Life is a Cabaret!

NOTE TO SELF: Buy new lashes.

Friends, it's finally here:

 

On Friday, January 27 @ 7 pm and Saturday, January 28 @ 9:30 pm, Michael and I will be performing our cabaret show, Noah's Very Unusual Insight, for a return engagement!

Below is a short preview of this tuneful (and topical) show, and there's so much more, including two brand new musical numbers: a Jerry Herman ballad sung by yours truly and a rousing duet familiar to fans of Gypsy and/or the Family Frolic Night episode of The Brady Bunch. 

You'll laugh, you'll cry -- it is SO much better than Cats.

Tickets are $15/$10 for seniors + a 2-drink minimum. (The Duplex is at 61 Christopher Street & Seventh Avenue in Manhattan.   Click here to make reservations (you don't have to pay until the night of the show).

Hope you can make it,  and be sure to stay after and say hello to me if you do!

Have a great day, everybody!

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Peter's Fashion Forecast for 2012!

Readers, imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon the book Fashion Trends: Analysis and Forecasting by Eundeok Kim, Ann Marie Fiore, and Hyejeong Kim at my local library yesterday.  Talk about synchronicity! 



I eagerly paged through it and discovered it to be about as dry as a fashion-related book can be, though, granted, it's a textbook.  If this doesn't turn students off fashion trend analysis nothing will. 





There's a dirty little secret buried at the end of this book (p. 153) and it's quite the eyebrow raiser: "...most U.S. retailers experience large errors in their sales forecasts, resulting in dramatic financial losses. According to the U.S. Census Bureau and National Retail Federation, U.S. retailers are losing more than $200 billion a year due to forecast errors (Kumar & Patel, 2008).

Yes, folks, $200 billion.  What does that tell you about the success of fashion forecasting?

My hunch is that if I told you to dig around the Internet and come up with ten likely fashion trends for Fall 2012, you could do it by tomorrow morning.  You don't need a Ph.D. and you can skip Fashion Trends: Analysis and Forecasting.  You need to be creative, observant, confident in your choices, and able to justify them.



Let's face it, nobody knows for sure what's going to happen tomorrow, whether it's in economics, politics, or fashion.  But decisions need to be made today and forecasting gives us the confidence and -- when necessary (like when sales suck) -- provides a justification, so we don't lose our jobs.

It's not our fault -- Pantone predicted Tangerine Tango!

The truth is that people who need clothes are largely going to be limited to what's in the stores.  They'll have to buy something, so if they're told that the big color is orange and that's what they see, they're going to buy orange.  They may prefer red, but if there's no red to be had, they won't be buying red.  Which helps to justify our choice of orange.  If orange doesn't meet expectations, though, we can always blame it on the economy, the weather, or bloggers.

It's like American presidential campaigns.  By the time elections happen, we're choosing between two people we can't stand, neither of whom will represent our interests.  But if we're going to vote, this is the choice we have, and invariably a vote in favor of candidate A or B will be interpreted as a mandate for his or her positions, though it's nothing of the kind.

Just as it's no surprise that relatively few people end up voting, it's shouldn't be a shock to discover that a growing number of people today are shopping in thrift stores, making their own clothes, and snubbing their noses at fashion forecasting.  They've dropped out of the "fashion system" and are doing their own thing or whatever their immediate peer group is doing.  Or the opposite of that.

Friends, here are my five fashion predictions for 2012.  I invite you to add some of your own, below.

1) Women and men will continue to wear tight jeans.  In fact, the big word for 2012 is denim.  Does this sound a lot like last year's prediction, and the year before that?  Surprise!

2) Men will increasingly adopt the late Nineteenth Century prospector look.  Plaid vests, tight pants, suspenders, long underwear, high laced boots, wire frame granny glasses, and shaggy beards.  Fashion forward types will blacken a few teeth.

3) Vintage-inspired fashion will continue to grow in popularity.   Mad Men-inspired dressing will wane, as young people rediscover Here's Lucy and The Mother's In-Law on DVD.  It's all about 1968!

.


4.  BIG colors for Fall 2012:  Dusty Rose (think Cathy's Forties coat) and Teal (because Michael says so).  If not Fall 2012, maybe Fall 2013.  Anyway, it will happen eventually so don't be caught behind the trend.







5.  Black is the new black.  Yes, black is back, and will replace navy, tan, and gray as the neutral du jour.  Expect to see black in men's swimsuits, men's and women's shoes, women's pants, and men's formal wear.   Plus all-things funeral-related.  A return to the classics!

