Let's Take a Trip!

Friends, we're traveling today, so pack you bags.  We're climbing into our trusty time machine -- safety belts, please! -- and traveling back exactly sixty years, to 1951.

Our focus is fashion, but we're going to see much, much more.  Our guide is the October 1951 issue of Woman's Home Companion, a popular magazine aimed at the American homemaker.  Like so many women's magazines of this era, Woman's Home Companion combined articles on fashion, decorating, health, politics, as well as (gorgeously illustrated) contemporary fiction.





I love to read books about fashion history, but searching out primary sources is even more fun, and it's not hard. Vintage women's magazines -- and there were so many -- are easy to find, especially at flea markets, usually for just a few dollars.  Unlike vintage patterns or store catalogs, there's very little interest in old general interest magazines like Woman's Home Companion (which folded in the late Fifties).  Yet they are a treasure trove of information about what life was like back then, particularly for (white, middle class, MARRIED) women.

They are also bursting with unintentionally hilarious ads  -- postwar consumerism was taking off -- classic period graphic design (think, cluttered) and sumptuous color photography.

This October issue is also chock full of fashion.  Let's take a look...



Waists were nipped and skirts were often full, but not as big as they were later to get.  Heightened femininity was the look of the day, with an emphasis on perfect grooming and elegance.



I must make Cathy a lounging ensemble like this...







A great article about separates.  Do you know how to mix and match?





Women were expected to know how to sew, and this 1951 Woman's Home Companion has many sewing machine ads and sewing-related articles...









Fifties advertising is exuberant -- there was so much to buy, so many new appliances and products to make life easier!
 







The operative word here is exciting -- Americans had never had it so good and life seemed to be getting better and better. 

Many more photos from this issue of Woman's Home Companion are viewable here.

Readers, do you like to look through old magazines or collect them?  Which are some of your favorites?  Which do you enjoy more -- the articles or the ads?

Vintage fashion magazines are wonderful, but I honestly think these general interest homemaker magazines are much more fun.

Lemon Cheese Cake Pie, anybody?

Have a great day, folks!

Some Of My Favorite Pictures From The Archives.... Part 3..... Hope U Are Having A Great Day (:

Interviewing Shirley MacLaine was fun (:



I loved taking this picture of magician Jim Bentley being tied up for a Harry Houdini escape act  trick by by JoAnn Worley, Romi Dames and Tippi Hedren at The Magic Castle's Magical Birthday Celebration.                                                                 

Harrison Ford is such a cool guy.

 Hanging out and covering  the Magic Castle Birthday Celebration for http://www.lastheplace.com/ rocked. Great camaraderie.  Photo: Bill Dow

The Cole Porter Star Ceremony was great. Photos are being published twice because for some reason  the computer won't let me erase them - Oh well... 

Meeting Jane Fonda was very cool (:

Legendary Actress Ann Rutherford of "Gone With The Wind" with Harrison Held following an on camera interview for The Backlot Film Festival....  Photo by Joe Faulkner (:



Filmmaker Henry Jaglom with actress Vida Ghaffari



Self Portrait: Harrison Held

"Life is a journey, get on the right track"

Paris Hilton and Atlanta's Talkin' With Tammi at Bravo's A-List Awards (:

Bernard Herrmann would have turned 100 today

Because today marks the centennial of influential composer Bernard Herrmann, CBS News recently assembled a lengthy slideshow/audio clip gallery that's a pretty good overview of Herrmann's career. It's fitting that CBS would be the one to give Herrmann such a thorough and reverent centennial tribute because Herrmann had a long association with the network, from the days when radio was a more dominant medium (Herrmann served as conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra and composed score music for countless CBS radio dramas, including Orson Welles' 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast) to the period when CBS conquered TV in addition to radio (Herrmann provided music for several Twilight Zone episodes and composed the anthology show's somber and lesser-known first-season opening title theme).

