the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 110
suits. That summer, Mars shipped 120,000 dresses to JC Penney, Sears,
and other middlebrow department stores across America. Moda-Mia, a
division of Rayette-Fabrege, soon unveiled its own line of $2 Mexicanprint
shifts in sleeved and sleeveless styles.
By fall, bizarrely, the fad had migrated upstream from couponclipping
middle-American housewives to the urban fashion elites. Chic
emporiums such as I. Magnin and Neiman Marcus opened their own paper
dress boutiques, stocked with items such as New York designer Elisa
Daggs’s “wastebasket dress,” which used a petticoat to mimic the shape of
a waste receptacle. In October, at a charity ball in Hartford, Connecticut,
to benefit the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum, society swells eschewed
evening gowns in favor of paper dresses. An Associated Press correspondent
depicted the event as “a nationally important test to determine
whether non-woven paper wrapped around a pretty package doing the
frug, the swim or the monkey could long endure.” Model Peggy Moffi tt
reportedly stole the eve ning in a creation by Los Angeles designer Rudi
Gernreich—a see- through vinyl dress with paper polka dots obscuring
the critical areas.
A paper-napkin manufacturer’s publicity ploy had inadvertently
tapped into the mother lode of the mid-1960s zeitgeist. It fit perfectly into
the pop art movement led by Andy Warhol and others, which embraced
modern mass-production methods and techniques borrowed from comic
books and advertising, and celebrated ordinary objects as irony-tinged
objets d’art. And after all, what could be more ironic than a $100 designer
version of the same flimsy, mass-produced garment that could be had for
$1.25 and a coupon cut from a bathroom tissue package? Warhol himself
created a dress emblazoned with Campbell’s soup cans, a reference to his
own pop art painting. (A surviving copy recently was offered for sale on
the Internet for $3,700.) Graphic artist Harry Gordon used his paper
dresses as wearable canvases, emblazoning them with cryptic images such
as an eye, a rocket taking off, or a Buddhist peace gesture. The novelty of
paper as a haute couture material fascinated Euro pe an designers such as