Deep Glamour: At the Intersection of Imagination & Desire

The Glamour of Cars and Fashion: Embodying Escape and Transformation

In the introduction to her essay collection, A Dedicated Follower of Fashion, fashion critic Holly Brubach makes a case for the cultural significance of fashion. It is, she suggests, “architecture’s feminine counterpart....Buildings and clothes are the primary components of our everyday landscape, and they embody the ideas and the attitudes of the time in which we live.”

While I agree with her about fashion’s significance, I’m not convinced that buildings are clothing’s masculine counterpart. They are too static, too permanent, and too communal. Architecture operates differently on the imagination. It tends to be more evocative in photographs than in person, while clothes are just the opposite.

Fashion’s real masculine counterpart is personal transportation, which since the early 20th century means cars. (It once meant coaches, as time spent with Madame Bovary or Sherlock Holmes will quickly demonstrate.) Like an outfit, an automobile wraps its owner in a new outer shell, both protective and decorative. Even the most ordinary car, like even the most ordinary clothes, thus holds some prospect of transformation while extraordinary cars, like extraordinary clothes, conjure up whole new lives. The glamour of both comes from the promise of escape and transformation.

Both cars and clothes also express, as Brubach said of architecture, the ideas and attitudes of their time. Yet, outside of the movies, they are only rarely deliberately paired to call attention to these correspondences. People who think seriously about cars usually know little about fashion, and vice versa.

The photos here represent an exception: an exhibit, titled Automotivated: Streamlined Fashion and Automobiles, on display at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles through January 23. A collaboration between the Petersen and my friend Dennita Sewell, the uber-talented fashion curator at the Phoenix Museum of Art, the show pairs such examples of 1930s styling as (top) the 1934 LaSalle Model 350 Convertible Coupe with a 1939 Hattie Carnegie dress whose pattern echoes the car's portholes and streamlining. (Dennita mounted a similar exhibit in Phoenix in 2007, complementing this extraordinary car exhibit.)

As the exhibit’s copy notes, in the streamline era the echoes were sometimes deliberate:

Wealthy connoisseurs would collaborate with French couturiers, automakers, and coachbuilders to create perfectly matching ensembles. Even Chanel met with exclusive coachbuilders like Joseph Figoni to formulate matching automobile and fashion ensembles for a select few clients. Well heeled patrons often had long lunches in exclusive hotel restaurants with their coachbuilders and couturiers to order coordinating fashion and automobile ensembles to be debuted at prestigious parties or high profile events such as a concours d’elegance.  

There might have been other, less official wardrobe coordination. The second car pictured is a 1937 Delage D8-120. Louis Delage, the car company’s founder, contrasted his products with the competition. “Gentlemen drive Alfas, and you’re driven in a Rolls,” he said. “But a Delage is something to give one’s mistress,” perhaps along with a similarly streamlined bias-cut dress.

[Car photos courtesy of the Petersen Automotive Museum. Fashion from Phoenix Art Museum Collection, photos by Ken Howie. Bottom exhibit photo by Virginia Postrel.]

The Vulgar Versus the Tasteful

In the 1980 comic movie Caddyshack Rodney Dangerfield’s character played a loud-mouthed, nouveau-riche real-estate tycoon who disrupts the decorum of a country-club golf course. Great touches in Dangerfield’s portrayal were brightly colored clothes and flashy cars.

Now life is imitating art as American golfer John Daly has become a representative of Loudmouth clothes. Virtually all of Loudmouth’s pants have a clown-like character which makes Dangerfield’s movie outfits look almost restrained. The psychedelic pants shown in the photo are so garish that most men would be embarrassed to wear them as pajamas.

Golf has long been a relatively moneyed sport, and if you watch a telecast of a major golf tournament the main sponsors will inevitably be investment firms, luxury cars, expensive watches, and golf equipment. Since much golf is played at country clubs, proper dress is usually tasteful, occasionally even a bit dapper. Here is British player Sir Nick Faldo looking as glamorous as his title suggests he might (he was knighted for his services to golf).

Although some brightly colored golf clothes in solid colors are seen on tournament broadcasts, Daly’s outfits make him look as if he has wandered in from some other cultural universe. One of Daly’s nicknames has been ‘wild thing,’ and it is a tribute to some quirk of his personality that he can manage to play great golf while wearing clothes that make him look like a caricature of bad taste.

[The photo of John Daly is by Flickr user Keith Allison and is used under the Flickr Creative Commons License.]

When Did Sunglasses Catch On?

When I first saw this painting a few years ago at SMU's Meadows Museum, I thought it was some kind of spoof. Surely the sunglasses were an anachronism in a Baroque painting.

But, no, Jusepe de Ribera's Portrait of a Knight of Santiago is a legitimate 17th-century work. The Meadows website explains that the "large ebony spectacles are of a fashionable type sometimes worn by upper class Spaniards. Besides adding concentration to the sitter’s already imposing gaze, the spectacles offered Ribera an opportunity to capture the subtle interplay of shadow and reflection in the lenses as well as a glimpse into the sitter’s personality."

The history of sunglasses seems under-researched. This dubiously sourced article seems to be the Ur-text of most online histories, but even this seemingly more reliable one suggests that tinted lenses date only to 1752, a history contradicted by de Ribera's painting from more than a century before. But there seems to be a consensus that they only caught on in the early 20th century.

Why did it take so long? Were there manufacturing and cost barriers? Or did hats and veils provide the physical and psychological protection that now come from shades? If you know more, or can point me toward good sources, please leave a comment or send an email to vpostrel-at-deepglamour.net.

What Retrosexuals and Metrosexuals Have in Common (Besides the Obvious Pun)

 Writing in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, William Loeffler proclaims the end of the Metrosexual:

The man's man is back. And he's had enough of unisex salons, simpering emo music and the emasculating kryptonite of the Oprahsphere. 

Or so say a spate of ads, books and websites that hail the emergence of the retrosexual, whose attitude and style hearken back to the strong, silent type of the '50s and early '60s.

The retrosexual keeps things simple. He does not own more hair and skin care products than his wife or girlfriend. He does not "accessorize."

Think Don Draper, the dapper, jut-jawed executive played by Jon Hamm in the AMC series "Mad Men." He may be a philanderer, but you won't find a pink shirt in his wardrobe. Like the dark hero characters of ex-spy Michael Westen in "Burn Notice" and U.S. Marshal Raylon Givens in "Justified," "Mad Men" presents alpha males who live unapologetically by their own code.

Loeffler's is the latest in a string of articles on the so-called Menaissance (see for instance this 2006 Boston Globe piece). What struck me, however, was the juxtaposition of Don Draper and Michael Westen (I've never seen Justified)--both exceedingly stylish figures. They may not own a lot of grooming products, but they do accessorize. Westen's sunglasses are, in fact, one of the show's signature props and have sparked much online discussion from viewers who want their own versions. (That'll be $400.)

The real contrast isn't between these guys and overgroomed Metrosexuals but between both groups, with their grown-up polish, and the beer-bellied American male in comfy shorts and untucked oversized shirt. On my recent trip to research glamour in Shanghai (more on that later), I talked with author and marketing consultant Paul French who, among many other interesting things, commented on why, with a few exceptions, American apparel lines haven't been terribly successful in Shanghai. U.S. companies are too attuned to the sloppy casualness of the American market, and Shanghainese like to look sharp. They want Banana Republic, he said, not The Gap--something that apparently escapes the parent company of both. (Instead of BR, there's a local knockoff called Urban Renewal.)

By way of illustration, French recounted what observed when two jet-lagged Americans came into the McDonald's where he and his 10-year-old son were having breakfast:

I noticed the Chinese were giggling at them. And then I looked at them. These guys were about my age. They’re in their 40s, right? And they had T-shirts, baseball caps, shorts, and then sort of sports shoes that looked like they had some tractor tires on the bottom of them. And I looked at them and then I looked my 10 year old who was not quite as casual as them.....If you put them on a bus and drove them around town, people would think they were retarded and going to the special place that they’re looked after for the day. I mean just isn’t it a shame? They never grew up mentality but they did physically.

No one would say that about either Michael Westen or Brad Pitt. What makes Retrosexuals seem manlier than Metrosexuals is their sprezzatura. They hide the artifice it takes to achieve their look. But the popularity of both models suggests that at least some American men want to escape the pressure to be sloppy.

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How Did Project Runway Jump the Sharkskin Pump?

In a minor victory for age-inappropriate hipsters everywhere, Seth Aaron Henderson took the title of reigning champion of Project Runway last night in a collection inspired by "1940s Russian-German military style." (Oh what I would have paid to see the look on Michael Kors' mother's face for that gem!  You know he took hell for that one at seder in the Hamptons.) This year's finale theme was "trends that everyone else discovered a few years ago."  Patent leather?  Gasp!  Mustard yellow and bright blue? Don't tell Mr. Jacobs. He'll never think of it.

Ah, to return to those halcyon days when Wendy Pepper was sending  gowns down the runway to the dramatic strains of "A L'Infini," or to have but one glimpse of another ombre feathered creation by Christian Siriano. Drama! Music! Sizzle!  At certain fabulous workplaces, fashionistas would scramble to the water cooler the morning after a Runway finale to dissect every last button on the final collections and defend their designers to the death. But Season 7 not only failed to inspire, but it may have achieved the unthinkable: to de-glam the notion of showing at Fashion Week. This season's collections were, to quote one of Padma Lakshmi's best lines of all time from reality television, "pedestrian at best." This is saying a lot after Season 6, where the unlikeable Irina Shabayeva proved that one really can escape the doldrums of bad taste with a rescue ladder made of pleather and fur, and Season 5, where the milk-toasty Leanne Marshall designed a collection so forgettable that I had to Bing it to remember the signature piece.

So how did Project Runway jump the sharkskin pump and lose its glamour?  DG offers 3 reasons:

1.  The move to Lifetime.  Notwithstanding the great strides that "Television for Women (and Gay Men)" has made over the past few years, this used to be the network that considered re-runs of Supermarket Sweep and The Golden Girls to be its anchor programing.  Watching Runway in high definition on Bravo gave the show an air of cool, current relevance, but Runway on Lifetime feels like wearing a Dior gown for a coffee date at Wal-Mart.  I can't see a commercial break for Drop Dead Diva and then return  to a program purporting to show me haute couture.

2.  The heavy hand of the marketing department.  Frankly, the Bluefly.com accessories wall, even when used thoughftfully under the watchful eye of Uncle Tim, is an eyesore. (Remember when Kara Saun got into a throw-down with the producers in Season 1 over those fantastic shoes that may have put her over-budget? Can you imagine telling Kara, "but look at those lovely metallic flats on the Bluefly.com accessories wall!") Models on the Runway was another misstep.  Does Lifetime not watch the CW? An ANTM rip-off may have been timely a few years ago, but not when Tyra's girls are now just as likely to end up in (or under) the Rock of Love tourbus with Bret Michaels. But perhaps the lowest point of Season 7 was watching Vivienne Tam hawk an HP TouchSmart PC in somewhat broken English as part of the "fashion meets technology" challenge. Even the designers were visibly unethusiastic about such gross product placement.

3.  Judging fatigue. Could Nina Garcia possibly be any more bored with the show?  We used to live for Nina's caustic critique, but after career demotion and new motherhood, Nina seems to lack the energy to muster much more than a raised eyebrow for an unfinished hem. Inspired by Michael Kors, I live for an opportunity to describe an outfit as looking "like a dinner napkin just crumpled up" or "a paper brioche."  Where were the zingers for this season that brought bitchy fun to the last 10 minutes of the show? 

What could bring back the glamour to Season 8?  Give us your thoughts in the comments.

Finding a Look: The Value of Good Salespeople

Needing a new pair of glasses, I drove an hour to visit an eye wear store in Denver. I was told they had 4,000 “products” to choose from, with designs from all over the world. To help me narrow down the possibilities, I was meeting with Paige, the salesperson who had helped me choose my last pair of glasses. While working in a local shop, Paige had put me in a pair of glasses I would never have tried without her help. I knew she had done well because many people, including strangers, had subsequently commented on how much they liked my glasses.

I called a few hours early to let her know I was coming, and when I arrived she said she had been thinking about what eye wear she would like me to try ever since I had called. I sat in a chair while she walked around the store putting glasses on a tray, and she came back with about ten pairs to try. As soon as I tried some she would say “no,” and before long we were down to two choices that she felt looked great. Finding it hard to choose, we called another salesperson over, and that woman voted for the pair that she felt had more “edge.” So the choice became the Danish-designed Orgreen pair shown in the photograph.

I’ve described this satisfying shopping experience to illustrate why we go back repeatedly to work with good salespeople. Sadly, finding a salesperson with a good eye whose opinion you trust can be difficult. So when you locate such a salesperson, they become a valuable asset. In this case, when Paige changed where she worked, I followed her to her new location. Paige has helped several people I know choose their eye wear. Some friends told my wife and me about her, and I send people to her whenever they comment on my glasses or my wife’s. 

All too often you find yourself dealing with salespeople who don’t seem to hear what you’re telling them—they seem to ignore or not understand what you’ve said about the look you are hoping to find, the situation you need it for it, and so on. Sometimes they don’t even know the store’s merchandise well enough to help you narrow down your choices, whereas a good salesperson whose opinion you trust can save you a lot of time, and save you grief in other ways.

Last fall my wife was headed to an event in London. After she had the rest of her outfit picked out, she went to a shoe store that had a bewildering array of choices. She knew the look she wanted, so she picked out seven pairs of shoes to try on. With both arms full of samples, she showed a young salesperson her choices. My wife explained that the event would be in a huge exhibition center, and that she might be walking and standing for most of a day. To my wife’s surprise the young woman started taking shoes away from her, explaining that she was taking away any shoes that she felt would be uncomfortable after a few hours. My wife was left with only two choices, one of which was the pair of Dansko Sally suede clogs pictured at right.

Though my wife loved them, she doubted they would remain comfortable for a full day. The salesperson assured her they would, and thankfully it turned out she was right.

A friend of ours was going to the same event and purchased a pair of shoes without asking about comfort. He decided to test his purchase by spending an hour on his feet in them, after which he pronounced them “posing” shoes, not “wearing” shoes. He had to go shopping again to buy shoes he could wear all day.

Finding a salesperson who will tell you when something you are trying on doesn’t work well on you is a good start. Finding one who tells you that something “looks great on you” when it fits terribly is a signal to shop elsewhere. We once had artist residencies at Montalvo in California, with second-story rooms. The villa grounds were often used for elaborate weddings. I got to know the wedding planner, and looking down on one of those wedding ceremonies I commented to her that the strangely layered dress that the mother-of-the-bride was wearing looked as if her slip were showing. The wedding planner’s comment was, “Someone lied to her.”

Seeing Yourself from a Thin Perspective

My wife and I moved from the Phoenix area to Fort Collins, Colorado about four years ago. A recent Gallup Poll study reported that Fort Collins and the neighboring city of Loveland have the lowest level of obesity in the country (16%). Boulder, Colorado was number two at 16.6%. The study reported that most people in these cities practiced good health habits.

Any American city of 100,000 or more will have some people who are obese and some who are underweight. But I find living in a city where obesity is relatively uncommon to be quite a different experience. During a recent trip to Phoenix and Tucson, I saw more obese people in four days than I would likely see in six months in Fort Collins. (And Arizona cities are not among the most obese.) In a large book store in Tucson, almost half the employees struck me as obese or nearly so. In contrast, I couldn’t ever remember seeing obese employees in retail stores in Fort Collins. At a restaurant in Tucson I was stunned by the obesity of the patrons at one table. Compared to what I have become used to seeing, some of them seemed grotesque. Yet there were diners at other tables who were just as obese. I have never seen a similar situation in a Fort Collins restaurant.

A recent study found that high school girls judge their weight relative to their peer group, and I think adults do the same. We assume that the people around us provide a more realistic perspective on normal weight than do tall, thin models in magazines. So if you are overweight and hang out with other overweight people, you may feel that your weight is reasonably normal. But in a city where most people are relatively fit, this feeling is hard to sustain. If you are seriously overweight and shop in downtown Fort Collins or Boulder, you will look fat compared to most people around you.

This creates pressure to stay fit. Among our close friends, everyone does something to exercise, as well as putting some some effort into maintaining a healthy diet. Several of our friends work with personal trainers or take classes in Yoga, Pilates, or Tai Chi. All of them engage in some outdoor activities, from gardening and walking to running, bicycling, and cross-country skiing.

