Presumably you've already considered religious differences in dress, gender differences, local fashion trends and the fact that NYC or LA ready to wear wasnt necessarily available thruout the region.
I tried asking my Israeli spouse, but he made a face & said "I have no idea". For my part, when when my family lived in Athens in the 70s, dressing like an American meant those women who were wearing pants & particularly jeans. We Americans also tended to be more casual in our dress whether at school or the American Club, but most especially for going out to dinner. We wore bikinis to the beach, but no Greek woman or girl did. My high school had 40-some different nationalities attending. Many you could pick out as "different" from their clothes alone. What was available in shops locally was not at all what was shown in the US teen fashion mags. The fabric designs, the default colorways, the cuts were all different. (Try on a pair of med to high end Euro style dress slacks & compare with similar US dress slacks - you'll find the crotch length is much shorter in Euro styles.) Shoes were different. Jewelry & hairstyles were different. The famous faces to emulate were different. It's the whole look that's different. Imagine my teenage angst at the horror of having to choose a prom dress from either a US catalog, a local shop or homemade. For us, dressing in the styles we were accustomed to, was definitely a statement of belonging to our own culture while surrounded by foreigners. The downside of that was of course that it made us targets for envy, ridicule, political controversy and teenage gang fights in Kefalari park. Just some random thoughts, --cin Cynthia Barnes [email protected] Hi all, Some of you who were alive back then might not consider this historic costume, but I thought this was a good place to ask this question. I was recently reading 'The Gabriel Hounds' by Mary Stewart, which is set in Lebanon in, I think the '60's (1960's that is). The narrator is English but has been living in America and at one point describes herself as 'dressing like an American'. I was curious how differently American and English women might have dressed at this time. Is this another way of saying that she dressed informally? Or wore trousers a lot? _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
