Fashion Goes Around and Comes Around

I really didn’t think I’d be writing about sweaters in April, but much of the northern United States has had a bit of snow, and it is even predicted here in the southern mountains later this week.  The way I see it, anytime is right for a fantastic sweater like the one above.  I took this photo at the DAR Museum in Washington, DC several years ago.  Even though this was a sports piece, the sleeve style is pure fashion, and dates this fabulous sweater to the mid 1890s.

You would think that such an extreme style would have had its moment in the sun, never to be seen again, but it seems to me that all fashion is at sometime recycled.

I spotted this 1980s sweater recently at the Goodwill Outlet.  The puffed sleeved sweater was not unusual in the 80s; I had one myself.  What I found to be most interesting was the tight lower part of the sleeve.  My photo is sort of pitiful, but imagine this sweater on a body.  Though not nearly as extreme, the effect would be the same as the 1890s sweater.

I don’t think I would have not made the connection if not for my recent reading of Dressed for the Photographer by Joan Severa.  Suddenly I’m seeing 19th century influences everywhere.  It just goes to show the power of reading, and looking at lots of wonderful old photographs, to improve one’s eye.

In the latest issue of Dress – The Journal of the Costume Society of America, there was a tribute to Joan Severa, who died in 2015.  Colleagues often referred to her as “Joan Perservera” because once started, she would simply not give up on a project.  Seeing as how she spent almost twenty years working on Dressed for the Photographer, I’d say it was a very accurate moniker!

Currently Reading: Vintage Inspired Fiction

Those of you who have been reading The Vintage Traveler for a while might guess that I’m really not a reader of fiction.  It’s true, I’d rather read a great book about history than an historical novel, but I have a deep appreciation for a well-written novel, and my name is on the pre-order list for Go Set a Watchman.

That said, I’ve always had a problem with novels that have been written for the niche market, “people who like old clothes.”  I get the feeling that the writer did some market research, realized that a lot of people who like old clothes also like to read, and set about crafting a book for that market.  So in spite of my misgivings, I knew I had some hand surgery recovery time coming up so I bought the book above at the Goodwill, and I agreed to read another as a possible review.  I needed something light that would not be hard to catch up with if it put me to sleep.

A Vintage Affair is about a woman who owns a vintage clothing store.  She’s probably the luckiest vintage clothing store owner ever because lovely things just fall into her lap quite easily.  The inventory of the store sounds like a who’s who of British fashion and French couture: a 1957 Hardy Amies gown, a Balmain gown from the early 1960s, a Thea Porter kaftan, a Mary Quant dress, a Balenciaga coat,  a Jacques Fath coatdress, a Norman Hartnell cocktail dress, and on and on and on.  It’s an inventory most museums would envy, and it’s very unlikely that a small store would have all these treasures.

So without going into the story line except to say the main character finds love and resolves her guilt issues, let’s just say that unless you like designer name-dropping and the occasional fashion history lesson (such as, Marilyn Monroe was buried in her favorite Pucci) you probably want to skip this one.

I looked at book sites and realized that there are quite a few chick-lit books about vintage clothing store owners, most of whom double as solvers of mysteries.

The second book, The Dress Thief, actually has quite a bit to offer.  The book is set in 1937 Paris, and is concerned with the couture industry.  As the title suggests, this book is about the very real problem of fashion design theft that Elizabeth Hawes wrote about in her wonderful Fashion is Spinach in 1938.

The main character works for a fictional designer, and financial worries tempt her into stealing his designs and passing them on to someone who passes them on to a Seventh Avenue manufacturing business in New York.  After much hand-wringing, our heroine resolves her guilt issues and finds true love.  Unfortunately for her the book ends in 1939 and she is Jewish, but that’s for another book, I suppose.

Evans manages to skillfully merge the real and the imaginary with references to people like Chanel and Vionnet.  A person not familiar with fashion history would have a hard time telling who is real and who is not, were it not for the handy author’s note in the back of the book.

There is a disturbing scene where the main character is victim of something very similar to a date rape.  It made me squirm, but then I don’t need gratuitous sex in my books.

If you love pre-WWII history and fashion, you will find The Dress Thief to be of interest.  It really does help to know a bit about the era in understanding some of the plot lines.

I was given an e-book of The Dress Thief by the publisher.

Quote of the Week

It also seems to me that there’s an unjustified amount of pressure on designers to make youthful clothes. No one wants to be called boring or dated, but the relentless insistence on youth actually seems to be hindering imagination.

I’d like to personally welcome Cathy Horyn back to fashion journalism.  With statements like the one above she cuts to the heart of what bugs so many women over the age of thirty-five about fashion.  Why is “fashion” geared to the young, when it is the older women who possess most of the means to indulge in clothes?

Even if you do not follow the fashion world, it is important to know that there are an increasing number of critics who can see that fashion will not truly be “democratic” until older women can picture themselves wearing the clothing that goes down the runways.

Sure, I want to be thrilled by great design, challenging ideas, even offensive ideas. I’m all for that. But my mind is equally open to clothes that are simply beautiful, that have an easy and inhabited and ageless quality.

Let’s hope the designers and manufacturers are listening.

Currently Reading – Hijacking the Runway

I discovered the writings of Teri Agins years ago after picking up a copy of her 1999 book, The End of Fashion.  Subtitled How Marketing Changed the Clothing Business Forever, that book was a look at how fashion resources were being put more into selling clothes than in creating them.  In an interesting way the book foretold the rise of fast fashion.

Now Agins has tackled the issue of celebrity “designers”.  Starting with the incredible success of Jessica Simpson, Agins tells about the rise of the celebrity label, and how being a “brand” has become so important in the fashion business.

Not that celebrity labels are new.  In the 1930s many celebrities from Amelia Earhart to Shirley Temple had their names on clothes.  I have a 1940s dress with a Dorothy Lamour label, and the Gloria Swanson Forever Young label is quite commonly found today. In the 1960s model Twiggy had her name on a label.

But no time in fashion memory has the celebrity label been what it is today.  And it’s not just the labels.  Celebrities are usually featured on the covers of fashion and women’s magazines.  Celebrities are paid to sit in the most desirable seats in the trade shows otherwise known as fashion weeks. And what celebrity does not have his or her own fragrance?

Agins tells how some celebrities, like Simpson, have been wildly successful.  On the other hand, she examines why others, like Kayne West, have struggled.

So have fashion designers taken a back seat to the celebrity brands?  In many cases yes, but savvy designers like Michael Kors have taken a page from the celebrity manual and have built celebrity-like brands themselves.  Kors was able to do this through his appearances on Project Runway.  It can be argued that Kors is the Project Runway grand prize winner, with his brand going public in 2011 with a value of $3 billion.  It is currently worth around $20 billion.

This is my favorite kind of book – one that not only reveals certain things that might not be obvious to a casual observer of the fashion world, but that also gives the reader plenty of food for thought.

Making a Scarf Top, and Thoughts on Copying

Today I’m going to show how easy the Vera Jollytop would be to replicate, but first, a few words about copyright and fashion copying.

In the United States, there is no copyright protection for fashion design.  The reasoning is that clothes are basic, useful items, and as such cannot be copyrighted.  Even though the Council of Fashion Designers of America, led by Diane von Furstenberg, has made attempts to get legislation passed, it has come to nothing.

There is rarely anything in fashion that is actually “new.”  Designers visit and revisit the past, and each other on a regular basis.   Can anyone claim ownership of a French cuff, or a ruffled hem, or a bateau neckline?  It just isn’t possible, and because of this freedom to pick and choose design elements, creativity is fostered.

Of course, the lack of protection also allows companies to make cheap versions of expensive goods.  This is the type of copying that the CFDA opposes.  I suppose that if I were Diane von Furstenberg  selling a $3000 dress, I’d be pretty irritated about seeing a copy of it selling for $60 at some fast fashion store.

I think it is interesting that copying by the home sewer seems to be above this criticism.  Designers have been selling their designs to pattern companies for many decades, and for the price of a pattern and some nice fabric, the home sewer can have her own Givenchy or Diane von Furstenberg or Dior.

But note that there is a copyright symbol next to the Vera signature on my top.  The protection was granted for Vera’s artwork, not for the design of the top.  Vera got copyright protection for all her scarf designs, a protection that is still owned by the Vera Company.  Simply put, it is okay to copy the blouse, but not the art on the blouse.

To copy this scarf top, you need two scarves the same size.  Mine is made from 20 inch squares, which fits about a 36″ bust.  The back and front of mine are identical, but that is not really necessary.  Someone has a similar scarf top on etsy that she made using two Vera scarves with the same colorway, but with different designs.

