One Shot: Cape, 1890s

    I found this cape, and decided that I had to share it for two reasons, one because prior to the 20th century, capes were a far more often chosen outerwear style than after 1900. There are two reasons for this, really.  The first is that women were finally doing more active things, and as dramatic as a cape may be it does not really help active pursuits.  The second reason is that even during the day women's clothing was often enormously complex in terms of its decoration.  So stuffing arms laden with abundant trimmings into coat sleeves was both time consuming, and potentially damaging.

    The other reason for sharing this particular piece is the manner of its decoration.  I have written before that certain decoration techniques appeared across the globe, without intervening communication, because the idea was a simple one, and because we are endlessly inventive.  This is one of those techniques. It is called couching.  The idea is an extremely simple one.  By passing thread over the surface of an object, (or in this case a narrow cord), the object can be affixed to the textile surface permanently.

    This cape has been decorated over its entire surface with a dense and elaborate paisley pattern all done in thin gold wound cord that is couched with gold thread.  This method of work allows all of the material in use to stay on the surface, so precious metal work like this is nearly always done using couching.  The only spots on this garment done in a different technique are the pair medallions on the front near the collar.  The motifs there are done in padded satin stitch with metallic thread, and the round, couched frame was originally set with turquoise cabochons, (of which a few remain).

    One of the other reasons this technique was popular, and is still so often used in embellished clothing is that large areas can be covered in less time, because the stitches required to hold the desired stuffs down can be more broadly spaced than if it was being done as thread work that passed under the fabric.

  

Cultures across the globe have used this technique for as long as we have been doing surface embellishment.  It is used throughout the Middle East for their elaborate robes. It adorns the imperial robes of China. It forms the basis for bead work done by Native American tribal nations. Some simple ideas never leave us.  I suspect that, as robotics expands and becomes more sophisticated, couching will emerge into the ready to wear market as an easy method of enlivening clothing.  That could be fun to watch.

Scatter #86

    Here we go, Kiddies, another edition of our favorite weekly treat. Scattertime!

   

    It was, I suppose an inevitable event that the sheer thing, and the embroidery thing were going to move over to the menswear camp.  This image when I first saw it caused an audible to escape my lips.  Partly, I admit from how stunning this fellow is, but also because this garment is amazing.  It is transformative in aspect. It both embellishes this man, and creates him anew as something not quite human.  The work itself is admirable, elegantly conceived and interestingly placed.  I approve.  I want to live in a world where men get to dress like this for reals.

    I suppose this unique object would be perfect for travel, since it would pack away so neatly.  It's a book bracelet, made in England around 1840.  It is made of gold, with green, translucent enamel. The spine has a hound, the cover, and leaves have floral sprays, each accented with diamonds. It is a charming object, and one that evokes both it's time, and it's place of origin.  It is interesting to me how an item of apparel can call to mind such things.  It is another expression of the power we have invested our clothing with.

    Empress Elizabeth of Austria wore this lovely confection of a dress in the 1890s. She was wife to Fanz Joseph I, and she was much famed for her beauty, her abundant dark hair, and her minute waist, which stayed with her to the end of her days.  This dress was made for resort wear, so it's a trifle more playful than would normally be allowable.  And the black tie references a sailor suit just enough without pulling out all the sailing tropes.  This dress is also a monumentally complex one, full of lace insertions, ribbon work, embroidery, applique, and ruffles.  Her lady's maid must have hated this frock.

    Looking at the interesting cut, and bold striping of this shirt you might be deceived about who designed and made it.  This was created by the Levi Strauss company in the 1950s.  It is a cotton and rayon plain weave shirt with square snap buttons mounted diagonally so that they mirror the angle of the pocket and yolk striping.  This shirt, though it's over 60 years old now, has considerable edge to it.  Take a look at the depth of the sleeve cuffs, with their pronounced points.  It's a great looking garment.   It's also an interesting look at just how much more detail and care went into ready to wear back in the day. a good deal of attention was given to the placement of the stripes and the proportions of everything involved in the design.  You have to get to the pret a porter level now before you see this sort of thing.

    We don't get to see a real deal evening coat much anymore.  Our culture has become too informal for them, I suspect.  But this delectable piece of coat porn is from the design team of Ralph&Russo.  Made in a glorious gold brocade, with beadwork in high relief to give it more texture, it's a classic swing coat given new life and considerable presence.  Anyone wearing this work be envied, and sought after.  Hell, I'd wear it.  It does make me think, with a certain wistfulness about how little effort we really give to going out in the evening anymore.  Sigh.

    Street fashion.  It used to be the case that it was entirely anonymous, and unremarked upon.  Then, in the middle of the 20th century the growth of the youth culture spurred an interest in what the young were wearing, because they had an amazing amount of money to play with. Manufacturers, and designers suddenly started creating clothing for that market exclusively.  But what began as a reaction to the newly affluent young, quickly became a going concern that now drives the greater part of the apparel industry.  Coupling that with the increased flexibility of apparel choices in the workplace, and the greater sense of the casual means that the street, in all it's forms, is now the strongest influence in the Attire language.

    Now, here's an Attire word that has entirely vanished from the lexicon of spoken apparel words.  The play suit for women.  Essentially a bodice with attached shorts, the playsuit was meant for outdoor activity, and sport that did not require special clothing, like swimming, or skiing.  This one, called "Drumbeat" was designed in 1947 by Louella Ballerino. Its made of a plain weave cotton print with a strong African tribal influence.  The playsuit comes with a wrap skirt that can allow it to go from the beach, to cocktails, or a casual dinner.

    Meanwhile, back at street style,... I suppose that one of the reasons for the use of so many knits and softer materials in street style like this is the speed with which we move through our days now. Our lives are crammed to bursting with commitments of time and place, so being maximally comfortable seems a logical result of that situation.  The seeming knee jerk response is the black uniform of jeans and hoodie, here given some dash with a brightly printed vest. The all black thing, of which I've written before is a real time way to deal with looking put together without having to give it  much time and thought, since we are all so over-extended already.

    Next up, a detail image of an effort from Manish Arora.  I'm posting this because the embellishment work is really breathtaking, and expertly done in every respect.  I love the scale, the dimension, and the positioning of this work. It recalls to my mind some of the more elaborate parade armor that was produced between 1500 and 1800.  What I also see here is subtle reference to the chakra points of the body, so there is, for me, anyway, a connection to matters of spirit and feeling, as well as the protective nature of armor.

    This is a Grebo mask. It comes from the Ivory Coast of Liberia.  The Grebo people are a sub-group pf the greater Kru people of Western Africa.  This mask intrigues me because, unlike so many tribal masks that attempt to create a semi-divine or animal appearance for the wearer, this one is nearly realistic in its portrayal of a male, down to the braided beard and the ritual facial welts.  I've been unable, so far, to find out what the metal bands mean, whether they are a kind of armor, or if they have other significance.  But I'm going to keep digging and if I find out more, I will share it!  regardless, I find this beautiful, and compelling.

    Z. Zegna, Fall/Winter Menswear 2014.  I was much taken by this idea.  I like how the yellow wool melton coat gets a second life with the addition of the waist length, hooded windbreaker.  It is an interesting take on wet weather gear and I like the interaction of the two differing textiles.  This is an idea that could move forward into more common usage, since it could be made up at any price point level.  Or, more simply, this idea could be configured by anyone from existing garments in their wardrobe, with a bit of consideration to proportion and finish.

    To finish up today, this sublimely simple gown of cotton muslin from 1800.  To our eyes this looks innocent, ladylike and quite demure, but when dresses of this nature appeared they were a shock to the society.  Unadorned, made of plain stuff, these gowns were in direct contrast to the overblown, wildly decorative costumes that had been the fashion.  They were also a phenomenally comfortable, easy way of dressing that was one of the first glimpses women were to get of the freedom they would eventually be allowed.  Sure, such simplicity as this did not last long. We can't resist elaborating on an idea once we get one.  So these light, airy gowns, within a decade were weighted down with detail. But for a short while, this effortless looking clothing reigned, and women could move a bit more easily.

That's all for this week, folks!  I hope you had fun.  Enjoy your weekend.

Artful Design: The Gift Of Zandra Rhodes

    It is true that each person who chooses to craft clothing brings a sensibility to the process, like any artist or craftsperson does to their chosen medium.  It is rare, however that a designer of clothing produces so much work that arcs away from the normative in such a graceful way, without ever forgetting that inside the garments, there will be a real person, who must be able to move, and live.
    Zandra Rhodes, who will be 76 this year still creates with the same delicious balance of art, edge, and comprehension of form, and function.

    Rhodes began her career designing and creating printed textiles, but they were though far too outrageous for use by the established British fashion industry, so she started creating her own clothing out of the materials she had printed, opening her first shop in 1967, quickly coming into the notice of Diana Vreeland, who featured her work in American Vogue.  From there she was on her way.

   She has a passion for pattern, and for blending patterns gleaned from differing cultures into a new conception.  Her work is usually soft in feel, though often bold in color.  She has never shied away from the edge, in fact her work often tiptoes precariously near it.  But somehow she never falls over into the realm of cartoon, or absurdity.

    To our eyes, her work doesn't seem quite as out there as it did when she first arrived, but it still has all the brio, and individuality than it ever had.  She continues to work, designing clothing, textiles, and home furnishings.
    What makes her so interesting to me, as regards the Attire language and how it operates is that she has managed to create her own dialect of the tongue that lives as part of, but distinct within that greater structure.  So take a nice long look at this remarkable person's work, and viewpoint.  There is humor, grace, snap, and a gentle push to all her work.

One Shot: Portuguese Court Dress

    Though Portugal was never one of the most powerful nations in Europe, they certainly did try to keep up with court etiquette as it was practiced elsewhere, and the fashions that predominated in those more influential courts.  As a case in point, this magnificent court gown from 1845.  It conforms to both the current mode for formal evening dress in shape, and has the requisite train that indicates the status of the wearer, by its length.

    It is a garment both lavish and sober at the same time.  Though it is heavily embellished in gold, the pattern of the embroideries refers more to the baroque or the rococo than to the 19th century.  Also the choice of base material, this stiff, plain weave, gunmetal gray silk, is far more restrained that would have been seen at the French, English, or Italian courts.

    Let me start with the shape of the dress itself.  Looking at the dress, devoid of it's train, it could be a perfectly acceptable, though powerfully luxurious evening or ball gown.  Everything about it is right out of the style book for 1845.  The deep Bertha collar, the sharply pointed waist, and the half sleeves were all standard issue parts of women's clothing at the time. The skirt has reached the maximum fullness possible with only petticoats to prop it out.  It will be another years before the cage crinoline will allow skirts to widen ever further.

    Court trains were most often attached at the waist, less so at the shoulder.  This train conforms to all the rules and regulations governing its shape, and wear.  At this point in time, court trains were essentially rectangles that were pleated into form at the waist, or shoulder.  It would be separate from the main body of the dress, allowing the wearer to use the gown at less important functions. And this one, at 54 inches of full width and 120 inches of length is meant for a noble lady of the highest rank.

    The amount and quality of the gold work decoration on the surface of the dress and train was not regulated at the Portuguese court, so this display is entirely about wealth, and the status that conferred.  We are fortunate that the conservators at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where this resides, thought to take numerous detail images of the embroidery work as that we can see its complexity, and its excellence up close.  Every last stitch of this work is done with gold plated strip, gold wound thread, and gold plated purl, (tightly wound coils that are cut into short section and sewn down).

   

    The greater part of the work is also padded to give it more dimension away from the textile surface.  Typically narrow bits of cotton, wool or silk wadding would first be secured and then the gold work would be done over it.  A conservative estimate of the time required to create this is in the thousands of person hours, and undoubtedly many sets of hands did the work, otherwise it would have quite literally required years to complete.
    The world where such things have a functional reality, even for the wealthy, is gone.  Those royal courts that remain have moved forward with the times, and such levels of formality and expense are rarely, if ever required.  It is, however, important for us to look back and see these things, even if we dislike what they stand for, as symbols of a way we thought and felt about nation, power, and social precedence.

   

Scatter #85

    Welcome to the first Scatter post for 2016! There has been quite a lot of build up of new material to share, so it was tough coming up with just what I wanted to talk about.  So, here's goes nothing!

    Lets talk about something rather prickly, shall we?  These are not art pieces, they are not for some edgy performance piece, though they surely could be.  This is actually armor meant for a very specific purpose.  This apparel was in use in Siberia in the past for bear hunting.  Though I suspect that, given the size differential between humans and bears, there was still a good deal of injury to the hunters, but all these spikes would surely have been a deterrent, and would have kept those huge claws at bay.

    Issues of utility are sometimes entirely avoided by words in the Attire lexicon.  Take this Comme Des Garcons shirt.  As open as it is on it's front face, it serves no function beyond that of adornment.  It could be argued, however that adornment itself is one of the primary functions of the Attire language, and therefore this item, presents the essential nature of the tongue we wear.  It is an article meant to enhance attractiveness to others, and nothing else.  When we look at the broad scope of the language, a huge percentage of the words that exist are precisely that.

   

This magnificent coat is a true rarity.  Outwear surviving as long as this has is nearly unheard of. In fact there are only a handful of pieces of this sort known to exist.  This is a woman's coat from the earlier 1500s.  It is made of a beautiful polychrome silk brocade and has the uniquely shaped sleeves popular during the beginning of the Tudor period.  Often such sleeves had a slit that began just above the wrist and ran up to near the shoulder, so that the coat sleeve could be left hanging while the arm came through the opening.  It was quite useful, since coats were often worn indoors as well as out, due to the lack of heating.  What makes it so amazing that this survives is the huge expanse of expensive material that could easily, and most often was, remade into something else.

