The Decade That Refues To Die

Could somebody please shoot the 1970s and put them out of our misery? In the mail today was an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog filled with the worst clothes of the 1970s Manhattan art crowd: pre-destroyed $80 jeans filled with enormous tears, rips, gashes and bleach spills, brown bell-bottoms, horrendous olive T-shirts, and female models who alternately look like Mia Farrow from her saucer-eyed Rosemary’s Baby period and Angela Davis with a circa-1972 24-inch high Afro.

William F. Buckley probably won’t get carded if he picks this catalog up in his local Manhattan Abercrombie & Fitch, but I think he’d probably want to take a shower after looking at all of these pathetic duds–the smell of stagnant bongwater just oozes from every page. The Manolo, he would have the coronary infarction if he ever flips through this drek.

As James Lileks once wrote, The ’70s was the decade that taste forgot. And God knows why, but for clothing retailers, it’s the decade that never, ever ends.