Does everyone in these cities work hard at fitness? Of course not. But a high percentage of them do regularly engage in physical activity. Knowing this makes it harder to make excuses for not exercising, especially when some your neighbors are amazingly fit. In my case a woman two houses down has climbed all 54 of Colorado's 14,000+ mountains. And a woman in her late sixties at the end of the block still runs marathons at 5000' elevations.

[Photo of two women on a Sunday ride in Boulder County by Let Ideas Compete. The photo of the group backpacking the Estes Park back country west of Loveland is by akeg. Both photos used under the Flickr Creative Common's license.]

Innocence versus Worldliness

Virginia’s recent post contrasting the differences between “cute” and “glamorous” made several interesting comparisons. Her distinction between “innocent, ingenue” and “worldly, sophisticated” reminded me of a lyrical poem by Richard Wilbur in which an experience of innocent beauty created an ecstatic moment for him. His poem, Piazza di Spagna, Early Morning, begins:

I can't forget
How she stood at the top of that long marble stair
Amazed, and then with a sleepy pirouette
Went dancing slowly down to the fountain-quieted square;

Nothing upon her face
But some impersonal loneliness,—not then a girl
But as it were a reverie of the place,
A called-for falling glide and whirl;

The poet witnesses a girl who, amazed by the Spanish steps in Rome, comes gliding and whirling down them, seemingly innocently unaware that she somehow completes the image of the place for the poet. Wilbur continues:

As when a leaf, petal, or thin chip
Is drawn to the falls of a pool and, circling a moment above it,
Rides on over the lip—
Perfectly beautiful, perfectly ignorant of it.

To create the lovely photograph shown at the beginning of this post, the photographer Matilde dressed herself in the kind of fairy skirt that so many young girls have played in, and she danced in her bare feet. The photograph has a wonderful feeling of innocence, but it is a portrayal of innocence created by a grown woman.

If we imagine a glamorous Italian woman descending those same stairs wearing a high-fashion gown such as the one shown here by Valentino, we assume that while she was descending she would remain perfectly aware that she was presenting herself as a beautiful, sophisticated woman.

And her awareness of her image, and the value that she knows that Western culture places on such fashionable glamour, is part of what makes her appear “dangerous,” to use Virginia’s term. She seems fully aware of the worth of her beauty and perfectly willing to use the status offered by her appearance and wealth to her full advantage.

The photograph of this gown (found on a Chinese economic site) is an illusion in that it was taken during a runway show, and the model may be wearing a gown that she herself could not afford to own. So this photograph is a portrayal of glamour designed to convince women who can afford Valentino’s gowns to purchase them. Nonetheless, I imagine this model feels glamorous while wearing this gown and walking the runway.

To see this model wear this gown and descend the Spanish steps would provide an impression as unforgettable as a girl innocently dancing down them. But where the girl presented an image of innocence, the model would present an image of glamorous worldliness.

[The photograph “As A Fairy” is copyrighted by Flickr user ♥ { ๓คtเl๔є, and is used by permission.]

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Video Girl Barbie and the Future of Female Body Image

There's a new Barbie on the scene, and the rest of the dolls on the shelf aren't quite sure what to make of her. She's got long blond hair and bright blue eyes, just as she always has, and a smooth, tanned, curvaceous body. And just like most Barbies you've known over the years, she loves any color as long as it's pink. But there's something different about this new doll. When you meet her, you might notice there's a special little necklace hanging just over her sternum, or as she turns to leave, that there's a flat panel screen between her scapulae. Meet Video Girl Barbie, presented to the world this week at the International Toy Fair, a kind of Flip camera with a face that Mattel promises will let you look into the world of Barbie.

There's something interesting about this notion of looking into Barbie, or looking through her. Barbie has always been a lens into a different world for girls, a glamorous teenaged or adult world full of fashion, parties, careers, and dream houses. This was, after all, the intention behind the doll as it was invented by Ruth Handler — to give girls a way to act out their fantasies and fears through imaginative play. This premise of projection was also the reason for the most controversial feature of Barbie's physicality — her breasts — because Handler felt a mature physique was essential to allowing girls to envision their future selves. The Barbie business model, with its endless parade of kits containing outfits and accessories, serves as stimulus for these projective fantasies, providing ample conduits to aspirational worlds.

It seems to me that girls have never had trouble looking into Barbie's world. Because the nature of Barbie is such that at any point in time, Barbie's world is at least partially (often mostly) in a girl's head, that world is personal and accessible. Barbie is a sketch, just defined enough to inspire a story. She's an outline to be inhabited, a room to decorate with your own desires. The doll and her things provide the form and the context; you provide motivation and narrative. Talking to friends who played with Barbies as children, the imagined scenes vary wildly, even with the same props. Some girls staged fashion shows in the Dream House while others were hosting dinner parties. Some were getting dolled up for the prom while others were making out with Ken behind the bleachers. Barbie's stories are as varied as our own because her stories are our stories. Maybe not the ones we lived, but the slightly more glamorous or dangerous ones we once wished to live. Girls see through Barbie into these fantasy worlds, and they do it effortlessly.

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To think that such a view could enhance the fantasy of Barbie is to assume that Barbie's world is the molded plastic one Mattel produces in its factories, and not the ethereal one in the female consciousness. The most interesting things a girl sees in Barbie are not things she sees with her eyes, but with her mind.

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Making the leap to Video Girl Barbie, a doll you look through, seems logical but oddly literal, an Amelia Bedelia kind of goof. What can you see in looking through Barbie like a periscope that you can't see with your own eyes? To think that such a view could enhance the fantasy of Barbie is to assume that Barbie's world is the molded plastic one Mattel produces in its factories, and not the ethereal one in the female consciousness. The most interesting things a girl sees in Barbie are not things she sees with her eyes, but with her mind.

Given that, this seems less a doll than a tech toy, and I imagine it will have big appeal to girls on this level. A video camera is a video camera, and it's fun regardless of the housing, though girls today are probably savvy enough that they don't need technology to be softened up with fashion in a bionic Barbie.

But the bionic nature of this doll — a strange mashup of hard tech and feminine physicality — does raise a different set of interesting questions. As we move closer to an era of post-human body modification, what kinds of new body types will emerge as aspirational? If in the past five decades Barbie has represented a standard of beauty that can be blamed with a rise in body modifications ranging from breast implants to blond highlights to anorexia to tanning, how will she evolve as a standard in a world where the available modifications are increasingly technological? Will Barbie offer a new viewpoint on the form and function of the female body as the lines between man and machine are increasingly blurred?

If these sound like imaginary inquiries better left to the world of futuristic sci-fi films, think again. Already, the field of wearable technologies is electrifying fashion, exploring ways our clothes can behave or react like smarter, more beautiful skins. Designer Hussein Chalayan is known for his avant garde work with wearables, exploring how robotic elements can create extraordinary displays of movement and light. Joanna Berzowska of XS Labs is another designer working in this space, fusing fiber and wire to create striking interactive garment-sculptures. Often these designs suggest new functions our bodies might take on in the future, like increased sensory capabilities or protective response mechanisms. The subtle displays of Ying Gao's Walking City dresses, for example, function like hypersensitive second skins, unfurling and rustling in reaction to the proximity of others. Powering many of these innovative designs is the LilyPad Arduino, a washable microcontroller that can be fully integrated into clothing, developed by Leah Buechley at MIT's Media Lab.

These are technologies worn on the body, without requiring any intrusion or permanent modification. But those innovations are coming too. Discussions of augmented-reality contact lenses are in the offing, and just this week, the New York Times reported on the development of piezoelectric body implants that would allow us to convert our bodily movements into energy that can be used to power our electronics. Already we see people who seem chained to their iPods or mobile devices — imagine if one day we actually plugged them into our skin to recharge them. Or stopped by the Apple Genius Bar for a surgical battery change?

If these potential innovations sound eerie, think about how breast implants sounded the first time you heard of them. Body modification is always unsettling, sometimes even long after it has become widespread. But all of these designs, whether worn on the body or inserted within it, are pioneering new possibilities in the shape and performance of the human physique. As we gain more power to control how our bodies look and what they do, which of these designed bodies will move towards the mainstream? Which will become new aspirational models? Will techno-bodies ever be sexy?

I don't propose that Video Girl Barbie is in any way an attempt on the part of Mattel to forge a new post-human female ideal. (The violence of the mashup — Barbie's viscera removed and replaced with a TV — would make that a vision more appropriate for R-rated horror films than Toys 'R Us.) But the juxtaposition has made me wonder what the Barbie of 2029 looks like. Will Barbie at 70 be a stunning cyborg? If we saw her today, would we think she's beautiful? Or, in an ironic twist, will Barbie's plastic figure seem nostalgically natural in comparison with our own bodies of the future?

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Shoemaker Glamour

This full page image appears next to an ad for Louis Vuitton shoes which is titled, “The Craftsman with his Brush.” A better title might be, “A model in a photographer’s studio pretends to be a craftsman with his brush.”

Part of the ad text reads, “But other qualities remain unseen: the craftsman’s skill and the simple elegance of his gestures, repeated so often and precisely. Not forgetting the final touch: a coat of dark paint to protect the sole and enhance the beauty of every step.”

If we take this photo at face value, it’s a difficult job to get. You have to be stunningly handsome, have great hair, and never ever get the dark paint on your hands. The job is made harder by the lighting conditions, a single light source (reflected in the glass jars) that makes you look artistic and soulful, but makes seeing what you are doing difficult. Apparently you’re only allowed to wear dark clothes, to go with the black walls. At least they’ve given you a nicely stained work table, though you’re never allowed to get paint on that either.

In some senses this glamorous image is harmless, as long as we recognize that it is an fabricated illusion designed to make us feel beautiful with every step, provided we wear Louis Vuitton shoes. But as Elizabeth Wilson pointed out in Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, the fashion industry has a long history of exploiting workers, and an image such as this does not convince me that applying paint to the soles of shoes has now become a glamorous job. I appreciate craftsmanship, but the craftsmanship displayed here is a photographer’s, not a shoemaker’s.

Alexander McQueen: Designer, Artist, Visionary

The untimely death of British fashion design Alexander McQueen has been covered in a number of articles already (the best is the Telegraph obituary). Most describe him as an enfant terrible and as the "bad boy of British fashion," focusing on the goth edge for which he was famous.

Those that take a closer look at McQueen's life and career portray him as something rare - a creative visionary who also possessed superb technical skills. He will be remembered as a risk-taking designer with a penchant for skulls, but also as a technically excellent tailor. Despite his talent for couture, McQueen's take on fashion lacked any snobbery (his McQ collection sold at Target in he spring of 2009) and he considered individualized style more important than brand.

McQueen's startling creativity is on full display in this brief clip from his Fall 2006 show at Paris Fashion Week, in which a hologram of Kate Moss floats above his runway:

Alexander McQueen's edgy aesthetic, technical brilliance, and dramatic vision will certainly be missed.

Giorgio Armani Gets His Superhero Moment

In 2008 Giorgio Armani sponsored the Met’s annual Costume Institute gala and the related exhibit, “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy.” It was an odd pairing. At the press preview, Mr. Armani, who built his career on understated elegance, marveled at the over-the-top concoctions of designers like Thierry Mugler, Gareth Pugh, and Alexander McQueen and acknowledged the irony of his own role. “The curators must have worked very hard to find something in my past that belongs in this exhibit,” he said. It was clear, however, that for all his dedication to “a fashion that is worn,” he was enjoying the exuberant creativity behind all those impractically superheroic clothes.

Left: Thierry Mugler, fall/winter 1995-1996, Photograph courtesy of Chris Moore. Right: Thierry Mugler, fall/winter 1997-1998 Photograph © copyright Patrice Stable. Both courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute. Lady Gaga photo from Giorgio Armani press materials.

And now we have Lady Gaga wearing Armani haute couture to the Grammys. Strange, but perhaps not as strange as it immediately appears. Aside from recycled press releases, there hasn’t been much commentary on how music’s most flamboyant performer teamed up with a designer known for his restraint. But I can’t help thinking that Armani wanted his own superhero moment.

Left: Gareth Pugh, spring/summer 2007 Photograph courtesy of firstVIEW. Right: Alexander McQueen, fall/winter 2007-2008 Photograph courtesy of Chris Moore. Both courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute. Lady Gaga photo from Giorgio Armani press materials.

For the best look at Lady Gaga’s Grammy costumes, check out this New York magazine slideshow.

See a slideshow of Armani Privé's Spring 2010 collection, inspired by the moon, here.

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What to Wear to the Grammy Awards?

The awards season provides various fashion spectacles, and the Grammys are usually the most outrageously flamboyant. This is especially true now that music videos and elaborately costumed stage acts have become part of the popular music business. Artists coming to the Grammys have to choose who to come as—their onstage persona, or a person glamorously dressed to attend a fancy awards ceremony.

Lady Gaga has become so known for outrageous costumes that she would risk disappointing her fans by attending in more traditional attire. Her costumes are so singularly outré that it would difficult for others to wear similar clothes without seeming to imitate her. Her Grammy costumes were on most of the worst-dressed lists that I saw on the internet, but viewing her outfits as clothing rather than as costumes misses the point. She costumes herself onstage and offstage as “Lady Gaga.” Her costumes remind me of the commedia dell’arte tradition, in which characters like Columbina wear masks and heavy makeup, as seen in the carnival photos at left and below. Like Gaga, the Columbina figure was typically portrayed as bold, experienced, and frankly erotic.

Country-western women, on the other hand, are free to dress like glamorous movie stars. Their performance costumes range from jeans to beautiful evening gowns, and in their videos they are much less prone to place themselves in surreal environments calling for surreal costumes. Taylor Swift attended in a lovely gown that would have been appropriate for the Oscar red carpet.

Rock and rap stars have an interesting problem. With some notable exceptions, their performance costumes tend to emphasize anything but fashionable haute couture clothing. They usually perform in some variation of urban street clothing, sometimes made over into something flashy for the stage. So for them to “dress-up” in a way that suggests a Vogue or GQ sense of style might seem to distance them from their fan base.

Some performers solve this problem by not trying to “dress-up” at all. Others manage to put together outfits that retain a sense of “street,” but still look stylish. Unfortunately, in other cases their efforts to “dress-up” end up making them look like night clubbers, pimps, hookers, drug dealers, or people on their way to a prom in a horrible dress or tux. Others, such as Rihanna, have a personal interest in high fashion, and use awards ceremonies as a reason to wear their finest. All of the women mentioned can be seen in the following video:

[Photo of the bird couple by Nahlinse. Photo of the masked woman by Alaskan Dude. Both used under the Flickr Creative Commons License.]

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Vienna as Fashion Muse? Projections of Splendor

Shown at the Paris Fashion week last Thursday, the Louis Vuitton Fall/Winter 2010 Menswear Collection immediately caught my eye. Not because I am particularly fond of Vuitton (like too many other fashion houses, it has fallen prey to the Plague of Excessive Logos), but rather because of the references to Vienna.

Dominated by narrow-waisted suits, crisp riding boots and structured bags, the collection is described as having been inspired by Vienna's Age of Splendor, and by the Vienna of today. As Vienna has been my home on and off for the past several years, I could not help but ruminate on my own impressions of the city's style, and on the implications of its new status as Fashion Muse.

Over the course of my life in Vienna, I have continuously struggled with how I relate to it. On some level, it has become deeply familiar and even quite mundane, while on another level it has remained a romantic hallucination. In many ways, Vienna is a continental European city like many others – rich in heritage but dynamic in contemporary culture. The streets are full of young trendy people, the museums offer impressive lineups of cutting-edge international artists, the UN Headquarters looms large, and no matter where you are, you can be certain that a Starbucks or an H&M is not terribly far off. And yet, Vienna is not quite of this time. The spirit of the Austro-Hungarian Empire remains present, its rigid, explosive splendor running through the city like a rogue undercurrent.

Experiencing Vienna in this manner is like having persistent double vision, or perhaps even triple vision – whereby reality, history and historical fiction co-exist and struggle for domination over the cultural landscape.

When I ask myself why this is so, one obvious thing that comes to mind is the architecture. Unlike that of other German-speaking cities, Vienna's architecture has largely remained intact after the Second World War. Enormous neoclassical structures erected for the sole purpose of glorifying the Empire continue to surround the city center along the Ringstraße. The towering white marble, the black wrought iron, the vast stretches of cobblestone, and the tall chestnut trees, create a backdrop that insists upon itself and undermines the passage of time. In a sense, it is a romantic backdrop. But the brand of romance is the kind that makes one feel overpowered and somewhat uneasy. The architecture - both in its grandiosity and in the sheer fact of its continuity - sets a mood over the central district that even an army of neon Starbucks and H&M signs cannot overpower.