    I really like this, though I personally would look terrible in it.  I love the color combination, the use of two different scales of the same pattern, and the fact that as complex as this garment is, somehow being rendered in a strong pattern doesn't take it over the top. When I really scrutinize this I can see that every design element works within the structure of the pattern, so it is not jarring, which is the typical result of trying to make a garment with a lot of pieces, that is also patterned.

    Pierre Cardin was an acolyte of Cristobal Balenciaga, and it shows out loud in his earlier work.  This evening dress is from 1962.  He obviously learned about editing from Balenciaga.  He also learned how to cut to minimize the number of pieces.  Considering the importance of looking ultramodern at the time, space aged, this combination of editing for shape, use of solid material, and confining the design to the minimum number of possible pieces, creates an end product that looks fiercely modern, even now.  And that luscious green.  Yes.

    It is something I'm delighted to see happening, menswear getting the level of embellishment that is available to women's clothing.  This jacket is dazzling, and has an interesting sleeve structure, with the intentional indents at the base of the deltoid and at the elbow.  What makes this image much more worthy of commentary is the model.  It took me a moment to realize that he is missing one hand, and that they had styled his prosthetic with the same sort of beadwork.  And I say, why the heck not?  It's also as subtle indicator of the change that is occurring regarding differently-abled people and their appearance in fashion editorials and advertising.  It's a small thing, but by these little changes, we all change.

    I'm including this image because it's a simply breathtaking example of the embroiderer's art.  Devised to look like some wildly extravagant necklace, the embroidery skims the surface in such a way that the illusion of it's being separate is unbroken.  Marchesa Pre Fall 2016 collection.  Thanks, Georgina Chapman.

    Another look at how menswear is shifting, altering to encompass softer ideas of maleness than we have allowed before.  The rounded shoulder line of the cape/coat, the volume of the trouser legs, and especially the long tie of the shirt.  It's a simple rendering of a societal shift that continues.  I fully realize that this is still at the outer edges of the culture, but it keeps gaining ground as we discuss in greater depth subjects of gender, sexuality, and social roles.

    Speaking of social roles.  How about this dinner dress from the 1890s?  This dress, as much as it speaks of the wearer's taste, speaks every bit as much about what was expected of women of a certain class.  A dinner gown like this needed to be an extravagant object, full of detail, and fragile decoration that made it evident that the lady had a multitude of servants to maintain it before and after dinner.  This dress, with it's embroidered silk chiffon over-dress would have been nightmarish to tend to once it got rumpled, or heaven forbid, stained.  Extreme care would be needed not to scorch the chiffon when ironing it.  So someone expert at handling the irons of the time would be needed.  We tend not to think of it, but households of middle class and upwards maintained their own laundresses, who were, like lady's maids, expected to understand the subtleties of using an iron that was heated on a stove.

    This handsome fellow was an attendant to Queen Victoria. He may be, though we are not certain, Ghulum Mustafa, who was a trusted member of staff. The image was taken in 1887, and shows him in household uniform, wearing numerous decorations, with the crest of Victoria boldly emblazoned on his chest in gold bullion work.  It was quite common for sovereigns to maintain members of staff who were to one degree or another exotic.  And in the case of Victoria, it was a visible symbol of the breadth of the empire.  Such uniforms as these also helped the process of styles moving from culture to culture, as the sight of them would invite utilizing aspects of them.

    We think of tiaras and the like as being nearly always made of diamonds and other precious stones, but it is not always the case, like with this gorgeous, and unexpected Cartier tiara from 1922.  The rose gold frame is decorated with jet rectangles and arched red coral plaques.  At the upper rim, pairs of coral beads are bound with more jet.  Yes there are diamonds, but they take a back seat in this delicious Art Deco creation to the brilliance of color in the two primary materials.

    And finishing our cat walk of randomness today this outfit designed by Asger Juel Larsen in 2013.  It's a continuation, really of the post I did about menswear and the Avant Garde.  Actually, the only thing truly edgy still about this is the skirt, which appears to have a draw string and a cord stop, so it could be drawn tighter at the hem.  The fabrication, though unusual isn't really Avant Garde.  What makes this not quite successful in my eyes is the choice of model.  It is clear that the intent was to continue the pattern theme of the textile by using a model who is heavily inked.  What this does to my view of the ensemble presented is muddy the image so that I become unsure where garment and person stop and start.  If you wish to create a visual shout, then this is ideal, it is questionable whether the message shouted will be intelligible.

So get out there and enjoy the beginning of 2016.  Make it a year of positive change for yourself and for those around you, that at least, is my own goal.