Irwin Silver put a dress in a can, gave it a frenchified name, and then sold these for $25 a pop. This was back in 1966, and it was a marketing gimmick about as cynical as you might guess. Silver was cashing in on the mid-1960s fad for anything canned, and he figured that if people were stupid enough to buy canned air (i.e. an empty can), perhaps they'd also buy a canned dress. Apparently he sold around 100,000 of them.
More info from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch - Dec 14, 1966:
Everything's packaged in cans these days, even candles and air. But the newest tinned item to roll into stores is "Le Canned Dress," the bright idea of sportswear manufacturer Irwin Silver.
"I was being driven crazy by cans," he says. "Every time I turned around, I seemed to bump into a can. First I saw canned candles, then someone gave me a tin of canned air. I began to wonder why dresses couldn't be put up the same way."...
The fashions produced by Silver's company, Wippette, each weigh 4½ ounces, come packed in gay one-pound cans and are tagged with silver labels designed to look like the top of a can."
Some examples of fish bowls (with live fish) incorporated into fashion:
In 1954, Kathleen Radel created fish bowl earrings containing live guppies.
The Pittsburgh Press - Apr 4, 1954
More recently, London fashion designer Cassandra Verity Green included a goldfish handbag in her "Neptune's Daughter" collection of knitwear.
And finally, there's the Japanese artist Eijiro Miyama who's known for riding around on his bicycle wearing, among other things, fish bowl earrings that contain live goldfish.
Paper clothing — a fashion fad of the 1960s. It was disposable consumer culture taken to an extreme. Wear your clothes once or twice, and then just throw them away instead of washing them.
Paper clothing, in the form of women's dresses and other clothes made from disposable cellulose fabric, was a short-lived fashion novelty item in the United States in the 1960s...
By 1967, paper dresses were sold in major department stores for about $8 apiece, and entire paper clothing boutiques were set up by companies such as Abraham & Straus and I. Magnin. At the height of demand, Mars Hosiery made 100,000 dresses a week. Other items made of paper included underwear, men's vests, bridal gowns (expensive at $15), children's pinafores ("just the thing for ever-sprouting sprouts") and even rain coats and bikinis ("good for two to three wearings")...
But as the novelty appeal of paper clothes wore off, their downsides became more apparent: they were generally ill-fitting and uncomfortable to wear, their garish colors could rub off, they were often flammable, and of course they very soon ended up as waste. By 1968, paper clothing had disappeared from the market.
I'm a bit surprised these anti-mosquito leggings never (to my knowledge) caught on, because if they actually worked then who cares if they looked dorky. Then again, I suppose DEET had already been discovered.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.