Readers, I think that's enough forecasting for now -- I don't want to overwhelm you, or myself.

Please tell us about the trends you're seeing in your neck of the woods and what you predict for the coming year.  Should anyone be investing in day-glo at this point?  And after Tangerine Tango...what?

Of course, please (briefly) share why you believe your predictions are likely to come true.  Be creative!

Have a great day, everybody!

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The Demise of Dainty

Friends, whatever happened to dainty?

I am talking about the word dainty, used not to describe a porcelain tea set, but rather to describe women and all things female.


 



Just so we're all on the the same page, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word dainty as marked by delicate or diminutive beauty, form, or grace.  

Between the World Wars,  dainty became synonymous with "feminine hygiene" -- itself a rather dainty way of saying clean genitals.



Dainty was always an ideal; nobody's born dainty.

For decades it was a way to connote a certain kind of fragile beauty, a frilly femininity -- all ruffles, posies, and sweet smiles.  But, perhaps as a backlash, it eventually took on a negative meaning, synonymous with prissy, fussy, and fastidious, and is more likely to be used as a put-down today.

A very dainty Forties dress pattern.

Soprano singing star Jane Powell was the quintessence of Forties daintiness -- pretty (but not sexy), petite, and not too pushy -- in films like A Date With Judy.



Elizabeth Taylor started out as dainty, playing a fragile, sweet-tempered ingenue in Cynthia at age sixteen.  Just a few years later, however, in A Place in the Sun, a more voluptuous, confident Elizabeth represented something much more dangerous and decidedly less dainty.

 


Let's fact facts: nobody in the West expects women to be dainty anymore and perhaps that's a good thing.  There was something repressive about the very concept of dainty that denied women their own strength and sexuality.

But there was something optimistic about dainty, too, something youthful and appealingly innocent.

In 1945, Jeanne Crain, playing an Iowa farm girl (top pic) in the film State Fair. could sing, longingly:
 
I keep wishing I were somewhere else,
Walking down a strange new street.
Hearing words that I have never heard,
From a man I've yet to meet.

Eighteen years later we had the hip-swiveling bombshell Ann-Marget, playing a suburban teenager in Bye Bye Birdie crooning:

There are men of nineteen or twenty
Who are suave and reckless and true
Older men who give a girl plenty
I've gotta a lot of livin' to do

And we knew exactly what kind of livin' she was talking about.  Dainty was seriously endangered.

Today, Britney Spears, croaks the double-entendre'd:

If I said my heart was beating loud
If we could escape the crowd somehow
If I said I want your body now
Would you hold it against me.

Britney is to dainty what Agent Orange is to the California redwoods.

What a journey we've traveled in a just a few generations!
 

Even Walt Disney studios, which did more to extend the life of dainty than any other filmmaker, with its shiny re-tellings of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, all scrubbed of their gruesome bits, replaced the warbly, uber-dainty soprano sound of it's heroines (think Snow White) with a more confident Broadway-style belt (think The Little Mermaid).  Dainty went the way of the dodo.

Readers, just what killed off dainty?  I can identify a number of factors, none by themselves the proverbial nail in the coffin, but all contributing to dainty's (unavoidable) demise:  

a) World Wars I & II, which forced women into traditionally male roles;

b) The pill, which disconnected sex from the fear of pregnancy; 

c) Marilyn Monroe, whose joyful sexual expressiveness was a direct attack on the delicate, dainty ideal; 



d) Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita, which revealed that a dainty facade may be just that, a facade; 

e) Films like Rebel Without a Cause, that presented young people of both sexes as alienated from the adult world, and depicted them as multidimensional beings as opposed to sunny songbirds.

In closing, readers, is dainty something you ever aspired to be, or were taught you should be?

Is dainty truly dead, or does it live on in the cultural crevices: Disney princesses, Barbie pink, and Casey's Elegant Musings?

In your opinion, when we dumped dainty, did we throw out the baby with the bathwater, or was it good-bye and good riddance?    Do you ever feel nostalgic for dainty?

Speak up, Ladies (and Gents), but please, don't shout.

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Dress Silhouettes Gone Wrong + POLL!

 

Readers, do you believe in objective truth?  Do some ideas live in the universal mind and transcend both history and geography?  Are some concepts simply not up for discussion? 

I believe that, despite changing fashion trends and cultural differences, the human eye finds -- and has always found -- beauty in the natural silhouette of the human body, and humans have chosen to attire themselves in garments that closely echo that silhouette.  There are different body shapes, certainly, but the differences are relatively minor.



