Mother and Daughter

Tonight:  A Fashionable Mommy Dearest

The right side:

I like everything about this suit - well not the puffiness in the lap.  Blurbage:  "A tireless grey flannel suit with the freshening of grey-checked cotton gingham collar and cuffs.  (These are subtractable, and the gingham idea continues as lining.) So it's very versatile at $265 ($2,100).  You could buy it at Saks, Neiman-Marcus and Hutzler's.  Hutzler's is gone, but the other two are still here; we're following them on Twitter.  (But they're not following us!  Nor have we heard back from @JaneFonda.  Pity.)

Hat by Sally Victor; bag by Nettie Rosenstein; gloves by Fuchs.

The suit is by Pattullo-Jo Copeland.  This is the first time we've come across Jo Copeland, which is rather remarkable.  Jo Copeland began her career as a fashion illustrator in the 1920 for Pattullo.  She became a partner in 1938 and remained until the firm died in 1970.  Then she designed scarves and gowns.

She pioneered the two-piece suit worn without a blouse, using her own figure to drape.   Like Claire McCardell, she was very much an American designer, designing for the American woman,which usually means less formal.

She married Edward Regensburg of Regensburg cigars . . .

but divorced him in 1953.  Her daughter was the writer Lois Gould (died, 2002), who wrote Such Good Friends  and other novels in the 1970s, mostly categorized as "women's fiction."  (I have a feeling we got her novels from Book-of-the-Month Club; possibly Literary Guild.)

This is a fascinating family to whom I'm not doing any justice in this small space.  Lois Gould also wrote a memoir of her mother - Mommy Dressing - A Love Story, After a Fashion.

Jo Copeland and Joan Crawford were very good friends, but that is not the only link to Mommy D - (which doesn't quite work as gracefully evocative as someone must have thought).  Book is "on the shelf" at the main branch, so more to come.

This is why I still like doing this - you'd never expect to get all of this from that suit.

Tweeting today:  still Duke Ellington, with "All of Me."  Very sunny man.

Tomorrow:  Suit Three of Seven.