Love and aggression, war and peace, drugs and music, clothes, freedom, philosophy, searching for oneself – those were the things which hippie discovered. Their ideas entered into the mentality of the modern generation like something obvious. Nevertheless up to now there’re some stereotypes connected with this subculture. In this presentation we’ll try to throw light on some aspects of this long-haired subculture.
For the first time the word “hippie” appeared on the 5th May 1965. Michael Fallon, the writer from San-Francisco, used that term in his article dedicated to counterculture San-Francisco, where he described the coffee-house “Blue Unicorn” where the Company of the Fighting for legalization of marihuana and the League of Sexual Freedom used to band together. Also Fallon used this term to describe the houses where hippie lived.
Hippie never called themselves that way. They preferred to be called “wonderful people”. But Mass media used that word everywhere to image the masses of young long-haired people who listened to rock music, took drugs, practiced free love, came to different festivals and concerts, made demonstrations and rejected the mass culture of the beginning of 60th.
For hippies sex was something spontaneous. If someone attracted you and there were convenient conditions, you had sex. It could happen anywhere: in the minibus, in the forest or during the festival. Free love was everywhere, especially in communes where nobody hid making sex. Hippies never cared about what someone else thought about them.
It will be right to mention that there was no AIDS at those times. Nevertheless veneral diseases were the main problem of sexual life. Teen pregnancy became a very common phenomenon. Thanks to sexual openness, which had created those problems, the society started to handle those problems, and there appeared free of charge hospitals, sexual education in schools, permission of laws of abortion and advertisements of sexual products. It was the result of easy virtue which hippies had unleashed in society.
Hippies conceive sex as the expression of our animal nature and it wasn’t anything which was to be suppressed. Many holidays hippies considered to be the rituals of old times. Music, drinks, dancing and drugs were like a prelude to sex act.
In such a manner hippies released the USA from sexual prohibitions through making free love, experiments with psychodelics and rejection of mass moral. The result of that was a dataflow about sex, battle for sexual rights and interest towards health.
The main rule of 60th was absence of rules. Colorless and conservative clothes faded away. Hippie’s fashion took a lot from traditional Indian, Nepal, Central America, Bali and Morocco styles, besides many designers were inspired by Renaissance times.
Flare ran the show, there were striped jeans with low belts baring the belly-button. The upper part varied from shirts to bright-coloured African dashiki and middle-east caftans and silk shirts with frilling. Girls wore Indian sari and sarong from Bali and Java. Velvet, leather, batik, jeans, Indian cotton and silk were very popular. Pop-art, fractal figures and psychedelic motives which appeared on the clothes turned hippies’ brains. Footwear differed from sandals to boots with zapper, they used high wedge and bright leather shoes as well. Peasant clothes, long skirts with gathers were also popular.
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