As a child and well into my thirties I spent almost every weekend at a large house on the Eastern Shore. It was an enormous place with a supposed thirty six bedrooms (no one every really counted them, there were so many) and it faced a secluded creek on the bay. It had a dock with a few sail boats moored there, a family graveyard on the crest of a hill overlooking the water and the remnants of formal gardens with ancient wisteria vines strong enough to climb on. It had been, in it's heyday, a bustling hotel for the people who came over to the Eastern Shore from Annapolis and Baltimore to take a train to the ocean. This was before the advent of the Bay Bridge. There were many ferry villages like this one- Betterton, Tolchester Beach, Rock Hall , and probably many"boarding houses" as they were called like this one. The reason I am not naming the house (it has a name, like many estates on the Bay with Anglophile pretensions) is because it is in the process of being demolished this week. It was bought by a lawyer from Richmond who decided that renovating it was too expensive and too problematic and the best thing to do was just raze it and build something new.
The reason why I am writing about this on my PollySue's blog is because my dismay at the thought of the destruction of a place that I have loved since before I could walk (my parents discovered it in the early sixties before I was born) has forced me to consider two very opposing views of the world- that of preservation of the old, and that of championing of the new.
My beloved hotel would be considered a bit of Victorian brick a brack to an English person who has a local church that has stones over the door that read 1300, or who lives in a thatched roof cottage that is a mere middle aged 1750. But in a relatively young country like America a house that was built in the 1860's is considered ancient, a bit of flyblown time preserved in amber. To the majority of people the thought of taking on the project of preserving and maintaining such a house is as pleasant as being flogged with damp towels in a snowstorm while seeing your money being stolen by unscrupulous "contractors." Yes, there are Amercian historic preservation societies many of whom I contacted to try and save this house from the wrecking ball- but they put many restrictions on the owners , and the former owners of this house didn't want to be told what to do with their own property. So the house , while listed as a "property of historic significance" was not designated historic, and eventually came to the point of no return it stands at now.
All this said let me take you back to a weekend when I was about seven years old. The excitement of getting in the family Ford Fairlane and going over the Bay Bridge after hours waiting in the beach back up traffic. The stop at Holly's restaurant to have crab cakes on Kent Island. The approach to the small town down the road from the hotel, slumbering in the humid July evening, seeing a racoon cross the road, it's eyes shining green in the headlights. And then, down the dark country lane to the house, rising above me magisterially , a circular drive and massive oak trees sheltering it, and blue neon bug zapper lights on sticks that formed a sort of whimsical signage complete with frizzing sounds of unfortunate mosquitos being drawn towards them.
Going in to the house, being warmly welcomed and shown to our rooms that did not have doors, only transoms and curtains that blew in the breeze of ancient steel fans that made clunking noises as they rotated. Our food put in 1940's era refrigerators that looked like hot rod cars somehow, with lots of curves and chrome. The furniture mostly Victorian Eastlake, with cut oak, marble top dressers. Light fixtures dangling from the ceiling, made of painted frosted glass, white chenille bedspreads, cotton sheets that had been dried on a line in the sun and somehow smelled of light. In the morning going down the creaky stairs and out into the lush canopy of a southern summer- swimming in the creek, lying in the grass, watching herons and snakes and minnows and crabs seeing the rippled sand under the water, hearing the gentle clank of the boat rigging. Napping in the hot part of the afternoon in the old house, wandering around the many rooms, going up staircases that appeared here and there to large unused rooms with fading floral wallpaper and half curtains, windows propped up with hardback books from Readers Digest. Climbing into the attic on yet another hidden stairway and looking at yellowed letters with spidery writing, old photographs, trunks of ancient clothes. Becoming aware that what I thought of as time wasn't really just now, but was also the past shadowing me at every step, watching over me, comforting me in the knowlege that I wasn't alone here, that many other children had been happy here and left that happiness somehow in the very floor boards and plaster.
I know it is because of my love of this place that I instinctively loved anything old, anything that had a story, a history, a bit of depth and interest that a brand new object lacked. The horrific pea soup and pumpkin coloration of the seventies apalled me, I wanted the deep burgundy and robins egg blues of the Chinese rugs, the delicate pastels of the china lamps and the patina of 100 year old mahogany. I was aghast at the earth shoe pale blue levis pants and tee shirts of my classmates, I wanted a white eyelet dress that blew in the breeze, that was of a cotton so fine it seemed like a spiderweb. I started liking vintage clothes because they connected me to the past that at this place seemed like such a better place to be than the Eagles listening kickball playing horror of seventh grade in 1977 urban Washington.
This is how I came to champion the old, to see the quality and charm in it, to feel that it was a crime to destroy something of beauty that was old just to have something that was new.
This house was to many eyes a delapidated wreck that got worse with time. Ceilings fell in. The foundation shifted and weakend. Mold developed, birds took up residence, racoons and squirrels slept in the abandoned beds and ate out the filling leaving it on the dusty wood floors. To the practical eye of the lawyer from Richmond the house was a tear down. Just shoring up the foundation so that the walls wouldn't buckle was a near million dollar prospect, and after that tearing out walls, replacing windows, leveling the floors that were so bumpy they looked like roller coasters rather than flat surfaces to walk on- money would evaporate into this house like water in the desert and it would just need more and more. A nice new house built with the latest design could maximize the gorgeous bay views and keep you nice and cool in summer, nice and warm in winter. Granite countertops and sub zero refrigerators, open floor plans and massive decks, all these things would be far superior to old cracked linoleum, antique refrigerators coated in rust, windows that opened and let in rain and screen doors that slapped closed instead of swinging on carefully calibrated magenitc hinges. Plus, the resale value of a site this prime would be far more with a new house than with some old decaying pile that only a fool would consider saving.
Old things ask more from you but they give more. They give the sense of continuity, of quality, of uniqueness, of depth. I am sure that the house built on this site will be very comfortable, and to many people just what they always dreamed of in their long careers working to be the kind of person who could afford to tear down an old house and build a new one. Many people want to be the first owner of something because the thought of those that came before them is somehow creepy, haunted, dirty, well....used. But to me, it is precisely because of this that an old place or object has a fascination, a beauty and a quality that far exceeds a Potomac worthy mansion with all the latest convieniences. I wouldn't trade my old cracked claw foot tub by the open window for a million double sinked marble crusted bathrooms. Living with the past is not living in the past. And this is a distinction that I think is very important.
My life will be my eulogy for this place that shaped who I am and helped me find a career that I love. And someday I hope to save another, (perhaps slightly smaller,) old house and bring it back to the present with respect, love and tact so that others can experience what I knew as a child in this wonderful, lost place that I will always carry with me in my heart.
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
I have a need to save other people's histories. At the auction I go to there are often boxes of photographs, letters, diaries, bills of sale, dried corsages, ribbons from contests, programs from plays, old dance cards, graduation notices, postcards, report cards. This falls under the category of "epehmera" and is often discarded as having no resale value by the antique dealers who have bigger fish to fry.
Vintage clothing I suppose could be seen as a kind of fabric ephemera, telling a visual and sometimes olfactory history of the owner. We see the sweat under the arms of a wedding dress and the tear on the hem of a party gown as evidence of stress or hurrying down a staircase after having too much to drink. We smell the cigarette odor of a smoker, we find the ticket stub in the old purse.
But it's the actual physical archive of a family's history written down in black and white or printed in kodachrome that fascinates me and I save it, because if I didn't snatch it up the bulldozer that comes at the end of the auction will plow it down and take it to the dump where it will be lost forever.
"That's sad, to have your family photos end up like this" the dealers say as they sift through the birthdays, the weddings, the proms, the proud new home owners in front of their brick house, the beach photos of women in the twenties in their wool bathing suits, showing more skin than was probably ever seen before in history and looking sheepishly pleased about it.
The men in their boater hats with their school pennants. The children in white dresses and ringlets posing with the family cat. The color group school photos with the name of the teacher and the year, the platform shoes and bellbottoms, the tee shirts with their timely logos. That is the thing about ephemera. You can criss cross through the twentieth century with one family from great grandmother to the present day, you can trace the resemblence in the faces, you can see their embarassing bare bottomed baby pictures and the same person in a formal graduation shot with their serious picture in the yearbook and their accomplishments beside them.
You can read their letters to their mother from college asking for money. You can read their journals describing all of the movies that came out in the year 1947 and rated from good to excellent. You can go to Paris with a teenager in 1926 and shop for hats with her and talk with her father who comes to pay her bills and have what she calls "a talk fest." You can read between the lines when a lawyer in 1882 says that he enjoyed a lady's company "very much" and was annoyed when his coworker made him go back to the office. You can read the story of a single mother in New Jersey in the 30's written by her depressed mother she takes care of, citing the weather every single day and the laundry that she did, meals that she cooked, worries that she had regarding her granddaughter who was having trouble at school and was home sick often.
The journals are often dull and badly written, rarely do they show any literary merit or anything earth shatteringly novel. Rather they are the real record of lives lived, dutifully recorded on paper with a pen, and the fact that they are able to reach out to the present and connect with me, a total stranger in a different century, fascinates me.
With the internet you can do a cursory search and find out who the people were, if there are names with the ephemera. Often it is just boxes of photographs or albums with first names only so you can only surmise- upper class family from Philadelphia judging by the photographer's studio name on the formal portrait. Upper class couple in New York City getting married at the Waldorf Astoria in 1945, old movie camera film transformed to silent video cassette, the richness of the guest's hats and dresses breathtaking, the food that they are eating and the utensils they use of the highest cost and quality. You can even read their lips to see what they are saying if you are good at that kind of thing. One of my favorites was a stick in snap shot album from the 80's , definitely Baltimore or a suburb of, the girls wearing the permed hair and pouffy prom dresses of the time, the boys with their mullets and beer cans clowning for the camera. One girl went to three proms and had three different dresses, each a more magnified pastel powder puff than the last, one with a matching parasol. Who is she now? Is she my age, a young grandmother at a crab feast in Ocean City? Is she a single woman living with cats in New York City writing a book on middle age angst? Is she even alive still, and if so , what would she think about me and my friends looking at this album academically, seeing it as a prime example of horrible 80's fashion?
What I see again and again is a paradox, a metaphysical one. Nothing stays the same. People are born, age, die. Their lives , no matter how grand or how humble , leave a paper trail that leads us to the fact that they are gone, and they once were here. Yet the business of antiques and ephemera is a curious way of entering the lives of these people on an almost alarmingly personal level and seeing who they were, what they wore, where they lived, and if you are lucky, what they felt and thought. All very similar yet all completely unique. Why are we alive if all we do is leave paper behind that means nothing to anyone but our family, who obviously didn't care enough to save it if it passes in to the hands of strangers like me? And what should I do with the crates of photos, letters, journals, programs, that I have accumulated over fourteen years in this business- too much to archive, too heartbreaking to consign to the dustbin of history.
Faulker wrote something to the effect that the past isn't dead, it isn't even past. It is oddly ephemeral, yet never disposed of entirely. That's why I will continue my collecting, in the hopes that someday someone who comes across my paper trail will at least give it a look and know that I was alive.
Vintage clothing I suppose could be seen as a kind of fabric ephemera, telling a visual and sometimes olfactory history of the owner. We see the sweat under the arms of a wedding dress and the tear on the hem of a party gown as evidence of stress or hurrying down a staircase after having too much to drink. We smell the cigarette odor of a smoker, we find the ticket stub in the old purse.
But it's the actual physical archive of a family's history written down in black and white or printed in kodachrome that fascinates me and I save it, because if I didn't snatch it up the bulldozer that comes at the end of the auction will plow it down and take it to the dump where it will be lost forever.
"That's sad, to have your family photos end up like this" the dealers say as they sift through the birthdays, the weddings, the proms, the proud new home owners in front of their brick house, the beach photos of women in the twenties in their wool bathing suits, showing more skin than was probably ever seen before in history and looking sheepishly pleased about it.
The men in their boater hats with their school pennants. The children in white dresses and ringlets posing with the family cat. The color group school photos with the name of the teacher and the year, the platform shoes and bellbottoms, the tee shirts with their timely logos. That is the thing about ephemera. You can criss cross through the twentieth century with one family from great grandmother to the present day, you can trace the resemblence in the faces, you can see their embarassing bare bottomed baby pictures and the same person in a formal graduation shot with their serious picture in the yearbook and their accomplishments beside them.
You can read their letters to their mother from college asking for money. You can read their journals describing all of the movies that came out in the year 1947 and rated from good to excellent. You can go to Paris with a teenager in 1926 and shop for hats with her and talk with her father who comes to pay her bills and have what she calls "a talk fest." You can read between the lines when a lawyer in 1882 says that he enjoyed a lady's company "very much" and was annoyed when his coworker made him go back to the office. You can read the story of a single mother in New Jersey in the 30's written by her depressed mother she takes care of, citing the weather every single day and the laundry that she did, meals that she cooked, worries that she had regarding her granddaughter who was having trouble at school and was home sick often.
The journals are often dull and badly written, rarely do they show any literary merit or anything earth shatteringly novel. Rather they are the real record of lives lived, dutifully recorded on paper with a pen, and the fact that they are able to reach out to the present and connect with me, a total stranger in a different century, fascinates me.
With the internet you can do a cursory search and find out who the people were, if there are names with the ephemera. Often it is just boxes of photographs or albums with first names only so you can only surmise- upper class family from Philadelphia judging by the photographer's studio name on the formal portrait. Upper class couple in New York City getting married at the Waldorf Astoria in 1945, old movie camera film transformed to silent video cassette, the richness of the guest's hats and dresses breathtaking, the food that they are eating and the utensils they use of the highest cost and quality. You can even read their lips to see what they are saying if you are good at that kind of thing. One of my favorites was a stick in snap shot album from the 80's , definitely Baltimore or a suburb of, the girls wearing the permed hair and pouffy prom dresses of the time, the boys with their mullets and beer cans clowning for the camera. One girl went to three proms and had three different dresses, each a more magnified pastel powder puff than the last, one with a matching parasol. Who is she now? Is she my age, a young grandmother at a crab feast in Ocean City? Is she a single woman living with cats in New York City writing a book on middle age angst? Is she even alive still, and if so , what would she think about me and my friends looking at this album academically, seeing it as a prime example of horrible 80's fashion?
What I see again and again is a paradox, a metaphysical one. Nothing stays the same. People are born, age, die. Their lives , no matter how grand or how humble , leave a paper trail that leads us to the fact that they are gone, and they once were here. Yet the business of antiques and ephemera is a curious way of entering the lives of these people on an almost alarmingly personal level and seeing who they were, what they wore, where they lived, and if you are lucky, what they felt and thought. All very similar yet all completely unique. Why are we alive if all we do is leave paper behind that means nothing to anyone but our family, who obviously didn't care enough to save it if it passes in to the hands of strangers like me? And what should I do with the crates of photos, letters, journals, programs, that I have accumulated over fourteen years in this business- too much to archive, too heartbreaking to consign to the dustbin of history.
Faulker wrote something to the effect that the past isn't dead, it isn't even past. It is oddly ephemeral, yet never disposed of entirely. That's why I will continue my collecting, in the hopes that someday someone who comes across my paper trail will at least give it a look and know that I was alive.
Friday, May 10, 2013
"The world is too much with us, late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers, and little we see in nature that is ours."
The one benefit of having a liberal arts education, that I can see, is having quotes like this rattling around in your head like marbles. This poetry fragment from William Wordsworth often comes to me when I am at auctions, which are the ultimate example of getting and spending.
I recently drove to a Pennsylvania fire house to attend a premium vintage clothing auction. This auction, Whittakers, was attended by The Dukes of Melrose (Decades in LA) the other lady who has a vintage clothing reality show whose assistants are beautifully dressed willowy young men, and various other cranky, respectful, competitive and hell bent for leather vintage clothing dealers who would throw their grandmother under a bus if she had enough Hermes scarves to justify murder.
Of course I am exagerating for entertainment value, but not much. First off, it was one of the first warm Saturdays of Spring, delicate breezes wafting through new sprung flowers, the sun showing itself finally after weeks of cold rain. I am in this fire house auditorium with about thirty people sitting in folding chairs riveted to the action on the stage. Because this was no ordinary auction. The flowers will come back next spring, but we may never see again the astounding collection of 1920's hats from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the delicate mint green folds of a Fortuny evening dress from the Fashion Institute of Technology, the eighteenth century cotton gown that Marie Antoinette herself would have lounged in, the liquid silver flapper dress from a Euclid Avenue gilded age estate- all in one place! All for sale to the highest bidder!
I attended the preview a few days before and wore the obligatory cloth gloves to handle the garments which probably hadn't seen the light of day for 100 or more years. The experience of seeing hundreds of silk evening gowns from the late 1800's all in one place took my breath away, and handling them gently, seeing the beading , the silk, the intricacy of the designs, the colors no longer seen made by dyes that no longer exist, all I can say is WOW! I wasn't able to keep the poker face that I saw on some of the higher end dealers. It felt like I was in Bergdorf Goodman in 1900 , shopping for an outfit for a life I didn't have.
I have always been fascinated by antique clothing, and perhaps it is because of the sense of "otherness" that it exudes, the sense of a different time when people didn't throw on sweat pants and a tee shirt but rather took hours to be carefully secured in layers of cotton, silk, hooks and eyes, ribbons and lace. And perhaps there is a vouyeristic element of getting a glimpse of the lifestyles of the extremely rich, since these are their artifacts, clothes made of less expensive materials would have decayed by now, or not been valued and have all perished.
I am estimating from memory here, but standout items were the 1920's baywater green wool cape with red silk lining that had sea lions exquisitely embroidered along the front in a winding art nouveau design. $8,000.00 My bidding card stayed down. The silver lame sheperdess inspired evening gown also from the 20's, apx. $9,000.00 sold over the phone to an overseas bidder. The box of ethereal silk afternoon dresses from 1904, airbrushed with the barest suggestion of roses and swathed in spiderwebs of the finest lace, $300.00. I should have gotten that one!
And the high prices went on and on as the decades rose, the 1950's beaded cream silk ballgown that must have weighed at least ten pounds- over $4,000.00, the bizzare conquistador jump suit (was it Yves St. Laurent?) thousands, the Chanel lace dress, quite recent , thousands. By the fifth hour my bidding card was creased and folded and had not been raised once. I'm thinking, either I am charging way too little, or these people have customers that I have never seen, for whom cost is no object.
After the formal auction, was over and the Dukes of Melrose bagged up his forty thousand dollars of purchases, they did something called a "discovery" auction, which was basically boxed lots of antique clothes that had some flaws or were not designer enough to qualify for the catalog auction. This had a more carnival like atmosphere, more like the auctions I attend regularly, with bad manners, fighting, snide remarks and a blessedly comedic auctioneer tossing the Victorian widow's weeds and white cotton bloomers here and there with gay abandon. The competition here was no less fierce, however, and the prices high enough to make me airsick. I bought one lot of evening clothes for much more than I would normally have paid just to make driving all the way to this thing worth the gas and the hellish drivers on the Pennsyvania Turnpike. The auctioneer said as I held up my card "Is this the first thing you have bought today?" I nodded. "I hope it won't be the last!" he says , digging in to the next lot, a box of elfin leather shoes from the Philadelphia Museum.
I walked out of the fire station after eight hours of concentrated attention, holding my trash bag of garments, the most notable being a cream taffeta rhinestone studded evening dress from 1935 that had a Glida the Good Witch feeling about it. I had spent the last few days devoted to garments worn by people who were long dead, from a world that no longer exists.
However, the warm Spring evening as I drove home would have been the same now as then when some hopeful Philadelphia society girl put on this sparkling dress to go out dancing. Nature connects us to the past probably more than clothes or things do. So, would Wordsworth be miffed at me for spending my day in pursuit of things rather than rambling about the daffodils? Probably. But he was a poet, and I sell vintage clothes.
The one benefit of having a liberal arts education, that I can see, is having quotes like this rattling around in your head like marbles. This poetry fragment from William Wordsworth often comes to me when I am at auctions, which are the ultimate example of getting and spending.
I recently drove to a Pennsylvania fire house to attend a premium vintage clothing auction. This auction, Whittakers, was attended by The Dukes of Melrose (Decades in LA) the other lady who has a vintage clothing reality show whose assistants are beautifully dressed willowy young men, and various other cranky, respectful, competitive and hell bent for leather vintage clothing dealers who would throw their grandmother under a bus if she had enough Hermes scarves to justify murder.
Of course I am exagerating for entertainment value, but not much. First off, it was one of the first warm Saturdays of Spring, delicate breezes wafting through new sprung flowers, the sun showing itself finally after weeks of cold rain. I am in this fire house auditorium with about thirty people sitting in folding chairs riveted to the action on the stage. Because this was no ordinary auction. The flowers will come back next spring, but we may never see again the astounding collection of 1920's hats from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the delicate mint green folds of a Fortuny evening dress from the Fashion Institute of Technology, the eighteenth century cotton gown that Marie Antoinette herself would have lounged in, the liquid silver flapper dress from a Euclid Avenue gilded age estate- all in one place! All for sale to the highest bidder!
I attended the preview a few days before and wore the obligatory cloth gloves to handle the garments which probably hadn't seen the light of day for 100 or more years. The experience of seeing hundreds of silk evening gowns from the late 1800's all in one place took my breath away, and handling them gently, seeing the beading , the silk, the intricacy of the designs, the colors no longer seen made by dyes that no longer exist, all I can say is WOW! I wasn't able to keep the poker face that I saw on some of the higher end dealers. It felt like I was in Bergdorf Goodman in 1900 , shopping for an outfit for a life I didn't have.
I have always been fascinated by antique clothing, and perhaps it is because of the sense of "otherness" that it exudes, the sense of a different time when people didn't throw on sweat pants and a tee shirt but rather took hours to be carefully secured in layers of cotton, silk, hooks and eyes, ribbons and lace. And perhaps there is a vouyeristic element of getting a glimpse of the lifestyles of the extremely rich, since these are their artifacts, clothes made of less expensive materials would have decayed by now, or not been valued and have all perished.
