Original subtitles

Great style is something that is grown from within.

Woman: Style is culture.

Style is expression.

King: There is no stopping point short of victory.

All of us must stand up and say no more.

Gunn: I don't believe that there has been a fashion decade

as tumultuous as the 1960s.

Woman: Peace and love and things like this,

basically, they're great. They really are.

Woman: People celebrated their bodies, literally,

by showing their bodies.

Skirts went up.

Narrator: The birth control pill

is very effective if taken as directed.

The pill, it's a symbol of the radical changes in the culture.

Man: People realizing that how you presented yourself

was a political act.

It was an artistic act.

It was something to have fun with.

Gunn: Disco was a wild, mad, drug-saturated party scene.

Man: Through the '60s, '70s,

our style and fashion represents freedom.

Man: When people think of the '50s,

they think of something that's very stiff and conservative.

We're talking about a time in which society

was completely dominated by white men.

This is the sort of era of conformity.

Woman: You know, in the '50s,

everything was kind of, like, repressed.

In the Eisenhower era, everybody's still buttoned down.

Things seem to be in black and white.

Everybody wanted to look like everybody else.

Nobody wanted to stand out.

A man could not be in business in the '50s

and even the early '60s unless you were wearing a hat.

But what happened, the world was changing.

The world was changing.

Narrator: The United States elected its 35th president

in 1960, John F. Kennedy.

The youngest man ever elected.

We stand today on the edge of a new frontier.

The frontier of the 1960s.

The frontier of unknown opportunities in peril.

We begin the '60s with the Kennedy administration.

Kennedy represented youthful optimism.

Man: When Jack Kennedy's becoming president,

we were not going to be a rural country anymore.

We were now an urban country.

Jack Kennedy was cool and sophisticated

and cosmopolitan, and so was Jackie.

Woman: You see with Jack and Jackie this idea

that they represented something that was young and aspirational,

and that seemed to people strikingly different

from the last few presidential couples.

I mean, so different than the Eisenhowers, for example.

Woman: To have this new outlook in the White House

was definitely helpful to the youth culture

because they finally said,

"Okay, there's someone that actually represents us."

There was a reason that John Kennedy took his hat off

for his inauguration.

He chose to signal to, you know, the millions of people

who were watching that this was a new generation.

It was a new time.

And all of a sudden, men thought that hats were old-fashioned.

Woman: John Kennedy had the style

of a kind of wealthy,

upper class, New England person.

So it was more casual than the sort of typical,

ruling class person.

Man: Kennedy carried himself with simple style.

It was never overthought.

It was very much with ease.

Style matters with Jack Kennedy,

and his style is grace under pressure.

He defines cool.

President Kennedy's youth, his sartorial excellence,

his great physique were all differentiators,

I will say, from prior presidents.

He looked fantastic.

Woman: Jackie Kennedy was so beautiful and so stylish

and seemed to not sweat the details.

Man: She was like American royalty.

There was a kind of impeccability about her,

but yet, it was also relaxed.

Simple lines, bright colors, beautiful sorbet colors.

Man: Her pillbox hat.

We still call those collars that she wore,

the little rounded collars, Jackie Kennedy collars.

They weren't hers, but she made them hers.

Woman: It was decluttered.

It wasn't fussy or overly feminine.

It was just chic.

Everyone was picking up on how she dressed.

People could replicate her style.

Woman: She was very intelligent about thinking

how her style was perceived.

She really had a sense of how you could use style

from a political point of view to get a message across.

Woman: When she came to the White House

and became First Lady,

it was very important to her

to have an American designer.

So she turned to Oleg Cassini, who is a fashion designer,

but he was really a costume designer of Hollywood

for many, many years.

And one of the reasons that she turned to him

knowing that he was a costume designer,

knowing that he knew how to package stars,

both for the camera and off camera,

that was critically important to her.

Narrator: The presidential plane landed at Orly Airport in Paris.

President Charles de Gaulle

greeted the American chief executive.

Man: Jack Kennedy goes to Paris

because he wants NATO to stay supreme.

He wants to meet with the French leader.

