The Fashion Museum in Bath, England

Posted on June 18, 2013 by Lynn
Bath Fashion Museum

Bath Fashion Museum

On my recent trip to England, I made a side trip to the beautiful small town of Bath primarily to visit its fashion museum.  Of course, I also took in the stunning Georgian architecture of this gem of a town, which is now of the UNESCO list of world heritage sites. But truth be told, it was the reputation of the fashion museum that tempted me, and I was not disappointed.

The museum is located in the basement of the Assembly Rooms in Bath, where Jane Austen promenaded and her characters danced and gambled. What excited me about the museum’s collection is that it includes not only rare examples of designer clothing, but also everyday outfits that normal people wore. For example, the special exhibit “Fifty Fabulous Frocks” marking the fiftieth anniversary of the museum showed not only stunning works by the world’s most famous designers, but also several home made dresses to illustrate what the average woman might have had in her closet.

It wasn’t hard for me to pick a favorite outfit. Since I love champagne, I was particularly taken with this dress designed to look like a Veuve Clicquot bottle worn to a fancy dress ball in 1902.  The museum even located a photo of the unknown owner of the  dress, worn with some alterations. While she is certainly not yet in my preferred age group, she is no spring chicken either.

I was fascinated by the wide range of exhibits, showing items from the eighteenth century to the present, from couture to ready-to-wear, from hats to shoes. There was even a dress up room where you could try on the kinds of undergarments and layers necessary to dress like a stylish nineteenth century woman.  (It made me tired just to consider the process.) While the museum’s website offers a search engine, as of yet it is very modest and does not reflect the depths of its holdings.

Interested in fashion history?  Anywhere near Southern England?  This museum is definitely worth the trip.

 

Posted in 1900s, General | Tagged | 1 Comment

Trying on Hats, 1946

Posted on June 13, 2013 by Lynn
Museum of the City of New York

Museum of the City of New York

Unless you are a female member of the British royal family, hats are not a required wardrobe element these days.  I, for one, am grateful for that.  Consider the time, not to mention the expense, of adding that mandatory final touch.

In this 1946 photo, we see an older woman trying to find the perfect hat, with a friend or relative looking on.  In this go around, she has tried to match her hat with her coat and has put in on at a jaunty forward slopping angle.  Her companion, however, does not look impressed. Perhaps it’s because the hat looks too small for the woman’s large frame.

We don’t get to see what the woman makes of her own choice, since her face is obscured. Instead, in a sly touch, we get a glimpse of the photographer in the mirror.  It is none other than the famous filmmaker Stanley Kubrik, who got his start in photography.

Posted in 1940s, General | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Remembering Edna

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Lynn

A young acquaintance recently sent me this remembrance of her grandmother:

Alix1“My grandmother was the most elegant woman I’ve ever known. She was always dressed to the nines, right up until the day she died at age 90. She made almost all of her own clothes herself, and she sewed a lot of clothes for her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. I have fond memories of sitting in her closet going through all of her patterns in paper envelopes. She made both outfits in these photos — one is from 1980 (the photo taken outside) and one is from a bit later, around 1990 (the one inside). The latter was taken while she was tap dancing in my house. She must have been almost 80 years old there!

Alix2Her name was Edna. She was born in 1911 in Missouri and moved to Long Beach when she was a teenager. She raised four boys (my father is the youngest) and she always talked about how she wanted a little girl, but she had plenty of granddaughters and great-granddaughters whom she loved dearly. Granny would spoil us with Easter dresses, Halloween costumes, and all kinds of amazing handmade clothes. She wore high heeled pumps every single day and she sang in her church choir every week. It’s been over a decade since she passed, but I will always remember Granny for her elegance, class, and compassion, and of course for her clothes, which she always made with love.”

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Cassie and Jennie, 1932

Posted on June 7, 2013 by Lynn

CassieJennie32A handwritten message on the back of this photo gives me names and dates, and I know that it comes from my stepfather’s family.  Unfortunately, there is no one left to tell me who Cassie and Jennie were. I do not even know their relationship to one another. Is this a mother-daughter photo? The woman on the left is holding on to the younger woman’s arm, perhaps for stability in lieu of a cane. Given their gloves, hats, and lightweight coats, I’m wondering if perhaps this is an Easter portrait.  The hats and the cuts of their coats still have a 1920s flavor to them, even though a new decade had begun. The older woman’s clothes look especially dated, in her cloche hat and wide-collared coat with a single button closure.

The photo’s composition tells a story. The older woman is dressed almost entirely in dark colors, with only a printed sliver of her blouse and a few hints of silver to relieve her somber look.  Posed in the back, it looks as if she knew her time was coming to an end.  The middle aged woman in the front is dressed entirely in lighter colors, with just a hint of darkness in the necklace around her neck.  She moves forward towards us while her companion moves back.

