BASIC BLACK

1970.....I had acquired an old 1930's silk velvet dressing gown and an old  black silk French cloche with black maribou feather trim......and fancied myself as a Russian expatriate  artist living in Paris....This was what I called "the year of costuming" as I seldom appeared "out of one costume or another".....favorite outfit?.....peculiarly enough, it was a pair of red,yellow, black and green skin-tight bellbottom trousers worn with a long-sleeved "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts club skin-hugging cotton sweater" over which I wore a sweater vest in identical colors, bearing the "Ritz Cracker" Logo......completed by a pair of yellow, red and black tennis shoes and a beret......the era of "Cosmic Drag"...A friend was so wild about this outfit that I eventually gave it to him, and he wore it incessantly for yet another year, although it was then terribly outre and ill-suited for the new "Disco" look!   [second skin NIKNIK shirts with crotch-squeezing doubleknit bells] The dressing gown became my formal dress attire.....Oddly enough, I never considered my outfits to be particularly unusual, as  even more daring friends like Woody Brooks would, with little self-consciousness,  appear in a Folies Bergere outfit, wearing a 3-Ft. white Marie Antoinette Wig surmounted by a giant white bird cage filled with white doves, which he would release at  fashionable nightclubs {gay bars} to spectacular audience reactions.......When I saw PARTY MONSTER,  it brought back memories of these days of high fashion excesses.....