How Did Bohemian, That Free and Unruly Subculture, Become a Commercial Symbol? | QDaily Business History

From a way of life to a fashion trend, Bohemian style is now everywhere. Ah, this vain and shallow world.

Bohemian fashion swept all four of this year's big spring/summer fashion weeks.

Anna Sui did Bohemian designs, and Tommy Hilfiger, long known for casual clothes, worked in Bohemian elements too. Some brands seemed to be using the trend to stake out a position: Coach, whose womenswear walked a runway for the first time, and Gucci, which had just hired a new creative director, both used Bohemian designs.

Then, on the fourth day of London's fall/winter fashion week in February, Burberry staged an entire Bohemian show — and that day got called the "highlight of fashion week."

For high-end ready-to-wear brands, fringe, capes, graphic patchwork and suede — design elements that once belonged to Bohemian dress — are no longer marginal. A few years ago Bohemian style still wasn't quite respectable. However recognizable it was, it stayed tangled up with words like artsy, unruly, ornate and ethnic.

A fresh pastoral look, lace, prints, long sweeping skirts, fringe, strong colors, embroidery, hand-tied cord knots, elaborate stripes — all of these are Bohemian, but no single one of them counts as Bohemian on its own. They have to be piled on top of one another.

Against the "less is more" philosophy of dress, free and romantic Bohemian fashion insists that "more is style." But that "more," that complication, didn't come out of nowhere. What drives it is the Bohemian way of life.

Strictly speaking, Bohemia was a place in old Central Europe, later a province of the Austrian Habsburg empire. After the First World War, when Austria-Hungary broke up, Bohemia became a province of Czechoslovakia. If you insist on defining Bohemians, they were the 6 million people who lived in the region of Bohemia.

The interesting thing is that no one has ever really defined Bohemians geographically. Instead, Bohemians have been confused with the Roma all along. Many Roma are said to have wandered out of northern India; their tracks run from Russia to India to Morocco, all over the world.

Wherever they passed, they took a bit of the local dress with them — India's embroidered sequins, Spain's tiered ruffled skirts, Morocco's off-shoulder halter tops and leather fringe, North Africa's beadwork are all sartorial wisdom the Roma successfully "annexed." You have to admit that a life of constant displacement produced a real openness in fashion.

This is also why, every season, you can read the backdrop of one country or another in fashion editors' readings of different brands' Bohemian designs.

At New York's spring/summer week this season, Tory Burch used folk patterns from Mexico and Romania and Aztec tribal totems. Burberry's famous Bohemian show in February made clever use of the Bohemian elements 1960s hippies had picked up from India. Dsquared2 added Inuit tribal elements: eye-catching rhinestones, hooded fur coats, capes and fringed blanket skirts.

You see, descriptions of Bohemian fashion are always complicated, and they involve a good deal of imagination. You can't sum the style up by its cut or its fabric.

If you've seen Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, you probably remember the Roma woman who is the second female lead in the second film — and yet plenty of people described her clothes simply as "that long Bohemian skirt looks great." That is what a fuzzy definition does. One idea gets swapped for another all the time.

"Ethnic style" often stands in for Bohemian, and the two get stacked together with no logic at all, as in "Bohemian ethnic style."

Attach that style to middle-class consumption and you get the bobo. Read literally (Bourgeois-Bohemian), the word means "bourgeois Bohemian" — a modern composite of the 1970s hippie and the 1980s yuppie. Put plainly, bobos are as rich as the bourgeoisie and as unhurried as artists; they own bourgeois things while keeping an artist's taste for risk and revolt.

Bobos will spend tens of thousands of dollars on a bathroom and refuse to spend half that on a stereo or a big-screen TV. To feel some holy transcendence they haul themselves to the summit of a glacier or deep into a rainforest to "torture" themselves; the moment a holiday starts they turn into long-distance ascetics. In clothes they look down on conspicuous consumption: they dress casually, in expensive materials. In the spirit they preach, extreme, singular and above all unruly are the important words. So what could suit them better than Bohemian dress?

The core of Bohemian is wandering and refusing to be bound. Bobos just reached for cloth to express what was inside them. They aren't heirs to the Bohemian spirit in any real sense; they are imitating a way of life.

Looking at how Bohemian developed, bobos were the force that finally pushed the style into the mainstream — not because the class itself grew powerful, but because what they wanted to buy drew far wider commercial attention.

This wave, of course, was started by some fashionable bobo women.

Effie Gray put fresh flowers in her hair as decoration, and the flower-crowned Bohemian look followed. Dorothy "Dorelia" McNeill was another muse of the style, and a new look came out of her. The bob, a haircut that started in Paris in 1909, was another; in the 1920s the American film stars Colleen Moore and Louise Brooks carried it to the United States. In Paris in 1944, women wore brightly colored skirts, flowers in their hair, big earrings and high wooden-soled shoes.

By the 1970s, Bohemian fashion had reached a decisive moment. Put simply, the way people recognized it changed subtly — what stuck in the mind was more likely a brand's classic Bohemian design than a scatter of individual styles.

For that you can thank the change in 19th-century philosophy. European thought took its second turn then, and Europe waved a final goodbye to classicism. Grand narrative and symmetrical beauty faded from European society, and Romanticism took their place. One clear sign: the leading figures in literature and painting could move from biblical characters to small people in society. That made it possible to break with traditional taste.

Industrial production followed and changed how the world made things. The assembly line made copying anything easier, and programmatic reproduction replaced the handwork and invention of the past. Reproduction put traditional ways of telling stories under strain, but for the clothing business it was a new life.

Once Bohemian design entered the fashion industry it stopped being a small private display of style and became mass production. This copying in clothes is also why Bohemian culture spread so fast: everyone could buy the same Bohemian styles.

Someone once described 1970s fashion as bold in design, fresh and shameless. The mix-and-match aesthetic of the time blended "sophisticated pantsuits, Bohemian style, and the childlike doll look of the 1960s."

In the last season of Mad Men, which won 15 Emmys and 4 Golden Globes, Bohemian clothes took over the screen. The story, set among Madison Avenue advertising men and starting in the 1950s, had finally reached the 1970s. One clear marker: women had left the 1950s New Look behind, stopped wearing twin sets and mostly dropped the pearls popular in the 1960s, and replaced them all with Bohemian style — bright colors, prints, chiffon and tulle, and miniskirts.

Season 7 of Mad Men: Megan's looks are all Bohemian.

Across the Atlantic in Britain, a trendsetter of the 1970s brought the kaftan onto British runways and into the fashion world, and finally carried the design into high-street clothing.

Thea Porter was the face of London's Bohemian set in the 1970s. Her singular eye for fabric and pattern won her the British Fashion Council's Designer of the Year award in 1972.

Plenty of designers who traveled to Afghanistan at the time simply copied clothes straight back to Britain, but Thea Porter kept trying to fit these ethnic styles to middle-class taste. Her early designs used Swiss lace, Indian block prints, Islamic embroidery and Damascus brocade. Around the 1960s, in her shop on Greek Street in London, she introduced customers to the chazara jacket and the sirwal skirt, and combined those elements with the kaftan into something like a cape.

The Beatles were fans of Thea Porter. Pink Floyd — the band behind the world's first music video — wore her designs for the cover shoot of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Barbra Streisand, Joan Collins and Dunaway were all regular customers.

It's no exaggeration to say Thea Porter built Elizabeth Taylor's classic 1970s look. Taylor went further and called Porter her "favorite designer"; she stayed infatuated with the kaftans Porter made.

In 1975, when Taylor married Richard Burton, she chose a kaftan gown Gina Fratini designed for her. Bohemian fashion became famous overnight and was soon the most popular evening style among the middle class. Later, Laura Ashley, a British brand founded in 1953, built a style of its own on top of Thea Porter's designs.

Thea Porter herself

Thea Porter's Bohemian clothing designs of the 1970s

Pink Floyd wore Thea Porter's Bohemian designs for an album cover shoot.

Elizabeth Taylor in a kaftan look in New York, 1976.

