Bohemian style

Young Bohémienne: Natalie Clifford Barney (1875-1972) at the age of 10 (painting by Carolus-Duran)

Main article: Bohemianism

In modern usage, the term "Bohemian" is applied to people who live unconventional, usually artistic, lives. The adherents of the "Bloomsbury Group", which formed around the Stephen sisters, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf in the early 20th century, are among the best-known examples. The original "Bohemians" were travelers or refugees from central Europe (hence, the French bohémien, for "gypsy").

Reflecting on the fashion style of "boho-chic" in the early years of the 21st century, the Sunday Times thought it ironic that "fashionable girls wore ruffly floral skirts in the hope of looking bohemian, nomadic, spirited and non-bourgeois", whereas "gypsy girls themselves ... are sexy and delightful precisely because they do not give a hoot for fashion". By contrast, in the late 19th century and first half of the 20th, aspects of Bohemian fashion reflected the lifestyle itself.

Pre-Raphaelites

Jane Morris painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Proserpine (1874)

In 1848 William Makepeace Thackeray used the word bohemianism in his novel Vanity Fair. In 1862, the Westminster Review described a Bohemian as "simply an artist or littérateur who, consciously or unconsciously, secedes from conventionality in life and in art". During the 1860s the term was associated in particular with the pre-Raphaelite movement, the group of artists and aesthetes of which Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the most prominent:

As the 1860s progressed, Rossetti would become the grand prince of bohemianism as his deviations from normal standards became more audacious. And as he became this epitome of the unconventional, his egocentric demands necessarily required his close friends to remodel their own lives around him. His bohemianism was like a web in which others became trapped – none more so than William and Jane Morris.

Jane Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and pre-Raphaelite traits

Jane Morris, who was to become Rossetti's muse, epitomised, probably more than any of the women associated with the pre-Raphaelites, an unrestricted, flowing style of dress that, while unconventional at the time, would be highly influential at certain periods during the 20th century. She and others, including the much less outlandish Georgiana Burne-Jones (wife of Edward Burne-Jones, one of the later pre-Raphaelites), eschewed the corsets and crinolines of the mid to late Victorian era, a feature that impressed the American writer Henry James when he wrote to his sister in 1869 of the bohemian atmosphere of the Morrises’ house in the Bloomsbury district of London and, in particular, the “dark silent medieval” presence of its chateleine:

It’s hard to say whether she’s a grand synthesis of all the pre-Raphaelite pictures ever made … whether she’s an original or a copy. In either case she’s a wonder. Imagine a tall lean woman in a long dress of some dead purple stuff, guiltless of hoops (or of anything else I should say) with a mass of crisp black hair heaped into great wavy projections on each of her temples … a long neck, without any collar, and in lieu thereof some dozen strings of outlandish beads.

In his play Pygmalion (1912) Bernard Shaw unmistakably based the part of Mrs. Higgins on the then elderly Jane Morris. Describing Mrs. Higgins' drawing room, he referred to a portrait of her "when she defied the fashion of her youth in one of the beautiful Rossettian costumes which, when caricatured by people who did not understand, led to the absurdities of popular estheticism [sic] in the eighteen-seventies".

A biographer of Edward Burne-Jones, writing a century after Shaw (Fiona MacCarthy, 2011), has noted that, in the 1960s, when the influential Biba store was opened in London by Barbara Hulanicki, the "long drooping structureless clothes", though sexier than the dresses portrayed in such Burne-Jones paintings as The Golden Stairs or The Sirens, nevertheless resembled them. The interior of Biba has been described by the biographer of British 20th century designer Laura Ashley as having an atmosphere that "reeked of sex ... [It] was designed to look like a bordello with its scarlet, black and gold plush fitments, but, interestingly, it implied an old-fashioned, Edwardian style of forbidden sex with its feather boas, potted palms, bentwood coat racks and dark lighting" MacCarthy observed also that "the androgynous appearance of Burne-Jones's male figures reflected the sexually ambivalent feeling" of the late 1960s.

Early flower power: Effie Millais

Effie Gray, whose marriage to John Ruskin was annulled in 1854 prior to her marrying the pre-Raphaelite painter John Millais, is known to have used flowers as an adornment and probably also as an assertive "statement". While in Scotland with Ruskin (still her husband) and Millais, she gathered foxgloves to place in her hair. She wore them at breakfast despite being asked by her husband not to do so, a gesture of defiance, at a time of growing crisis in their relationship, that came to the critical notice of Florence Nightingale (who tended to regard others of her sex with "scarcely concealed scorn" and was generally unsympathetic to "women's rights").

In 1853 Millais painted Effie with Foxgloves which depicts her wearing the flowers while doing needlework. Other paintings of the mid to late 19th century, such as Frederick Sandys' Love's Shadow (1867) of a girl with a rose in her hair, sucking a sprig of blossom, which was described in 1970 as "a first rate PR job for the Flower People", and Burne-Jones' The Heart of the Rose (1889), have been cited as foreshadowing the "flower power" of the mid to late 1960s.

Early 20th century

Rational dress

The pre-Raphaelite look was still considered "advanced" in the late years of the 19th century, by when movements, such as the Rational Dress Society (1881), with which the Morrises and Georgiana Burne-Jones were involved, were beginning to exercise some influence on women's dress. However, it was not really until the First World War that "many working women ... embarked on a revolution in fashion that greatly reduced the weight and restrictions imposed on them by their clothing". Some women working in factories wore trousers and the brassiere (invented in 1889 by the feminist Herminie Cadolle and patented in America by Mary Phelps Jacob in 1914) began gradually to supersede the corset.

By the early 1920s, what had been a wartime expedient - the need to economise on material - had become a statement of freedom by young women, manifested by shorter hemlines (just above the knee by 1925-6) and boyish hairstyles, accompanied by what Robert Graves and Alan Hodge described as "the new fantastic development of Jazz music". At the [[1920 Olympics|Antwerp Olympic Games],] in 1920 the French tennis player Suzanne Lenglen created something of a sensation with a knee length skirt that revealed her suspender belt whenever she lept to smash a ball. However, from then on, sportwear for women, as with day to day clothes, became freer. The Penguin Social History of Britain noted that "by the 1920s newspapers were filled with advertisements for 'lingerie' and 'undies' which would have been classed as indecent a generation earlier". Thus, in Ben Travers' comic novel Rookery Nook (1923), a young woman evicted from home in her nightwear and requiring day clothes remarked "Combies. That's all right. But in the summer you know, we don't-", while in Agatha Christie's thriller, The Seven Dials Mystery (1929), the aristocratic heroine, Lady "Bundle" Brent, wore only "a negligible trifle" under her dress; like many real life "it girls" of her class, she had been freed from the "genteel expectations" of earlier generations. In Hollywood the actress Carole Lombard, who, in the 1930s, combined feistiness with sexual allure, never wore a brassière and "avoided panties". However, she famously declared that though "I live by a man's code designed to fit a man's world ... at the same time I never forget that that a woman's first job is to choose the right shade of lipstick" Coincidentally, sales of men's undershirts fell dramatically in the United States when Lombard's future husband, Clark Gable, was revealed not to be wearing one in a famous motel bedroom scene with Claudette Colbert in the film It Happened One Night (1934).

Looking back at this period, Graves and Hodge noted the protracted course that "daring female fashions had always taken ... from brothel to stage, then on to Bohemia, to Society, to Society's maids, to the mill-girl and lastly to the suburban woman".

The "Dorelia" look

Among female Bohemians in the early 20th century, the "gypsy look" was a recurring theme, popularised by, among others, Dorothy "Dorelia" McNeill (1881–1969), muse, lover and second wife of the painter Augustus John (1878–1961), whose full skirts and bright colours gave rise to the so-called "Dorelia look". Katherine Everett, née Olive, a former student of the Slade School of Art in London, has described McNeil's "tight fitting, hand-sewn, canary coloured bodice above a dark gathered flowing skirt, and her hair very black and gleaming, emphasiz[ing] the long silver earrings which were her only adornment".

Everett recalled also the Johns' woods "with wild cherry trees in blossom, and ... a model with flying red hair, clad in white, being chased in and out of the trees by nude children". With similar lack of inhibition, as early as 1907 the American heiress Natalie Barney (1875–1972) was leading like-minded women in sapphic dances in her Parisian garden, photographs of which look little different from scenes at Woodstock in 1969 and other “pop” festivals of the late 1960s and early 70s.

