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In fashion, skirts are as high as an elephant's knee, cleavage has plunged so far down the middle that there is no place to go except around the side, cutouts appear in the darndest places, exposing undiscovered areas from whose bourn no traveling eye willingly returns. When the dress is not cut out, it is transparent. Slacks can and do go anywhere. Even men are abandoning their traditional drabness; tuxedo jackets now come in cerise, vests may be flowered. The New York Herald Tribune's Eugenia Sheppard points out that "vulgar" is no longer a nasty word. "For the last few years there hasn't been an all-out new and exciting fashion that hasn't been just a little vulgar," she says, and quotes an interior decorator to the effect that "there is nothing worse today than a room in good taste."
The tradition of the family continues to decline. While some see it as the individual's last refuge from Big Organization, it has lost much of its cohesiveness—joint vacations for parents and even slightly older children have become a rarity. Paternal authority, long on the wane, is being undermined further. What the doctrines of Freud failed to do to father—and Freud himself is now old hat among the young—the knowledge explosion accomplished. After all, it is difficult to remain the fount of wisdom while the junior members of the family discourse expertly on the new physics. There is little force left in family rulings as to what careers to choose or where to go to school. For that matter, not going to college at all for a year or two—working instead or joining the Peace Corps—does not cause the sky to fall either.
Society used to be one of the chief guardians of tradition, but what was once a fortress is now at best a series of scattered camps. Snobbery will always exist, but it is now on the defensive and increasingly hard to uphold against bright, moneyed or attractive outsiders. The chief question is no longer who belongs to a certain class and who doesn't, but who at a given moment is in or out of a particular clique—and the rule of in-and-out can be more tyrannical than any old-line social arbiter. Parties can mean anything from a small conversational dinner with a string quartet in the next room to taking over a discotheque or having a couple of short-order cooks come in at midnight to make omelettes for 50. The grand, slumbering old men's clubs have lost much of their importance or have taken on alarming new guises: New York City's refurbished Princeton Club, for instance, now evokes Conrad Hilton more than F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The debutante business is still going strong, but almost anyone with a little money can now have a coming out, and if a debutante will choose to forgo her party and take a trip to Kenya instead, not even the caterers will care. Weddings still have the traditional trimmings, including white lace and tears, but many couples now insist on writing their own wedding service or at least varying the hallowed music; the customary wedding marches have begun to give way to Handel's Water Music, Haydn's St. Anthony Chorale, or even Spanish guitar tunes.