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Boho-chic

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Boho-chic was a style of female fashion (c.2003-5) associated particularly with the actress Sienna Miller (b.1981).

Contents

\"Boho\" and \"chic\"

"Boho" is an abbreviation of "Bohemian". Vanessa Nicholson (grand-daughter of Vanessa Bell, one of the pivotal figures of the unconventional, but influential "Bloomsbury group" in the first half of the 20th century) has described it as a "curious slippery adjective" (Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939, 2002). Although the original "Bohemians" were travellers or refugees from central Europe (the French bohémien translates as "gypsy"), the term has, as Nicholson noted, "attached itself to individuals as disparate as Jesus Christ, Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes". In Arthur Conan Doyle's first short story about Holmes for The Strand, Dr Watson noted that the detective "loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul" and "remained in our lodgings in Baker-street, buried among his old books and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition ..." (A Scandal in Bohemia, 1891).

Chic was borrowed from French in the late 19th century and has come to mean stylish or elegant.

Elements of boho-chic

The "boho" look became especially popular after Sienna Miller's appearance at the Glastonbury festival in 2004, although some of its features were apparent from photographs of her taken in October 2003 (see Glamour, April 2004) and of others living in or around the postal district of W10 (North Kensington), an area of London associated with Bohemian culture since the mid 1950s. By the spring of 2005 boho was almost ubiquitous in parts of London and was invading stores in every British high street. Features included "floaty" skirts (notably long white ones), furry gilets, cropped jackets, large belts, sheepskin ("ugg") and cowboy boots, baggy cardigans and "hobo bags".

Sienna Miller in 2004-5

Miller's relationship with - and, for a time, engagement to - actor Jude Law, after they had starred together in the film, Alfie (2004), kept her and her style of dress in the media headlines during 2004-5. The ending of the relationship seemed to signal that boho too was past its peak. In fact, as early as May 2005 the Sunday Times Style supplement had declared that "overexposed" white peasant skirts were "going down" (16 May 2005) and had advised adherents of boho to "update your boho mojo" by mixing the look with metallic items (anticipating so-called "boho-rock" in 2006) or with layers (1 May 2005). By the end of 2005 Miller herself had adopted other styles of dress and her shorter, bobbed hairstyle - ironically a feature of Bohemian fashion in the quarter century before the Second World War - helped to define a new trend in 2006 (Hair, June 2006). She was quoted in Vogue (January 2006) as saying "no more boho chic ... I feel less hippie. I just don't want to wear anything floaty or coin-belty ever again. No more gilets ..."

Miller or Moss?

Some, including the American teenage actress Lindsay Lohan [link], attributed the "boho" look to "supermodel" Kate Moss (b.1974) (who in 1997 had been associated, through an advertising campaign for Calvin Klein, with the so-called "heroin chic"-"waif" look). In fact the Australian journalist Laura Demasi used the term, "boho-chic", as early as October 2002 with reference to Moss and Jade Jagger, daughter of Sir Mick Jagger, of the Rolling Stones, and Bianca Jagger. In April 2004, the British-born fashion writer Plum Sykes was quoted as saying of a lynx mini-top, "Very cool, very bohemian, very Kate Moss–y" (New York Magazine, 5 April 2004); and in 2006 Times fashion editor Lisa Armstrong described a plaited leather belt of the previous year as a "Boho "Kate" belt" (Times Magazine, 20 May 2006). Nevertheless, it was the apparently unaffected ease with which Sienna Miller carried off the look that brought it into the mainstream. (Even in advertisements for Chloé early in 2005 Miller was shown as if casually shopping.)

The influence of boho

The cross-generational appeal of boho helped, among other things, to influence the ranges that brought about a revival in the fortunes of Marks and Spencer in 2005-6. An illustration of this, just as boho as such was nearing its end, was M&S's use of 1960s' icon Twiggy and younger models such as Laura Bailey ("the natural choice for the season's bohemian chic": Your M&S, Christmas 2005) for a major advertising campaign in late 2005. In 2006 the Sunday Times identified fur gilets and "ugg-a-likes" as preferred winter wear for middle-aged women it described as the "botox-and-better-sex-after-40 brigade" (Style, 18 June 2006).

In their differing ways, the British singers Joss Stone and Rachel Stevens were both held up as exemplars of boho. The author and critic Bruce Dessau wrote of American actress Juliette Lewis that "there is something odd about [her] attractive boho-chic appearance in a stringy black vest, vintage beads and blue skirt that I cannot quite locate" (The Times, 12 June 2006). Another well-judged exponent, in the second series of ITV's Murder in Suburbia (2005), was Detective Sergeant Emma Scribbins, the character played by Lisa Faulkner.

The Olsen twins: ashcan/bobo chic

In America twin actresses Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen (b.1986) were credited with a "homeless" look, first identified as such in Greenwich Village, New York in late 2004, that had many "boho" features (large sunglasses, flowing skirts, boots and loose jumpers). This was sometimes referred to as "ashcan chic" [link].

