Fashioning Expo ’67 opens at McCord Museum

The McCord Museum bills itself as’ Montreal’s Museum of Social History’ and the show that opened yesterday captures a special time in Canada through the lens of fashion.

Expo ’67, the international fair that welcomed the world to Montreal for Canada’s centennial year, was a huge success. It was a high point for the city of Montreal, and a great event in Canada’s history.

Hemlines made headlines

Now, fifty years later, in Canada’s Sesquicentennial year, the McCord is showcasing some of the smaller elements that went into making up that great experience, by displaying the fashion and style that became an iconic part of many people’s memories.

Head of Collections and Research, and Curator of Costumes and Textiles at the McCord Museum, Cynthia Cooper says “it was really exhilarating, it was a lot of fun” working on this exhibit. She says there hasn’t been a lot written about fashion at Expo.

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The research took Cooper and her team into many archives, as she says “people didn’t really think of putting aside things or documents that had to do with fashion”. She says they read a lot of newspapers and magazines from 1966 and 1967 to see what people were talking about at the time.

“Expo encouraged in every creative field sort of a re-thinking of the current way of doing things and proposing new ways of doing things.” Cooper says.

“One of the most exciting sources for information was the people who actually had been involved in fashion at the time”. Cooper says four of the five designers who had distinguished themselves at the time are still alive.

Michel Robichaud, having created the iconic blue and white outfits of the Expo hostesses went on to become one of the favourites of the time Cooper explains.

He designed outfits for hostesses in several of the pavilions along with many of the outfits for the wives of dignitaries.

“It was really one very bright, shining, optimistic moment of great pride that’s definitely worth remembering.”

The hostesses in the American pavillion wore outfits designed by Bill Blass.

Sorelle Fontana designed for the Italian pavillion.

Roger Nelson designed the outfits for the hostesses in the British Paviliion and those made headlines!

“The pavillion commissioner announced that those women would have the shortest skirts on the site in keeping with the swinging London-look of Carnaby Street. And he even described the length, he said it would be four inches above the knee, and he thought that was a little longer than what they were wearing in England but he was afraid of shocking Canadians.” Cooper says.

Meanwhile, at the Bell Telephone pavillion, designer Michel Robichaud was instructed not to make the dresses too fitted so the hostesses would not be a distraction as they narrated their scripts!

“My hope is that people will learn who our key designers were… and how fashion at Expo really contributed to what that event was”, says Cooper. “It was really one very bright, shining, optimistic moment of great pride that’s definitely worth remembering.”