This time - an unexpected trip to Bermuda.
Continuing along with the sitting-awkwardly-in-the-studio-is-fun! beach news. . . on the left, the ugliest picture I have come across in Vogue:
Weird, cheap-looking cutout, the model is nearly in white face, one foot looks bare, the other in one of those nasty "suntan" color nylons with reinforced toes. The blurbage (which I just remembered I was going to Tweet - sorry, my dear three followers: "Sharp-edged, immaculate -- eel-scrubbed, in fact: American separates-dressing has been throng on these principles for years. What's new, and delightful: the separates-attitude beached." Um . . . I don't think that means what you think it means. "Notable in this neat-on-the-beach era: a current of strict little knee-capping sun dresses." Knee capping? That's really not what you think it means. She's wearing an Omega watch, still alive and kicking and we pick up another member of the Twitter flock. Let's just move on. . .
Much better, but still veering toward Ladies' Home Journal, which is sadly on its last legs. "Instant beach dash - without water: the news of brown and a surprise play of navy blue." Note the shorts: batik! I think of batik as a fabric of the Sixties - as in Madras bedspread-on-the-wall Sixties. I am wrong.
Charles James - of the big exhibition now at the Met - toyed with batik as a beginning designer, before getting underway in 1926 - just spent several minutes trying to attribute that to the article in a recent issue; there is just too much Vogue online. But the grand Charles James did not design these cute little shorts, shorts that would look pretty good today, or anyway, a few months ago - I think we are onto Bermuda shorts at the moment. And this designer just happens to be Bermudan, but not in a short-short mood.
Polly Hornburg was, from the brief amount I can gather, the daughter of a old Bermudan white family, who began designing after World War II. She experimented with African tribal cloth, as well as batik, and she is credited with - and while there is too much of some things on Vogue.com, it is utter crap in other ways because there is nothing about Polly Hornburg thereon. She is credited on various sites with popularizing the one-piece diving suit, the sheath, and the dinner skirt. The diving suit? She was a diver. Also a business woman, who had a string of shops that sound like the Lilly Pulitzer shops - bright, vacation fashions. It's kind of still around in fancy Bermuda hotels. Here is Polly Hornburg in front of her father's house, photo by Slim Aarons. She died at 94, just a few years ago.
More Polly:
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| Thanks, CoutureAllure.com. They've got this as 1952. Looks right. |
In researching this, I came across a very interesting, well-done blog about Calypso Couture. You should go visit it.
The photographer for this shoot was William Bell - he seemed to flourish for a few years in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Someone left a note on Vogue.uk that he died in 2012, and was thrilled to see that his work was visible again.
Oh, our Picasso - "The Reappearance of the Bull." Good for the bull. It was one of 50, but I couldn't find this lithograph anywhere on line. Either it appreciated wildly, or it didn't. Best I can do.
But I did find this - Polly Hornburg was once so popular that her Polly Pants inspired a song:
Which Blogger can't find. Here's the link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csnZVUYPzjw
Polly deserves better.
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