#augustfolly

[professorpski]

'I say, when you come to us, you couldn't possibly wear that ripping white trailing dress, could you?' 'The Callot or the Schiaparelli?' asked Mrs. Dean interested.

Oh, to be able to ask which haute couture gown. As this indicates, Mrs. Dean, a character in the novel August Folly by Angela Thirkell, is a wealthy woman. She refuses to wear said gown to dinner away from her home because it is a tea-gown and too informal. As she explains to the young man who brought it up, “I must dress up a little more when I am having my first dinner with your parents.” A good reminder that not everything haute couture was the most formal of evening gowns, and some were for lounging around your own house.

This novel was written in 1930 which indicates that grown women were still wearing tea gowns which had first surfaced in the late 19th century as loosely fitting dresses worn without corsets and thus worn for less formal occasions in one’s own home. Of course, the 1920s was supposed to be a period when the corset was discarded but many women had to wear corsets still in order to create from their curved bodies the test-tube silhouette which became the fashion.

You can find Thirkell’s books in reprints from Virago Books here:  https://www.virago.co.uk/?s=thirkell

[professorpski]

'Do you remember the blue dress you were wearing on the Norwegian cruise?' Mrs. Tebben did remember Winifred Ross's blue dress. It was the blue muslin with white sports, five years old, on its last legs, altered, washed out, but good enough for picnics on the fiords. Miss Ross did not think that Mr Tebben, that nice young Civil Servant had noticed it.

Ah, the power of a dress. The opening question is put by Mr. Tebben to Mrs. Tebben who have been married long enough to have grown children. She wore it on the trip when she met him for the first time, many years ago, when she was still Miss Ross.

Yet years later, admiring his wife in another altogether different blue dress, he remembered that first one. Old, altered, faded it may have been at the time, but it clearly made an impression on the man who fell in love with her.

There are dresses that do that.

This quotation comes from Angela Thirkell in her novel August Folly from 1936. Many of her novels are set in the English countryside, and the characters of one novel may show up in another. I am currently reading my way through them. Her books are reprinted by Virago Books which you can find here: https://www.virago.co.uk/?s=thirkell

[professorpski]

'I say, when you come to us, you couldn't possibly wear that ripping white trailing dress, could you?' 'The Callot or the Schiaparelli?' asked Mrs. Dean, interested. .... 'Oh, that tea-gown. It was very sweet of you to like it, Richard, but I must dress up a little more when I am having my first dinner with your parents.'

This exchange is a hoot for a few reasons. First, that the young man Richard describes the dress as “ripping” by which he means wonderful; second, that he doesn’t know that a tea-gown which was a casual form of dress reserved to be worn around the house even if in the presence of family friends; and third, that Mrs. Dean is so well-off that she has to think, hmmmm... which white trailing haute couture dress does he mean? Ah, to have such a puzzle to solve. Apparently, she has one by Callot Soeurs, a Parisian house which shut one year after this book, August Folly, was published in 1936. And she has another one by Elsa Schiaparelli, the Italian designer, who also set up shop in Paris.

Poor Richard has a terrible crush on the older, married Mrs. Dean, one of the common sub-plots of Angela Thirkell’s novels. The older woman always thinks the young man is a bit of a goose, and nothing comes of it. Thirkell wrote novels set in the English countryside among people with plenty of money and fashion shows up in numerous ways in their pages.

Virago Books has republished them and you can find them here: https://www.virago.co.uk/contributor/angela-thirkell/

[booksforyears]

Happy birthday to author Angela Thirkell, whose book August Folly expertly channels the heat of summer in the English countryside 📚❤🏞 #books #read #reading #bookish #booklover #bibliophile #author #authorbirthday #angelathirkell #augustfolly #virago #picnic #summertime #bookstagram #booksofinstagram