Vintage Miscellany – April 9, 2017

I love Mary Fritschi’s shoes, but I love her little dog even more. My guess on the date is 1939 or 1940, but it could be earlier, or later.  My thanks to Lynn at American Age Fashion for the photo.  We have a little transcontinental photo exchange going that really makes me happy.

And now, for the news…

•   Debbie Reynolds sold much of her Hollywood costumes collection, but son Todd Fisher still has quite a bit of his mother’s costumes and is putting them on display.
•   This article about costume exhibitions is really interesting.
•   Operation Clothes Moth should provide needed information about how to protect textiles.
•    This CNN piece is about an Indian immigrant whose clothing manufacturing business is providing jobs in New Jersey, but it also shows how the use of technology is so important in maintaining a competitive edge in the  industry.
• “[Clothes] are not about what men want anymore, but about what women want.” 
•  Floundering in the Archives
•   Not only will a Chinese counterfeiter copy your product, he will also steal your photos.
•   A cache of nineteenth century workers’ clothing was found stuffed into the eaves of a house in Maryland.
•   Does it matter what people wear on planes? This was the clothing story of the hour last week, and it seems like everyone had an opinion.  Are leggings somehow indecent? Did it matter that the tickets were free? Should the young ages of the leggings wearers have been considered?  So many questions; so many opinions.
•   Who was England’s first Black and female footballer?
•  Last week there was a bit of a Twitter brewhaha over an article posted on Racked. The article was based heavily on information taken from Alison Matthews David’s research that she wrote about in her book, Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present. The issue taken with the article was that even though there were links to David’s research, nowhere in the article was she cited.  Racked did eventually cite David in the article, but not until after there was an unfortunately defensive back and forth between the writer of the offending article and David’s defenders.

This is not exactly a rare occurrence.  Not too long ago Vogue.com pulled a quote from an interview on my blog without citation. This is why I really do not like to link to big “fashion” sites. The articles on fashion history are rarely written by historians, and seem to be mined from the work of others.  To make the mess even worse, the leading image in the article is of a circa 1870 dress, and the caption has it labeled as 1778.  Quite a few people have pointed out the error in the comments and on Twitter, but the editor obviously trusts Getty Images more than the historians trying to set the record straight.