Bobbed hair and cross-gender styles

By contrast, short bobbed hair was often a Bohemian trait, having originated in Paris c.1909 and been adopted by students at the Slade several years before American film actresses such as Colleen Moore and Louise Brooks became associated with it in the mid 1920s. This style was plainly discernible on a woodblock self-portrait of 1916 by Dora Carrington, who had entered the Slade in 1910. A shorter style, known as the "Eton crop", became popular around 1926: on her arrival in Tilling (Rye) in E F Benson's comic novel Mapp and Lucia (1931), Lucia described "Quaint" Irene as "a girl with no hat and an Eton crop. She was dressed in a fisherman's jersey and knickerbockers". For many years trite assumptions were often made about the sexuality of women with cropped hairstyles; an historian of the 1980s wrote of the Greenham Common "peace camp" in England that it "brought public awareness to feminist separation and even to lesbianism, hitherto seen in the mass media - when acknowledged at all - either in terms of Eton-cropped androgyny or of pornographic fantasy".

One social historian has observed that "the innocuous woollen jersey, now known [in Britain] as the jumper or the pullover, was the first item of clothing to become interchangeable between men and women and, as such, was seen as a dangerous symptom of gender confusion". Trousers for women, sometimes worn mannishly as an expression of sexuality (as by Marlene Dietrich in the 1930 film, Morocco) also became popular in the 1920s and 30s, as did aspects of what many years later would sometimes be referred to as "shabby chic". Winston Churchill's niece Clarissa was among those who wore a tailored suit in the late 1930s.

Post-Liberation Paris

Café de Flore, Saint-Germain-des-Près, Paris: haunt of post-war bohemians

The "New Look"

After the Second World War Christian Dior's "New Look", launched in Paris in 1947, though drawing on styles that had begun to emerge in 1938-9, set the pattern for women's fashion generally until the 1960s. Harking back in some ways to the Belle Epoque of the late 19th and early 20th centuries - and thus not a "new" look as such (by early 1948, it was simply known as "The Look" in America) - it was criticised by some as excessively feminine and, with its accompanying corsets and rustle of frilled petticoats, as setting back the "work of emancipation won through participation in two world wars". It also, for a while, bucked the trend towards boyish fashion that, as after the First World War, tended to follow major conflicts.

Rive Gauche

American influences had been discouraged in France during the Nazi occupation, but, notably in the form of be-bop and other types of jazz, were strong among intellectual café society in the mid to late 1940s. In 1947, Samedi-Soir lifted the lid on what it called the "troglodytes of Saint-Germain", namely bohemians of the Parisian Left Bank (Rive Gauche) district of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, who appeared to cluster around existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. These included Roger Vadim (who married and launched the career of actress Brigitte Bardot in the 1950s), novelist Boris Vian (since described as "the epitome of Left Bank bohemia, standing at the center of its postwar rehabilitation") and singer Juliette Gréco.

Juliette Gréco

In contrast to the "New Look" (which itself scandalised some Parisennes), the clothes of the post-war bohemians were predominantly black: when Gréco first performed outside Saint-Germain she affronted some of her audience by wearing "black trousers, her bare feet slipped into golden sandals". In old age she claimed that this style of dress arose from poverty:

When I was a teenager in Paris ... I only had one dress and one pair of shoes, so the boys in the house started dressing me in their old black coats and trousers. A fashion was shaped out of misery. When people copied me I found it a little ridiculous, but I didn't mind. It made me smile.

Performing in London over fifty years later, Gréco was described as "still ooz[ing] bohemian style".

Saint-Germain in retrospect

Capturing the spirit of the time, David Profumo has written of how his mother, the actress Valerie Hobson, was entranced by Roger Vadim's flatmate, the director Marc Allégret, while she was filming Blanche Fury in 1947:

Allégret's apparently bohemian lifestyle appealed sharply to her romantic side ... and she revelled in the Left Bank milieu to which he introduced her during script discussions in Paris. There were meals with André Gide, Jean Cocteau and the long-legged Zizi Jeanmaire. For an attractive British woman who felt deprived of attention ... this was an ideal situation for some sort of reawakening.

In 1953, when Hobson starred in the musical The King and I in London, it was apparent that she had retained a mix of chic and Boheminism. A Daily Mirror journalist described her "pale, ladylike looks, her well-bred clothes ... she likes embroidery and painting", while a young Etonian who visited her dressing room recalled that "it had been freshly painted pink and white for her, and was like entering a risqué French apartment". Ten years later, when Hobson's husband, the politician John Profumo, was involved in a sex scandal that threatened to destabilize the British government, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan wrote that "his [Profumo's] wife is very nice and sensible. Of course, these people live in a raffish, theatrical, bohemian society where no one really knows anyone and everyone is "darling"".

