• Home
  • Shop
  • Completed Costumes/Impressions
  • Emma and Her Dresses
  • Patterns & Kits
  • Free Patterns and Instructions

Kitty Calash

~ Confessions of a Known Bonnet-Wearer

Kitty Calash

Author Archives: cyclokitty

Rude Boys and Reenactors

06 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by cyclokitty in Frivolous Friday, History, Living History, personal

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

authenticity, Frivolous Friday, London Calling, music, personal, philosophy, punk, the Clash

This morning, the Twitterz provided me with a link I’d missed back in November, to a piece about the Clash’s Vanilla Tapes. I listened to the cut of London Calling, and heard the ways in which it was not the final cut, and thought of authenticity. What a fabled state of grace: authenticity.

You think, if I just get this one thing right, I’ll be done.

portrait as a process test

process test poser portrait

But you won’t. And that’s okay. You’re still not a poser. (That’s an old Chicago punk term that got thrown around the way farb gets thrown around now.)

I’m pretty familiar with the album version of London Calling, but the Vanilla Tape version really reminded me: it’s not a destination, it’s a process.

It can mean taking coats apart and making them over till our eyes bleed. It can mean thinking and rethinking a character.

What matters is the process. I know, how tiresome: it’s the journey not the snow leopard.  But it’s true: what makes history in any expression fun are the questions, the new things to learn.

Yes, I have always like to dress up, and to get my friends to join me.

Yes, I have always liked to dress up, and to get my friends to join me.

I realized, too, that the joy I felt seeing the Clash at the Aragon ballroom none-of-your-business years ago was not unlike the pleasure I get from living history– and that’s not just because of the funny clothes and loud noises, though both sub-cultures share a taste for natty dressing and unusual music.

I find joy in the physicality of living history*, for although a milliners’ shop is no mosh pit, when your  clothes, shoes, and accessories are as right as they can be, you will move and feel differently than you do in your office or workout clothes.

There’s joy for me in the difficulties, too: from Saratoga to cooking, I like a problem to solve, a process to learn.

I’ll never get everything just right: I’ll get closer to right, and the fun is in figuring out how.

 

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Email
  • Twitter

Like this:

Like Loading...

A Visit with the Ladies

25 Friday Jan 2013

Posted by cyclokitty in Clothing, History, Museums

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

1940s, Clothing, family, fashion, history, Museums, personal

The apple never falls far from the tree, my mother used to say, of me and my grandmother, her mother, Elsa. Elsa went to a woman’s college, majored in botany, graduated in the mid-twenties, and went back to western New York State, where she opened an eponymous dress shop.

Elsa, Studio Portait ca 1935

Elsa, Studio portrait ca 1935

Elsa managed that shop for more than 50 years, dressed most of the women in town (or at least the type of woman who knew how to dress, and be dressed), and even dressed a woman who later became a donor to the architectural collection I managed in St. Louis.

She was a controlling woman, no doubt, and carefully managed and cared about her appearance. She was also a lady of a steely, ladder-climbing type native to the 1940s and 1950s, full of the foibles and desires of the daughter of immigrants who spoke Swedish at home. The stories they told about her would make a cat laugh: the day the local radio station called and Elsa answered the phone (on air? That part was never clear) to find out that the household had won a month’s supply of white bread.

“Oh no,” she said. “I don’t believe we care for that,” and hung up.

Not of the quality to which she had become accustomed, you see: she insisted on some picky particular white sandwich bread for fancy lunches, and otherwise ate the limpa rye the cook or  Ingeborg made. All the household help was Swedish, as were the women who did alterations at the shop.

Elsa married late, at 35, and her husband moved into the house she shared with my great-aunt and their father, August, known as Morfar after my mother was born. Buying trips to New York for her store resulted in the delivery of boxes from Saks Fifth Avenue, deliveries that came so often, in such quantity that my grandfather questioned her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “They just keep sending them.”

Elsa in Italy ca. 1980

Elsa in Italy ca. 1980

They were boxes of shoes, spectators and sling backs, pumps, court shoes, Cuban heels, stilettos, peep toes, sandals, every kind of shoe you can imagine, and all in brown, tan, beige, ecru, off-white, cream, none of them black or red or blue or green. Beige: that was her signature color, beiges and browns with occasional accents of coral or green or gold. She assigned blue to her younger sister, my great-aunt Gladys, and when Gladys once dared to buy a beige dress she liked, Elsa had a temper tantrum. A quiet one, but effective.

She died before she could meet my husband, died before I was married, and I am sorry about that. But I remembered her this week when I went with my friend (and Registrar) to visit two older ladies, sisters, on the East Side. We picked up a collection of clothing worn when the two ladies (now in their early 90s and late 80s) were babies, the wedding dress their mother wore in 1918, the dress one wore in 1939 that her daughter wore again in 1970, with quite the wrong black moccasins, at a Christmas Eve party in Georgetown.

The sisters reminded me of my grandmother and aunt, and the clothes reminded me of what my grandmother sold and boxed and wrapped in her store. Sitting at the mahogany table for lunch, drinking tea and eating a slightly stale roll, I missed Elsa and Gladys terribly, but was glad for all they’d taught me about how to behave and what the world was like for independent women in the 1940s and 1950s

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Email
  • Twitter

Like this:

Like Loading...

Kitty Calash FB

Kitty Calash FB

Kitty Calash on IGram

Prototyping. #bonnets #millinery #milliner #fashionplates #19thcenturyfashion #1800

The Etsy Shop!

Kitty Calash Swag on Teespring

Archives

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 1,928 other followers

Blogroll

  • A Most Beguiling Accomplishment
  • Afroculinaria: Michael Twitty
  • British Tars
  • Clothing the Carolinas
  • Drunk Tailor
  • History Research Shenanigans
  • Kleidung um 1800
  • New Vintage Lady
  • Not Your Momma's History
  • Our Girl History
  • Picking for Pleasure
  • Places in Time
  • Ran Away From the Subscriber
  • Slave Rebellion Reenactment
  • The Hidden Wardrobe
  • The Quintessential Clothes Pen
  • Worn Through

Etsy Shop

  • Kitty Calash on Etsy

Resources

  • Casey Fashion Plate Collection, LAPL

Sutlers

  • Burnley & Trowbridge
  • Wm Booth, Draper
wordpress statistics

Creative Commons License
Kitty Calash blog by Kirsten Hammerstrom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

A WordPress.com Website.

  • Follow Following
    • Kitty Calash
    • Join 1,928 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Kitty Calash
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

    %d bloggers like this: