Lily Lemontree is a Darling

Yesterday, after I lost a follower, I figured I'd sure better clean up my blogging act and get around to posting something once in a bloody while. Undeniably, you people don't get a whole lot to read from this blog. (Which is maybe a good thing? Huh. ) The interesting part is I have no excuse for neglecting everyone. I've been on holiday all this past week, with absolutely nothing to do, and instead of doing something fun like blogging, I've been reading about the origins of the Abrahamic religions. Actually, it's absolutely fascinating, as well as having a great deal of personal significance, but it isn't exactly the same as spending my time away from the Hell that is School doing something un-scholarly. However, for those of us wishing above of all else we lived in the past, I can now say that there is a very positive aspect to the present, which is that the internet has made all sorts of information available to us that average people don't know and wouldn't want to tell us if they did. It makes me shudder to think of the things people could have told me fifty years ago that I would be unable to prove right or wrong.

Okay, enough with that.

The real point of this post is to say thank you very, very much to Lily Lemontree (who happens to run a delightful blog) for giving me an award.

Here are the rules:

1. Link to who gave you the award.
2. Give the award to 7 blogs you love.
3. Let the people you have awarded know.

I give this award to:

1. Millie of Classic Forever. She runs a great blog, with plenty of style related posts. This was an obvious choice for me.
2. Harley of Dreaming in Black and White. The same goes for Harley. In fact, she writes more about classic style than classic movies, which I think is great. And I absolutely trust fashion advice from people who admire Grace Kelly.
3. All the lovely ladies of Spiffy. It is an excellent guide to modernized vintage style, and it introduced me to a fabulous site, ModCloth.
4. Baroness Von Vintage of Tea with the Vintage Baroness. This blog is pure vintage fashion. It has awesome pictures.
5. Magaly of Modern Starlet. More great pictures plus a wider range of style related posts. I get a strong feeling of the atmosphere of the past from this blog, not just the clothes.
6. Sarah of Glamor a-go-go. Her blog is a strong dose of sixties style!
7. Nicole of Classic Hollywood Nerd. Supposedly nerds don't have much style sense. That is either not true, or Nicole has named her blog wrong.

Congratulations to everyone!

If Life Were a Classic Movie...

1. You would magically wake up looking better than you did when you went to sleep.
2. You would lose jewelry all the time because it would never take more than a tug to undo the catch.
3. You would perfect the art of looking beautiful while drunk, ill, or both.
4. No matter how much you'd swish your hair around, it would never get messed up. As a matter of fact, everyone would talk about how sexy you were because of it.
5. People would be perfectly divided into "nice" and "bad." Nice boys would quickly get tired of girls who liked kissing all the time, particularly if they looked like Lana Turner.
6. All it would take were three kisses and one fade out to get you pregnant.
7. Your average soldier would look either like Frank Sinatra, Montgomery Clift, or Burt Lancaster.
8. People would randomly burst into song, particularly over dinner or on the street in the rain.
9. Kissing would result in lipstick getting on the man, but not actually getting smeared off the woman.
10. You would be able to spot rebels a mile away by their hair.
11. There would be no such thing as someone badly dressed...only someone dressed in a perfectly bad way.

There should so be a tag for this if there isn't already. If there really isn't, everyone who reads this is tagged.

Quotes and Such for November

What with school and work in full swing, everyone could do with some cheering up around this time of year. Here is a collection of quotes, pictures, videos, etc. that are intended to make people feel better. Please excuse the disorganization.

******************************************************

Elizabeth Taylor:
"I am a very committed wife. And I should be committed too - for being married so many times."

"You find out who your real friends are when you're involved in a scandal. "

"The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues. "

Bob Hope:
"A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don't need it."

"A James Cagney love scene is one where he lets the other guy live. "

"I do benefits for all religions - I'd hate to blow the hereafter on a technicality."

"I have a wonderful make-up crew. They're the same people restoring the Statue of Liberty. "

"You know you are getting old when the candles cost more than the cake. "

Cary Grant:
"I improve on misquotation."

"I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me."

"Do your job and demand your compensation - but in that order. "

Lucille Ball:
"It's a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy."

"Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead. "

"I'd rather regret the things I've done than regret the things I haven't done. "

Warren Beatty:
"My notion of a wife at 40 is that a man should be able to change her, like a bank note, for two 20s." (!)

"Marriage requires a special talent, like acting. Monogamy requires genius. " (!!)

Bette Davis:
"A sure way to lose happiness, I found, is to want it at the expense of everything else."

"Brought up to respect the conventions, love had to end in marriage. I'm afraid it did."

"I am just too much."

"With the newspaper strike on, I wouldn't consider dying."

**********************************************************************
A Streetcar Named Desire

Gloves Need to Come Back in Style

While recently trying to figure out how to dress like Audrey Hepburn in Charade, I made a discovery. Nothing I could think up out of my own closet was anywhere near as elegant, and I could think of nothing to buy that would be either. Then, I made another discovery. There were two things that Audrey Hepburn had that I did not, and they were one glove on each hand. Well, to be literal, I do have one pair of vintage leather gloves in beige, but I would never wear them out because people would look at me like some kind of a freak. And that happens often enough as it is, thank you. Far be it from me to purposely attract that kind of attention.

But anyway, I tried on a few things with the gloves, and it made all the difference in the world. That is both a good thing and a bad thing, good because it means that not looking elegant can just be blamed on current fashion, but it's a bad thing because until gloves come back in style (if!), nobody can be impeccably well-dressed. Sadly, it doesn't seem likely, so to relieve my feelings I am blogging about it. (Be glad I'm not blogging about other feelings that could do with relieving.)
A few pictures:

The idea that certain aspects of vintage fashion would make us all look better dressed is not limited only to gloves. The list could go on and on. I can think of a few:

• Skirts. Not that they are no longer worn, but they are worn far less often than they used to be. I don't really understand why...they are more flattering than pants, comfortable, and some guys have said they prefer them.
  
• Hats. They add about as much to an outfit as gloves do, but they also add a lot to your face, if you choose the right ones. I cannot say much about hats; the fact that they are never worn except for winter, sports, or the beach makes me ill.
• Suits for casual wear. Nowadays there is hardly any such thing as a casual suit, or a suit that looks casual even when it is. Last February, I bought a tweed suit for a completely ridiculously cheap price, but I have discovered that wearing it anywhere could only not look out of place unless I carry a sign saying "One-Girl Freak Show." So, I have not worn it once. I am quite sore about that.
• Casual dresses. So easy to wear, so flattering, but almost nonexistant, or so it seems. Why can't people satisfy their desire for casualness by wearing dresses made out of casual fabric, instead of sacrificing all nice clothes??
• Natural looking makeup. You don't see this very often among many "vintage revivalist" people--they exaggerate their makeup quite a lot--but genuine classic makeup looks are usually a dramatization of natural coloring. It looked like the way people really look, just more so. At least, that is true of the forties and fifties.
• Stockings. Seamed or not, what a difference they make! Honestly, how many of us have pretty skin on our legs? I tend to have a few light bruises that pop out out of nowhere, and that's all it takes to look a bit ugly. Also, tights are far more popular than vintage style thigh-highs, which are impractical, but so much more comfortable. And God knows knee highs are too short for anything useful.
• Medium-toned skin. I don't get some people's dedication to being pale to the point of being faintly blue, but it makes more sense than orange tans. And tanning was fashionable even as far back as the twenties, there was just more balance.

I am sure there are a lot of things you can add to this list. Please do! Or, better yet, write a post about it. Consider yourself tagged.

A..Bad?...Picture of...Grace Kelly??

It sounds impossible, doesn't it? Her candids do not look bad:


Pictures of her on a bad hair day do not look bad:


Even when her arms look quite hairy she does not look bad:


Of all the pictures I have ever seen of Grace Kelly, none of them look bad...except one:

And the sad thing is, if I saw a picture of myself that looked like that, I would be happy. (Although I would rather wonder who snapped a photo of me...undoing my shirt?? Judging by the rest of the photos in this shoot, this red thing is a jacket or a heavy sweater, but it sure doesn't look like it here.) I am not doing this post out of disrespect for HSH, but because she was so beautiful any photo of her looking like an average person is bad compared to all the pictures of her looking like a goddess. Many such photos are ahead. Prepare yourself, because I need a pic spam fix baaaad.

