• British Pathé says the future will be great because everyone will be dressed in plastic!
• Unsung Sewing Patterns spotlights women’s overalls on the American home front. (Thanks, Carmen! This also happens to be my next sewing project.)
• The 2008 BBC series Blood, Sweat & T-Shirts sent half a dozen carefree British fashionistas to India to experience life at the other end of the garment industry, with harrowing results. Some thoughtful Finn has painstakingly uploaded episodes to YouTube.
• Let’s Clean Up Fashion provides audits of various UK high-street clothing retailers’ stance on labor conditions in their supply chains.
• Casual orientalism and flat-out balboa in Maharaja, 1943.
• It’s wedding season again! Conscientious objections from 1929, 2004.
• Maru and Gregory Peck make everything better.

Here’s a silent film short of unknown date (looks postwar to me) showcasing austerity fashions by designer Peter French. I like how curiously astringent some of the models look, even when smiling. However, there are some interesting fashion ideas here — love the cascading pleat detail on that straight skirt, and now I just have to try elbow gloves with a button-back blouse.  I particularly like the playsuit/convertible skirt beach ensemble — the cape is perfect for huddling under on those summer days when lashing winds are whipping damp sand across your exposed flesh.

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Back in the days when designers could be bothered with plus sizes, in-store mannequins (i.e. models) were needed to show them off to customers. This wartime film follows a chic plus-size model with the delightfully gothic name of Mrs. Danvers through an average day.  Note to furriners: Mrs. Danvers weighs 182 lbs. or 82.5 kg. For some unknown reason, the British claim to understand human body weight only when given in “stones” (units of 14 lbs.) Honestly. Tell a Brit how much you weigh and they’ll pretend they have no idea what you mean.

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Attention ladies: the time has gone when smart women wear slacks in the house! That’s right, the war’s over — drop that spanner/scythe/anti-aircraft gun and get back to pouring tea, tinkling on the piano and making bright, inconsequential chitchat. “Day Wear, Gay Wear” features some admittedly very smart little outfits in enviable fabrics (chenille on a georgette background, anyone?).

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This 1941 film with the amusingly patronizing title “Ladies! Here is news for you!” features fashions from an America not yet at war. The timing is particularly cruel when you consider that less than a month after this fashion flash was released, the UK would enter the long dark night of clothing rationing, which was to last a brutal 8 years. Also, from the sound of the commentary, our narrator seems to have had a few himself. Eek!

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Here a model gamely demonstrates several ways of wearing a headscarf:

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This film shows how to make one dress do duty all week long by adding collars, waistcoats, false bodices and other embellishments:

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I showed that video to James, who wasn’t convinced. “‘Lancelot’s coming over — put on a pinny!’ That’s the best you can do for a Knight of the Round Table?“

Here are several ways to wear the ubiquitous turban — some more successful than others:

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Here’s her method for making your own handbag (assuming you could obtain a hide, which was a pretty big assumption at the time):

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And here’s her advice for making women’s hats from hubby’s. The amount of millinery skill she assumes is pretty impressive — how many women do you suppose actually owned a hat block?

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I like how some of these fashion ideas are so dubious even the models betray visible uncertainty. Still, it’s a great insight into how much innovation was required to stay smart in wartime.

And now for the giveaway!

Up for grabs is one copy of Complete Dressmaking in Pictures, a postwar British dressmaking guide edited by Constance Howard and published by Odhams Press. Those of you accustomed to freewheeling American vintage sewing books may be amused by the comparatively prim illustrations.

Others overwhelmed by the proliferation of sewing advice available in books and on the internet may enjoy how blessedly simple it makes sewing look by reducing the options to an acceptable few techniques.

The book also includes instructions for how to draft basic pattern blocks and adapt them to make the illustrated designs.

The Complete Dressmaking in Pictures giveaway is open to readers everywhere — just leave a comment below about your favorite wartime fashion tip! I’ll be picking a winner at noon (London time) on Monday, April 19.

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[Link to part 2]

There’s so much to love about this film. The irony of a rumba band in postwar Britain playing “Brazil“. The OMG Anglo-Indian! waitress (“Believe it or not, her name’s Molly, and her mother’s English”). The calypso band in ruffled shirts. The kick-ass jive dancers in a West Indian bar. The sense of wide-eyed novelty in a diversity we now take for granted. The glimpse into a London where the phrase “night-time economy” implied something other than greasy kebabs forked out of styrofoam clamshells and teenagers vomiting into gutters. This film makes London look like so much fun!

TED talks always cheer me up when I’m feeling a bit jaded about humanity’s prospects — they’re inspiring, informative and exciting. There are a lot of talks on the psychology of happiness, fulfillment and decision-making, which I find endlessly fascinating. One of the most useful concepts I’ve run across in reading up on the subject is flow.

If you’re not already familiar with the concept of flow, I recommend you watch or listen to this TED talk by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the term. It’s an excellent thumbnail introduction. Briefly, Csikszentmihalyi has found that human fulfillment — the good life — requires more than the accumulation of pleasures or material comforts; it also requires experiences of intense and creative engagement. He calls that engagement flow — total absorption in an activity that harnesses our skills.

Why do I sew? I’ve spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars on an activity that has never made me a penny and which I’m still not very good at. It’s slow, expensive and often frustrating, yet I return to it time and again. The answer is that it allows me to spend time in flow — or, as I call it, Craft Trance. Craft Trance is the state from which I awake, seam ripper in hand, to realize it’s after dark, I’m still wearing this morning’s pajamas and I have made two-thirds of a Regency day dress covered in poker hands. It’s strange that regularly spending time in such a state should keep me sane, but such is the case.

From Wikipedia (I’ve lent out my copy of Flow):

Csíkszentmihályi identifies the following nine factors as accompanying an experience of flow:

1. Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one’s skill set and abilities). Moreover, the challenge level and skill level should both be high.
2. Concentrating, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
3. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
4. Distorted sense of time, one’s subjective experience of time is altered.
5. Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
6. Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
8. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
9. People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.

Not all are needed for flow to be experienced.

The factor I find the most interesting at the moment is #5 — direct and immediate feedback. It explains why, for me, sewing and blogging is a magic combination. Sewing on its own can feel lonely and thankless, especially in a city with as few crafters as London, but by combining it with blogging, I’m making it into an activity that provides me with plenty of feedback. And, the craft blogging world being the defiantly kind and supportive place it is, that feedback is overwhelmingly positive and helpful. Which is another way of saying: thank you all for reading, and for leaving such wonderful comments.

Do you have a similar experience of crafting? What puts you in flow?

Little did I know that working women had the same problem back in 1949, when the phrase “sexual harassment” was not so much as a glint in Merriam-Webster’s eye. Their solution was a lot more becoming than the bookstore burqa. It was called the blixie — an all-in-one blouse/camiknicker set!

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