Fashion History

A noteworthy event of 20th century American fashion was the emergence of the film costume designer as an influence on everyday fashion. Prior to the 30s, Hollywood imported European fashion designers to bring some much needed style and class to their offerings after the excesses of the 20s. When the Paris designers returned home, Hollywood designers came in to their own designing both period epics and modern fashion features.

Due to the success of both the film industry and the untiring efforts of the studio publicity departments, many costume designers became house hold names and used this recognition when they made the shift to fashion design. They were certainly helped in the USA by the absence of French and English fashion during the war years. By the time their houses closed in the 50s and 60s, the influence of film designers on retail fashion had begun to fade. Today even most fashionistas can’t name a film costume designer. And yet in their day designers such as Howard Greer, Adrian, Irene, Helen Rose, Edith Head and Travis Banton were as well known in the US and even internationally as many Couture designers.

The greatest of them all was possibly Adrian, whose work in film and fashion influenced much of American fashion in the 1940s. His fashion work commands serious attention to this day. Greer was an earlier star, but his work went on for years, and was seen as recently as 2005 when Sarah Jessica Parker wore a black and pink Greer dress to the CFDA awards. Both Irene’s and Helen Rose’s work continues to be highly collectible. Banton and Head, while influential, never attempted their own wholesale houses.

Read more about notable designers in the film industry

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British Boutique movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
My name is Liz, a.k.a Emmapeelpants, and I will try to introduce you all to the vibrant design movement as much as I can. Obviously it is an enormous subject, so I have chosen some select designers and boutiques to concentrate on.

The emergence of youthful and ambitious British designers in the 1960s was a revolution in the fashion world. Quite apart from the front-runners enabling lots of other young designers to feel that they too could start their own boutique, it forced the other fashion capitals to change their outlook and methods. So radical was the new look of the era, Britain became the focus of the world, and thus its leader. For once, New York, Paris and Milan were looking to quirky old England for inspiration. British designers headed out on PR tours of America, pushing the Swinging London lifestyle and expanding their empires. It would end, in the great scheme of things, almost as suddenly as it began. Failing economy in Britain in the 1970s increased overheads and reduced sales for these designers, and as the other fashion capitals of the world fell out of love with the London look, most British designers floundered. I will try to give you a flavour of the designers involved and, within their stories, the eventual decline.

British Boutique Movement: burning brief and bright.

To start, I have put the designers and labels I know of into a tier system, which make it easier to digest and remember all the major and minor players in the vibrant British fashion scene in the 1960s and 1970s.

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Fashion trends of the mid 1960s

I’m known as Senti (a nickname with a long history) and I am totally stuck in a 1960s timewarp. I missed the 1960s myself – being born in 1979 – but developed a love for this decade very early on, and now live in a 1960s house decorated with the appropriate vintage wallpaper and furniture, wear mainly 1960s clothes, am a self confessed knee-high boot addict.

Not having lived through the fashions at the time, I’ve discovered them via films from the era and stacks of 1960s fashion magazines… so I can usually pin down each look to a specific season and know what hairstyles and accessories would have been worn with it when it first came out.

My particular fashion idol of the era is Beatle girlfriend, model Pattie Boyd – so you’ll be seeing quite a lot of her here – and I have a love of the Dollyrockers range that Samuel Sherman created.

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I will start with the earliest use of paper in fashionable dress and that is with fans in the 17th century. The idea of the folding paper fan was brought from the Far East and became a fashionable accessory in the early 1600s!

In the late 18th century a cardboard impressed and glazed to look like fancy straw work was used to make hats and bonnets. This example is from 1812.

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Swirl was not so much a company as it was a product, especially in the early days of production. But in order to understand the product, we need to know a little about the company that produced it.

The story starts in Philadelphia with the L. Nachman and Son Company, which was located at 10th and Berks Streets. This company had produced clothing since the early days of the 20th century. In 1944 the Swirl dress and label were born. Actually, the Swirl was originally conceived as an apron. When Lawrence Nachman registered the Swirl name with the US Patent and Trade mark office, the product was listed as “WOMEN’S AND GIRLS’ WRAP-AROUND APRONS”. The wrap around apron was a common garment of the day.

