Two $165 dresses from the "Vera Stewart chateau collection," found certainly in the Better Dresses departments of the many department stores named herein. $465 today - that sounds about right. Rather primitive photoshopping. Spellcheck - that's another one! - doesn't even think "photoshop" worthy of a query. I can't for the life of me think of what faking photos was called before Adobe. Cut and paste? So little thought went into this entire thing, let's not waste another minute.
Yet more Belgian linen. Whatever happened to Belgian linen? We've (the Blog We) linked to them before, but I can't remember a thing about it. Now I see that Belgian linen is used mostly for interior decor and by artists. I suppose it's too expensive to use in ready to wear clothing. See the little crest in the ad? Here it is from the website:
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| Their Trademark |
And here is a film about the production of linen. Very European. I kept thinking that everyone in the video has had either a university education or rigorous apprenticeship (even the salespeople); they all have full health insurance, and they all have at least six weeks off each year.
Now, in 1959, where could you buy linen dresses in California? San Francisco, of course (Livingston Brothers, a store with which I am not familiar) and one other place -- wait for it --- Stockton! Oddly enough, the Smith & Lang Department Store of Stockton burnt to the ground in 1958 and re-opened in 1959 in a building by architect Weldon Becket, designer or mastermind of Century City, the Capitol Records Building, the Cinerama Dome and the Glendale City Library, my least favorite library ever. Oh, and the Federal Building in Los Angeles, and the Kaiser Center in Oakland. And the Music Center in Los Angeles. Can't seem to find a photo of the Stockton store, though.
What else on these pages?
The end of the fake story about the different types of childbirth a woman's daughters supposedly underwent in Span and in America. Probably just written under a pen name - like this! Still, something fishy about it.
The house ad asks, "What's changing now? Read the fashion answers in January 1 Vogue." Well, we might be making a quick trip to England to find out.
This looks just as bad in real life as it does here. What an awful ad! Both of them.
Let's go to the movies!
* Night Train, from Poland. I don't even read the Netflix envelope when I get a movie I haven't heard of. It's always a surprise. This time a good one. A man in a hurry and a woman running from a bad romance share a compartment on a holiday train. Is he a murderer? Hmmmm. . . . A lot is done with very little in this film. Definitely worth a shot.
* Very evocative movie if you've ever spent the night trying to sleep sitting up all night with seven other strangers in an overcrowded train. Second film of 1959 set almost entirely on a train (also Northwest Passage.)
* I couldn't get a screen shot, but the heroine reads a paperback by Rudolf Leonhard (I had to look him up - German journalist, writer, Communist). Couldn't get the title, but the design of the book leaped out. Whoever writes A Journey Round My Skull has posted a lot about Polish book design.
Speaking of obscure (to me, anyway) cinema: The second oldest movie director in the world just died. Kaneto Shindo was best known, apparently, for Children of Hiroshima (1952). He had a movie out in 1959, Lucky Dragon No. 5, but it doesn't appear in the Wikipedia list I've been working off, none of his movies are on Netflix and his IMDB entry is pathetic, considering how many movies he wrote or directed. So many worlds don't show up on the internet.
What we're missing on Netflix:
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