Found

I had an epiphany today, after studying and thinking, and more studying, of styles, my needs, and personality: I can use the fashions of 1910 -1919, in the Arts and Crafts colours which suit me, as an everyday work style that is both artistic and chic.

This happened, prosaically, as I was driving home from work, out in the Avenues, and saw someone wearing a jacket that was ivory and scarlet (I think it was a windproof, but no matter.) Now I can work things out, marrying artistry, detail and colour in clothing that is attractive, appropriate and timeless.

It does amuse me that it is the '10s I have gravitated toward; it is a decade I know well. I honestly thought the choice would end up being the 1930s and early '40s. But I want more coverage.

Marquise Cut

I have spent almost the whole day working on a toile for myself. I figured, since I have to get a pattern for one anyway for a client of mine and haven't had a new one in ages, it seemed a good idea. I got a size 10, because that's all there was (and no prob for the client, because I know how to draft patterns, I just was too lazy to start completely from scratch), figuring, okay I'll enlarge it. (According to the common wisdom of 'buy by your bust size' I should be wearing a 16. Even with Nancy Zieman's buy 'by your front chest width measure', it should have been a 12.) Well, I had to enlarge the bust only and had to actually take in both the back and front upper chest and shoulders a LOT. And the waist, but I'm used to that. Thing is, this is supposed to be a fitting pattern - it's supposed to have NO ease. Obviously, it had a lot, because I took off four inches' width front and back. Heck!

So I'm standing there thinking, 'man, I have to move these front darts or I'll look like Jane Russell', and I had a flash of my mother. She made her wedding dress, a scrummy ivory faille Jackie Kennedy suit that fit me like a glove when I was the same age she was when she got married (I wore it for several swank occasions). Woo, scary. But, she had to do this too. All this fiddling. It was very sweet, a very tangible link, like her dress.

Then I thought, hey, I don't have so awful a figure! (It's been ages since I've bought a Big Four commercial pattern for me that wasn't a costume 'cause most of them are very boring, WHY DOES EVERYTHING HAVE PRINCESS @£$%!! SEAMS?! Ahem. I digress.

So, I only got the actual bodice fitted, I have yet to do sleeves and (yikes) straight skirt - that sort of Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot 'sewn onto you' type, in which I look horrible. Let's EMPHASISE my WORST FEATURE! HERE IT IS BOYS, LOOK AT THEM HIPS. yah. sure. But I will do it because it gives me a template for other things and then I don't have to alter every pattern every time; I can simply lay this one on top and bob's your uncle.

I've been trying to figure what a woman of my age and figure, job and number of grown children should be wearing, but the only rules I have are about 100 years old (I am not joking) - and stuff in catalogues is A-W-F-U-L, and shops aren't much better. I can look like a frump, an old hippie/folkie, or like I'm wearing the patio tablecloth. Gee which shall I pick? I pick Olivia deHavilland! or Vivien Leigh, Elsa Lancaster, or Myrna Loy or Maureen O'Hara anyone in any film before 1960. I can't pick the Queen Mum; I look ghastly in pastels, and forget ginormous flowers. Maybe I could pick the Queen Mum when she was Duchess of York. Anyway, the straight PRINCESS CUT sold colour dress is out. So are elastic waist trousers. Even if I wore trousers.

My friend Mrs. Washington (Mary Wiseman that is) wears beautiful ethnic print clothes with modern jewellery. About as far flung from Lady Washington as possible. But she always looks smashing.

I'll find what I'm looking for. Meanwhile, I'll stick to my vintage Laura Ashley.

Going Pear-Shaped

I am making a sloper for a dear friend of mine, for some yummy scrummy 1920s garments. Among the questions I have asked (after securing measurements in 72 different places) are the following, which she probably has never considered before (most people wearing RTW and taking what they get):

1) Ease -There is, now, at least 2" of 'ease' in patterns, if not more. This is too much for my taste (the vintage Laura Ashley I am wearing at the mo has 1" and that's plenty). How much ease do you like in your clothing?