I am estimating from memory here, but standout items were the 1920's baywater green wool cape with red silk lining that had sea lions exquisitely embroidered along the front in a winding art nouveau design. $8,000.00 My bidding card stayed down. The silver lame sheperdess inspired evening gown also from the 20's, apx. $9,000.00 sold over the phone to an overseas bidder. The box of ethereal silk afternoon dresses from 1904, airbrushed with the barest suggestion of roses and swathed in spiderwebs of the finest lace, $300.00. I should have gotten that one!
And the high prices went on and on as the decades rose, the 1950's beaded cream silk ballgown that must have weighed at least ten pounds- over $4,000.00, the bizzare conquistador jump suit (was it Yves St. Laurent?) thousands, the Chanel lace dress, quite recent , thousands. By the fifth hour my bidding card was creased and folded and had not been raised once. I'm thinking, either I am charging way too little, or these people have customers that I have never seen, for whom cost is no object.
After the formal auction, was over and the Dukes of Melrose bagged up his forty thousand dollars of purchases, they did something called a "discovery" auction, which was basically boxed lots of antique clothes that had some flaws or were not designer enough to qualify for the catalog auction. This had a more carnival like atmosphere, more like the auctions I attend regularly, with bad manners, fighting, snide remarks and a blessedly comedic auctioneer tossing the Victorian widow's weeds and white cotton bloomers here and there with gay abandon. The competition here was no less fierce, however, and the prices high enough to make me airsick. I bought one lot of evening clothes for much more than I would normally have paid just to make driving all the way to this thing worth the gas and the hellish drivers on the Pennsyvania Turnpike. The auctioneer said as I held up my card "Is this the first thing you have bought today?" I nodded. "I hope it won't be the last!" he says , digging in to the next lot, a box of elfin leather shoes from the Philadelphia Museum.
I walked out of the fire station after eight hours of concentrated attention, holding my trash bag of garments, the most notable being a cream taffeta rhinestone studded evening dress from 1935 that had a Glida the Good Witch feeling about it. I had spent the last few days devoted to garments worn by people who were long dead, from a world that no longer exists.
However, the warm Spring evening as I drove home would have been the same now as then when some hopeful Philadelphia society girl put on this sparkling dress to go out dancing. Nature connects us to the past probably more than clothes or things do. So, would Wordsworth be miffed at me for spending my day in pursuit of things rather than rambling about the daffodils? Probably. But he was a poet, and I sell vintage clothes.
Monday, June 18, 2012
The Seersucker Social- Fashion as Art
The Seersucker Social is a unique event. Organizer Eric Channing Brewer manages to rustle up 800 or so people dressed in a sort of Edwardian/1920's hybrid of cloche hats, floral dresses, natty suits and bow ties. They then take a liesurely bicycle ride through the city and end up at the Hillwood Estate, a mansion tucked away in Rock Creek Park that bears a striking resemblance to an 18th Century French Chateau. Then the scene becomes very Great Gatsby with naughty gin cocktails, croquet on the ample lawn, live jazz music and dancing and an all out fashion promenade.
The fashion promenade is fashion in its highest form- at least by my definition. That is : ordinary people transforming themselves by carefully chosen clothing into something beautiful and unique and being joyful in the moment. It's not a vain thing as in My Chanel handbag costs more than your Gucci. It's not about snobbism or exclusivity or labels or spending a fortune. It's about looking good in creative new ways with clothing. I saw alot of things from PollySue's repurposed in original ways. A 19th century red dotted swiss long skirt had been cut off to make a chic peplum belt over a mini dress. A yardage of foam green and white seersucker had been fashioned into a button front day dress -designed and sewn by the wearer. A 1970's polyester dress with a flowing skirt had, when combined with an artfully tipped hat, the look of a flapper from 1925. A simple navy blue straw hat when joined with wide legged trousers , a tank top,and dark glasses made me think Lauren Bacall herself was striding along the lawn.
Jackie and I had fun also. I almost chickened out and wore a modern floral dress, which would have been fine, but then I thought, where else can I wear my authentic Sufragette white linen dress from 1915 with the asymetrical buttons that I got at the Brimfield Antique Market years ago? Where else could I wear my authentic 1920's cloth maryjane shoes with the low heels? Where else could I wear my slightly moth damaged 1920's cloche hat with the orange rosette on the side? And where else could Jackie wear a nineteenth century cotton step in ( known now as a "teddy" and accentuate it with lavish costume jewelry and combat boots to look like one of the "ladies" in a cable series about the building of the railways in the 19th century?
Strolling around the grounds dressed this way was in a sense like entering another dimension- mostly because everyone else had put such effort and style into their clothing. Perhaps the popularity of this event and its Fall cousin, the Tweed Ride, is because this kind of joy in clothing just isn't indulged much in modern life. We throw on something made of tee shirt material and go about our business looking like everyone else. Weddings and Proms seem to be the last hold outs for dress up occasions. Formality has been left behind in the dizzying sweep of digital devices, instant information, virtual reality. The opportunity to enter the kind of fashion time warp offered by the Seersucker Social is a rare treat, and to those of us who secretly wished we lived in another place and time where clothing was something other than just covering for your body- a bonanza, a jackpot, a delight.
As I was taking the house tour of Marjorie Merriwether Post's over the top mansion I looked out the window past the Faberge egg which was worth more than my house and saw the tableau of the well dressed people dancing, strolling, laughing, and vamping. And I thought, they are the real works of art, done for the sheer joy of being young, looking good and haing fun with fashion. .
The fashion promenade is fashion in its highest form- at least by my definition. That is : ordinary people transforming themselves by carefully chosen clothing into something beautiful and unique and being joyful in the moment. It's not a vain thing as in My Chanel handbag costs more than your Gucci. It's not about snobbism or exclusivity or labels or spending a fortune. It's about looking good in creative new ways with clothing. I saw alot of things from PollySue's repurposed in original ways. A 19th century red dotted swiss long skirt had been cut off to make a chic peplum belt over a mini dress. A yardage of foam green and white seersucker had been fashioned into a button front day dress -designed and sewn by the wearer. A 1970's polyester dress with a flowing skirt had, when combined with an artfully tipped hat, the look of a flapper from 1925. A simple navy blue straw hat when joined with wide legged trousers , a tank top,and dark glasses made me think Lauren Bacall herself was striding along the lawn.
