Unisex - The Musical!

Readers, a pre-dawn epiphany:

The loathsome message implicit in every unisex sewing pattern is "we are so into each other, we don't give a damn how we look to the rest of the world."  Am I right? 



The Western shirt pattern below, a late Sixties Butterick, sums up the essential flaw in the unisex concept -- a misbegotten assumption about (heterosexual) intimacy and sartorial similitude -- which proved to be the seed of its destruction. 



Your comments yesterday relating to unisex patterns were telling:

 Yuck!

 One-size-fits-no-one.

 Who wants to look that bad?! 

Are the pattern companies listening?

Here is the primary problem with unisex:  Latest research shows that while 68% of women polled are willing to wear menswear (think boyfriend jeans), only 4% of men are willing to wear womenswear -- only half of whom are not consciously trying to crossdress.

As a result, unisex -- almost without exception -- has meant that men get to wear what they'd wear anyway, and women get to look like Eighties-era lesbians: an observation, not a judgment, progressive readers!







In the early days of unisex, during the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, there were exceptions to the soon-to-be-dominant women-in-menswear look  -- cringe-worthy exceptions.







Unisex was undoubtedly the reflection of a more idealistic time, when pattern companies naively thought that by dressing men and women alike, the sexes would be more equal.  I think you'll agree that the effort resulted in little more than a series of fashion don'ts.





While unisex lives on today, primarily in polyfleece hoodies, scrubs, and Gitmo detention camp-inspired pajama bottoms, one word you will never, ever hear is the oxymoronic unisexy.

After extensive research, I could come up with only two remotely titillating unisex patterns, both resembling Seventies-era Benson & Hedges ads.

 
If I had to distill the essence of unisex and turn it into a movie musical, I could do no better than the Burt Bacharach-Hal David 1973 snooze-fest Lost Horizon, produced by Ross Hunter, the man who gave us not only Magnificent Obsession and Madame X, but also Pillow Talk!

Here one finds songs oozing in unisex values, like the rousing "Living Together, Growing Together":

Living together, growing together, just being together
That's how it starts; Three loving hearts 
All pulling together, working together, just building together
That makes you strong
If things go wrong, we'll still get along somehow
Living and growing....together

Watch it (with Portuguese subtitles!) here.

There's also the heartwarming "The World Is a Circle," which is essentially Do Re Mi performed in the Himalayas by caftan-clad children seemingly on loan from Jim Jones' People's Temple cult.

The world is a circle without a beginning,
And nobody knows where it really ends.
Everything depends on where you
Are in the circle that never begins.
Nobody knows where the circle ends.

It's both profound and banal and very, very unisex, if you ask me.  Confession: I have owned the Lost Horizon album for nearly twenty years and can't stop playing it.

Sing along with me and Liv! (click twice to avoid annoying pop-up)



Friends and fellow travelers, our unisex journey has come to an end.  Is there anything I've missed?

If you have any closing statements to add to this veritable "Ode to Unisex," please feel free to add them below.  I will do my best to pass them along to the appropriate pattern company executive.

Tuesday Tidbits

Friends, if this image looks just like one I posted yesterday, it's because I never got started on my skirt alteration project -- I was paralyzed with anxiety after reading your comments, with predictions of time required ranging anywhere from 20 minutes to 3-4 days.  Whom to believe?  No, I think I'll just put this one on the back burner for a while.  Anyway, I won't see Stephanie for a week.  

I didn't so much as touch a sewing machine yesterday.  The whole day is a blur, to be honest; I felt very off-center.

You're probably wondering why I haven't mentioned the Singer 201 that Nicholas (aka Rain) was supposed to give (I mean "loan") me last week.  That's because we had to postpone the pick-up once again, but today I'm supposed to go get it for real.  Where am I going to put one more sewing machine, you ask?  That's a very good question and one I'll hopefully have answered before I bring it into the apartment.

Apropos of nothing, last night I watched a very entertaining screwball comedy I hadn't seen in decades, The Awful Truth, starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne.  Have you seen it?  So funny, witty, and charming in a way that has completely vanished off the face of the earth, or at least off the screen.  If you want to see what sophisticated light comedy used to be, watch this film, or anything with Irene Dunne, for that matter.  Her type is no more.  I hope I don't sound like a crusty old curmudgeon; is there any other kind?

For those of you still reading this stream of consciousness, I feel like I'm in one of those "big shift" periods of my life -- oh, not so big a shift that I'd stop blogging or sewing or blogging about sewing, but for a while now -- months certainly, though most especially since I returned from vacation at the end of August -- I've been feeling like I need to purge a tremendous amount of stuff out of my life.  

If you saw what the inside of my bedroom closet (actually I have two) looked like, you'd probably run away screaming, which is precisely what I want to do every time I open it.  Actually, it's reached a point where I can't even get the door closed, so I scream daily.  Except it's more of an inner scream (don't want to alarm the neighbors, or the dogs), which manifests as lack of energy and a sense of feeling overwhelmed.  

Do you ever want to get rid of things, regardless of what value (to others, or to you, once upon a time) they might have?  I mean, I've found treasures in the trash and sometimes I think I should just put some of my own there and let other people find them.  Of course, the term "treasure" is relative, but I do have many things cluttering my life that I really have no need for, and they take up a lot of psychic space as well.  What to do?   

I used to sell stuff on eBay on a regular basis and I enjoyed it, but the photographing, posting, weighing, packing, shipping is extremely labor-intensive and I no longer have the time, or care to make the time.  Thrift stores (the ones that pick up at your house anyway) are extremely selective here in NYC.  Many no longer want old electronic equipment, for example, and won't touch any piece of pressboard furniture, let alone wigs.

Readers, I think I need to make a plan, something I'm not very good at and resist.  As you know, I generally just take things moment-to-moment, which certainly has its benefits, but also its downsides.  It hurts to watch the planners get ahead and I live with one.

I will leave it at that.  I was reminded of this old blog post I wrote not so long ago.  As you can see, planning and resistance-to-same is a definite leitmotif in my life.  It's always there and never fully resolved; hence, decluttering has its own listing in the MPB Archives (located on the right-hand column of this blog, as always).

We are out of time, alas.  I must address my many organizing tasks and I hope I've inspired some of you to address a few of yours, if you have any.

In closing, do you think creative types are more apt to be surrounded by clutter -- or is that just an excuse?

Any great one- or two-year planners out there?  What's your secret?

Have a great day, everybody!

Mad Men and the early Sixties

Friends, I started watching Mad Men yesterday.  With three episodes of Season 1 under by belt, I am sorry to say that I think I've had enough.

It's a lot easier to criticize others' creative output than to be creative yourself and it's obvious that Mad Men is a collective labor of love.  The achievements of Mad Men stylist Janie Bryant in recreating the look of the period deserve praise.  But the writers' take on Sixties attitudes and relationships is one big politically-incorrect cliché.

This series -- which could be dubbed Cigarettes and Alcohol and the Miserable Sexist WASPs Who Consumed Them -- feels like it was made by people who have no living knowledge of the period, but can't get over the fact that women were once called girls.
  
The theme of the banality of prosperous postwar America and the stultifying conformity that oppressed so many affluent white Americans is a familiar one.  We've been here before -- from Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, to John Updike, to films like The Graduate, Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven and many, many others.  

In Mad Men, all the men are aggressive louts and lotharios, the women submissive, competitive (with each other), or outcasts.  Nobody's happy because, you see, the American Dream is....... a MYTH! (Sound familiar?)

This series is so bogged down in recreating Sixties style -- long-line dress silhouettes, knotty pine kitchen cabinets, vintage IBM Selectric typewriters; endless close-ups of office bars and ashtrays and rotary phones and tailfins -- that the substance takes second place.

And the substance -- society's "winners" and their lives of quiet, nicotine-addicted desperation -- is old news.  

The postwar world of corporate conformity was already ripe for satire while it was happening.  Just watch Billy Wilder's Oscar-winning The Apartment starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley Maclaine, from 1960.  Nobody was more cynical about contemporary American life than Billy Wilder, and this classic film nails the greed, the sexism -- indeed the sickness -- beneath the slick veneer of American success.

The Apartment still feels fresh today.  It's funny, knowing, and terribly moving.  You'll learn much more about life in 1960 than you ever will from the Postwar America 101 version that is Man Men.

Looking for a deftly clever satire on advertising?  Try Lover Come Back, starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson from 1961, another brilliant send-up of the duplicitous, appallingly sexist, cut-throat world of the early Sixties three-martini-lunch business world.

Both Lover Come Back and The Apartment address the competitive "jock" culture that was very much in evidence in (and in many ways defines) the corporation.  But unlike Mad Men, these films handle these themes with a lightness and charm utterly lacking in the contemporary series, not to mention sharp writing, masterful acting (neither Jack Lemmon nor Doris Day has ever been better) and genuine affection (and sympathy) for their characters.

Watch these films and then go back to Mad Men and you'll know what I mean instantly.  The slurred diction and amateurish acting alone make it painful to watch.  And the unrelenting ugliness of the human relationships represented is depressing.

In other news, friends, I also watched Coco Before Chanel and I loved it.  Audrey Tautou gives a beautiful performance as the young, soon-to-be-famous couturier, and the period styling is perfect without the film ever being about the period styling.

Why are French films able to present human relationships with subtlety and non-judgment and create characters of such dimensionality -- even when they're biographical films and have to stick to the facts -- and why can't Hollywood do this anymore (if it every could)?

In closing, friends, I'm taking off my film critic hat for the day now; I'm much more comfortable with the sewing machine. And there will be sewing today. There must be!

Happy Wednesday, everybody!

Anyone seen The Apartment or Lover Come Back?

"The September Issue" + fashion movie faves!

Between last week's tulle-athon and this week's stock market crisis, I've been needing to chill, and there's nothing that relaxes me more than popping a video in my DVD-drive and watching a good fashion flick.

I've always had a thing for movies centered on the fashion world.  Of course Funny Face is a favorite, starring an impossibly chic Audrey Hepburn, Fred Astaire, and featuring gorgeous French scenery, fabulous Givenchy gowns, Gershwin songs, plus appearances by legendary Fifties models Suzy Parker and Dovima!

The opening number, "Think Pink," is a knock-out -- wonderful, campy fun!

Less entertaining, but still essential viewing, is the 1944 film adaptation of the musical Lady in the Dark, which I wrote about a long time ago here.  Ginger Rogers isn't really right for the role of a repressed fashion magazine editor undergoing psychoanalysis, but the forties clothes and lush technicolor are superb.

Another fashion movie fave is Maghogany starring Diana Ross, from the early 70's.  It's a mess of a film, but full of fabulous Seventies fashion and campy, over-the-top performances.   It's best known, perhaps, for the song "Do You Know Where You're Going To?" (see video below)

Anyway, just look what I picked up at the library yesterday!



I'd been wanting to see The September Issue, the 2009 documentary about Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour, for some time.  I don't know too much about Coco Before Chanel starring Audrey Tatou. but the reviews on Amazon are largely positive ones.  Have you seen it?

I also found the first three seasons of Mad Men -- I've never seen a single episode!  I know that's not about fashion per se, but it certainly has had an effect on the contemporary fashion world (and inspires many a vintage sewing blog).

Last night I watched The September Issue and I found it fascinating.  One hears so much about how awful Anna Wintour is (especially in The Devil Wears Prada -- a rotten film) but I actually found her likable here, though clearly not as warm as Vogue Creative Director Grace Coddington.  Wintour is obviously driven to put out the best magazine possible and is under a great deal of pressure to perform -- which she does, month after month.  There were many moments when I sensed that beneath Wintour's chilly facade there's a complicated, sympathetic human being with a lot of -- excuse the pun -- issues.

The September Issue is glamorous (as you might expect), compelling, and fair.  Fashion is a tough business and you don't rise to the top of it by being a soft touch -- which definitely comes across in the film. 

In closing, friends, what are some of your favorite fashion movies?

Anything that changed your view of fashion -- or even your personal style?

Anyone out there seen Who Are You, Polly Magoo?

Have a great day, everybody!

Cathy Sings! (Jerry Herman, no less)

Such exciting news, friends.  Cathy -- fashion model and my beloved identical cousin -- is adding professional singer to her list of accomplishments!

It's all very hush-hush right now, but songbird Cathy is deep in rehearsals for a musical show which she'll be performing before a live audience this coming fall!  Cathy plays a character considerably older than she actually is (with much bigger hair), but my cousin can find the truth in any role and I think you'll agree she pulls it off.

Cathy looks sporty in houndstooth double knit blazer, silk scarf, and jazz pants.

I managed to sneak into rehearsals today and take this behind-the-scenes movie, which I do hope you'll enjoy.  It's all very informal -- Cathy doesn't even have her lashes on-- but I think it will give you a taste of what's in store.

