Like Natalie, I will be focusing on the Hippie movement that began in the Haigh-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the 1960s. As previously mentioned, this movement focused on a peaceful state of mind and the common theme of one love. There was also an emergence of a new kind of fashion, music, and graphic art (posters) that solidified in correlation with the movement. In addition, there were different kinds of hippies: the visionaries, the freaks and heads, the midnight hippies, and the plastic hippies. These were the people who allowed the outside world an aesthetic view of their lifestyle and political goals. The entire hippie look was based around the idea of the natural; hair, clothing, make up, accessories, etc. However, for the purpose of this paper, I will focus on the reasons why San Francisco as a city was able to foster this movement and allow it to spread cross-country. Among many reasons, San Francisco serves as the creative milieu because of the social context and the people that originally occupied the Haight-Ashbury region. There were many people who were described as “eclectic, visionary, polytheistic, ecstatic, and defiantly devotional.” These characteristics seem extremely important for the Hippie movement in particular. They were experimenting with poetry, theater, and other forms of self-expression. This is just my initial research to get an idea of why San Francisco as a place was able to provide the foundation for this specific movement.
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Aliza Hobish: So many questions pop into my head when I read about this topic. I am really interested in this paper topic because “hippie” is a word so commonly thrown around to this day. Many people of our generation have parents who associated themselves with the hippie movement. I am interested in how this movement became such a sensation and if you find that much of its popularity came out of influence of group mentality. San Fransisco is such a creative hub to so many industries but I am interested how it specifically facilitated what could be considered a political movement. How is it that out of certain shared values and beliefs such a mass of people started to share the same fashion sense, interest in art, and in many cases the habit recreational drug use? I wasn’t aware that there were different categories of hippies so it will be interesting to learn what was common between the different sects and what separated them. The Hippie movement spread across the world but how is it that it came to evolve in San Fransisco specifically? Also, why is it that the people who originally occupy Haight-Ashbury region were described as “eclectic, visionary, polytheistic, ecstatic, and defiantly devotional?” What about this area drew these people in and allowed them to creatively express their beliefs in such a wide spread manner? Did their sense of community extend outside of Sanfransisco and to the rest of the country where the hippie movement was also taking place? Really interesting topic, I hope I
Also- you might try and look into the types of clothing and music that started to become popular and how local stored recreated their consumer products to meet the hippie movements interests. Were any businesses hurt by the movement? What businesses might have profited on it?