Friday Video: From Clothing to Character

Isabella reporting,

There are plenty of people reading this blog who believe it's a fashion history blog. It's a natural mistake, of course. Glancing at the list of label topics, I see that we've tagged 366 of our blog posts with the term "historic dress", and 287 with "fashion", which does appear to be fairly compelling evidence.

But the truth is that as much as Loretta and I like clothes and fashion (which we do, we do), we also like clothing for what it says about our characters. How a person (okay, a character) dresses is often the first indication a reader has about that character's wealth and status. But clothes also broadcast many other things, such as occupation, nationality, and age. Does he fuss over the precise folds of his cravat, demonstrating a need for control? Does wearing a corset beneath her dress make her feel confident and secure, or confined? Does he wear loud colors to match his loud voice, or does she dress provocatively to attract men? Even a character who claims not to care at all about clothes is making a major statement about himself. It's inescapable when building a character: clothes really do matter.

All of which is why I enjoyed this recent TEDx Pacific Palisades talk by Hollywood costume designer Kristin Burke. Turns out that dressing actors and actresses for television and film is pretty much the same as dressing our heroes and heroines. It's all part of the same business of story-telling. "The language of clothing is specific, persuasive, and totally silent," Kristin notes. "Most of the time we don't even realize that we are being influenced by it while it's right in front of our face." Exactly!

Kristin has designed costumes for over forty feature films in addition to music videos, commercials, and television series. You can read more on her blog Frocktalk, which she describes as the web's only costume-based movie review site.

Her design work is also currently featured in my greatest guilty-pleasure of the fall, Sleepy Hollow. Sleepy Hollow is a rollicking, scary, and occasionally quite funny time-travel reboot of Washington Irving's story of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman. Once I was able to turn off my history-nerd-switch (There were no witch-burnings in New York in 1780! That's not the reason for the Boston Tea Party! Ichabod Crane isn't supposed to be a handsome Oxford-educated English spy from the American Revolution!!) and accept that the writers were cheerfully going to jumble history and plunder scary woo-woo stuff from all kinds of improbable sources (Paradise Lost, the Old Testament, Iroquois legends), I've gotten totally hooked. Unlike most series where things blow up, this one has imaginative writing and great characters, including a wonderful, strong female protagonist, plus a romance between lovers separated by time.

The muted palette of Kristin's costumes contribute to the unsettled, forbidding tone of the show, and help create an average small town where a lot of inexplicably bad things are happening. Her separated lovers are dressed in black and dark grey, colors of sadness. To top it off are the excellent nightmare-inducing demons -- not to mention that really scary Headless Horseman. Just in time for Halloween!

1954's Car of the Future

Loretta reports:

I’m not much of a car nut, (or am I?  see here, here, and here) but a trip to the Heritage Museums & Gardens in Sandwich, MA, on Cape Cod, brought out my inner motorhead.

Or maybe it has less to do with auto lust than an appreciation of beautiful design.

One part of the exhibition Driving Our Dreams: Imagination in Motion, features postwar car design concepts, the result of American men's exposure to Italian design during and after WWII.  Former GIs were looking for the exciting sorts of vehicles they had seen abroad.

I hope to show several examples in the near future, but here was one of my favorites.  This beautiful 1954 Plymouth Explorer was designed to shed “Chrysler’s stodgy 1940s image.”  According to the explanatory note, the Italian design house “Ghia built cars more creatively and less expensively than the American companies.”  Thanks to Italian flair, Chrysler became the leader in cool auto style.

Blinded by Brilliant Buttons, 1777

Isabella reporting,

It's no secret that I have a weakness for caricatures that poke fun at fashion – and 18th c. fashion was the perfect target for the wickedly on-the-mark Georgian artists.

The long coats worn by gentlemen in the 1770s depended on fancy buttons for maximum sartorial impact. These buttons ran the decorative gamut. They could be covered with fabric and embroidered, elaborately wrapped with metallic thread, carved from horn, ivory, or mother-of-pearl, studded with cut stones, or fashioned from polished and engraved metal like pewter, brass, silver, and steel.

What these buttons didn't necessarily do was fasten the coat. The coat was often left open to display the waistcoat beneath, or closed with hidden hooks that fastened only the fronts of the coat edge to edge across the upper chest, leaving the buttons and their embroidered buttonholes with nothing more to do than look gorgeous. Stylish buttons became increasingly large, with some as big as two inches in diameter. With as many as a dozen of these buttons running down the front of a coat, the effect must have been impressive indeed.

Or, as this print shows, brilliantly blinding. (Click on the image to enlarge it to see the details.) Greeting a lady while walking in the park, this dandified gentleman has made the mistake of standing in the sunlight, making his polished steel buttons catch the sun and reflect back into the poor lady's face. They almost look like a comic book superhero's special laser-weapons. As the caption notes in elegant French, he's delivering the ultimate Coup de Bouton.

The lady recoils, and can only attempt to defend herself with flailing hands and fan. Not that the lady herself is innocent of Crimes of Fashion, however, not with her enormous wig and nodding plumes, gathered skirts over hoops, and a sizable nosegay of flowers tucked between her breasts. Perhaps they do deserve one another after all....

Above: Steel buttons: Coup de Bouton, etching by William Humphrey, c. 1777. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Fashions for October 1819

View online here

Loretta reports:

Toward the end of the official Regency decade, waistlines climb quite high, while the bottom of the skirt carries increasing amounts of decoration, making a sort of upside-down cone effect. I especially enjoyed the note about the bias cut being employed to "display the bust very advantageously."

View online here

Read online here

Read online here

Today's fashion plates and descriptions are brought to you by Ackermann's Repository, October 1819.

The Last Word on Jane Austen's Ring

Isabella reporting,

Last year one of the few pieces of jewelry known to have belonged to author Jane Austen was put up for auction by a descendant. The ring, left, is simple and unassuming in design - an oval odontalite (a less expensive substitute for turquoise) stone, set in gold - but it was the connection to that first owner that made it so special. Interest in the auction was high, and grew higher still when the final prize realized at the sale was £152,450 (or about $236,000), considerably more than the £20,000-£30,000 that was original estimate projected by the auction house. Our original post about the sale is here.

The winning bidder's identity wasn't known at first, (more about that here) but when it was finally revealed that American Idol winner and pop singer Kelly Clarkson was the buyer, the howls of outrage began in Britain. The government declared the ring to be a "national treasure," and a temporary export ban was put into effect. Ms. Clarkson was prohibited from taking the ring home to Texas, and the Jane Austen's House Museum - a disappointed bidder in the original auction - was given until the end of September to match the amount of the winning bid. A world-wide campaign successfully raised the funds, and graciously Ms. Clarkson gave up her prize - not that she had any choice. The Museum will soon be putting the ring on display, while Ms. Clarkson had an exact replica made to wear whenever and wherever she pleased - surely a somewhat bittersweet memento.

It's interesting to read how differently the story was presented by the media in America and the UK. While the facts are the same, the perspective certainly isn't. NBCNews.com's headline was Kelly Clarkson forced to sell $250,000 ring to Jane Austen museum, while the BBC.co went with Kelly Clarkson thwarted in bid to keep Jane Austen ring. 

The policy of designating and restricting "national treasures" is a complicated one; every major museum in the world contains national treasures removed from other nations, treasures that are never going to be returned to their one-time owners. So what do you think - should Kelly have been permitted to keep the ring she paid for, or does it belong on display in the Jane Austen's House Museum?