fashion inspiration – Page 2 – a word is elegy to what it signifies

Another vintage find too cool to keep to myself. This book is subtitled “The Art, Technique and Cost of Being Beautiful” and is from 1938. And is available, for free, from archive.org (here).

“Today clever women build wardrobes as carefully as architects build skyscrapers.” This is more of a style guide than a sewing guide, and some of the advice is (obviously) very period specific, and the value of hard and fast rules about what to wear is questionable, but it is thorough and has tons of things that I hadn’t thought of. How to hide my big feet?! Um, yes please! It also breaks down styles in an interesting way (exotic, gamine, patrician, romantic, coquette, sophisticate) and gives examples. Turns out my style preferences are gamine + sophisticate, which was fun to find articulated in this way. My colors and styling preferences are even outlined, much to my surprise, very accurately in these descriptions! This has info on designers of the era, too. And the ever important, ever difficult trick of balancing all of these style and fashion tricks with the day to day reality of (dum dum DUM) the budget. Lots of pages devoting to budgeting here. It’s kind of like Style Statement with all the hippie frou frou self-helpiness drained out of it replaced with budget sense and practicality. I’m definitely enjoying the read!

So I recently considered bidding on a hard copy version of Elizabeth Blakely’s The Practical System for Drafting Ladies’ and Children’s Clothing from, oh, 1907 or so. It went for a higher price than I was willing to pay because, well, we hoarders gotta practice some kind of selectivity once in awhile if we wanna have money for sewing with cotton bag pamphlets.

Much to my satisfaction, it’s available on archive.org for free. Both volumes! Part 1 is (here) and part 2 is (here). What’s that you say? Yawn. Edwardian/turn of the century fashion just isn’t your thing?

Then clearly you: a) did not grow up in the 90s wanting to be Mina Harker or b) you need a visual refresher romp through Eiko Ishioka’s swoonworthy interpretation of the era to remind you of its glorious kinkified potential. Apparently a huge part of the film budget went to elaborate costume design; the idea was that the clothing should tell a story in itself. Let me just put these right here: