Harper’s Bazar dress, 1913. High fashion fantasy spread. They didn’t have movie awards shows back then. The motion pictures were considered low-rent and tawdry and actresses only went into the industry if they couldn’t get stage work.
I have a 1910 clipping from the Nicholson Collection posted on my website http://www.tighsolas.ca/ : A Plea from Macdonald Teaching School.
The School Commissioners are asking that rural school inspectors hire more girls with diplomas; after all, that is why they are giving rural students free tuition, so that they can go back home and teach.
Now, attached to this clipping, at the bottom is another headline: Mark Twain, doctors report his condition unimproved.
Twain died in 1910, which is why his part 1 of his autobiography was recently published. I have a copy at my bedside. The volume is HUGE.
I recently taped a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (the 1949 musical with Bing Crosby) and watched it yesterday.
That book is my favourite Twain novel, although I acknowledge that Huckleberry Finn is superior literature. Now, that book that has been in the news lately, too.
This version of Connecticut Yankee is pretty lame, a kind of road picture, with all the really sly Twain humour cut out.
I was most interested in the opening that is supposed to take place in 1912, the Tighsolas Era.
The book, I assume, did not begin in 1912. (Haven’t re-read it lately.)
The script writers chose 1912 for good reason: so Bing’s character could remark on all the recent innovations, auto, victorola. Bing Crosby’s character is a blacksmith who has to repair automobiles for lack of work in his field.
There are some women in the opening scene, and their hats aren’t quite right. Too forties-ish. Small, tasteful.
I enjoy looking at the fashions in movies set in 1912, (the Great Race, etc) because now that I am ‘an expert’ in 1910 fashion, I can see how the designer adapted those fashions to his or her day, or stylized them.
Easter Parade, is of course, the movie showcasing the best-ever hat fashions. But I haven’t seen it lately.
Yesterday, I read an article that claimed the Golden Globe Awards are a bit of a joke and exist 1) to promote movies 2) draw millions of viewers to the network carrying it 3) and to show off fashions for the well-known designers. In short, they are 100 percent commercial.
I visited a friend and didn’t watch the awards, probably for that reason, although my husband taped Colin Firth’s acceptance speech for me, how nice of him!
But the next day I did visit those sites with slideshows of the best and worse dressed women and I even voted on some dresses. (Still waiting for hats to come back into fashion with the Beau Monde.)
A silly, petty, diversion, I know. But hard to resist. I have just spent a month eating everything in sight, so it’s fun to diss women who clearly skipped the festive season at home, so they could celebrate themselves and their conspicious-consumption (of everything but food) in public during the awards season.
Salon.com published an article saluting the women actors at the Golden Globes. The author of this article thought these women represented a wide range of shapes and sizes and ages. Well, I saw women of all ages, but not of all sizes. They were all fashionably emaciated, as per usual.
Apparently, paunchy Paul Giamatti was buzzed from eating five boxes of free chocolate, when he accepted his award for his role in Barney’s Version. My first thought, and no doubt everyone else’s: “Someone has to eat it.”
Giamatti also remarked about how he got to act with three very hot women in Barney’s Version. So true. His ‘wives’ in the movie are wonderful characters. Still, it’s clear, most male actors, Giamatti or, say, Mark Ruffalo in the Kids are All Right, can fall apart on screen as they age, but female actors cannot. And that’s despite the harrowing tell-all autobiographies by formerly anorexic actors.
But motion picture actresses have always been pencil thin. I just saw Eve Arden in some mediocre and fictionalized Cary Grant vehicle where he plays Cole Porter. My lord. THIN!
In 1910, the great beauties of the stage were much heftier than, say, Lilian Gish. I have a number of pictures on this blog.
Maybe 3 D will change all that, maybe not. (Technology changes us in ways we can’t predict.)
I should stop bitching. I’m just feeling like a big fat voyeur.
Anyway, you could spend a million billion words deconstructing the link between the 20th century and women’s power, and consumerism and female fat, with Ground Zero being the remark by Wallace Simpson, “You can never be too skinny or too rich.” Hmm. And she’s portrayed as such a tart in the King’s Speech. Helena Bonham Carter’s Queen E. was the heroine and she looked lovely in her pearls (although the Queen Mother’s ‘confectionary’ fashion sense was mocked by Edward and Wallis) while the sublimely beautiful H B C dressed WEIRDLY for the Globes, which, I assume, was her own kind of statement.
I think, in Flo in the City, I’ll have tiny, skinny Flora Nicholson, wish she were a full-figured girl after she goes to see EveryWoman at the Princess Theater starring zaftig Adele Blood, who was deemed the most beautiful blonde on the stage. (That will be my only comment on this complex issue.)
Now, another article about the Globes asked why Geoffrey Rush of the King’s Speech was wearing a hat. The answer? He has shaved his head for a stage role, Diary of a Madman.
That must be Gogol’s Diary of a Madman, another of my very very favorite novels, or novelettes in this case. He’d be perfect.
Now I have another reason to go to New York. I think I will drag my husband this time.
Opening scene for Connecticut Yankee with Bing Crosby. Not in HD so what a difference. They are supposed to be in a Museum, but the knight’s armor is far too big.
