Who Killed Paper Clothing?

A modest proposal on how clothing might be reborn

You’re feeling groovy. Across the country in San Francisco, the Summer of Love is blossoming, but in New York City, plenty of freaky things are happening, too: anti-war marches, a Central Park “be-in”…in fact, what is this right here? You stop and look through the window at 220 East 60th Street: “In Dispensable Disposables.”

Is that a goat in there? Is that a white, bearded goat being fed an orange dress? Why is a man in a dark suit trying to make a goat eat a dress? Wondering about your mental state, you peer inside.

You’re not tripping. A photographer snaps a shot of, yes—an actual goat.

The animal’s name was Lorrie. What you would have stumbled on, had you been taking such a stroll down East 60th Street on June 9, 1967, was the grand opening of a store dedicated to selling nothing but disposable clothing, mostly dresses made of paper. There were racks with glow-in-the-dark shift dresses for $15 and a red, gingham-checked couture evening gown by designer Ann Pakradooni for $150. Lorrie was a promotional stunt, designed to show the ephemeral nature of the garments, and the man in the suit was William Guggenheim III, 28, proprietor of the shop and scion of the Guggenheim family.

Mid-1967 was the apogee of paper wearables. You would have seen news of this peculiar revolution. There was a feature in LIFE magazine titled, “Wastebasket Dresses.” One company’s fabric, Kaycel, had “a slightly bumpy surface resembling paper toweling, though its next-of-kin is actually Kleenex.” According to the magazine, Kaycel was made up of 93 percent cellulose wadding—like Kleenex—plus seven percent nylon, pressed inside to impart strength and “drapability,” but not impairing an owner from shortening the dress with a pair of scissors or lengthening it “by pasting on trim, like lace on a valentine.”

At an annual shareholders meeting, the chief executive of a joint venture between Kimberly-Clark (among their products: glossy, coated paper for Playboy magazine) and textile-maker J.P. Stevens Co. called paper wearables “a significant field.” Although total paper garment sales were only around $3 million for 1966, a tiny share of a $30 billion women’s apparel industry, 60 manufacturers had rushed into the paper fabric business, and there were predictions that revenues would soon grow to $50-$100 million a year.

It seemed, in that era when so much else was changing, that clothing was too. “The answer to laundry in outer space,” a magazine article declared, two years before the first manned moon voyage. “Democratic” (small “d”) another proclaimed, noting that dresses worn a half-dozen times and then tossed were feminist, eliminating the drudgery of cleaning. One company sold them in a can. Campbell’s Soup took Andy Warhol’s cue and printed its own soup can image paper dresses. Anyone could mail in a few proofs of purchase and a dollar to receive a wearable Pop art gem.

And then, within two years, it all fell apart. By the fall of 1967, In Dispensable Disposables was out of business, and Guggenheim out more than $10,000. The Kimberly-Stevens venture was dissolved in 1969. Those Campbell’s Soup dresses are now museum pieces.

This is not exactly a story like the one told in the documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car?, in which a corporate conspiracy knocked the legs out of a world-changing environmental technology because it threatened established oligarchies. The story of who and what killed paper clothing involves a combination of the whims of fashion, bad public relations, and a lack of economic pressure to solve its technical challenges. But now, with the fashion business stripping natural resources along with the health and dignity of workers, and with a resulting awareness telling consumers that buying five bleached white v-necks at Old Navy for $10 might be as unhip as failing to recycle a six pack of beer cans, even some fashion cognoscenti are starting to search for a better way.

Could paper and other fabrics with a shorter, less environmentally damaging lifecycle be the way forward?

“We are disposably using items that are not disposable,” said Andrew Morgan, director of the fast-fashion exposé documentary, The True Cost.

In the mid-1960s, during In Dispensable Disposables’ run, 95 percent of America’s clothes were made domestically; by 1990, it was 50 percent; and today, 97 percent are made abroad according to the American Apparel and Footwear Association. Tightening the timeline, roughly 80 billion pieces of clothing are purchased globally in a year—400 percent more than a decade ago, and three out of four of the worst garment factory disasters in history happened in 2012 and 2013, including the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, killing more than 1,100 workers. Meanwhile, the world’s top three fast-fashion brands—H&M, Zara, and Fast Retailing (owner of Uniqlo)—boasted 2014 sales of more than $56 billion.

Relegated for four decades to hospital gowns and other utilitarian uses, there is a case to be made that disposable clothing in the form of paper or other materials may offer a solution to a crucial quandary: how to change fashion without killing it.

PAPER CLOTHING, LIKE MARIJUANA, FREE SPEECH, AND FREE LOVE, was not a completely new idea in the 1960s. It goes as far back as the 18th century, when fabric and clothing were expensive, and stylish women began to use paper instead of cloth for the detachable collars and cuffs of dresses. These parts of a woman’s outfit normally required the most laundering, and by switching them out, a whole new look could be achieved without buying an additional dress. The trend picked up again in the 19th century, when the price of traditional cloth goods spiked.

“During the 18th and 19th centuries when clothing and fabric was expensive, and you didn’t throw anything away until it was in shreds, you can get a sense of the novelty paper would have had,” says Colleen Hill, co-author of Sustainable Fashion: Past, Present and Future. Women could achieve a completely fresh appearance for a fraction of what a whole new garment would have cost.

Most environmentalists who have turned their attention to the emergency of apparel have concluded that there is only one logical place for us to end up, likely by necessity when peak oil crashes and container ships can no longer chug cheaply across the seas. The simplest solution, propounded by the likes of author Courtney Carver and her Project 333—living with only 33 clothing items for three months—as well as the blog Unfancy, is that we must pare our wardrobes down to five or six outfits and little else. If an item tears or needs letting out, a nearby tailor handles it.

But what if there was another way—one that might better dovetail with what Jessica Goldstein described on ThinkProgress as “the all-American pastime of seeking affirmation and joy through consumption, instead of simply stating that it shouldn’t exist?”