Not only have I enthusiastically endorsed Anna Kalinowska’s Clothed with Beauty: A Catholic Philosophy of Dress, I have begun to work through her Recommended Reading. The Lost Art of Dress :The Women Who Once Made America Stylish by Linda Przybyszewski is at the top of the list, and I finished it yesterday. Spoiler alert: the villain of the piece is an Englishwoman, i.e. Dame Mary Quant (1930 – 2023).
There are those who blame Coco Chanel for the 20th century degradation of women’s dress, but the Youthquake of the 1960s was really unprecedented in its destruction of women’s wear–and many other aspects of culture, too, of course. It’s as if something terrible happened around 1963, a year I have impugned in both Notting Hill Journal and Toronto’s Catholic Register. (As both my articles [2011] have disappeared, I may reprint them here for your enjoyment.)
The Lost Art of Dress describes the efforts of American Home Economics professors (the “Dress Doctors”) to teach women how to create tasteful, flattering outfits for themselves. They used “art principles” to do this, and goodness, truth and beauty were never far from their minds. They distinguished between clothing that suited the young, the middle-aged, and the elderly. They viewed the sophisticated clothing of older women as something the young could look forward to. They believed in such a thing as aging gracefully, and they were also very conscious that many American women were poor and needed help. Through both college and correspondence courses, they provided countless women with ideas for making clothing very inexpensively and the skills to make a living as dressmakers. Many women of the first half of the 20th century–my own Canadian grandmother among them–could look at the latest fashions in a shop window and then make them for themselves at home. And then the 1960s happened.
When I got to that part of The Lost Art of Dress, I discovered I was angry. It was partly because the Revolution robbed women of the opportunity to master very useful skills. It was partly because the art principles were thrown out the window. It was partly because the inventors of the “baby doll” made women dress like toddlers, and that a reason women began to wear trousers en masse was to avoid having to wear a miniskirt. (Recall that in the 20th century the social pressure to wear the current mode was enormous.) Decades after his wife brought the mini into fashion, Mary Quant’s husband said of “the little kid look”, “I think there was a slightly sort of p*doph*le thing about it, wasn’t there?”
Disgusting.
One of the cultural benefits of the 21st century is that the tyranny of designers has been overthrown, and—to a certain extent—we can ignore the latest fashions to wear modes dating back to, arguably, the First World War. Anna Kalinowska’s Clothed with Beauty has a list of companies and dressmakers from which her readers can buy modest-and-yet-smart-or-pretty clothes, among them Scotland’s House of Bruar (smart) and the vintage-inspired Simple Retro (pretty). I would add, for British readers, House of Foxy, Seamstress of Bloomsbury, Pretty Retro and Lindy Bop, with the proviso that not everything these companies sell is modest.
Even better than buying clothing online, we could make a real bid for independence and learn how to sew. I do not say this lightly, for dressmaking takes patience and skill, and I know what I am talking about. In fact, just as learning a language properly involves several skills–speaking, listening, writing, and reading–dressmaking involves reading a pattern, measuring, cutting, fitting and manipulating a sewing machine or needle. It is harder than it looks, and unless you were born with excellent hand skills, you will need a kind teacher. You will have to practise making cushion covers and tote bags before you can go anywhere near a dress pattern. You will have to forgive yourself a thousand times and accept that your first attempts will look terrible. Indeed, you will have to remember that the fixed mindset is wrong and the growth mindset is right. And by “you” I mean “I.” But also you, and especially you for perhaps you have the time to take elementary sewing lessons. As yet I do not.
What does this have to do with dancing, you ask? Well, when we go to dances, we need something to wear, of course. And finding modest evening dresses is not fantastically easy, as contemporary designers seem to think that SOMETHING must be naked on women at formal events: if not our legs, then certainly our arms, our backs, or a great expanse of chest. (We cannot blame this last on either Mary Quant or Coco Chanel, as décolletage has been fixture of evening dresses since the 15th century. We can indeed blame the backless dress on Chanel, however.) For less formal dancing events, however, I highly recommend designs based on dresses from the 1930s to 1960. (I wish you the best of luck in finding sleeves.)
Naturally the other connection is that the rejection of art principles in dress and of formal partner dancing happened almost at the same time. The “Twist” dance began around 1958, and it really took off with Chubby Checker’s cover of eponymous “The Twist”. (Here he is on The Ed Sullivan Show.) Partner dancing soon thereafter ceased to be cool among the English-speaking young, and so far so bad until (hooray!) the Lindy Hop revival of the 1990 and (three cheers!) the vintage-style clothing industry. Thus, I end on a note of hope. “Aslan is on the move–perhaps he has already landed.” That is, the Restoration has begun, and we can all be a part of it.