Jackie and I had fun also. I almost chickened out and wore a modern floral dress, which would have been fine, but then I thought, where else can I wear my authentic Sufragette white linen dress from 1915 with the asymetrical buttons that I got at the Brimfield Antique Market years ago? Where else could I wear my authentic 1920's cloth maryjane shoes with the low heels? Where else could I wear my slightly moth damaged 1920's cloche hat with the orange rosette on the side? And where else could Jackie wear a nineteenth century cotton step in ( known now as a "teddy" and accentuate it with lavish costume jewelry and combat boots to look like one of the "ladies" in a cable series about the building of the railways in the 19th century?
Strolling around the grounds dressed this way was in a sense like entering another dimension- mostly because everyone else had put such effort and style into their clothing. Perhaps the popularity of this event and its Fall cousin, the Tweed Ride, is because this kind of joy in clothing just isn't indulged much in modern life. We throw on something made of tee shirt material and go about our business looking like everyone else. Weddings and Proms seem to be the last hold outs for dress up occasions. Formality has been left behind in the dizzying sweep of digital devices, instant information, virtual reality. The opportunity to enter the kind of fashion time warp offered by the Seersucker Social is a rare treat, and to those of us who secretly wished we lived in another place and time where clothing was something other than just covering for your body- a bonanza, a jackpot, a delight.
As I was taking the house tour of Marjorie Merriwether Post's over the top mansion I looked out the window past the Faberge egg which was worth more than my house and saw the tableau of the well dressed people dancing, strolling, laughing, and vamping. And I thought, they are the real works of art, done for the sheer joy of being young, looking good and haing fun with fashion. .
Monday, October 10, 2011
Why I Keep Doing This
When I first started collecting vintage clothing I loved it because it transformed me. I was a shy, insecure junior high school student who was bad at sports and unable to stand up for myself. I wore the normal, dull clothes of the late seventies- corduroy pants, acrylic sweaters, slip on comfortable shoes. My hair was cut in a modified Dorothy Hamil flip that wouldn't feather right, no matter how much I blow dried it. I thought that getting in to the Pom Pom squad would make me instantly into the perky high energy American teenager that I was supposed to be- but no. It just solidified my total apathy about sports and my terror at performance. Besides the cheerleaders were the cool girls. Pom Poms were dorks in brown dresses shaking clumps of shredded paper to the tunes of the Bee Gees.
This is where vintage clothes came to the rescue. When I was fifteen I managed to score a plum silk velvet dress from the estate of a recently deceased former flapper- perfectly fitted along the bias with flamboyant ruffled sleeves. When I put the dress on, I was an elegant young woman whose clothing fit perfectly and whose rather muddy green eyes suddenly stood out. I was ready to go to a party where they served things like oysters and champagne, where handsome boys wished to speak to me behind the potted palms rather than yelling "One, Two Three Four, Get those Horses Off the Floor!" This artifact of a vanished time was going to help me to simply rise above my current situation and become someone else. And that was good.
Now my reasons for loving vintage clothing have become more complex. I don't escape with the clothes any more, in fact few of them fit me. I don't have a desire to be glamorous or cool, or to be noticed on the red carpet. In fact my everyday clothing now is strictly functional and more suited to rough and tumble auctions than high toned parties. I think what I do have, which keeps my interest, is a desire to see the past reignited, if only briefly. For example: last week I went to an auction. There was a pile of very old clothing sitting on an oak chair. I looked at it enough to see that it was from the twenties through the fifties, some of it in poor condition and all of it dirty. I bought it, stuffed it into a box and took it home. I washed what was salvageable and brought it to the shop. Immediately Juliana, my sometime employee, honed in on a peacock print rayon dress from the late 40's with cap sleeves, hand sewn with dressmaker's touches like seam binding and tiny stitching on the neckline. She changed out of her yoga type flowing clothing into this dress and became a woman of the 40's, brave, self sufficient, making her own pretty dress and wearing it proudly. No one else on K street would have this dress. She would be stopped by fashion students ask where it came from, the fabric and cut were so "other" than what we see now. And I am thinking- there is a link between Juliana and the person that wore this dress, a tenuous hand holding from the past to the future that became real when she put the dress on . As Faulker said ," The past isn't dead, it isn't even past." We are living in the same world, experiencing the same seasons, vicissitudes of life, hopes, fears , dreams of those who have lived before us. And when we wear their clothes, we are in a sense connecting with them, showing that our humanity is the same, despite the dramatic ways the world has changed in the last seventy years.
So, from a teenager seeking an escape from her dull, suburban identity I have evolved into a kind of Dr. Frankenstien of fabric. The seeking out, rehabilitating and eventual repurposing of antique clothes is a way of reanimating something that was once a vital part of everyday life- the clothes on people's backs. However, these are not usually ordinary clothes. The clothes that survive the decades are those with a special significance to the wearer- a wedding gown, a prom dress, a dress so extravagant and beautiful that to throw it away would be wrong . By wearing them again we can forge a bond between the past and the present, and show that the concept of time is something that can perhaps be bent, or overcome in subtle ways. I am sure my interest in history, vintage clothing and the artifacts of everyday life will evolve as I do. And this is why I do it, to find out how.