De Gaulle and Jack Kennedy did not get along terribly well,

but he and Jackie Kennedy got along incredibly well.

She completely charmed them.

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.

She loved French fashion.

She knew who the top French designers were.

I promise you, Bess Truman did not.

Narrator: Mrs. Kennedy, till this night,

had been wearing American-designed clothes.

French fashion houses were besides themselves

that peace came in the form of Mrs. Kennedy's decision

to wear a gown made by Givenchy,

one of France's leading designers.

She actually was one of the first First Ladies

to kind of use fashion diplomacy.

She took that opportunity to celebrate French couture

in France and sort of honor it that way.

She certainly captivated the Parisians.

I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris,

and I've enjoyed it.

It certainly was the first time, I think,

that Europeans had seen a President

and a First Lady as icons of style.

As, you know, a couple that shared

that particular connection and that value system

which had always been very important in Europe.

But, you know, I think that really was a turning point

for how everyone thought about what you could do with an image.

When Kennedy's in Paris,

he is epitomizing the triumph of American culture.

The big music in all of Europe was rock and roll.

The most interesting artists of the era

were Jackson Pollock and his drip paintings

and Mark Rothko and his color codes

and Robert Rauschenberg and his collages.

We were selling our pop culture and art

and style all over the world, and everybody was buying.

But there was also the civil unrest at home.

We're marching today to dramatize to the nation,

dramatize to the world,

that hundreds and thousands of Negro citizens of Alabama,

but particularly here in the Blytheville area

denied the right to vote.

The Civil Rights movement

is one of the defining moments of the 1960s.

Freedom Rides and March on Washington.

Martin Luther King as a symbolic figure.

Also someone like Malcolm X.

These are all parts of that era.

As a little girl, I can remember very distinctly looking

at a black-and-white television in our living room,

and these horrific, you know, film of black people

in the South having water hose turned on them

and the dogs attacking them.

And Martin Luther King and this whole idea

of conquering hate with love.

The television was showing us the plight of people in despair.

Look at any civil rights footage.

These are African-Americans wearing church clothes.

It's symbolic to say,

don't judge me on the color of my skin.

Man: I think the African-American community

always wanted to look nice

because they did not want their lack of being dressed properly

to be held against them because so many other things were.

It's not just civil rights of black people.

It's civil rights of all people.

Certain people are frightened of other people being included.

It's about inclusion.

You had all these different groups question,

are we really equal?

And when they questioned themselves,

they discovered they weren't.

So the '60s was, like, we've got all these issues.

What are we gonna do about the issues?

Announcer: "Firing Line" with William F. Buckley Jr.

and Hugh Hefner.

Tonight, the "Playboy" philosophy.

It is, I think, important for the record to establish

that you are seeking, in effect, to annul the traditional code

about what is proper sexual behavior.

Let me ask you think, did you --

I'm suggesting that we re-examine.

You suggested that two or three times or stated two --

it's not true that I'm not, by any sense,

because the end that I'm seeking is really very similar.

The real key to the philosophy

is not offering an alternate moral code

to the traditional one,

but a suggestion that we're apt to find some better answers

if we re-examine many of these old, traditional ideas.

You can't underestimate the power of Hugh Hefner

when he invented the "Playboy" philosophy.

While he was a sexual revolution pioneer,

Hugh Hefner, he was also a misogynist.

"Playboy" magazine was the first time

that girlie magazines were being sold

in reputable stores over the counter.

Man: There is no magazine after World War II

that has the impact on fashion and style

as much as "Playboy."

"Playboy" was for men like "Vogue"

and other magazines were for women.

They taught men to see themselves

as consumers and creators

and drivers of culture and consumers of fashion,

and there weren't a lot of fashion magazines

for men before "Playboy."

Woman: The "Playboy" man is very sophisticated.

In Hefner's first letter for "Playboy,"

I think he said something like he loves to listen to jazz,

you know, read Nietzsche, and he knows how to,

you know, make hors d'oeuvres and all this stuff.

Woman: "Playboy" had a huge impact on American society.

Hefner was creating a new sort of male image.

It was telling men that they also didn't have to be

just conscientious, working drones.

