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.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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.
Scholars of the hippie era are hardly surprised that such shows and styles are finding an audience. Among the young, the bohemian 1960s of Greenwich Village, Haight-Ashbury and Carnaby Street excite an unalloyed envy, said Martin Lee, the author of Acid Dreams, a social history of the psychedelic revolution. "People look back on it as a time of expanded horizons and possibilities, expressed as much in the fashion as in the music of the time," he said.
Vibrant with promise, the hippie era promoted the upending of conventions, improvisation, a frugal, laid-back way of life and an appropriation of the influences of a rapidly globalizing society. "The concerns that emanate from that era are still pretty much with us," Lee said. "We are engulfed and surrounded by them. That extends to fashion, too."
Cella DeLuise, the owner of Nypull, a boutique selling hippie and rock paraphernalia on Lafayette Street in downtown Manhattan, ascribes her customers' absorption with the hippie look to a desire to connect with previous generations. People are intent, she said, on reviving not just their parents' music but their garb. "They are looking for some sense of their history in everything they do."
Once a badge of rebellion, the pastiche of Victoriana, American Indian feathers and beads and futuristic neon that defined the counterculture of the 1960s, has now been transmuted, others say, into little more than a style statement.
"Paisley, flowers, all that cotton and fringe - in a particular time, these things meant something," said Albert Wolsky, the costume designer of Across the Universe. In contrast to a "very restrictive 1950s look, constructed on a scaffolding of girdles and brassieres, merry widows and garter belts," he said, the flowering of hippiedom was an expression of "fresh air, a universal wanting to let go."
In contrast, the current revival has little of the impetus that drove the original hippies. It is likely nothing more "than a cyclical fashion thing," Wolsky suggested, "part of the endless recycling of styles that has been with us since the 1970s."
Indeed, this pendulum swing is more reactive than inventive, a form of protest, yes, but only against the current glut of fashion juvenilia - the rampant little-girl look that exasperates some merchants.
"I sometimes walk into a showroom full of baby-doll dresses and ask, 'Why are you doing this? Don't you know people don't want this anymore?'" said Lauren Silverstein, the owner of Amalia, a boutique in Lower Manhattan.
In its place her customers are craving a look she describes as "flowing, sensual, kind of sexy acid trip" - something akin to the dress Silverstein wore Saturday afternoon, a sidewalk-sweeping halter dress from a line called Fourties, awash in Yellow Submarine tints of lemon mauve and green.
If those customers are in revolt, it is mostly against fashion literalism. Karin Bereson, a stylist and fashion retailer in New York, champions what she calls a hippie mix, "but one not done in a costume-y way." Bereson, who favors clashing neon patterns that owe a debt to the psychedelia revived in the late-1980s at rave clubs in London, wears tailored men's waistcoats layered over billowing maxidresses.
"My look is Pakistani tailor," she said. At her downtown boutique, No. 6, she updates the flower-child style - all vintage Indian-printed voile dresses and bib-front coveralls - with unorthodox accents like unlaced white jazz shoes or studded gladiator sandals.
Beth Buccini, an owner of Kirna Zabete, the progressive shop in SoHo, is an advocate of a hippie revivalism that mingles the tough with the tender. "Accent your hippie look with neo-punk to make it modern," Buccini urged.
At Teen Vogue, Gloria Baume, the fashion director and a self-professed neo-bohemian, observed: "The summer of love 2007 is very different from the original. On lower Broadway, young girls are wearing little corduroy or patchwork dresses mixed with modern elements: a piece of crystal, sandals in metallic or patent leather.
"It's a look we've never seen before - 'hippie' mixed with patent leather. All of a sudden it all feels modern."
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