When we examine women's fashion of the last hundred years or so, we find that fashion has often followed or sought subtly to enhance, the natural lines of the body.  But we also discover trends in which the "ideal" silhouette presented is in conflict with the body's natural shape, putting the waist at the hips, say, or the shoulders as high as the earlobes.  Worse, "fashion" has sometimes reshaped the body into no clearly identifiable shape at all!  This is all likely due to the fashion industry's need to increase sales, a desire among fashion designers to court controversy, and downright misogyny.







While no doubt considered the height of fashion at the time, we often revisit these silhouettes in horror.  How could we have been so stupid not to see what is (now) so obvious?

Friends, today I would like to share a group of such dress patterns with you.  Depending on your age and eyesight, some of these dresses may look appealing.  Rest assured, these patterns were not chosen arbitrarily, but rather derived from a complicated algorithm.  This is science, not opinion.

Below are a few highlights.  You can view the grouping in its entirety here.  Occasionally, one view on the pattern envelope may look acceptable.  Discount that and seek out the view that is a nightmare -- it's there.











As you can see, the biggest culprit here is the ruffle.  This detail, used sparingly on an apron edge or petticoat hem, may charm.  Used in excess however, or intentionally applied to a part of the body where gathered fullness distorts our natural human proportions into something freakish, they are an embarrassment.

Unless you are 1) square dancing, or 2) reenacting the Charles and Diana wedding, please use ruffles sparingly.  (Infant-wear excluded.)

Another blemish on the fashion world is the effort to impose exaggerated geometry on the human (primarily female) body.  Few of us are truly rectangular, and yet in the 1980s, many dresses might just as well have been cardboard boxes, perhaps with Old Gold written across the front.





These patterns look wrong because they were wrong -- wrong according to taste, truth, and a very sophisticated algorithm I cannot share with you.

Finally, there is the attempt to create the panted version of every dress, no doubt in an attempt to court the casual, comfort-minded consumer, regardless of what the result might look like.  I can only say ugh, or rather ugg-a-wugg.







In closing sophisticated readers, do you agree with the basic thrust of my argument (and my top-secret algorithm)?  Can you see how attempts to distort the natural shape of the human body fail every time, and are met with little more than derision in hindsight?  Are you hiding any vintage nightmares in your closet?

Please complete the following poll:



NOTE: An ugly rumor has been circulating in the blogosphere to the effect that I hate orange.  I do not hate orange.  On me, it is an atrocity, but if you like it, more power to you.  Tangerine Tango, on the other hand, may end up being the Eighties knee-ruffle of tomorrow.

What is your favorite silhouette and are giant shoulder pads and parachute pants involved?

Jump in!

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More on Color Forecasting, etc.

Friends, I know you're eager to continue yesterday's discussion about Tangerine Tango, not to be confused with Clementine Clog Step,  Satsuma Slide, or Kumquat Gavotte.

Amateur sleuth that I am, I decided to do some online research to see just how deeply Tangerine Tango has penetrated the American consumer market.  Answer: not very.  First, I made a beeline for the Lord & Taylor dress department, well, actually the LordandTaylor.com dress department, where I looked at tiny photos of hundreds of women's dresses.  I found virtually nothing in anything even close to Tangerine Tango.  In fact, judging by Lord & Taylor, the big colors are purple, emerald, and other jewel tones -- no citrus fruit at all.

Even when you search specifically under orange, the closest I found was a cute little one-shoulder polyester dress in Papaya.

Here's what I think: a Lord & Taylor buyer with a head on her shoulders realized that if she jumped on the Tangerine Tango bandwagon, there'd be a lot of rotting fruit on the racks come Spring.  Surely store buyers must recognize that orange is a difficult color for most -- most -- people and much more suitable for the cheap accessory than the big purchase.

Other than Clio, who looks good in orange?  I want names, people, names.

I also did a search under orange appliance in the Home & Kitchen section of Amazon.  There wasn't much.  You can get a tangerine (though not Tangerine Tango) classic Kitchenaid mixer for a few hundred dollars (see top pic), but they offer a wide array of colors, not just orange.

I looked over at the Bed, Bath & Beyond website and it's slim pickings in orange -- a plastic pitcher here, a Bodum coffee maker there.  Usually the orange you do see is that late-Nineties iMac orange (remember those candy-colored computers of yore?).  Most definitely not Tangerine Tango.



