Short Stuff: The Paper Dress Fad

There was a brief period when it was highly on trend to wear a super short dress made out of paper. Learn why right now!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck. And this is short stuff stuff stuff about
a really amazing fad that I hadn't heard of until
fairly recently. Chuck, I somehow knew about this, and I'm
not sure how, Huh do you think your mom might
have worn a paper dress and told you about it
or something. I don't think so, but we're talking about

(00:27):
paper dresses. In the mid nineteen sixties, Uh, the Scott
Paper Company had a new product to promote called Dura weave.
It's basically mostly paper. And then about Rayon and it
was sort of just like a little more durable napkin
that they were super stoked about. Plastic was all the rage.

(00:50):
I don't know what that has to do with rayon.
Rayon's a kind of plastic. I believe it's like a
plastic fiber. Okay, great, Plastic was all the rage, like
I said, And they said, all right, here's what we're
gonna do to try and market this thing. We're gonna
show how durable it is by making clothing, making some
dresses out of paper. And it was literally just a

(01:11):
marketing thing, and you you like sent out like clip
clip something off and mail it in and then like
a dollar in a quarter to get your paper dress
mail back. And then a few weeks later you might
have like a little red bandana print paper dress to
wear around. And it went off like gangbusters. It just
blew up. Like they had two dresses to choose from.

(01:35):
Scott called the dresses paper papers, and they both wear
the same cut there like a frame like mod mini
dress um. And like you said, one was red bandana,
the other's black and white op art and um. For
some reason, they just happened to touch a nerve and
like you said, it took off like Gangbusters, so much

(01:55):
so that Scott suddenly pivoted and started advertising in magazine
it's like mad Moiselle um for their paper dresses and
got just a huge response from it. I think they
sold half a million of them in the less than
the year that they were producing these things. Yeah, and
you may think, I'm in what a what a funny
boon for the Scott Paper company making all this money

(02:18):
on these dresses. It was a marketing thing, so they
never they sold them for so cheap. They weren't really
even making any money. They're kind of covering their costs
because it was only meant to be an advertisement anyway,
So they basically couldn't say, all right, well, now we're
going to charge eight bucks a pop forums oh you
like those, hukay. But other companies did catch on and

(02:40):
think they could make more than a dollar apiece. Yeah.
So when I said Scott touched something off, um, which
is a really weird way to put it now that
I say it out loud, Um, that's kind of an understatement.
They somehow managed to say, Um, let's try this marketing thing.
It'll be cute, it'll be fun or whatever, but really,
what we're doing showing off how durable or dura weave

(03:02):
paper line is, Like, it's so durable you can wear
it as a dress. But they managed to stumble backwards
into this like the exactly where the fashion industry was
at that moment, and then this burgeoning like um kind
of ethos or zeitgeist of popular culture just wanting everything

(03:22):
plastic and disposable and and just handy. Um. And they
put them together accidentally in these paper dresses. And I
think that's from everything I saw, that's why historians think
it took off and became a fad like it did.
That's right, and they were I think there was about
three and a half a million dollars worth of these

(03:43):
paper garments. And we'll get to after the break, all
the different kinds they had. Um at the close of
n that's a lot of money in nineteen I'm sorry,
nineteen sixty six. It's a lot of money in sixty six.
And I think, um, the Waste bast Kit Boutique, which
is one of the paper design houses, were making a
hundred thousand of these a week at one point. Yeah, nut, nuts,

(04:04):
it is good nuts. We're going to take a good
break and be right get back mm hmm and shock. Okay, silly,

(04:36):
so we're back. We're back. Um, you were talking about
Waste Basket Boutique making a hundred thousand dresses a week.
One of the great things about these things, these paper
dresses that were sudden fat in the mid sixties, UM,
is that they were easy to produce, which is how
you could create like a new business to make them
and make a hundred thousand a week. But that also

(04:57):
meant that you could come up with all sorts of
different desig lines for these things. They were really easy
to print on because they were paper and um it
really tied in nicely. I think another reason why they
took off as a fat um because they were They
came along at a time when commercialism was big in art,
when pop art was becoming a thing, when op art

(05:17):
was really established. Like those big, bold, chunky, um colorful,
weird prints. UM, all of these things were just ready
made to be put on to print it onto a
paper dress. That's right. If you think of Andy Warhol,
then you're on the right track. Because they had uh
Campbell soup dresses. They had jolly green giant can vegetable dresses.

(05:42):
I mean just literally look up image search paper dresses
nineteen sixties and you'll see candy bars, You'll see the
yellow pages, um, like you name it. Kind of any
um graphic print that you could print on a poster
they were putting on dresses. Yeah. There was one big, big,
giant Bob Dylan face, which is pretty cool. Richard Nixon

(06:04):
had one, which is like the opposite of what the
paper dresses were all about. Bobby Kennedy had one which
was much more in line with it. UM. The that
that green giant one I thought was pretty cute. It
was it was um. The tunic that the jolly green
Giant wore that leafy tunic. That's what the that's what
the dress looked like. Um, what else was there, Chuck?

