Counterculture legend who invented bell-bottom jeans dies at 84
121 points by anigbrowl 9 days ago | 40 comments
  • toomuchtodo 9 days ago |
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peggy_Caserta
    • Hilift 5 days ago |
      Peggy sold LSD for Owsley Stanley. Owsley was an legendary audio engineer and the first large scale LSD producer (1965-1967). He made five grams that made 5 million doses. Tom Wolfe wrote about him in the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test (1968), although I don't recall him mentioning Peggy. Truly an oversight.

      The "Acid Tests" were large parties where people drank fruit punch mixed with LSD.

      https://stanfordmag.org/contents/what-a-trip

      • soulofmischief 5 days ago |
        You're looking at 25k to 50k doses, not 5 million. A typical dose is 100-200μg, and back then they were often even stronger than that.
      • mistrial9 5 days ago |
        the Acid Test parties were real and had a lot of impact at the time! many say foolish, in hindsight.. there was a sense of urgency among certain people about it that was a combination of factors.
        • morkalork 5 days ago |
          There's a telling anecdote in the book about one of the first parties where there were two coolers of Kool-Aid, one plain and one with LSD in it. The organizers weren't malicious, they put them out and made an announcement like "this one is for lions and tigers, this other one is for kittens" hint hint right? No one could hear it over the music and the whole thing became a shit show. Definitely their hearts were in the right place but they were also a bunch of amateurs
          • neilv 5 days ago |
            Wouldn't a person of average intelligence, who wasn't a drug user, have seen the obvious risk?
            • morkalork 5 days ago |
              No. That's the entire point. As the other poster said, Owsley was the first large scale producer of LSD. Obvious risk of what? Up until then, the risks you're talking about didn't even exist, let alone being common knowledge.
              • neilv 5 days ago |
                So they thought it didn't matter that people wouldn't know what drug they're getting, so no need to handle the obvious fact that they won't?
                • briankelly 4 days ago |
                  I read that book as well and it was pretty clear they wanted people to take it without exactly knowing what they were getting into; at least, it escalated to that point. They being Ken Kesey and his group more so than the Dead. One of the core bus riders eventually quit because he saw it as non consensual dosing. That was my takeaway anyway - there is a good amount of ambiguity in the way the book is written.
                  • morkalork 4 days ago |
                    There are some events in the book that are reported by other writers and the difference in interpretation is uh not small.
                • morkalork 4 days ago |
                  Are you talking about the party-goers or the organizers. The attendees did not have a good idea of what they were getting into. The organizers were comically amateur-ish.
  • master_crab 5 days ago |
    Imagining a time when San Francisco used to be the center of fashion and music is wild.
    • Avicebron 5 days ago |
      It wasn't until I think around ww2 when sf got fucked really hard population wise, that had like some maybe good 10 years until the burden on the infrastructure and culture just blew it to bits, I know people with family histories in the bay going back until the gold rush and they really know what's been going on and why it's so bad
      • aSanchezStern 5 days ago |
        This post is about 20 years after WWII, so that timeline doesn't really line up.
    • _trampeltier 5 days ago |
      I just listened to the charts in the radio. Since streaming is included, it's just sad. Most top songs are more than 40, 50, 100 one even song over 250 weeks in the charts (Switzerland). The "hits" are all just boring radio / background music. Of course there is cool new music, but today nothing such is played in the normal radio.
  • slfnflctd 5 days ago |
    Great piece. This subculture has been overanalyzed to death, but the early roots were very humble indeed, and the spirit of entrepreneurship this woman possessed was quite real and strong. Circumstances and tragedy unfortunately short-circuited her trajectory, yet she made a lasting impact, and it seems she found grace in her stride again through her final chapters.

    My parents had at least one Janis Joplin record and each dipped their toes into the hippie scene, so I was aware of it early on. Bell-bottom jeans were reviled by many in my early youth - including me - but by the time I was in high school, I started to see the appeal in more than one way. I helped create a fake video news report on Woodstock as part of some kind of A/V class. I took acid. I listened to the Grateful Dead tapes a friend had acquired through the still robust tape-trading scene going at the time (incidentally, some of my favorite background music lately has been some instrumental-only jam collections posted by gratefuldeadosaurusrex on YT, check it out if you're so inclined).

    Only a tiny percentage of baby boomers were actually significantly involved in hippie culture, even during its height. Like nearly everything truly special, it got overblown. Despite its exaggerated presence and oft-deserved mixed reception, though, there was something important about it. There's a reason so many keep going back to take another look. I think it's wise for some of us to continue sifting through the remnants to find what's worth holding on to.

    • mistrial9 5 days ago |
      interesting to read this and thank you for writing it.. I suspect that many are missing the deeper roots of "folk" that contributed to the whole thing.. Media was evolving at that time, so certain media figures tend to represent the whole thing in the perception of many, but media products were not the only effects. Some aspects of the cultural emergence have roots more than two thousand years IMHO
  • lotsofpulp 5 days ago |
    >They got on well, and when they were talking one day, she learned Dugan had been sewing a triangle of paisley cloth into her boyfriend’s Levi’s, allowing him to more comfortably pull them over his boots.

    Why was this person putting on their jeans after putting on their shoes?

    • joshstrange 5 days ago |
      Maybe they mean pull the jeans down over the boots. Like put the jeans on first, then your boots but in the process you push up your jeans, then you want to pull your jeans back over the tops of your boots.
      • lotsofpulp 5 days ago |
        Oh, that makes more sense. I’ve never worn shoes like that so I couldn’t make any sense of that situation.
      • 1659447091 5 days ago |
        As a home-grown Texan--Exactly this.

        Boot-cut and baby boot-cut jeans are required for proper boot wearing.

    • ChrisMarshallNY 5 days ago |
      It's the other way round.

      Boot-cut jeans (still being sold, these days) have a slight flare, because the top of the boot is kind of wide, and hard to get under the jeans.

      I don't know if the US Navy still has bell-bottomed jeans, but a part of their work uniform used to be these highwater bellbottoms.

      • technothrasher 5 days ago |
        My immediate thought when I read the title of this thread was, "What? The US Navy invented bell-bottomed jeans." But I see it is just the headline here on HN that gets it wrong. The actual article pointed to credits her with the origin of the 1960-70's popular craze, not the invention.
  • ChrisMarshallNY 5 days ago |
    Great story. I had never heard about her, but she seems like someone I would have enjoyed hanging with (later in her life).
  • fsckboy 5 days ago |
    in terms of invention, sailors had been wearing bell bottoms since the US Navy introduced them 1817 and sailors tromping around seaport cities would have been more of an every day event through WWII. That US Navy uniform is informally called "Cracker Jacks"

    https://www.shopthesalvationarmy.com/Listing/Details/2645572...

    They were intended to allow sailors to roll their pants up above the knee while swabbing the decks

    https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-trending/this-is-why-t...

    But we can see "bell bottomed trousers" referenced in popular culture in the 1940's, here's Louis Prima's band doing the song Bell Bottomed Trousers

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QXmdbc5sx0

    and here's a painting used for the sheet music

    https://fineartamerica.com/featured/bell-bottom-trousers-alb...

    https://www.ecrater.com/p/42407644/vintage-1944-bell-bottom-...

    • conductr 5 days ago |
      Interesting historical context but I also think fashion is something where subtle changes can completely differentiate the thing, and for that, these are not the bell bottom jeans I think most people think of when that term gets mentioned. They are loose around the upper parts all the way down. Much more similar to the jeans the JNCO brand popularized in the 90s. The 60s/70s bell bottom jeans were hip hugging but also flared at the bottom. They were different enough to not be the same from a fashion perspective.
      • MichaelZuo 5 days ago |
        It’s not a novel invention in the legal sense, I doubt the parent was trying to make a claim in the fashion sense which might have millions of different subtle variations.
        • fsckboy 5 days ago |
          yes, my point was saying she "invented bell bottomed jeans" when the word "bell bottom trousers" already existed and was sung about in everybody's recent memory just sounds silly on its face.

