Tailors and designers seemed to be particularly interested in the early ‘60s in the shoulder area.
Coats, jackets and cloaks were indeed often characterised by well-defined and at times exaggerated curved shoulders.
This picture portrays a perfect example of this trends: the model here is wearing a belted cotton faille coat (though the picture is in black and white, the coat was actually turquoise) created in 1961 by Patrick de Barentzen (matched with a straw hat by Monsieur Gilles - in the ‘60s de Barentzen and Gilles owned an atelier in Rome).
Introducing innovative ideas and silhouettes was a prerogative in the '60s (as opposed to today's prerogative: selling old/stolen ideas to an essentially bored and uneducated consumer...).
At the time quite a few designers tried to look at ways to give a more dynamic shape to the female figure through different techniques while taking inspiration from unlikely places such as the automotive industry that provided hints to give a sort of rigid yet dynamic fluidity to the designs.
The exaggerated rounded shoulder trend reappeared during the last few seasons both for men and women’s wear collections.
In fact it will be one of the main trend for the Autumn/Winter 2011-12 season with Prada, Louis Vuitton, Jil Sander and Calvin Klein among the others coming up with their own version of the curved shoulder trend.
Now that we all know where they copied that from, a good idea would be to buy a couple of '60s magazines of the kind that included also patterns or directly buy vintage patterns (it's not difficult to find on the Internet vintage patterns of specific designs from the '60s) and make your own curved shoulder coat/jacket. At least in this way you will be able to say you have more or less the original garment rather than an updated and extremely expensive copy recreated by a famous fashion house...
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