New York Times on thrift style

The article in today's (Dec 28/2013) online issue of the New York Times contains some wonderful insights on the allure of thrifted clothing.  Macklemore's song an end of the year anthem?

This excerpt refers to "D.I.Y. solipsists" who are "curating" our "selves" through the stuff we assemble:

"It was “Thrift Shop,” of course, the ode by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis to the democratic joys of the bargain bin, where “one man’s trash is another man’s come-up.” For a generation of digital natives accustomed to ransacking the Internet for goods and ideas floating free from a contextual matrix, “Thrift Shop” was more than a chart topper. It was a metaphor.

We live in a thrift shop culture, compelled by daily, hourly and constantly refreshed trips to the Goodwill outlet that is the web. There we find all the stuff for assembling the “curated” selves who experts say are the new American trendsetters, D.I.Y. solipsists. Like Macklemore, we repurpose, we mash up, we grab things off the sale rack and try it on for size.

Nowhere was this clearer in 2013 than in the evolution of style. Despite the best efforts of luxury-goods manufacturers and their attendant lap-dog press, fashion seemed to have mislaid the capital “F.”

Lee Miller

In  New York City in late November, I happened to walk by the Rizzoli bookstore and wandered in. It's not in its original location, but it still feels very much like an old world bookstore, the kind of space in which one wants to linger and finger the pages of books. I picked up a book on photographer Lee Miller, which I thought my younger daughter Clara and I could share.

Clara has read it and now it's my turn. The question of female beauty has arisen, I see her as athletic and wholesome, but also a cross between Catherine Deneuve and Greta Gerwig. But what I like the most of course are the clothes and the poses. 

The fact that she was both in front of the camera and behind it is also intriguing. 

  in front …  

… and behind the camera

                                                                                                   

Becky Conekin, the author of the book on Miller and fashion, attempts to analyze this paradox, and attempts to understand the possibility of a woman making herself the object of the gaze.  I'm not sure that Conekin succeeds in her interpretation. But it doesn't really matter. This book is a fun fashion book and a biography of a woman who had an extraordinary life. 

This photograph, taken during World War II to promote the use of safety gear during German bombings of London, summarizes for me at least the disappearance of a border between aesthetics (surrealist inspired in this case), commodification (of clothing, not just as practical but also as fashionable and trendy) and propaganda (we can defend ourselves against the enemy). Furthermore the photograph is very modern. By modern I mean that it is not only timeless, but it sets the style for fashion photography for decades to come. Fashion photography is attractive not only because it commodifies the clothes. That would be predictable and boring. But because it also surprises the viewer with poses, accessories, lighting, backdrops and special effects (with the advent of photoshop) that make the viewer dream of another reality. At the risk of sounding like a Roland Barthes wannabe, I will stop and let the images speak for themselves.  

Back and foreword

I spent the Thanksgiving holiday in New York City, as mentioned in a previous post. I finally uploaded the photo of my friend Laure in a consignment shop on West Broadway in Soho. I don't have a photo of the skirt she ended up purchasing, and this sweater, albeit lovely, had a tying system that became too complicated.

The end of a calendar year is a good time to purge -- which means cleaning out closets and filling bags with stuff to bring to consignment shops and thrifts stores. It's also a good time to look back and look forward. I look back on a tumultuous year for many people, and I look foreword to a more peaceful year, pared down to its most essential elements.

young bohemians

Another blog I just came across via Sally Jane: It Girl, Rag Doll
Great clothes, inspiring outfits!

New thoughts on old clothes

I just spent Thanksgiving in New York City where I reconnected with my daughter Clara whose clothes come mainly from the Salvation Army.

This outfit is made up of hand me downs and aforementioned finds at a West Side Salvation Army store.

I visited her in her new neighborhood in Bushwick, Brooklyn, reachable by M train, an elevated subway train that harkens back to the New York of the 1940s and 50s, including, free of charge, a slow and slightly bumpy ride through Williamsburg and Bedford Stuyvesant.

                                 

I also went to the New Museum on the Bowery in Lower Manhattan where I couldn't help but notice the number of men wearing colorful sneakers,  suede shoes and leather booties. 

I'm not sure how I feel about this male fashion statement. Perhaps I just need to get used to it. 

It's December, drab, grey, cold, and depressing. Back home in New Hampshire, when I'm feeling bored and blue, I cruise ebay looking at Coach bags. Harlow's vintage web site popped up, with a lovely red bag

 as well as  this wonderful little video…

a very inspiring documentary about older women in the UK

fabulous fashionistas

what is vintage?