          She story is interesting and a fun ride, but she applied the bell bottom to blue jeans as part of the rising popularity of blue jeans, James Dean etc. I was just rounding out the history.

    • adfm 5 days ago |
      The bell bottoms referenced are alterations called “flares” where colorful fabric panels were sewn into the garment rather than manufactured whole cloth. To be clear, people knew bell bottom pants existed, but “flares” were what people wore. I believe everyone just started calling them bell bottoms because it was a generic term.

      There’s a lot more to the recent past than you realize and not all of it is online.

      • fsckboy 5 days ago |
        >There’s a lot more to the recent past than you realize

        listen youngster, bell bottoms were mid to late sixties worn by dirty hippies

        while "flared slacks" are really a 70's item, often in polyester, worn by more mainstream types who wanted slacks (not pants), worn to the disco scene, etc.

        The main difference would be bell bottoms belled in every direction, while flares were more front to back.

        it is true in the early period of bell bottoms that many people would convert their straight leg jeans to bell bottoms by inserting a triangle in the inseam below the knee, often of a contrasting material, paisly/psychedelic/leather that type thing. As that was a bit unbalanced, a more ambitious style would do a bit of a spiral around the ankle and calf.

    • abecode 5 days ago |
      Actually if you want to find the origin of bell bottoms, according to a museum exhibit on men's clothing I saw, it was the sans coulottes in the 1700s. They protested the aristocrats, who wore high-legged pants, and eventually led to the French revolution and the association of bell bottoms with revolutionary/countercultural things.
      • fsckboy 5 days ago |
        I did an image search for sans coulottes and I did not see any bell bottoms. They did appear to wear long pants to the ankles rather than breeches to the knees.
        • abecode 4 days ago |
          Yeah you're right, I guess it was more the general fashion motif of long baggy pants being associated with revolutionaries/bohemians/anti-aristocrats.
  • dieselgate 5 days ago |
    “Bell bottom blues you make me cry”
    • MrMcCall 5 days ago |
      "I don't want to lose this feeling."

      I loved that album in my youth. Now that I have kids in their teens, Clapton isn't much our style, preferring Pink Floyd and Massive Attack, lately. It's great not having really ever listened to "Dark Side of the Moon" until recently.

      Cheers, mate. I had the exact same thing ring in my head when I saw the article title.

  • eadmund 5 days ago |
    > the long-haired woman with a Southern lilt behind the counter who was the brainchild of it all, opening up the shop when she was just 24 years old

    Surely if she opened it up, the shop was her brainchild.

  • tivert 4 days ago |
    > Dugan grew tired of the rising demand for the custom garments, so Caserta decided to head over to the Levi Strauss & Co. headquarters on Valencia Street to see if she could talk them into mass-producing her new signature style. The meeting didn’t go well at first — she was rebuffed for even suggesting that she could improve upon the world’s most popular jeans. On her way out the door, an older man who claimed to be the only employee still alive who had worked with Levi Strauss himself caught her just as she was leaving and asked what she wanted.

    > She crudely sketched out her concept on a piece of paper and showed it to him — a straight leg with a flare forming several inches below the knee to make a bell shape. He stared at it for a moment. Then he told her to follow him down to the factory floor, where the head of the sewing team agreed to make a pattern. They worked out a deal: Her store would be the only one to sell this new style for six months.

    With all the outsourcing our business leaders have spearheaded, this kind of innovation happens all the time in China but increasingly cannot happen in the US. If we stay the course, it's only a matter of time until that catches up with us.

  • adamc 4 days ago |
    Reading this, all I can think is there is so much subtext. Janis Joplin was a mess. A lot of the people mentioned were a mess. Yes, Caserta did some cool things, but there was a backdrop of being excluded people, broken people, that powered a lot of it.

    History is complicated.