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.
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
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.
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