The term, "bobo chic", had similar connotations, "bobo" being a contraction of "bourgeois" and "Bohemian" coined by New York Times columnist David Brooks in his book, Bobos in Paradise (2000). "Bobo chic" was associated in particular with "punks" in the SoHo area of Lower Manhattan, to the south of Greenwich Village. It was described by a student fashion writer as "paying to look poor" and having been "made popular by silver screen stars who all look like they got dressed in the dark like the Olsen twins, Kirsten Dunst and Chloë Sevigny" (Kristale Ivezay, The South End, 8 April 2005).

Boho-rock

By Midsummer 2006 the Sunday Times had discerned a trend that fused aspects of boho-chic with "heavy metal attitude": "It's about wearing a studded leather jacket with a flimsy chiffon number, stomping about town in biker boots ... and wearing anything with a skull on it" (Claudia Croft, Style, 2 July 2006). The newspaper referred to this style, which had been a feature of collections for Autumn 2006 by Dior and Galliano, as "boho-rock" and noted that both Sienna Miller and Kate Moss had adopted it.

Bohemian roots

Although boho-chic in the early years of the 21st century represented a definite style, it was not a "movement". Nor was it noticeably associated with Bohemianism as such. Indeed, the Sunday Times thought it ironic that "fashionable girls w[ore] ruffly floral skirts in the hope of looking bohemian, nomadic, spirited and non-bourgeois", whereas "gypsy girls themselves ... are sexy and delightful precisely because they do not give a hoot for fashion" (Style, 19 June 2005).

In fact, most of the components of boho had, in one way or another, drifted in and out of fashion since the peak of the hippie movement in the late 1960s. As journalist Bob Stanley has put it, "the late 1960s are never entirely out of fashion, they just need a fresh angle to make them de jour" (The Times Knowledge, 24 June 2006).

Early 20th century

By contrast, in the first half of the 20th century, aspects of Bohemian fashion were a reflection of the lifestyle itself. The "gypsy look" was a recurring theme, popularised by, among others, Dorothy "Dorelia" McNeil (1881-1969), muse and lover of the painter Augustus John (1878-1961), whose full skirts and bright colours gave rise to the so-called "Dorelia look" (Nicholson, op.cit.). Short bobbed hair was often a Bohemian trait, having originated in Paris c.1909 and been adopted by students at the Slade School of Art (see Gilbert Cannan (1916) Mendel) several years before actresses such as Colleen Moore and Louise Brooks became associated with it in the mid 1920s. On her arrival in Tilling (Rye) in E F Benson's comic novel Mapp and Lucia (1931), Lucia describes "Quaint" Irene as "a girl with no hat and an Eton crop. She was dressed in a fisherman's jersey and knickerbockers".

Trousers for women, sometimes worn mannishly as an expression of sexuality (as by Marlene Dietrich in the 1930 film, Morocco) became popular in the 1920s and 30s, as did aspects of what many years later would sometimes be referred to as "shabby chic". As early as 1907 the American heiress Natalie Barney (1875-1972) was leading like-minded women in sapphic dances in her Parisian garden (see Diana Souhami (2004) Wild Girls), photographs of which look little different to scenes at Woodstock in 1969 and other “pop” festivals of the late 1960s and early 70s.

Post-World War II

Post-Liberation Paris

After the Second World War Christian Dior's "New Look", launched in Paris in 1947, set the pattern for women's fashion generally until the 1960s. However, in the same year, Samedi-Soir lifted the lid on what it called the "troglodytes of Saint-Germain" (3 May 1947), Bohemians of the Parisian district of Saint-Germain-des-Près, who appeared to cluster around the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and included Roger Vadim (whose launched the career of actress Brigitte Bardot in the 1950s) and the singer Juliette Gréco. Their clothes were predominantly black: when Gréco first performed outside Saint-Germain she affronted some of her audience by wearing "black trousers, her bare feet slipped into golden sandals" (Anthony Beevor & Artemis Cooper (1994) Paris After the Liberation).

America: the beat generation and flower power

In the United States adherents of the "beat" counter-culture (probably best defined by Jack Kerouac's novel, On the Road, set in the late 1940s, written in 1952 and published in 1957) were associated with black polo-neck sweaters, blue denim jeans and sandals. The "beatniks" (as they came to be known by the late 1950s) were, in many ways, the antecedents of the hippie movement that formed on the West Coast of the USA in the mid 1960s and came to the fore as the first post-war baby-boomers reached the age of majority in the so-called "Summer of Love" of 1967. The Monterey pop festival was a major landmark of a year associated with "flowerpower", psychedelia, opposition to the Vietnam war and the inventive music and flowing, colourful fashions of, among others, Jimi Hendrix, the Mamas and Papas, Jefferson Airplane and the British group, the Beatles, whose album, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, is said to have caused the guru of psychedelia, Timothy Leary, to remark that "my work is finished" (see The New Yorker, 26 June 2006).