Moving right along, I realized that I actually do know someone in the field of fashion/color forecasting, a man I met a book launch event last fall who happens also to be a well-known paper doll enthusiast and illustrator.  I am going to reach out to him and find out more about color forecasting.  I may wait till the dust dies down on yesterday's post in which I basically trash the forecasting field, however.

In other news...

You may have noticed that a few things have changed in the Comments section of this blog in the last few days.  You now have the option to respond directly to a specific comment.  I invite you to use this feature, though please treat each other with kindness -- not all of us are writing in our native language.  Avete capito? 

I must return to sewing before I forget how.  This Twenties dress, straight out of a Clara Bow movie, is high on my list.



Finally, now that we're into 2012, I have made my first sewing-related purchase!

It is the Couture Techniques Workshop Basics with Claire Shaeffer DVD.  Are you familiar with it?  As much as I like to read about sewing -- and I still intend to review the revised edition of Claire Shaeffer's book Couture Sewing Techniques -- I really love to have things shown to me.  (It was the Margaret Islander Shirtmaking DVD, a bootleg copy of which I was given by someone whose anonymity I will respect as the original costs a fortune, that taught me how to sew my first successful men's shirt, and I've watched that DVD, easily, fifty times or more.  I love her.)

Do you like sewing videos?

Friends, that's it.  Those with time on your hands, where can we find Tangerine Tango today?  Bloomingdales?  Macy's?  Kmart?  Please do some research and report back.

Have a great day, everybody!

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The Wacky World of Color Forecasting

Before I get started, why does current fashion illustration make women look like Bratz dolls?  I don't like it one bit.

Moving right along...

Friends, how much do you know about color forecasting?  I don't know much, but you'd have to live on Mars not to have heard that Pantone's official Color of the Year for 2012 is Tangerine Tango, aka orange.  (You can read more about it here.)  I hate to sound grumpy -- I am still recovering from my weekend cold -- but I was "over" that color ten seconds after seeing it; to me it screams Guantanamo Bay prisoner jumpsuits. 

Why should we care about a Color of the Year?  Is there a food of the year we eat to the exclusion of others?   (2012 -- Year of the Pickle!)  The beauty of sewing our own clothes is that we're free of the limitations of what's available at the stores and all this forecasting drivel.  We don't have to dig through racks of Tangerine Tango stuff in search of something that's actually flattering or that ten million other people aren't wearing.  (Read this in your best robot voice, arms extended like zombie: Must. Wear. Orange.  Must. Wear. Orange.)

In this day and age, when every kind of authority is being questioned (with good reason), why does color forecasting still hold sway?  My understanding is that many different industries pay big bucks to the companies that do color forecasting.  Color choices have to made for all sorts of things: appliances, carpeting, wallpaper, car interiors, makeup -- the list goes on and on -- and nobody wants to be off trend.  When I was growing up in the early Seventies, appliances were all avocado and harvest gold, avocado and harvest gold: phones, mixers, refrigerators, kitchen tile, plastic dinnerware, paper napkins, etc.  This was not coincidence, but the result of color forecasting.

I had to dig, but I finally located this old Milliken "Fashion Colors for 1971" booklet I found years ago.  It presents an evocative theme for the colors Milliken would be producing (in textiles) that year.   The overall palette is the American Southwest, with groupings of colored swatches labeled "Grand Canyon," "Indian Brights," "Painted Desert," etc.





It's not so much the individual colors, but rather the color combinations that are remarkable -- I remember them so well from childhood clothes I owned or from TV shows.  You find them in old sewing pattern envelope art too.  Do any of them feel familiar? 

The Brady Bunch looking very "Sierra Sands" with a hint of "Painted Desert."

Then, just as now, colors were given provocative new names consistent with the fashion "story" they were meant to tell.  Just as orange is now Tangerine Tango, in 1971, Milliken called its vibrant red War Paint.  The Native American population was thrilled.

More Milliken color samples pics here.

So I ask you: as sewers, how much attention, if any, do you pay to color forecasts like the one from Pantone?   When I saw the men's forecast for Spring 2012, I couldn't relate in the least.  The descriptions of the colors themselves are so banal and the color choices....you won't find me in Starfish (aka beige), rest assured.  To me this whole forecasting idea seems very played out and Twentieth Century.  Do you agree? 

In closing, when you hear a color is Color of the Year, does that make you run toward it or away from it -- screaming?

Anybody have additional insights into this industry they wish to share?

Have a great day, everybody!

