Announcing Our New Lesson: Drafting Bell Bottoms

To look at College of Vogue’s lesson preview click on: Drafting a Girls’s Bell Backside Pant (Picture credit score: UniversityofFashion.com)

Once I consider bell bottoms, I consider the 60s & early 70s, hippies and Cher. Distinguishing themselves from their shut relative, flared pants, bell bottoms widen dramatically on the knee, making a bell-like form on the backside. 

Cher, of Sonny & Cher (circa Sixties), sporting striped bell backside pants. (Picture credit score: Wix.com)

Historical past of Bell Bottoms

Cracker Jack’s mascots Sailor Jack and his canine Bingo (drawn by Andrew Loomis) have been launched in 1916 and helped popularize bell bottoms. (Pinterest.com)

Bell-bottoms have lengthy been synonymous with sailors within the U.S. Navy, actually, do you know that their service costume uniforms are nonetheless referred to as “cracker jacks”, based mostly off of the 1916 mascot of the caramel-colored popcorn referred to as Cracker Jacks?

Different references to bell bottoms are Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly dancing and singing within the 1945 musical Anchors Aweigh. Throughout World Battle II, songwriter Moe Jaffe even reworked the lyrics of a bawdy Nineteenth-century English sea shanty into “Bell Backside Trousers,” a track a couple of girl’s love for her sailor, who wore “bell backside trousers, coat of navy blue.”

Nineteen Seventies Flower Energy bell backside pants (Badinka.com)

Bell bottoms went proper from the 60s hippies proper into the disco 70s. There appeared no restrict as to how extensive the bell would go, particularly when princess seams have been added to the pant legs.  The final vital resurgence of bell backside pants occurred throughout the Spring/Summer season 2023 trend season, as evidenced by their distinguished presence on the runways of New York Vogue Week (NYFW) in September 2022. Total, bell bottoms have cycled out and in of trend over the a long time, however their newest return to prominence displays a broader development that embraces retro kinds, notably influenced by the Y2K revival that started round 2019. And to cite a 60s Sonny & Cher track, The Beat Goes On.