Man, the 70s were so fashion forward

Did people casually wear hard hats?

I want to know the context of this pic. Little Bo Peep has a 3-way with Siegfried and Roy?

Early '70s fashion is the kind of thing that happens when creativity goes too far.

I worked at Chess King I high school. I had a bitchin’ wardrobe. Plus got to measure a lot on inseams on those tight pants.

Over the top fun style: the only "no no" was wearing something bland.

I wish 70s fashion would make a comeback. I even think the hairstyles were more attractive, particularly the mens

I lived through the 70s and have to say that I don't recall men actually wearing belted sweaters. Many of those other fashions were quite commonplace, however.

You have to admit, they are fun, colorful styles. I like the pullover sweaters and sweater vests. They look comfy to me. And I like the colorful underwear, that looks fun. But it says it’s nylon, which would be sweaty.

That picture at R2 looks like a woman went to pick up a friend from work to go out on what she thought was going to be a date, only to find to her dismay, that he was gayer than a picnic basket. Look at her face.

Her dress is kind of timeless, but she needs to steal the cowboy boots from the guy and lose the black pumps, which look really inappropriate for such a casual dress.

It is a mistake to reward "trying" when the effort is wholly without success.

A number of the photos appear to be a little on the homoerotic side.

I loved the pimp hat and yellow pants. Just who was their target audience?

I can’t believe the guy on the left is a model. It looks like someone stole his chin and gave it to the guy in the beige shirt.

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Dataloungers back in the day...

I love the ABC "Movie of the Week" font accompanying the green sweater vest.

Hmm, they liked using porn stars, didn't they. Here you have 2 XXX gay pornstars (Bob Noll & Gordon Grant) and softcore straight and gay star (and former Cassandra Peters' lover) Bill Cable.

I LOVED my leisure suits, my mother bought me 2 for my first vacation to the west, Phoenix, 1974. One was powder blue and the other was tan. I had matching silky shirts for each. I loved all the pockets. We stayed at the Camelback Inn, and guess what you guys, they drive you to your hotel room in a golf cart!

I want to buy a onesie. I hate belts, I feel like they cut off the energy to my chakras.

My father had a powder blue leisure suit, with a silky (polyester) shirt.

I don’t think it was his best look.

[quote] I want to buy a onesie. I hate belts, I feel like they cut off the energy to my chakras.

Guuuuuuur please! Stop wearing those jockey shorts and your chakras won't feel so drained. Move over to boxers so the chakras will have room to breathe. LOL

I lived through the 70s and fashion was genuinely crap. However, at least it moved. How long are we going to be stuck with skinny suits? Already 15 years. Also, fashion was less designed for cartoon bodybuilding physiques.

But 70s fashion was crap ........ unless you were a supercool, superfly black guy.f

I'm happy to say I never let my fashion choices sink to the leisure suit level. The worst fashion choice I ever made was in college when I bought a pair of red/white/blue wing tips that were all the rage in 1971.

R18 the man in the red pants is yummy 😋

I have to say I'm an eldergay and was working in NYC in the 1970s and I don't remember ever seeing anyone wearing clothes like these.

Yes people wore bellbottom jeans and some weird sweaters and all, but this stuff? Nope.

Was "crocheted Tom Bombadil" really fashion-forward?

But I do kinda appreciate the whimsy. And the prevalence of average guys.

[quote] [R18] the man in the red pants is yummy

That's Gordon Grant. Watch him go for broke on a hot young stud in this retro video.

And here's Bob Noll (they guy in the grey onsie at R18} doing some nekkid posing.

r23 You were just TOO fashion-forward. If you'd saved them for five years, they'd have been a big hit during the Bicentennial.

R27 thanks

After we left Phoenix, we drove to Pasadena. My Aunt lived next door to Jon Provost, Timmy from Lassie. That was cool, but my 14 gayling was hoping somehow, somewhere, I would see Freddie Prinze and he would notice how my powder blue leisure suit matched my eyes. When my parents weren't looking I'd switch out my pooka -shell necklace for a roach clip. I knew that Freddie liked the weed.