Granted, architecture can be seen as a passive influence. But there are other areas where Vienna's anachronistic atmosphere is maintained by choice. Take, for instance, the phenomenon of the Viennese Cafe. One can walk into any number of Viennese cafes that look as if they have remained basically unchanged since the 1920s: gilded interiors, plush red upholstery, starched white tablecloths, waiters in tuxedos, sugar cubes in tiny silver bowls, newspapers attached to wooden holders... the head spins from the elegance, and extravagance of it. And the elaborate coffee nomenclature puts other countries' terminologies to shame. (When in doubt, just order a Melange - and stay away from what the Viennese call a Cappuccino unless you want your coffee made with pure cream instead of frothed milk.)

It is not just the look of such a cafe that functions like a time machine, but the atmosphere as well. In a Viennese cafe, you will be called by your title. You will not encounter crammed floor space, even if it means that the cafe is serving only a quarter of the patrons that it could be serving. And you will never be rushed to free up your table, even if you have been nursing the same cup of coffee for hours while a crowd of hopefuls queues outside. And no, such places are not gimmicky tourist traps; they are perfectly normal cafes where the Viennese themselves go to relax.

And then of course, there are the head-turning persons you see in Vienna, the likes of whom I have not encountered elsewhere: from the ladies in floor-length fur coats and sculptural hats who look as if they've walked out of a silent film, to the serious men with heavy, intense gazes and thick streaks of gray in their hair regardless of their age, to the people wearing traditional national costumes as formalwear on a night out. True, the “retro” look has been internationally popular for over a decade, but I feel that in Vienna the look isn't “retro” at all, as it is done entirely without irony. The mixing of the old with the new simply reflects the city's nonlinear sense of time and its playful attitude towards contemporary realities.

An interesting trend I have noted, is how many fashion ateliers in Vienna are simultaneously involved in costume design for the theater. Of all the arts, theater probably occupies the most important position in Vienna, and has enormous cultural influence. Perhaps this explains why even the most contemporary boutiques seem to be at least partly inspired by dramatic turn of the 20th Century style: the designers who make the clothes for the streets are the same ones who create the costumes for the local stage. It would also explain why the past that mingles with Vienna's present seems to be not so much a historically accurate past, as a fantastical one: a romantic notion that the city embraces and projects back onto itself.

Getting back to the Louis Vuitton Fall/Winter 2010 Menswear Collection, I think that in large part it succeeds in portraying all of these things. The clothing is architectural, theatrical, and communicative, and there is a conceptual depth to it that exceeds what I have come to expect from Vuitton. The garments are rigidly tailored while suggesting fluidity, tightly closed while expressing a potential for openness. They evoke Sigmund Freud's writings on hysteria, Egon Schiele's images of tortured lanky youths, Gustaf Klimt's gilded motifs, and Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis while mixing traditional and contemporary materials and employing deconstructive techniques.

The LV collection is rather impressive really. But... Well, quite frankly, it brings to mind what has been available in Vienna for as long as I have lived there. If you want Viennese splendor that embodies all the anachronistic complexity the city has to offer, visit Vienna itself and walk through some of the neighborhoods that are lined with independent boutiques carrying Austrian designers, including the areas around Neubaugasse and Kettenbrückengasse. Viennese style is at its best in its natural habitat.

[LV runway images via Louis Vuitton/ Antoine de Parceval; all other images belong to the author]

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Bare-foot Fantasy?

I drove a friend to a podiatrist appointment, and one of the magazines in the waiting room was this December 2006 issue of Traveler. I was struck by the strange photograph on the cover. Though it is daylight, the model is wearing a brightly colored evening gown, and is posing on the steps of the grounds of this estate in bare feet.

 Though an image showing a bare foot seemed fitting for the office of a foot doctor, I felt that there must be a more romantic advertising purpose involved.

The cover mentions fairy-tale Europe, so perhaps the image is supposed to make the viewer think of Cinderella. If so, the story has been distorted because the model’s foot looks fairly large. Feeling that the model’s proportions seemed slightly odd, I cut the page apart to see if the image had been split apart just slightly to make more room for the banner. To my eye, the lines of the skirt and her bodily proportions looked more natural when I moved the bottom portion up about the height of a step, so I suspect the cover image was manipulated a little in Photoshop. (Check out Lady Gaga’s shoulder on this cover photo to see an obvious and bizarre Photoshop manipulation.)

Whether the image was manipulated or not, I don’t get it. If women find this image appealing, I can’t quite understand why. As a man I can’t image going around in a tuxedo in bare feet, not even as a fantasy. Ladies, is there something about this image that appeals to some deep inner sense of princess? I’m both baffled and curious.

Achieving Elegance

In trying to achieving an elegant effect suitable to a situation, there are many ways to go wrong. At one end there are  possibilities that suggest we made insufficient effort. These can range from a sense that we made no effort (wearing rumpled “around the house” clothes) to being underdressed or out-of-style relative to the occasion and everyone else.

There are also many ways to “try too hard” or show questionable taste: ranging from overdone glitz to being decades out of style. Ever since Liberace took glitz over the top in Las Vegas, some entertainers have confused glitz with glamour. This photo of Elvis Presley in his gold lamé tux exemplifies how show-biz costumes can become outrageously glitzy. Such costumes inevitably crossover into kitsch when wore offstage (whatever you think of them onstage).

One of the widely acknowledged exemplars of elegance was the appropriately named Grace Kelly, show in the above photograph at left. You can find several articles on the web discussing how to look or dress like her, and the emphasis is often on a certain simplicity in clothing design, jewelry, color choices, and use of makeup.

On the other hand, “elegance” implies more than mere simplicity. Dictionary definitions of “elegance” often include the word “pleasingly.” For example: “pleasingly graceful and stylish in appearance or manner,” or, relative to solving a problem, “pleasingly ingenious and simple.” As Albert Einstein said about science, “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

This is one of the great quandaries of style in many fields, including fashion, art, and writing. If you want your work to be elegant, you have to do enough to create a pleasing effect; otherwise you will have failed to achieve your aim. In fashion, true elegance can be stunning in effect. Thus effects that are dowdy, shoddy, or just plain dull fail to qualify.

On the other hand, once you have done enough to achieve an elegant effect, adding elements that seem extraneous can weaken the sense of artful simplicity.

Jessica Biel, a beautiful woman, wore the Prada dress shown at left to the 2009 Oscars. The bow on the front was widely criticized as looking sloppy and extraneous, and some critics were surprised that the normally elegant Prada seemed to have  miscalculated in this instance. Yet the outfit cannot be faulted as glitzy became the color scheme and jewelry are so classic and restrained.

For those of us who feel the bow looks “added on,” rather than ingeniously integrated, it is a single design flaw, but nonetheless regrettable in that we feel that we might have admired the dress without the bow. In contrast the addition of rhinestones to Elvis’s gold lamé tuxedo is of little consequence. The gold lamé has already pushed the concept of a formal tux so far into glitz-ville that some extra sparkle just turns it into extreme kitsch—gold lamé made superbly lame.

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When Fashion Meets Political Function

[Editor’s Note: With this post, DG intern Crystal Hubbard, an aspiring television writer and organizer of the L.A. chapter of Liberty on the Rocks, joins our writing crew.]

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image…” wrote art critic John Berger in his text on visual culture, Ways of Seeing. Berger’s perception hinges on the word “must,” implying that there is something inescapable about the female vigilance to appearance; something within her psyche that compels a woman to preen and then guard the finished product.

But it is one thing for a woman to watch herself at trivial and mundane events (though she will) and a completely different matter when she has committed herself to public service. Suddenly, a decision to wear (or not wear) X-item becomes a clue as to how she will vote, how she will govern, how she will wield power.

When Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) announced she would support the Senate’s motion to keep health care reform legislation alive, her historic decision—Lincoln’s was the last, and necessary, vote to further debate—was marked not with an accompanying dossier of accomplishments, but by what she was wearing. A relative unknown, Licoln chose to make her biggest senatorial moment into something almost not worth mentioning. “Her attire was school-principal prim—blue suit with knee-length skirt, orange silk scarf tied tightly at the neck,” wrote the WaPo's Dana Millbank. A meekly feminine showing, at best.

One has to wonder why she chose something so uninspired. A more memorable ensemble would have communicated that Lincoln realized she had climbed to the pinnacle of power, and had seized the national spotlight with an outfit worthy of the moment.

"My decision to vote on the motion to proceed is not my last, nor only, chance to have an impact on health-care reform," Lincoln said, having outlasted all the other pork-barrel beggars, and as Millbank noted, “She took a streetcar named Opportunism, transferred to one called Wavering and made off with concessions…”

If there is further motive—Lincoln is sure to remind her party, in the coming weeks of debate and deal making, of her solidifying vote—her propriety now becomes suspect. Following Berger’s observation to its logical conclusion, this may turn out to be only a penultimate moment for the senator from Arkansas, who gave a major piece of legislation a much-needed second wind, and may show up in something significantly more eye-catching the next time Harry Reid is found holding his breath.

 In his same essay, Berger also said, “men act, and women appear.” Which helps explain why fashion plays a less important role in the career of a male politico. Men are physically imposing without having to adorn themselves, and powerful just by being. If a man fails in the fashion—or appearance—department, we do not automatically question his judgment or ability to govern. We merely chastise him for not being mindful of the moment.

During a 2005 visit to Auschwitz to commemorate the liberation of Jewish prisoners, then-Vice President Dick Cheney sported an ill-advised parka, that, as Pulitzer Prize winner Robin Givhan wrote, made him look “like an awkward child amid the well-dressed adults.” Former interim UN Ambassador John Bolton also received the Givhan treatment during his hastily made-up appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in the days leading up to his failed (permanent) appointment as Ambassador.

…when he settled in before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week to answer questions about his record, his philosophy and his intentions at the U.N., he looked as though he did not even have enough respect for the proceedings to bother combing his hair -- or, for that matter, straightening his tie, or wearing a shirt that did not put his neck in a chokehold. Bolton was one wrinkled suit away from being an insolent mess.

For men, we playfully mock and move on; for women, we analyze and critique ad nauseum. It’s one thing for Dick Cheney to look as though he should be clearing the driveway at Number One Observatory Circle; it’s another to say that since a woman looks like she could be the offspring of Tammy Faye Bakker we should question her political acumen. When the contentious results of the 2000 presidential election put Katherine Harris in charge, fair or not, the nation took one collective look and said, “Uh oh.”

We react this way because we count on women to “continually watch” themselves. And if our elected women aren't watching, if they too are schlepping around their closets like the worst of the boys, then they are—whether they know it or not—signaling that they are an aberration, out of touch with what it means to be a woman, and negligent of one of their most sacred weapons: themselves.

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Activewear as Ecological Urban Chic

While shopping in Santa Fe, my wife and I discovered a new line of activewear, nau (based in Portland, Oregon), that has made chic urban design one of their main concerns. Their “Urbane Jacket” for women is shown at left. The luxurious-feeling fabric is waterproof/windproof/breathable recycled polyester. The fabrics in every garment that I examined were remarkable, and the construction of the garments was meticulous. High-tech materials and careful construction can make activewear expensive. Patagonia, for example, is known for styling, quality, and being costly (some of our friends call it “Patagucci”).

Nau emphasizes creating garments that will look fashionable in a sophisticated urban market, and still function superbly as activewear. This concern has been important in some urban European markets where many commuters bicycle, and under “who inspires us” nau lists Copenhagen Cycle Chic (as well as Dior, YSL, Balenciaga, Gerhard Richter, and numerous other designers). The company’s web statements list Patagonia and Prada as the kind of company they compete with, and nau’s design sense moves activewear toward a forward sense of fashion that we are more used to seeing from Italian and Japanese designers.

The “Riding Jacket” shown at right is described as “a contemporary update to the traditional blazer.” The 100% recycled polyester fabric is 4-way stretch. Their designs tend to be cut for fit, slender bodies (such as bicyclists often have), and many feature sleeves that are slightly long to help cover wrists during activities such as bicycling.

One of the design principles of the company seems to be to avoid the visible display of their company name on their garments. We have come to expect “look-at-what-brand-I’m-wearing” logos on activewear and ready-to-wear clothing. Yet it is obviously difficult for tags and logos to serve a valid design purpose, and they are seldom found on couture garments. Nau not only avoids frou-frou fabric ornamentation, but also avoids labels of any kind on the outside of their garments—doing so would compromise their minimalist aesthetic. Some other high-end outerwear companies also seem to be moving in a less flashy direction, as concern grows for creating fashionable products suitable for urban wear.

Yesterday I saw a middle-aged man riding an old bicycle along the edge of a  snow-plowed road. The sun was setting, and the temperature was 7 degrees Fahrenheit. He was riding into the wind, so the  windchill was subzero. He was dressed warmly in inexpensive clothing, and was likely riding a bicycle out of necessity. He was on a bus route, but perhaps he couldn’t afford a bus ticket.

I suspect that he represented the ultimate in low-impact commuting, given that his bicycle and clothing were all old and well-used, and perhaps even purchased second-hand. Seeing him reminded me that high-end outerwear is a luxury that most people cannot afford. A single jacket from a top manufacturer could easily cost more than his bicycle, plus everything that he was wearing.

If we can afford them, the high-tech materials in the latest activewear can allow us to be relatively comfortable in extreme conditions of cold, heat, moisture, and wind with less weight and more freedom of movement than was possible with some older materials. On the other hand, for urban wear it is still possible to stay luxuriously warm with fur coats made from the hides and pelts of buffalo, coyotes, beavers, foxes, rabbits, minks, and other animals. The fur option reminds us that there is an environmental cost to the creation of any kind of clothing. Wool can be removed without sacrificing the animal, but raising sheep has an environmental impact, as does raising cotton or manufacturing synthetic fibers.

I visited the websites of a several high-end outerwear companies (companies whose products I wear). As I expected, most of them had pages devoted to topics such as eco-consciousness, social responsibility, sustainability, recycling, and ethics. Such awareness is laudable, and perhaps necessary in an industry in which many of the customers are environmentally concerned. And it is no easy task to convince us that wearing a waterproof, breathable membrane like expanded polytetrafluoroethylene (Gore-tex) is ecologically sound. This web page at Gore-tex uses of a series of images that imply that Gore-tex gives us some of the protective qualities of animal fur without needing to sacrifice the animals.

Thinking about nau’s use of recycled materials, it is a sign of our times that many consumers consider a garment of recycled plastic to be more chic than a fur coat. Yet given that some animals like rabbits, cattle, and bison are being raised for pelts, hides, and meat, I’m not qualified to say whether one of my leather jackets or one of my synthetic-fiber jackets has had a higher environmental cost (setting aside the contentious issue of killing animals). It is difficult to even imagine all the steps involved in creating such jackets (whether starting from raising animals or pumping oil), and finally shipping them to a retail store.

Being eco-conscious leads to complex questions without easy answers. Hopefully caring is at least better than not caring, and awareness allows us to at least question whether the companies we do business with seem to care about such things as sustainability. Of course, in our current cultural climate, companies are likely to say that they do, whether it’s true or not.

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The Value of Dissatisfaction

I found myself agreeing completely with the first sentence of Kit Pollard’s Thanksgiving post: “One of the peculiar side effects of blogging is looking for your blogging subject in absolutely everything around you.” In addition to that feeling, as a result of reading DeepGlamour I have found myself interested in learning more about certain subjects, one of which has been the history of fashion.

Having been intrigued by the excerpts on DG, I recently read Karen Karbo’s delightful book, The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World's Most Elegant Woman (DG interview here), and I was struck by how many of Chanel’s designs were created because she was personally dissatisfied with the fashions available for her to wear.

The dress shown in the illustration was advertised in a Parisian paper in 1906. As Barbara Tuchman vividly describes in The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 , the Belle Époque, the era just before World War I, was a period of extravagant luxury for European upper classes. So much so that wealthy, aristocratic women spent much of their day changing from one fashionable outfit to another.

When Étienne Balsan invited a young Coco Chanel to come to Royallieu, the chateau where he bred horses, she agreed and became his second mistress. She was ill-suited to the lifestyle of a kept woman, so she spent most of her days at the stables and became known for her ability to work with difficult horses. She amused Balsan and his pals because she was young, and could jump astride the back of a two-year-old stallion and gallop off.

Given this athleticism, you can imagine Chanel was dissatisfied with much of what women were expected to wear. Having been abandoned by her father as a child and raised in an orphanage, Chanel was fiercely determined to eventually be financially independent. Since she had been making her own clothes since she was a teenager, fashion seemed a possible avenue (despite the fact that the field was then dominated by men). Though she thought some women looked fine in Belle Époque fashions, she didn’t feel they suited her personally. Seeing that some men’s fashions offered more freedom of movement, some of her most successful designs were reinterpretations of male clothing, made convenient and stylish for women to wear. As Karbo relates, Chanel legend has it that she borrowed a pullover from her next lover, Boy Capel, while walking at the beach. Finding it inconvenient to put on, she took out a pair of scissors and cut the pullover up the front. And thus the basic concept of the cardigan was born. 