Could a show tune album be in the offing?  Who knows!

Happy Sunday, everybody!

Whoops!

No blog today, folks, but the incomparable Sarita has agreed to provide some entertainment, complete with tassels.

See you tomorrow!

Making a Ginger Rogers Dress

What can you say about Ginger Rogers that hasn't already been said on a million other sewing/vintage style blogs?  I'll try to come up with something. I've actually written about her a few times, early on, here and here.

Growing up, I adored Ginger Rogers and the more I learned about her the less I liked her.   Aside from her politics -- don't get me started -- she apparently wasn't much fun to work/be/live with.  As recounted by someone I knew years ago who performed with her in Hello Dolly, she was very grand and very cheap, at least by that time in her life. 

But let's not let facts get in the way of fiction.  On screen, especially in the late-Thirties, early-Forties (her heyday), Ginger was wonderful fun.  Working women, especially, identified with her.  You always knew, whatever part she was playing in the film -- and she was usually a shop girl or dancer -- that she'd worked hard to get where she was.  Nothing had been handed to her, and she was tough, which endeared her to struggling Depression-era audiences.



And how lovely she looked.  Obviously she didn't dress herself, but she wore clothes beautifully, having been blessed with a lean and lithe dancer's body.   The films she made with Fred Astaire at RKO are classics and her on-screen contributions are equal to his, especially in the later films.  When they dance, I watch her.

Whatever her personality quirks, Ginger Rogers endured; she started in movies in the Twenties and was still working in the Eighties.  I saw her live at Radio City Music Hall in 1980 in her nostalgic one-woman (and a zillion effeminate chorus boys) show, and I remember being very entertained by it.  She even autographed my program!

Cathy has been begging me to make her a Ginger Rogers-style dress and I'm kind of eager to make one too.  The styles are easy to find: nearly any late-Thirties secretary dress from a pattern company like Hollywood or DuBarry fits the bill, and I recently found one that had a lot of the elements from the dress pictured up top, which Ginger wore in the Pick Yourself Up number in Swing Time, one of the very best of the RKO Astaire-Rogers musicals.

Here's what I recently bought on on Etsy:

Another shot of the Pick Yourself Up dress:

If you inspect Ginger's dress (you can click on it to supersize) you'll notice it has a fitted midriff yoke.  I may or may not try to recreate that.  This Hollywood pattern, currently for sale on Etsy, has a similar yoke, but I will not pay $35 for a vintage dress pattern.

Ginger's skirt is pleated and it seems to wrap across the front, below the midriff yoke (or does it?  If you inspect the top photo you'll see it looks like the layers overlap for additional fullness; in the video below not so much).  What do you think a dress like that was made out of, silk?

Anyway, this is what I'm thinking about sewing next, or soon, though things could change, as they sometimes do.

On an unrelated note, if you haven't contributed your recipe for a happy life on yesterday's post -- or you'd like some good instructions for whipping one up this weekend -- please have a look.  Some wonderful comments -- and a lot of wisdom -- were contributed.

Thoughts about Ginger/the Ginger dress?

Happy Friday, everybody!

Ginger as I saw her:



In her prime:

Peter in Pajamas!

Friends, there are two kinds of men: ones who wear pajamas and ones who don't.  I certainly don't want to reinforce stereotypes, but some men have pajamas written all over them. 

And some don't.

I never thought I liked pajamas until I made my own.  Now I don't want to get out of them.



For those arriving late to the pajama party, I made these short cotton pajamas out of three different soothing shades of seersucker: gray, lavender, and pale brown.





The pants, which I completed yesterday, have two front fly buttons (the pattern called for just one but I feel safer with two), and a waistband casing with a twill tape tie.


 



I've since replaced the twill tape, which felt flimsy, with wider, sturdier elastic, though the twill tape was a nice vintage touch.

Would my pattern,  Simplicity 9956 from 1990, be considered vintage?  I hope not, but maybe so.  Anyway, pajama patterns haven't changed much over the last century and why should they?

 

You're probably wondering if I slept in my pajamas last night.  Friends, I do think that crosses a line.  You'll just have to decide for yourselves.



And so, the pajama game has ended.

I hope you'll open your heart to pajamas if you haven't already.  They're really quite fun to make and even if they're never slept in, they're great for dress-up and let's not forget community theater.

Have a very Doris day, everybody!