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On "Famous Frocks" and sewing books in general

Friends, I'm happy to report that I'm feeling much better and was able to make it to the library yesterday, where I happened upon a copy of the new sewing book Famous Frocks by Sara Alm and Hannah McDevitt.  Are you familiar with it?



I rarely find sewing books at the library, not that I look for them much.  I own a ton already and have leafed through even more, but I find that for my current level of sewing -- which I'd categorize as intermediate, whatever that really means -- there isn't much new; the masters remain the masters. And let's face it, 90% of what a sewist is ever going to need to know can be found in the highly untrendy Reader's Digest Complete Guide to Sewing.  Am I wrong?

More experienced sewers are already committed to their craft and don't need a strong hook to lure them into a book purchase, or expect a book to come with patterns included.  And they probably already own too many (books and patterns).

But demographics change and a new generation of sewers demands its own sewing books, and why not?  But to judge from many of the new sewing books, the focus today is on making sewing fun.  I have a lot of thoughts about why this is the case, but I'll save that for another post.

So I borrowed Famous Frocks and had a look. 

It's much easier to criticize other people's work than to create your own, readers, and a lot of how a book ends up is beyond the author's control.  That said, as much as I wanted to love Famous Frocks, I was a little disappointed.  Here's why and I'll be specific.



The title and subheading of this book are a bit misleading.  The authors choose 10 celebrities with highly identifiable (some to the point of banality) signature looks (Jackie, Audrey, Marilyn, Twiggy: all present and accounted for).  The book includes a paper pattern reinterpreting (i.e. simplifying) each iconic look.  Included too is a slight variation for each look/dress.



While Jackie's signature A-line is attributed to Oleg Cassini, Audrey's LBD to Givenchy, and Marilyn's Seven Year Itch dress to William Travilla, no designer is mentioned for Bette Davis, although Orry-Kelly and Edith Head played a huge role in creating her onscreen wardrobe.  Am I being too picky?  No designer is mentioned with regard to Twiggy either.   Shouldn't a book entitled Famous Frocks either mention all the frock's original designers, or the designers behind the icon's famous look?

Farrah Fawcett is shown in what is referred to as a wrap dress, "likely inspired by none other than Diane von Furstenberg."  Notice anything unusual about this wrap dress, eagle-eyed readers?





Whoops, it's a shirtdress.  Anyway, Farrah's hair was iconic, and the book includes a wrap dress pattern, which I think most people prefer to a shirtdress these days anyway.

The book contains no photographs of its patterns sewn up, just leggy illustrations, which may have had more to do with budget constraints than anything else, but I think the book really suffers for it.



You can see some versions of the finished dresses here, at a website whose URL is buried in the closing acknowledgments.  (I think some of them are cute, actually.)  Much is made about uploading your own versions to famousfrocks.com.   Obviously, something went wrong.





Like so many sewing books I've seen lately, Famous Frocks seems primarily targeted at the young female Project Runway fan who'd like to learn to sew her own clothes.  That's why there's a glossary with terms like baste and gather.  And why pretty much all the outfits lean toward the slim 'n' sexy.   



For someone like that this book could be inspiring and fun.  I know I'm not the target audience.  But would someone who wanted to dress like mid-Eighties Madonna also want to dress like Rita Hayworth or Twiggy?

One last pet peeve: I find some version of this in many contemporary sewing books with regard to using vintage patterns and it's here as well:

With vintage patterns, sizing and fit is always an issue...

ALWAYS?  Now as then, if your measurements match those of your pattern, the garment should fit.  If not -- which is more the rule than the exception -- you're going to have to make some alterations to the pattern.  Sometimes, true, patterns of yore (especially Fifties-era patterns) assumed you'd be wearing different undergarments than those popular today, which would enhance the final look and affect the fit of the garment, but there's a modern version available today of virtually everything grandma wore.  Or just adjust the fit.

You can see more pics of Famous Frocks here.

Finally, my dream sewing book, which isn't really a sewing book at all:

A highly experienced costumer, perhaps with the aid of a writer, deconstructs a series of actual dresses or gowns from Hollywood's Golden Age -- perhaps from a private collection; they don't have to be iconic, though ideally we would be able to track the costume to a specific film and performer -- and shows, in extreme detail, precisely what techniques were involved, specifically what materials, shortcuts, and so forth, maybe even how the design was intended to flatter or camouflage the person's body.  That is a book I'd buy.  

Any thoughts about favorite or not-so-favorite sewing books you wish to share?

Go for it!

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