The Power of Less

Power of Less, The: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential...in Business and in Life is the self-descriptive title of a best-selling book by Leo Babauta. It is one of a growing number of books which offer advice for coping with the seemingly unending information, tasks, and choices offered by modern society. Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less deals with the paralyzing effect that having too many consumer choices can have. For example, now that Apple’s App Store has more than 100,000 apps, there are increasing numbers of blogs devoted to how to possibly choose among them, as well as asking questions like how many apps do you actually need or use?

In this light I found it interesting that some current guidebooks on style in fashion emphasize the importance of periodically paring down your closet. In her The Little Black Book of Style Nina Garcia writes, “Be an editor. Your closet should only contain amazing pieces—it is much easier to be inspired when you see five remarkable pieces then when you see twenty-five pieces and twenty of them are unremarkable. Pick out those key pieces and get rid of the rest.”

She advises being “ruthless when you edit,” and to keep only items that look good on you now, and make you feel good about yourself. She advises not to hang on to any item because of sentimental reasons, initial cost, or the hope that someday it will fit again. Esquire’s Handbook of Style offers similar advice for men about paring down their closet to items that look good on them now.

Both of these guidebooks also advise shopping for items that emphasize quality fabrics, careful construction, and timeless style over trendiness and bargain prices. And because they believe that good fit is crucial to appearance, they also recommend finding and using a good tailor.

On the fashion-design reality show Project Runway, the models always come in to be fitted, and this is a crucial part of the process. During the judging the way that the garment fits the model is a key factor. With the great variety of sizes available in stores, there is a good chance that you can find items that fit reasonably well, but a good tailor might make them fit exceptionally well.

Which brings us back to purchasing items that use quality fabrics and good construction. The tailor that I now use told me that people sometimes come to her with an item they have picked up as a bargain, and hope that she can tailor it to fit so that it looks great on them. They are surprised when in some cases she has to explain that there is a limit to what she can do if the material is of poor quality or the garment was poorly constructed.

After encountering so much advice on paring down, I decided to go through my closet, and I tossed out clothes that were worn out, no longer fit, were out of style, or that I hadn’t worn in years. Now I am surprised how much more inspiring it is to look through a selection of shirts when I like them all than it was when my closet contained lots of shirts that I was never going to wear again. The same with shoes, pants, jeans, and so on. I also noticed that many of the shirts that I threw out were ones I had purchased on sale  and then had worn only a few times. Ouch. They weren’t such bargains after all.

[Photo by iStockPhoto contributor Attator.]

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Tina Fey: Funny, but Glamorous?

In the November 2009 issue of Harper's Bazaar, Tina Fey trades in Liz Lemon's schlumpy cardigans for several seriously gorgeous designer cocktail dresses. They say that the clothes make the man, but in this case, I wonder.

On the subscriber cover (at left), in white Yves Saint Laurent, Fey looks pretty. But she also looks awkward, like a jockish girl all dressed up for a high school dance. Like she can't wait for the shoot to end so she can wash her face and get back into her baggy jeans. It just doesn't feel like Tina Fey. But it's a fashion magazine, so she's in a dress.

Inside, Fey admits that she's not really much for dressing up and that Liz Lemon, the character she based on her early years as a writer in NYC, "has little to no style."  She also admits that Lemon's character could use a little more confidence.

This Bazaar cover just looks all wrong to me. But what I wonder is this: who's responsible for that? Should Bazaar have dialed down the glam factor, dressing Fey in something more comfortable and familiar? Or is Fey selling herself short by not totally owning that dress?

[Harper's Bazaar cover image by Alexi Lubomirski.]

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Junky Styling: Recyling Glamour

The striking garment shown at left was created by deconstructing a rain mackintosh, recutting the material, and then recombining the resulting pieces with extraordinary imagination. It is typical of the work produced by a London-based company called Junky Styling. The company’s name is an ironic reference to their use of second-hand clothing as their raw material. The transformed final garments are stylish, well-constructed, and finished in great detail. Vogue called their clothing “high fashion street couture.”

As teenagers Annika Sanders and Kerry Seager began taking men’s suits (bought from second hand shops) and turning them into experimental garments to wear to clubs. “We began because we wanted to dress differently. Initially, it was all about unique design, and we were able to achieve this through cutting up clothes that were second hand.” While traveling they noticed that textile recycling was already happening in cities like San Francisco and Tokyo, and their own designs drew lots of compliments. Their London friends began to commission outfits, and this led to a market stall in Kensington Market. In 1997 they launched Junky Styling, and their clothing is now  stocked in shops in cities like London, Paris, and Hong Kong.

I learned of their work through the new book Junky Styling: Wardrobe Surgery. The ethos of their company is “timeless, deconstructed, re-cut, and completely transformed clothing,” and they are so committed to recycling textiles that their book contains a how-to section with basic instructions for some of their most popular designs. Intrigued, I asked them  a couple of questions.

Deep Glamour: Your use of men's suits and shirts as primary sources for material is interesting. Did you do this because of the quality and quantity of the material in these items, or is there a certain provocativeness in reworking these normally staid items? Perhaps both?

 Kerry Seager: Yes both! The combination of using such fine, quintessentially British fabrics that have truly stood the test of time and then transforming them into very apparent recycled styles really works for us. 'City' items that evoke a certain thought process in people tend to work really well when redesigned as there is that instant familiarity, that then provokes the next question as "Is that..." or "How did..." which is why our customers are addicted not only to the recycling aspect of our label, but the conversations they have with strangers when wearing Junky.

(The crossover top shown at right was one of their first designs, and perfectly illustrates both the sense of familiarity with the suit elements and the surprise at what was done with them.) 

DG: You mention that it might have been helpful to have had more tailoring experience in starting your business. Do you think that not having conventional training in tailoring might have left you more open to thinking about design in unconventional ways?

KS: Certainly our lack of training enabled us to produce the freestyle designs that we do, as there is no doubt of the freedom that a sewing machine and cloth (with no constraints) can provide you with! I think though that training is an integral part of progression, as the skills enable you to realize your vision quicker — vision of course can't be taught, but French seams can.

Over the years the Junky crew has grown larger. The zipper elements in the dress at right were created by Eric Holah. Their website lists some locations where you might see some of their work.

As the images in their book and on their website illustrate, garments based on the same design can look remarkably different when produced from different second-hand material. These are definitely one-of-a-kind garments, and many are made to fit for individual clients. (The process is outlined here.)

Junky Styling designs garments for both men and women. In addition to shots of models wearing their clothes, their book contains photos of some of their customers wearing their favorite items. Wearing such garments draws attention. Chris Richmond, a video director and film maker wrote, “I’m not a show-off (I’m actually quite shy), but I enjoy the comments that I get when I am wearing Junky clothing.” Kurt Williams, an actor and jewelry designer, said he wears his favorite jacket when “I’m feeling a bit resigned or subdued so people can focus more on the jacket and less on me.”

In the book’s foreword fashion writer and broadcaster Caryn Franklin describes checking out Junky Styling by having them make her something, and she writes that the garment that they created out of an old Paul Smith suit jacket “frankly looks better on me than it ever did on the hanger gathering dust in my husband’s side of the wardrobe.” I cringed when she mentioned that he had “unknowingly donated” the jacket. Though it made a good story, I suspect most women would find secretly commandeering some of your husband’s upscale clothing a risky way to recycle.

[All photos used by permission. The rain mac photo is by Ness Sherry. The crossover top and zipper creations photos are by Luz Martin.]

Ralph Lauren's Timeless—and Endangered—Glamour

Ralph Lauren, who turned 70 last week, is the most successful purveyor of glamour since the golden age of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Like studio-era movies, Lauren sells dreams of transformation and escape—all those green lawns and polo fields, safari tents and Rocky Mountain ranches. His designs transport the audience out of everyday experience and make the ideal life seem palpable.

Critics may mock him as a faux WASP parvenu and dismiss his customers as “yuppie arrivistes” (as a New York Times letter writer put it in 1992), but Lauren’s work has authentic emotional power. It expresses his own “yearning for something beautiful and timeless that conjures up a world and takes you there.” His genius as a designer and businessman was to find a huge audience that shared his yearnings.

If fashion is of the moment, Lauren is an anti-fashion designer. “I’ve never designed for obsolescence,” he wrote. “I’ve designed for longevity.” Flip through the massive volume of photographs and reflections he published two years ago to mark 40 years of designing and you see what he means. Only the most subtle differences in silhouette distinguish today’s clothes from those of decades past.

A brand built on timeless glamour faces special challenges. Glamour is eternal, but its embodiment changes with the audience. Aspirations and tastes formed in one era may not suit the next. Lauren writes that the songs of Frank Sinatra “have no time.” A child of the ’60s—or the ’90s—would disagree.

And glamour is a delicate illusion. Anything discordant can break the spell. Lately, Ralph Lauren the brand seems determined to puncture its audience’s reverie.

Read the rest at Forbes.com.

The “Myth” of French Glamour

In honor of glamorous Frenchwoman Catherine Deneuve’s 66th birthday (which is today), I have a question: What is it about French women that is just so glamorous? And how can I get some of it?

I ask myself that question more frequently than I should probably admit – every time I painstakingly wrap a scarf around my neck or throw on a striped, boatneck shirt in an effort to grab a little of the nonchalant chic that French women seem to be born with.

I’m hardly the first frustrated American woman to ask that question. Last January in the New York Post, writer Maureen Callahan posed the question, albeit in a snarkier tone, in her article, “French Women Can Suck It.” In an effort to uncover the roots of the myth that “French women are better than we are,” Callahan interviewed a couple of legitimately glamorous French women, both of whom hedged a little when asked about French glamour.

Mireille Giuliano, author of the French Women Don't Get Fat books and president and CEO of Veuve Cliquot, Inc., says that it’s not really all French women who appear so glamorous, it’s just the Parisians. And they’ve got American counterparts in New York. (Full FTC-approved disclosure: I once received a signed copy of one of the French Women books, along with a very nice handwritten note from Ms. Giuliano, thanking me for something complimentary I’d written about the books. Glamour or no, I was charmed.)

Callahan also spoke with Garance Dore, a Paris-based street style photographer-blogger (and girlfriend to Scott “The Sartorialist” Schuman). Dore said, “For me, the French woman is a nice and beautiful myth.”

Both Giuliano and Dore seemed eager to assure their American fans that the “French” thing can be overcome. That there’s no glamour gene that exists only in French DNA. The thing is, while both praise the confidence, style, and attitude of American women (especially New Yorkers), I’m pretty sure they both believe that French women have something special in the glamour department.

At the beginning of her second book, French Women for All Seasons, Giuliano writes about the reaction the first book generated among her French female friends. In short, they were outraged. She quotes one, who said, “How dare you give away OUR secrets to the world?” This was specifically said with respect to “not getting fat,” but the books are really about the way of life that keeps French women famously trim – and glamorous. Somebody in Giuliano’s circle, at least, believes that French women have a corner on the fabulous market.

Garance Dore’s story is similarly murky. Just a few weeks before the NY Post article ran, Dore was interviewed by New York-based writer Joanna Goddard. The subject? How Goddard could stick to her New Year’s resolution to “dress like a French woman.” Dore gave a real, and thorough, answer, involving stripes, scarves, “unconcious layering,” an aversion to color, laziness, and an appreciation for the “sexy detail” (though it seems to me that “sexy detail” is pretty vague…and probably where a lot of American women get caught up). Gore also shared this:

The French woman doesn’t take any resolutions. The French woman is. The present is her sole religion. In fact, the mystery behind the French woman is that she has confidence in herself, despite all the nonsense she says. There’s the secret to her indestructible Frenchitude.

So there it is. French women – from Deneuve to Dore – do share a secret. And, unfortunately for us Yanks, even when it’s spelled out, it’s vague. Guess it’s back to scarf-tying class for me.

[Photo of the Eiffel Tower at dusk, the ultimate glamorous building, by Flickr user stevenvanwel. Used under the Creative Commons license.]

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Cosplay Visions

This Japanese vision in pink and white is engaged in cosplay (costume play) in Tokyo near Harajuku station. Virginia wrote about cosplay and the glamour of dressing up in July. In Tokyo many girls and young women engage in cosplay on Sundays, and are happy to pose for photographs. This Little Bo Peep costume has some interesting details: she is wearing a crown necklace and a giant costume jewelry ring. This has historical implications because Western royalty also used to masquerade. She is referencing not just a nursery rhyme, but also the history of costume play.

One of the most famous costume players was Marie Antoinette, whose husband Louis XVI gave her a fake hamlet called Hameau de la Reine within the park of Versailles. There Marie gained a fantasy setting for her costume play, complete with docile, well-cleaned livestock, and porcelain milk pails. Here the Queen and her attendants could play at being elaborately dressed shepherdesses and milkmaids.

In 18th-century England nobles loved to attend balls masquerading as sumptuously costumed rural characters. Anti-masquerade clergymen felt that no moral woman should attend one. Nonetheless, the masquerades became so popular that conservatives warned that suggesting that the difference between nobles and peasants was a matter of appearance was a danger to the established social order. As Terry Castle writes in Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction :

The anti-masquerade rhetoric of the period offered a clue to the masquerade’s ultimate demise when it exposed the masquerade as a threat to bourgeois decorum and rationalist taxonomies. Mask and costume, the signs of a joyful exchange between self and other, had to be laid aside, and more sober pursuits embraced.

In Japan another popular cosplay character is Lolita, and she is often costumed in Goth black. The young woman shown here blowing bubbles evokes both childhood innocence and a seductive nymphet. The bow on her head seems girlish, but the Goth clothing and the black-cross necklace seem more witch-like. Perhaps the iridescent bubbles she is conjuring are charmed, and have the power to bewitch.

Nabokov’s novel provides no more basis that Lolita should wear black than the nursery rhyme does that Little Bo Peep would dress in pinks and whites. And, clearly, no real-life shepherdess wore fancy clothes while tramping about with her sheep. But this is costume play, and so it is rightfully playful.

The cosplay characters sometimes overlap. A parasol is usually part of the Little Bo Peep costume, but this young woman glancing back from beneath her black parasol suggests a combination of shepherdess, Goth, and Lolita. Her features are still somewhat child-like, but the costume and makeup are grown up and provocative. This unexpected mixture is part of the charm of the costume, and, with her appraising gaze, this Little Bo Peep/Lolita looks dangerously sexually precocious.

These elaborate costumes involve significant expenditures of time and money. And, as all of these photos show, these young women act the roles they are portraying. As Virginia has written, the chance to participate in cosplay, to be noticed, to stand out, and to be photographed is a social activity these young ladies find richly rewarding.

I imagine that these young women gain poise from cosplay that carries over into their everyday lives. Playing someone other than themselves may genuinely expand their sense of self. Terry Castle wrote that the 18th-century masquerades were “a profound mingling of opposites, an absorptive, endlessly satisfying embrace of self and other.”

(The "Harajuku girl" photo is by jaybergesen, and is used under the Flickr Creative Commons license. The "Lolita" photograph is by Bryan Campbell, and is used by permission. The "Glance" photo is by Tommy Cuellar and is used by permission.)

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DG Top Ten: The Wisdom of Coco Chanel

Coco Chanel was a woman famous for her aphorisms. To cap off our week of Chanelore, Karen Karbo, author of The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World’s Most Elegant Woman, compiled a Top 10 list of those she considers the most interesting, including one from someone Karen calls Chanel’s “compatriot in upsetting the apple cart.” Can you spot the ringer? (Answer below the fold.)

1. “To be irreplaceable one must always be different.”

2. “Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.”

3. “Fashion fades, only style remains.”

 

Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, French, 1883-1971. Evening Dress and Slip, 1928, metal sequins on silk tulle. Dress, 1925, crystal beads on lace, silk ribbon. Dress, 1925, crystal beads on silk chiffon. Phoenix Art Museum Fashion Collection. Gifts of Mrs. Wesson Seyburn.

4. “Elegance is refusal.”

5. “It’s always better to be slightly underdressed.”

6. “Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.”

 

Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, French, 1883-1971. Dress and Jacket, 1960s, wool tweed with brass lion’s head buttons. Gift of Mrs. Nathan Cummings. And Jacket, Skirt and Blouse, 1959-1960, wool boucle and silk. Gift of Mrs. Peggy K. Colbentz. Phoenix Art Museum Fashion Collection.

