Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The Paper Dress Fad

Episode Date: November 17, 2021

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! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 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. 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 paper dresses. In the mid 1960s, the Scott Paper Company had a new product to promote called Duraweave. It's basically mostly paper and then about 70% rayon and it was sort of just like a little more durable napkin that they were super stoked about. Plastic was all the rage. 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 going to do to try and market this thing. We're going to show how durable it is by making clothing, making some dresses out of paper. And it was literally just a marketing thing. And you sent out like clip something off and mail it in, send in like a dollar and 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. They had two dresses to choose from. Scott called the dresses paper capers. They both were the same cut. They were like a A-frame like mod mini dress. And like you said,

one was red bandana, the other is black and white op art. And for some reason they just happened to touch a nerve. And like you said, it took off like gangbusters. So much so that Scott suddenly pivoted and started advertising in magazines like Mademoiselle 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, oh man, what a funny boon for the Scott paper company making all this money 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. Right. So

they basically couldn't say, all right, well now we're going to charge eight bucks a pop for them. Oh, you like those, huh? Okay. But other companies did catch on and think they could make more than a dollar a piece. Yeah. So when I said Scott touched something off, which is a really weird way to put it now that I say it out loud, that's kind of an understatement. They somehow managed to say, let's try this marketing thing. It'll be cute. It'll be fun or whatever. But really what we're doing is showing off how durable our DuraWeave 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 ethos or zeitgeist of popular culture

just wanting everything plastic and disposable and just handy. 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 million dollars worth of these paper garments. And we'll get to after the break all the different kinds they had at the close of 1996. That's a lot of money in, I'm sorry, 1966. Right. It's a lot of money in 66. And I think the waste basket boutique, which is one of the paper design houses, we're making 100,000 of these a week at one point. Yeah. Nut nuts. Nut nuts. It is good nuts. And we're going to take a good break and be right good back.

or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this. I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So

we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikala, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet

and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, silly. So we're back. We're back. You were talking about Waste Basket Boutique making 100,000 dresses a week. One of the great things about these things, these paper dresses that were sudden fad in the mid-60s, is that they were easy to produce, which is how you could create a new business to make them and make 100,000 a week. But that also meant that you could come up with

all sorts of different designs for these things. They were really easy to print on because they were paper. And it really tied in nicely. I think another reason why they took off as a fad, because they came along at a time when commercialism was big in art, when pop art was becoming a thing, when op art was really established, like those big, bold, chunky, colorful, weird prints. All of these things were just ready made to be printed onto a paper dress. That's right. If you think of Andy Warhol, then you're on the right track because they had Campbell Soup dresses. They had Jolly Green Giant Can vegetable dresses. I mean, just literally look up, image search, paper dresses, 1960s, and you'll see candy bars. You'll see the yellow pages.

Like you name it, kind of any graphic print that you could print on a poster, they were putting on dresses. Yeah, there's one, the big, big, giant Bob Dylan face, which is pretty cool. I want to get that one. Richard Nixon had one, which is the opposite of what the paper dresses were all about. Bobby Kennedy had one, which was much more in line with it. That green, giant one, I thought was pretty cute. It was the tunic that the Jolly Green Giant wore, that leafy tunic. That's what the dress looked like. What else was there, Chuck? I could see these coming back now if they were recycled. Right. If they were recyclable, biodegradable, all that stuff, I could totally see it, but that was one of the things. Nobody

cared about that stuff in 1966. You can put these things on, you can buy them for cheap, you can wear them a few times, and you throw them away. It was such a big fad that people were starting to rethink how we do things like travel. Apparently, hotel chains were having meetings about how they were going to start selling entire lines of paper clothing so that when you went to a hotel or a resort or something for a week, you didn't pack a suitcase. You just showed up, bought whatever clothes you needed out of their gift shop, and that's what you wore, and you threw it away, and then you put the clothes that you arrived in back on to go home. And that was it. Easy peasy, beautiful, covered girl. Yeah, it's kind of funny to look. Every

great idea in history has so many bad ideas attached to it. I feel like people won't want to wear their own clothes that they shopped for and like just for the benefit of leaving their suitcase at home. That one didn't take off. They did make other clothes that they made men's suits. They're kind of hard to find images of these, but I finally dug one up. It looks like a wrinkled napkin, basically. Yeah, this DuraWeave stuff, you've almost certainly experienced it. Anytime they put a bib on you at the dentist for like a cleaning, that is basically DuraWeave. If not actual DuraWeave, it's like a competitor to DuraWeave. That's what these dresses were made out of. Yeah, they get very wrinkly, but again, in terms of these young women who are sort of

out on the town in these things, there were a bunch of benefits. They always had something new that they could put on, which was a big deal. They could tell mom to go stick that sewing machine where the sun don't shine because I've got tape and a pair of scissors. I can alter this thing however I want. I can be a little risqué and cut the belly out of one of them or cut a really low back if I want to. It was sort of the time of the sexual revolution. 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 people say, what just happened? 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. One of the first ones is that they were almost exclusively super-mod mini dresses and those were no longer in by the end of the 60s. They were super in in 1966, but they were not so in, it's a 68 or 69, right? That was a big one. Yes, there's not a lot you can do style-wise, but that is one shape that you could definitely make your paper dress out of and it just happened to be popular for a few years. There is 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 for giving me these ideas. But in one of those, Jonathan Walford,

who's a curator of the Fashion History Museum in Ontario, he's like probably the biggest reason they went away is because they were not particularly comfortable to wear. No, they don't look super comfortable. And like I said, they get really, really wrinkly. So it's sort of a one-night affair, I would imagine. 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 dissolving in front of my eyes. Sorry. A boomer would do that? Yeah, no way. So that was another one too. But one of the ones that 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. Yeah, a little bit. That's entirely possible that that was a big driver of it. You know, the first Earth Day was in 1970. So that was around the time these things faded out. So it probably would have seemed pretty gauche to wear like a disposable plastic paper dress that you were going to throw away after a couple of weirs. But I saw some article 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, 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 recycled 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. Yeah. Well, look for Chuck and I and matching Canadian tuxedos made out of paper in the near future someday. And don't spill your drink on me. And that's it everybody, of course, for short stuff, which means short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are where every listen to your favorite shows.