Posted in 1930s | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

A Tale Told Through Shoes

Posted on June 4, 2013 by Lynn

Jetticks2Ad65This ad for Enna Jetticks shoes from 1965 reminded me of a section of the book The Thoughtful Dresser by novelist and fashion writer, Linda Grant. “I can think of nothing worse than to have been a middle aged woman who loved fashion in the 1960s, because fashion hated middle-aged women.” (146) If the middle-aged felt left out, then what about the elderly?

The message in this ad was (I think) supposed to be positive: If you are older, all you have to do is change your shoes (and your outfit, your stockings, and the size of your ankles and calves) and you would look up to date.  But there is a more sinister undertone as well. If you aren’t with the fashion program, somehow you aren’t a woman anymore.

All of us know the transformative power of fashion, but there is a limit to the magic new shoes can perform.  Older women wore sensible lace up shoes for a reason; they provided stability and protected them from falling. Would any of them been inspired to change their footwear after seeing the ad?  Or would they simply have assumed that the current styles had passed them by?

 

Posted in 1960s | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Dress Up Clothes from the 1920s

Posted on June 1, 2013 by Lynn
Vogue, 1924 and 1927

Vogue, 1924 and 1927

It is hardly a surprise that the new film version of The Great Gatsby includes almost no older women, unless you count a brief scene with Daisy’s mother. After all, this is a book and a film about young people in the 1920s. Although a few older men have parts as movers and shakers, the lives and styles of older women are not up for consideration.

Given my preoccupations, the film made me consider how hard it is to find photographs of the older set in evening dress from that decade. Then I remembered Elsie de Wolfe, the much photographed actress, decorator, and socialite who loved designer clothes.  In a relationship with a woman for decades, she suddenly decided to marry an English lord in in 1926, when she was well into her fifties, thus transforming herself from Miss de Wolfe into Lady Mendl.

Take a look at her simple beaded gown, with unusual beaded straps at her wrist.  Apparently her pearls were famous.  And in her second outfit, when she was already Lady Mendl, she shows off her love of fur.  Are those perhaps fur trimmed pants?  I think she would have made a stir at one of Jay Gatsby’s parties.

 

 

 

Posted in 1920s | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Irene Saltern’s Archive

Posted on May 28, 2013 by Lynn
Special Collections, University of California Irvine

Special Collections, University of California Irvine

German American designer Irene Saltern (a merging of her maiden name Stern and her married name Salinger) is not well known today, but she was an important creator of California sportswear from the 1940s through the 1970s. Her life story is documented in her personal archive recently acquired by the University of California, Irvine. Born in a well-off Jewish family in Berlin in 1911, she came into adulthood just as Hitler took power. Her husband, a judge, lost his job under the new laws that excluded Jews from civil service. That made her the main earner for the household and she used her education in art and fashion to work as a journalist and fledgling designer. Interesting letters, photos and artifacts document this stage of her life, including many press passes and her 1935 German passport, complete with a swastika on the cover.

Through the help of family friend Albert Einstein, Saltern and her husband came to the United States in 1937. They settled in Los Angeles and she quickly found her feet in the fashion industry. In her first job with Republic Pictures, she traveled around the country giving lectures about the movies and fashion design.  In the publicity, she was listed as a “Parisian designer,” at best an exaggeration.  In 1938, she became a costume designer for her first film. During the next five years, she worked as a freelancer, moving from studio to studio.  Her husband’s letters to relatives make it sound like a difficult job: “Reni has to work very hard, sometimes more than 20 hours a day.”  The archive includes many drawings of her costumes as well as still photos from films

In the early 1940s, Saltern made a big move from costume to fashion design.  She took a position with Hollywood Premiere, one of the many sportswear companies designing clothes for a more casual lifestyle. She moved from there to Tabak of California, where she made a name for herself as a designer of coordinated separates called “Tabak Tie-Ins.” According to papers in her archive, these mix and match outfits were so successful that they were featured on television and one set was even acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In the mid 1950s, she briefly had her own label “Irene Saltern of California,” part of TomBarry Industries.  After that she moved on to many different companies, continuing to design until she retired in the seventies.  You can see of some of her designs in the guest post I wrote for The Vintage Traveler.

Special Collections, University of California Irvine

Special Collections, University of California Irvine

When Saltern began her California career, the sportswear industry was synonymous with youth. However, she quickly realized that her clothes needed to appeal to a broader (and older) audience as well. In an interview for California Apparel News in 1966, she said that she designed clothes for women aged 25 to 50. “These women have money to spend. They have cultured taste and abhor gimmicks. They exercise and watch their diets so they have streamline figures.  This past-girl is proud she is still young and has her figure and lots of pep and energy, but she isn’t as faddish as the girl in her teens or early 20s.”

