Janis Joplin looms large in Kim Matulova's consciousness - not least Joplin's free-form hair, flounced frocks and fingers choked with rings. "My style is, like, gypsy," Matulova said last week, "something like a ghetto hippie."
Matulova, an actress and musician who says she is "into folk and hip-hop," gives expression to her passions, wearing a breezy flowered dress, porkpie hat and boots stamped with the image of a prairie rose. It is a streetwise amalgam she describes as "an urban hippie thing - sort of Bob Dylan, but, you know, today."
She is one in a trickle of style setters embarking on a latter-day magical mystery tour, revisiting the hippie aesthetic of their mothers or grandmothers and giving it a brash new spin.
In pockets of downtown Manhattan and in cities as far-flung as Miami and Los Angeles, young women in the vanguard are setting aside their trapeze and baby-doll dresses - and as often as not, their drainpipe jeans - in favor of a breezier, more audaciously colorful interpretation of boho chic. Their pavement-grazing frocks, bells and feathers, flares and cascading hair, recall the freedom that once was a hippie rallying cry, an invitation, quite literally, to go with the flow.
A departure from the structured shapes and rigorous geometry of the current 1960s wave, this look is blithely improvised, unencumbered and emphatically fluid. Which may be why, as temperatures spike, it is beginning to flourish at retail.
"People don't want to have to think about what they're going to wear - they just want to throw it on," said Jaye Hersh, the owner of Intuition, a Los Angeles boutique that is hard pressed to keep up its inventory of neo-hippie staples like high-waist flares, floppy hats and gauzy long dresses with ethnic motifs.
"It's a new summer of love," Hersh declared. "The look is Haight-Ashbury - straight out of the 1960s."
The resurrection of a style that first permeated the American mainstream in the mid-1960s and peaked in the sultry months of 1967 coincides with an influx of books, films and exhibitions commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love in San Francisco.
The florid romanticism - and drug-induced haze - of the vaunted psychedelic era is being revisited at Nerw York's Whitney Museum of American Art in The Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era, a show of concert posters from rock emporiums like the fabled Fillmore East in New York, the Fillmore West in San Francisco and clubs like UFO and Fifth Dimension in London.
Books like The American Counterculture chronicle the age of Timothy Leary, Sergeant Pepper, Procol Harum and Woodstock. The woozy euphoria and utopianism of the day were memorialized this spring in Summer of Love on PBS, a portrait of the event widely considered the peak of the counterculture movement, and in Hippies, a documentary broadcast recently on the History Channel.
The Age of Aquarius, and its decline, is also the subject of Across the Universe, directed by Julie Taymor, a glossy rock musical set to a medley of Beatles tunes and scheduled for release in late September.
The naivete and renegade spirit of the hippie period, if not its aesthetic, are also alive on Broadway in Spring Awakening, a dark rock musical about adolescent sexuality and rebellion in 19th-century Germany. And it lives on on the runways in collections as diverse as those of Marc Jacobs, whose secondary spring line pulsed with patchwork effects and mixed floral prints, and Roberto Cavalli, who paraded a sweeping gown with Art Nouveau flourishes and butterfly sleeves on his catwalk for fall.
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