Post-war Paris was recalled fondly in 2007 when France introduced a ban on smoking in public places. The aroma of Gauloises and Gitanes was, for many years, thought to be an inseparable feature of Parisian café society, but the owner of Les Deux Magots, once frequented by Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and other writers, observed that "things have changed. The writers of today are not so addicted to cigarettes". A British journalist who interviewed Juliette Gréco in 2010 described Les Deux Magots and the Café de Flore as "now overpriced tourist hotspots" and noted that "chain stores and expensive restaurants have replaced the bookshops, cafés and revolutionary ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's Rive Gauche".

America: the beat generation and flower power

In the United States adherents of the "beat" counter-culture (probably best defined by Jack Kerouac's novel, On the Road, set in the late 1940s, written in 1952 and published in 1957) were associated with black polo-neck (or turtle neck) sweaters, blue denim jeans and sandals. The influence of this movement could be seen in the persona and songs of Bob Dylan in the early to mid 1960s, "road" films like Easy Rider (1969) and the punk-oriented "New Wave" of the mid 1970s, which, among other things, produced a boho style icon in Deborah Harry of the New York band Blondie, whom photographer David LaChapelle has described as "the definition of cool". (However, as with some American musicians of the mid 1960s, such as Sonny and Cher, Blondie came to international prominence only after a tour of Britain in 1978.)

Greenwich Village and West Coast

New York's Greenwich Village was a particular magnet for bohemians in the early sixties. Bob Dylan's girl-friend Suze Rotolo, who appeared with him on the cover of his second album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), recalled that the Village was "where people like me went - people who didn't belong where they came from .. where the writers I was reading and the artists I was looking at had lived or passed through". These "beatniks" (as they came to be known by the late 1950s) were, in many ways, the antecedents of the hippie movement that formed on the West Coast of the USA in the mid 1960s and came to the fore as the first post-war baby-boomers reached the age of majority in the "Summer of Love" of 1967. The Monterey pop festival was a major landmark of that year, which was associated with "flowerpower", psychedelia, opposition to the Vietnam war and the inventive music and flowing, colourful fashions of, among others, Jimi Hendrix, The Mamas & the Papas, Jefferson Airplane and the British group, The Beatles, whose album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, is said to have caused the guru of psychedelia, Timothy Leary, to remark that "my work is finished".

Hippiedom and the Pre-Raphaelites

For men's fashion, the wearing of neckties, which, in the mid 60s had often drawn on 19th century paisley patterns, declined as muttonchop whiskers and teashades (sunglasses) came in: by the time of the Chicago 7 trial (late 1969), hair over the collars had become so commonplace that it was beginning to transcend Bohemian style, taking on mass popularity in the 1970s. The London art dealer Jeremy Maas reflected in the mid 1980s that

there [was] no question that the Hippy [sic] movement and its repercussive influence in England owed much of its imagery, its manner, dress and personal appearance to the Pre-Raphaelite ideal ... It was observed by all of us who were involved with these exhibitions [of pre-Raphaelite paintings] that visitors included increasing numbers of the younger generation, who had begun to resemble the figures in the pictures they had come to see.

Jimmy Page of the British band Led Zeppelin, who collected Pre-Raphaelite paintings, observed of Edward Burne-Jones that "the romance of the Arthurian legends [captured in his paintings] and the bohemian life of the artists who were reworking these stories seemed very attuned to our time", while the author David Waller noted in 2011 that Burne-Jones' subjects "have much in common with the sixties rock chicks and their pop-star paladins".

London in the 1950s

Although the annual Saturday Book recorded in 1956 a view that "London's now nothing but flash coffee bars, with teddies and little bits of girls in jeans", the "Edwardian" ("teddy boy") look of the times did not coincide with Bohemian tastes. For women, the legacy of the "New Look" was still apparent, although hemlines had generally risen as, as one journalist put it in 1963, "photographs of those first bold bearers of the New Look make them seem strangely lost and bewildered, as though they had mistaken their cue and come on stage fifty years late". The Bohemian foci during this period were the jazz clubs and espresso bars of Soho and Fitzrovia. Their habitués usually wore polo necks; in the words of one social historian, “thousands of pale, duffel-coat-clad students were hunched in coffee bars over their copies of Jean-Paul Sartre and Jack Kerouac”. As with the literary phenomenon of the so-called "Angry Young Men" from 1956 onwards, the image was more a male, than a female, one. However, when the singer Alma Cogan wished to mark her success by buying mink coats for her mother and sister, the actress Sandra Caron, the latter asked for a duffel-coat instead because she wanted to be regarded as a serious actress and "a sort of a beatnik".

