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.
1 comment:
You have to keep in mind that the advert discussed here is depicting fashions from East London, where the free-spirited working classes not only rejected the bourgeois mentalities prevalent in each era, but also spawned and ushered new styles into our mainstream culture, so it is correct for them to show long hair for men for the 60s decade, since East London boys favoured such haircuts as early as 1961, immediately after their Teddy boy phase. Also; no wig was necessary here, for marcellated hair or bobs were no longer used by any woman in the late 1930s, which are the only fashions of that decade shown in the ad... By then, the likes of Ginger Rogers and Veronica Lake had inspired women everywhere into less artificial hairstyles.
It is indeed granted that the musical arrangements did not always matched the era represented, but it was done for the sake of continuity and coherence: It mustn't be easy to compile, into one single advert, the most distinctive genres of music and on top of that, make it match specific fashions.
BTW, fox-trot as a fashionable dance was already dead by 1930, and replaced by rhumba, swing and other dances.
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