This is where vintage clothes came to the rescue. When I was fifteen I managed to score a plum silk velvet dress from the estate of a recently deceased former flapper- perfectly fitted along the bias with flamboyant ruffled sleeves. When I put the dress on, I was an elegant young woman whose clothing fit perfectly and whose rather muddy green eyes suddenly stood out. I was ready to go to a party where they served things like oysters and champagne, where handsome boys wished to speak to me behind the potted palms rather than yelling "One, Two Three Four, Get those Horses Off the Floor!" This artifact of a vanished time was going to help me to simply rise above my current situation and become someone else. And that was good.
Now my reasons for loving vintage clothing have become more complex. I don't escape with the clothes any more, in fact few of them fit me. I don't have a desire to be glamorous or cool, or to be noticed on the red carpet. In fact my everyday clothing now is strictly functional and more suited to rough and tumble auctions than high toned parties. I think what I do have, which keeps my interest, is a desire to see the past reignited, if only briefly. For example: last week I went to an auction. There was a pile of very old clothing sitting on an oak chair. I looked at it enough to see that it was from the twenties through the fifties, some of it in poor condition and all of it dirty. I bought it, stuffed it into a box and took it home. I washed what was salvageable and brought it to the shop. Immediately Juliana, my sometime employee, honed in on a peacock print rayon dress from the late 40's with cap sleeves, hand sewn with dressmaker's touches like seam binding and tiny stitching on the neckline. She changed out of her yoga type flowing clothing into this dress and became a woman of the 40's, brave, self sufficient, making her own pretty dress and wearing it proudly. No one else on K street would have this dress. She would be stopped by fashion students ask where it came from, the fabric and cut were so "other" than what we see now. And I am thinking- there is a link between Juliana and the person that wore this dress, a tenuous hand holding from the past to the future that became real when she put the dress on . As Faulker said ," The past isn't dead, it isn't even past." We are living in the same world, experiencing the same seasons, vicissitudes of life, hopes, fears , dreams of those who have lived before us. And when we wear their clothes, we are in a sense connecting with them, showing that our humanity is the same, despite the dramatic ways the world has changed in the last seventy years.
So, from a teenager seeking an escape from her dull, suburban identity I have evolved into a kind of Dr. Frankenstien of fabric. The seeking out, rehabilitating and eventual repurposing of antique clothes is a way of reanimating something that was once a vital part of everyday life- the clothes on people's backs. However, these are not usually ordinary clothes. The clothes that survive the decades are those with a special significance to the wearer- a wedding gown, a prom dress, a dress so extravagant and beautiful that to throw it away would be wrong . By wearing them again we can forge a bond between the past and the present, and show that the concept of time is something that can perhaps be bent, or overcome in subtle ways. I am sure my interest in history, vintage clothing and the artifacts of everyday life will evolve as I do. And this is why I do it, to find out how.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Wedding Gowns-The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same
Due to a recent article in the Washington Post's 'Local Living' section that touted PollySue's as a place to sell your vintage wedding gown, we have been innudated by gowns. The most interesting aspect of this was seeing that there was always 'the dress' for any era. Just as 'the dress' for the past ten years or so has been a strapless white satin ballgown (look at the weddings section of the paper for proof, or any bridal magazine) 'the dress' for each decade has a definitive look, varying only in the details or expensiveness of the fabric.
Our first wedding dress vendor came in with four gowns, each one a perfect example of its time period. The dress from the 1930's was a slinky bias cut satin with a high bustline and covered buttons up the front. A slight train completed the look-and was echoed in every wedding dress I have seen from the 1930's. Perhaps because this was a time of financial hardship the use of fabric was sparing, concentrating more on the cut and minimal frills (no lace, only same fabric frills around the high neck.)
The second dress, a Mad Men era gown from 1962, showed all the hallmarks of its time. Made of a stiff synthetic satin the dress had capped sleeves and a fitted lace embellished bodice with covered buttons down the back. It had a full belled skirt puffed out by a tulle underslip and it was a size zero-so small that only the most petite contemporary woman could wear it. THe early sixties was by far the most common era of gowns we have had come in- and 'the dress' is echoed in all of them- with only a difference in the details on the front skirt- some with bows and lace medallions, some with a slight pearl beading. The use of fabric was not as sparing as the 30's dress, but still less than lavish, concentrating more on a stiff structured look which I suppose those brides aspired to, the early sixties being the last years before the great changes of the late sixties(womans liberation, civil rights, the assasination of many influential political figures, the Vietnam War...the list goes on. )
The third dress I was shown skipped back ten years to 1952 and shows the period in sharp detail. A lavish use of material and a showy 'Princess' quality was 'he dress'for the fifties. A slim fitted bodice of tight mesh lace embroidered with exploding curlicues of lace and pearls. A sweetheart neck satin camisole showing through the lace. A skirt of yards and yards of fluffy pale pink tulle with a long train (that I got stuck in while steaming it-quite comical). This dress shows the exhuberance of the fifties-the wish to splash out with expensive fabric and intricate detail and spare no expense since the lean years of the Depression and the War were finally over and brides everywhere wanted to have their dream wedding with the house and picket fence at the other side. For most of the decade the dress remained the same-only getting a bit stiffer and more structured by the late fifties-but overall a classic 'princess' gown like that worn by Glinda the Good Witch in 'The Wizard of OZ'.
The last gown pulled out of it's blue garment bag was from 1989- a heavy satin and beaded dress studded with pearls on its fitted long sleeved bodice with a low cut u neckline. This dress was the only dress that fit me (an average size 12) and as I swept upstairs in it to show my coworkers they exclaimed 'That bow on the back is crazy!'. And it did have the charactaristic monster 80's bow flat on the backside underneath the row of satin buttons (which by this time were only for show-they concealed a easily moving zipper.) So the dress for the 80's was rich heavy satin, quite covered up but full of expensive details-embroidery, lace, pearls, beadwork. This reflected the times of glitz and excess, where the average person aspired to be a character from 'Dynasty' or the resplendent Princess Diana whose train would reach the entire length of the shop and half way across the street.