Continental influences

In Iris Murdoch's novel, The Bell (1958), an art student named Dora Greenfield bought "big multi-coloured skirts and jazz records and sandals". However, as Britain emerged from post-war austerity, some Bohemian women found influences from continental Europe, adopting, for example, the "gamine look", with its black jersies and short, almost boyish hairstyles associated with film actresses Audrey Hepburn (Sabrina, 1954, and as a "Gréco beatnik" in Funny Face, 1957) and Jean Seberg (Bonjour Tristesse, 1957 and A bout de souffle, 1960), as well as the French novelist Françoise Sagan, who, as one critic put it, "was celebrated for the variety of her partners and for driving fast sports cars in bare feet as an example of the free life". In 1961 Fenella Fielding played "a mascara-clad Gréco-alike" in The Rebel with comedian Tony Hancock.

Others favoured the lower-cut, tighter styles of continental stars such as Bardot or Gina Lollobrigida. More generally, European tastes - including the Lambretta motor scooter and Italian and French cuisine, which the widely travelled cookery writer Elizabeth David, herself a bit of a Bohemian, did much to promote - not only began to pervade Bohemian circles, but offered a contrast, from 1955 onwards, with the brasher Americanism of rock 'n' roll, with its predominantly teenage associations.

Hamburg and Beatlemania

In 1960, when the Beatles (then an obscure Liverpudlian combo with five, as opposed to their eventual "fab" four, members) were working in Hamburg, West Germany, they were influenced by a Bohemian "art school" set known as Exis (for "existentialists"). The Exis were roughly equivalent to what in France became known as les beats and included photographer Astrid Kirchherr (for whom the "fifth Beatle" Stuart Sutcliffe left the group) and artist and musician Klaus Voormann (who designed the cover for the Beatles' album Revolver in 1966).

John Lennon's wife Cynthia recalled that Kirchherr was fascinated by the Beatles' "teddy-boy style", but that they, in turn, were "bowled over by her hip black clothes, her avant garde way of life, her photography and her sense of style". As a result the group acquired black leather jackets, as well as fringed hairstyles that were the prototype of the "mop-top" cuts associated with "Beatlemania" in 1963-4. The latter coincided with the revival of the bobbed style for women (as adopted, for example, by singers Cilla Black, Billie Davis and, in America, Bev Bivens of We Five, and fashion designers Mary Quant and Jean Muir). However, when longer blonde hair (associated with, among many others, Julie Christie, Samantha Juste and a fashion model named Lorna McDonald, who, at the end of each edition of the BBC's Dee Time, jumped into Simon Dee's open E-type Jaguar ) came to typify the "sixties" look, advertisers turned to the Bohemian world for inspiration: through its use of herbs, Sunsilk shampoo was said to have "stolen something from the gypsies".

Swinging London

Beatlemania did not of itself create the apparent iconoclasm of the 1960s; however, as one writer put it, "just as Noël Coward and Cole Porter reflected the louche, carefree attitude of the [Nineteen] Twenties, so did the Beatles' music capture the rhythm of breaking free experienced by an entire generation of people growing up in the Sixties". By the middle of the decade, British pop music had stimulated the fashion boom of what Time called “swinging London”. Associated initially with such "mod" designs as Quant’s mini-skirt, this soon embraced a range of essentially Bohemian styles. These included the military and Victorian fashions popularised by stars who frequented boutiques such as Granny Takes a Trip, the "fusion of fashion, art and lifestyle" opened by Nigel Waymouth in the King's Road, Chelsea in January 1966, and, by 1967, the hippie look largely imported from America (although, as noted, London stores such as Biba (1964) had, for some time, displayed dresses that drew on Pre-Raphaelite imagery). The Rolling Stones' Keith Richards, whose early girl friend, Linda Keith, had, in her late teens, been a bohemian force in West Hampstead, noted on the Stones' return from an American tour in 1967 how quickly hippiedom had transformed the London scene.