2) Armscyes (holes) -they are cut very big now (I liked Tom Wolfe's comment that on mens' suits they were the size of the Holland Tunnel!)I like a smaller armscye for ease of movement and line (everything before about 1968 had smaller armscyes.) What do you prefer? (NB, if they are too big, they restrict arm movement, unless the garment is VERY loose-fitting.)

3) Shoulder pads -From the 1940s to now, I hate them, and remove them from patterns or garments (where possible). Do you like them? If so, what size?

4) Fastenings -personally, I HATE zippers, and prefer buttons, hooks and eyes, snaps, or ties. How do you feel about them? If you like them where do you prefer them - back or side?

Of buttoning garments - almost any back-fastening garment can be changed to fasten
in the front, side front or shoulder/side. Do you like back buttoning things? If you like back buttoning things and they are a pain, a zip or hooks or snaps can be put in the side (the LA I am wearing right now has this.)

Because I also have some - ahem - middle aged figure changes, I am making a new sloper for myself. Some problems remain: I have a 'classic British figure' and have always been short-waisted (2 full inches from commercial patterns and RTW!) and had a short waist to full hip ratio; I have always had narrower shoulders and a smaller upper chest than patterns and RTW. But now everything sits (or falls) differently, and unless I wear my half-boned corset, I am hopelessly squashy, which I hate. Ah Collagen! No amount of exercise will bring that back.... But I digress.

Anyway, in remeasuring self, I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that I am pear-shaped. Now, when I weighted 105 pounds this was not noticeable. 30 years and pounds and three children later, it is. 'Hourglass' I can deal with. 'Edwardian' is preferable. But 'pear-shaped' has terrible connotations; it means something really rather hopelessly bad across the Pond in Blighty. I am not 'zaftig' and probaby never will be, but my ancestors (Scots-Irish and 'five-feet tall' Welsh) are showing. If I could I would simply wear period clothing, which solves most of these problems, but I have to function in the workaday world. I can get away with 1920s-40s (and do) but by 'period' I mean anything before that.

I realised, in writing the questions to my friend, that all of my clothing preferences come from period clothing. All of them. I suppose that could be charming, but it certainly makes me an odd duck.

Nothing else to do but waddle along, pear-shaped and glory in being a femme Celtic lass.

Clothes make the Man

In the midst of refurbishing some old things (including old pattern ideas and ancient methods of stitching) and making new, I came across the following in an article by Tom Wolfe in the New York Herald Tribune's Sunday magazine "in 1963, '64, or '65":

Real buttonholes. That's it! A man can take his thumb and forefinger and unbutton his sleeve at the wrist because this kind of suit has real buttonholes there. Tom, boy, it's terrible. Once you know about it, you start seeing it. All the time! There are just two classes of men in the world, men with suits whose buttons are just sewn onto the sleeve, just some kind of cheapie decoration, or—yes!—men who can unbutton the sleeve at the wrist because they have real buttonholes and the sleeve really buttons up. Fascinating! My friend Ross, a Good Guy, thirty-two years old, a lawyer Downtown with a good head of Scotch-Irish hair, the kind that grows right, unlike lower-class hair, is sitting in his corner on East 81st St., in his Thonet chair, with the Flemish brocade cushion on it, amid his books, sets of Thackeray, Hazlitt, Lamb, Walter Savage Landor, Cardinal Newman, and other studs of the rhetoric game, amid his prints, which are mostly Gavarni, since all the other young lawyers have Daumiers or these cute muvvas by "Spy," or whatever it is, which everybody keeps laying on thatchy-haired young lawyers at Christmas—Ross is sitting among all these good tawny, smoke-cured props drinking the latest thing somebody put him onto, port, and beginning to talk about coats with real buttonholes at the sleeves. What a taboo smirk on his face!

..."I want to tell you a funny thing," he says. "The first time I had any idea about this whole business of the buttonholes was a couple of Christmases ago, one Saturday, when I ran into Sturges at Dunhill's." Dunhill the tobacco shop. Sturges is a young partner in Ross's firm on Wall Street. Ross idealizes Sturges. Ross stopped carrying an attaché case, for example, because Sturges kept referring to attaché cases as leather lunch pails. Sturges is always saying something like "You know who I saw yesterday? Stolz. There he was, walking along Exchange Place with his leather lunch pail, the poor bastard." Anyway, Ross says he ran into Sturges in Dunhill's. "He was trying to get some girl a briar pipe for Christmas or some damn thing." That Sturges! "Anyway, I had just bought a cheviot tweed suit, kind of Lovat-colored—you know, off the rack—actually it was a pretty good-looking suit. So Sturges comes over and he says, 'Well, old Ross has some new togs,' or something like that. Then he says, 'Let me see something,' and he takes the sleeve and starts monkeying around with the buttons. Then he says, 'Nice suit,' but he says it in a very half-hearted way. Then he goes off to talk to one of those scientific slenderellas he always has hanging around. So I went over to him and said, 'What was all that business with the buttons?' And he said, 'Well, I thought maybe you had it custom made.' He said it in a way like it was now pretty goddamned clear it wasn't custom made. Then he showed me his suit—it was a window-pane check, have you ever seen one of those?—he showed me his suit, the sleeve, and his suit had buttonholes on the sleeve. It was custom made. He showed me how he could unbutton it. Just like this. The girl wondered what the hell was going on. She stood there with one hip cocked, watching him undo a button on his sleeve. Then I looked at mine and the buttons were just sewn on. You know?" And you want to know something? That really got to old Ross. He practically couldn't wear that suit anymore. All right, it's ridiculous. He probably shouldn't even be confessing all this. It's embarrassing. And—the taboo smirk!

Yes! The lid was off, and poor old Ross was already hooked on the secret vice of the Big men in New York: custom tailoring and the mania for the marginal differences that go into it. Practically all the most powerful men in New York, especially on Wall Street, the people in investment houses, banks and law firms, the politicians, especially Brooklyn Democrats, for some reason, outstanding dandies, those fellows, the blue-chip culturati, the major museum directors and publishers, the kind who sit in offices with antique textile shades—practically all of these men are fanatical about the marginal differences that go into custom tailoring. They are almost like a secret club insignia for them. And yet it is a taboo subject. They won't talk about it. They don't want it known that they even care about it. But all the time they have this fanatical eye, more fanatical than a woman's, about the whole thing and even grade men by it. The worst jerks, as far as they are concerned—and people can lose out on jobs, promotions, the whole can of worms, because of this—are men who have dumped a lot of money, time and care into buying ready-made clothes from some Englishy dry goods shop on Madison Avenue with the belief that they are really "building fine wardrobes." Such men are considered to be bush leaguers, turkeys and wet smacks, the kind of men who tote the leather lunch pail home at night and look forward to having a drink and playing with the baby.

...The secret vice! A whole new universe! Buttonholes! The manufacturers can't make ready-made suits with permanent buttonholes on the sleeves. The principle of ready-made clothes is that each suit on the rack can be made to fit about four different shapes of men. They make the sleeves long and then the store has a tailor, an unintelligible little man who does alterations, chop them off to fit men with shorter arms and move the buttons up.

