chuck, I somehow knew about this, and I'm 0:00:17.920 --> 0:00:21.160 not sure how, Huh do you think your mom might 0:00:21.200 --> 0:00:23.119 have worn a paper dress and told you about it 0:00:23.239 --> 0:00:27.200 or something. I don't think so, but we're talking about 0:00:27.240 --> 0:00:31.200 paper dresses. In the mid nineteen sixties, Uh, the Scott 0:00:31.200 --> 0:00:36.400 Paper Company had a new product to promote called Dura weave. 0:00:37.200 --> 0:00:42.239 It's basically mostly paper. And then about Rayon and it 0:00:42.360 --> 0:00:45.440 was sort of just like a little more durable napkin 0:00:45.520 --> 0:00:49.040 that they were super stoked about. Plastic was all the rage. 0:00:50.200 --> 0:00:51.560 I don't know what that has to do with rayon. 0:00:53.120 --> 0:00:55.760 Rayon's a kind of plastic. I believe it's like a 0:00:55.800 --> 0:00:59.520 plastic fiber. Okay, great, Plastic was all the rage, like 0:00:59.560 --> 0:01:01.360 I said, And they said, all right, here's what we're 0:01:01.360 --> 0:01:03.640 gonna do to try and market this thing. We're gonna 0:01:03.680 --> 0:01:06.880 show how durable it is by making clothing, making some 0:01:07.000 --> 0:01:11.720 dresses out of paper. And it was literally just a 0:01:11.760 --> 0:01:15.680 marketing thing, and you you like sent out like clip 0:01:15.720 --> 0:01:18.200 clip something off and mail it in and then like 0:01:18.240 --> 0:01:21.240 a dollar in a quarter to get your paper dress 0:01:21.280 --> 0:01:23.600 mail back. And then a few weeks later you might 0:01:23.640 --> 0:01:26.440 have like a little red bandana print paper dress to 0:01:26.520 --> 0:01:30.880 wear around. And it went off like gangbusters. It just 0:01:31.200 --> 0:01:35.200 blew up. Like they had two dresses to choose from. 0:01:35.200 --> 0:01:38.240 Scott called the dresses paper papers, and they both wear 0:01:38.319 --> 0:01:41.199 the same cut there like a frame like mod mini 0:01:41.319 --> 0:01:44.280 dress um. And like you said, one was red bandana, 0:01:44.319 --> 0:01:47.520 the other's black and white op art and um. For 0:01:47.600 --> 0:01:51.680 some reason, they just happened to touch a nerve and 0:01:52.240 --> 0:01:55.200 like you said, it took off like Gangbusters, so much 0:01:55.240 --> 0:02:00.000 so that Scott suddenly pivoted and started advertising in magazine 0:02:00.000 --> 0:02:03.840 it's like mad Moiselle um for their paper dresses and 0:02:03.880 --> 0:02:06.440 got just a huge response from it. I think they 0:02:06.480 --> 0:02:09.280 sold half a million of them in the less than 0:02:09.320 --> 0:02:12.560 the year that they were producing these things. Yeah, and 0:02:12.600 --> 0:02:14.600 you may think, I'm in what a what a funny 0:02:14.600 --> 0:02:18.800 boon for the Scott Paper company making all this money 0:02:18.840 --> 0:02:21.880 on these dresses. It was a marketing thing, so they 0:02:22.000 --> 0:02:25.320 never they sold them for so cheap. They weren't really 0:02:25.360 --> 0:02:27.320 even making any money. They're kind of covering their costs 0:02:27.639 --> 0:02:30.799 because it was only meant to be an advertisement anyway, 0:02:30.840 --> 0:02:33.760 So they basically couldn't say, all right, well, now we're 0:02:33.760 --> 0:02:35.960 going to charge eight bucks a pop forums oh you 0:02:36.040 --> 0:02:40.840 like those, hukay. But other companies did catch on and 0:02:40.880 --> 0:02:43.560 think they could make more than a dollar apiece. Yeah. 0:02:43.680 --> 0:02:48.079 So when I said Scott touched something off, um, which 0:02:48.120 --> 0:02:49.560 is a really weird way to put it now that 0:02:49.600 --> 0:02:53.400 I say it out loud, Um, that's kind of an understatement. 0:02:53.440 --> 0:02:57.320 They somehow managed to say, Um, let's try this marketing thing. 