By Mark Nobes, chief editor
From Roger Moore's Safari Suits to John Travolta's white disco suit in Saturday Night Fever, the 1970s was certainly an interesting decade for fashion. On this page, I'm going to take a look at the wide and varied array of fashion styles that people adopted during what was a very memorable decade.
By the late 70s, the disco scene was
thriving, especially in the nightclubs and discotheques of major U.S.
cities. The disco fashion was extremely popular, with men wearing
expensive (or expensive-looking) silk nylon, shiny shirts with
big, pointed collars and a couple of buttons undone at the top to
reveal their chest - the hairier the better! This would be worn with a leisure suit and sometimes a medallion.
For ladies, long, semi- transparent and flimsy dresses - preferably designed by the American fashion designer Roy Halston Frowick - were worn with a necklace.
This is the Swedish model Ulla Jones in 1976 wearing a lurex halter top and matching flares.
Disco Pants and Hot Pants
ABBA introduced the World to a whole array of flashy costumes during the 1970s.
BELL BOTTOMS / FLARED TROUSERS
One of the most recognised fashion styles from the 1970s, here we see a fine example from 1971 of bell bottoms and hot pants. One of the finest examples of flare wearing can be seen with John Travolta in the disco-orientated movie Saturday Night Fever.
Slade in 1973 wearing an early incarnation ofglam rock clothing.
Marc Bolan (T. Rex) 1973 (Public domain image)
Tartan and Rolled-Up Jeans (UK)
In the UK, the Scottish pop band Bay City Rollers helped to popularise tartan and rolled-up/cropped jeans. I certainly remember many of the boys at primary school trying to replicate the style.
I remember my Dad wearing a knitted tank top on a regular basis in the 70s. Particularly popular were these patterned Shetland designs, as shown below.
The public domain photo above was taken in 1974 and features a young lady who is wearing typically long hair with a centre parting.
American musician Billy Preston in 1974 with Afro hairstyle
This girl has a mid 70s pageboy hair style, and is wearing a top sporting medieval style wings which is belted across the middle. The style first became popular in the 50s and 60s.
The image shows two punk rockers sporting a mohawk (known as the mohican here in the UK). The style was also worn by the native Amercians of Mohawk Valley, and has been discovered on the body of a 2000 year old mummified man in Dublin, Eire.
These two goth girls are wearing Deathhawk hair styles, which are part of the gothic rock movement first seen in 1979, and which became more popular during the early 80s.
Punk clothing came in a wide variety of styles, with the main intention to be rebellious and show individualism. Punks wanted to make a statement with their clothing, which included ripped clothes, offensive T-shirts, safety pins, chains, studs, spikes, leather, torn fishnets stockings, tight leather pants and leather pattern pants. Later on in the punk scene, Dr. Martens, motorcycle boots and tartan kilts became more fashionable.
There were more militaristic punk styles, darker gothic punk and glam and dance punk which used brighter colours. There were probably a couple of dozen punk subgroups in all.
Bondage Pants
These were made popular by designers such as Malcolm McClaren and Vivienne Westwood and were worn by the Sex Pistols, The Clash and Adam Ant, to name but a few. Mens drainpipe bondage trousers tended to be more baggy and crinkled than the smoother-fitting ladies design, and also had larger pockets with more metal parts such as chains and skulls etc.
Tartan
This was very popular in the UK (particularly red tartan), although the use of tartan as an anti-establishment symbol, no doubt, upset many traditional tartan-wearing clans in Scotland.
The stylised red spray paint version of the circle-A logo was used by punks during the late 1970s, and it is believed that the original logo may have been used by anarchists as far back as the Spanish civil war.
A group of British punks in the 70s
The Jersey wrap dress was made popular by the Belgian born, American fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg. After divorcing the German Prince Egon of Fürstenberg in 1972 (and losing her title of Princess), she started work on the wrap dress which was knitted from Jersey and became extremely popular during the mid to late 70s.
Both of the photos above feature original Fürstenberg wrap dresses. The one on the left is called Floral Italy and the other one has a painted leopard design.
The Afro is often associated with the 60s and 70s, but its roots (forgive the pun) appear to go back to many centuries ago. The Circassian beauties who lived in the North Caucasus region of Russia had very similiar, big hairstyles. 