This is the basic layout of the top.  Place the two scarves right sides together, with the correct top and bottom orientation.  I’ve put in the stitching lines at the shoulders, the sides and for the drawstrings.

Click

This diagram has the measurements for the 20 inch scarf added.  Of course, you’ll have to make adjustments if you use a larger or smaller size.

There is a 4 1/4 tuck taken on the front 1 1/4 inch down from the neckline.  That is to make the front a little lower than the back, and helps prevent choking!

The shoulder seam is sewn between a point 4 1/2 inches on the top side, and 1 1/2 inch down the side.  That leaves a neck opening of 11 inches.

The side seam starts 9 inches down from the top, and is 6 inches long.  That gives a sleeve opening of 7 1/2 inches.

The casing for the drawstrings is sewn directly below the side seams on both front and back.  The area below the side seams is left open.  They used strips of bias seam binding to make the casing and also to make the strings, which are 32 inches long.

Any questions?  Let me know if you decide to make this one.  There is nothing hard about it, just be sure to adjust the measurements for your own needs.

The best explanation of fashion and copyright I’ve ever seen is in an old TEDTalk by Johanna Blakley.

Trends

 © Pantone LLC

“Trend” seems to be the word of the week for me.   First, Pantone released their color of the year, Radiant Orchid.  I generally don’t pay much attention to things like “the color of the year,” but I’d just finished listening to a segment on NPR’s Planet Money that talked about how color trends are determined.

The segment was part of a project the program has been undertaking to track the development and production of a tee shirt.  In last week’s Vintage Miscellany I posted a composite website they put together that tells about what they learned, but all summer and fall they did segments.  Thanks to Lynn Mally, I discovered the other programs.

In choosing the colors for the Planet Money tee shirts, the company who managed the manufacturing, Jockey, consulted a color trend manual.  There are groups, like Pantone, I suppose, that track colors as they emerge in things featured in the news.  For instance, the color forecasters noticed that due to a recent sell of one of his paintings, the colors used by artist Frank Stella in his protractor series were becoming familiar to the public.  The more people see a color, the more they tend to see it as new and popular.

So the Planet Money pink came directly from a Frank Stella painting.

Another encounter with trends came from a book I’m reading, The Power of Style, by Annette Tapert and Diana Edkins.  This book has been around since 1994, and I read it then, but I found a copy in a thrift store recently so I added it to my library and decided to reread it.

I was reading about Millicent Rogers, and how she varied the way she dressed depending on where she was living.  In 1936 she moved to Austria, and took up elements of Tyrolean costume in her dress.  She would go to Paris, mixing her Schiaparellis with Austrian peasant costume.  Before long other women, including the influential Wallis Simpson, were doing the same.  Next thing you know, this was a full blown trend.  Of course, there were probably other factors, including the exposure Germanic folk dress received during the 1936 Olympic Games which were held in Berlin.

Still, it was good food for thought.

A side note:  The color trends program was done in response to criticism that the woman’s tee shirt was to be made in pink, a color that many consider to be “girly”.  Many thought it to be  stereotypical and patronizing.  It’s true that the men’s shirt would never have been made in pink, and it is also interesting that the program did not really address the issue.

Bates Fabrics and Fashion

A few weeks ago I got an email from a new reader here, Diana.  After exchanging a few back and forth she mentioned that she had worked for Bates Fabrics in the late 1940s . She had trained for a career in radio, and after college she worked doing women’s programs for a station in Maine.

Bates, which was at the time most famous for their bedspreads and home fashions fabrics, hired Diana as part of an effort to expand more into fashion fabrics.  Bates had famous designers do clothes using their fabrics, and Diana’s job was to travel around the northeastern US summer resort hotels presenting fashion shows utilizing these clothes.  She got some of her friends to model the fashions while she did commentary.

Here you see Diana at the microphone, describing a gown made of Bates fabric.  The model is Hazel, Diana’s sister-in-law.

Another photo from one of the fashion shows.  Isn’t it interesting how the audience sat around under the sun umbrellas?

Diana pointed out that while the young women had a wonderful time, she’s not sure that the campaign was very successful.  I do know that at least some of the clothes were produced for the market, including the Louella Ballerino for Jantzen swim suits in the 1946 ad at the top.  I thought it was really interesting that one of the women involved, Diana’s friend Cricket, sent her the same ad as an example of the clothes included in this campaign.  Below is another example.