0:02:57.320 --> 0:02:59.320 It'll be cute, it'll be fun or whatever, but really, 0:02:59.320 --> 0:03:02.000 what we're doing showing off how durable or dura weave 0:03:02.200 --> 0:03:04.519 paper line is, Like, it's so durable you can wear 0:03:04.560 --> 0:03:08.200 it as a dress. But they managed to stumble backwards 0:03:08.200 --> 0:03:12.240 into this like the exactly where the fashion industry was 0:03:12.280 --> 0:03:16.320 at that moment, and then this burgeoning like um kind 0:03:16.320 --> 0:03:22.520 of ethos or zeitgeist of popular culture just wanting everything 0:03:22.760 --> 0:03:27.240 plastic and disposable and and just handy. Um. And they 0:03:27.280 --> 0:03:30.400 put them together accidentally in these paper dresses. And I 0:03:30.400 --> 0:03:33.560 think that's from everything I saw, that's why historians think 0:03:33.600 --> 0:03:35.520 it took off and became a fad like it did. 0:03:36.520 --> 0:03:40.200 That's right, and they were I think there was about 0:03:40.200 --> 0:03:43.000 three and a half a million dollars worth of these 0:03:43.040 --> 0:03:45.680 paper garments. And we'll get to after the break, all 0:03:45.680 --> 0:03:48.000 the different kinds they had. Um at the close of 0:03:48.080 --> 0:03:50.880 n that's a lot of money in nineteen I'm sorry, 0:03:50.920 --> 0:03:54.120 nineteen sixty six. It's a lot of money in sixty six. 0:03:54.480 --> 0:03:57.880 And I think, um, the Waste bast Kit Boutique, which 0:03:57.880 --> 0:04:00.320 is one of the paper design houses, were making a 0:04:00.440 --> 0:04:03.280 hundred thousand of these a week at one point. Yeah, nut, nuts, 0:04:04.000 --> 0:04:07.040 it is good nuts. We're going to take a good 0:04:07.040 --> 0:04:36.120 break and be right get back mm hmm and shock. Okay, silly, 0:04:36.279 --> 0:04:39.440 so we're back. We're back. Um, you were talking about 0:04:39.440 --> 0:04:42.520 Waste Basket Boutique making a hundred thousand dresses a week. 0:04:43.040 --> 0:04:45.400 One of the great things about these things, these paper 0:04:45.480 --> 0:04:49.080 dresses that were sudden fat in the mid sixties, UM, 0:04:49.279 --> 0:04:52.080 is that they were easy to produce, which is how 0:04:52.120 --> 0:04:54.320 you could create like a new business to make them 0:04:54.320 --> 0:04:56.919 and make a hundred thousand a week. But that also 0:04:57.000 --> 0:04:59.280 meant that you could come up with all sorts of 0:04:59.320 --> 0:05:01.760 different desig lines for these things. They were really easy 0:05:01.800 --> 0:05:05.479 to print on because they were paper and um it 0:05:05.640 --> 0:05:08.080 really tied in nicely. I think another reason why they 0:05:08.120 --> 0:05:11.120 took off as a fat um because they were They 0:05:11.240 --> 0:05:14.599 came along at a time when commercialism was big in art, 0:05:14.800 --> 0:05:17.719 when pop art was becoming a thing, when op art 0:05:17.800 --> 0:05:21.880 was really established. Like those big, bold, chunky, um colorful, 0:05:22.040 --> 0:05:25.480 weird prints. UM, all of these things were just ready 0:05:25.600 --> 0:05:28.080 made to be put on to print it onto a 0:05:28.120 --> 0:05:31.839 paper dress. That's right. If you think of Andy Warhol, 0:05:32.560 --> 0:05:36.120 then you're on the right track. Because they had uh 0:05:36.440 --> 0:05:41.240 Campbell soup dresses. They had jolly green giant can vegetable dresses. 0:05:42.040 --> 0:05:45.760 I mean just literally look up image search paper dresses 0:05:45.839 --> 0:05:49.120 nineteen sixties and you'll see candy bars, You'll see the 0:05:49.200 --> 0:05:53.280 yellow pages, um, like you name it. Kind of any 0:05:53.760 --> 0:05:56.400 um graphic print that you could print on a poster 0:05:56.720 --> 0:05:59.640 they were putting on dresses. Yeah. There was one big, big, 0:06:00.080 --> 0:06:04.880 giant Bob Dylan face, which is pretty cool. Richard Nixon 0:06:04.960 --> 0:06:07.400 had one, which is like the opposite of what the 0:06:07.400 --> 0:06:10.480 paper dresses were all about. Bobby Kennedy had one which 0:06:10.520 --> 0:06:14.240 was much more in line with it. UM. The that 0:06:14.240 --> 0:06:16.440 that green giant one I thought was pretty cute. It 0:06:16.520 --> 0:06:20.599 was it was um. The tunic that the jolly green 0:06:20.640 --> 0:06:23.800 Giant wore that leafy tunic. That's what the that's what 0:06:23.839 --> 0:06:27.200 the dress looked like. Um, what else was there, Chuck? 0:06:27.520 --> 0:06:32.120 I could see these coming back now, Uh yeah, right. 0:06:32.320 --> 0:06:35.480 If they were recyclable, biodegradable, all that stuff, I could 0:06:35.520 --> 0:06:37.600 totally see it. But that was one of the things, 0:06:37.600 --> 0:06:40.600 like nobody cared about that stuff in in nineteen sixty six. 0:06:40.640 --> 0:06:42.760 It was you can put these things on, you can 0:06:42.800 --> 0:06:44.240 buy them for cheap, you can wear him a few 0:06:44.279 --> 0:06:46.560 times and you throw them away. And they were like 0:06:46.839 --> 0:06:50.520 really um like it was. It was such a big 0:06:50.560 --> 0:06:53.880 fad that people were starting to rethink how we like 0:06:53.960 --> 0:06:57.919 do things like travel. Like apparently hotel chains we're having 0:06:58.000 --> 0:07:01.520 meetings about how they were going to start selling entire 0:07:01.640 --> 0:07:04.279 lines of paper clothing so that when you went to 0:07:04.320 --> 0:07:06.560 a hotel or like a resort or something for like 0:07:06.600 --> 0:07:09.760 a week, you didn't pack a suitcase. You just showed up, 0:07:10.040 --> 0:07:12.760 bought whatever clothes you needed out of their gift shop 0:07:12.920 --> 0:07:14.600 and that's what you wore, and you threw it away 0:07:14.640 --> 0:07:16.440 and then you put the clothes that you arrived and 0:07:16.560 --> 0:07:19.080 back on to go home. And that was it. Easy peasy, 0:07:19.320 --> 0:07:22.560 beautiful covered girl. Yeah, it's kind of funny to look 0:07:22.680 --> 0:07:25.880 like every great idea in history has so many bad 0:07:25.920 --> 0:07:30.200 ideas attached to it. I feel like like people won't 0:07:30.200 --> 0:07:33.320 want to wear their own clothes that they shopped for 0:07:33.520 --> 0:07:36.880 and like just for the benefit of leaving their suitcase 0:07:36.920 --> 0:07:39.960 at home. Uh, that one didn't take off. They did 0:07:40.000 --> 0:07:43.440 make other clothes that they made men's suits. Uh you can. 0:07:43.480 --> 0:07:45.000 There are kind of hard to find images of these, 0:07:45.040 --> 0:07:48.480 but I finally dug one up. Um it looks like 0:07:48.520 --> 0:07:53.120 a wrinkled napkin. Basically, Yeah, this dirt we've stuff. You 0:07:53.480 --> 0:07:56.320 almost certainly experienced it anytime they put a bib on 0:07:56.400 --> 0:07:59.560 you at the dentist for like a cleaning that is 0:07:59.600 --> 0:08:03.040 basic derwee if not actual dirahweave, it's it's like a 0:08:03.040 --> 0:08:06.720 competitor todrahweeve. That's that's what these dresses were made out of. Yeah, 0:08:06.800 --> 0:08:09.560 get they get very wrinkly. But again, in terms of 0:08:09.600 --> 0:08:11.720 these young women who were sort of out on the 0:08:11.720 --> 0:08:14.320 town and these things, there were a bunch of benefits. 0:08:14.320 --> 0:08:16.920 They could they always had something new that they could 0:08:16.920 --> 0:08:20.000 put on, which was a big deal. They could, uh, 0:08:20.040 --> 0:08:23.040 they could tell mom to go stick that selling machine 0:08:23.080 --> 0:08:25.520 where the sun don't shine. Because I've got tape in 0:08:25.560 --> 0:08:28.560 a pair of scissors. I can alter this thing however 0:08:28.680 --> 0:08:31.040 I want. I can. I can be a little risque 0:08:31.200 --> 0:08:33.319 and cut the cut the belly out of one of them, 0:08:33.720 --> 0:08:36.480 or cut a really low back if I want to. Uh. 0:08:36.480 --> 0:08:38.160 It was sort of, you know, the time of the 0:08:38.200 --> 0:08:41.680 sexual revolution. So all of these different things came together 0:08:41.720 --> 0:08:45.480 to make these super popular. Yes, And like any good fad, 0:08:45.559 --> 0:08:48.280 it ran its course and just went away almost as 0:08:48.320 --> 0:08:51.280 fast as it came on and let quickly people saying 0:08:52.120 --> 0:08:55.920 what just happened? Right, But this was one of those 0:08:55.960 --> 0:08:58.120 fads where a lot of people have some ideas about 0:08:58.160 --> 0:09:01.920 why it went away so quickly. There's some pretty good theories. Um. 0:09:01.960 --> 0:09:04.080 One of the first ones is that they were almost 0:09:04.080 --> 0:09:09.600 exclusively um super mod mini dresses, and those were no 0:09:09.679 --> 0:09:12.040 longer in by the end of the sixties. They were 0:09:12.080 --> 0:09:15.080 super in in nineteen sixty six, but they were not 0:09:15.160 --> 0:09:17.959 so in. It's a sixty eight or sixty nine, right, 0:09:18.000 --> 0:09:20.840 that was a big one. Yeah, there's not a lot 0:09:20.920 --> 0:09:23.520 you can do style wise, but that is one shape 0:09:24.000 --> 0:09:25.920 that you could definitely make a paper dress out of 0:09:25.960 --> 0:09:28.240 and it and it just happened to be popular for 0:09:28.320 --> 0:09:31.320 a few years. There was also there's a guy named 0:09:31.400 --> 0:09:37.360 Jonathan Walford who I saw interviewed in I believe, Oh 0:09:37.400 --> 0:09:39.920 I don't remember. But also, by the way, shout out 0:09:39.960 --> 0:09:44.680 to History's Dumpster Textiles and context Groovy History and Timeline 0:09:44.760 --> 0:09:48.480 for giving me these, uh, these ideas. Um. But in 0:09:48.559 --> 0:09:52.000 one of those, um, Jonathan Walford, who's a curator of 0:09:52.040 --> 0:09:55.320 the Fashion History Museum in Ontario, he's like, probably the 0:09:55.320 --> 0:09:57.160 biggest reason why they went away is because they were 0:09:57.160 --> 0:10:03.240 not particularly comfortable to wear. No, they don't look super comfortable. Um, 0:10:03.280 --> 0:10:05.840 and like I said, they get really really wrinkly, So 0:10:05.960 --> 0:10:08.960 it's it's sort of a one night affair, I would imagine. Um, 0:10:09.040 --> 0:10:12.400 the other kind of downside, there's always been terrible men 0:10:13.040 --> 0:10:16.080 and men got into a habit at parties of like, oops, 0:10:16.120 --> 0:10:19.200 I spilled my drink all over your dress. That's now 0:10:19.240 --> 0:10:21.960 like a dissolving in front of my eyes. Sorry a 0:10:22.000 --> 0:10:25.839 boomer would do that. Yeah, no way. So that was 0:10:25.880 --> 0:10:28.400 another one too. But um, one of the ones that 0:10:28.440 --> 0:10:31.120 you like in almost any article you'll ever find about 0:10:31.160 --> 0:10:33.839 paper dresses that explain why they went away is that 0:10:33.880 --> 0:10:38.160 people became much more environmentally conscious a little bit that's 0:10:38.320 --> 0:10:40.560 entirely possible that that was a big driver of it. 0:10:40.600 --> 0:10:42.760 You know, the first Earth Day was in nineteen seventy, 0:10:42.920 --> 0:10:45.640 so that was around the time these things faded out. 0:10:45.720 --> 0:10:48.240 So it probably would have seemed pretty ghost to wear, 0:10:48.320 --> 0:10:51.720 like a disposable, plastic paper dress that you were going 0:10:51.760 --> 0:10:54.320 to throw away after a couple of wars. But I 0:10:54.320 --> 0:10:58.240 saw some articles somewhere that said, that may be true, 0:10:58.320 --> 0:11:00.880 but the stuff that we replaced it with is not 0:11:01.080 --> 0:11:04.600 much better, because it's almost as disposable. It's much more 0:11:04.720 --> 0:11:07.640 durable than a paper dress. But we throw our clothes 0:11:07.679 --> 0:11:10.040 away way more than we probably should. And I thought 0:11:10.080 --> 0:11:11.959 that was a pretty good ending for this short stuff, 0:11:11.960 --> 0:11:14.679 don't you think. Yeah, And when you know, when we 0:11:14.679 --> 0:11:16.319 were talking about if they could do this today to 0:11:16.360 --> 0:11:20.600 make them out of recycling materials and recyclable, they would 0:11:20.600 --> 0:11:22.559 also have to do a comparison that said, by the way, 0:11:22.600 --> 0:11:25.320 the thing you're wearing had this sort of impact on 0:11:25.320 --> 0:11:29.200 the environment. By the way, well look for chuck and 0:11:29.240 --> 0:11:33.440 iron matching Canadian tuxedos made out of paper in the 0:11:33.480 --> 0:11:38.800 near future someday. Don't spill your drink on me, uh, 0:11:38.840 --> 0:11:42.040 And that's it everybody, of course, for short Stuff, which 0:11:42.080 --> 0:11:47.480 means short Stuff is out. Stuff you Should Know is 0:11:47.480 --> 0:11:50.360 a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts my 0:11:50.400 --> 0:11:53.680 heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, 0:11:53.800 --> 0:12:00.560 or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.