Rebirth, renewal, pedicure

Mrs. Euphrosyne needs a makeover.

She’s slowly regaining a waistline (she always has great gams) and is hoping that the girls will be subsiding soon as well. It’s been two years and a bit since she worked outside the home; most of her work wardrobe, which was rather snazzy if she says so herself, is long gone to relatives or Goodwill, and anyway she’s not really interested in looking teacherish, even cute teacherish, on a daily basis.

But she’s realized lately that her wardrobe has gone completely over to the dark side…

MommyWear.

She doesn’t wear the de rigeur MommyWear capris – they cut her off at the precisely least flattering level, and she does have some pride – but she owns more knee-length crops and slim bermudas than she cares to admit. She has two types of shirts: t-shirts and toddler-stained t-shirts. She has good but unbearably dull undergarments. She has flats and sandals. Her earring piercings may have closed. Her nails are short because she’s been working with resin (she claims) and the residue is hard to clean (so she says). The truth is she simply doesn’t want to deal with the maintenance.

Or maybe, just maybe, she does.  And here’s the damnedest thing: she can dress everyone else, but evaluating her own lack of style and amending this problem is hellahard, possibly because she has no idea what the options are. Prissy schoolgirl: got it. Artsy student: did it. Party girl: nailed it. Teacher: aced it. Non-slob mommy?

No frickin clue.

Somebody, somebody, come to my rescue and take me shopping. Force me to try things on. Block my Landsend account. Veto boring shoes. Make me commit to accessories.

Tim Gunn, I cry for you in the wilderness.

I renounce Project Runway.

Forever.

I love you, SissyBear.

Programming note

The next episode of a terribly, terribly disappointing season of Project Runway is on tonight. I will be watching. I shouldn’t – it’s agony. But like the generations of hard drinkers and chain-smokers from whence I spring, I will go right on doing this painful, unsatisfying, soul-destroying thing until it kills me. Or the season ends.

Fabric shopping!

More later, but I’m looking at two things:

1. High-end dominatrix gear, and
2. pleather, baby. Wet-look vinyl – trying to decide between four-way and two-way stretch.*

I’m thinking of a combination of this:

and this:

Not for me, silly. For a doll. La petite poupeé. FUN.

*edited to add: after feeling swatches, the answer is obviously four-way. It’s much thinner and drapier, better for small-scale work, and besides, it’s called “four-way.”

The bitch is BACK.

Maybe it was the successful Christmas pudding (more on that later).

Maybe it was the continued outpouring (inpouring?) of lurv and support from my grrls and my dollfriends and my Scrogues and everyone.

Maybe I’m just sick of my morbid, joy-sucking self.

Or maybe… it was this:

Green coats for TG

Unfortunately, most of the green coats I like are of the “good god how much do you really think a coat should cost” variety. IF someone lived on this continent, I could MAKE her a couture green coat…

Speaking of boots…

… I just got these for Nora, ostensibly because she could use some extra ankle support. Boots = support, right? Right?

And by the way, for those who are interested, in the last week her vocabulary has exploded, she’s started mimicking again, and she’s been suddenly leaning across the car, pointing at things and shouting “purple!” or “pane!” (for airplane). She’s retained that oddly precise enunciation, too – I was wondering if it would degrade slightly as her word bank increased, but no. “Pink” has all four phonemes; the consonant blend in “flower” is crystal clear. Weird.

Her toddling now looks like toddling rather than a zombie staggering across the room; she still hasn’t let go of my finger, but she took off around the neighborhood last night on her scooter, so fast I was taken by surprise and had to sprint after her. We met some of our new cul-de-sac neighbors in the process – a uniformly lovely group.

Good week.

Costume links: garment exhibits and collections

It occurs to me that I have all these bookmarks, and that knowledge is a wonderful thing to share.

Primary sources: these would be photographs of extant garments, including accessories and sometimes textiles, in exhibits and personal collections. Technically I suppose they’re secondary, but not everyone can get to the V&A or the Met on a whim. Links are current when posted: online exhibitions are frequently taken down without warning, so caveat browser, I suppose.

Bissonnette on Costume

Anne Bissonnette, curator of the fashion and textile collections at Kent State Museum and a very nice person, showcases a diverse assortment organized by period and type of garment. Her commentary is clear and detailed; I’ve linked to her own page, but be sure to check out the museum home page.

National Museum of American History

Garments from 1770 to 1992, mediocre photography but great construction details in the descriptions. This is a direct link to the women’s dress collection; go here for a searchable database of the majority of the museum’s collection and a look at the current exhibitions.

Karen Augusta Antique Lace and Fashion

C. A. Whitaker Auctions (Karen Augusta’s partner; look here for auction catalogs and additional photos)

One of the important names in antique clothing and textile collecting. After lusting over the items for sale, go to the Museum Archive and tear your hair out in jealousy and impotent desire. (I wouldn’t sell my grandmother for the 1884 wedding gown, but I’d very likely sell yours…) Multiple photos from every angle, inside and out, highly informed commentary. Then go to her Links page, and get me to bed a little earlier tonight. These are all the best commercial, museum, and educational resources, including the V&A, the Met, FIT, and the Bath Museum of Costume.

Tomorrow, I’ll post some links to my favorite online art galleries and ephemera collections.

A bit more on Tissot

He covers my all-time favorite costume period – well, my latest all-time favorite; commonly called “Natural Form,” it was a hiatus between First Bustle and Second Bustle (the truly hideous one) from about 1876-1882. I love the way you can see the same dress trimmed in different ways and the same models in different settings; plus, his brushwork is light-handed but strong, and he loved his Kathleen very, very much… after she died, he painted only religious subjects.

He’s often dismissed as a “society painter,” whatever that means to assorted critics, but I don’t care. I want to see the details of fabric, the difference in sheen and drape among watered silk and twill and taffeta, the effect of a new set of ribbons on a plain muslin dress, the posture and poses adapted to the exigencies of costume. Yes, it’s pretty. Yes, I just love dress and fashion history. But more than anything, I love an accurate depiction of clothing because it is the record of hundreds, sometimes thousands of hours of handiwork by utterly forgotten women. I can look at an issue of La Mode Illustreé from 1879, and then find contemporary portraiture from, say, the East Coast of the United States, London, and Germany. Not only can I compare the interpretations of the mode according to wealth and status, I can find regional touches as well: the floral embroidery on an Austrian chemise that hearkens back to the Tyrol, the English devotion to understatement as an expression of elite solidarity, the joyous extravagance of the first American millionaires becoming more subdued as their descendants become more cosmopolitan. Every nuance, every frill and tuck, every trend – touched and built by human hands and human imagination. Whether or not Tissot considered these aspects, he certainly appreciated the intended effect, and recorded it with love and skill.

People make clothes, and sometimes clothes can make people, and sometimes people re-make themselves to suit the clothes and the life they long for. Fashion is masking and social standing and personal fable and art and craft and industry and avocation and technology and instinct.

And millinery? A stretch of the human imagination toward the divine laughter of angels… okay, I just love hats. My God, how I love hats.

Relationship issues

Of the hair stylist variety.

I desperately need a haircut. And color. It’s two weeks overdue and making me twitchy. But the same woman has been doing my hair for almost eight years and I think we’re having relationship issues. I can’t seem to communicate my interpretation of “subtle highlights;” therefore, I wind up every five weeks with stripey-head. Then the dark stripes go too red as they fade and the light stripes get even lighter and the dark ash blonde roots appear and my head is just one hot mess.

I can’t bear to leave her; we’ve been together so long, but these hillbilly highlights are killing my spirit. I’m almost forty. I need soft, complementary tones. I need a little tenderness, damn it. Is that too much to ask?

It’s mediation or divorce.