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Adrian (1903 – 1959) was born Adrian Adolph Greenberg. As a teenager he changed his name to Gilbert Adrian in 1922. His father was Gilbert Greenberg, who later changed his own last name to Adrian to signal pride in his son’s accomplishments. Adrian started out in costume design working with Irving Berlin and later George White’s Scandals.

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He went under contract with Cecil B. DeMille in 1926 and in 1928 he was lured to MGM. Adrian was a workhorse of film design, turning out scads of film costumes of all types. He handled both period wardrobes and elegant modern fashions with great skill, although his period films were more representative of his personal interpretation of period clothing rather than of historical accuracy. He would exaggerate a silhouette, or move a story to a different time period he felt was more in line with current fashion. But Adrian’s costumes were always attractive and very well received.

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Margaret Bailey in Those Glorious Glamour Years : “….Adrian was not afraid to test surprising new styles or have a bit of fun with a design. He maintained it would either be fashionable by the time the movie was reviewed or be so unusual that it was exempt from fashion.”
As a film designer, he became a highly paid star in his own right. According to Hollywood and History ;“In 1940, one thousand American buyers voted on their favorite designers. Three of the top nine names were designers from motion pictures; Adrian, Travis Banton, and Howard Greer”. Adrian had that kind of recognition.

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They were unique. They were of their time. And they were ours. And now, they are all but gone. Like so many other American cities, Louisville once had scores of local clothing stores that were institutions. One grew up and learned to shop were one’s mother and aunts shopped, not unlike following family traditions regarding one’s choice of church, doctor and attorney. Ladies went downtown to shop to the flagship buildings of Stewart’s, Selman’s or Kaufman – Straus or a bit later to the Art Deco Byck’s. If you went to Stewart’s, you wore a hat and gloves and went to lunch on the Orchid Tea Room. If you were a doctor, you shopped at Martin’s; a banker at Rodes-Rapier. . .

Read More …

Written by Hollis Jenkins-Evans, pastperfectvintage.com

Just what IS rockabilly? Well, according to Wikipedia, “Rockabilly is one of the earliest styles of rock and roll music, and emerged in the early-1950’s. The term “rockabilly” is a portmanteau of “rock,” from rock and roll, and “hillbilly”, the latter a reference to the country music (often called “hillbilly music” in the 1940s and 1950s) that contributed strongly to the style’s development. Other important influences on rockabilly include Western Swing, blues music, boogie woogie, and Jump blues. Although there are notable exceptions, its origins lie primarily in the Southern USA.”. Rockabilly is generally considered to have been popular just from the early 1950’s to early 1960’s, though once its influence reached the mainstream it never truly went away. Several rockabilly revivals have taken place within the music industry over the years, most notably in the 80’s with the popularity of the Stray Cats.

But why does rockabilly matter to fashion? What is the rockabilly “look”? That’s a question often pondered by both sellers and buyers of vintage clothing, and the answer is a little more complicated than the one above. As any genre of music has done over the years, rockabilly had a strong influence on fashions on the 50s to early 60s which have evolved into a more complex definition in today’s fashion world.

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Louella Ballerino (1900 -1978) was a young mother when she first embarked on a professional design career in the mid to late-30s. She had studied with MGM costume designer Andre Ani (over 40 films, c. 1925-1930) while an art history major at the University of Southern California. When her family found themselves in financial difficulties after the Depression, Louella returned to a student money-making scheme of selling fashion sketches to wholesale manufacturers. She could make $125 a month from these drawings.

At the same time, Louella enrolled in pattern-making and tailoring courses at the Frank Wiggins Trade High School, Los Angeles, while gaining practical experience working in a prestigious custom dress shop.

Louella’s designs started to be used in the dress shop too, while at the Institute, her teachers decided to promote her to tutor classes in Fashion Theory.

After gaining further experience with manufacturers, Louella started her own custom business in partnership with a friend in the late 30s or c. 1940. The partnership later became a solo venture, illustrating the instability of a design-business without a full industrial co-producer, or a moneyed backer.
But apart from being fostered by the academic art school atmosphere, Louella Ballerino seems to have drawn strength and commercial support from the local California design movement, a trend driven both by the West coast lifestyle and the response to it by a new wave of fashion designers and manufacturers, a group of ‘Californian Fashionistas’ with whom Louella consistently showed her designs through the late 40s.

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See shoes from VFG members on Etsy (paid link)

THE 19th CENTURY – Modesty and Technology

Nature may dictate height but the shoe designer is more than capable of manipulating it. This was never more obvious than immediately following the French Revolution (1792) when shoe heels all but disappeared. Their demise was motivated by politics and the desire to suggest that everyone was born on the same level.

Heels first returned on male footwear when in the late 1810s a new fashion emerged. Trousers were anchored with stirrup straps underneath the foot, which displaced the older knee-length breeches. The heel was an additional aid in keeping the pant strap in place.

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Carmen de Tomasso (1909 – 2015)

“I don’t like sophistication”

The words of Carmen de Tomasso, looking back on her career, in 1989, sound somewhat absurd coming from a Paris couturière who resided in a veritable treasure trove of Louis XVI furniture and rich tapestries. But in 1950, ‘Carven’, as she renamed herself, was something different.

In 1947, Dior had reasserted the luxury of Paris design with the lavish New Look. Carven, who established her maison at the Rond Pont des Champs-Elysses in 1945 (having possibly first attempted to start her business in 1938), followed an altogether different, more modern tack.

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Remember the 90s when everyone wore black until a darker shade came along? What is it with colour? Brown became the new black in the late 1990s but then a riot of colour exploded each spring of the new millennium that offered a playful palette for hot summer months, only to be shelved each autumn for a return to neutrals. Fashion, is… well, fashion. And it must change if for no other reason than the sake of change.

Colour may be a tool of seasonal fashion fun but in the past it could represent status better than a Hummer, and technological wizardry better than any Ipod that can carry a billion tunes.
The first colour that carried fashion weight was purpura; (Latin for purple) was made from the putrefied crushed shells of Murex, a mollusk, and was more expensive than any colour ever procured in fashion history. Emperor Aurelian refused to let his wife buy a purpura-dyed silk garment in 273 CE because the cost was literally its weight in gold. Seven hundred years previous to this domestic dispute, purple robes had been accessioned into the royal treasury of Persia. Alexander the Great discovered this multi-million dollar vintage hoard nearly two hundred years after their being stowed away.

Fashion however, has always been an art of invention, interpretation, and imitation. By 300 CE a mixture of red and blue dyes made a new, more affordable purple, which was a good thing since the Murex had been harvested to near extinction. Knock-offs however, have always plagued fashion and the late 4th century Emperor Theodosium of Byzantium issued a decree forbidding the use of purple except by the Imperial family. Death was the result of breaking the edict.

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See sewing patterns and supplies from VFG members on Etsy (paid link)

Vintage sewing patterns open up a whole new world of collecting for someone interested in vintage fashion. Some collect vintage patterns because they want to reproduce the styles of days gone by for their wardrobes. Others collect them because these slim envelopes filled with tissue give a glimpse into a lifestyle that many of us no longer have the luxury to live. They are, in, and of themselves, a documentation of fashion sewing of the past. The artwork on the envelopes can also be a thing of beauty to behold all by itself.

For those who cannot find the vintage styling they want in their size, fabric, or price range, vintage patterns afford the ability to have exactly what one wants, the way one wants it, whether one sews it up at home or retains the services of a custom clothier. Even if the pattern doesn’t have the proper size specifications, a skilled seamstress or tailor can make adjustments to fit any body type or size. Patterns can also be used as a starting point or “inspiration” for a modern garment.

Other related items that can be collected along with vintage patterns are old pattern books from fabric stores and departments and monthly or quarterly pattern magazines that were issued by the pattern companies. These publications are invaluable tools for designers, students of apparel design, the custom clothier who specializes in vintage fashion, and the vintage fashion enthusiast.

