On the Passing of the Wristwatch...

Another classic accessory from the past 100 years is passing into history as technology replaces its function with something slicker and with more functionality. At least for the near future they will remain as collector items and novelties, but it cannot be long before they become as rare as a camera that uses film.

I am talking about the wrist watch.

Watches, which are, of course, just miniature clocks, were first developed in the early 16th century, or maybe a little earlier. The idea of being able to carry around a little miniature clock tower in your pocket must have been a challenge and a novelty. At first these watches/clocks were very crude, and kept bad time. Most did not have a minute hand, but only a hand to denote the hour, and could be as much as fifteen minutes off time, but since these timepieces belonged mainly to the wealthy and the nobility, they did not have to keep good time. They were decorative novelties.

The face was not covered with glass, but usually had a hinged brass cover, often decoratively pierced with grillwork so the time could be read without opening it. The movement was made of iron or steel and held together with tapered pins and wedges, until screws began to be used after 1550. Many of the movements included striking or alarm mechanisms. They usually had to be wound twice a day. The shape later evolved into a rounded form; these were called Nurnberg eggs. Still later in the century there was a trend for unusually shaped watches, and clock-watches shaped like books, animals, fruit, stars, flowers, insects, crosses, and even skulls (Death's head watches) were made.

The Earl of Leicester’s New Year’s gift in 1571-2 to Queen Elizabeth of England was a diamond-and-ruby-set watch, on a bracelet, one of the first appearances of a "wrist watch," though it would not be called that until the turn of the 20th century. Small watches were usually worn on chains, or ribbons, or had pinning mechanisms so that they could be affixed to clothing like brooches.

In the late 16th century watches were occasionally worn in unnecessary multitudes: Marie d’Medici, (1575-1642) dressed with a half-dozen pinned all over her dress, once unpinned a pair of watches from her gown and gave them as a gift to the Venetian Ambassador. By 1622, in Blois, watches were made small enough to serve as earrings, and others were made into a series of three-quarter inch watches to be worn as buttons.

As watches became more sophisticated technologically, and thus more reliable, they became useful for the middle class businessman to be able to keep a more rigorous schedule. No doubt the watches were more expensive at first, but the price dropped as the demand grew. Germany , Switzerland and the Netherlands were known for their watch-making- but the common man in the 17th century, Puritan or no, would not want a highly decorated watch that was pinned on or worn around the neck, which would be too easy to steal on a city street, and thus was the simple, plain pocket watch born, rounded, with a glass or metal cover to keep the dial hands from snagging to slowing down time. In the 1670s, Charles II of England introduced the vest to fashion, which had a pocket for a “pocket watch,” and that became the common custom for men into the 20th century.

It took until the 19th century for the wristwatch technology to come to fruition. The wristwatch was invented by Patek Philippe. From the time of its invention until world war one, the wristwatch was mainly considered something that a woman would wear. In 1904, Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos Dumont asked his friend Louis Cartier to come up with an alternative that would allow him to keep both hands on the controls while timing his performances during flight. Cartier and his master watchmaker, Edmond Jaeger, soon came up with the first prototype for a man's wristwatch called the Santos wristwatch. The Santos first went on sale in 1911, the date of Cartier's first production of wristwatches. During the First World War soldiers needed access to their watches while their hands were full. They were given wristwatches, called 'trench watches', which were made with pocket watch movements, so they were large and bulky and had the crown at the 12 o'clock position like pocket watches. When the war ended, the soldiers got to keep their army issued wristwatches. They must have gotten used to wearing a wristwatch everyday, because soon after the war ended, it became common to see civilian men wearing wristwatches in public. After the war pocket watches went out of fashion and by 1930 the ratio of wrist-to-pocket watches was 50 to 1.

Many people, men and women, wore wrist watches in the 20th century. Some watches were heirlooms, given at graduation or other rites of passage- other watches were more decorative and fun and as interchangeable on women as bracelets. In the 1970s there was a huge craze for so-called digital watches, which told you the exact time in number form, instead of the “old-fashioned” analog form, which is deduced by judging the time on a circular face with the minute and hour hands, just like wall clocks. It is still a rite of passage for young children to learn to be able to tell the time from analog clocks- we learn it about the same time as we learn to read. While digital watches have not gone the way of the dinosaur, analog watches returned in the 1980s in a big way, and are still the most common form of wristwatch.

