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THE TIPPING POINT Direction MADELINE RITHOLZ Photography PATTY ALVAREZ Styling CAROLINE HUDLEY PRIYA KRAL
The mini skirt is hot. Red hot. It’s the summer of 1969 and the one glance down the streets of New York reveals legs, legs, legs. The shorter the better. Mary Quant, the iconic owner of the London boutique Bazaar tells The New York Times, ‘’If I didn’t make them short enough, the Chelsea girls, who had wonderful legs, would get out the scissors and shorten the skirts themselves.” The mini skirt is radical, fresh, daring, sexy. It is contagious. Soon, it graces the pages of every major fashion magazine, and in a mere year, becomes a mainstay in the closets of the masses. Many compared the rise of the mini skirt to that of an epidemic, the popularity swelling to critical mass just as a virus takes over a city in mere days, spreading exponentially with each person affected. Fashion trends, much like sickness, reach a tipping point, a moment in which the stars align and a seemingly contrived trend becomes the look of the season. Malcolm Gladwell, in his groundbreak-
Writing RACHEL HELLMAN Models JEREMY BARNES HIBA YOUSIF STANLEY XIO MEREDITH BUSCH
ing book The Tipping Point defines this phenomenon as “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do”. People make careers out of defining and identifying fashion trends, marketing upon them, and bringing them to full fruition. Sometimes, it seems like they appear out of thin air, their popularity so artificial it seems silly to assign meaning to why everyone suddenly is wearing dad sneakers and mom jeans. Does our generation have some deep, onset daddy issues we’re trying to work out, reflected in an obsession with “ugly” clothing that our parents wore? Probably not. Instead, we can turn to the rich world of social theory to begin to understand why at certain points in history everyone seems to be wearing the mini skirt, chokers, or even dad sneakers. Change, that elusive moment of flux that defines history, happens not gradually, but once in a dramatic moment, a tipping point.
