Yesterday, the Smithsonian Magazine’s blog, Past Imperfect posted a rather long article on Rudolph Valentino and his impact on sex and seduction in the early silent film era – and of course there is a brief mention of Natacha Rambova (the main subject of my own research). The article spends much of its time focused [...]
“What cannot be pushed past the censors with words is often tried with costume. Marilyn Monroe was an expert at this—often to the despair of designers. Miss Monroe refused to wear underclothes. She felt they inhibited the rotary motion of her hips, dulled the color of her skin and, in general, reduced her sex appeal. [...]
This coming June my paper, “Icon: The Shirtwaist Dress in Good Housekeeping and other media,” will be included in the presentations at the upcoming conference: Women in Magazines: Research, Representation, Production and Consumption. I’ve previously discussed this work, as it relates to Donna Reed and idealized Motherhood on Fashion Historia. Kingston University in London will [...]
“David Cox, who had been [Gilbert] Clark’s assistant, stayed on until 1931 and became a fully-fledged designer. He did Joan Crawford’s famous beaded Charleston dress for Our Dancing Daughters and the rest of her films until the arrival of Adrian. Six days before the film had its world premiere in New York on 6 October, [...]
Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I’ve been debating watching L’Amour Fou, the 2010 film on Yves Saint Laurent, for the last few weeks. This last weekend, I finally took the plunge. I have read a good deal on Yves Saint Laurent, but somehow seeing the information in a film made [...]
The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk exhibit at the de Young has been getting a fair amount of media attention since it opened to the public on March 24. Much of the coverage focuses on the technology used for the mannequins, and indeed when I first saw them [...]
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Actress Rosalind Russell said to Mourning Becomes Electra (1947) Costume Designer, Travis Banton “We have got to change these petticoats because they are going to make too much noise on the microphones; the taffeta will rustle.’” (Russell, Rosalind and Chris Chase. Life is a Banquet. New York: Random House, 1977, pg 144) Can you hear [...]
In case you missed the SF Chronicle article (“Pre-Code films tell truth about life in gritty era“), the Roxie theater in San Francisco is running a series of double-features from the early 1930s. In my opinion, this is the best era of film – and the costumes were frequently scandalous (i.e. skimpy and tight). Actresses [...]
Daniel Miller, an Anthropolgoist at the University College London and Sophie Woodward, a Sociologist at the University of Manchester have teamed up to present a new book in the denim history catalog: Blue Jeans: The Art of the Ordinary. Here is a brief excerpt from the introductory chapter, explaining how this book fits within the [...]
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