James Dean

Male style icons are, in my opinion, more unique personalities than fantastically dressed people. Their clothes, ideas, and acting combine to form a non-fashion related style. James Dean is an awesome example of this. Few people are as hung up with dressing like him as they are with acting like him--but a closer look reveals that his clothes matched the attitude that made him so popular. What attitude exactly? A rebellious, modern, and vaguely dangerous one. Perhaps James Dean encouraged 1950s teenagers to be borderline delinquents, but he only had this effect because that is what they already were, and by being the same way, he validated their position and painted it as a legitimate way to be. He was a total glorified bad boy, but he always seemed to mean well. A sympathetic rebel, and that is how all rebels feel about themselves. No wonder he made such a hit with teenagers and still resonates today.

My real purpose is not to analyze the causes and effects of the James Dean phenomenon but to talk about his clothes and his image. Certainly you couldn't have expected a scholarly, unfrivolous post from this me. In the future, you should know better. Anyway, the easiest way to get my point across would be to do a pic spam, but that isn't at all sufficient or in-depth, so I shall try to write a paragraph for each picture and point out some things you might not have noticed, if I notice them myself (not likely). If you like this, please tell me, because if I get the feeling no one cares for this format, I won't do it very often.

********************************************************************

"It takes 500 small details to add up to one favorable impression."
--Cary Grant

Here we see a lot of the elements that were part of Jimmy's persona. This picture was taken in some sort of art room or gallery and he is posing similarly to the statue on the table behind him, representative of his artistic side. It is also a very modern photo--it practically could have been taken yesterday--and the colors of Jimmy's clothes are an essential part of this. The combination of cool dark blue and white is very sleek, colors which also happen to be brought out by the color of the statue, the table, and the hazy background. If you have seen modern movies that take place in the past, something that keeps them from looking completely authentic is the tint of the film, which is often blue or gray in today's movies, but was yellowish seventy years ago. The blue tint here lends a very modern touch.

Here I see a distinct Brando resemblance around the mouth, but that is beside the point. Instead, notice the minimalist combination of brown and white, the leather rather than metal watch band, the lack of a tie, and the hair. The extremely messy polar opposite of your typical boy next door's hair. There is nothing precise or polished about this image. However, it has a similar quality as Grace Kelly's snow-covered volcano persona. Jimmy may be wearing a suit, but beneath it he is his sensual, untamed self.


The same contradiction is present here. Jimmy is wearing a suit in the same sleek brown and white, but the jacket's off and he's sitting on a hot car (hot in no small part because he's on it) with his hair messed up as usual. In so many pictures, the background color seems selected to set off the modern, clean colors of his clothing--in this picture, that is done by the cream car and the brown thing sticking up in the back. Also see the lace up boots, which add a rugged touch to the outfit.

This picture is hard to see, but it does show a few things. As elegant a shot as it may be, the modern coloring is all that saves Jimmy from looking like a near tramp. That and the fact that the clothes he is wearing are actually very nice...just wrinkled and very casually put together.



See the clean line of the black t-shirt, the contrast caused by the sunlight streaming through the odd curtains, the moody look, the unshaven face (you see that SO often now), and the messy eyebrows. He looks properly untouched up--but considering how different most men in the fifties were styled up for photos, this was probably a more offbeat shot. Have you ever seen Cary Grant this way? I haven't even seen Marlon Brando like this. I can't think of anybody famous before James Dean who posed so naturally--and by natural I mean without the dressings and stiffness of a typical movie star.

To finish it off, here are four photos of James Dean that I believe show four sides of his image that were important to his success:

The Tough Rebel

The No-Explanation-Necessary

The Vulnerable Little Boy Lost

And The Gorgeous Face

(the very, very gorgeous face)