c. 1970s Vintage GEOFFREY BEANE Designer Beene Bag Pom Pom Dress

Adorable and iconic c. 1970s Vintage GEOFFREY BEANE Designer "Beene Bag" Pom Pom Dress made of a paper bag brown coloured 100% soft cotton twill with turquoise and hot pink trim. The covetable Beene Bag dress was likely released in 1971-74 along with his other pieces from this label. The shoulder straps have attached pom poms and are adjustable on one side. The dress has no closures but has pockets and belt loops to draw the waist in (but no belt was found with the dress). Aside from some stain freckles on the skirt in three places, this comfy and covetable designer dress is in very good vintage condition. Laid flat, it measures 34" bust, 38" waist, 46" hips, 46" Length (which may adjust as strap is adjusted.

More on Geoffrey Beene from his New York Times obituary:

Geoffrey Beene, a single-minded innovator who put fashion above commerce yet succeeded in making a business from originality,

Mr. Beene was American fashion's most paradoxical designer: a technician who stood shoulder to shoulder with the great French couturiers; a modernist who consistently defied those technical conventions; a Southern gentleman who found converts among New York's high priestesses of art and society yet refused to kowtow to the industry's bible, Women's Wear Daily, with which he had a long feud.

Whereas other Seventh Avenue designers adapted their clothes to fads or sought out highfalutin references to give them a veneer of significance, Mr. Beene approached the problems of design — chiefly, the problem of how to put fabric on the human body — with the blinkered enthusiasm of an artist. He was interested only in his own evolution.

In the early 1970's, Mr. Beene effected a radical change in his thinking. Until then, he had been largely a product of Seventh Avenue, of its biases and commercial values. He had achieved modest success with stiff, structured dresses that had a high waistline, a paper-doll silhouette that was widely copied, and he won attention for designing, in 1967, the high-necked princess-line dress that Lynda Bird Johnson wore at her wedding to Charles S. Robb.

Stung by criticism from the writer Kennedy Fraser, who complained in The New Yorker that his pretty dresses resembled "concrete," Mr. Beene began to look for lighter ways to construct clothes, a search that would preoccupy him until the end of his life. Although he became known for such shapes as the bolero and the streamlining jumpsuit, and for proposing seemingly illogical combinations of fabric — the fancy with the naïve — his real achievement was to address the three-dimensional quality of the body."
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