An exhibition of Thea Porter's Bohemian designs

Other brands we know well today also show up in the fashion landscape of the 1960s and 1970s, of course.

Christian Dior designed his own front-opening kaftan in France, and Yves Saint Laurent and Balenciaga followed. In the same period, the designers best known for working with Bohemian style were Tom Ford and Anna Sui. The designer Cath Kidston is said to have inherited some of Thea Porter's style as well. Then a new generation, Alice Temperley among them, drew nourishment from Porter too.

Since then, Ralph Lauren, Valentino, Dries Van Noten, Chloé, Saint Laurent and Burberry have all put Bohemian elements into their designs at one point or another.

After the 1970s, though, Bohemian fashion seemed to disappear for a while. After style figures like Joni Mitchell, Twiggy, Jane Birkin and Stevie Nicks, no new face appeared in its history through the whole of the 1980s. Not until the 1990s did Johnny Depp turn up as another emblem (ah, how charming he was then).

That Bohemian could catch fire again probably belongs to the supermodel Kate Moss and the British actress Sienna Miller, who brought Bohemian dress back into public view around 2003.

Kate Moss is a commercial symbol herself. In the first years of street-style photography, her taste and her instinct carried Bohemian dress culture easily outward. The influence hasn't faded: last year, though she had already turned 40, Moss shot a Bohemian campaign for Rimmel and launched a new Bohemian collection with Topshop.

More players have crowded into the Bohemian world at the same time, all of them independent labels: Johnny Was, Lucky Brand, Novella Royale, Chelsea Verde, Etro, Rapsodia, Cleobella, For Love & Lemons.

The strongest of these young brands is Free People, owned by Urban Outfitters. Free People has been growing fast, and it stands out even against the group's namesake main brand. Last year Free People's sales rose 14%, while the main Urban Outfitters brand grew 2%.

A survey run by Goldman Sachs and the fashion site College Fashionista found that in clothing, Free People has passed Zara, H&M and Brandy Melville to become college students' favorite brand — a sign that young people have caught the scent of Bohemian too.

Beyond luxury and fast fashion, independent Bohemian labels are selling well.

Isabel Marant, the French label founded in 1994, works the same line. The designer Isabel Marant has even said: Bohemian is in my bones. Up against luxury groups like LVMH and Kering, this independent brand has kept growing. Since it started, Isabel Marant's sales have risen 30% a year, even in downturns.

In 2013 the brand worked with the fast-fashion chain H&M for the first time, on a high-street collection in her signature Bohemian style. Fans are said to have waited outside H&M stores from London to Japan all night for the release. So many people rushed to buy that H&M's website crashed outright at the midnight launch.

Isabel Marant told Britain's The Guardian at the time: "The good thing about working with H&M is that you can feel how many people love my Bohemian designs — they really do respect my brand's DNA."

Free People

Isabel Marant

Isabel Marant's collaboration collection with H&M.

Yes, Bohemian now runs from luxury to fast fashion, and it keeps getting more popular. Perhaps, from the day it was born, it was never going to die. Commercial society has given it an equality and a democracy it never had before — beauty is one of the few fair standards this world has left.

Bohemian, always a subculture, has finally won a voice. Its method was simple: step by step, it turned into a commercial symbol, something to be consumed.

And yet this flourishing is probably what the real Bohemian spirit would disdain. The rags Bohemians wore because they wandered are now staged by the fashion industry in the most lavish way. You have to admit the motive and the result have drifted far apart.

As Bohemian style spread and became common, it turned from a cultural expression of hippie freedom and defiance of authority into middle-class pretension inside commerce, a shallow symbol to buy on a whim. Behind those kitsch motives lie ignorance of Bohemian culture and indifference to it. It's the same as buying Doc Martens and studs with no idea what punk is.

The conclusion is a little helpless, but clothing may always be the easiest ground on which mainstream and non-mainstream culture play each other — you can say anything on it, and nothing gets hurt.

Cover image and in-body images from: Free People.com, Wgsn.com, the Guardian, Sky.com.