Saturday, September 10, 2011

Two Lace Dresses/Four Degrees of Separation



Not too inspiring, n'est pas?  Allors -



Disappointing to hit the doldrums so few pages in.   L'Aiglon, was a fairly large "house dress" manufacturer reported on far more frequently in the business pages than the fashion page.  It seems to be best known for a lawsuit against a rival who used a L'Aiglon dress in an ad and then sold a very inferior dress in its stead.  I also found a suit with California's own Equalization Board in which L'Aiglon tried to get out of paying a very small payroll tax on the salary of its California rep.  Nice.

Here we have a daytime dress -- I think. Today you'd pay about $190.00 for it - ($24.95 in 1959).  This seems steep to me.  Maybe it was L'Aiglon's top dress of the season.  It looks so uncomfortable -- that model is wearing serious corsetry.  And she's wearing the same kind of shoes that came with my Barbie doll -- little default pumps.  The whole ad makes no sense whatsoever.  L'Aiglon was based out of Pennsylvania or New York.  

Next.



Dress by John Moore of Talmack.  Photo by Louise Dahl-Wolfe.  Available at Bonwit Teller. This is much better.  The dress looks like fun to wear, although what color is mimosa?  

Louise Dahl-Wolfe we have already met in the October 15 issue.  Here is an excellent piece from the NYT from 2000 that unfortunately lacks photos.  Fortunately, I have some.  I'll post them later.  In 1959, Mrs. Dahl-Wolf was right between quitting Harper's Bazaar (1958) and quitting fashion photography (1960).  

The designer, John Moore, described somewhere as a "blond from Texas," designed Marilyn Monroe's wedding dress (Arthur Miller, husband).  Thank goodness for some color:



The Movie of the Week --   The irritating-in-every-way-possible The Fugitive Kind.  Spoilers aplenty.

First - there's no trailer.  Second -- even though it shows up in the WikiList for 1959, it apparently was released in 1960, thus eliminating the need for me to see it at all.  Third -- the whole damn movie itself.  Here is a key scene -- I can't even get it to load in the center of the page, goddamn it.



*  Usual Tennessee Williams horror.  This time a drifter drifts into town, gets a job in a dry-goods store, gets himself and inexplicably Italian mistress luridly killed.  

*  Six degrees (actually four) of separation between Marlon Brando and me:  my mother's cousin was best friends with Marlon's sister Jocelyn in Libertyville, Illinois.  Marlon was a strange boy.  Here, he would be a lot more riveting with a bit of direction.   He is so different from any other man on the screen at that time - except possibly Montgomery Clift - that it is hard to believe he was possible. This movie comes between  Guys and Dolls and Mutiny on the Bounty.

*  The women in this film:  Anna Magnani, strange and compelling, more out of place than I think was really meant.  Why does her character have such a thick accent? Not Italian war bride, as I had assumed. Joanne Woodward.  Why was she channelling Courtney Love?  Maureen O'Hara.   Why did her character, an artist -- oh, irony! -- go blind and crawl through the gutter,  and what did that have to do with Marlon Brando?  No explanation at all.  

And a fourth * this week:  By sheer coincidence, I saw The Help right before seeing this.  Do Southern writers make the South seem so awful just to keep the rest of us out?  It would have been a lot better coincidence if I had seen Odds Against Tomorrow this week because I should have mentioned that Cicely Tyson had a micro bit as a bartender in that movie and that she just popped out the few seconds she was on screen.  She should have had a much different career.   

Meta-posting:  best search term of the week --  young lady is putting off nylon socks.  Traced to an office complex in Litja, Slovenia.  Intriguing, but I don't think I ever wrote the word "socks." 


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