I’m crazy about caftans—all caftans—past and present. Here’s one by Oscar de la Renta from 1963 and an up-to-the-minute street style from today’s New York Times Style Blog.
Sex, money, and fashion in a dance of desperate yearning: the hallucinatory Gold-Diggers of 1933. Tonight at the Brattle. We’re going!
Last week, The New York Times reviewed the past and present of a sadly extinct fashion—the glamorous hostess gown.
Above, Donna Reed in a 1964 Pucci-style hostess dress.
Cut, Baste, Stitch, Sing: a revival of “Pins and Needles,” the fabled 1937 Broadway musical, opened today and runs at the Irondale Center in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, through July 9.
The New York Times reports that the original “Pins and Needles” was the brainchild of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union whose 250,000 members in 1936 made it “one of the most powerful unions in the country.”
More 1930s and 1940s fashion in Style For All’s free slideshow!
Antoine Lavoisier, father of modern chemistry and his wife and scientific partner, Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, loom over a gallery in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a painting nearly 9 feet high and 6 feet wide, by neo-Classical artist Jacques-Louis David. The painting was done in 1788, before the French Revolution; Lavoisier was guillotined in 1794; painter David, a member of the National Assembly, did not intervene. A panel at the Met about the painting, the Lavoisiers, and their era is one of 50 events at the five-day World Science Festival, which The New York Times describes as “the annual smooch-fest between science and art.” Fashion historians have long loved this painting, in which Marie-Anne wears the ultra-fashionable and expensive “Gaulle,” or simple cotton gauze gown, gently gathered at neck, arms and waist, along with a gorgeous example of the “hedgehog” hairdo, wider than it was high, with a long love-lock. More Neoclassical fashion in Style For All’s free slideshow!
On Sunday Bill Cunningham reported on the increased visibility of whimsical headdresses and hats for evening wear, comparing current looks to Surrealist hats of the 1930s and rolled hairdos of the 1940s. Above: Elsa Schiaparelli’s “mad little hats:”; rolled hair with snood. More fashion history in Style For All’s free slideshow!
Three examples from the ninety masks created for mannequins in the Alexander McQueen retrospective at the Met. Crafted from leather, jewels, burlap, lace, felt, fur and feathers by McQueen hair stylist Guido Palau.
More haute couture at Style for All’s free slideshow!
L’Amour Fou, a new documentary about Yves St. Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé, opened in NYC.
Today’s New York Times observed:
”Like Valentino: The Last Emperor and Lagerfeld Confidential, L’Amour Fou mourns the demise of high fashion while paying tribute to the slightly mad geniuses given unlimited license to realize their design fantasies.”
More haute couture in Style For All’s free slideshow!
Museums face philosophical issues exhibiting fashion as art, reports The New York Times.
Above: Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, opening in May at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Roberto Capucci at Philadelphia Museum of Art; Balenciaga and Spain at the deYoung Museum in San Francisco.
More fashion and art in Style For All’s free slideshow!
“Savage Beauty:” Fantasies from 2006 and 1939.
Above: Alexander McQueen, 2006 Widows of Colloden collection, with Philip Treacy headpiece; Salvador Dali, 1939 drawing over a nude photograph. Model wore only Gala Dali’s Galalith: a candy-colored astronomical necklace of stars from Elsa Schiaparelli’s 1939 collection.
Alexander McQueen’s retrospective, “Savage Beauty,” opens at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 4.
More Surrealism and fashion at Style For All’s free slideshow!
Dali image from Shocking Schiaparelli by Dilys Blum (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2004), 145.
Traditional non-Western art is out, supplanted by brand-new work from contemporary African, Chinese, and Indian artists, reports the The New York Times.
This traditional Ivory Coast mask from the Metropolitan Museum of Art is compared with a new one made by Benin’s Romauld Hazoume from a plastic can, speakers, and a brush.
This visual juxtaposition invokes the fertile 1920s-1930s Surrealist dialogue with African masks, both in Man Ray’s “Noire et Blanche” series from 1926 and in fashion photography, including Baron de Meyer’s for Elizabeth Arden in 1927 and Hoyningen-Huene’s “Life Mask of Dolores Wilkinson” for Vogue, 1933.
More Surrealism and fashion in Style For All’s free slideshow!
Dada, born in Zurich and popular in Germany, France, flourished in New York City, personified by Marcel Duchamp and the German Baroness Elsa Freytag-Loringhoven.
An exhibition at the Swiss Institute in New York explores these Dada connections, featuring Swiss artist Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York, “a towering contraption composed of found junk, dismembered bicycles, dismantled musical instruments, glass bottles, a meteorological balloon and electric motors in questionable condition. It came to life and spectacularly self-destructed in a one-night-only performance in MoMA’s sculpture garden in 1960.”
(For a fascinating clip of D.A. Pennebaker’s movie as Homage blew up: ”A Homage to a Homage, Destruction at its Core,” The New York Times, April 6, 2011.)
Above: Jean Tingeley with Homage to New York; photos of Baroness Elsa during her NYC years, 1913 to 1923, when she became known for her junk sculptures and sexually charged, controversial performances.
Dada and fashion in Style For All’s free slideshow!
“I LOVE the book!”
“I opened the book and went immediately to Chapter Three: ’Exotic and Erotic.’ Not only was I impressed with the writing but I was blown away by your drawings. They were totally captivating. Thank you so much for providing the means to take this incredible journey. I LOVE the book!”
—Rocque Dion, fashionable man about town.
MOMA’s retrospective on revolutionary film artist Dziga Vertov (Man With a Movie Camera, 1929) runs through June 5. Fashions of the 1920s shared Vertov’s optimism, his love of machines, the city, and belief in the future. Above: 1929 poster for Man With a Movie Camera; 1930 Vogue fashion illustration by Depero, an Italian Futurist; 1929 Harper’s Bazar photo by Baron De Meyer; 1928 Butterick Pattern book. More 1920s fashion in Style For All’s free slideshow!
Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay is at the Cooper-Hewitt through June 5. The New York Times calls it “sumptuous and enlightening show.”
The Cooper-Hewitt’s SD website is superb: excellent text, gorgeous, rarely-seen images, and video.
Above: fabric swatches and images from SD’s 1920s work; final image is SD herself at her worktable. All from exhibition catalog Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay (available on-line).
More Sonia Delaunay in Style For All’s free slideshow!
About me
Haute Historiettes: Fashioning Present to Past
"Historiette:" An anecdote,
a short story or history (Fr.)
Daily fashion musings
with updates on my book
"Style For All."
(To browse all my historiettes, click "Haute Historiettes" at top of page.)
Everything about me and "Style For All"
is at www.hautehistory.com.