7. “Success is often achieved by those who don't know that failure is inevitable.”

8. “There is time for work, and time for love. That leaves no other time”

9. “Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.”

10. “Anyone can be the duchess of Westminster, but there is only one Chanel.” (It remains a mystery whether or not the Duke of Westminster ever proposed to Chanel; it was beside the point for her.)

The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: On Fearlessness (Part III)

In yesterday's installment from The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World’s Most Elegant Woman, Mademoiselle Chanel turned jersey, formerly the stuff of men’s underwear, into the basis for modern fashion. With no margin of error, she invented sportswear. In our final excerpt, author Karen Karbo considers the value of being a bit of a bitch.

Perhaps it’s not that unusual to exhibit courage in the course of finding our métier. In becoming an attorney, a professor, a web designer, a hair stylist, there are challenges that must be met, doors through which you must step to get to the next level. There are crossroads, required leaps of faith, and moments when you need a new idea (jersey!), and thin air is the place you’re forced to look for it.

But Chanel was fearless on another front. For the length of her long life, she said what she thought. In case this doesn’t strike you as such a huge achievement, consider the cottage industry of best-selling books about the apparent inability of women to speak up, to negotiate, to press on with their ideas when they feel they’re not being heard. “The Daily Asker” is a popular blog, wherein the blogger has set herself the goal of asking for something every day. Yes, women can cry and women can rage, but even now, we still struggle with just saying what’ son her minds.

Chanel was not just a straight talker, she was a back talker, a woman who embraced her own churlishness. One of the cares she lost when she decided to be someone and not something was that of talking around her real thoughts and feelings, so as not to offend. Really, she couldn’t give a damn. Bring it on.

Stendhal (author of The Red and the Black and also ahead of his time) famously observed that the way to offend a Parisian was to call her kind. On this front there is no chance of offending Mademoiselle Chanel. She could be ruthless in her honesty and often downright mean. Unlike most American women she was never tempted to channel her inner, crowd-pleasing Labrador retriever. While she was a masterful flirt, she never felt the need to be kittenish in order to compensate for her wealth and fame.

Once, during the end of the 1920s when Chanel was the queen of Paris chic, after she’d created the famous black dress and after the massive L’Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, where rival Paul Poiret had torpedoed what was left of his brilliant and erratic career by showing opulent, floor-length gowns in silver, lamé, velvet taffeta, and chiffon, totally missing the “modern” aspect of the exposition, Chanel ran into him on the sidewalk. Poor Poiret had not just fallen out of favor, his finances were also in ruins. In addition to the expensive, out-of-style gowns he’d just shown at the Expo, he’d insisted on exhibiting them on a trio of electrically lit river barges, which cost the moon. Before this, in an effort to shore up his reputation and combat Chanel’s stubborn devotion to plainness, he even created dresses lit from the inside with tiny bulbs. At the risk of sounding Seusssian: He was down, she was up. He was over, she was on top. When she met him that day on the sidewalk, it would have been nothing for her to have been gracious.

Seeing Chanel in her little black suit with white schoolgirl collar and cuffs, Poiret said sarcastically, “What are you in mourning for, Mademoiselle?”

She said, “For you, dear Monsieur.”

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Chanel’s wit was not gentle but combative; she was Dorothy Parker with a pair of shears. She sneered at the husbands of her clients and said, “Those grand dukes were all the same. They were tall and handsome and splendid, but behind it all—nothing; just vodka and the void.” 

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Chanel’s wit was not gentle but combative; she was Dorothy Parker with a pair of shears. Aside form her basic French disinclination to be agreeable, and her Cinderella complex, she bore the indignity of being a mere dressmaker. Even as she was becoming a success, when her hats were being worn exclusively by major actresses and she expanded her business to include both Biarritz and Paris (by 1917 she had five workrooms; in one workroom sixty seamstresses worked on clothes for Spain alone), she was routinely snubbed by the aristocratic women who were paying astronomical amounts for her clothes. They would spend hours having a fitting at her shop, then the next day pretend she was invisible when they ran into her at the races. This wasn’t unusual. Couturiers were considered tradespeople, no better than cabinetmakers and knife sharpeners. Charles Worth, the so-called father of haute couture, would cross the street when he saw a client, so as not to put her in the position of having to ignore him.

Then came Chanel with her neat, fresh clothes and her disinclination to take crap from anyone. She was charming, but she refused to censor herself. She sneered at the husbands of her clients and said, “Those grand dukes were all the same. They were tall and handsome and splendid, but behind it all—nothing; just vodka and the void.” Of the increasingly zaftig Colette she said, ”Colette preferred two grilled sausages to love.” She called Picasso “that Spaniard, with his hat.”

The result of all this mouthing off was not what you might expect. Rather than driving people away, Chanel’s devotion to thinking for herself, aloud, drew them to her, made her intriguing. She simply did not have the time, the energy, nor the inclination to care what anyone thought of her. Life was serious. She was serious. She defined luxury as liberty, and stopping to censor herself, to make herself pleasing to others, would be depriving her of luxury. Until she was a very old and very cantankerous old lady, Chanel was beloved. Axel Madsen closes his superb biography of Chanel with a kind, malice-free remark by the sausage-loving Colette, “It is in the secret of her work that we must find this thoughtful conqueror.”

Am I suggesting then that we err on the side of being a big ol’ bitch (or in this case a tiny, chic bitch)? Yes I am.

(Read previous excerpts here and here.)

Reprinted with permission from The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World’s Most Elegant Woman, published by Skirt!, an imprint of The Globe Pequot Press, copyright © 2009 by Karen Karbo.

--Buy Karen Karbo's book here--

The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: On Fearlessness (Part II)

When we left young Coco Chanel, she had established herself first as a successful hat designer and then opened a trendy little shop in the resort town of Deauville, selling her little skirts and cardigans. But she had not yet become the great Mademoiselle Chanel, independent of her boyfriends’ support. She needed a Great Idea. Here, in our second excerpt from Karen Karbo’s new book, The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World’s Most Elegant Woman, she finds it. (The photos are stills from the new movie Coco Before Chanel.)

Most of us, when we land upon a great idea, a lifesaving idea, immediately turn it into our baby. And like our real-life babies, we only want the best for it. We love it. We coddle it. It’s our great idea, and who knows when we might have another one! We want to implement it at the right time with the best materials possible. We want the stars to be right.

But Chanel’s chutzpah dictated the opposite. She was going to reinvent the female wardrobe, and she was going to do it now with whatever was at hand. And what was at hand was jersey, then thought of as the cheesiest material possible.

If the world of fabric was high school, jersey was the personality-free, nearly invisible nerd everyone avoided at lunch. Stretchy, clingy, and cheap, it came in colors like beige, medium beige, light beige, and lighter beige. It was the opposite of silk, wool, cashmere, tulle, and other fine fabrics that could, at the very least, hold their own shape.

How did Chanel decide to use this red-headed stepchild of fabrics? The Chanelore differs. Either she got a sensational deal on a lot of jersey from a manufacturer that decided against using it for the menswear for which it was originally made, or else her lease at the Rue Cambon stipulated that she could only make hats, because there was another dressmaker on the block. As jersey was not something used to make women’s clothes, Chanel’s early jackets, skirts, and suits were not considered clothing, and therefore did not violate the terms of her lease (I will not attempt to parse the French bureaucratic logic).

If things hadn’t worked out so well, Chanel could have easily been dismissed as a whack-a-doo, and her jersey ensembles written off as the crocheted beer hats of the early twentieth century or the disposable paper minidresses in style for a nanosecond during the 1960s.

But Chanel possessed an unswerving faith in her instincts, which included what she believed to be her impeccable taste. And it was (largely) impeccable, because she believed it was. It was sheer nerve. When she launched her line that summer before the war, her dressmaking skills were nearly nonexistent. She knew how to make hats, and she knew how to explain what she wanted to other people (i.e., the women she hired who did have actual dressmaking skills).

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 The history of haute couture is populated with designers who were either born in a box by the side of the road, or like Chanel, suffered traumas straight out of Dickens. For every high-born Miuccia Prada, there is an Armani, who grew up in a small town near Milan that was so aggressively bombed by the allies during World War II that Giorgio lost his entire gang of boyfriends in a single day. 

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It’s possible Chanel’s pluck was not as unique as it seems. The history of haute couture and luxury goods is populated with designers who were either born in a box by the side of the road, or like Chanel, suffered traumas straight out of Dickens. For every high-born Miuccia Prada and Pucci, there is an Armani, who grew up in a small town near Milan that was so aggressively bombed by the allies during World War II that Giorgio lost his entire gang of boyfriends in a single day. On another day, a rifle cartridge he’d found in the street exploded as he was leaning down to have a look. He spent forty days on the burn ward and still bears the scars. Chanel’s contemporary, Madeleine Vionnet, “queen of the bias cut,” was born dirt poor in Chilleurs-aux-Bois, Loiret. Her family sent her to begin her apprenticeship as a seamstress at age eleven; by eighteen she had already been married and divorced and was working in a London hospital as a seamstress, repairing tattered bedding. Louis Vuitton came from a family of farmers in the foothills of the French Alps; he left home at age thirteen for Paris and worked as a stable boy until he was able to apprentice himself to a trunk maker. In 1854, with nothing more than his good ideas as to how a fine trunk should be built, he opened his first shop on the Rue des Capucines. Thierry Hermès was orphaned at fifteen, after his parents and siblings died of various diseases during the Napoleonic Wars. He wandered a bit before settling in Normandy, the heart of French horse country, where he learned to make harnesses. In 1837 he opened his own shop in Paris (not far from Vuitton’s) and proceeded to make the most exquisite harnesses, saddles, and eventually, yes, handbags, on Earth.

It’s tempting to think that the gene for the courage to impose one’s vision of beauty on the world is located on the chromosome that also determines the ability to create a simple, beautiful object (a bag, a hat, a dress) for which people the world over will pay staggering amounts of money.

Chanel’s biographers have surmised that she was able to stick her neck out the way she did because she had nothing to lose, meaning she had no family, no husband, no name, and no money. The other thing she had was no wiggle room. Had her business tanked, she would have lost the patronage of Balsan and Capel, both of whom had absolutely no obligation to underwrite her or her shop. Unlike Blanche Dubois, she was not relying on the kindness of strangers, but on the kindness of businessmen, a far riskier proposition.

The moral of the “Using Jersey When Good Sense Would Dictate Using Wool or Something More Sensible” story is twofold. First, when it comes to going with your gut and making the big, bold, seemingly outlandish move, doing so from a precarious position in life is not just a good idea, it’s the best idea. The very precariousness can, in fact, be a source of strength. Chanel wasn’t about to wait to launch her big idea; on the eve of war, in a relative backwater town (Deauville was chic, but it was hardly Paris), modern fashion was born.

Continued tomorrow...

Reprinted with permission from The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World’s Most Elegant Woman, published by Skirt!, an imprint of The Globe Pequot Press, copyright © 2009 by Karen Karbo.

--Buy Karen Karbo's book here--

The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: On Fearlessness (Part I)

In The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World’s Most Elegant Woman, Karen Karbo (interviewed here) tells the story of one of the 20th century’s great innovators: the woman who, among other things, popularized the little black dress, made costume jewelry respectable, developed the first deliberately abstract and artificial perfume, and turned jersey and cardigans into women's wardrobe staples. Coco Chanel's greatest invention, the one that made the others possible, was herself. Here, illustrated with video from the newly released movie Coco Before Chanel (the date is British; the film is just now opening in the U.S.), is the first of three excerpts from the chapter titled “On Fearlessness.”

From the perspective of someone who is able to overcome her fears only sporadically through a combination of deep yogic breathing and self-talk, the strong, unrelenting heartbeat of Chanel’s courage alone is enough to qualify her for beatification, St. Coco, Patron Saint of Jersey (the fabric, not the island).

After Chanel realized she could more or less single-handedly (let’s not forget her assistants—she could not have done what she did without the little people) overthrow the institution of the twenty-pound platter hat with her saucy department-store boaters, she decided she could do the same for all of women’s fashion. Pourquois pas? Why not? It was the same principle, only on a larger scale. She was like a warrior queen who invaded a little country as practice for attacking a larger one.

It was the summer of 1914, the uneasy first summer of the first World War, and everyone who could fled Paris for Deauville, a posh resort on the northeastern coast of France, known for its racetrack, Grand Casino, and grand hotels. Chanel (with the backing of her new lover, Boy Capel) opened Chanel Modes on the main drag between the most luxurious hotel in town and the Grand Casino, and there she started selling little skirts and fetching cardigans.

A lucky heat wave in July, and that being-on-holiday-so-what-the-hell feeling that in our times manifests itself as a willingness to stop at the market on the way home from the beach in a sarong, sent fashionable society ladies (with fabulous rich-lady names like Princess Baba de Faucigny-Lucinge and Pauline de Saint-Saveur) into Coco’s shop for her light, comfy pieces, which would soon be known as sportswear, even though the only “sport” women engaged in them was the occasional slow bike ride, promenading between shops and motoring.

The creation of the fetching cardigan has its own equally fetching Chanelore behind it. One day Chanel was tromping around the barn/at the races or strolling along the beach and asked to borrow boyfriend Capel’s pullover. This was the kind of relationship they had, intimate and chummy. She could ask to borrow his clothes and Capel, an iconoclast in his own right, thought nothing of it. But the pullover...what a nuisance to haul this thing over her head—one presumes she had to remove her nervy little straw boater first—and so she simply took a pair of scissors, cut the pullover up the middle, belted it, and Bob’s your uncle. How the shears and belt miraculously appeared at the barn/track/shore is one of those charming Chanelian mysteries that we faithful simply accept. It supports the observation of her friend Paul Morand (novelist, diplomat, modernist, friend of Proust) that she “built her wardrobe in response to her needs, just the way Robinson Crusoe built his hut.”

It took pluck to introduce easy-to-wear clothes during an era when “clothes” and “easy-to-wear” had never yet appeared together in a sentence. At the end of the Belle Époque, the S-bend corset was out, but the long-line corset, looser laced but extending to the knees (!) for a slimming effect, was in, and women’s clothes were still a cross between costume and armor. Ladies dressed every morning in a woman disguise, in clothes designed to aggressively suggest femininity while at the same time hiding the female shape lurking beneath.

So Chanel, the young milliner who still scrubbed with the same no-nonsense soap the nuns used at the orphanage, with one cheeky, well-received concept under her belt (simplify!), decided to expand. She decided rather than disguising women as women, it was time to create clothes that allowed the ladies to work it.

Historians differ on how she came to take this giant step forward. Some say she was innocently putting one delicate foot in front of the other, and moving from hats into clothing was the next obvious thing; others believe she was a crafty businesswoman with a master plan hatched—I’m guessing—during all those idle hours at Royallieu while she was helping Étienne Balsan’s grooms tend the thoroughbreds (as anyone who has horses in her life knows, for every hour in the saddle there are hours and hours of cooling down, bathing, brushing, hoof picking, etc.). I’ve decided to believe the latter, that she was a crafty faux Auvergnate bent on conquering the world in her own way, as opposed to a darling wee thing that simply fell into monumental, world-changing success.

Anyway, it was her big idea at a time when she needed a big idea. Chanel always looked young and passed herself off as younger. If she could have continued to pass herself off as eighteen indefinitely, she would have. In 1914 she was thirty-one, a few years past the age when women who were neither wives nor mothers were written off as “redundant.” In this way things haven’t changed much. Or rather they changed about forty years ago, when it was thought that a woman needed a man like a fish needed a bicycle, and then they changed back. To be thirty-one and unmarried is the same tragedy now as it was a hundred years go, back in the days when driving was considered a sport. At any rate, Chanel’s fate wasn’t yet guaranteed. Just because she had a successful hat business, that didn’t mean she wouldn’t be thrown over by Capel (as she eventually was) and left husband-less, family-less, penniless.

Continued tomorrow...

Reprinted with permission from The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World’s Most Elegant Woman, published by Skirt!, an imprint of The Globe Pequot Press, copyright © 2009 by Karen Karbo.

--Buy Karen Karbo’s book here--

DG Q&A: Karen Karbo on Coco Chanel

When Karen Karbo was a kid, she wanted to be a large-animal veterinarian and a movie director. Instead, she became a remarkably prolific author. Her well-received oeuvre includes three novels for adults, the Minerva Clark series of juvenile mysteries, and a book on Katharine Hepburn. Her newest title, The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World's Most Elegant Woman, is a witty biography-cum-advice-book starring one of the 20th century's most influential innovators. DG will feature excerpts from the book tomorrow through Thursday, followed by a special Top 10 from Karen (and Coco) on Friday.