Saltern wore her own designs throughout her long life. These two photos show her in her mid fifties wearing dresses she designed for the label Phil Rose of California.  Perhaps she was living out a prediction that she made in the 1966 article: “There is no such thing as an older woman today.”

Posted in 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s | Tagged , | 3 Comments

The Lace-Up Oxford Revisited

Posted on May 24, 2013 by Lynn

BarbaraOxfords3My husband and I were recently in Los Angeles for a play, August Wilson’s amazing Joe Turner’s Come and Gone at the Mark Taper Forum.  Since LA traffic is so unpredictable, we always leave a lot of extra time for the trip. That gives us a chance to walk around before the show and take note of what people are wearing.

These fabulous tri-colored lace-up oxfords caught my eye, part of my ongoing fascination with the sensible shoe style of the past. In a new step for me, I stopped to talk to the woman wearing them and asked permission for my husband to take her photograph.  That gave me a chance to meet Barbara, a Brooklyn native who moved to California when she was twelve. When I tried to explain the purpose of my blog, she told me that she did not feel disadvantaged by the clothing industry, even though their target audience was mainly younger women. Instead she looked around and bought her clothes from many different sources. The beautiful silk jacket and gabardine pants came from her closet.  The shoes, from a favorite brand Fidji, she found on line.

I love her polished menswear-inspired style, and especially how her clothes and accessories pick up the colors of her shoes in a subtle way. Annie Hall, all grown up.

Posted in 2010s | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Nana Macdonald

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Lynn

My blog’s first guest post is by Donna M. Macdonald.  She offers this remembrance of her paternal grandmother, who lived most of her life in Watertown, Massachusetts.  Donna is the beauty and style writer for GoLocalProv.com and lives in Wickford, Rhode Island. She also blogs at alovelyinconsequence.blogspot.com.

MacDonaldRecently my brother shared some old family slides and as a beauty/fashion writer, the images of my grandmother, Anne Macdonald (1904-1987), were particularly interesting to me. However nonchalant she may have been about it, she had great panache. She never read Vogue or other fashion magazines, and was raised as any good first generation Italian girl – she learned cooking, sewing, and knitting at home out of necessity. Delightfully, I discovered her classic style measures up today in many ways even though at the time, I only saw her as an older person. She was never “young” to me because our lives overlapped only 30 years.

In this photograph she is sitting beside my grandfather at about age 72, in a polyester blend dress I remember as her 1970’s dress up outfit.  I love the peach chiffon scarf wrapped about her neck and I think it was a great choice with the grey and taupe paisley stripes on her dress.

She is also wearing her signature silver cuff that a beloved brother brought her from India, after WWII. The bracelet had 40 silver beads which jangled enchantingly, and she wore it every time she got dressed up. As well, the small screw on pearl earrings, and her classic platinum pave diamond ring, barely seen.

My grandmother sewed most of her own dresses as she felt anything bought in the shops was usually inferior. She also knit her own sweaters. I can see her in a Liberty print shift made on her black enamel Singer, along with a pastel mohair cardigan tossed chicly across her shoulders. The sweaters almost always had mother-of-pearl buttons, and she always carried a beautiful leather satchel style handbag. Her Ray-Bans and raspberry lipstick completed her look.

I love recalling her Barbizon nightgowns with matching robes, as bed clothes were just as important to her as day clothes. She always bought the best things she could afford on my grandfather’s furniture salesman salary, and was very frugal and discerning.

As for beauty, my grandmother’s routine was partly learned from her mother’s old country ways, such as tar soap for hair washing and olive oil for moisturizing. But she also loved Pacquins hand cream, and kept a pretty bottle of Lily of the Valley scent on her dresser.

She had an approach to style – self-created and perhaps unawares, but it was simple and timeless and she always looked wonderful.

Posted in 1970s | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

A Stylish Librarian in Black and White

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Lynn

ChristinaI love libraries. Even in this age of online resources, document delivery services, and tablets, I love going into the library stacks and wandering around. That’s why I was happy to give a talk at my university’s library on the resources available there to study the history of fashion. That includes archival sources, like the recently acquired Irene Saltern collection (I’ve written about it here), online resources like the complete Vogue magazine, and a wonderful collection of books.

At the talk was Christina, a reference librarian whom I have long admired for her free spirited approach to fashion. She was wearing a polka dot ensemble in black and white.  Her jewelry and her glasses are also a part of the theme. Here is what she says about her style: She wears colors that flatter her hair color and skin tones, including a lot of black and white; she aims be comfortable at work without looking dowdy; and she chooses age appropriate styles, while still daring to be adventurous. (Although it’s hard to see in this i-phone photo, she has on knee length shorts which I consider an adventurous step.)

I asked her specifically about her glasses, because I know she has many pairs. Her secret—LA Eyeworks’ annual sale.

 

Posted in 2010s | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment