#thebrandons

[professorpski]

She raised her long amber necklace with one hand and let if fall heavily on her coral necklace, her silver chain, and her coloured wooden beads, with a gesture of final doom.

This strange conglomeration of jewelry is won by Mrs. Grant, an annoying woman, dubbed “the Englishwoman Abroad” by novelist Angela Thirkell in The Brandons from 1939. Thirkell dresses this character in a hodge podge of garments and fabrics as well as accessories to indicate her lack of sense shows up both in all she does which is mostly annoy people. Someone who doesn’t have the sense to know she is always annoying and inconveniencing people hasn’t the sense to recognize the lack of harmony in her clothing and ornaments. Her material foolishness reflects her general foolishness.

Thirkell wrote novels set in the English countryside from the 1930s through 1950s, and several characters, including the annoying Mrs. Grant show up in more than one of them. You can find them as reprints from Virago Press: https://www.virago.co.uk/?s=thirkell

[professorpski]

It's about Miss Delia's knickers.... She really hadn't a fit pair to wear, not if she goes away to stay anywhere. I really don't know what she does with them. So I thought if you didn't need those three yards of the double width pink crepe de chine you got in the sales, I could start at once. I'd just run down to the village on my bike before the shops shuts and see if Mrs. Thacher can match me up some pink sewing silk."

This passage from The Brandons by Angela Thirkell tells us a lot about the clothing in the lives of well-off English women. The person speaking is Nurse, the woman who raised the children and still lives in the house looking after their mother, the widowed Mrs. Brandon, and doing sewing. Nurse, who seems to have no other name, is talking about the underwear of Mrs. Brandon’s daughter Delia who probably wears them out playing tennis and running around as young women with plenty of free time will do.

Notice that the underwear is to be made of silk fabric, something not every family could afford, yet even the well-off Mrs. Brandon took advantage of a sale to buy some silk yardage for which she had no immediate plans. And notice Nurse wants to sew them up with silk thread, another luxurious touch.

Delia is supposed to go away for a weekend which is why Nurse is worried about her not have “a fit pair.” Although Delia herself seems completely and happily unconcerned, the choosing of appropriate clothing for the weekend house party is a source of worry for several women.

Thirkell wrote a set of novels with overlapping characters all taking place in a rural region of England starting in the 1930s and running through the 1950s. Their satisfaction lies in watching romances bloom between couples you would like to see get together, and the petering out of romances which are a very bad idea for one or both of the parties.

Virago Press has reprinted them: https://www.virago.co.uk/contributor/angela-thirkell/

[professorpski]

And I was thinking about the black frock of mine with the pleated skirt. I haven't worn it since the winter, but I think if you took the gold belt off and put on a black one, and just put some of that black lace that is in the cardboard box... round the neck, I could wear it quite nicely.

This is Mrs. Brandon planning the re-modeling dress for the funeral of a relative in the 1939 novel, The Brandons, by Angela Thirkell, an English novelist. Although Mrs. Brandon is a well-off young widow, she was not above having a dress that she already owned reworked by a servant in order to make it appropriate for a particular occasion. All black was then considered appropriate for a funeral of a relative. Wardrobes were smaller and each dress far more detailed than ours today, so that re-modeling a dress made economic sense even for people with money

The lace would be a luxurious yet appropriate touch. The fact that the lace was kept without having a present purpose is telling; hand-made lace was so expensive that it was removed from dresses that were discarded in order to be applied to new garments. Of course, the making of lace by machine was invented in the late 19th century, which made lace much cheaper, and it is possible that a nice piece of machine lace would be treasured. Because Mrs. Brandon is so wealthy--she honestly doesn’t want to inherit anything from her dying relative--the odds seem good that it was hand made lace. 

For Thirkell’s novels, go to Virago books: https://store.virago.co.uk/collections/author-angela-thirkell-pid-57706

[professorpski]

'...one of my studs has got down a hole in the wall and I can't find my spare one. Could you possibly lend me one? It's only an ordinary gold one.' ....He hunted in a box and found a stud which was just sufficiently unlike...to make that young gentlemen conscious of it for the whole evening.

Studs shut men’s formal dress shirts for evening wear, instead of buttons, thus making for one of the quiet ways that a man could dress up with gold. This hapless young man appears in The Brandons published 1939. He is hopelessly in love with the young widow Mrs. Brandon, so his worries over clothing are even greater on that account. These wealthy English people move in circles where everyone changes their clothes for dinner--”dresses for dinner”-- and then servants came with the meal to the table. I realized you can only change for dinner easily if you are expecting someone else to make it and bring it out.

Angela Thirkell wrote novels from the 1930s through the 1950s. This one doesn’t have a lot of comments on clothing, it does give a good idea of how the upper-classes dealt with getting dressed. Or as we academics say, their clothing strategies.