Coats (Montgomery Ward, Fall-Winter 1929-30)

 The weather has turned cold.  Happily for me, I have pages of toasty-warm coats from the Montgomery Ward catalog of Winter 1929-30 to feast my eyes on.  And my how very stereotypically 1920s they are!

They're also remarkably similar to each other in design.  Each coat is knee-length, fastens on one side at around hip-level, and has a fur (shawl) collar and cuffs.  (The exception to this is the coat worn by the model near the bottom right: she's dressed in sporty "American Wombat", i.e. sheared lamb!)

The main difference between these coats are the materials they are made of, with the main choices being between All Wool Broadcloth and All Wool Velour.  The furs include Manchurian wolf dog (probably neither wolf nor Manchurian) and dyed coney (i.e. rabbit).  Most of the furs on offer, however, are "Mandel furs"—in other words, sheep skins treated to look like more expensive pelts!

"Myer: Celebrating 100 Years of Fashion" by Stella M. Barber

 No doubt, some of my regular readers will recognise the name "Myer" from my "Lost Department Stores of Australia" series.  That's because it's not only a store that is definitely not lost, but also because it took over (and rebranded) many of the independent stores I've been writing about.

Myer: Celebrating 100 Years of Fashion is a bid of a hybrid.  It is the history of a department store... and it is a history of twentieth century fashion.  To tell you the truth, it is fairly superficial on both topics.  The fashion history looks at the major trends in women's clothing decade-by-decade from 1900 to the early 21st century.  The department store history hits the high points of Myer's story in the same period, with particular emphasis on the selling of fashion.  Thus we learn that Myer had a "Model salon" specialising in haute couture during the 1950s and held fashion parades, without getting much information about either.  The same goes for the Myer Miss Teen Shop and the Myer woollen mills (to name just another couple of examples).

(To be fair, this is clearly meant to be a promotional publication, and the author has written much more detailed books about Myer and members of the Myer family!)

Where Myer: Celebrating 100 Years of Fashion excels, however (and why I bought it) is in the illustrations.  Myer not only has an extensive archive of its own, but has acquired the archives of all the stores it has taken over.  The editors of this book have happily dug into all of this material, reproducing pages from catalogues (not necessarily its own) advertisments, invitations and brochures, photographs of their stores and events, and pictures of models wearing the latest Myer fashions down through the decades.  It's a visual delight!

Myer: celebrating 100 years of fashion / by Stella M. Barber
Woolloomooloo, N.S.W. : Focus Publishing, 2008
ISBN: 9781921156403

"Seasonable Clothing and How It Should Be Made" (Girl's Own Annual March 1882)

 Time to dip into my copies of The Girl's Own Annual again.

First up is "the new petticoat".  Readers familiar with the Victorian era will recognise it as the dawn of the "second bustle era".  For the moment, back fullness is achieved by sewing flounces onto a  petticoat; as the decade progresses more substantial bustles will take its place.

The illustration below is of three up-to-the-minute fashions for March 1882, comprising of (from left to right) a walking costume, a dress made of black satin and silk trimmed with black Spanish lace, and a princesse costume with puffy sleeves and a striped scarf.  The Girl's Own Paper advised that a "drapery at the back" could be substituted for the train worn by the second figure.

This column had much to say on the topic of dress reform, which apparently had been a hot topic in the press recently.  Firstly they strike a patriotic note:

Having read thus far, I paused to think the subject over, and was not long in coming to the conclusion that, not only do English women make use of the woollen fabrics of their own country, but they have been singularly happy originating fashions where they can be used.  The waterproof first, and the ulster afterwards, bear witness to this fact, and in both of these garments the Englishwoman has set the fashion to the world.  For their manufacture no cloth but the English is good, and no makers are so highly thought of.  The same is the case with regard to tailor-made jackets and dresses, and the much maligned Englishwoman was undoubted the original inventor of the famous "Jersey", which gave employment and brought wealth to so many within the last few years.

  

However, they also advise English women to take a leaf out of the Americans' book:

As to the desire for "perpetual change," of which we all stand accused, I think in this perhaps we have something to learn from the Americans, who are singularly conservative in many ways; and when a shape or material has been found to be really good, they use it for years, without ever changing. 

For the rest, The Girl's Own Paper suggest that the dress reform measures that are really needed are the abolition of tight-lacing and the simplification of underwear.  All of which would eventuate in time, but not as the reformers imagined it! 

An Announcement!

 I was looking through my folder of vintage advertising the other day, and decided that I really had more  images than I could ever use up in this blog.

That's why I decided to set up a spin-off blog: Fab Fashions, where I'll be posting scans of fun and funky fashions from the advertising of the 60s and 70s.  

I'm planning on keeping things light, with lots of images and not much in the way of text.

Looking forward to seeing you over there!

Australia's Lost Department Stores III (Farmer & Co., Autumn & Winter 1940)

 Farmer's called its twice-yearly catalogue a "Fashion Book", so it's easy to tell that its main business was selling clothes.

It began in 1840 as a shop on Pitt Street, Sydney, offering "a well selected and fashionable stock of drapery goods".  The store prospered, moved to progressively larger premises over the years and becoming a limited liability company in 1897.  By the beginning of the twentieth century shoppers were visiting a large, six-storey building on the corner of Market and Pitt Streets; a decade later Farmer and Company had acquired land and expanded into adjacent George street.  By 1937 Farmer's was able to boast that its store occupied one and a quarter acres of land!

Lest you think that size was all the Company had to brag about, they also proudly announced an art gallery (the Blaxland Galleries on the eighth and ninth floors of the George Street store), a commercial radio station license (from 1923), escalators (installed 1927) and from 1936, air-conditioning!

The cover of Farmer's Autumn & Winter Fashion Book for 1940 illustrates:

Left: UB40—A casual Swagger Coat, from cosy wool-boucle coating.  This swinging-style features square shoulders and neatly stitched collar.

Right: UB41—Swinging Swagger Coat in a soft, supple-wool coating.  Featuring Peter-Pan collar, square shoulders and four flap pockets.

Centre: LB55—Tailored, knitted Jumper Silk of pure wool.  Features smart straight neckline; yoke is trimmed with two tabs.  Plain, tailored skirt.

Sadly, after the war things didn't go so well for Farmer's.    Among other things, their customers were moving out to the ever expanding suburbs, making it harder for them to get to Farmer's city stores.  Farmer & Company tried following their customers, opening their first suburban branch in Gordon in 1960.   However, that didn't save the business, which was taken over by Myer in Melbourne in 1961.  No longer an independent entity, Farmer's continued trading in Sydney as "Farmer's" until 1976, when Myer re-branded its Sydney stores with its own name.

For those wanting to investigate further, Farmer's Spring and Summer Fashions catalogue for 1897 is available online.

200 Years Ago (Ackermann's Repository, May 1823)

 Pictured below is a:

Cloak or mantle of levantine silk, of flamme de ponche colour; at the bottom are four narrow satin rouleaus, and also round the hood, which is drawn with white satin ribbon: small square standing collar.  The cloak is lined with white sarsnet, and for cool mornings and chilly evenings will be found appropriate and comfortable.

The cloak is worn with a leghorn bonnet "with a plume of white ostrich feathers".  "Leghorn" was a type of straw grown from a particular kind of wheat in Tuscany:

Leghorn bonnets are much in favour for plain walking dress; they are also worn in the promenade, but not so generally as silk and satin.  In the first case, they are ornamented only with ribbons; in the last, with flowers or feathers.