My newest guilty pleasure - Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries - is like Hercule Poirot and Downton Abbey in one with extra feminist undertones in the storyline, and in fashion. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1988386/
Haven't written a proper blog update recently because of many reasons, including a lack of cultural impulses around me, but this week compensated empty days with tons of inspiration more than enough, because it was a week of costume history. But let's start from the beginning...
Like many others I am a fan of Downton Abbey for a while now, and, despite a lack of sophistication in the plot-line of the first season, I became one because of two reasons: a) Dame Maggie Smith playing Violet Grantham, b) all those Edwardian era costumes, beautiful morning and evening dresses by Susannah Buxton.
Next to watching Downton Abbey, I've also had a big inspiration moment because of costume history this summer while visiting Berlin and going to a "Fashioning Fashion" exhibition at the Deutschen Historischen Museum , and reading beautifully published book "Russian Elegance" earlier this year. So somehow costume history became one of my inspirational wells next to classic / ethnic ornaments, that demands more and more of my time but in some indirect way feeds my professional work too.
So having said that, there is no surprise in me googling and "pinteresting" fashion history keywords and searching for new sources of information. As I work at home, listening to lectures (instead of reading articles) makes a lot of sense, so I found this keynote speech "Is Fashion Art?" given by Valerie Steele to mark the opening of the exhibition Reflecting Fashion: Art and Fashion since Modernism at the Mumok (Museum of Modern Art in Vienna), on the website of Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) and I can recommend watching it to everyone who is interested in fashion history professionally or as a hobby, because Valerie Steele describes a chronology and conceptual development of XIX-XX century fashion in very simple terms and also mentions a lot of "keywords" (terms and names) worth googling for deeper knowledge:
Just after listening to this speech one afternoon this week, I've turned on TV set and heard a news story on an opening of an exhibition about fashions of Art Nouveau here in Vilnius. The exhibition is based on a part of massive costume collection by internationally acclaimed costume and set designer as well as fashion historian Alexandre Vassiliev and you can see original work by great masters of "Worth", "Doucet", "Paquin", "Cheruit", "Rouff", "Poiret", "Babani", "Fortuny", and other fashion houses there. I've bought a ticket the next day and gave myself a three hour-long holidays in the land of fashion history. This was the icing on the cake that summed up everything I love in historic costumes.
Those shoes and dresses, perfume bottles and hats, corsets and evening gowns, theater accessories and purses, wedding dresses and men fashions... Some of the dresses were dark, heavy and very "Anna Karenina on her darkest days in windy St.Petersburg", others - pink and light, decorated with fabric flowers, more in spirits of "young and naive Katerina (Kitty) Alexandrovna Shcherbatsky fell in love with a wrong guy", but all of them were spectacular masterpieces. While silently walking and looking to all that, I've heard a little girl, probably age of 6, who was holding her moms hand and dragging her in a fast manner from one dress to the next one and diligently repeating "gorgeous", "gorgeous", "gorgeous", "gorgeous", "gorgeous"<...> "gorgeous" about each and every dress she saw. I have to admit, she told out loud what everyone else in the room were thinking.
xxx
p.s. please leave comments with notes on good costume history sources - books, catalogs, speeches, articles, documentary films, images, archives, pin boards, etc. Thank you.