In the 1990s, however, with the invention of the hand held, mobile/cellular phone, the tolls of doom started to peel for wristwatches. After all, the mobile phone not only could be used to talk to someone else, but they always came equipped with a digital time piece, somewhere, and though at first it was common to carry both a phone in your purse and a watch on your wrist, over time the watch is gradually losing its place. Like landline telephones, why duplicate what you already have? Right now I have a favorite Fossil watch in my bag, but it is one of the fashionable kinds of watches from a few years ago that were so big that it is heavy to wear and so I only carry it to use it as a remote clock in class to make sure I give the students their proper break and exit times.

Today my iPhone not only lets me call people, but it also lets me send text messages to them, as well as emails. I can get on the Internet and download stuff as I need to. With my iPhone apps I can find out the weather, where I am geographically (as if I did not already know, most of the time), dance to a techno dance station, put on the news radio, and connect me with like-minded individuals around the world for socializing and dates. I can download the mobile version of Women’s Wear Daily and get the latest fashion scoops. I even have two of my favorite movies on there that I can watch whenever I want. Oh, and it tells the time, too, and can act like a travel alarm clock, buzzing me to wake up like old digital watch used to do. The iPhone isn’t as comfortable for calling as previous phones I have had and it is shaped like a small can of sardines, but it has supplanted my wrist watch for most things. If it didn’t shut off every 5 seconds to save power I might also use it in class, but I don’t. Yet.

I still have a collection of cool wrist watches, from the Waltham watch I got for graduating high school , inscribed with my name and dates, to the really cool Keith Haring watch I bought at Macy’s in 1985.

I could be wrong, but I do not expect I will ever buy another wristwatch, and I am sure I am not alone.

Costa, Alan, The History of Watches, http://www.clocksonly.com/watch_history.html

Wikipedia History of watches, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_watches

History of Wristwatches, http://www.lussori.com/watch-history.html

Antique Pocket Watches, http://antiqwatch.com/

Chenille = Caterpillar

Did you know that the word "chenille," which is the name of a type of fabric characterized by a thick, tufted cording, often woven into patterns above a plain ground, comes from a French word for "caterpillar?" It is another one of those French words that comes in to English and we learn it as kids without knowing what it originally meant.

Chenille yarn is created by twisting shorter threads of yarn called pile threads between two core threads of yarn. The shorter pile threads then poke out at right angles. It is these pile threads poking out that gives the yarn a fuzzy, tufted appearance that feels like velvet. The word chenille originally referred to the cording alone, which resembled a fuzzy caterpillar. Starting inthe 18th century, it was used for embroidery, fringe, and tassels on both furniture and clothing, and eventually evolved into a fabric. Sometimes the fabric has tufted sections that are woven into patterns, and sometimes the chenille tufts have no plain ground, and seem like a very soft, velvet like fabric that is softer, which generally a longer pile.

Chenille fabric comes in and out of fashion. Growing up in the early 1950s, there had been a big vogue for chenille in the late 1930s and 40s for bedspreads, pillows and bathrobes, so for me, in one of my Proustian moments, I can remember being put to sleep (to nap) on one of these bedspreads at my aunt's house or grandmother's, and I remember lying there before falling asleep, picking at the small tufts of corded material, and tracing the patterns with my fingers. Later, in my teens, when I needed a new bedspread, I asked for a chenille one, but made in a heavier cotton with a pattern that was stiffer and less comfortable, I could fall asleep on the top of my bed on a lazy weekend afternoon and wake up with a pattern of red indentations on my face and arms where I lay against the fabric.

In the last couple of decades the fabric has evolved tremendously. The fabric has developed into a much softer version. What had been usually used for bedspreads and bathrobes, became adopted for jackets and vests. These outfits at first looked like they had been artfully made from an old bedspread or curtain, but in fact the fabric patterns had been woven for the garment. Still later, in the 1970s, when it really was developed to be made into garments, chenille fabic that was made completed from the tufted yarn added a new fabric with a unique feel and drape. The last decade saw the use of chenille in a variety of boas neckwarmers. Usually woven in cotton these days, it can also be made from silk, rayon, or even wool.

There is currently an organization dedicated to the improvement and development of chenille manufacturing processes. This organization is known as the CIMA, or Chenille International Manufacturers Association. Visit them for more detailed information.

