That Girl, Those Clothes

(Warning: this post is kind of a GIF-fest)

You know what we need right now?  I would never have guessed it myself, but having stumbled on it, I now know what just might be the greatest panacea for tired nerves one can imagine.

Goodnight, Lady

Ever since the sad news yesterday - that the lovely and gracious Miss Dina Merrill has sailed for Fabulon - I have been looking at and thinking about this picture.

Birthday Girl: The Wisdom of Eve

I suppose it says something about me more than anything else, but my feed over at Facebook just plain lit up with the news that yesterday was the birthday of the heavenly Miss Eve Arden.

"You Get to Live When You are Living"

Orchids and royalty in Mrs. Post's front hall

The end of another week, elhamdulileh, and a busy one it's been, too, with some odd and unexpected ups and downs.

The Joy of Dressing Up

Sad news on Seventh Avenue tonight; an era of American* fashion closes with the flight to Fabulon of the one and only Scaasi.

Of Couture and Corn

The holiday weekend rolls on, with yesterday's highlight an outing to the Museum of Fine Arts, ostensibly to see their current exhibition of Goyas.  I found an unexpected treat, however, that very nearly outshone even the master's portrait of the Duchess of Alba (not, of course, the recently deceased edition thereof - she was old, but not that old...).

Grace Under Pressure

As the years passed, she increasingly looked as if not every aspect of the bargain she'd made had worked out quite as expected...

Glamour: a Reminder

Hollywood, California, 59 years ago today:  Miss Edith Head revels in her own personal fabulousness - and (as was its wont) Life was there.

Sparkle, Plenty

If Adrian and Erté had gone for marriage equality avant la lettre and had a son, with Liberace sitting in as godmother...

Thelma

I woke up this morning thinking of Pat Nixon.  I have no idea why.

Why Don't You...

...don you now your gay apparel?

He is Planet

I'm not quite sure what this is, but I believe it may be a nearly perfect specimen of whatever kind of thing it actually turns out to be.  And it has its own Know Your Meme page, for what that's worth.

And for what that's worth, this is pretty much the look of the moment in many of your more regrettable nitespots in this benighted part of the the world...

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: Kittypalooza

"Style is everything."

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

Kitty Carlisle had a sensational figure.  And she was one, too - a peerless self-invention (aided, it's true, by a fairly poisonous mother, the high-society equivalent of Momma Rose).  She had a middling career as an operetta leading lady (at precisely the moment that the genre more or less died) and was something of a fizzle as a film star (too distinctive in her looks to be an ingenue, too young, in her early '30s go at the screen, to suit her temperament) before she made a highly advantageous (and apparently, however, unorthdox, quite entirely devoted) marriage, one that allowed her devote the subsequent six decades to the fine art of being Kitty Carlisle, Mrs. Moss Hart.

Watching her breeze on to the To Tell the Truth set - as here, again and again - it's striking how contemporary she still looks.  There's a lesson there: if you hone a style until it is indistinguishable from your own genuine persona, you can maintain it almost indefinitely.  Having perfected the art of looking perfect, she could then turn her attention to all the other things, from promoting the arts to maintaining her husband's legacy, that interested her.

Some people - and characters as diverse as Crawford and Madonna come to mind - use their style as a weapon, a kind of barricade to really knowing anything about them; Kitty's was a natural extension of her character.  Paradoxically, this both made her a character - the ultimate Great Lady, New York-division, which one would normally think would be a limiting thing, and gave her enormous freedom to exercise what was never, really, more than a limited talent (considered impartially on its own) on a far wider stage than would otherwise have been at her disposal.

By the end, she was an institution, through sheer force of personality, a phenomenon of charm and joy that seemed to draw strength from its contrast to the increasingly crass world outside its orbit.  Kitty Carlisle is on the very, very short list of people about whom I have never heard anyone whisper an unkind word. Insofar as she is camp, it's of a very knowing kind, in which she is wholly complicit - the joy of an ugly duckling having turned into the most exquisite, and appreciated, of swans.

Why Don't You...

...go all out with accessories this spring?  What could dress up that drab old outfit more than a few smart touches?  Feeling daring?  Try them all at once for a look that's uniquely you!

(Mrs.) Nixon in China

Forty-one years ago today, Pat Nixon looked at ducks, plucked and otherwise.  At times - and really China was not by a long shot the most surreal passage of her life - she must have wondered how and why things turned out exactly as they had.

I was struck by this picture not just because, well, it's Pat Nixon looking at some very wizened ducks, but because, despite her rather dire coiffure (side curls, Pat?  Really?), that is just about the most chic dress I've ever seen her in.  I wonder what Madame Mao made of it...

When Worlds Collide

Yesterday's birthday girl, Miss Marlene Dietrich, gives what is apparently the bemused glance of death to a really rather touchingly terrified young Miss Barbra Streisand, who has clearly only this very moment realized that being Kicky at a Chanel runway show might be classified by some - Miss Dietrich among them - as Trying Too Hard.