It marked a kind of shift between a culture

that emphasized productivity and restraint

to one that emphasized pleasure and consumption.

Narrator: Most people want to decide for themselves

how many children to have and when to have them.

The pill really has revolutionized social,

as well as medical,

way the birth control picture in the last decade.

There wouldn't have been a sexual revolution

without the pill, because the pill decoupled

women being sexually active from women fearing

or inevitably getting pregnant.

The pill had an enormous impact on women's lives

and their attitudes,

and therefore, also, their style.

If you could take a pill and not get pregnant,

then women's whole behavior could change completely.

It's a social revolution for women.

You're a free person, then you can kind of enjoy

your life or your sex life or whatever, you know.

All of a sudden, it just brought a different spirit to women,

more empowered, more freedom, more control over themselves.

Woman: The pill was the single, transformative,

medical miracle for men and women.

You know, to change their attitudes toward

how you could be as a single person.

Man: Isn't this whole subject of sex being discussed

and written and talked about too much?

People are now talking about it a great deal,

and I don't think that's so bad.

Woman: I do.

I think it's a pity.

I think it spoils the mystery.

Man: In 1965,

when Helen Gurley Brown took over

"Cosmopolitan" magazine,

she completely changed the magazine.

She took a couple redo.

Man: Helen Gurley Brown represented

the intellectual woman who was liberated

and was empowered of her own independence

and her self-worth.

For her first cover, which was the July 1965 issue,

she puts this model named Renata Beck,

right on the cover with, like, large breasts

and big, blonde hair and a very kind of,

like, sexual expression on her face.

And she wanted to project the image of "Cosmopolitan"

as shaking things up.

Woman: "Cosmo" was all about giving women permission

to be as, you know, sexy and sexualized

and articulate about their own sexuality as you want it to be.

Woman: This was one of the first times in this country

that anyone had come out speaking about sex so frankly

and honestly and out in the open.

I did several of the covers myself.

They were daring.

I remember walking in for one of them,

and they handed me what looked like a bunch of strings.

And they said, "Here's your outfit.

Put that on."

It was Norma Kamali's first time on a magazine cover.

And that was the kind of cover that dared women

to go where they'd never gone before.

Woman: The effect of "Cosmopolitan"

rocked a whole culture.

Helen Gurley Brown really impacted

the nation of women, particularly young women.

Skirts went up, and you know, people celebrated their bodies,

literally, by showing their bodies.

The mini skirt is really just a physical embodiment

of the desire for sex in some ways.

It's meant to attract the eye.

They are out in front, and they are taking control

and using their sexuality

as something that's very powerful for the first time.

Woman: There is an ongoing debate

about who originated the mini skirt.

Most people associated the mini skirt with Mary Quant.

Woman: Andre Courreges always claimed,

"I was the man who invented the mini skirt.

Mary Quant just popularized it."

And Mary Quant said, "It wasn't Courreges or me.

It was the girls in the street."

It was definitely not a question of fashion designers

imposing the mini skirt.

It was a question of coming out of youth culture,

girls were wearing shorter and shorter skirts.

They were taking it upon themselves

to give themselves their own identity,

so fashion designers were really just kind of reflecting back

to them what they saw that they were interested in.

Man: It came from young people who wanted to style themselves

in a way that signaled their departure

from mainstream society.

It was stunning.

This nation and the world

had never seen anything quite like it.

Narrator: Everyone is coming to the New York World's Fair.

They're coming from the four corners of the Earth

and from Five Corners, Idaho.

Man: The 1964 World's Fair

was the most well-attended event of human history.

Over 75 million people attended.

They have all of these incredible pavilions

showing you what the modern world's going to look like.

Man: I believe what was so captivating

was we had proven ourselves in World War II.

We had now become a world leader as a country.

We had a lot of technology we were really proud of,

and we were really upping our game in the space race.

It became a huge part of American inspiration

and American pride, as well.

The Space Race was very influential in design.

Kressley: People were wearing unusual, manmade fibers.

They were wearing sleeker silhouettes.

They were wearing moon boots.

Woman: There were bubbles everywhere

and A-line mini dresses.

Architecture was changing.

It was becoming more modern.

So the world was really changing.

The Saarinen Terminal was iconic.

It was a lot of imagination to this approach.

There was John Lautner who made you feel

like you're walking into the future.

Man: Lautner grew out of Frank Lloyd Wright.

I knew him personally, and I loved everything he did.

He did something that not very many people did.

He took nature and this kind of futuristic, architectural look

and pushed them together like no one had ever before.

That's what's kind of magical about his architecture.

It's very livable.

Space had an impact on everything,

design across the board.

Lyndon Johnson: We want nothing for ourselves,

only that the people of South Vietnam

be allowed to guide their own country in their own way.

You know, when John F. Kennedy died,

in his place comes Lyndon B. Johnson.

The youth culture never embraced LBJ.

He's wearing big belt buckles, cowboy hat, plaid shirts.

He's seen as something alien,

and he has none of the cool of Jack Kennedy,

none of the cosmopolitanism that they're craving.

Man: Youth culture starts to rebel against Lyndon Johnson,

the Vietnam War.

It ultimately comes to split the society,

and so when you look at hippie culture,

it's really oppositional to the Vietnam War.

Woman: They have no concept of out loving the enemy,

so we're gonna change it.

But we're not gonna change it with bombs and guns.

We're gonna change it with fuzzy sweaters and flowers.

Woman: Fashion has always been a tool of protest.

You know, clothing has always been a symbol of the opposition.

Man: People were realizing that how you presented yourself

was a political act.

It was an artistic act.

It was something to have fun with.

Woman: Young people were having their own style,

their own attitudes which were expressed in their clothing.

It was very egalitarian.

It was anti-hierarchy.

It was about asserting your individualism

against a social authority.

We saw influences of sort of Hinduism

and Eastern Asian culture coming in.

Gunn: Women aren't shaving their legs or their armpits,

and no one's wearing deodorant,

and women are wearing muumuus and caftans

and Jesus sandals are in abundance.

If you're dropping acid and seeing 85,000 new colors

you haven't seen before, umm,

you want to wear some pretty crazy outfits.

Gunn: Men are wearing ripped and torn clothes,

and we are going shirtless,

and people don't care about grooming.

For men, of course, that's when long hair began.

They grew their beards.

Everything was about let it go.

Woman: When men had their hair long,

it was a statement of anti-establishment attitude.

It was a statement of individuality,

that you're gonna be your own person

and not just this kind of corporate flunky

who did everything to serve the man.

Don't be afraid. Don't be ashamed.

We want black power. We want black power.

Crowd: Black power!

We want black power.

-Black power! -What do you want?

Black power!

Man: The late '60s sees the emergence of

a different approach to racial politics.

It's not the civil rights movement anymore.

It is the emergence of what comes to be known

as black power.

You have the emergence of a younger generation

led by groups like the Black Panther party.

Man: Black Panthers adopted a more militant stance

towards social justice and racial politics in America.

The Black Panthers used style.

They used their bodies.

They used fashion.

Black Panthers, the big symbol becomes the beret.

They're taking a military look

that's not part of the Vietnam soldier look

and adopting it to urban warfare.

The Black Panther look, well, it was natural hair.

It was wearing lots of black clothes.

It was black leather jackets.

It was definitely associated with revolutionary

liberation movements around the world.

That was a very, very powerful and stylish look

that presented an image of powerful and chic

and proud black people.

Man: Black Panthers, they pioneered

a broader style culture

that was not just about fashion,

but it was also about gestures and language and speech

and music as well.

Man: And so the style imagery from the Black Power movement

is something that would be appropriated

by various cultural forms and groups

in many generations long after the Black Power movement itself

had passed on.

Woman: Roy H. Frowick

dropped his first and his last names

and won fame and fortune as Halston.

Halston was once known primarily as the man

who put Jackie Kennedy into a pillbox hat.

Woman: Halston was an iconic designer of the 1970s.

Man: If you looked at clothing and fashion of the '60s,

and then saw the '70s, you were, like, this was a radical change.

Woman: I worked with Halston, you know,

when he was the hot shot movie star, fashion designer.

His parties were legendary.

