A FLARE FOR FASHION

I have a fabulous pair of 1970s green flares in my vintage closet. Bearing a Chelsea Girl label they are high-waisted with three buttons, tight on the hips and behind, and super wide at the bottom. Now, being blessed with a bottom that would rival Beyonce I was rather jealous of Cillian Murphy when I spotted that he was wearing the same pair of trousers in an early scene of Breakfast On Pluto and they didn't stretch and strain the way that they do when I have to spray them on.

He may be a slim-hipped boy but I remember when girls naturally had boyish figures. It is a bit of a chicken and egg condundrum this fashion business. How is it that the gamine ladies of the twenties transformed into the elegant starlets of the thirties, the pin-ups of the forties, the hour-glass beauties of the fifties, and then magically achieved the elfin proportions of the sixties before morphing into the leggy beauty of the seventies? Does the figure follow the fashion, or the fashion follow the figure?