These days, Herrmann is best known for his brilliant work with Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Ray Harryhausen, which probably would have irked Herrmann because the famously testy maestro hated being labeled a film composer and wrote for more than just the screen (for instance, he composed an opera based on Wuthering Heights). His final film score, is, to me, his most stunning achievement. Herrmann initially had no interest in working on Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, the ultimate vision of '70s New York-as-hell, but then he changed his mind because he liked the part of Paul Schrader's script where Travis Bickle poured peach brandy on his Corn Flakes.

Perhaps because Herrmann knew he wasn't long for this world at the time he wrote it (he finished recording it only a few hours before he died in his sleep on December 24, 1975), the Taxi Driver score sounds like the last few gasps of a dying man, with its thunderous, apocalyptic-sounding percussion, a melancholy theme for alto sax that was performed by an uncredited Ronny Lang and a final cue where the last few notes quote at a funereal pace a previous Herrmann theme, the ominous three-note motif that concludes Psycho.

Be sure to check out the mp3 clips of the Taxi Driver title themes and other Herrmann compositions that CBS News has posted--or enjoy Herrmann's cues from Taxi Driver, The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, Vertigo, Psycho, Jason and the Argonauts and Marnie whenever they're streamed during the "Assorted Fistful" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks.

Favorite Books on Fashion History

Readers, one of my goals this summer is to increase my knowledge of fashion history -- particularly of the last century.

It's not that I know nothing about fashion history, it's just that most of what I've learned I've picked up watching old movies.  If Lana Turner didn't wear it, I might not know about it.  I have a lot of books on period style but these focus more on industrial design and decor (also areas of interest).

At the Mid-Manhattan Library yesterday I picked up some gems I'd like to share with you, along with a few others I own.

Forties Fashion: From Siren Suits to the New Look by Jonathan Walford (Thames & Hudson, 2008) is a stunner.  Like many of you, I adore Forties fashion -- the cuts, the colors, the accessories, everything.  One of the wonderful things about this book is that it includes German, Italian, British, Australian and even Canadian fashion of the period as well as American.  As one might expect from a fashion book, the photographs are beautiful, but the writing is also excellent: clear and compelling.  (Did you know that due to American wartime restrictions, no collar or ruffle on a dress could be more than 5" wide?)

Happily, the text and the photos support each other, which isn't always the case in fashion books (photographs in many books seem to have been chosen by someone who hasn't read the text too closely, or the photograph will end up pages away from the description of it).



Many of the fashions are modeled by mannequins here, but accessories are included.





Fashion Since 1900 (second edition) by Valerie Mendes and Amy de la Haye (Thames & Hudson, 2010) is more of a pocket-sized book but still full of great photos, and it provides a clear overview up to and including the current period (make sure you buy the second edition).  Although the tone is academic, this is a great book to start with, and you can carry it on the subway.







Not to be handled without a forklift, Fashion Today by Colin McDowell (Phaidon, 2000) is an eight-and-half pound treasure, bursting with gorgeous images and fascinating essays on such topics as "Designer as Superstar," "The Lure of Retro," and "Modeling the Image."  McDowell's writing can be a little dense but he speaks with tremendous authority (he is/was the Senior Fashion writer of the London Sunday Times.)

Warning: the print in this book is in a non-serif font (Arial?), making it tiring to read.  The print is also miniscule -- you may need a magnifying glass and/or aspirin.  Art direction takes precedence over legibility here. 







I already owned Lesley Jackson's The Sixties (Phaidon, 1998), which has an excellent chapter of textile design, and the many historical and ethnic influences that inspired designers of the period.





While not a fashion book, fashion trends are discussed in Thomas Hine's classic Populuxe (Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), which covers design and social trends during 1954-1964, the height of postwar American consumerism.  I love this book.





You can view a more pics of these and other fashion and fashion-related books here.  Are you familiar with any of them?

Friends, what are some of your favorite fashion books?  Any you particularly recommend to the student of Twentieth Century fashion history?

Any pet peeves about fashion books you wish to share?  (In his chapter on models and modeling, McDowell describes a famous Helmut Newton photo in great detail but fails to include a photo of it -- thank goodness for the Internet!)   UPDATE:  McDowell specifically apologizes for this in the back notes -- Whoops!)

Jump in!