Marilyn Bowen remembers wearing an orange and yellow striped paper dress to Antioch High School when she was a senior in 1969.
The dress is long gone, but the memories of clothes Bowen wore over the years are returning as she plans a decade of dresses fashion show spanning back 125 years to when the village of Antioch was founded.
“Antioch is celebrating its 125th anniversary and the Antioch Junior Woman’s Club wanted to do something to acknowledge this,” said Bowen, a member of the club and a teacher at Grass Lake Elementary School in Antioch.
The club saw a fashion show in a neighboring town presented by two Chicago area women, Ruth Thomas and Chloe Berg, who have 300 clothing items in their collection. “They share their fascination with clothing, accessories, even undergarments over the years,” she said.
After a buffet lunch, participants can watch a show in which these women discuss fashions from past decades, how they related to history and past events.
“They have family members wearing these clothing in photographs from back in the 1930s. They’ll talk about who wore what and why they wore it – sometimes it had to do with the materials available at different times,” Bowen said.
They’ll start in the late 1800s and continue to the 21st century.
Bowen, who grew up in Antioch and still lives there, said her parents owned a gift shop in town and went on shopping sprees looking for trendy items.
They brought home paper dresses. And Bowen got herself an orange-and-yellow-striped paper dress in 1969.
Though that dress might sound risqué, it really wasn’t, she said. At that time Antioch high school had a dress code and the girls had to kneel on the floor and the bottom of the dress had to be a certain length. If it wasn’t, the girls had to wear lab coats over their dresses while at school, she said. Girls were not allowed to wear pants, she said but by the early 1970s, girls no longer had to wear dresses and her sister, Barbara Porch, also of Antioch was able to wear pants to school. “And boys could wear jeans,” Bowen said.
Bowen also remembers wearing peasant dresses in the middle 1960s and a pink leisure suit in the 1970s. The suits worn by women had polyester pants with bell bottoms – and polyester jackets with a winged collar.
The 1980s was the era of shoulder pads, Bowen said, and tie-dye returned after being introduced in the 1960s.
Sometimes the teachers at Grass Lake even wore tie-dye outfits to work, she said. “I can’t believe now that I did it.”
In the 21st century, Bowen said, “Everybody is wearing black and white.” She was wearing a black-and-white knit dress herself.
“If you paid attention to clothing this last season, gray was huge earlier, and black and white is really huge in spring,” she said.
Bowen said she invites women who come to the fashion show to bring photographs of themselves or their parents or grandparents wearing clothes from different decades.
She’s digging through old photos to see if she can find a picture of herself wearing the paper dress.
“I’m looking forward to having a lot of fun,” she said.
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Sheryl DeVore is a freelance reporter for the News-Sun.
Decades of Dresses Fashion Show and Lunch
When: 11:30 a.m., May 18
Where: Dockers North, Antioch
Tickets: $30 in advance
Information: 847-395-2233; www.facebook.com/Antioch-Junior-Womans-Club-879104782160404/