Man: I knew Halston socially.

Conversations would happen.

I was an actor. I wasn't in fashion.

He was interested in my opinions because I wasn't into fashion.

And he offered me a job being one of his assistants.

His staff was very young.

We were still connected to the streets.

We were still connected to the younger people,

not the rich people that were buying his clothes.

And that's what we brought

as assistants into the House of Halston.

He had the classicism and he had the street, as well.

And the street was where the party was.

Halston first became famous for his hats,

his little pillbox hats.

And then he moved into making very modern,

streamlined clothes.

Very, very easy-looking garments,

but with a lot of panache.

Kressley: It allowed the fabric to kind of just graze

over a woman's curves, and it was revolutionary.

It was very new because it was minimalistic,

and we hadn't seen minimal in fashion.

Man: Halston's view of American fashion

was about stripping it of ornamentation.

So Halston was all about the cut and all about the fit

and all about the movement of whatever the fabric was.

Everyone wore his clothes.

Man: In the history of American fashion,

there really had not been very many famous American designers.

Halston was the first rock star of American fashion.

In 1973, this Franco-American alliance

decided to put a fashion show on to raise money

for the restoration of Versailles

because Versailles was in bad shape.

It was the brainchild of a brilliant PR person

named Eleanor Lambert.

And she would create these events that were amazing.

Eleanor Lambert conceived it as a fashion show.

Eleanor Lambert knew it was no fashion show.

She was telling everyone it was a battle.

And it featured five American designers

and five French designers.

As far as the American designers are concerned,

we had Halston, Oscar de la Renta, Bill Blass,

Stephen Burrows, and Anne Klein.

Her number-one assistant was Donna Karan.

Anne was the only woman,

so all the practicing was sort of going on in New York.

Picking out the clothes and how we're gonna do it.

And then we hit Versailles.

Now, the French went all-out.

Woman: The French put on very elaborate fashion shows

with beautiful clothes and elaborate sets.

Man: The French part lasted 2 1/2 hours.

They had so much scenery and so much things

that had nothing to do with the presentation.

They had big imitation boats that were highly decorated

coming in with the girls standing still

with the French design on it.

The French show was so long and so boring

and so overstuffed, the fashion was lost.

It was a hodgepodge.

When the Americans came on, from the very first moment,

we pumped up the music.

I don't think they ever heard Al Green

played in the Royal Theater of the Palace Royale.

They never heard Barry White and Love Unlimited.

Now, the whole idea of models

moving to contemporary music was new.

Woman: "Bonjour Paris" opened the show,

with all umbrellas and raincoats with Liza Minnelli.

We used music and lights

and the girls themselves to show the clothes.

Our girls strutted and walked.

The movement, the energy,

the throwing of clothes, the showing the clothes.

The clothes never stopped moving.

Karan: And that was the first time

that kind of modeling had hit the runway.

You know that the clothes were free.

The bodies were free. The energy was free.

The French didn't know what was happening.

They'd never seen anything like this at all,

and they went wild.

Man: They were standing up.

They were trying to dance.

And when it was all over, these beautiful silk programs

that I think cost $200 to buy, they were throwing them up

on the air and throwing them on the stage

as if they were at a rock concert.

We were dominated by African-American models.

Man: It was a coincidence that there were so many

black models in the show.

Man: We weren't counting. Nobody was counting quotas.

Nobody was saying, "We have eight black girls

and only four white girls."

Nobody was doing that kind of math.

Man: It was not intentional.

These were all girls who knew how to show clothes beautifully.

Woman: American designers totally cast

the French fashion world into the shade,

and the Battle of Versailles became famous right away.

It was such a shock, both for the French and the Americans

to see the Americans doing so well.

The Battle of Versailles legitimized the idea

of American style and design,

it said, this thing really does exist.

It isn't just copies of European fashion,

which is what everyone had sort of dismissed it as.

It changed from then on,

because France started imitating America after that.

It really was the beginning of a seismic shift

in fashion in the world.

Narrator: Once upon a time, there was three little girls

who went to the Police Academy.

Man: "Charlie's Angels" was a very popular television show

in the late '70s.

