the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 112
worn one before, and some had only seen them on TV. As they quickly
discovered, disposable fashion wasn’t necessarily very comfortable. “They
didn’t move well, they were uncomfortable when you wore them, and they
billowed out when you sat down,” Ellen Shanley, curator of costumes at
the Fashion Institute of Technology Museum, told Newsday in 1999. And
as our newspaperwoman in Kansas discovered, they also were prone to
sudden disintegration. Consumer Reports derided the original Scott Paper
Caper dress’s quality, noting that it “is rather sloppily made; the ‘fabric’ is
not very strong; and the printed color has a tendency to rub off when it
gets damp.”
Paper dress wearers also often found themselves feeling nervous at
parties, out of fear that a chance encounter with a Benson & Hedges 100
could turn them into a fashionista flambé. The Los Angeles City Fire Department
briefly banned the sale of paper dresses in late 1966, until a department
chemist determined that they were no more fl ammable than
other garments. In truth, paper dresses were probably safer than cotton or
nylon, since most were treated with a fl ame-retardant fi nish.
But there was a catch. As the chief of the U.S. Public Health Service’s
injury-control program warned in a newspaper interview, the fl ameretardant
chemicals were rendered ineffec tive if the garment was washed
or dry-cleaned. To be on the safe side, paper dresses could be worn only
once—unless, perhaps, the wearer had the same blithe disregard for personal
hygiene that she had for sartorial convention. Life discovered that
limitation when it tested paper dresses’ durability by somehow convincing
a woman to wear one every day for a month while she did housework.
Though the fabric didn’t shred, she complained afterward that “I like a
dress I can wash.”
As those drawbacks started to sink in, sales of paper dresses plummeted
as quickly as they had risen. In a sense, the paper dress was a victim
of its own success. As fashion writer Angela Taylor noted in 1969, the garment
became popular so quickly that companies, in their rush to meet the