I wanted to smoke the weed with him and suck his dick. This my first air trip and I planned for months. I grew my hair out, just like I have always liked. I knew Freddie would like it long too. Before we got to my Aunt's house, my father made me get my haircut (like every other man I've ever lived with,). I remember sitting on the curb and heaving, and sobbing at the crew cut the guy gave me. I hated it and Freddie would hate it.

The highlight of the trip was a day trip to Nogales, Mexico where we had lunch in a cave. I spoke better Spanish than anyone in the family and I ordered for all of us including a beer for myself and margaritas for them. My mothers raised her eyebrows as big as saucers, but didn't say a word. I will always love her for that. I think it was the highlight of my childhood, because 6 months later...

Belted sweaters were a thing, but not for long. I worked retail during Christmases and one summer for an upper-middle brow department store. We definitely had them and people bought them, although I did not. Leisure suits were something our lower middle brow competition sold, although we did sell moderately priced "separates". I never had either one, but I did have a cheap suit from J Riggings, even though what I really wanted was a very expensive one (a simple navy blue number) from our better men's department.

yes R20 .... the 70s were very hard on my Dad's look also.

The 2 on the left look like they belong on an episode of Star Trek.

Loved the flashy, Ken doll look.

The thing about 1970s fashion is that the stuff that looks tacky now looked tacky then and people of taste weren't wearing crap like polyester leisure suits and platform shoes. Whenever '70s styles come back into fashion it always amazes me that designers ignore the styles fashionable people actually wore and go for the fabrics and styles that you would have found at K-Mart or a department store catering to blue collar people who didn't particular care about good taste but were just looking for wash and wear clothes they didn't need to iron. The nadir for me was seeing a rack full of copies of the iconic Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress--which my stepmother used to wear in pretty, understated floral prints--in hideous garish fluorescent prints that would have been used maybe for a teenage girl's button-up shirt in the 1970s.

Those tacky Ah Men fashions were rarely seen because they were worn only by people in the entertainment industry who had poor fashion senses and those who were brave enough to wear them, and associated with people who wouldn't be aghast at seeing them dressed like pimps.

To this day I am still embarrassed by the fact that, when I graduated from college in 1975, I went to job interviews dressed in a leisure suit. Horrified. And more embarrassed that I had no one around to guide me regarding dressing for interviews and I was apparently not gay enough to figure it out on my own.

Wait! There's more! Most of the interviews were for management training positions at stores such as Bloomingdale's, Macy's, and Bergdorf Goodman.

r38. 70's Fashion WAS bi-coastal. They 70's culture never got to flyover country outside of a few college campuses. Cleveland, didn't have hippies. Flyover country went from the 50's to the 80's via cable TV. People in flyover were not TOO tasteful to avoid the trends. Por favor. "People in the entertainment industry who had poor fashion sense...". LOL. You wished you could have been a shitkicker and a thief, but you worked for the phone company and shopped at Mr. Ray's Wig World. Goan hun, get atta here.

I loved the sci-fi movies, THX 1138 and Logan's run. I was sure in the future we would just wear the same thing to make it easy. In THX, everyone wore black or white and had crew cuts, then I saw Logan's run and could appreciate color and big hair, which I've always loved.

Single colored togas. What's not to like.

R25, I remember it this way:

One of the few men who actually looked good in '70s fashions was Dick Cavett.

Cavett was a fucking stud when he took his blouse off.

Everyone was ugly in the 1970s, yet everyone was hideous in the 1980s. The two decades of style infamy.

R44-That's revolting. R43- Really, is that the best we can do. Here's 5 random black men who did it better.

Oh man R32, that's rough. On the one hand your parents were cool enough to buy you a leisure suit, but then made you get a crew cut?? That's cruel and unusual.

