When Clothes Mattered

[shereads]

Proposed: People looked better in the early 1900s. (Rich people. The poor have never looked better.)

The Golden Age of corsettes and dressing gowns and day dresses and dinner dresses and gentlemen's smoking jackets and of course, being rich enough to afford a ladies' maid or a gentleman's valet, because who could change clothes 6 times a day if you had to work all those tiny buttons and shoehooks?

Posts to another thread, about the sinking of Di Caprio and the costumes and sets that made "Titanic" worth seeing, made me remember an exhibit of Golden Age fashions at the Metropolitan Museum. My college roommate and I were wearing jeans and T-shirts. We felt okay about how we looked when we went in, and like ragged guttersnipes when we emerged.

All that hand-beading on all those bodices. Thousands of seed pearls on dresses with matching gloves and two pairs of matching backup gloves, so the gloves could be changed as soon as there was dust on a fingertip. No wonder the rich couldn't get by without lots of poor people.

Complaint: ever since the Brits let India go, hand-beading is prohibitively expensive.

 

[Lucifer_Carroll]

Aqualung is the pinnacle of fashion.

 

[CharleyH]

Proposed: People looked better in the early 1900s. (Rich people. The poor have never looked better.)

The Golden Age of corsettes and dressing gowns and day dresses and dinner dresses and gentlemen's smoking jackets and of course, being rich enough to afford a ladies' maid or a gentleman's valet, because who could change clothes 6 times a day if you had to work all those tiny buttons and shoehooks?

Posts to another thread, about the sinking of Di Caprio and the costumes and sets that made "Titanic" worth seeing, made me remember an exhibit of Golden Age fashions at the Metropolitan Museum. My college roommate and I were wearing jeans and T-shirts. We felt okay about how we looked when we went in, and like ragged guttersnipes when we emerged.

All that hand-beading on all those bodices. Thousands of seed pearls on dresses with matching gloves and two pairs of matching backup gloves, so the gloves could be changed as soon as there was dust on a fingertip. No wonder the rich couldn't get by without lots of poor people.

Complaint: ever since the Brits let India go, hand-beading is prohibitively expensive.

No one need change 6 times a day now because of the advent of deoferant. Nonetheless . . . . . . Well, I am not a parent, but believe me, clothes seem to be important to people these days. Shaving all hair seems to be more important than clothing, but I do get your meaning. I dressed up in a very expensive authentic Army Uniform - which took a hell of a time tracking down - during sex once . . . was laughed out of bed, before I got there. sans lover.

Who laughs costume out of bed I am not a corset chick, but I do enjoy taking them off . . . kind of pseudo-bondage

Added, you are right. It is a niche, as is bondage. One must take the time to appreciate either the ropes, or in this case the beading, lace, material of something that a woman decides to wear because she loves it.

Added: why not take up beading, Sher

 

[shereads]

Ladies/Other, check out this fabulous travel suit. Honestly, who wouldn't look fabulous scrunched into a tight-laced Edwardian corsette and sporting a parasol to match her gown? What a belle epoque.

 

[cantdog]

Imagine it without the white. Very décolleté. Like Morticia Adams, if you also lose the hat.

 

[lucky-E-leven]

I'm down with the corsett, gown and even the parasol.

The hat has got to go.

~lucky (normally a hat lover)

 

[fogbank]

Yeah, I certainly long for the days when it was fashionable to put on a respectable brown tweed three-piece before climbing into the MG and embarking on a weekend in the country, or slipping into a nice grey tweed and matching hat when slipping out to the Drones Club for a mid-morning martini. And of course the white linen suit and panama hat for those summers out at the seaside.

Seriously, finding any sort of decently cut tweed suit these days is next to impossible. Canali makes some nice ones, but that's about it.