vintage clothes | Phillipa Fioretti

Lily in Lucca

February 17th, 2010

luccaview1

lucca1

lucca21

red-dress

lucca3

robbie8

buccellato

robbie3

soup

2-lucca-roof-tree

robbie7

choc

robbie5

lucca-walls-2

spinch

robbie4

apple_

The Book of Love

January 10th, 2010

booklove4

book-of-loveblog

booklove2

booklove5

booklove3

booklove6

booklove1

booklove7

booklove8

booklove9

Hanging Dresses image via Pony and Pink blogspot
Teacup and Rose image by Annalisa Feleppa

Get Your Cozzy On

December 10th, 2009

cozzies1

swim1

cozzies5

swim3

cozzies2

swim2

cozzies4

swim6

cozzies6

swim4

cozzies7

Torta Caprese

October 25th, 2009

capri3

capri1

capri5

capri2

capri4

capri6

capri7

My mother hoarded magazines. My grandmother hoarded images, art catalogues, menus, postcards, theatre programs and news clippings. In those days there was no Internet, and for my grandmother, no television, and thus printed images were precious. My mother was also a newspaper clipping aficionado and champion magazine hoarder.

I picked up the habit and have carried with me, for the last twenty years, an old cardboard box full of images I like. There is no pattern that dictates inclusion. I just like them or they interest me. So for a bit of an image bowerbird like myself, Google Image is a siren, singing to me of the voluptuous pleasures of time wasting.

As I warmed up for a writing session this morning, (actually I was cunctating, but I like to kid myself), I googled Mary Quant, which led me to Julie Christie which led me to Twiggy (whose images used to scare me) which led me to Veruschka and it all came flooding back. As a child I used to endlessly look at my mother’s Vogue magazines from the 60’s and 70’s and I remember being fascinated with the model Veruschka.

I had to post these images. I’ll save the colour ones because they deserve their own post. I particularly like Veruschka’s self-portrait as an Afghan hound. I would adore to be clothed and made up like a chocolate Labrador. Not as dramatic as a longhaired Afghan, I know, but I’ve always had a personal preference for short sleek fur.

Self portrait Veruschka

Richard Avedon

Self Portrait Veruschka

Richard Avedon and Veruschka

Lily’s Wardrobe

October 7th, 2009

lily6

lily13

lily12

lily14

lily41

lily11

lily7

lily8

lily4

lily2

lily1

lily5

lily3

lily9

All images from Dorothea’s Closet Vintage Archives (see links page)

Camellia Japonica

July 22nd, 2009

b287c

js1973

b428

b261

d254

0505900

10071403

03092159

b410

10071402

20th Century Japanese Woodblock prints via Ukiyoe Gallery

The Girls in Their Summer Dresses

June 23rd, 2009

smallfufu

I love clothes. Not fashion and not necessarily expensive ones, but interesting, unusual clothes that suggest an era or an idea, a country or mood.

I used to wear a bias cut satin slip from the thirties that had been my grandmother’s. I had astrakhan coats and Victorian nightgowns, Chinese silk shirts and nineteen forties silk dresses, heavily beaded cardigans and thick gold Edwardian necklaces, marcasite and bakelite costume jewellery, glorious spotted shirts from the nineteen fifties, sundresses with cinched in waists and flared skirts and a swimming costume with shirring and a halter neck from the fifties, scarves…. masses of them.

I’d go out shopping wearing vintage pyjama tops and carrying knitting bags from the nineteen fifties. I was drawn to my best friend at art school at first because she wore a pair of salad tongs in her long pale hair, and she wore them with incredible style. From across the painting studio I thought, ‘Now there is a girl worth knowing.’

chanel

Many of these lovely things have long since disappeared. Some days I approached my wardrobe in a fury and ruthlessly plucked out the offending items. Because some days, unless your choice is perfect, or you are the fabulous Vivienne Westwood, with vintage clothes you can look like a bag lady.

viv

Vintage clothes are hard to find now at a reasonable price, and I don’t have those long indolent Saturdays to stalk them through the city markets, nor do I have that many opportunities to wear them, as I spend most of my time tapping away in front of the screen wearing what I call ‘slops’ – basically anything draped over the bedroom chair that could still pass for clean.

Despite this cloistered life, I love to see beautifully dressed women. It is my observation that many women over seventy can often put themselves together in a most exquisite way. The clothes of their youth are our vintage clothes. Years ago I saw a woman on a train in Sydney dressed in a black suit, sheer black stockings, a small pillbox hat with black net over her eyes and jet earrings. Her hair was grey, her face distinguished and her expression was that of world-weary detachment. She smoked a cigarette in a languid manner and despite being well over seventy; she bore herself like a lioness. I have never forgotten her, nor my intense desire to stare in admiration, and the lengths I went to, behind my book, to drink in every detail of this woman.

parisian

Perhaps she embodied the essence of what vintage clothes lover’s are after. An attention to detail and a lost glamour. Not the glamour of instant celebrity, paparazzi, and the gangster/whore derivative dressing found in all the retail stores. (Those who have a girl child will know of the frustration at only being able to find outfits a Las Vegas hooker might wear on the job). But a glamour that comes from within one’s self and the attention paid to presenting that self.

