Boomers look back fondly on many events and milestones throughout their lives: The days of hot cars, great music, graduations, weddings, birth announcements and lives full of excitement and memories. But like the 18 ½ minute gap in the presidential tapes of Richard Nixon, there was one segment from Boomer history that should be erased – the era of Leisure Suits.
How did we let that happen? Someday, historians will look back and say, “What were those people thinking? They look ridiculous.”
Leisure suits took root when some du Pont chemist came up with a fiber called polyester. This should be a sign to future generations. Never let a scientist design clothing.
Polyester, it was decided, would be the fabric of the future. Wools, silks and cottons would become mere relics of the past.
Polyester had many redeeming qualities. The fabric was relatively inexpensive. Machines could churn it out like ice cream at a church social. And polyester never wrinkled. You could wad up a polyester jacket, stuff it in a barrel, send it over Niagara Falls and it would bounce miraculously back to life. You could even wash polyester. No more dry cleaning bills!
Somewhere around 1970, the first polyester suits hit the market and joined the clothing racks alongside Scottish tweeds, thick piled corduroys, cotton seersuckers, wool flannels and gabardines.
Immediately, shoppers at fine men’s and women’s stores noticed that polyester had a few drawbacks. First, polyester didn’t take dye like natural fibers. Every color seemed bland. In the world of polyester, a crisp burgundy and hunter green did not exist. And because the stuff resisted wrinkles, it also resisted tailoring. Shoulders on suits and sport coats looked like two extra humps on Quasimodo’s bell ringing uniform.
Polyester also was hot as a North Face insulated parka in Hades. The fabric didn’t breathe. A long sermon at a Southern Baptist church in July found the faithful in the pews drenched in sweat. There was no such thing as summer polyester and winter polyester. It was all hot as blazes.
There was yet another flaw in polyester clothing. If you walked on the same aisle as a Brillo Pad, polyester would pick and there was no known repair. We should have known then that this stuff was bogus, but along came John Travolta and the Bee Gees and someone decided that polyester would make great clothing for discotheques – another idea whose time should have never come.
Discotheques – and leisure suits – surged to popularity in the mid-70’s. Private dancing clubs popped up, with no live bands, therefore only “discs” were played for music – thus, disco music. In 1962, the Peppermint Lounge in New York City became popular and is credited as the place where go-go dancing – later to become disco – originated.
Disco clubs exploded in New York and major metropolitan centers fueled by music from Donna Summer, KC and the Sunshine Band, the Village People, Van McCoy and – oh yes – the Bee Gees, the brothers Gibb. The movie Saturday Night Fever was of such magnitude that tens of thousands of wanna-be Travolta’s watched and memorized every disco move in the movie. And they all wore leisure suits – with bell-bottom trousers and in various shades of pastel.
But as quickly as disco became popular, it fell aside. In the late 70’s, an anti-disco protest in Chicago led to the mass burning of any and all disco records. The end was in sight.
Disco music will go down as the last mass-popular music driven by the Baby Boomer generation, but like leisure suits, I hope they won’t hold that against us.