So, I have learned these things:
Each time has 'the dress'. The farther back you go ,the smaller the dress and the harder it is to get into (one dress had sixty covered buttons that took half an hour to fasten. ) And the number of gowns from divorced brides jumped as we got to the seventies alhough generally the dresses were from happy marriages that have stood the test of time.
In fact, some of the sweetest moments of this whole dress experience was meeting the couples who are still married after sixty years (one couple in particular still smiling at each other and looking as exhuberant now as they did in their wedding picture of 1949). I asked this couple what their secret was to a long marriage and they said 'Being able to have arguments'. Wow. Another couple bringing in an impossibly tiny short gown from 1960 telling me that no this was not the bride- this was a classmate and friend of the bride who reconnected with the groom after she died and eventually started dating (I saw them kissing on the street like teenagers!)
Please come in and see all of these beautiful gowns, learn their story, try them on and think of making them walk down the asile another time, breaking the strapless satin ballgown mold we are all so familiar with.
Our first wedding dress vendor came in with four gowns, each one a perfect example of its time period. The dress from the 1930's was a slinky bias cut satin with a high bustline and covered buttons up the front. A slight train completed the look-and was echoed in every wedding dress I have seen from the 1930's. Perhaps because this was a time of financial hardship the use of fabric was sparing, concentrating more on the cut and minimal frills (no lace, only same fabric frills around the high neck.)
The second dress, a Mad Men era gown from 1962, showed all the hallmarks of its time. Made of a stiff synthetic satin the dress had capped sleeves and a fitted lace embellished bodice with covered buttons down the back. It had a full belled skirt puffed out by a tulle underslip and it was a size zero-so small that only the most petite contemporary woman could wear it. THe early sixties was by far the most common era of gowns we have had come in- and 'the dress' is echoed in all of them- with only a difference in the details on the front skirt- some with bows and lace medallions, some with a slight pearl beading. The use of fabric was not as sparing as the 30's dress, but still less than lavish, concentrating more on a stiff structured look which I suppose those brides aspired to, the early sixties being the last years before the great changes of the late sixties(womans liberation, civil rights, the assasination of many influential political figures, the Vietnam War...the list goes on. )
The third dress I was shown skipped back ten years to 1952 and shows the period in sharp detail. A lavish use of material and a showy 'Princess' quality was 'he dress'for the fifties. A slim fitted bodice of tight mesh lace embroidered with exploding curlicues of lace and pearls. A sweetheart neck satin camisole showing through the lace. A skirt of yards and yards of fluffy pale pink tulle with a long train (that I got stuck in while steaming it-quite comical). This dress shows the exhuberance of the fifties-the wish to splash out with expensive fabric and intricate detail and spare no expense since the lean years of the Depression and the War were finally over and brides everywhere wanted to have their dream wedding with the house and picket fence at the other side. For most of the decade the dress remained the same-only getting a bit stiffer and more structured by the late fifties-but overall a classic 'princess' gown like that worn by Glinda the Good Witch in 'The Wizard of OZ'.
The last gown pulled out of it's blue garment bag was from 1989- a heavy satin and beaded dress studded with pearls on its fitted long sleeved bodice with a low cut u neckline. This dress was the only dress that fit me (an average size 12) and as I swept upstairs in it to show my coworkers they exclaimed 'That bow on the back is crazy!'. And it did have the charactaristic monster 80's bow flat on the backside underneath the row of satin buttons (which by this time were only for show-they concealed a easily moving zipper.) So the dress for the 80's was rich heavy satin, quite covered up but full of expensive details-embroidery, lace, pearls, beadwork. This reflected the times of glitz and excess, where the average person aspired to be a character from 'Dynasty' or the resplendent Princess Diana whose train would reach the entire length of the shop and half way across the street.
So, I have learned these things:
Each time has 'the dress'. The farther back you go ,the smaller the dress and the harder it is to get into (one dress had sixty covered buttons that took half an hour to fasten. ) And the number of gowns from divorced brides jumped as we got to the seventies alhough generally the dresses were from happy marriages that have stood the test of time.
In fact, some of the sweetest moments of this whole dress experience was meeting the couples who are still married after sixty years (one couple in particular still smiling at each other and looking as exhuberant now as they did in their wedding picture of 1949). I asked this couple what their secret was to a long marriage and they said 'Being able to have arguments'. Wow. Another couple bringing in an impossibly tiny short gown from 1960 telling me that no this was not the bride- this was a classmate and friend of the bride who reconnected with the groom after she died and eventually started dating (I saw them kissing on the street like teenagers!)
Please come in and see all of these beautiful gowns, learn their story, try them on and think of making them walk down the asile another time, breaking the strapless satin ballgown mold we are all so familiar with.
Pollysue's Shop
PollySue's Vintage Shop was founded in November, 1999 and has been in operation ever since. Founded by Polly Baker and Susan Collings, PollySue's is a vintage shop in the grand tradition- a two level space with bright walls and a stamped tin ceiling in historic Old Town, Takoma Park, Maryland.
PollySue's carries top notch vintage clothes ranging anywhere from the 1850's to the 1970's. We have been a favorite of theater groups, opera companies, dancers, musicians, high school musicals, prom going teenagers, brides and anyone seeking original and stylish clothing.
PollySue's carries top notch vintage clothes ranging anywhere from the 1850's to the 1970's. We have been a favorite of theater groups, opera companies, dancers, musicians, high school musicals, prom going teenagers, brides and anyone seeking original and stylish clothing.
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