^LOL it was a pain even the Darfur Orphan, could appreciate. My father and the barber tried to pass it off as the latest fashion, but I wasn't having it!. Heaving! I got over it quickly when he said, enough, and threatened to cancel the trip to the La Brea Tar pits. I made them stop by the Brown Derby so I could go in and get a pack of matches for my collection. I looked around for Freddie, but no luck. Ostensibly, I would have offered him a joint and blown him in the restroom.

It's strange. Technically 70s lifestyle was far less healthy. But everyone looked so much more vibrant and alive. Everyone seems to have a sallow and pasty pallor nowadays.

Because people used to go out all the time. It wasn’t unusual to just go walking or shopping for the hell of it. People went to clubs and concerts a lot. Now people sit in the couch and look at their phone.

Sit on the couch. ^^

"... and I can wear this dress to the office, I can wear it on a date, I can wear it to the RenFest!"

Of course, by the late seventies, a lot of the fun (and ridiculousness) had gone out of fashion. Halston had made elegant simplicity the height of fashion, people wanted to look rich and sophisticated instead of young and wild. And hippies were so fucking out, man.

I'll be honest, the guy on the right in red is my type.

R6, there was a YouTube series called "100 Years of Beauty" and they just focused on hair and makeup and I remember thinking, divorced of the clothes, how attractive the hair and makeup styling often was in the 70s. Based on this series at least.

r53 I love a lot of the simpler fashions of the late 70's.

I love that it was so accessible. Girls could still sew their own dresses without a lot of skill. And up to about the sixties, mothers would regularly sew school clothes for their kids, so the seventies was a time when a lot of girls had mothers and grandmothers that taught them at least some sewing skills and knitting or crocheting.

I knew a lot of teen girls in that era who were trying to be creative by at least sewing small bags or pillows for themselves. Today, a lot of people have no one to teach them, although I’m glad to see a renaissance of sewers and knitters that communicate with each other online.

The dresses on the models on the right and left in R53 look like someone took a bed sheet and wrapped it around them.

That two=tone number in shit brown and tan is certainly something special.

(ANd is that a Tyrolean Michael C. Hall at far right?)

[quote] It's strange. Technically 70s lifestyle was far less healthy. But everyone looked so much more vibrant and alive. Everyone seems to have a sallow and pasty pallor nowadays.

This was the decade that they started fucking with the food supply. We are still paying for it today.

The center guy in R14 deserves his own post in the "Let's Be the Home of a Typical OVER 50 DL Poster" thread:

"I'm the poncho lovingly crocheted by Mother. I wish she'd made it a full caftan, but nonetheless I treasure it."

"Send for a FREE Fashion Catalog"

Someone said the fun in fashion was gone by the late 70's. It was gone by the mid 70's. On the Mary Tyler Moore show the first two seasons Mary wore those fun youthful forward looking fashions and her hair was long and youthful. By 1973 her hair and clothing was total MEH. She looked much older too.

Orange was everywhere and it's probably why it's my least favorite color now. It was in clothing, inside the home and there were even orange paper towels. I think people grew used to it in the early 70's.

Ugh I hate orange too R64.

[R2] "Sorry, Wrong house. I'm looking for my sheep, not the people who fuck them."

Agreed. To this day, bright orange and rust are my least favorite colors!

Only about 2% of the population can wear either color, and neither should EVER be allowed in interior decoration.

R54, youngish Mediterranean/Jewish looking guys are sort of consistently a acceptable hawt regardless of era or fashion choices.

This is objectively hideous and nobody looks good in that shade of... baby-poop mustard, but hell. It's bold and it's fun, and all the fun has gone out of today's fashion!

BURN ALL THE NEUTRALS! BRING BACK COLOR!!!

If I were a young woman today I would So sport that outfit R69 ! Unfortunately 85% of young girls these days are too fat to carry that off.

R70 don't you mean curvy??

r70 You mean they don't make it in my size?

more orange

R54 Very cute. I do see a bit of Anthony Wiener though

I'd like to see a bit of the guy in red's wiener.