Nothing he could ever do would make me hate him, BUT...

Coaster Punchman is one of the loves of my life. And for twenty years, every time one of us does something that might annoy the other, we remind each other that nothing we could ever do would make us hate each other. But this time, CP has gone to far. Baby's coming out of the corner swinging, my friend.

Mr. Punchman had the audacity to criticise the fashions and hairstyle of Dirty Dancing. He claims they are not authentic. That the movie does not look like it is taking place in 1963. This criticism is a thinly veiled insinuation that this movie is not perfect, and THAT is simply not so. Easily one of the greatest movies of all time, or at least one of the top 10 dance movies of the last 20 years.

And where exactly do you come by this erroneous conclusion, sir? I submit the following to you:
- The summer of 1963 looked much more like 1959 than 1969.
- Crew cuts and various versions of bouffants were the hairstyles of the day for the fashionable.
- A young liberal Jewish teen like Baby would not care for this, and would be ahead of her time with folksy, hippie looking clothing. She is planning to join the newly formed Peace Corps, after all.
- Men's fashions for the affluent or stylish consisted of suits, skinny ties, knit sweater-polos and the like.
- The mini-skirt, nowhere to be found until 1965 in popular mainstream fashion, was nowhere to be seen. Instead, well-bred women were not seen in public in skirts above the knee.
- Jackie Kennedy fashion was the dominant in style, but casual clothes still consisted of shirtwaist dresses and the like.

Fashions from the 1963 Sears catalog

- This is, of course, a summer camp, and people would not be wearing their finest clothes at all times.
- And the dirty dancers, well, they're poor kids from the other side of the tracks. We all know they can't follow fashion as well as the wealthy. Therefore the fact that they're dressed like the Lords of Flatbush and their girlfriends is actually pretty realistic.

See? Hoodlums. There.

- And Patrick Swayze's mullet is really just a growing out duck tail.

And finally, here is historic footage from eight months later, in early 1964...tell me that the crowd does NOT look very much like the extras in Dirty Dancing. Of course, the band's haircuts were scandalous, so they're nothing to go by.