London in the 1950s

Although the annual Saturday Book (vol 16, 1956) recorded a view that "London's now nothing but flash coffee bars, with teddies and little bits of girls in jeans", the "Edwardian" ("teddy boy") look of the early to mid 1950s did not coincide with Bohemian tastes. The Bohemian foci during this period were the jazz clubs and expresso bars of Soho and Fitzrovia. Their habitués usually wore polo necks; in the words of one social historian, “thousands of pale, duffel-coat-clad students were haunched in coffee bars over their copies of Jean-Paul Sartre and Jack Kerouac” (Dominic Sandbrook (2005) Never Had It So Good). The image was more a male, than a female, one (the same being true of the literary phenomenon of the so-called "Angry Young Men" from 1956 onwards). Some Bohemian women adopted the "gamine look", with its black jersies and short, almost boyish hairstyles associated with the film actresses Audrey Hepburn (Sabrina, 1954) and Jean Seberg (A bout de souffle, 1960); others, the lower-cut, tighter styles of Continental stars such as Bardot or Gina Lollobrigida. In Iris Murdoch's novel, The Bell (1958), an art student named Dora Greenfield bought "big multi-coloured skirts and jazz records and sandals".

Hamburg and Beatlemania

In 1960, when the Beatles (then an obscure Liverpudlian combo with five, as opposed to their eventual "fab" four, members) were working in Hamburg, West Germany, they were influenced by a Bohemian "art school" set known as Exis (for "existentialists"). The Exis were roughly equivalent to what in France became known as les beats and included photographer Astrid Kirchherr (for whom the "fifth Beatle" Stuart Sutcliffe left the group) and artist and musician Klaus Voormann (who designed the cover for the Beatles' album Revolver in 1966). As a result the Beatles acquired black leather jackets and fringed hairstyles that were the prototypes of the "mop-top" cuts associated with "Beatlemania" in 1963-4 (see, e.g., Sandbrook, op.cit.). The latter coincided with the revival of the bobbed style for women (as adopted, for example, by singers Cilla Black and Bille Davis and fashion designers Mary Quant and Jean Muir).

Swinging London

By the mid 1960s, British pop music had stimulated the fashion boom of what Time (15 April 1966) called “swinging London”. Associated initially with such "mod" designs as Quant’s mini-skirt, this soon embraced a range of essentially Bohemian styles. These included the military and Victorian fashions popularised by stars who frequented boutiques such as Granny Takes a Trip, which opened in the King's Road, Chelsea in January 1966 (see Times Magazine, 24 June 2006) and, by 1967, the hippie look imported from America. This fusion of influences was discernible in two black-and-white productions for BBC televison in 1966: the series Adam Adamant Lives!, starring Gerald Harper as an Edwardian adventurer cryopreserved in time and Juliet Harmer as a stylish "mod" who befriended him, and Jonathan Miller's dreamy, rather Gothic production of Lewis Carroll's mid-Victorian children's fantasy Alice in Wonderland. In Britain, this was probably the first era of “boho-chic” as a popular style.

Other boho terminology

In advance of Glastonbury 2004, the Sunday Times coined the term, "festival chic", for a style with some similarities to boho (Style, 6 June 2004). It subsequently labelled a photographic spread of Miller, Bailey, Erin O'Connor and other muses of designer Matthew Williamson as "boho babes" (ibid., 16 January 2005), advised its readers to "think art-school chic" by adopting layers of clashing colours (1 May 2005) and, in 2006, noted that "last year's boho babe" had become "this year's boho-rock chick" (ibid., 2 July 2006). The London Evening Standard Magazine referred to "hippie chic" (a term used in the 1990s with reference the velvet kaftans created by Tom Ford for the Italian house of Gucci) in feature about "gypsy queens" (11 March 2005).

"Boho-by-default" was a description used by Lisa Armstrong to describe the style of women ("Gargoyles" as opposed to "Summer Goddesses") who, for summer wear, "drag the same greying, crumpled boho-by-default mess out of storage every year" (Times Magazine, 1 July 2006).

Morocco

In 2006 the Sunday Times described the Moroccan resort and sea-port of Essaouira as the "boho/barefoot-chic beach" because of its association with fashionable "Euro aesthetes worth their Talitha Getty-esque kaftans" (a reference to an iconic photograph of Talitha Pol, wife of John Paul Getty and step-granddaughter of Dorelia McNeil, taken by Patrick Lichfield in Marrakesh in 1969) (Style, 18 June 2006). Anticipating Glastonbury 2005, the Guardian had recommended the wearing of headscarves to achieve "Talitha Getty chic" (Hedley Freeman, 24 June 2005).

Boho in quotes

Further reference

 

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