(06:27):
I could see these coming back now, Uh yeah, right.
If they were recyclable, biodegradable, all that stuff, I could
totally see it. But that was one of the things,
like nobody cared about that stuff in in nineteen sixty six.
It was you can put these things on, you can
buy them for cheap, you can wear him a few
times and you throw them away. And they were like
really um like it was. It was such a big

(06:50):
fad that people were starting to rethink how we like
do things like travel. Like apparently hotel chains we're having
meetings about how they were going to start selling entire
lines of paper clothing so that when you went to
a hotel or like a resort or something for like
a week, you didn't pack a suitcase. You just showed up,
bought whatever clothes you needed out of their gift shop

(07:12):
and that's what you wore, and you threw it away
and then you put the clothes that you arrived and
back on to go home. And that was it. Easy peasy,
beautiful covered girl. Yeah, it's kind of funny to look
like every great idea in history has so many bad
ideas attached to it. I feel like like people won't
want to wear their own clothes that they shopped for

(07:33):
and like just for the benefit of leaving their suitcase
at home. Uh, that one didn't take off. They did
make other clothes that they made men's suits. Uh you can.
There are kind of hard to find images of these,
but I finally dug one up. Um it looks like
a wrinkled napkin. Basically, Yeah, this dirt we've stuff. You
almost certainly experienced it anytime they put a bib on

(07:56):
you at the dentist for like a cleaning that is
basic derwee if not actual dirahweave, it's it's like a
competitor todrahweeve. That's that's what these dresses were made out of. Yeah,
get they get very wrinkly. But again, in terms of
these young women who were sort of out on the
town and these things, there were a bunch of benefits.
They could they always had something new that they could

(08:16):
put on, which was a big deal. They could, uh,
they could tell mom to go stick that selling machine
where the sun don't shine. Because I've got tape in
a pair of scissors. I can alter this thing however
I want. I can. I can be a little risque
and cut the cut the belly out of one of them,
or cut a really low back if I want to. Uh.
It was sort of, you know, the time of the

(08:38):
sexual revolution. So all of these different things came together
to make these super popular. Yes, And like any good fad,
it ran its course and just went away almost as
fast as it came on and let quickly people saying
what just happened? Right, But this was one of those
fads where a lot of people have some ideas about
why it went away so quickly. There's some pretty good theories. Um.

(09:01):
One of the first ones is that they were almost
exclusively um super mod mini dresses, and those were no
longer in by the end of the sixties. They were
super in in nineteen sixty six, but they were not
so in. It's a sixty eight or sixty nine, right,
that was a big one. Yeah, there's not a lot
you can do style wise, but that is one shape

(09:24):
that you could definitely make a paper dress out of
and it and it just happened to be popular for
a few years. There was also there's a guy named
Jonathan Walford who I saw interviewed in I believe, Oh
I don't remember. But also, by the way, shout out
to History's Dumpster Textiles and context Groovy History and Timeline

(09:44):
for giving me these, uh, these ideas. Um. But in
one of those, um, Jonathan Walford, who's a curator of
the Fashion History Museum in Ontario, he's like, probably the
biggest reason why they went away is because they were
not particularly comfortable to wear. No, they don't look super comfortable. Um,
and like I said, they get really really wrinkly, So

(10:05):
it's it's sort of a one night affair, I would imagine. Um,
the other kind of downside, there's always been terrible men
and men got into a habit at parties of like, oops,
I spilled my drink all over your dress. That's now
like a dissolving in front of my eyes. Sorry a
boomer would do that. Yeah, no way. So that was
another one too. But um, one of the ones that

(10:28):
you like in almost any article you'll ever find about
paper dresses that explain why they went away is that
people became much more environmentally conscious a little bit that's
entirely possible that that was a big driver of it.
You know, the first Earth Day was in nineteen seventy,
so that was around the time these things faded out.
So it probably would have seemed pretty ghost to wear,
like a disposable, plastic paper dress that you were going

(10:51):
to throw away after a couple of wars. But I
saw some articles somewhere that said, that may be true,
but the stuff that we replaced it with is not
much better, because it's almost as disposable. It's much more
durable than a paper dress. But we throw our clothes
away way more than we probably should. And I thought
that was a pretty good ending for this short stuff,

(11:11):
don't you think. Yeah, And when you know, when we
were talking about if they could do this today to
make them out of recycling materials and recyclable, they would
also have to do a comparison that said, by the way,
the thing you're wearing had this sort of impact on
the environment. By the way, well look for chuck and
iron matching Canadian tuxedos made out of paper in the

(11:33):
near future someday. Don't spill your drink on me, uh,
And that's it everybody, of course, for short Stuff, which
means short Stuff is out. Stuff you Should Know is
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts my
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(11:53):
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