DeepGlamour: You previously wrote a book called How to Hepburn: Lessons on Living from Kate the Great, about Katharine Hepburn. What drew you to Hepburn and Chanel? How much do they have in common?

Karen Karbo: My connections with Hepburn were largely personal. Katharine Hepburn was a household saint; my mother was said to look like her and she introduced me to her movies. I’d known about Chanel because I hail from designers. My grandmother was a couturiere in Los Angeles in the ’40s and ’50s; she designed pieces for the wives of movie moguls. My father was an industrial designer. He designed the hood ornament for the Lincoln Town Car, that iconic cross inside a square. Anyway, I started thinking about Coco and her life when I was writing the Hepburn book and came across Coco, the 1969 musical starring Hepburn. One thing lead to the next.

Despite the fact that one was a classic New England Yankee from a WASPy, relatively wealthy family and the other was a scrappy French peasant born in a poorhouse, the two women had a surprising amount of personality traits in common: both women were confident, hardworking, and fearless, except when it came to people finding out secrets about their past. They both discovered their individual style and talents young, and worked them for their entire lives. They were both bossy. They liked to instruct. They both always thought they were right about everything. And, they demanded that they be comfortable in their clothes!

DG: How would you define “Chanel style”? Does it require Chanel clothes?

KK: Chanel style is a philosophy. In its purest form it holds that luxury is a necessity, and true luxury is about feeling absolutely comfortable in your clothes (and thus, in your skin.) Chanel style means wearing simple pieces that skim the body. There is no unnecessary extra fabric, nor is anything so tight you can’t move. I’m sure ultra low-rise jeans would have driven her mad. Indeed, being able to move through the world easily and with comfort was one of Chanel’s main tenets. I don’t think this requires Chanel clothes, but it requires the wearing of clothes with a Chanelian attitude: only wear what suits you. When Chanel was just starting out, when she was Coco before Chanel, the fussy, overly complicated gowns of the Belle Époque were not simply beyond her reach financially, they looked ridiculous on her. She found what flattered her the most and stuck with it until the end of her days.

DG: You write, “Style has always been about money, and it always will be.” That’s a pretty depressing thought. Do you really believe it? How, aside from making your own Chanel-inspired suit, do you deal with it as a middle-class writer?

KK: I agree a hundred percent: it is a depressing thought. But it’s also a reality. To believe otherwise is to live at the mercy of the fashion industry which, in order to survive, needs women, rich and poor and in between, to buy a lot of clothes at all different price points as frequently as possible. “Style” is synonymous with variety in our culture; to be chic and stylish Carrie Bradshaw required a closet full of Manolos.

I have a friend who’s very rich and his clothes are the epitome of simplicity: he likes to wear jeans, loafers and cashmere sweaters, bespoke shirts and Armani jackets. The fabrics are astonishing in their color, their softness. The cut of everything he slips into is perfect and flawless. So is his style.

There are clothes that give a shout-out to style. They boast the of-the-moment neckline or cuff; they’re made of cheap fabric and slapped together by shockingly underpaid workers in Indonesia and China. That’s another discussion for another time, but the point is, from a Chanelian point-of-view, that style is luxury, and luxury means a garment is as beautiful on the inside as it is on the outside. Plus, it has to fit, and cheap clothes just don’t fit that well, generally speaking.

Both variety and quality cost money. Or, more money than a writer makes. J. Crew has been my reliable go-to catalogue for decades. Which is not to say I don’t own a few stylish pieces. Up the street from me there’s an extraordinary consignment store I visit once a week. I just snagged a Ralph Lauren Black Label top for $18. I wear jeans, boots, and jackets a lot, and I have some great jewelry that belonged to my grandmother. As long as I don’t decide to become a socialite who needs to look fantastic five nights a week, I’m set.

DG: You write that Chanel’s attitude toward her past made her “seem completely modern.” What was her attitude and how did it inform her work and her persona?

KK: Chanel lied about her past, and then rewrote the lies. She created a past for herself that suited her. She was, in a lot of ways, one of the early practitioners of spin. France is a family-centric country, and the French tend to honor their heritage. To invent yourself, to make yourself, the way Chanel did was a 20th-century maneuver. It was an American maneuver. We Americans understood what Chanel was about long before the French did. We loved her message of ease and freedom immediately.

DG: Chanel was a master of self-promotion, yet you also note that she was “shrewd enough to make her unavailable to her customers.” What can she teach contemporary figures about balancing publicity and mystery?

KK: A salesman has no mystique. TMI extinguishes allure. Chanel said, “People should guess you,” and so they should. She understood intuitively that inviting her clients and her public to participate in the creation of her allure was to capture their attention. She put enough out there to create a screen for their projection. She understood that self-promotion was also seduction. She was also extraordinarily lucky; she was able to create a desire for her pieces, for her look and way of life, and then recede into the shadows.

DG: Coco Chanel was elegant and chic, but was she glamorous? If so, to whom?

KK: Chanel’s most glamorous move was to replace the real jewels given her by her lover, the Duke of Westminster, then the richest man in the world, with poured glass. At a time of great prosperity she invented costume jewelry and during the Depression she insisted women wear diamonds they could sell in order to eat. She was a revolutionary disguised as a fashionista. Can it possibly get more glamorous than that?

DG: How would Coco Chanel fare on Project Runway?

KK: I’m sure she would have nothing to do with it. She would find another way to succeed. When the dazzling Elsa Schiaparelli stole Coco’s thunder in the ’30s (as well as some of her best clients), Chanel’s response was to completely ignore her.

The DG Dozen

1) How do you define glamour? Chanel said “art is imperfection” and the same can be said of glamour. To be glamorous is be aware of one’s flaws worthy of envy. Barbara Stanwyck comes to mind. A glamorous item is usually a fetish item that few people have but everyone wants. The iPhone was glamorous for about 48 hours, once upon a time. 

2) Who or what is your glamorous icon? I worship Christiane Amanpour. She’s brilliant, chic, and courageous, with that devastatingly fabulous accent and weird, thick fringe of hair. 

3) Is glamour a luxury or a necessity? Absolute necessity. When glamour goes, so does creativity and hope. 

4) Favorite glamorous movie? Double Indemnity. Also, Chinatown. Any movie in which people can’t overcome their own worst impulses while wearing sunglasses.

5) What was your most glamorous moment? Sipping Lagavulin single malt scotch aboard the Four Seasons Explorer in the Maldives, after a scuba dive in which I’d encountered a hammerhead shark. 

Blogs, Fashion, and the Resurgent Glamour of Smoking

Jennine of The Coveted is calling on fashion and street blogs to stop posting “images of cool, chic people standing around casually smoking.” Such images, she argues, promote a seductively glamorous image of a gross and dangerous habit. “Even...people who hate smoking in real life, get a voyeuristic joy out of these cool people who are immune to health hazards and smelly breath.”

“Would it be too much to ask to put out the cigarette for a moment, for the sake of social responsibility?” she asks.

She’s not the first to make that argument. Her prime target, The Sartorialist, has long drawn criticism for showing so many street-fashion icons with lit cigarettes. (Examples here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) The topic has become something of a joke among commenters, and this post included a disclaimer declaring that the image isn’t supposed to celebrate smoking.

The problem, of course, is that these cool, chic people do smoke, particularly on the street. (The New Yorkers in these photos often look like they’re on the street precisely because they’re smokers fleeing no-smoking buildings.) But, Jennine correctly notes, such photos are always selective. Why not edit out the cigarettes? In effect, she’s arguing that fashion blogs should further glamorize their subjects by deleting their nasty habits.

In truth, these blog photos rarely glamorize smoking. Unlike images like this, this, or this, they don't emphasize the smoking. It is unimportant to the image and the emotions it evokes. Rather, these photos normalize smoking, by depicting cigarettes as no more unusual or problematic than cell phones. You have to care about cigarettes to imbibe any message about them.

Of course, that normalization is something of a change from the treatment of cigarettes in my youth, when smoking was generally viewed as a low-class habit for losers. The unrelenting campaign against it has given smoking new cachet, making it an emblem of “heroic, sexy social outlaws,” as one observer put it in British Vogue.

Still, the main pro-cigarette bias on fashion blogs isn’t overt. It’s a side effect of the photographic medium. The still image removes the smoker from time and, thus, from the long-term consequences of the smoking. In this way, the photos are indeed glamorous, offering escape into a perfect, and illusory, moment beyond entropy, age, decay, or death.

[Celia enjoying a cigarette by Flickr user Malias, St. Tropez smoker by Flickr user FaceMePLS, both used under Creative Commons license.]

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Footwear as Fashion Indicators

Recently I found myself with time to kill in a area of Denver where there are several courthouses and high-rise office buildings. I decided to sit in a Starbucks and spend some time observing the clothing of the steady parade of customers.

Some clothing served as markers of high-status positions. The men in expensive shoes and suits were most likely connected to nearby law firms or corporate offices. Yet their clothing sometimes reflected more than business seriousness. Some of the men clearly relished looking great, right up to their impeccably cut and combed hair.

To give my observations some coherence, I decided to focus on footwear. Years ago I heard an art dealer mention footwear as one of the gauges you could use to judge people’s willingness to spend money on themselves. The premise was that if a potential customer had spent money on stylish footwear, they were also more likely to spend money buying art. Since then, several retailers of luxury goods have told me that they have learned to be careful about jumping to conclusions based on appearance. People often dress quite casually while relaxing or on vacation, and there are people with money who don't like to dress up.

Nonetheless, we all make make assumptions based on first impressions, and a salesperson in an jewelry store will instinctively notice when someone enters the store wearing nice jewelry. So while I was observing the diverse clothing styles of the Starbucks customers, I decided to see if looking first at people’s footwear would usually provide a quick indication of both the expense and style of what I would see when I looked higher.

In general this proved to be the case. Dressy shoes predicted dressy clothes, casual shoes predicted casual clothes, and so on. Nonetheless, there were enough subtle variations to keep things interesting. Casual footwear varied in stylishness over a vast range, and these variations also tended to reflect the wearer’s fashion look.

Even flip-flops varied widely. There were some decorated ones, though I saw none of the hand-decorated Swarovski crystal variety, such as those available on the internet here and here. (The latter site even offers a collection of bridal flip flops.) Fun flip flops styles generally went with fashions that were fun and looked comfortable to wear.

Footwear that exposes bare feet has been and remains a subject of debate as office wear. I saw only three women in business attire who wore flip flops, and in each case their business wear was relatively casual, and their flip flops were black and sleek, which made them look something like sandals. The women that wore them were young and appeared to be lower level employees. (I was reminded of the business maxim, “dress for the job you want, not the job you have.”)

While observing I also noticed that footwear and attire were sometimes used either to attract attention or seemingly to avoid attention. For example, two young women came in together, obviously from the same office. One had on black flip-flops and the other wore stylish three-inch heels. The flip-flop wearer had on a loose white blouse worn outside a knee-length, loose brown skirt. Nothing about her clothing called attention to her body, which was thin, but also rather shapeless. In contrast, the young woman wearing the stylish high-heels had on a black dress which, while still office appropriate, was short enough to showcase her remarkably beautiful legs. There were a lot of customers, and when she left Starbucks every man there turned to watch her walk away. She clearly knew the value of her legs, and had directed attention to them. And, like the stylishly dressed businessmen, she seemed to relish knowing that she looked great.

The lyrics of the above 1980s No Nonsense commercial say, “If the attitude fits, wear it.” Yet sometimes wearing different clothing can substantially influence our here-and-now attitude about ourselves. So  perhaps the saying should sometimes be, “If you want an attitude, wear it.”

[Business suit photograph used by permission of jjwam, whose Flickr photostream is here. The "pink flip flops" photo is by cambodia4kidsorg, and used under the Flickr Creative Commons License.]

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The Fashion Portfolio Problem

Aspiring models and aspiring fashion photographers share a Catch-22 problem. Neither is likely to find paid work without a portfolio of professional quality photographs. To have such a portfolio, the model needs to have been photographed by skilled photographers, and the photographer needs to have photographed beautiful models. But how do you develop a professional-looking portfolio before working professionally?

One answer is to pay a professional model or photographer for their time. If a top agency signs a model, they may pay a professional photographer to create a portfolio. For an aspiring model to do this herself would be expensive. This makes young women who want to try modeling vulnerable to scams, and there are many disreputable agencies and photographers who will gladly take their money.

Yet aspiring models do need good photographs to demonstrate that they are photogenic (not always the same as being beautiful in person). Normal human vision is stereoptic and three dimensional. A single-lens camera can only record two-dimensional information, and our perception of shapes in photographs depends on the angle and quality of light that falls on the subject, as well as on how the subject reflects that light back. Faces with strong bone structures and unusual features may photograph beautifully because they reflect back well-defined shapes and shadows (notice the above model’s unusual eyes). Makeup can also be used to create dimensional illusions. Experienced photographers are always concerned about how the light falling on a subject defines it dimensionally.

Conversely, aspiring fashion photographers need to work with photogenic models in order to build their portfolio. They can ask their friends and acquaintances, but as one workshop for aspiring photographers put it bluntly, you need the chance to work with models who photograph at 8 or above on a 10-point scale (something few people do). Photographer workshops sometimes provide students with models and some coaching, but for workshops the students must pay a fee. In better workshops the ratio between students and models is low, such as 2:1. In the photo at right the student is getting a chance to work with a model 1:1. Notice how side lighting is helping the muscles in the model’s leg look exceptionally well-defined, but also leaves her face in shadow. One solution would be to have an assistant use a white reflector to bounce more light to her face, but finding a solution first requires consciously noticing the problem—that the light falling on her face fails to define her features in a way that a camera can clearly record. If the student does notice the problem, then he might decide to add light, change her pose, or change locations. He has to learn to be constantly aware of the relationship between his subject and the direction and quality of various sources of light.

While researching this post I looked at several websites listing would-be models. Looking at some of these sites  made me sad. (Two examples are here and here.) Many individuals listed would appear to have no chance of becoming paid models (as is true of most people). But, regardless of that, far too many of them were represented by terrible photographs. Many have posted casual snapshots of themselves taken by someone who was obviously not a photographer. These snapshots typically featured no careful hairstyling or makeup, a depressingly mundane location, and truly horrible lighting. Such photographs work against any chance they have of being hired as models—their photographs brand them as non-professional.

One possible solution to building a strong portfolio is a barter system. Realizing that it can be mutually beneficial for good models and photographers to work with each other, there are a number of internet networking sites for them. Some members of these sites will exchange their time for either CDs of images (TFCD) or prints (TFP). In this way both models and photographers can build their portfolios. Naturally, the more work the members have booked as paid professionals, the more likely they are to seek monetary payment for their time. 

Flickr contains photographs from a number of fine photographers and photogenic people, and Flickr images can be easily searched. The image at right and the first image in this post were found on Flickr, and both contained a link to the Canadian site Model Republic, a fashion networking site for people working in all aspects of the industry. You can find some impressive model and photographer portfolios on other networking sites (such as Model Mayhem and iStudio). Some of these sites require potential members to submit images which are screened for quality before they are allowed to join.

Aspiring models need to be cautious about donating their time. They don’t want to find themselves posing for an untalented and potentially creepy GWC (guy with camera). A t-shirt proclaiming the wearer is a Professional GWC is not a reference. If a photographer has done good work, he or she should be willing to show samples.

One tongue-in-cheek member of Model Mayhem is GWC, a fictional nerd photographer from Baltimore who offers “drive-by shooting workshops.” For these workshops “students” pay a fee to sit in the back of his pickup, and, beginning and ending at a Hooters parking lot, he drives around spotting “hotties” to photograph on the move. His gallery of photos includes an out-of-focus portrait and a magazine cover titled “Perfect 5½” that features “the best models we can afford.” His fictional character personifies just the sort of GWCs that models hope to avoid.

Workshop photo shoots happen all over the world (the workshop shown here was in Singapore). People in some Asian countries seem particularly open to posing for and taking glamour shots. I have often seen young Japanese women strike fashion poses as soon as a friend turns a camera their direction.

The young men shown in this workshop photo shoot are likely enjoying themselves, despite the 6:1 student-to-model ratio. Perhaps each fantasizes that someday he will be paid to take photographs of an endless supply of beautiful models. It’s an unlikely dream, but if nothing else they are learning by trial and error that you need a lot more than just a camera and a beautiful subject to produce a professional-looking fashion photograph. Aptitude, and hard-won knowledge and experience are also essential requirements.

["Ariana" and "City Style and Living Shoot" are from photographix.ca's Flickr photostream. "Posing Jess" and "Railroad Shoot" are from madaboutasia. All are used under the Flickr Creative Common's license.]