And suddenly Ross found that as soon as you noticed this much, you started noticing the rest of it. Yes! The scyes, for example. The scyes! Imagine somebody like Ross knowing all this esoteric terminology. Ross is a good old boy, for godsake. The scyes! The scyes are the armholes in a coat. In ready-made clothes, they make the armholes about the size of the Holland Tunnel. Anybody can get in these coats. Jim Bradford, the former heavyweight weight-lifting champion, who has arms the size of a Chapman Valve fire hydrant, can put on the same coat as some poor bastard who is mooning away the afternoon at IBM shuffling memos and dreaming of going home and having a drink and playing with the baby. Naturally, for everybody but Jim Bradford, this coat is loose and looks sloppy, as you can imagine. That's why custom-made suits have high armholes; because they fit them to a man's own particular shoulder and arm. And then all these other little details. In Ross's league, Wall Street, practically all of these details follow the lead of English tailoring. The waist: the suits go in at the waist, they're fitted, instead of having a straight line, like the Ivy League look. This Ivy League look was great for the ready-made manufacturers. They just turned out simple bags and everybody was wearing them. The lapels: in the custom-made suits they're wider and have more "belly," meaning more of a curve or flared-out look along the outer edge. The collar: the collar of the coat fits close to the neck—half the time in ready-made suits it sits away from the neck, because it was made big to fit all kinds. The tailor-made suit fits closer and the collar itself will have a curve in it where it comes up to the notch. The sleeves: the sleeves are narrower and are slightly tapered down to the wrists. Usually, there are four buttons, sometimes three, and they really button and unbutton. The shoulders are padded to give the coat shape; "natural shoulders" are for turkeys and wet smacks. The vents: often the coat will have side vents or no vents, instead of center vents, and the vents will be deeper than in a ready-made suit.

...You walk into a room and you can't tell whether somebody has real buttonholes on his sleeves or not. All of these marginal differences are like that. They're so small, they're practically invisible. All right! That's what's so maniacal about it. In women's clothes, whole styles change from year to year. They have new "silhouettes," waists and hems go up and down, collars go in and out, breasts blossom out and disappear; you can follow it. But in men's clothes there have only been two style changes in this century, and one of them was so esoteric, it's hard for a tailor to explain it without a diagram. It had to do with eliminating a breast seam and substituting something called a "dart." That happened about 1913. The other thing was the introduction of pleats in pants about 1922. Lapels and pants leg widths have been cut down some, but most of the flashy stuff in lapels and pants goes on in ready-made suits, because the manufacturers are naturally hustling to promote style changes and make a buck. In custom-made suits, at least among tailors in the English tradition, there have really been no changes for fifty years. The whole thing is in the marginal differences—things that show that you spent more money and had servitors in there cutting and sewing like madmen and working away just for you. Status! Yes!

Yes, and how can these so-called Big men really get obsessed with something like this? God only knows. Maybe these things happen the way they happened to Lyndon Johnson, Our President. Mr. Johnson was campaigning with John Kennedy in 1960, and he had to look at Kennedy's clothes and then look at his own clothes, and then he must have said to himself, in his winning, pastoral way, Great Hairy Ned on the mountaintop, my clothes look like Iron Boy overalls. Yus, muh cluths look luk Irun Bouy uvverulls. Now this Kennedy, he had most of his clothes made by tailors in England. Anyway, however it came about, one day in December, 1960, after the election, if one need edit, Lyndon Johnson, the salt of the good earth of Austin, Texas, turned up on Savile Row in London, England, and walked into the firm of Carr, Son & Woor. He said he wanted six suits, and the instructions he gave were: "I want to look like a British diplomat." Lyndon Johnson! Like a British diplomat! You can look it up. Lyndon Johnson, President of the United States, Benefactor of the Po', Lion of NATO, Defender of the Faith of Our Fathers, Steward of Peace in Our Times, Falconer of Our Sly Asiatic Enemies, Leader of the Free World—is soft on real buttonholes! And I had wondered about Ross.

The Perfect Cap

For everyday wear, for me.






http://www.modehistorique.com/ elizabethan/coif.html
http://www.modehistorique.com/elizabethan/images/hoods/coif1.jpg

Of course it is Elizabethan, what else? (rolls eyes)

There is also this, actually. Jacobean (there we go again!)

http://www.extremecostuming.com/articles/howtowearthecoif.html

which shows at the bottom of the page how to wear a coif with a forehead cloth. The author of this site is a re-enactor at Jamestown, which was literally down the road from me at Williamsburg (I lived in an unincorporated section of James City Co., off the Jamestown Road.)

I could get very elaborate with embroidery (OMG! yes) but probably shouldn't.

Anyway, I'm happy.