Paper Clothes

Paper clothes were all the rage in the Sixties as the industrialised world increasingly became a throw-away society.

Disposable cutlery, cigarette lighters and nappies were already common in the mid-Sixties. Throw-away paper clothes, paper furniture, and tablecloths seemed a logical next step.

NASA had considered making paper dresses for space-travelling women of the future. However the Scott Paper Company beat them to it in 1966, when they released the psychedelic Paisley shift. A dress that cost $1.25, and sold over half a million in the USA.

It hit the UK's shores in 1967, and even the Beatles got in on the act, wearing paper jackets in public.

France's contribution to paper fashion was a bikini designed to disintegrate upon contact with water.

No surprises there then!