Farrah Fawcett was the most identifiable

of the show's stars.

Farrah Fawcett is perhaps best known for the iconic poster

that she did in the 1970s.

Man: There was a serape blanket behind her.

Her blonde locks were feathered to the gods.

Woman: The hair was the first thing that entered the room.

It was, like, whoo,

hair that did this

just without any help.

She chose to wear her red Norma Kamali bathing suit.

Woman: Farrah was a great customer.

I did a test of these red swimsuits,

and I only made, I think, six of 'em.

And I said, we've got to change the fit.

I hate this.

And then I see this poster,

and that was the suit she wore.

And that was on the wall of every little straight boy

that I knew when I was an adolescent in the 1970s.

I even had the Farrah Fawcett poster.

The poster was an unprecedented success.

Six million posters were sold.

Lucky for me, it's in the Smithsonian now,

if you can imagine.

I think one of the reasons that it resonated so much

is that she really embodied a look of

what the ideal American girl was in the 1970s.

Outdoors, athletic, healthy.

Man: But there's kind of a sexual ferocity

that's also mixed in there.

And even to this day, if I do photo shoots,

if they're trying to give a period look,

they say Farrah Fawcett.

Woman: Everyone talks about Farrah Fawcett

in the red bathing suit,

and what I think that shows everyone is

just the way that an item of clothing

can become a symbol of a moment.

A kind of totem of a time in our culture.

When it comes down to American style,

you cannot leave out Farrah Fawcett.

Woman: In the 1970s,

as women are going into the workforce more,

some women move towards trousers and pantsuits.

Others were saying, you know, can you wear a dress

and still be a successful working woman?

Woman: Diane Von Furstenberg went to a guy she knew in Italy

and said, "Well, I have this idea for a dress.

Can you make it for me?"

I made a few samples, and I came to America.

I knew nothing about American fashion,

and I lived an American dream.

At age 25.

Diane was really in the middle of the cool

because she was hanging out with everyone at Studio 54,

and everyone looked at Diane as becoming the new girl in town

with an incredible look of her own

with her mane and the wrap dress.

Woman: The wrap dress is really like a kimono.

It's a dress with no zip and no button,

and it existed before, but nobody did it in jersey.

Cybill Shepherd wore it for "Taxi Driver."

It was such a moment at that time.

Gunn: It has an elegance and a sophistication.

At the same time, it's so easy.

Put it on like a shirt and wrap it around.

Nothing could be easier.

Woman: It was relatively affordable.

It came in a million different prints,

and it sold like hotcakes.

Von Furstenberg: It is extremely flattering.

It is both proper and sexy.

You get the guys, and their mothers don't mind.

Man: The little wrap dress

was worn not only by secretaries

who could afford it, but it was worn by socialites.

And it was the first dress

that liberated American women and said,

"This is a go-to dress for every woman.

Office to boardroom to society."

How many iconic items of fashion can we cite that were created

fairly recently that have had staying power?

That wrap dress is a phenomenon.

Woman: Diane Von Furstenberg

became a symbol of women's liberation,

and women's empowerment,

and that dress embodied all of it.

Von Furstenberg: 45 years later, it's still around.

I made the dress, but really, the dress made me.

There's a new form of assault on city streets these days,

an audio assault.

The sound of disco music

pouring from portable radios and cassette tape players.

It's part nuisance, part culture,

and part sociology.

So disco gets its start from funk

and soul music of the 1960s and '70s.

Disco was a wild, mad, drug-saturated party scene.

You danced the night away with all your gyrations.

You were covered with sweat,

and people were absolutely captivated

by the whole experience.

Man: Disco was very important in terms of

people being free to express themselves.

It showed us that we can party together.

We can enjoy one another.

There are elements of disco culture

that grow out of African-American culture.

There are elements of disco culture

that grow out of gay culture.

It had been going on, but it was underground,

and in the '70s, it came above ground.

Woman: It was definitely an important music phenomenon

and had a big impact on fashion for that decade.

Man: Disco brought out some peacocking.

Disco said, "I very much care how I look,

and I want to look good."

And not just women presenting sexually that way,

but also men.

Well, Studio 54 was the mecca,

and what would you wear to Studio 54?

The flashiest outfit you could possibly find.

Man: Guys would often wear suits.

Women would often wear dresses.

Platform shoes were big,

and disco sunglasses were sometimes in vogue, as well.

It was very much a kind of upscale, aspirational music.

And so a sense of fashion was also upscale

and very much aspirational, too.

♪ Macho, macho man

♪ Macho man, yeah

♪ I've got to be a macho man

♪ I've got to be a macho, macho man ♪

Each member of The Village People

was dressed as a kind of anthemic male masculine style.

Gay men eroticized archetypes

that aren't typically very gay-friendly.

Construction workers, cops are clichéd bigots and homophobes.

Man: But it was so camp, it was so over the top,

it's shocking and amazing

that there were a lot of straight people

who just didn't even know what was happening at all.

When I was a little kid, one of my favorite groups

was The Village People.

I was kind of, you know, naive.

No gaydar at all, so I was just taking Village People

at face value.

I'm just, like, man, these guys

are some cool-looking dudes, man.

They got an Indian. They got a police officer.

You got a guy with all the leather.

Oh, my God, these guys are amazing.

You know, I'm singing songs.

They had a song called "Fire Island."

I'm just, like, "Yeah, man, this is the bomb."

Like, I just didn't get it until somebody broke it down.

But then even after that, I was, like, "Ehh, so what?

The music's still great."

Man: This is now officially

the world's largest anti-disco rally!

Woman: 50,000 people, the largest crowd of the season,

showed up at Chicago's Comiskey Park.

Many had come for disco demolition night.

Man: Local radio morning man Steve Dahl was the catalyst.

He is anti-disco.

Woman: Between games, as planned,

a huge box containing thousands of disco records

was blown up.

Man: Yeah!

Let's blow it up real good!

Woman: Fans stormed out onto the field in the thousands.

Disco records were hurled like Frisbees.

Bonfires were set.

Bottles were thrown.

The melee lasted an hour and a half

and resulted in 39 arrests and a few minor injuries.

Why did they get all hyper?

They wanted to blow up the disco records they don't like.

The disco demolition destroyed Sox Park,

burning disco records.

They had to cancel the game

because they so screwed up the ball field.

It was a kind of rage.

There was a lot of pushback, and some of it was racist,

and some of it was sexist, and some of it was homophobic.

Man: So many of the major successful disco artists

were black or Latino.

Part of the reaction was the idea that, you know,

let's get some whiter music back on the radio

and back into popular culture.

Man: Disco was just perceived by some as a threat

because this was the music of queers,

and this was the music that was pouring out of clubs

where there were

gay people dancing with straight people,

and white people dancing with black people.

And it was just perceived as violating multiple levels

at multiple times different taboos.

I think the reason why disco was such a phenomenon was that

if you look at what was happening in America,

it wasn't very much fun.

There's a malaise that comes into the American life,

and disco was a way to break from the malaise.

Man: Disco brought so many different cultures

and gender and race, class together.

The music had a joy to it.

And no matter what was going on in your life,

while that music was on, you were free.

Woman: The 1960s were a combination

of sort of the highest of highs in American history

and the lowest of lows.

The '60s is an era of assassinations,

civil rights, counterculture, and the birth of feminism.

Man: All the many different styles

that American youth adopted

in the late '60s and early '70s

had some bearing upon rebellion in American society.

So you had everything from blue jeans to black leather jackets,

natural hair.

There's a transition in the 1970s.

A lot of stuff came out of the '70s.

Wide ties, flair, sort of terrible, muddy colors.

Things that we first looked at it and thought,

"Oh, God, that was a mistake,"

have become part of the grab bag of history

that's endlessly referenced by designers.

Man: One cannot over-estimate how the '60s and '70s

just smashed paradigms.

It divided the country into two

between mainstream culture and counterculture.

So we look at the '60s and '70s

as about a 20-year period of revolution and style.

The 1980s was excess on top of excess.

Man: With every ying, there's a yang.

A pendulum swings so far to one side,

it swings back to the other.

And the world changes.

Profoundly.