The Revolutionary Costume for Today

This may not look like much of a scandalous photo, but it is.  Ignore the sloppy ankle socks and the egregious shoes: this is a picture of high - and dangerous - fashion.

The lady on the left was known by many names.  She was born Li Shumeng, in girlhood called herself Li Yunhe, became a well-known actress in Shanghai as Lan Ping ("Blue Apple," which seems a rather Dada touch), and finally emerged on the world stage under two names:  Jiang Qing, Madame Mao Tse-Tung.

She spent the first several decades of her time as the wife of China's leader in near obscurity, but that ended in the mid-sixties, when she took direction, to the extent it had any, of the wave of anarchy that engulfed the country and became known as the Cultural Revolution.  For Jiang Qing, it started with culture in a very specific way, as she took control of the country's performing arts, replacing China's wild diversity of traditional and modern plays, operas, dance works, and films with a small number of enormously formulaic "model revolutionary operas," kitschy epics that mashed together Soviet ballet, Chinese traditional styles, silent-film emoting, and heaping doses of leaden rhetoric (we saw a snippet of one last August, you may recall).

In 1967, Jiang Qing first turned her attention to fashion, in this case fashion-as-weapon, using a faux pas by her rival (a woman called Wang Guangmei, wife of Mao's second-in-command) to destroy her and to establish herself as China's de facto tastemaker.  On a 1963 state visit to Indonesia, Wang Guangmei had the poor judgment to put aside the drab military fatigues that dominated Chinese public life in those days, appearing instead in a silk dress of old-fashioned cut and a string of pearls.  For her fashion daring she paid dearly.  As the tide of the Cultural Revolution crested, Jiang Qing made an example of her in front of a million-person demonstration, dragging her out in a grotesque parody of her supposed finery (including ropes of ping-pong balls from which dangled insulting placards) and decrying her bourgeois decadence.  Wang spent more than a decade in prison - a high price for a night out on the town.

As the years passed, Madame Mao remained, to an extent, preoccupied with style.  What to wear in revolutionary Beijing was a vexing question, and after so many years of essentially unisex green pantsuits, it may be that she had become bored.  In 1972, she met with a Western journalist wearing a tailored shirtwaist dress of a design that recalled the 1950s, when for a few years a Soviet-inspired frock called a bulaji had been considered acceptable (it's basically what Jiang Qing's companion on the right is wearing).

Within two years, as the onetime Shanghai leading lady plotted to follow her husband as top leader of the Chinese revolution, she spared time to consider what the women of her country might wear as a distaff version of the ubiquitous Mao suit, a kind of National Costume with Revolutionary Conscience.  Her interest appears to have arisen in part about concern about her own image as a 1974 state visit by the glamorous Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos approached.  What in due course appeared is, more or less, the outfit in which we see her above, which has become known to history as the Jiang Qing Dress.  It takes the basic form of the bulaji, but adds elements of traditional Chinese fashion, especially the V-neckline with its inner band in constrasting white and the longer, fuller skirt, which in some examples is finely pleated.  One can only imagine what Chinese women, after twenty years of trousers and jackets, made of the spreading skirts and narrow bodices of this new, semi-mandatory fad. 

Whatever their thoughts, however, the reign of the Jiang Qing Dress was brief, for within two years, Mao was dead and his widow jailed, one of the Gang of Four accused of trying to sabotage his legacy and subvert his legitimate successors.  On the few occasions when Jiang Qing was seen in public between her downfall and her death fifteen years later, she eschewed her eponymous costume for a sober trouser suit.  Perhaps, having been burned by fashion just as once she had torched her rival, she decided it was safer to go smart casual.  Just as well, for however chic Lan Ping may have been in '30s films, you have to admit that in a baggy aqua shirtwaist, she's no prize.

Today, with China a major player in the world and a comparatively open country (even if it did block the New York Times for its domestic readers today), it's amazing to think how little we knew about the place just a few decades ago, what a paucity of information leaked out to the West.  For a long time, the Jiang Qing dress was more or less a myth, dismissed as just another of the wild calumnies directed against Madame Mao by her enemies, who called her "the White-Boned Demon" and accused her of trying to become a new empress, on the model of several who took power over the centuries in pre-revolutionary China.  The posters and cartoons that accompanied her fall often showed her in some version of the Dress, as if it stood for all her evil just as Wang Guangmei's pearls had represented her revolutionary backsliding.  What goes around, comes around, in politics and fashion alike.

An Australian scholar called Antonia Finnane has written a fascinating essay on the Dress and its social and political implications.  As for me, my favorite take on Madame Mao comes in the form of opera, the very format that she sought to mold her in her image just as she did her countrywomen.  John Adams's brilliant Nixon in China features Jianq Qing as a terrifying harridan who intimidates poor Pat Nixon and finally takes center stage to declare, in thrilling coloratura, "I am the wife of Mao Tse-Tung/ ...When I appear the people hang... upon my words."  Sadly, at least in the pictures from productions that I've seen, the Dress doesn't appear.

