“Is bad taste a bad thing?” wondered a British Vogue writer in 1971. At that time, old rules about suitability and propriety were being jettisoned, replaced by personal expression and a stylistic free-for-all. Bad taste was no longer bad, it was good.
It was from this potent brew that hot pants—tiny, form-fitting shorts, often in dressy fabrics like velvet and brocade and worn for effect rather than athletics—emerged. First fashionable from late 1970 through 1971, their exuberant campiness ensures they remain a vivid symbol of the era. At their height, hot pants were donned by brides, stewardesses, office workers and celebrities as sartorially disparate as Elizabeth Taylor and the funk singer Betty Davis. As the decade progressed, however, they became associated with sex workers, a development foreshadowed in the 1971 erotic film “Dagmar’s Hot Pants, Inc.” (“Dagmars Heta Trosor” in the original Swedish) about a call girl trying to turn her life around.
