NICOLE RICHIE BOHO HAIR
In the autumn of 2006, The Times' style director Tina Gaudoin observed that "when the women's wear buyer at M[arks] & S[pencer] is quoted saying 'boho is over', you know the trend is well and truly six foot under." Even so, the so-called "folk" look of spring 2007, with its smock tops and flounce hemmed dresses, owed much to boho-chic, while embracing such trends as the re-emergence of the mini-dress: as the Sunday Times put it, "if you are still bemoaning the passing of the gypsy look, then the folk trend could be your saving grace". The Sunday Times cited the 1960s singer Mary Hopkin as influencing the use of bandannas, while, around the same time, Sienna Miller's appearance as sixties "starlet" Edie Sedgwick in the film Factory Girl positioned her once more as a bohemian style icon. London Lite observed in May 2007 that: Sienna Miller's relationship with Рand, for a time, engagement to Рactor Jude Law, after they had starred together in the 2004 film, Alfie, kept both her and her style of dress in the media headlines during 2004-5. In December 2004, Vogue featured Miller on its front cover and described her as "the girl of the year". Later, the ending of her relationship with Law (which resumed temporarily in 2009-10) seemed to signal that boho too was past its peak. In fact, as early as May 2005 the Sunday Times Style magazine had declared that "overexposed" white peasant skirts were "going down" and had advised adherents of boho to "update your boho mojo" by mixing the look with metallic items (anticipating so-called "boho-rock" in 2006) or with layers. By the end of 2005, Miller herself, who claimed later that her boho look was not very original - "I think I'd just come back from travelling or something" - had adopted other styles of dress and her shorter, bobbed hairstyle Рironically a feature of bohemian fashion in the quarter century before World War II Рhelped to define a new trend in 2007. She was quoted in Vogue as saying "no more boho chic ... I feel less hippie. I just don't want to wear anything floaty or coin-belty ever again. No more gilets ...". Even so, in 2008, Miller reflected that Footless tights or "leggings", of which Miller was a proponent, were a contributory factor in the halving of sales of stockings in Britain between 2003 and 2007. By the spring of 2005, boho was almost ubiquitous in parts of London and was invading stores in almost every British high street. Its adherents were sometimes referred to as "Siennas", this eponym even being applied to Miller herself: "Sienna's Sienna-ishness", as Jessica Brinton put it in the Sunday Times in 2007. Features included "floaty" skirts (notably long white ones), furry gilets, embroidered tunics, cropped jackets, large faux-coin belts, sheepskin (UGG) boots and cowboy boots, baggy cardigans and "hobo bags". Demand was so great that there were allegations the following year of some sub-contractors' having used cheap child labour in India for zari embroidery and beading. The boho look, which owed much to the hippie styles that developed in the middle to late 1960s, became especially popular after Sienna Miller's appearance at the Glastonbury Festival in 2004, although some of its features were apparent from photographs of her taken in October 2003 and of others living in or around the postal district of W10 (North Kensington), an area of London associated with bohemian culture since the mid-1950s. In Arthur Conan Doyle's first short story about Holmes for The Strand, Doctor Watson noted that the detective "loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul" and "remained in our lodgings in Baker-street, buried among his old books and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition..". Designer Savannah Miller, elder sister of actress Sienna Miller, described a "real bohemian" as "someone who has the ability to appreciate beauty on a deep level, is a profound romantic, doesn't know any limits, whose world is their [sic] own creation, rather than living in a box". "Boho" is an abbreviation of bohemian. Vanessa Nicholson (granddaughter of Vanessa Bell, one of the pivotal figures of the unconventional, but influential "Bloomsbury Group" in the first half of the 20th century) has described it as a "curious slippery adjective". Although the original Bohemians were travellers or refugees from central Europe (the French boh̩mien translates as "Gypsy or Roma people"), the term has, as Nicholson noted, "attached itself to individuals as disparate as Jesus Christ, Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes". The writer and historian A. N. Wilson remarked that, "in his dress-sense as in much else", Winston Churchill was "pre-First World War Bohemian", his unbleached linen suit causing surprise when he arrived in Canada in 1943. Boho-chic is a style of female fashion drawing on various bohemian and hippie influences, which, at its height in 2004-5, was associated particularly with actress Sienna Miller and model Kate Moss in the United Kingdom and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen and Nicole Richie in the United States. It has been in evidence since the early nineties and, although appearing to wane from time to time, has repeatedly re-surfaced in varying guises. Many elements of boho-chic became popular in the late 1960s and some date back much further, being associated, for example, with pre-Raphaelite women of the mid to late 19th century.
