Woman's Paper Yellow Pages Dress

This sleeveless dress is made with a Yellow Pages print and a bow at the collar. The armholes and neckline are bound with a black tape. This dress also has a keyhole closure bound with the same color tape. An article in Women’s Wear Daily and a Vogue advertisement date the dress to 1968. The listings on the dress include restaurants, automobile dealers, moving services, and a salon. There is a label attached to the inside of the dress indicating that it was made by Mars of Asheville. A warning on the label says not to wash the dress as doing so would remove its fire resistence.

The Yellow Pages dress is an interesting example of using the paper dress as both a form of advertising and a reflection of art. In April of 1968 Women’s Wear Daily published a small feature entitled “Walking Ads” explaining that a Yellow Pages dress would flood the market after AT&T introduced a new premium and advertising campaign. In June of the same year an advertisement for the dress in Vogue magazine appeared. It covers the key points of what made paper dresses appealing. First, the dress is described as “wonderful”, “flashy”, and “just plain fun” (Mars of Asheville 1968, p. 53). The next selling point is the ability to adjust the length of the dress with scissors. Finally, the cheap price of one dollar plus the coupon made the dress affordable and worth the buy, even though it was not made to last. The ad then challenges the reader to “…see if it isn’t just as much fun to wear the Yellow Pages out as it is to wear out the Yellow Pages!” This dress also reflects the Pop Art movement in its use of the Yellow Pages, an everyday object, as a design element.

Worth exploring is the kind of mindset, specifically towards clothing, that the use of such materials would foster. As mentioned before, youth culture was important in the 1960s. Businesses recognized that baby boomers were a powerful demographic, and in turn they embraced the new power they possessed, expressing their new-found freedom through fashion. Rabanne, talking about jewelry, believed young people did not want to wear things that looked “eternal, which have to be worn long enough to justify a price…something perishable is requested now for accessories…worn a short time, then given up… ‘That’s the new feeling of the young’” (De Lousse 1965, p. 14)). It would be natural to assume that this way of thinking was also applied to clothing. With the many cultural and technological changes in the sixties came a quicker evolution of styles, and “durability was no longer an issue…change for the sake of change was the pervasive premise underlying all marketing… and fashion…became faddish” (Bryant 2003). It would have been possible to justify owning a dress that is unwearable, or inappropriate for everyday use, when the fashions changed so rapidly.