I have a dress, bought a long time ago in the Paris flea markets. The dress is pale green and ivory stripes and dotted with sprigs of pale blue and lilac flowers. It’s too fragile to wear now, but when I did wear it I felt myself going for a summer stroll through a Renoir painting.

It had been handmade, perhaps in the nineteen fifties or earlier, sleeveless, with a tight bodice, a little peplum, lined with beige silk and with sewn in cotton lace and tulle petticoats. I had a dressmaker fit it properly and even she cooed and clucked over this pretty confection, marvelling at the hand stitching and the lost loveliness of a home made Parisian dress.

mannikin

Whoever made it must have worn it with pride. Perhaps, as they did in those days, she selected matching shoes and handbag. Or perhaps she wore no shoes with it and simply ran through a poppy filled meadow, her hair flying. Whatever she did, whoever she kissed, and whatever meadow she ran through, it’s in that dress. I see it and it fills me with pleasure.

images

Reading the paintings

April 8th, 2009

John William Waterhouse

“Slowly, she began to engage with the pictures, recognizing the imagery from Classical myths, and the paintings of English painter, John William Waterhouse. In lavish, decorative drapery, his figures portrayed the stories of Orpheus, Circe and Ulysses. And there was poor old Ophelia, holding a dressful of flowers, her eyes pink from crying, ready to hurl herself into the stream, to get away from all the awful men in her life.
She didn’t hear William come back from the bedroom, and had no idea how long he had stood at the doorway watching her, as she sang to herself, while turning pages.”

Circe, John William Waterhouse

“Startled, she rolled over and sat up, then slumped back down as she noted his unsmiling face. She returned to the book, examining a picture of Circe in her red dress. The drapery and jeweled belt fascinated her, if only one could dress like that these days.
‘Good sleep?’ she asked, without looking at him, but she could feel him looking at her.
‘Can I join you?’
She turned her head and looked in astonishment, and he smiled at her. His shirt was rumpled and his hair all messy. She swallowed as she took in his deliciously sleepy appearance. Of course he could join her on the floor, any time he cared to. But she resisted making a quip about them and floors
‘I like looking at pictures.’
She gestured with her arm, ‘My floor is your floor.’
Their shoulders touched as she turned the page.
‘I love this one,’ she said. ‘I used to have a poster of it in my bedroom as a teenager. Hylas and the nymphs.’
‘Why did you like it?’
‘Is that a trick question from an ex academic? Because I can only give you my untrained, tainted by culture, immediate response.’
She stared at him warily. His face was so close, she could see the pores in his skin, smell his sleepy scent. Too close, making her uneasy, he’d push her away in a minute.
‘I don’t mind, I’m not an academic any more. I don’t care whether it’s correct to like, or dislike, something.’
‘I like it because it’s pretty.’ She gasped in mock horror and clamped her hand over her mouth. ‘Don’t tell anyone I said that.’
‘I’ll keep it a secret until I die.’
‘Look at their sweet faces,’ she said, ‘And their pale skin. They had nothing better to do than place flowers in their hair and swim among the water lilies. What a life.’
‘And that appeals to you?’
‘As a teenager, I suppose anything that reeks of indolence is appealing. But no, it was the aesthetic, all these Edwardian paintings attracted me; I used to trail around antique markets with my girlfriends on a Saturday, buying old dresses and bags. We’d read poetry in the afternoon and imagine our lives to be infinitely tragic. I had nothing more tragic in those days than Sports Day, or having to walk home from my friend’s house, instead of getting a lift.’
William rolled onto his side, hand propping up his head, watching her as she turned the pages.
‘Now I feel like her, the Lady of Shallot,’ she said, pointing at the woman about to hurl herself to her death. ‘Now I understand.’
‘She killed herself for unrequited love.’
‘Yes, for the knight, Lancelot.’
‘You’re a Romantic, Lily.’
‘And you William? Who are you?’”

John William Waterhouse

“He flicked through the pages, stopped briefly at Ulysses, struggling with the siren song, but went back to Hylas and his innocent nymphs.
‘They pulled him in, you know. The nymphs pulled him in and he drowned. That picture represents male fear.’
‘Let’s not go there,‘ she smiled. ‘I don’t want you to be horrible to me again.’
‘He drowned in a sensual world of big eyes and white skin.’
‘But he wants to do it, you can tell,’ she murmured, glancing at him and looking back at the picture. ‘He wants to hurl himself in and get amongst all that girl flesh.’
William stood up. ‘It’s a big seller that poster, all of his paintings are,’ he said, ‘They make it all seem so simple.’
‘Myths are, aren’t they?’
‘What?’
‘Simple.’
‘I don’t think so. Anyway, enough of this.’”

Extract from The Book of Love by Phillipa Fioretti, to be published by Hachette Australia in April 2010