Platform Shoes, Flared Trousers & Kipper Ties - So 1960s & 1970s? Er, Not Only... and DISCO Balls?!

Portuguese-Brazilian actress and samba singer Carmen Miranda helped to popularise the platform shoe in the 1930s and 1940s. The 1970s dragged them back as a "new" fashion.

You know, when me and my cousin Sue went round to see our dear grandmother in 1973, Sue wanted to shock. She was teetering on a pair of massive platform shoes and she thought they would stun Gran and draw growls of disapproval from her. But Gran was thrilled: "platform soles! How lovely! I used to wear them! The higher the better!"

Of course, Sue was not happy. "You can't have worn them, Nana, they're a new fashion!"

"I can assure you I did, my duck," said Gran serenely.

And, of course, hard though it was for arrogant youth to envisage, its "brand new fashion" had been around before!

And, in the case of platform shoes, worn by that generation's grandmothers.

Never mind.

'Ah, but we had huge flared trousers!' you 1960s/70s fans chortle.

Just as they did back in the 1930s, we chortle back. 

And kipper ties? Well, once again, one must gaze back towards the 1930s/40s...

It made us laugh a lot when, in the 1990s and early 2000s, numerous fashion pundits hailed '60s/'70s fashion as totally original. No such thing, I'm afraid.

We have two arms, two legs and fashion goes in cycles.

Lovely Carmen with just some of her platforms.

One last word or two: 'Disco Balls'. A retrospective naming in the early 21st Century, once again not actually from the 1970s. Mirror balls have been immensely popular in dance halls for over a century, and they were never called 'disco balls' in the '70s. In fact, coloured lights were more favoured at discos round my way. 

Mirror balls, despite John Travolta stepping out under one in Saturday Night Fever, were often considered 'fogey'. They were a regular feature on the original Come Dancing - which was not a favourite youth programme.

Why do modern day '70s aficionados keep appropriating things that were simply not new for that decade? We know the BBC's I Love The 1970s pedalled an awful lot of inaccuracies, but we have the newspaper archives to reveal the real and actual pop culture now. Time to move on.