History

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See women’s swimwear from VFG members on Etsy (paid link)
See men’s swimwear from VFG members on Etsy (paid link)

You may think that the body-baring bikinis of today would have shocked the world centuries ago but you’d be wrong. Actually today’s swimwear is rather similar to that which was worn in ancient Greece as far back as 300 BC. As pictured on mosaic walls, ancient Greek women were barely covered by pieces of fabric, much like the scanty bikinis of the 20th century!

During the Roman Empire, the communal bathhouse was an important neighborhood gathering place. Here business was discussed and gossip shared in pleasurable surroundings that offered the luxury of oil and water, hot and cold baths while you chatted. After the fall of the Roman Empire, bathing was no longer considered a recreational pastime in western society and was reserved for therapeutic use only.

Years later ‘spas’ began to reappear in European towns like Bath in England and Germany’s Baden Baden, at which men were segregated from women.

Even though females couldn’t be viewed by the male gender, they were still concerned about their modesty, so bathing dresses were donned. To prevent the skirts from rising up around the body when entering the water, hems often had weights sewn into them. The suits were worn with heavy dark stockings and for extra caution, many were also worn with long knickers or bloomers.

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The following was adapted from a 2006 live workshop presented by Chris Riopelle.

Part I: The Beginning

Joe Famolare grew up in a third generation shoe making family. He was born in Boston and grew up in Chestnut Hill, which is a neighborhood/area on Boston’s south side. His father, Joe Sr., owned Famolare Shoe Engineering, which was opened in 1934. The company made cutting patterns for the shoe industry. Joe Jr. started working at the family business at the tender age of 12. Very cognizant of the child labor laws, Joe Sr. required him to pay income tax and file at that age. When Joe Jr. became the age of majority, he had already designed shoes and was a young executive at the family business.

Despite this early success, he deviated from the family business and started singing in nightclubs for tips! According to Joe himself: “I hated the shoe business. It was so dusty and boring, and the people didn’t seem happy. I could sing, and studied voice seriously, and I found that people liked to hear me sing. So I went to Emerson to be an actor.”

For the next several years, he attended Emerson College in Boston and pursued a degree in the musical theater. Midway through, his dreams were put on hold. He was drafted by the US Army. Joe served at the very tail end of the Korean War as a radio operator, broadcasting having been a minor in college.

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Fashion brings to mind so many stylish cities: Paris, New York, London, Milan, Las Vegas? Las Vegas?

Okay, so it may not be the capital of couture, but there is a certain look associated with this vibrant city. Remember Sharon Stone in Casino and what do you see? Acid coloured crochet pantsuits with bare midriffs, pale pink lipstick and big blonde hair.

Dino or Frankie or any of the Rats might enjoy lounging about backstage in a silk robe…
You only have to say ‘Rat Pack’ to conjure up images of shiny sharkskin suits and cigarette ash adorned lapels set off by narrow-brimmed straw homburgs. Think about Elvis jeweled leather jackets, show girls with feathered headdresses and mobster’s molls in white mink coats in the dead of summer. There is a lot of style in Vegas, which is kind of odd when you consider this is where museums are optional and the oldest buildings standing aren’t old enough to drink in most states.

Las Vegas means ‘The Meadows’ in Spanish, an ironic term for a tiny oasis in the middle of a desert. But that’s Vegas – it’s all about irony. Back in the 1850s, almost a hundred years before the hotel-casino concept, Las Vegas consisted of a Mormon fort where it was illegal to flip a coin to settle a wager!
Founded on May 15, 1905 as a whistle stop tent-town of saloons, stores and boarding houses for the Union Pacific Railway, Las Vegas wasn’t much of a town at all. In 1931, the Nevada Legislature legalized gambling and construction was started on the nearby Hoover Dam. Here’s that irony again because it was just when most of America began to feel the effects of economic hardship during the Great Depression that Las Vegas began to prosper.

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Hattie Carnegie (1889 -1956) was born in Vienna, Austria. Her name was Henrietta Kanengeiser. In 1900, she immigrated to the United States, and settled with her family in New York City. There is a famous story that while on the ship to America, Hattie asked a fellow voyager about who the richest and most prosperous people in America were. The answer was, “Andrew Carnegie” and according to the story, young Hattie decided to change her name to Carnegie. Eventually the rest of her family dropped Kanengeiser and adopted the Carnegie name, a practice that was common among immigrants.

