Fashionably Late

Fashion history for the idly curious

[prepsterlibrarian]

Y’all, I’m hoping to be back-ish soon-ish! In the meantime, please enjoy the fabric/pattern that covers almost literally everything in Marie Antoinette’s bedroom at Versailles. It’s delightfully overwhelming in like a cottagecore meets luxury to the point of excess way...

[prepsterlibrarian]

Guys, I Got to Spend SO Much Time Looking for Tiny Pupper Pics, Why Didn’t I Think of This Topic Before

So recently I’ve been reading the biographies of famous royal ladies (all by the fantastic Carolly Erickson, she’s a delight and a treasure) and I started noticing a trend. Out of the five queenies, three of them were super into lap dogs. Specifically pugs, and who can blame them? Pugs are absurdly wonderful, as exemplified by my friend’s pup, Frankie:

*SQQQUUUUUUUUEEEEEE!!!*

At any rate, it got me thinking about little doggos and their place in the world of fashion. As accessories, lap dogs seem like they’ve been around forever, their furry little faces always popping out of designer purses wearing diamond collars and Ralph Lauren sweaters (This is actually a thing, the designer has a canine line called The Pup Shop. So if you ever wanna douche-ify your dog by forcing it into a pink polo with a popped collar, you know where to go).

Like... I don’t hate it per se, I just... hate it? If that makes sense...

Obviously, I decided to dig into the history of lap dogs as accessories. It actually turned out to be unexpectedly difficult to track down the origin of this particular trend because these little guys have been around for so long. Recently-ish, some folks in France discovered the remains of small dogs that dated back around 15,000 years, the oldest ever found. We get it, France, forever à la mode, putain…

But it makes it hard to pinpoint their debut as fashion accessories because they’ve just always been there. Originally, these pups were, I kid you not, used to attract fleas so that they would leave us people alone. Kind of a blow to the old canine ego, y’know?

Eventually, we started breeding tiny doggos to do stuff for us, like crawling into the burrows of small animals because apparently rodents are tasty? IDK, but traveling street performers also trained little dogs to dance for that bread. Others were mostly used as guard dogs, because as we all know, there’s no better alarm than a yip yip dog.

Eventually, aristocrats started noticing that some tiny dogs were cuter than others, and because they LITERALLY had nothing better to do, started breeding for these specific aesthetic characteristics. Many of the more famous breeds that we have today originated in China, such as the pug and the Pekingese. These fellas were so beloved that only members of the imperial court were permitted to own them, and smuggling puppies was a crime punishable by torture. They eventually made their way to the West via Dutch trading companies, and royals and aristocrats lost their shit over how delightful they were.

Look at this goddamn pug, you guys. (Just on a side note, as an art history major, Francois Boucher (who painted this masterpiece) is one of my fav painters and this just confirms it for me. A true arbiter of taste #legendary)

So I guess you could say that that’s where little dogs got their start as fashion must haves? Because if the royals had something, the aristocrats were almost legally bound to copy them, and then all the nouveau riche would have to have them. Peasants just had to deal with the shame of owning giant, fluffy mutts.

UGH, could you like, not... *

So anywho, as near as I can tell, that’s how teensy doggos became fashionable. By becoming synonymous with wealth, prestige, and privilege, these little buggers secured luxurious places for their great great great grand puppers.

With the exception, of course, of all the fashion doggies that get dumped at shelters once people realized that even though they’re small, you still have to feed them and walk them and stuff.

Sorry to end on a downer, but my point is, fashionable or not, #adoptdontshop

Bises,

Moi

*Also, just to clarify, it’s me, I AM THE PEASANT. That’s a pic of me with the canine love of my goddamn life and he died while I was far away and couldn’t snuggle him. So a) feel sorry for me and stuff and b) I was totally kidding about the UGH GROSS bit, please don’t hate me

[prepsterlibrarian]

BUSTLE-ing About (get it?)

I know it’s taken me forever to post again, but in my defense, I’m very lazy. My bad.

Moving on, today we’re gonna talk about... BUSTLES!

The Victorian butt pads, as shown above.

So, we in the twenty first century aren’t exactly strangers to body modification in the name of fashion. But back in ye oldene tymes, they didn’t exactly have the technology to go all Kardashian family on themselves, which meant they had to get their clothes to do it for them. Think about it, when they had to perform a life saving operation, they literally got the dude drunk and gave him a leather strap to bite on until it was all over (I mean, in extreme cases. But it did happen!) No one is doing that voluntarily for a tummy tuck.

For a long time, I just kinda assumed that when old timey ladies had weird bunches and poofs of fabric in their skirts, it meant that they were wearing a bazillion petticoats. What I did not take into account was that that much fabric would make it almost impossible for the wearers to move because of how stupidly heavy it would have been.

As an example, here’s what Catherine the Great wore to her coronation as Empress of Russia in 1762. Her skirts are almost as wide as she is tall, all of it was made with super heavy brocade, velvets, furs, silks, and absolutely dripping with jewels, even before she put on her actual jewelry, her huge crown, and that snazzy royal scepter. Now imagine, if you will, how much heavier aaallllll of that would have been, if there was nothing under her skirts besides yards and yards and possibly miles of fabric to give it that insanely architectural shape.

Basically what I’m trying to say is that common sense ain’t exactly my strong suit.

Obviously, by the bustle era (circa 1870-1890), things had calmed down a bit RE: the ridiculous circumference of ladies’ gowns. But just like today, women were still doing absurd things to make themselves look inhumanly curvy.

Here are a few examples from one of the most sought after designers of the time, Charles Frederick Worth. As we can see, it’s a pretty familiar silhouette, if overly exaggerated. Big ol’ booty and widened shoulders in order to make the waist look like women don’t have organs.

Fashions of the time dictated that any lady who wanted to be a cool kid had to have massive amounts of fabric poufed out over her derriere. But the problem was that regular human butts couldn’t shove the fabric up and out in order to be soooo hot right now. Ordinary junk in the trunk made the fabric fall flat.

Additionally, the beginnings of fashion reform were in the wind. People were starting to realize that trends in recent years were completely impractical and, oh yeah by the way, could literally get women seriously maimed and even killed.

Bitches catching their clothes on fire was a thing. The struggle was real, y’all.

So in an effort to combat this, undergarments went from giant crinolines like this:

To these little cuties:

Nice, right?

So, here’s what we’ve learned:

1) Bustles were silly.

2) But crinolines were stupid.

3) And finally, we’re no better than Victorian women, we just put our bustles in our actual buttocks these days.

Bises,

Moi

[prepsterlibrarian]

Unpopular Opinion: Flip Flop Edition

So, since it’s summer or whatever, and summer is a season and not an hellish nightmare of sweat and bug domination, I GUESS, I thought I should post something seasonal.

This is more my vision of summer, but with wasps and cockroaches. ANYWAY, when I was young, my mom held with this theory that if you were scared of or disliked something, you ought to learn more about it. Flying in the face of ignorance being bliss, this idea saw it as the root of your distaste for your Awful Thing. So, god help me, I’ve decided to delve into the history of flip flops.

UGH, I’m already annoyed. They look like something a stoned four-year-old drew up and his Pinterest mom brought to unholy life.

But actually, as it turns out, flip flops predate Pinterest by some years. Like, thousands of years. These suckers have basically been around in some iteration as long as human civilization has existed. From the ancient Egyptians to the equally ancient Greeks, thong sandals were the go to shoe for rich and poor alike. Except for the really, really poor, but they didn’t have a go to anything.

Charming.

At this point, we’re gonna scootch on over to Japan, the birthplace of the modern flip flop. Basically, it went like this. Flip flops are super easy and obvious to make, but not everyone lives in the Mediterranean. So thanks, Japan, for making sandals with socks a thing instead of wearing functional footwear.

This photo shakes me to my very core. I was trying to look at it as being cozy or cute and I just can’t. It’s fundamentally wrong to me.

Moving forward a few thousand years, rubber and plastic zori make their way to the States via American soldiers who brought them home to their loved ones after World War II. Made mostly by women and children who were using the literal rubble that their country had become in order to earn enough money to like eat and stuff, it’s easy to see why the US soldiers could take one look at them and think, “You know what would be great? Being incessantly reminded of the horrors of war every time my beloved Patty gets too lazy to wear real shoes.”

Really, darling, you SHOULDN’T have... But for some unfathomable reason, the things took off and created a multibazlillion dollar industry for awful sandals. We began calling them “flip flops” in the 1960′s, cuz that’s the sound they make. Or you can call them thongs if you enjoy making eight-year-olds giggle.

These days, people in first world countries are faced with the onerous and obviously imperative dilemma of deciding when it’s appropriate to wear flip flops. There was literal uproar when the Northwestern University women’s lacrosse team visited the White House in 2005 and several of the ladies were photographed wearing flip flops. Like, you guys, can we take a minute to appreciate our privilege? This is what we choose to get upset about on a national level.

Flip flops are also kinda terrible for the environment, unless you get them made out of leather or hemp or something equally surfer-esque. But mostly, they’re still made from plastic and rubber, which inevitably wind up in the ocean as trash. In fact, SO MANY flip flops were washing up on the shore, that a group of entrepreneurs in Kenya started making art out of them, because free art supplies and also trying to save the oceans. I actually really dig their project, which is called Ocean Sole so if you’re interested in learning more about it, check them out by clicking these words. Cool, thanks.

But yeah, flip flops are awful, change my mind.

Bises,

Moi

[prepsterlibrarian]

Dior, Darlings

So I’m not even getting paid to say this (which is a crying shame), but if anyone finds themselves even REMOTELY near Texas before September 1st, you simply must visit the Dallas Museum of Art to check out Dior: From Paris to the World. It’s absolutely incredible. My sister and I met up this weekend to go and I’ll be honest, I’m surprised they even let me in considering all the drooling I was doing.

And y’all, I tried. I really did. I was gonna historian the bejeezus out of this and study the context of Dior’s rise as a fashion designer from like, books and stuff. But here is an actual quote from The History of International Fashion by Didier Grumbach, which I’d got at the library: “The 1973 numbers included what Dior called indirect turnover, or revenues generated by the sale of licensed goods: couture creation 18 per cent, men’s ready-to-wear 5 per cent, women’s secondary diffusion lines and ready-made men’s collections 3 per cent, accessories 36 per cent.” And the whole book is like that (or at least, the ten or so chapters I got through before I gave up). I’m not a numbers girl, friends. The historian-ing was a bust. I decided to wing it.

Y’all. Y’ALL. I couldn’t. I can’t. As something of a brand-whore, I was in heaven, surrounded by some of the most luxurious history modern Western society has to offer.

And so, my dears, follow me as I recreate my journey with studiously average photos from the exhibition. Do try to keep up.

So I’m a bad fashion historian, fueled by social anxiety. There was a line of folks behind me and I panicked and rushed on without getting a picture of only the most iconic and original Dior look. But my sister did (kind of), and it’s that one in the bottom left hand corner with the white jacket and strange bucket hat, known as the Bar Suit. The 1920’s-30’s had seen women in relatively shapeless dresses, those favored by the infamous flappers. Later, out of necessity during the Great Depression, people had bigger things to worry about than spending a bazillion hours fitting and hand stitching a stylish dress for the thirties equivalent of brunch. They were literally wearing burlap sacks.

In the late 1940’s, Dior decided a return to a celebration of femininity was in order because, duh. His designs, dubbed “The New Look,” featured understated shoulder pads to accentuate thin, tailored waists, and full skirts. The overall effect was a subtly exaggerated tracing of the female form, emphasizing the areas that are categorically lady-esque. And people went nutso for it.

Dior famously called his studio the “Office of Dreams.” (And let’s be real, if anyone NOT famous called their office that, we’d all think it was stupid and self-indulgent. You know you would.) Once he had completed a design, it would be mocked up in cotton muslin. Because, y’know, it’s less expensive to mess up cotton than silks and furs. Anywho, this pic shows those mock ups and it was super tight.

So then we started getting into the progression of the house under it’s different directors. Remember that whole bad fashion historian thing where it’s me? Yeah, I didn’t take pictures of the first two designers, including the goddamn founder himself, and his immediate successor, the little known and widely unnoticed YVES SAINT LAURENT. I warned y’all there would be a learning curve.

BUT it’s whatever because check out this absolutely glorious skirt suit! I died. It was designed in the eighties by Marc Bohan, who took over after Laurent, and can you just imagine walking into a board meeting wearing that? This is what a power suit looks like, ladies.

Okay, so next up to bat was Gianfranco Ferré, and everyone was mad shook because he was an Italian heading up one of the most venerable French haute couture fashion houses. And boy, was he Italian. This fella brought the extra to Dior. Just look at that red dress. It looks like the 1600’s exploded all over an unsuspecting modern gown.

Look, I know John Galliano is a dick of the highest order. Anti-Semitism is never acceptable. And for those in the back, ANTI-SEMITISM IS NEVER ACCEPTABLE. But boy howdy, could that man make drama look classy. He had this crazy ability to blend elegance and tradition with just the right amount of excess. So your first reaction is, “Calm down, sir!” But your second reaction is, “…actually, I’d totally wear that.”

I wasn’t super into Raf Simons, the guy who followed Galliano. Like he was fine, but not really my jam, and the only pics I got of his stuff are grainy because I zoomed in too much. So, moving on to the current head of Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri. The first woman to head the house and dear God, it’s about time. She’s definitely not afraid to be provocative, utilizing Dior as a platform for her activism. And I’m here for it.

This post is already way too damn long, so the rest of my photos are just below in a gallery-style thing with my timeless witticisms as captions.

Enjoy the fashion feast, my doves.

I get it, I know, I understand that this has Handmaids Tale written all over it. But also, doesn’t it look so cozy? I’d wear that to HEB in a heartbeat.

Okay, let’s take a moment to process what we have here. Traditional, original Dior, moving onto Molly Ringwald-esque I’m-not-actually-trying-to-look-good-I’m-wearing-a-sweatshirt-around-the-waist-of-this-beautiful-dress-because-I’m-not-like-other-girls, and then just THIS. IS. DIOR. And then some courier from a different house is forced into a Walmart dress. Or some other awful haute couture punishment.

If you put a gun to my head and told me I had to articulate why I love that awful, Neapolitan ice cream, Eiffel Tower coat at the very top, you would have to shoot me. I don’t know why. I just do.

I mean, I dunno. Sure, I guess.

Now this one is insanely impressive to me. All of that stuff on the dress that looks like fabric? Wrong. It’s beads. Millions and millions of tiny beads. I tried to get a close up for y’all, but it came out all blurry and the ladies behind us were getting pushy.

I was kinda annoyed (in the most first world problems ever, kind of way) that they would occasionally put the really dramatic and elaborate dresses near the back. But I took a pic anyway, because damn. Look at that glorious hot mess.

I had to include this pic for you guys. My mandate demanded it.

“The Dior Gauntlet” as my sister dubbed it.

Bonus art photo!

I loved this statue. This lady is mood. “Excuse you?”

Until next time, mes amis.

Bises,

Moi

[prepsterlibrarian]

Take Several Seats, Chéries

I gotta say, it seemed sort of fate-esque that my bestest friend sent me this article on the day I had tentatively decided what I wanted to blog about. This fellow is a damn hero and my bff is a delight and a treasure for bringing him to my attention (among myriad other reasons, obvs).

At the end of the day, fashion at large is what it is because of, or in resistance to, the dictates of a larger society (at least, in my utterly and rather apologetically amateur opinion). And yet, here we have a young man who by his own admission, isn’t trying to get attention or make a statement, but rather prefers to feel confident and at home in his own trappings. The audacity!

In comparison, here’s me:

The consummate fashion historian! Everywhere I go, folks are lining up to ask me how to be à la mode, comfortably trendy, or make their vintage Halloween and theatre costumes authentic. It’s honestly a bit embarrassing to be so sought after.

And so, in my infinite fashion wisdom, I have decided to reach out to you all, the clamoring masses, to share the stories of how certain trends, from the ordinary to the absurd, came to be.

All of which is, of course, patently bullshit. I mean, I’m for sure going to hopefully learn you a thing or two about the history of fashion. But you and I, my friends, we’re in this pursuit of knowledge together. While my personal style has always been what I rather generously call “librarian prepster,” I’ve always been fascinated by what true fashion trends have to say about the times in which they emerged and flourished. Unfortunately, I’ve never actually taken the initiative to educate myself about it. But now I’ve got the perfect accountability buddies: you, my future adoring fans (or at least, mildly interested browsers).

So gather round, kiddos, this catwalk won’t strut itself.

Bises,

Moi

[prepsterlibrarian]

Look, it’s old fabric!