Here is somebody who wrote a nice piece on that very question. Well worth a read...

http://sociallifeof2ndhandclothes.com/2013/05/27/is-it-vintage-retro-or-secondhand-identify-that-retrorama-dress/

Guys like used clothes too

I have not deliberately excluded men from this blog. Men who take their time shopping for clothes have only just recently surfaced into my life. One is my office neighbor Scott who one day was wearing this lovely tweed jacket.

The lining on the jacket is a wonderful golden silk, and the pink tie goes beautifully well with the sylvan green.
Another male friend who enjoys shopping for clothes in second hand shops is Davide from Italy. On a recent trip to Montreal, he ended up in the exact same shop as I had, in Outremont, where he purchased this coat, made at the Woonsocket woolen mills in  Rhode Island.

On his final day of his visit to New Hampshire, I asked him if he would be interested in my old Barbour raincoat. I loved that raincoat, but because it was a man's size, the arms were too long and I always had to roll up the sleeves.  He tried it on, and it fit him to a tee. I was so pleased to pass that Barbour on to somebody who clearly was very excited to become its next owner!

People travel, clothes travel too. I wish people would place a map inside the pocket of a coat that they have traveled with and are leaving at a consignment shop, just to keep the story going. Woonsocket to Montreal to Italy. England to New Hampshire to Italy. To...….?

 Finally, there is my new "coinquilino" and colleague Jonathan, in a Filson jacket he found on sale in Italy. Not used, but still a classic find that he will likely wear for a long time. 

Young New York City feminists

I spent a quick weekend in New York City with my daughter Clara and her friend Jasmine who introduced me to the young feminist scene at a book reading on Prince Street. I had never heard of Chris Kraus, but now I am intrigued. I would like to unearth the rivalry between the two Simones she refers to in her book, Simone de Beauvoir and Simone Veil.

This blog began with pseudo feminist musings on clothing as merchandise that could be exchanged outside the normal monetary circuit. But thinking about the two Simones, and what they would say about our clothes obsessed culture, I have to assume that the recent fire in a clothes factory in Bangladesh that killed over one thousand workers would outrage the left leaning blue collar sympathizing Veil. Meanwhile, de Beauvoir would just shrug it off as another excess from the decadent capitalists, while readjusting her turbaned head.
We must stop buying clothes at dirt cheap prices. I don't want to put Bangladeshis out of work, and there lies the conundrum, I know.  There will always be cheap labor. And there will always be narcissism. And there will always be a desire to escape one's identity and adopt one seen in a photograph somewhere.

Kindred spirit

Over the summer, I met new people who moved into my town. Laura was wearing this incredible necklace made from zippers at an event celebrating the centennial of a "masque" or informal performance that was written and performed by members of the Cornish artists' colony at the beginning of the twentieth century. Glad to have met a new soul mate!

Montreal!

The crossing of Saint-Laurent and Duluth is quite the vintage clothing hub

I just spent five days in Montreal, the city I call the "mistress that never disappoints." I don't know why I don't say "lover." Perhaps it's because I think of Montreal as female, all cities are female in French (LA ville). I go to Montreal about once a year, since it's not that far away from where I live geographically, but it's quite another world from rural New Hampshire.

I rented a studio on the Plateau this time, because I wanted to be very independent and to become a part of the neighborhood. At Fromentin on rue Laurier I did chat quite a bit with the cheese sellers, who were both from France originally, and sampled some exquisite cow's milk and goat's milk (locally produced) wonders.

The tiny restaurant "La Sardine" on rue Fairmount, the heart of Mile End

rue Laurier on the Plateau

Montreal is also bicycling heaven, with the bike share system known as BIXI scattered everywhere. I took full advantage of the BIXI hub located just outside my apartment, and biked all over, enjoying the safety of the dedicated lanes.

One afternoon, as I was plopping my credit card into the slot of the BIXI machine in order to release a bike, I noticed to my horror that someone had forgotten theirs. Knowing that Montrealers love to help each other out, I simply asked a passer by for advice. He advised me to look for the nearest bank, which meant heading west to Saint-Denis. While waiting for the "lumière" to change (the French say "feu" or fire, the Québécois use the anglicized "light"), I asked another bicyclist where the nearest "Desjardin" bank branch was located. She sent me to Saint-Laurent, but there was no teller service, just the machines. Again I asked someone using the machines where the nearest branch was, and he sent me to Outremont. 

With my trusty BIXI bike in tow, I zipped over to rue Bernard, the main shopping artery of Outremont, but also the most ethnically diverse street in North America, where tatooed hipsters share the sidewalk with Hasidic mothers and their tots, Hasidic men in their archaic garb, regular folks like you and me, beggars, not to mention the bourgeoisie that make up a big part of this very mixed neighborhood. My Montreal friend Sylvie told me that there are three Outremont, "Outremont ma chère, Outremont cachère et Outremont pas cher" (the translation loses the pun but here it goes: "Outremont my dear, as in expensive, kosher Outremont, and cheap Outremont). After dropping off the abandoned credit card at the Desjardin branch on rue Bernard, I also left the Bixi bike at the nearest hub, and began the long walk back to the apartment. 

A vintage store grabbed my attention immediately, and I thought that perhaps this whole ordeal with the abandoned credit card was some greater power's way of leading me inside this lovely place where everything was on sale.

I picked up a yellow and grey striped shirt and a red cotton wrap dress, nice comfortable clothes to finish out the summer.

*****

For good measure, I photographed the line of vintage shops on Saint-Laurent, but honestly, the atmosphere in that neighborhood has become a bit too studenty/ honky tonk. I much prefer the quieter, more subdued atmosphere of the Mile End district, adjoining Outremont and the Plateau. 

Summer day trips

Two friends and I traveled to Williamstown and North Adams, MA to visit the Clark Art Institute   and the Mass MOCA.


At the Clark, they have shawls for people who might be cold from the air conditioning, rather an unusual offering for a museum. At Mass MOCA we were treated to quite the maze of exhibits, including three floors of Sol LeWitt, and two gigantic birds made out of industrial waste.

It wasn't until I got home and downloaded this photo on my computer, taken in Wilmington, Vermont, on our way to Marlboro for the music festival, that I realized that I was wearing consignment clothing. I tried to dress comfortably, and once again consignment clothing came in quite handy. The shirt is from a consignment shop in Angoulême France, and is a "Comptoir des Cotonniers" brand. The linen skirt is from a new consignment shop on West Broadway in Soho, New York City. The sweater I bought on sale at the Gap years ago. I like the way it brightens up an otherwise darkish outfit.

Normally I would have worn my new bad assed Doc Martens sandals that I had brought back from Portland, Oregon. But somehow, they're like boa constrictors because they seem to progressively tighten up around the front of the foot. So I opted for sneakers instead.

We ended up having a light supper in Wilmington, Vermont, before finishing the day at the Marlboro Music Festival. While watching people file into the auditorium, I caught a glimpse of a tall older woman whom I had spotted back at the Clark earlier that day. I want to make a blog entry that consists of older women who know how to pull together an outfit that makes age look elegant. Her silver hair was cropped at the neck, she wore a loose linen blouse and white pants if I remember correctly. I think she also had a shawl. Bill Cunningham  remarks that air conditioning is dictating fashion. Hence my red sweater...

Phone étiquette

I want to take a moment and publically apologize to the caller who identified himself as the “dishwasher installer” and who had misdialed and ended up with me on the other end of the line. I have caller id, and this phone call was labeled “cell user” or something of that sort. I was expecting a call from a friend and thought that it might be her. Instead it was a man who very politely identified himself immediately, and was not familiar to me. I asked him whom he was trying to reach, and he gave me my exact phone number except that it was off by one digit. Which I told him and then proceeded to hang up while he was still apologizing for the mix up.

That’s when I realized that I had just hung up on him. In the ensuing silence, I did some soul searching. Why was I in such a hurry to get off the phone with this man? Was something burning on the stove or in the toaster? No! I’m becoming exasperated with phone calls coming from people who want to sell me something, and phone calls coming from recordings. I am becoming very frustrated with my life being interrupted by a device that used to serve a social purpose and now seems to serve almost exclusively a commercial one.

I was also exasperated because coincidentally my cell phone – a device I seldom use – which had previously arrived by mail from our cell company with the requirement that we use it and dispose of the older one, this very cell phone which had been imposed upon me with no consultation from me, was refusing to charge because the USB plug was damaged from overuse. The USB plug was damaged from overuse because this new replacement phone, imposed on me by the cell phone company,  required constant charging since it wouldn’t hold its charge for very long. The phone it had replaced could hold a nice long charge, and had other nice advantages as well.

