Reveling in the fleeting moment of “now,” paper dresses of the 1960s offered a shiny new page of futuristic simplicity during fashion’s most tumultuous decade. An unlikely marriage of avant-garde design and the promotional arms of corporate paper manufacturers, they were also testament to a society-wide belief in the utopian fruits of technology. Drawing a bead on pomposity, “Generation Paper: A Fashion Phenom of the 1960s” opens today at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), in New York.
The exhibition originated at the Phoenix Art Museum (PAM), where it began to take shape in 2021, after Phoenix collector Kelly Ellman presented the museum with more than 80 paper garments—mostly unworn, often in their original packaging. She’d amassed them over 30 years, buying from other collectors as well as from specialty stores and the online market.
