Mid-Seventies. Harold and Maude, the movie directed by Hal Ashby and selected by the National Film Preservation Board, this year turns 50. Ashby directed other memorable movies, like Coming Home and Being There, but the success he achieved in his golden period was barely useful: Ashby became addicted to drugs and died for cancer refusing any kind of traditional medical care. An announced suicide, like the one committed by Maude, the main female character of a movie (with a stunning soundtrack by Cat Stevens) almost forgotten, but that reached the sensibility of the new generations in the 70s. The costumes, very accurate, anticipated a style adopted in the mid-Seventies that persists, sometimes in a very precise way and sometimes reinterpreted, in today’s fashion.

Fashion notes. A trend stops to be appealing for several reasons, based on the historic moment and on countless variables – among them, the social mutations. It’s true that, sooner or later, the hyperbole overturns and what was neglected comes back again in the must haves top hit. The cover headline of the picture you see below, in this page, “Style&Transgression together”, sums up in three words the main trend of 1996, when the sobriety of the suits’ tailoring and the lack of bright colors invaded our wardrobes, winking to a new classic; the stretch fabrics fitted the body without squeezing its shapes; the colors, pale but not too much, were a trick to play down the total-black. Nostalgia? No, it’s not. Forecasts? Neither. Only fashion notes in retrospective.

Not details. Eric Bergère, art director, journalist and stylist, born in 1960, in a portrait by Terence Donovan in 1988. Bergère styling is perfectly in line with those years: exaggerated and pompous. Obsessive about details: when he didn’t wear the tie, he wore the cache-col, inserted into the neck of the shirt buttoned up to the third button. With the tie he always wore the silky pocket-handkerchief, matched with the tie. The sideburns were still long, last traces of the 70s grooming; the hair instead were in very 80s style, smoothed back with hair gel. In almost 30 years shapes have changed, but in today’s collections we can see the checked moulinex on blazers and the houndstooth on trousers; rarely the paisley prints on ties. But the pocket hankie is still “missing”.