• Normal hair-cut:  1s. = £1.84 to £8.34
• Shampoo and set: 2s. 6d. = £4.61 to £20.80
• Marcel wave: 3s. = £5.53 to £25
• Permanent wave: 15s. to 30s. = £27 to £250

Here in London in 2010, £50 is cheap for a women’s wash and cut. This goes a long way toward explaining why so many Londoners, myself included, wander around looking like they’ve been dragged through a bush backwards. If prices were this cheap at the salon, I would so totally be there every week.

Sometimes it’s enough for me just to look at a pattern or fabric to conceive a clear vision in my mind of what I want the finished product to look like. This, I think, is the first time I’ve ever managed to realize that vision completely. I wanted a pale blue blouse with red accents… and I got it!

I’ve been taken with the color scheme of sky blue and bright red ever since I inherited this Threadless shirt. The design is called “99 Luftballons“, so I decided to name my wartime take on it the 99 Barrage Balloons blouse.

Don't ask tall people to take your photo or you will end up weirdly foreshortened.

I made up the blouse in blue cotton sateen I bought ages ago from MacCulloch & Wallis and added red topstitching and red buttons from the Cloth House, Berwick Street. The buttons are my favorite. They’re bright, shiny and cheerful — as vintage dressmaking manuals would put it, gay.

I made a few minor modifications to the bodice pattern — I raised the side darts a little and increased the bust measurement by an inch or so — but my biggest breakthrough was in the sleeves. Readers, I am proud to report that this is the first set-in-sleeved garment I’ve ever sewn without tears 0r swearing!

How did I do it? First, I reduced the amount of ease in the sleeve cap, because I’d read from various authorities that most home sewing patterns include too much, especially for a fabric like cotton that doesn’t ease well. I measured the length of the armhole against the length of the armscye, as detailed in Adele Margolis’s invaluable book Make Your Own Dress Patterns. Sure enough, the original pattern allowed more than 2″ of ease, so I reduced the amount to about 1″ by redrawing the sleeve cap to look more like my personal sleeve block. After that, the sleeve went in pretty painlessly.

I also modified the lower (wrist) edge of the sleeve to “hang more attractively”, as recommended in Claire Shaeffer’s Couture Sewing Techniques. This just involved redrawing the curve. I can’t say I notice a massive difference, but I’m telling myself it looks better than it otherwise would.

I eliminated final hair-tearing by getting DM Buttons in Soho to put in all the buttonholes. It took £3 and 5 minutes, and I walked out with perfect buttonholes on blouse front and cuffs.

On one of my sick days, I also partially repaired the shoddy-ass job I did on the sabotage skirt. I raised the hemline 1.5″ and re-stitched. I find it weird that despite how minutely dictated hemlines used to be — the boy in Pattern for Smartness mentions reading about them in the paper — it’s nigh on impossible to find out what the actual hemline was in any given year. Thanks to this National Archives podcast, I discovered that austerity regulations set hemlines at 19″ from the ground, which at least gave me a ballpark figure. The skirt does look more period now, and I’m pleased with how the outfit as a whole went together.

I give this photo an A for effort but D for deportment. I stand like a farmhand — unsurprising for someone who’s been wearing jeans all her life. Just another one of those casualties of feminism they warned the world about, I guess.

Never fear, though — I’ve been spending a lot more time these days thinking about my hair than plotting the overthrow of the patriarchy. Here’s what my vintage haircut looks like when I style it at home. A bit more wearable than what the salon gave me, but 1940s-influenced nonetheless:

This style was set dry on hot sticks and the front styled with a bit of teasing and a short sharp shock of TreSemme Freeze Hold. That stuff is amazing.

I am very pleased with the blouse, despite the fact that it’s agony to iron (all those tucks! ruffles! gathers!). It’s probably no coincidence that the first garment I’ve sewn in ages without being emotionally overinvested is also the only one that hasn’t gone horribly awry.

Lessons Learned:

• Study the design details and choose your fabric accordingly. The sateen is nice but just a bit too crisp for the blousy sleeves and tie bow. Something limper would have draped better.
• Use fusible interfacing with caution. I fused the cuffs and center fronts and wish I’d used sew-in — the interfacing has given the fabric a slightly bubbled texture. Also, I couldn’t find any resources to tell me which side of a doubled piece like a collar or cuff to fuse and had to learn the hard way. Fuse the half that faces inside, kids!
• On cuffs, like shirt fronts, there is a right way and wrong way to place buttons. Men’s and women’s shirts button up the front on opposite sides, but everyone’s cuffs button the same way to make it easier to do them up. Try sewing them the opposite way and you’ll see what I mean. Whoops!
• Relax, for pete’s sake.

Let’s kick off with two back-to-back “fashion police” clips from the 1940s. The first is American and comes to us from the Prelinger Archives via Glamourdaze. Here we see the wonderfully named Miss Ratherly Sterns, like a no-nonsense fairy godmother, make over a well-meaning but badly dressed protégé:

By contrast, in this British Pathé film from 1946, a disapproving narrator stationed in London’s Piccadilly Circus tears several women to shreds for minor fashion infractions. Give a girl a break, fella — clothes rationing has been in force for five years! I’m not sure about the “charming wimple” that eventually gets his seal of approval, either.

It’s a sign of how far we as a society have let ourselves go that even the Don’ts in these clips could stop traffic nowadays. They seem such sartorially innocent times by comparison. Fashion sins included things like “wearing the wrong hat or blouse with your smartly tailored suit” instead of “leaving the house in stained pink Uggs, a fake-down puffa vest with ratty fake fur trim, a t-shirt announcing I’M BRINGING SEXY BACK in gold lamé blockcaps and leggings two sizes too small with your underwear showing through”.

Can you keep a secret? I’m a total sucker for the makeover genre. That’s why I love films like Now, Voyager, TV shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and blogs like Already Pretty. The makeover genre is quintessentially American in the best way, with its relentless optimism, its inclusive ethos and its unwavering belief in the life-transforming power of self-improvement.

Here are two more videos via Glamourdaze, also starring Ratherly Sterns. The first contains useful advice on choosing hairstyles, makeup and necklines to suit your face shape — excellent if you’re trying to settle on your vintage look.

In this second film, Miss Sterns (would you dare to call her Ratherly? I wouldn’t) runs us through the basics of applying makeup. Note the total absence of eye makeup, the way blush/rouge is applied further back than today’s apple-cheeked ideal and the strict insistence on color coordination. Also, when did women stop doing their beauty routines sitting down?

This 1944 British Pathé clip about a school for mannequins (models) shows women learning to stand and move to show their clothes to best advantage and offers an interesting fix to keep wardrobe changes from spoiling your hair and makeup — put a (chiffon) bag on your head!

I’ve saved the best for last. Pattern for Smartness, a 19-minute film made by Simplicity in 1948, is vintage sewing paradise — a walk-through of the making of a dress from a Simplicity pattern using the tools and techniques of the time. The detailed instructional advice still holds true, and the evangelical tone is delightful. Who knew that a single home economics class could change you from a shuffling, pimply, badly-dressed troglodyte to a fresh-faced social butterfly with “that know-how look”?

Tagged: 1940s, hair, how to, makeup, sewing, video ]]> http://cargocultcraft.com/2010/03/03/you-will-be-prettier-1940s-fashion-and-beauty-advice-films/feed/ 8 Susannah http://cargocultcraft.com/2010/02/28/utility-hair/ http://cargocultcraft.com/2010/02/28/utility-hair/#comments Sun, 28 Feb 2010 21:06:15 +0000 Susannah http://cargocultcraft.com/?p=1230 ]]> What do vintage fashion geeks do when they come home drunk on a Saturday night? Why, spend hours wandering through the British Pathé film archives, of course!

During the war, Pathé newsreels and short informational films were shown in cinemas before and between features. I love the arch, sometimes snarky commentary and the models’ rigid carriage and fixed smiles. Here’s an interesting short from 1942 on the new utility hairstyles, suitable for wear during war work or under a military cap. Pay attention to the vintage cutting and styling techniques:

These hairstyles look ridiculously fussy to us now, considering how long they took to set and maintain, but if you think about how much time a modern woman with even a wash-’n-go cut spends washing and drying her hair (daily? every two days?), it probably evens out to much the same amount of time spent by wartime women with liberty cuts who only washed their hair once a week or so. They arguably got more stylish results, but we have less cause to worry about “unwanted guests”. [Warning: head-scratchy horrors below.]