At last, humanity has reached The Dawn of the Important Sweater and we have before us our first cashmere sweater. My mother still mentions a rich girl in her dorm at the University of Iowa in 1953: "She had a drawer full of cashmere sweaters, but she was so nice you'd never know it." And in Fifteen, the nice girl has one cashmere cardigan and the snooty girl has many.
I have often wondered about the explosion of cashmere in recent years. And how disappointing it often is. In 1956, (here for an explanation of the economics of cashmere in the 1950s) a cashmere sweater cost about $200.00 in today's dollars. And it is probably in better shape than the one I got online last year.
Bernhard Altmann - not B. Altman, which confused me at first - was an importer and manufacturer of cashmere clothes who died a year after this sweater appeared. He founded the company in 1914 in Vienna, and expanded to New York in 1938. (Or, given the date, perhaps fled Vienna in 1938.)
A good, but easy guess, that date. I'm barely getting to this post this week; too much work, and the pages seemed of slight interest. But then I find this:
This is 1) the Klimt that Ronald Lauder paid $135 million dollars for; and 2) one of the paintings returned to Bernhard Altmann's sister-in-law, Maria, after she sued Austria in a U.S. Supreme Court case. Here is Mrs. Altmann's obituary from last year. The brother-in-law who bought Maria's husband out of Dachau was Bernhard Altmann.
And what was Mrs. Altmann's claim to the paintings? She inherited them from her aunt, the lady in the painting.
Whenever I come to a page on unnatural fibers, I am reminded of how little progress I have made in understanding what this actually means. I have to wikicheat every time. Here we have American Cyanamid again, and its Creslan division, which is the brand name for Cyanamid's acrylic, which boils down to a cloth made from petroleum, or perhaps coal. Creslan contains nylon, which is made of nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. But, aren't we all?
Cashmere comes from cute little goats.
Let's go to the movies!
* The invisible charms of an Angry Young Man. Or, a bully runs amok.
* To be fair, the movie isn't quite as bad as the American trailer makes it seem. (Couldn't find a British version.) I had no desire to tear apart Claire Bloom. But I did find myself rooting for Richard Burton to get run over. Oddly, a revival of Look Back in Anger opened in New York the day I saw this. Room at the Top, similar in many ways, was much, much better.
* Happier days in that marriage were the worst: cover your eyes when Squirrel-y and Bear-y disport themselves.
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