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Hotel Week: Hotels and Hats—Stylish Ambiance

While traveling my wife and I often stay in historical hotels. In the late-19th and early-20th centuries some interesting hotels were built as stops on railroad lines, the kind of place where Harvey Girls or other uniformed staff served you. Resort spa hotels were often built near natural features such as hot springs.

Many of these hotels closed during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. Some have been renovated and reopened. The mineral resources of the western United States have generated boom-and-bust cycles that continue to this day. For example, Las Vegas, New Mexico, was once a wealthy mining and railroad community which had several hotels. The Castañeda, a mission-style Harvey House hotel, is now a decaying giant whose vacant rooms sleep silently only a few steps from the train station (the hotel was used in the film Red Dawn). A picturesque city, Las Vegas has been used in many films, especially in the days of silent Westerns. In another part of town the 1881 Plaza Hotel still operates (we’ve stayed there, and it‘s shown in the photo). The Plaza Hotel was used in the film No Country for Old Men).

Many of these hotels were built in boom periods and were furnished resplendently. These hotels were places where presidents, congressmen, and railroad and mining barons stayed, as well as famous entertainers. In some hotels the rooms are named for the film stars or presidents who stayed in them.

The present-day condition of such hotels varies from abandoned shells to five-star splendor (an example of the latter is the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs). We recently stayed in a historic resort hotel whose grandeur had faded a bit (I’ll leave it unnamed). There were echoes of its former majesty, as well as signs that times had changed. There were no bellhops, for example, uniformed or not, to the disappointment of one elderly couple. And the decor was sometimes slightly off—the new carpet in the dining room clashed with the upholstery.

During our stay there I noticed that the music heard in the lobby and dining room was 1940s big-band music, and I pondered why it is that Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald and other singers of that era are so often heard as background music in upscale locations.

One reason might be language. When I phoned about a change in our reservation, I was told, “That won’t be no problem.” The double negative told me that some of the staff would be downscale. Perhaps the relatively urbane language of many big-band era song lyrics era helps hotels project some sense of sophistication. In contrast, the vernacular dialects used in many post-1950s lyrics might create a more commonplace ambiance. If you’re striving to create an elegant dining room experience, hearing Mick Jagger sing “I can’t get no satisfaction” might shift the diners’ moods in the wrong direction. (An even worse strategy would be Karaoke. We stopped to look at one beautiful old hotel, but there was an outdoor Karaoke event going on, which demolished the Victorian ambiance.)

In keeping with DeepGlamour’s recent hat party, I think hats have an oblique relevance. In the hotel where we were staying, when you looked at photographs of its glory days, you might notice that the guests in earlier decades frequently wore hats. And when you see photographs of singers like Frank Sinatra in his heyday, he is often wearing a hat and a tailored suit. Thus when patrons hear the music of that period, they think of a time in which many entertainers dressed with high-fashion elegance when they performed, and they are reminded of a time when high style was appreciated. In a 1996 interview, American-born fashion designer Tom Ford commented, “If I was ever going to become a good designer, I had to leave America. My own culture was inhibiting me. Too much style in America is tacky. It's looked down upon to be too stylish. Europeans, however, appreciate style....In fashion, you can really tell that America is descended from the Puritans.”

The only hat that I saw at the hotel was a baseball hat worn by an attractive, model-thin woman in a black, stretch tee and a great looking pair of khaki pants. The baseball hat created a fun look, though I couldn’t help thinking that a stylish fedora would have made her outfit look more hipster current. Then again, thinking of Tom Ford’s comments, perhaps she didn't want to look “too stylish.” Otherwise, the contrast between her appearance and her husband’s, who arrived a few moments later in trucker-like clothes, might have seemed comic—though probably not from her perspective.

[Photo of the Plaza Hotel used under the GNU Free Documentation License.]

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Editor's Note: Order Forgotten Fashion Today!

Tuesday, September 8 is the last day to order your copy of Kate Hahn's witty romp through fashion history, Forgotten Fashion (excerpted here and here), signed by Kate and illustrator Andraé Gonzalo. Each copy is $9.95, plus postage.

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Today's Twitter question: Where would you put Forgotten Fashion? I vote for the mammography waiting room at UCLA, currently stocked with Westways and Real Simple.

Suits and Knives

A young corporate lawyer that I know was thrilled that he found a $4,000 Paul Smith suit in his size on sale for $800. He snatched it up and took it to his tailor to be fine tuned in fit. (The photo at right shows one of Smith’s suits.)

A friend of mine whose work never requires that he dress up could not understand why anyone would pay thousands of dollars for a suit. This friend likes to cook, and, while looking around a kitchenware store with our wives, I pointed out a Victorinox chef's knife which Cook’s Illustrated had praised as a inexpensive, yet favorite tool in their test kitchen. He then showed me the knife that he wanted, a Shun chef’s knife. It was incredibly beautiful, but given that it was priced at about five times as much, I wondered if it could possibly function five times as well?

I suppose that depends on what “function” means. If you love to cook and love to work with beautiful tools, then owning the Shun knife might be a daily source of pleasure. And if your work involves frequently dealing with clients who wear suits worth thousands of dollars, then wearing a suit in which you feel just as well-dressed could be both valuable to your business and personally pleasurable. Value in both cases depends on just how much the suit or knife means to the self-image of the buyer.

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Imagining Red-Hot Sensuality

I just purchased a book by Kim Addonizio that contains a poetic response to Freud’s question, “What Do Women Want?” Her poem begins:

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what’s underneath.

I suspect there are many women who sometimes fantasize about what it would be like to be boldly uninhibited about their sensuality. I know my wife sometimes does, and one of the fictional characters who fascinates her is Carmen (whether in the opera or the flamenco film). This story of a lustful gypsy who shamelessly seduces whatever man she chooses fascinates a lot of people—it has been the basis for more than 50 films, musicals, and dance works.

We plan to travel to London in October, and I discovered that Bizet’s Carmen will be playing at the Royal Opera House. So I located a dress-rehearsal video of Elīna Garanča, the mezzo soprano scheduled to sing the title role. My wife loved the red and blue costume and the staging. Here is that dress rehearsal video (not of the production we would see):

Carmen takes as her lover whatever man interests her at the moment, and then abandons him when he begins to bore her.  Similarly, later in her poem Addonizio writes:

I want to walk like I’m the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want.

Poor Freud. I wonder if he ever imagined that this is what women sometimes want, even if perhaps temporarily, or even if, for most women, perhaps only in fantasy. (Here are links to Addonizio’s whole poem, as well as Virginia’s earlier post on red dresses.)

[Red dress photo by inottawa, and used under the Flickr Creative Common's license.]

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DG Slideshow: "Hats Tell Tales," Photographs by George Hurrell

From Marlene Dietrich and Buster Keaton to Aretha Franklin and Bianca Jagger, George Hurrell captured some of the 20th century's great faces, in hats that added an extra dimension to the characters they portrayed, in film or in life. Click here to see the show.

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Forgotten Fashion: The Four O'Clock Dress

Kate Hahn's Forgotten Fashion: An Illustrated Faux History Of Outrageous Trends And Their Untimely Demise is a romp through fashion and social history, recounted through (faux) once-celebrated fads, from the Sidesaddle Motoring Coat of 1903 to the Hood-olo of 2005. Here, in honor of the new season of Mad Men (the show is set later, but the milieu is similar), is a mid-century selection, with illustrations by Andraé Gonzalo of Project Runway fame.

Four O’clock Dress, 1957 

Not a day dress, and not an evening gown, this toga-like garment was worn by mid-century American housewives during the single, lonely, long-shadowed hour after the pot roast was placed in the oven but before a husband’s key was heard in the front door. Made of light-reflecting fabrics such as satin or sharkskin, in bright period colors like Miami-limeade, Flamingo-pink, or Navajo-turquoise, it was meant to provoke optimism in the wearer.

The dress was held in place at the shoulder with a clasp which doubled as a makeup compact. This opened to reveal a more risqué shade of rouge than would be worn at other times of day. Each “Foursie” also had secret inner pockets to hide the tools of whatever vice occupied the otherwise abject and idle afternoon. Contents often included miniature gin bottles, marijuana joints, or palm-sized erotic novels.

Worn only in affluent suburbs reached by the commuter trains of New York City, the Four O’clock Dress was the concept of Jacques Brevi, a French couturier who trained in the Paris atelier of Hubert de Givenchy but came to the United States in the middle 1950s. Soon disillusioned with the grime of the bongo-playing milieu of the Lower East Side, he decamped to the affluent suburb of Bronxville, which, he wrote to a friend, was: “paradise with Cadillacs” but one that he feared was not safe from the “dirty fingers of Nihilism.” 

Brevi set to work preserving his suburban haven by creating a dress that would, “if not give meaning to life, then distract from the fact that there is none.” He imported the brilliantly colored material from the finest Italian mills, hired students from Sarah Lawrence as seamstresses, and sold his creations in at least seven shops in Westchester County. The distinct rustling sound of the brilliant togas became known in better neighborhoods as “the laughter of the dresses,” as Technicolor Athenas emerged from their houses and congregated on cherry-blossom drenched front lawns to trade hits of Indonesian reefer, sip Crème de Menthe, and read aloud from annotated bootleg copies of Tropic of Cancer.

Soon, the women began to expand the secret sartorial compartments to include heavier items such as law books and manifestos. Brevi warned that the garments were not designed for this, and would not be able to withstand it. In April of 1957, his prediction came true when New Haven resident Carol Jones weighed down her chartreuse “Foursie” with copies of Atlas Shrugged and a 300-page letter to the editor of the Westchester County Times espousing individual freedom. The inner pocket ripped, and the contents fell and crushed several of her toes, leaving her prone and unconscious from pain in her foyer.

The next day, the incident was reported in the very paper in which Carol had wished to publish her letter. Her husband, Charles Jones was quoted as saying: “A man should not come home to the smell of burning dinner. I blame these glorified bed sheets.” Clippings of the story were found on the pillows of most Westchester housewives. The Four O’clock Dress was soon known as the “divorce dress” and sales plummeted. Brevi wrote to a friend, “I suppose I will once again pull up my silver tent stakes and take the circus of my life elsewhere.” He moved to Vermont, where he made sandals.

Note: In areas closer to Manhattan, the garment was known as the Three-thirty Dress as the commuter trains arrived earlier.

*****

For a limited time, you can order a copy of Forgotten Fashion, signed by Kate and Andraé, for $9.95 plus shipping. Order it here no later than Labor Day, September 7—a great gift for your favorite fashionista! Greetings A&L Daily Readers: In your honor, we've extended the deadline for orders to Friday, September 18. But the sooner we receive your order, the easier it will be to get your book signed. Thanks!

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Glamour Girls

Whether wearing their own (left) or one of Arturo Rios's spectacular creations (right and below, left), guests at the DeepGlamour party demonstrated the enduring glamour of hats. And then there were the more playful approaches. For a full set of party photos, check out the DeepGlamour Flickr pool.

 

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"A Symbol of Grace"

Hats
by Glenis Redmond

Sistahs have always been able to style in hats.

You know they got it going on.
Those women can wear hats from dust ‘til dawn.

You’ve got to be bold and have snap to sport a hat.
You’ve got to have it and know where it is at.

You’ve got to stop and cock it to the side.
Check them out and continue with your stride.

Profile it. Style it.
Then let them wow it.

Tilt it, lean it, or wear it straight in place.
A well worn hat is a symbol of grace.

You have heard people say it. I have too.
“Oh, she can wear a hat.
She sho’ ’nough knows what to do.”

Oh, a hat can get those oohs and aahs.
If it is totally bad, it gets applause.

Some hats are so bad, they are just bad to the bone.
People stop and say, “that girl has got it going on.”

Or say “You just go girl, you just go on, girl,
‘cause with that hat you’re the finest thang in the world.”

            HATS
                                    HATS
HATS

Big ones, tall ones, small ones, fruity ones,
pointy ones, veiled ones, flowered ones
sporty ones,
polka-dot ones,
plain ones,
and kufis too!

Lean it,
            cock it,
style it,
            profile it,
                                    tilt it,
                                                 tip it,
                        check it,
            sport it.

                        HATS
HATS
                                    HATS

Do you dare to wear?
How do you fare?
Do you want to be bad to the bone?
Then, get you a hat and get it going on!

[Copyright  2000 by Glenis Redmond. Used with permission of the author. Photo of Virginia Postrel and Amy Alkon watching slide show of Kirk McKoy's photos of women in church hats by Karol Franks, from her DeepGlamour party set on Flickr.]

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What Is It About Redheads and Hats?

Selected photos from DeepGlamour's “You’re the Top” birthday party and Fashion Walk celebration are now up in the DeepGlamour Flickr pool. These two shots are from the many photo-booth portraits, which I’m still sorting through.

One striking fact is the disproportionate representation of redheads (persimmon-tressed?) among the guests and especially among those with interesting hats. Perhaps those with flame-colored hair are used to the head-oriented attention a hat commands. 

In addition to these ladies, Advice Goddess Amy Alkon carried off one of the evening’s largest hats, an Amy Downs creation, with her usual aplomb. “I’d dress this way all the time,” she said, “but people look at you funny.” (Or words to that effect.) It might be tough to be a shy redhead, but Amy wouldn’t know.

Our book-signing redhead Kate Hahn came hatless, but we forgive her because Forgotten Fashion is so much fun. Besides, its auburn-haired cover muse doesn’t have a hat either.

If you couldn’t come to the party, you can still get a signed copy of the book for $9.95 plus shipping. Order it here no later than Labor Day, September 7.

Name to sign book to

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The Great Hat Party & The People Who Made It Possible

DG’s anniversary party was great fun. We will have photos soon, but first I want to thank all the people who made it possible:

Loft Appeal, which lent us the furniture for our big, beautiful, and very empty former bank lobby. Loft Appeal is a furniture store, with two places in downtown L.A. At its Hewitt Street store it sells contemporary furniture (including the world's best sofa bed, from American Leather, which I wrote about here) in the front and has a prop house in the back. On Saturdays and Sundays, the back is open to the public for a big "garage sale," where you can buy everything from a giant globe from Armageddon and a huge ray gun/laser cannon from Sky High ($5,000) to a lovely tabletop mirror from Samantha Who? (which we borrowed for the evening), plus all sorts of normal furnishings at low prices. The entire staff is great.

Spring Center Inc./Spring Arts Tower, which lent us the big, beautiful, and very empty former bank lobby and was extremely helpful in dealing with my newbie party-planning questions and schedule revisions. A wonderful combination of friendly informality and professionalism.

Beauty Collection, which sells all sorts of great beauty products both online and in its three L.A. area stores, which gave us insurance for the evening.

The inimitable Brady Westwater, who put together Fashion Walk in two weeks and put me together with Rich Reams at Loft Appeal and Kevin Taylor at Spring Center Inc. He also made the arrangements with Beauty Collection. Brady fielded a million phone calls and emails and even gave us a hand moving a couple of car loads of party supplies (and a mini fridge) into the building. He also lent us his own mini fridge for the evening.

The Pancho Barnes Trust Estate and Lou D’Elia and Mike Salazar, who not only let us use the beautiful Hurrell photos but also (thanks, Mike!) spent many hours scanning and correcting the images for digital display. At Lou’s suggestion, I’ll be putting the slide show on the site so everyone can enjoy it.

Ejen Chuang, who ran our photo booth and set up a screen for our video, and Karol Franks, who shot party pics and gave me all sorts of help setting up. You’ll see their work soon. Aside from being talented photographers, they're both the kind of calm, practical, smart people you want on your team.

POM Wonderful, which gave us wonderful POM for Kit’s delicious “POM Pillbox” mocktails, and Jennifer Grossman and Dole, which gave us pineapple juice for the "Pineapple Panama." (More on the mocktails later.)

Nancy Rommelmann and Ristretto Roasters for giving us yummy coffee for our door-prize bags.

Now You Know How and Jensen Sussman at SweetTalk Publicity for donating How to Blow Dry Your Hair DVDs (stay tuned for a DG contest to win one).

Fabulous DG intern Crystal Hubbard, who demonstrated a remarkable ability to carry hat boxes, arrange cupcakes, and generally make herself extremely useful while wearing a glamorous black dress and very high heels.

Ted Coe, Kate’s fit and easy-going son, who spent several days with us moving furniture from Loft Appeal And Groomzilla’s husband Brian Chase, who provided both furniture-moving services and a pickup truck. Laura Main Collins provided an easel so we could display one of Lou’s limited edition Hurrell prints.

Pam Postrel for designing our beautiful invitations on a moment's notice and revising them equally quickly when the address changed. Mindy Blum for making special devotional candles featuring Hurrell images. (Maybe we should sell these at the next party.) Pam and Mindy also lent us the previously mentioned mini-fridge.

Kate Hahn and Andraé Gonzalo for signing their fun book Forgotten Fashion. If you couldn’t come to the party, you can still get a signed copy of the book for $9.95 plus shipping. Order it here:

Name to sign book to

Of course, the party’s theme would never have worked without our fantastic hat designers--Louise Green, Allison Parson, and Arturo Rios, whose work you'll see more of when we have a photos--and Wendy Ann Rosen’s wonderful hats and hat boxes. Getting to know these interesting, talented people was one of the great pleasures of putting the party together.

Jonathan A. Logan, whose cool leather designs had nothing to do with hats but added to the Fashion Walk atmosphere and helped defray some of the event costs. As someone who owns a large wardrobe of leather jackets (contrary to popular opinion, Nick Gillespie did not invent the Reason-editor-in-leather look) and a couple of pairs of leather pants (one of which I wore for my TED talk on glamour), I loved seeing Jonathan’s work.

Carwash Kim, whose “clothing relocation project” added a vintage touch to the evening’s wares. I met Kim when she was meticulously cleaning up after the event she curated during the previous week’s Art Walk and was delighted she wanted to join our space.

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"Peggy Sue" and "Elegance Is Refusal"

Once, listening to the radio while driving, I tired of a song in which the drummer was repeating a common ride pattern on the cymbal, and using his drum set to add other standard percussion patterns. Hoping to hear something more inventive, I put the radio on scan, deciding I would listen to the first song I found that didn't use the ride cymbal. After going around the dial twice without success, I turned the radio off.

“Peggy Sue,” recorded by Bully Holly and the Crickets in 1957, has been ranked as one of the greatest songs of all time. Many critics consider it Bully Holly’s best recording (he’s seen here looking his nerdy best). Jerry Allison’s restrained drumming on the recording has been one of its most praised elements. 

In his 1987 book The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism Robert Pattison searches (with considerable sympathy) for the ideological reasons that contemporary culture has come to value music and fashions that he feels are “crude, loud, and tasteless.” He seems to enjoy rock music, but intellectually he sees it as an expression of “Romantic vulgarity.” Pattison states that “refinement is the art of making reasoned exclusions.” He writes that “A black dress with a string of pearls is timeless good taste because of the calculated exclusion of all color.” He cites a Hawaiian print shirt in which “gross, lurid colors mix without restraint” as the “epitome of vulgarity.”

Pattison’s views make it particularly interesting that rock critics have praised Allison highly for limiting himself to a single drum when recording “Peggy Sue.” They feel that by confining himself to one percussion color, he helped the song have a distinctive sound. Given similar inventiveness on other recordings, this was clearly a conscious choice. And he had the self-discipline to maintain his pared-down effect—he didn’t unthinkingly throw in other percussion sounds.

Coco Chanel once said, “When accessorizing, always take off the last thing you put on.” Potentially elegant outfits can be disastrously weakened in effect by poorly chosen or overdone accessories. Avoiding this mistake is pithily summed up in Chanel’s statement, “Elegance is refusal.” Chanel is seen here in a black dress and multiple strings of pearls. The extra touch of her earrings is superb—they’re a great size and shape for the ensemble. When well chosen, accessories can be the final touches that make an outfit stunning. But choosing well means knowing which pieces will add to an ensemble’s effect, which pieces would detract, and, crucially, when to stop adding more.

In “Peggy Sue” Allison’s restrained use of percussion allows us to better hear the colorful way that Holly uses vocal “hiccups” and playful changes in the sound of his voice. (Listen to Holly change vocally to a teenage boy near the end.) The following live performance is a bit less fascinating then Norman Petty’s recording (there Petty controlled the dynamics precisely, and Holly also adds a deep-voiced man at the end). But as a slice of history, this video reminds us that there once was a time (not that long ago) when rock and roll was a new style of music. Switching back to fashion, notice how demurely the formally-attired dancers pose themselves in the background. Seeing them, it’s hard to imagine that the twist craze would arrive just two years later.

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Hidden Treasures: From Hurrell to Hats, Collectors Preserve the Arts of Commerce

Tonight’s DG party celebrating the glamour of hats (and our first anniversary) includes some rarely seen highlights from two museum-quality collections, both hidden away in Los Angeles-area homes.

The first is the Pancho Barnes Trust Estate, the largest privately held collection of vintage George Hurrell photographs, to which we also owe the beautiful photo of Dorothy Jordan that alternates with Rick Lee’s woman in sunglasses as our masthead. At the party, we will have an ongoing slideshow of more than 40 Hurrell photos of people in hats, including many rare treasures like this perfect-for-the-occasion shot of Buster Keaton.

The photos range from the Golden Era glamour of Marlene Dietrich, Douglas Fairbanks, Greta Garbo, and Carole Lombard (and, of course, the beautiful Anita Page photo on our invitation) to portraits from the 1970s and ’80s. It's an unusual Hurrell show, where Aretha Franklin and Bianca Jagger appear more often than Joan Crawford. But Crawford will be making a special appearance, since Lou D’Elia, the collector behind the Pancho Barnes archives, is also lending us one of the large-scale, limited-edition prints recently issued by the Estate of George Hurrell.

The second collection is Wendy Ann Rosen’s House of Hats, the best collection of 20th-century hats outside a museum. Wendy Ann, a makeup artist by trade, not only collects hats. She keeps them in a world-class collection of vintage hat boxes. Some of her hats are included in the V&A’s recent Hats: An Anthology exhibition, curated by Stephen Jones. Those hats are still traveling the world, but others will be on display at 5th & Spring--and available for purchase, since Wendy Ann is, as they say in the museum business, deaccessioning a few of her more than 600 chapeaux.

Wendy Ann is one of L.A.’s hidden treasures, someone only a few aficionados know about. Working on her own, mostly in the 1990s, she researched the history of 20th-century millinery and identified, bought, and preserved the best examples of the milliner’s art. (Here's a fashion spread featuring some of her hats from the 1920s, aquired through the Adamson Estate.) In addition to hats and hat boxes, she collects tools of the hat-maker's trade, signs and other ephemera, and the adorable cupcake-sized mini hats and boxes that were used as milliner's gift certificates since hats were custom-fitted. (Alas, she's not bringing any of the mini hats. Partygoers will have to make do with literal cupcakes.)

Although some of Wendy Ann's hats are from famous fashion designers, including Chanel, Dior and Schiaparelli, many are from hat specialists like Madame Georgette who were renowned in their day but are now forgotten. “I want to make sure that they're recognized and remembered. That's my main purpose,” she says.

DG's party, "You're the Top: A Celebration of Glamorous Hats & the People Who Wear Them," is free and open to the public as part of the first Downtown Fashion Walk. RSVPs are appreciated but not required. See our invitation for details on the location. Ample parking is available in the garage at 530 S. Spring for $5. The map for Downtown Fashion Walk is online here.

[Buster Keaton photo © Estate of George Hurrell, courtesy of Pancho Barnes Estate Archives]

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From the Archives: Kate Hahn's Forgotten Fashion

In Forgotten Fashion: An Illustrated Faux History Of Outrageous Trends And Their Untimely Demise, Kate Hahn plays fashion historian, plumbing the “Beatrice P. Fruit Archives” at the “College of the Willows” for such once-celebrated fashion fads as Ice Beading and the Four O’Clock Dress. It’s deadpan social satire in a tone Kate describes as “glamorous dark humor...inspired by things like Edward Gorey and the Limony Snicket series." In each of the supposedly historic episodes, everything goes wonderfully until some sort of “regrettable incident or unlucky moment” ends the fun.

Here, with illustrations by Andraé Gonzalo of Project Runway fame, is a sample chapter. Kate and Andraé will be signing copies of the book at our Downtown Fashion Walk party on Thursday evening (details here), 201 W. 5th Street at Spring in Downtown L.A. [VP]

Frigidaire Formals, 1950

Sometimes, it all begins with a muse.

When Gaston Darchez first laid eyes on Kaitlyn Anderson, she was removing a silver tray of Jell-O parfaits from a sparkling new 1950 Frigidaire Imperial refrigerator. Kaitlyn was six feet tall, with flame red hair and skin so white that it had been alternately described by her series of minor poet boyfriends as “milky,” “snowy,” “ghostly,” or by the less metaphorically inclined, “pale.” Her long spine gave her a slightly concave posture, which had once led her pediatrician to predict a lifetime of expensive medical treatments. But by the time 21 year-old Kaitlyn crossed Darchez’s line of vision, her backbone had become her fortune.

Kaitlyn was one of the few people in the world with the innate ability to hold her torso in a nearly perpetual C-curve, which at the time was considered the ultimate posture of a high-fashion model. She had been discovered by an art director, and embarked on a very successful career posing for illustrated magazine advertisements. It was in this capacity that Darchez, an expatriate French former fashion designer, first saw her. He had been hired to draw the ad for the 1950 Frigidaire Imperial. Kaitlyn had been contracted to be part of the picture. Her elegant form, swathed in a sky blue ball gown and curved over the tray of gelatin treats, suggested that the icy confines of the refrigerator emitted breezes that could transform anyone’s life into a glamorous one, and give pedigree to even the most pedestrian desserts.

For Darchez, the scene was simply a series of colors and shapes to be put on paper, until the moment Kaitlyn unwound from her C-curve, and stood up straight. “She dominated the entire room," he wrote. “And I knew what I had to do to become a fashion designer again: go big.” The Frenchman had worked in all the great Parisian fashion ateliers, but was never chosen as an assistant, and so had come to the US, bitter and angry, promising to abandon couture and “become an illustrator of the hulking monstrous machines and the lazy and wasteful women who use them.” But in truth he was haunted by the popularity of Christian Dior’s New Look of 1947 and longed to create a style that would have the same meteoric impact on fashion.

At the sight of Kaitlyn beside the modern ice box, he decided “hope lies in hugeness.” The drawing studio had the same high ceilings as the abodes of the Parisian elite – Darchez’s desired customers. He knew that all of these privileged women harbored the same secret wish: to enter the elaborate parties held in these cavernous rooms in gowns so stunning they would make all the other guests blend into the parquet floors. To become their next design darling, Darchez would have to make dresses that would dominate these spaces like no one before him: evening gowns on a gargantuan scale. “Double doors will become triples to accommodate their entrances, and grand staircases will look like matchstick ladders beside them,” he wrote. “I will transform every woman into Kaitlyn.”

Mystery, Mad Men, and Prom Season Success

Long before American went Mad Men mad, Katie Echeverry was a pharmaceutical sales rep with a passion for vintage fashion and a workaholic boyfriend. Instead of nagging him to spend more time with her, she decided to develop a hobby that would generate a little spending money—finding cool vintage pieces and selling them online.

That was nine years ago. Katie and her boyfriend are now married and expecting their second child. And what started as a hobby has become a real business, with 12 employees and sales that are thriving even in the midst of the recession. When you Google "vintage dresses,” the first site that pops up is her store, Unique Vintage, which opened a bricks-and-mortar shop in Burbank a year ago and expanded last December.

These days, few of the shop's wares are true vintage items. When she turned her sideline into a true business three and a half years ago, after her daughter was born, Katie switched from vintage to “vintage-inspired”—contemporary designs based on styles from the '20s, '30s, '40s, '50s, and '60s. Other vintage lovers may cringe, but the switch was essential to the store's success.

When she was selling true vintage, she says, “I just had so many people request a dress in a different size. They obviously didn’t understand that it was one-of-a-kind vintage." Plus, she says, “Vintage is so small, and most people are not size double-zero. I’d feel really lucky if I found a size six in anything cute.” The switch allowed her to offer a full range of sizes and keep popular items in stock.

Its high Google rankings, a result of being an online pioneer, are a major reason for Unique Vintage's success. They not only drive traffic but provide market research. When “vintage wedding dresses” searches kept sending people to the store, Katie decided she'd better add a wedding line. The same thing happened with flapper dresses, which are some of the store's most impressive wares. The meticulous beading is done in India by a company whose proprietor found Katie online.

Beading detail.
Click for larger view.

Despite its history-based styles, Unique Vintage isn't catering primarily to nostalgia buffs. Rather, the store's wiggle dresses and Marilyn Monroe-style halter styles appeal to young women looking for something that can be hard to find at the mall: dresses that are sexy but don't show too much skin. It does its biggest business during prom season, when Monday sales reach 500 dresses a day. These customers, says Katie, “want something unique without being too revealing.” Glamour, after all, requires a little mystery.

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The Transformational Power of Hats

When I went over to Gary Leonard's gallery yesterday to get my photo taken for this Downtown News piece on our party, I was carrying a bunch of hats. As I unpacked them, Gary’s daughter Xiu-Ling was enchanted.

“Did you make those hats?” she asked. I could have immediately become a style goddess in her eyes, but instead I explained who the hat designers were. Making up for my lowly writer status, I offered to let her try them on. Here she is, striking a pose in Arturos Rios's cocktail hat. (Arturo's hat got the attention, but Louise Green's red straw fedora had people ready to buy.)

All fashion makes a promise of transformation, but with hats that promise is especially potent. The face and head represent the self, so by framing, concealing, or decorating them a hat can change who we appear to be. It's not surprising, then, that hats are used in uniforms and religious dress or that hats went out of style in the let-it-all-hang-out period in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

At our party next Thursday, Wendy Ann Rosen will be showing some hats and hat boxes from her stunning collection—one of the best in the world. (I'll have a post on Wendy Ann later this week.) We'll also be showing a film short featuring Wendy Ann’s hats and the theme of transformation. Here’s a QuickTime clip.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: The DeepGlamour party has been moved to the Spring Arts Tower at 453 S. Spring Street (enter at 201 W. 5th). Parking $5 at 530 S. Spring Street garage. Great space, just down from fantastic art-book store Polyester.

Party with DeepGlamour on August 20

 

IMPORTANT UPDATE: As reflected in this revised invitation, the DeepGlamour party has been moved from its original location to the Spring Arts Tower at 453 S. Spring Street (enter at 201 W. 5th). Parking $5 at 530 S. Spring Street garage. Great space, just down from fantastic art-book store Polyester.

Download a PDF of the invitation here.

The Mystery & Magic of Hats—and a DeepGlamour Birthday Party

This is Anita Page, as photographed by George Hurrell in an extraordinary hat. (Page is a fascinating character: a long-lived Golden Age star who made only one movie between 1936 and 1996, then re-emerged in cheapo horror flicks as well as documentary interviews about studio-era Hollywood. She died last September at 98 but still has a movie in post-production.) This hat is presumably a costume, but women used to take as much pride and interest in their hats as they do today in shoes and It bags. Alas, the informality of the 1960s killed off hats. They became functional—a way of protecting yourself from sun or cold—rather than expressive.

Hats are now enjoying something of a resurgence among hipsters and fashionistas, with fedoras, cloches, and fascinators showing up on people in the business of being noticed. The paradox of a hat is that it simultaneously conceals and calls attention to the wearer—the very definition of a glamorous accessory. (Think also of sunglasses, fans, and cigarettes.)

Next Thursday, August 20, DG is curating an event—and throwing ourselves a birthday party—as part of the inaugural L.A. Downtown Fashion Walk. Our theme is the glamour of hats, with creations on display (and in some cases for sale) from local designers Louise Green, Arturo Rios, and Stella Dottir as well as collector Wendy Ann Rosen's renowned "House of Hats." (Some of Wendy Ann's hats are featured in this amazing V&A exhibit, curated by Stephen Jones, which is now on a two-year world tour.)

Plus, Project Runway's Andraé Gonzalo will join our friend Kate Hahn to sign their book Forgotten Fashion, excerpted in one of our very first posts, which includes some of Andraé's illustrations. The party starts at 6:00 p.m., giving Project Runway fans plenty of time to come by before taking off for premiere viewing parties (which is exactly what Kate and Andraé are doing).

Here are the particulars:

August 20, 2009
6 p.m. to 10 p.m. 
Farmers & Merchants Bank lobby 
Southwest corner of 4th & Main Streets
Spring Arts Tower, 453 S. Spring Street (enter at 201 W. 5th)
(Ample parking available at 530 S. Spring Street garage) 
Information & RSVPs: virginia-at-deepglamour.net

Dress glamorously, and wear a hat. You could win a prize.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: The DeepGlamour party has been moved to the Spring Arts Tower at 453 S. Spring Street (enter at 201 W. 5th). Parking $5 at 530 S. Spring Street garage. Great space, just down from fantastic art-book store Polyester.

[Anita Page photo © Estate of George Hurrell and courtesy of Pancho Barnes Trust Estate.]