On the short history and enduring appeal of disposable dresses
Imagine walking along your downtown street, ready to spend an afternoon shopping. But as you’re glancing into shop windows, you don’t see wool sweaters or cotton dresses—instead, it’s all paper. Now, paper doesn’t come immediately to mind when thinking of clothing materials, but it has two important qualities: it’s at once long lasting and disposable. The paper recreations of historical costumes made by Belgian artist Isabelle de Borchgrave exemplify the long-lasting quality. Using simple craft paper and paint, she has made life-size replicas of iconic dresses from history and art, including Jacqueline Kennedy’s wedding dress and gowns worn by the Medicis. Her work, exhibited widely, from the Victoria and Albert Museum to the Fashion Institute of Technology, represents the pinnacle of wearable paper. But not all paper clothing was made for exhibition. There was a time in the 1960s when women, men, and children put on paper outfits and headed out to dinner parties, vacations, and picnics. The idea was that their outfits would make it through the day, and then be thrown into the trash rather than the washing machine.
In 2021 collector Kelly Ellman donated several boxes of paper dresses to the Phoenix Art Museum after collecting them for more than thirty years. Now holding the largest collection of paper dresses in the world, the museum organized the exhibition Generation Paper: Fast Fashion of the 1960s. While many of the dresses remained in their original packaging, they still needed to be extensively conserved. Some were pressed under glass and had their creases lifted with light humidity, while others were left wrinkled, looking like they were worn just yesterday. After all, these imperfections “are a part of the story,” says Helen Jean, Jacquie Dorrance Curator of Fashion Design.
The fad for paper clothes was sparked on a lark by the Scott Paper Company in 1966. Needing a hook to sell its new line of “Colorful Explosion” paper products, Scott figured there was no better way to attract the women shopping in grocery stores than with dresses. All they would have to do was mail in a coupon, and a shift dress folded into an envelope would be sent to them—all for just $1.25. “Created to make you the conversation piece at parties. Smashingly different at dances or perfectly packaged at picnics. Won’t last forever . . . who cares? Wear it for kicks—then give it the air,” the copy read. Though meant to be a gimmick, the dresses became a smashing success. “This was the era of clipping coupons,” Jean explains. “Magazines were how we found out about fashion. Everything was done through the mail.”
Rather than actual paper, Scott’s dresses were made from a new material called “Dura-Weave,” which is now used to create ground cover fabric in gardens. However, not all paper dresses were made from this spun fiber, some were made from pulp. Even though made of a nonwoven fabric, both Dura-Weave and pulp dresses were surprisingly sturdy and could be worn several times before being retired to the trash can. Plus, hemming required only a pair of scissors.
Six months after its first dresses were mailed and half a million were sold, the Scott company canceled its advertising campaign. Overwhelmed by the success of the dresses, Scott announced it was still a paper company and had no intention of turning into dress designers. But where they left off, other brands and savvy business entrepreneurs picked up.
Hallmark designed its own paper hostess dresses, which were meant to match a dinner party’s tablecloth, napkins, and paper plates—the idea being that the hostess was the center of entertainment, while also suggesting that a party, including party clothes, could be put together on the spur of the moment. Designer Elisa Daggs took her paper tent dresses, caftans, and minis to New York City, first selling her collection to Neiman Marcus, and then expanding to sixty other stores. William Guggenheim III tried his hand at a boutique in Manhattan called In Dispensable Disposables, and the North Carolina firm Mars of Asheville began to produce a hundred thousand paper dresses a week. One woman from London reputedly cabled a New York department store and asked that two dresses be air-expressed to her, stat.
In 1967 a ball was hosted on the ocean liner Michelangelo in New York Harbor and the women aboard outdid themselves in throw-away fashion. One guest enjoyed a paper ball gown in a cheetah print made by Bill Blass, the cuffs trimmed with expensive sable fur. Jackie Kennedy attended a Washington charity benefit where the guests were required to bring Christian Dior pieces to be auctioned off but received paper dresses at the door to wear. And the Duchess of Windsor—traditional and dignified—had her own stack of paper clothes, opening the doors to the fad for older women. Even airlines jumped on the trend: TWA announced “Foreign Accent” flights in which stewardesses wore destination-themed paper uniforms designed by Elisa Daggs: French (a gold minidress), Italian (a Roman toga), Old English (a frilly wench dress), and Manhattan Penthouse (pajamas).
Some journalists wondered if clothes would eventually be sold on tear-off rolls like sandwich bags. Time magazine proclaimed in 1966, “gone are laundry bills and cleaner’s bills.” That same year Reader’s Digest wondered if the “time may not be far off when we will regularly be buying inexpensive paper garments, in cartons of a dozen or so, at the local supermarket.” The New York Times thought paper clothes every parent’s answer to messy children, writing on January 7, 1967: “Little girls will soon be able to spill ice cream, draw pictures, and make cutouts on their clothes while their mothers smile benignly at their creativity.”
The paper clothes trend fit into the revolutionary upheaval in social, political, and economic spheres in the 1960s. With the space age came an obsession with new technology, including in textiles. You started to see the rise of polyesters—the drip-dry miracle fibers that didn’t need any special care or ironing. Paper dresses were ripe for this new technology. “It’s for our age,” Julian Tomchin, a textile designer, told Life in November 1966, “After all, who is going to do laundry in space?”
Moreover, paper clothes fit into the rise of pop art, where artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns took pop culture advertising and flipped it around to become “high art.” The low became the high, and paper became fashion. This was all part of the youthquake, which sought to separate itself from past generations. “Before this, people were dressing like their parents,” Jean explains. Baby boomers’ parents had the make-do-and-mend ethos of the Depression and war years. For instance, the average middle-class woman typically owned one wool coat, which she painstakingly cared for to last her a lifetime. To preserve her shirts from sweat stains or the wear and tear of laundering, she wore “pit pads.” To keep her shoes looking new, she frequented lobby cleaning stations every time she entered a building. Reflecting the postwar boom in materialism and throwaway culture, paper clothing paved the way for fast fashion, which would continue to develop through the 1970s.
“Five years from now 75% of the nation will be wearing disposable clothing,” Ronald Bard, vice-president of Mars, told Life in November 1966. However, by 1968 interest was waning, and it wasn’t just that the fad had lost its novelty. The outfits simply weren’t all that practical. Unlike polyesters and nylons, which have remained popular over the decades, paper had its downsides. For instance, you needed to be careful when out at a party or hosting a dinner soiree since a splash could cut your night short. “Women reported that getting hit by an errant drink at a party was problematic,” Helen Jean says. Paper also wasn’t terribly comfortable, with its crunching and rustling and stiffness. After only a couple of years of oversaturation, paper clothes simply no longer felt cutting-edge and futuristic. People were ready to move on. Paper was thrown into the trash.
MARLEN KOMAR is a fashion history journalist whose work has been featured in prominent publications such as Time, Smithsonian Magazine, Vox, and others. She explores the intersections of fashion, history, and society, offering readers a fresh perspective on the ever-evolving world of style.
by Mars of Asheville and another American firm called Party Prints—were made for children as well as grownups. Photograph © Phoenix Art Museum.
