Counterculture legend who invented bell-bottom jeans dies at 84

https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/peggy-caserta-obituary-sf-bell-bottom-jeans-19976707.php

by anigbrowl • 2 years ago

122 41 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peggy_Caserta

Hilift• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

mistrial92• 2 years 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.

master_crab• 2 years ago

Imagining a time when San Francisco used to be the center of fashion and music is wild.

Avicebron• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

This post is about 20 years after WWII, so that timeline doesn't really line up.

_trampeltier• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

mistrial92• 2 years 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

lotsofpulp2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

lotsofpulp2• 2 years ago

Oh, that makes more sense. I’ve never worn shoes like that so I couldn’t make any sense of that situation.

1659447091• 2 years ago

As a home-grown Texan--Exactly this.

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

ChrisMarshallNY3• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

ChrisMarshallNY3• 2 years ago

Great story. I had never heard about her, but she seems like someone I would have enjoyed hanging with (later in her life).

fsckboy4• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

adfm• 2 years 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.

fsckboy4• 2 years 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.

abecode2• 2 years 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.

fsckboy4• 2 years 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.

dieselgate• 2 years ago

“Bell bottom blues you make me cry”

MrMcCall• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

Counterculture legend who invented bell-bottom jeans dies at 84

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