By the time she was a young teenager, Hattie was already working. She worked at various millinery establishments, and at Macy’s. But in 1909 she, along with friend Rose Roth, opened her own business, a tiny hat shop. It was called “Carnegie – Ladies’ Hatter.” They also sold dresses, which were made by Rose, as Hattie could not sew. Hattie did the hats. The place was a huge success, partly due to Hattie’s sense of style and appearance, and four years later they moved to a larger place and were able to incorporate as a business.

As the business grew, Hattie and Rose were able to hire workers who made the designs that Hattie developed. At this time, ALL fashion came from Paris, and so Hattie studied the Parisian styles, choosing only the best, and adapting them for her customers. And while she could neither sketch nor sew, Hattie was very good at communicating to her workers exactly what she wanted them to do.

In 1919, Hattie bought Rose Roth’s share of the business, and Hattie Carnegie, Inc. was born. This was also the year of her first buying trip to Paris. As I said before, during this time it was generally believed that all good fashion originated in Paris. It was common practice for American specialty shops like Carnegie’s and Bergdorf Goodman to go to the Paris shows. They would buy dresses and bring them back to America where they would be adapted and/or copied for the American market. The best description of this practice is in Elizabeth Hawes’s book, Fashion is Spinach, another vintage book that I highly recommend to students of fashion history.

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See hats from VFG members on Etsy (paid link)

Is a hat a frivolous accessory or a necessity? When looking into its history it quickly becomes apparent that it has been both.

Headwear for women began in earnest during the Middle Ages when the church decreed that their hair must be covered.

During the 18th century, milliners took the hat-making art out of the home and established the millinery profession. Today, a ‘milliner’ defines a person associated with the profession of hat making. In the 18th century however, a milliner was more of a stylist. Traditionally a woman’s occupation, the milliner not only created hats or bonnets to go with costumes but also chose the laces, trims and accessories to complete an ensemble. The term ‘milliner’ comes from the Italian city of Milan, where in the 1700’s, the finest straws were braided and the best quality hat forms were made.

DOUBLE OR NOTHING

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Howard Greer (1886 – 1974) was an earlier designer than Adrian, and as well known in his day. Like Adrian, Howard Greer was credited by Vogue with “a sixth sense about the fashion future.” Greer got his start as a sketch artist for Lucile, Ltd. in 1916. He served in World War I on the front line in Europe, staying in Paris afterward and working for Lucile, Molyneux and Poiret. Greer returned to New York in 1921, and became a costume designer for Famous Players Lasky, the forerunner of Paramount. He designed primarily modern dress films with glamorous wardrobes for the star, no matter what her social standing.

In * Designing Male * he stated: “Designing for the silver screen is a highly specialized talent. The dramatic flare necessary on film is often too flamboyant and exaggerated for private wear, and, by the same token, subtleties of color, fabric and drapery in three-dimensional clothes can be utterly devoid of personality and interest before the camera”. According to David Chierichetti, “One of Greer’s greatest assets was his ability to understand the vibrant personalities of the Paramount ladies, and translate them into clothes”.

Greer’s contract ran until 1927, when he left Paramount, to work in custom clothing and leave the black and white constraints of film.

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Madame Alix Gres (1903-1993) was actually born Germaine Emilie Krebs in Paris. She began as a sculptor, but never had a fruitful career. Frustrated, she began to design toiles for a design house in Paris. That’s when she decided to try her hand at fashion design.

She opened her first house under the name Alix Barton. She designed silk jersey dresses with simple lines and draping, and began gaining some publicity in fashion magazines. Her house was simply named “Alix”.

She felt that the true job of the couturier was not create a name for him/herself, as many designers do, but to pay rigorous attention to the clothing.

Her training as a sculptor influenced her clothing designs. She once created a dress modeled after the Louvre’s Nike of Samothrace. Alix created many of her gowns from silk jersey which she draped and pleated and cut on the bias.

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