Coterie Couture: The cultural resurgence of psychedelia encourages optimism through fashion

What someone wears says a lot about who they are as a person and so do styles associated with various movements and cultures. As a cyclical art form, fashion – and the politics that go with it – almost always re-emerges from the past. Follow columnist Natalie Brown on ‘Coterie Couture’ as she chronologically explores the impact of different subcultures and their corresponding fashions each week.

The story behind psychedelia is a journey.

Rather than being born out of a particular tradition, the psychedelic 1960s were an amalgamation of different cultural practices, centered around drug use. Behind the dominant conceptions of this era, the culture was rooted in Native American mystical hallucinogenic traditions, the proliferation of LSD use, and advances in technology, said musicology professor Robert Fink. However, these roots are best understood by analyzing the corresponding fashion of the time, which Fink says features a combination of electrifying colors and magnifying prints.

“(Psychedelic fashion) is much more about the personal perceptual distortions that LSD is associated with,” he said. “People want to dress like an LSD experience.”

At the start of the psychedelic era, LSD was seen as a medical and scientific breakthrough, believed to revolutionize psychiatric treatment through its distinct hallucinogenic properties, Fink said. Because it was technically not an illegal substance for a brief period of time, everyone from literary intelligentsia types to college-aged kids were giving up LSD, he said, as a means of access the transcendent perspectives of medieval mystics and philosophers.

It’s this idea of ​​an otherworldly aesthetic that connects aspects of psychedelic music, fashion and culture with the experience of taking LSD, thus defining the visual identity of the psychedelic era as threefold, he said. The first component of that identity is energization, said Fink, which is the idea of ​​images swirling and changing shape, mimicking the effect of LSD on an individual’s perspective. In fashion, this gives rise to bold prints, such as cashmere and tie-dye, he said.

The second and third components of the visual identity of psychedelia – depersonalization and an altered sense of time – are familiar with the idea of ​​losing sense of self while taking the hallucinogenic drug. Fink said LSD induces an out-of-body experience, creating a space in which users can feel detached from the universe and their surroundings. These latter two aspects manifest themselves in the fashion world by layering a variety of meaningful clothing items indicative of different groups throughout history, he said.

“People were encouraged to dress like the people they associate with psychedelics,” Fink said. “(There are) all kinds of cultural figures like Native Americans, medieval mystics and oriental religious figures (associated with these), becoming a great vault of hope from which (people) can derive various kinds of sartorial signifiers.” and mix them up. ”

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While psychedelia was popularized by the San Francisco acid-rock scene, Fink said it wasn’t just middle-class students who participated in his studies. fashion. Celebrities and artists have also put these different layered patterned clothing sets together, mimicking the cornerstones of depersonalization and disorientation that are synonymous with taking LSD.

“(The layering of different clothes) becomes a collage effect,” said Fink. “(Artists like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones) assembled their wardrobes with various types of clothing that, for the most part, would not be worn by the same person who was not on drugs.”

With wavy prints and surreal imagery, psychedelic clothing has started to infiltrate modern high-end fashion brands today, embodying the idea of ​​”dressing on dopamine” or wearing clothes that make people happy, said fashion journalist Max Berlinger. Brands like The Elder Statesman are launching luxe cashmere sweaters adorned with whimsical tie-dye prints and mushroom iconography, while other international brands are borrowing Deadhead visuals inspired by the Grateful Dead.

As hard as one can try, the iconography and ideology of the ’60s will never go away, Fink said, as both fashion and culture are cyclical. This concept has already led to several resurgences of the psychedelic 60s, the first being in the 90s around the use of ecstasy and MDMA. However, today Fink said that there appears to be another cultural resurgence reminiscent of the psychedelic 60s. Marijuana, just like LSD in its heyday, is now a legal drug in some US states.