My overall exasperation with phones might explain why I am losing the very phone etiquette the dishwasher installer had when he apologized for dialing the wrong number. The old land line serves no purpose but to annoy me with phone calls from people I don’t want to talk to or can’t talk to because they're on a recording. The rare times that a real human that I do want to talk to ends up on the other end of the line, I am almost surprised that they are actually there.

Pretty soon we will all have abandoned our land lines and switched over entirely to cell phones. I can consider myself one of the fortunate ones, having lived to see the rotary phone -- the index finger working the dial, the ear hearing the long and short sounds depending on the number--  replaced by the push button phone -- oh what fun and what speed! “Speed” is a relative concept, especially for someone who felt the excitement of replacing a rotary phone with a push button one.  

Sadly, I have capitulated to the smart phone marketing giants, since I needed to replace the flip phone that wouldn’t charge. I could have resisted the urge, and behaved like a Twenty First Century Luddite by asking for another flip phone. But it seems that everybody has a smart phone now, and the smart phone does present advantages. For instance, while traveling in the middle of Vermont, I borrowed my daughter’s iPhone and was able to respond to an email from my husband who was stranded at a European Airport because of an air traffic controller’s strike. Furthermore, my fellow Luddites might face the day in the not too distant future when they too will be forced to switch to a Smart phone, and flip phones will be added to the ever growing mountain of discarded rotary, push button and cordless phones.

(I do worry though that, during prolonged power outages, our cell phones will cease to work because they will have lost their charge, and with land lines a thing of the past, the old land line phone which used to work beautifully during power outages will no longer provide that much needed connection to the rest of the world). 

What is astonishing is that not only is my phone etiquette being eroded by the new association I make between the ringing of the phone and the likely uselessness of the call, but my faith in the “wonderfulness “ of the market place is being eroded as well, as the “free” market is slowly shifting into a dictatorship of goods whose built in obsolescence has increased exponentially.

Oops, excuse me, I need to get this call…I hope it’s my friend. In any case, I’ll try to be extremely polite. 

Nouveaux Peasants

I purchased the July British edition of "Harper's Bazaar" during a trip to New York City back in June. One of their articles was about the "Nouveau Peasant," an upper-middle class person who prefers to go back to the land during their spare time, or who lives there part to full-time. That would be me. I moved from the city to the country over twenty five years ago, making me more of an "Old Nouveau Peasant." We're called flatlanders by the locals, even if our kids were born and raised in New Hampshire. 

But what does that have to do with vintage clothing? Well, rural living is a matter of style for some, that borrows from old images, like that of English aristocrats in tweeds and Wellies. 

While rolling and stacking tree segments in the woods behind my house on a very hot and humid day, feeling nauseous and dizzy, I tried imagining that what I was doing might actually be chic and glamorous, dressed in an American version of Nouveau Peasant garb (rubber boots, shorts, tee-shirt and baseball cap). Strangely, the idea that what I was doing might actually be "glamorous"  suddenly supplied me with the much needed psychological edge that pushed me to finish the task at hand.  While I stack firewood as a sustainable source of energy, that is all I do that might be considered farming. I have a job that allows me to live comfortably, and buy other people’s meat, cheese, fruit and vegetables. Real farming, as in farming for a living, is very hard work, which requires long days of hard labor, all kinds of equipment and most importantly, the ability to use and maintain it. It is not for the faint of heart, as slaughtering animals or operating dangerous machine are an integral part of real farming. I am grateful for the image of the “nouveau peasant,” but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the people who toil away at getting quality food to our table.

 The much needed chipper showed up early one morning last summer to finally turn a huge pile of branches into mulch. That machine can suck in tree trunks, and, if you're not careful, a human limb or two. 

Clara and her friend Jasmine visit WRJ

Clara is home from NYC for a couple of days. "Home" is not really accurate anymore since she prefers to call NYC home. But oh well. Her sister's graduation was enough of a reason to leave the city for a couple of days. She is here with her artist friend Jasmine, and both prefer to wear vintage clothes, so naturally, I drove them to the vintage capital for the world, White River Junction, Vermont.

After lunch at the Tucker Box Café, 

we headed to the newly opened Schultz Library, associated with the Center for Cartoon Studies. 

                                                                                                                  

Then a little visit to Revolution where Clara found this Issey Miyake knock off...

Her friend Jasmine also picked up a couple of dresses. I found a pair of linen shorts, oversized and super comfy. What a great way to spend the day!