Victorian imagery

This fusion of influences was discernible in two black-and-white productions for BBC television in 1966: the series Adam Adamant Lives!, starring Gerald Harper as an Edwardian adventurer who had been cryopreserved in time and Juliet Harmer as Georgina Jones, a stylish "mod" who befriended him, and Jonathan Miller's dreamy, rather Gothic production of Lewis Carroll's mid-Victorian children's fantasy Alice in Wonderland (1865). (Confirming the aspiration, Sydney Newman, the BBC's Head of Television Drama in the 1960s, reflected of Adam Adamant that "[they] could never quite get [the] Victorian mentality to contrast with the '60s".)

On the face of it, Carroll (a pseudonym for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) had been a rather conventional and repressed Oxford University don, but he was a keen and artistic photographer in the early days of that medium (taking, among other things, rather bohemian looking pictures of Alice Liddell and other young girls) and he developed an empathy and friendship with several of the Pre-Raphaelites; the sculptor Thomas Woolner and possibly even Rossetti dissuaded him from illustrating Alice himself, a task that was undertaken instead by John Tenniel. The imagery of Alice, both textually and graphically, lent itself well to the psychedelia of the late 1960s. In America, this was apparent in, among other ways, the "Alice happening" in Central Park, New York (1968) when naked participants covered themselves in polka dots and the lyrics to Grace Slick's song "White Rabbit" (1966) - "One pill makes you larger/And one pill makes you small" - that she performed with both the Great Society and Jefferson Airplane, including with the latter at Woodstock in 1969.

Woman in the late 1960s and early 70s

By the late 1960s shops such as Laura Ashley (whose first London outlet opened in 1968) were routinely promoting the "peasant look" and selling a range of "uniquely eccentric clothes ... The magic was being able to step into a 'Laura Ashley' dress and imagine you had found something out of a dressing-up box". At around the same time too, and into the 1970s, the brassière (or bra), which, as noted, had been seen as a liberating innovation in the early part of the century, came to be regarded by some women, such as the English-based Australian academic Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch, 1969), as an unduly restrictive symbol of traditional womanhood. However, the much-publicised incidence of "bra burning" in the 70s tended to be overstated and came to be satirised: for example, in the 1973 film, Carry On Girls. It was also seen by many, including Greer herself, as a distraction from the cause of women's "liberation" and, by the 1980s, the American singer Madonna had turned the bra into a positive, even provocative, fashion statement. Madonna's flamboyant and gritty style was, in turn, a precursor of so-called "girl power" that was associated in the 1990s with various prominent young women (such as singers Courtney Love, who played the 1999 Glastonbury Festival in a headline-grabbing pink bra, and the more commercially oriented Spice Girls) and offbeat television series (Xena: Warrior Princess, Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

Since the 1960s: hippie/boho-chic

Main article: Boho-chic

Strawberry Switchblade in the mid 1980s

Journalist Bob Stanley remarked that "the late 1960s are never entirely out of fashion, they just need a fresh angle to make them de jour". Thus, the features of hippie fashion re-emerged at various stages during the ensuing forty years.

In the mid to late 1980s variants of the short and fundamentally un-Bohemian rah-rah skirt (which originated with cheerleaders) were combined with leather or demin to create a look with some Bohemian or even gothic features (for example, by the singing duo Strawberry Switchblade who took inspiration from 1970s punk fashion). In the 1990s the term, "hippie chic", was applied to Tom Ford’s collections for the Italian house of Gucci. These drew on, among other influences, the style, popular in retrospect, of Talitha Getty (d.1971), actress wife of John Paul Getty and step-granddaughter of Dorelia McNeil, who was represented most famously in a photograph of her and her husband taken by Patrick Lichfield in Marrakesh, Morocco in 1969. Recalling the influx of hippies into Marrakesh in 1968, Richard Neville, then editor of Oz, wrote that "the dapper drifters in embroidered skirts and cowboy boots were so delighted by the bright satin '50s underwear favoured by the matrons of Marrakesh that they wore them outside their denims à la Madonna [the singer] twenty-five years later".

In the early 21st century "boho-chic" was associated initially with supermodel Kate Moss and then, as a highly popular style in 2004-5, with actress Sienna Miller. In America similar styles were sometimes referred to as "bobo-" or "ashcan chic", or "luxe grunge", their leading proponents including actresses Mary-Kate Olsen and Zooey Deschanel. As if to illustrate the cyclical nature of fashion, by the end of the noughties strong pre-Raphaelite traits were notable in, among others, singer Florence Welch and model Karen Elson.