The Thread Count: A Fashionable History Of Wrestling Hippies

Via WWE

In last week’s inaugural edition of The Thread Count, With Spandex’s dedicated pro wrestling fashion column, Danielle Matheson and I took a look at the history of wrestling hillbillies, from its early days where everyone was dressed like a Country Bear to today, where it’s mostly people in Confederate flag shorts yelling about gays.

This week’s edition will be taking a look at wrestling hippies. Via Wikipedia:

The hippie (or hippy) subculture was originally a youth movement that arose in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world. The word ‘hippie’ came from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into New York City’s Greenwich Village and San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. The origins of the terms hip and hep are uncertain, though by the 1940s both had become part of African American jive slang and meant “sophisticated; currently fashionable; fully up-to-date.” The Beats adopted the term hip, and early hippies inherited the language and countercultural values of the Beat Generation. Hippies created their own communities, listened to psychedelic music, embraced the sexual revolution, and used drugs such as cannabis, LSD, and psilocybin mushrooms to explore altered states of consciousness.

To clarify, a modern wrestling hipster is a wrestler who pisses off average people by doing and wearing what is popular now. A wrestling hippie is a wrestler who pisses off average people by doing and wearing what was popular 40 years ago.