the Christmas Wish Book was Sears, actually. I remember pouring over it. There's a pretty fun web archive of Christmas catalogs, including the Wishbooks, at http://www.wishbookweb.com/
That's what I remember about them - all these kids and their pretend "70s" clothes, made out of comfortable, non-scratchy materials, and subtly colour-corrected to not be as egregious violations of the colour-wheel concept as we suffered then, ha! Ha! I say, at their pretending to understand the true squamous indefinable horror of that time - that they were awful in every respect.
Was the 1970s when TV news programs began to do little PSAs about how long it took various products made from solidified napalm to burn? I remember inexpensive tents in particular went up like flashpaper.
I used to have a favorite outfit that consisted of a cream shirt with a maroon pattern (sort of mini-paisley like), a pair of orange and purple plaid pants, and maroon loafers.
My problem was that pretty much all of my clothes were handed down to me from my two older brothers. They tended to preferentially wear the clothes that were not a complete affront to all that was right and good in the world, and of course wore them out. Leaving me with the dregs, like plaid pants and polyester turtlenecks. Fashion advice wouldn't have helped.
One of my brothers got too close the fire one Christmas and his shirt caught fire. Happily as it burned it pulled away from him so he wasn't burned but by the time it went out, there was a fist sized hole in the shirt.
Another thing I don't miss about the 1970s: clothes, generally shirts, made from synthetics to which I was extremely, instant-hives-and-welts, allergic.
Yours were. The 1970s were in retrospect a glorious time to be totally unfashionable. Since I am *always* totally unfashionable(1) it's amusing to win at least one decade.
(1) Well, sometimes when the in look goes from A to C and I am at B I become briefly fashionable by the intermediate value theorem, but for a few weeks at most.
I don't remember if I consciously realized it then or just realized it in hindsight, but I got much more pleasure looking at most of those toys and games in the Wish Book and dreaming about them than I did actually playing with them when I came across them in real life.
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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2010-10-14 04:32 am
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You know, it wouldn't have killed adults to offer a little fashion advice.
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Another thing I don't miss about the 1970s: clothes, generally shirts, made from synthetics to which I was extremely, instant-hives-and-welts, allergic.
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-- Steve comes to bury the '70s, not praise them.
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(Anonymous) 2010-10-14 06:56 pm (UTC)(link)(1) Well, sometimes when the in look goes from A to C and I am at B I become briefly fashionable by the intermediate value theorem, but for a few weeks at most.
William Hyde
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