Birthday Girl: Hat Sister

Let's wish a very happy 114th to an American pioneer, once the most famous milliner in the world: Miss Lilly Daché.  We see her here in one of her trademark creations, a broadbrimmed combination of latticework and flowers that must have cast extremely flattering shadows in the right light.

Daché's name may not be quite as recognizable today as those of other fashion giants of her era (which spanned the '30s to the '60s), but it still has a certain cachet (and not just because it rhymes).  She lives on, if nothing else, in the mocking second verse of the lovely song "Tangerine": "Tangerine / She is all they say / With mascara'd eye and chapeaux by Daché!"

Myself, I remember her because of Grandmother Muscato's hats, the very best of which were Dachés picked up during her trips to the big cities (Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and the occasional whirl of New York).  She wore them long after their creator retired in the late '60s (to the highly un-fashion-sounding Delray Beach, Florida, of all places), and I even had a few, for a while, after Grandmother left us for the Celestial Fitting Room in the Sky (lost, alas, along with so many other minor treasures, in the Great Fire of 1988).  I particularly recall an extremely beautifully draped tocque in oyster satin, a little miracle of grave elegance, as well as a more festive number in mauve velvet, with a swoop of silk lilacs that tumbled dramatically down one side, offset by a wave of velvet-dotted netting in the same shade.

In addition to her hattery, Miss Daché was a pioneer of brand diversity, adding to her line not only some rather predictable accessories such as gloves and stockings, but also neckties and other sundries, eventually even selling her name for use in a line of men's shirts.  You can find samples of all, should you be so inclined, out there in the great Internet bazaar.  Just remember - if you see that lilac velvet number, I want it back!

Green Goddesses

When Edie (left) first met Stella and Elaine, on her first day in the typing pool at Snell Snell & Snell, she had no idea that within six months she'd be launched into an exciting second career in show business.

While it lasted, the Key Notes were cherished by a small and very specific audience:  people neither ready for the raw, youthful energy of the Faith Tones nor for the towering glamor of the Tri-Tones.

Sadly, it all went south when Stella got a tempting offer to go on the road as a Florence Henderson impersonator and had the nerve to drag Elaine along with her as Ann B. Davis.  For years, Edie was bitter, not least because she had had a bit of a name back in the pool for her spot-on Robert Reed.

Mutual Admiration Society

Okay, I admit it:  I'm vain.  Not overwhelmingly, and not all that much, any more, about my personal appearance.  There's only so much to be done, really, as one's sixth decade approaches, without making it the sole focus of your life - I'm tidy and I don't frighten people.  Who needs more?

No, what I'm vain about at the moment (aside from a couple of never-fail recipes, possibly), is this very blog.  I like it when people enjoy it, and I spend perhaps a shade too much time tracking its traffic.  If I had the energy and was more clued in, I would probably try to find ways to really pimp it out.  I'm perfectly aware that there's only so many people interested in a (to be kind, even to myself) untidily eclectic combination of terriers, mutterings about life in Arabia, olde-tyme stars 'n' royalties, and the like, but still.

So I sat up and took notice (at least metaphorically - we have been very lazy hereabouts of late) when I started noticing, recently, a string of visitors from somewhere new.  Quite a number of folks make their way to the Café from wonderful places like The Redundant Variety Hour, Peenee-world, the exotic fever dream that is Norma's Mitten Drinnen, and the Towers of Dolores DeLargo; there's still a surprisingly stream from TJB's sadly neglected Stirred Straight Up; despite pleading endlessly with MJ, I can't keep out the riffraff from Infomaniac; and I practically seem to be Google's go-to site for searchers after Adrian Maulana, Celia Hammond (despite her having graced us only once), and, inevitably (and unsettlingly almost always in all caps) MARISA BERENSON NUDE.  But this was something I'd not seen before.

So, I went with interest over to Male Pattern Boldness, and darlings, I was enchanted.  The site is a cornucopia of devotion to every conceivable aspect of the very kind of glamour I find most delightful, and its creator, Petter Lappin, is an acute, funny, and very charming host.  He is simultaneously deeply erudite and boundlessly enthusiastic about things like how best to accessorize '40s beachwear, or how to carry off tricky period accessories like snoods and stoles.  He recounts his adventures in creating from vintage patterns a staggering array of period costumes, and he brings into it all his own joy in what is clearly a deeply rewarding hobby as a seamster and style maven.  I'm deeply flattered that he's added l'il old me to his blogroll, and I'm pleased to see all new Gentle Readers coming this way.

So check it out.  Go.  Enjoy.

But do come back - and if you like what you find, tell your friends!