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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