100 Years 1911-2011 / Style / East London

It has been about 4 years since I last posted an entry in this blog. Sorry, I've been busy...lol

The reality is that today I just discovered how to get back into here, and in the intervening years my interest in snippets of costume history has not only remained a part of my life, but it has grown tremendously with the new role I have as a teacher of costume history at the Academy of Couture Art in Los Angeles. I have been teaching there now for three years, and every class I seem to learn more and more about my subject, and to make connections I had never made before (or at least not consciously realized). It is an exciting place to be in my life, now- seeing the changes that have taken place just in my lifetime gives me a new perspective on the world of history, and fashion, and why people wear what they wear.

Today, though, as a way of dipping my figurative toe into the blogging water to see what it is like, I am excited to post a cool YouTube video that a friend of mine sent to me yesterday. It is for the new Westfield Shopping Centre opening in East London, called Stratford City, which opens on Tuesday, September 13, 2011. It depicts two dancers in fashions from 1911 to 2011, dancing representative dances of the times. It's cool!

After having seen it a zillion times, I have a few comments. At first I thought that they were going to have the girl and guy dressed in different outfits for each year, thus 101 outfits, but I soon saw that they hadn't done that, but had chosen a couple of looks from each decade, and flip flopped between them during the dance. It was really cool when the guy left the woman dancing in the 1940s; she changed into work/factory clothes, and he came back after "the War."

I realized that I was so busy seeing the clothes I didn't notice the backgrounds until the third viewing or so. There is a brick background for the 1910s, then a metal and girder art-deco look for the 1920s, then a moderne street look with windows for the 1930s, a brick wall and cement for the 1940s-'50s, a row of '60s garage doors for the 1960s, then a wooden fenced yard for the 1970s. The '80s period looks like they are on a high tech loading dock, and there is a shadowy tree street for the 90s (with a giant Squirrel painted on the wall), replaced by a sleek gray glass wall of the new mall for the 2000-10s. All of it cool!

I do have a few minor quibbles. The 1930s dancers are doing the Charleston, which was a 1920s dance- by the 1930s the popular dances were Swing and the Fox Trot, but they saved Swing for the 1940s and so the '30s era seemed to lag. Also, the female dancer's lovely red hair was left out and long for all three 1930s dresses she wore, though she should have been wearing a shorter, bobbed wig for the early 1930s. And the guy's hair was maybe too long in the first 1960s outfit, since most people still had short hair then (but the first look could have been about 1965, which is still early but post Beatles). And her hair, too, was wrong, though there were a few women who wore it that way then, for most women her hair was too straight and too long for the ratted styles of the early 60s. But, as I say, these are quibbles. I love the video. Watch it.

After I mentioned the video to a friend, he said, "oh yeah, there's a Westfield Mall here in Palm Desert," and I said there were Westfield malls all over LA (Century City - I used to work there back in the early 80s before it was a Westfield mall, at the Bullocks, remember them?-, the Promenade in Woodland Hills, the Topanga Mall in Canoga Park, Fashion Square in Sherman Oaks), and even the one I knew in downtown San Francisco. So I decided to look them up and found that the Westfield Group has shopping malls all over the world:

The Westfield Group has interests in and operates one of the world's largest shopping centre portfolios. The global portfolio has 124 high quality regional shopping centres in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, the United Kingdom and Brazil valued in excess of $59 billion, with approximately 25,000 retailers in more than10.5 million square metres of retail space.

Well, in this day an age, the Age of the Consumer (where we have been more or less since the beginning of the Industrial Age in the 18th century), I say more power to them. The shopping mall is to our times what cathedrals were in the Middle Ages, The first time I stepped into St. Peter's in London (and then reinforced by trips to Chartres and Yorkminster), I realized that these huge churches had served not only as a place to pray in the Age of God, but as a place to gather, and along the side walls were various chapels or vaults dedicated to families or saints, smaller spaces where people could meet, chat and pray together. Those chapels along the side marble-covered aisles reminded me so much of stores in a typical mall of today, where people meet to chat or shop together.

Shopping malls are probably the best and most efficient way of making clothing and fashion available to the general public today, and so they serve an important purpose. Plus they're fun and you can catch a movie in the afternoon at the multiplex for a discount.