You’ve probably heard people buzzing about the Musee d’Orsay Impressionism and Fashion exhibition going on now in Paris. I just noticed there’s a nice English write-up about the exhibit with some pretty pictures — worth checking out!
Vampire Ball!
Last night was the annual PEERS Vampire Ball, which is one the few balls I still get excited about! It’s in a great venue (an Elks lodge that has a beautiful look) that’s about 3 blocks from my house, plus people really go all out with the costumes — over the top historical, vampire/goth, scifi, fantasy, and hybrids of all of these. There’s so much eye candy, and that’s the best part! Plus there’s not only historical dancing but also a goth club with a DJ, so you can get the best of both worlds. Okay, and 2 bars.
For the past three years, Bella Donna has performed two 30 min. song sets at the ball, which is always lots of fun. We’ve rewritten all of our English songs so that they’re vampire focused (so, for example, “Sweet nymph come to thy lover” becomes “Sweet prey come to thy vampire”), and it’s fun to get to do something different than our usual Renaissance show… and we get to wear whatever costume we’re in the mood to wear!
This year I was thinking about wearing the Marie Antoinette dress, but it’s so huge that it would be hard to get into singing formation with the group and I certainly couldn’t do any historical dancing. So I decided to wear the Maja fancy dress costume, but I wanted to do something different with it. I came up with the idea of doing a Pierrot makeup, in line with the whole black and white theme.
To do the makeup, I used Kryolan Supracolor again, and made my illustrator husband do the black/detail work. Everything went swimmingly until I went to power the makeup, which you need to do to set it — I was using a brush and all the black smeared! So I had to do a bunch of repair work, which was super annoying… I’m not positive what the best way would be to powder when you’ve got more than one color going on, does anyone know? I ended up using a power puff and just pressing it, but it still smeared a bit.
I wanted to do a new wig, and decided to try a 1760s tete-de-mouton just to do something different — something along the lines of this. I used a pretty ratty wig that I’d cut to be a hedgehog, so the hair in front/top/sides wasn’t quite as long as it should be to do full justice to the curls across the top of the head… and I ended up doing things a bit backwards, in styling the front before the back, so had to do some curls at the side/back top to pull things together. But it was interesting to try something new, and now I know what to do differently next time!
I ended up recovering a mini-tricorn form and trimming it the vintage b&w ribbon I bought at Hyman Hendler in NYC.
The ball was fun and I had a great time seeing new and old friends, although I didn’t do ANY historic dancing — bad me! Instead after our singing sets were over, I pretended to be goth with some of my Bella Donna friends in the club room and had fun doing swoopy dances and “catch the bat, release the bat.”
A Happy Wig Customer & A Gorgeously Gothy Costume
I keep meaning to post more pictures of wigs that I’ve custom made for clients, but I’ve had a hard time remembering to get nice photos out of people. (If you’re reading this and you’ve got nice pics of you in your wig, I’d love to feature them!). Luckily my friend Tara was on the ball and sent me photos right away!
Tara went to New Orleans for Halloween, and put together a fabulous costume. Jenn of Ruby Raven made the gown and tricorn, and then Tara hired me to make her a wig. She ended up deciding on a medium-tall pouf with lots of ringlets, in black with one white streak. The whole costume turned out glorious — so much so that Tara won first prize in the costume contest at the Witches Ball!
I would love to take a costume trip to New Orleans sometime, but in the meantime, let’s all admire how fabulous Tara looks:
Powerhouse Museum Electronic Swatchbook
Thanks to Fran on the GBACGCostumers Yahoo group, I’ve discovered the Powerhouse Museum’s Electronic Swatchbook. Swatchbooks were designed so that fabric manufacturers, agents and merchants could show samples of their fabrics. The museum has scanned several from their collection from the 1830s through the 1920s. What’s cool is you can not only browse by year but also by color. The swatches themselves are scanned in high res and you can zoom in really closely.
A great resource for dating fabrics and identifying good reproductions!
Movie Review: The Help (2011)
Starring Emma Stone and Viola Davis. Costumes designed by Sharen Davis.
Buy this and other costume films from Amazon and support this site
Okay, so no doubt you read/heard about this movie when it came out. Strong performances from many of the cast members, a good quality film but definitely made for Oscars, some issues around the fact that it celebrates a fictional strong young white woman for telling the story of African Americans rather than celebrating real historical strong African-American women.
What I want to talk about is hair. Specifically, lead character Skeeter’s hair. Apparently in the book I have not read, Skeeter has curly, frizzy hair that is the bane of her existence (as it is so NOT the mid-1960s beauty ideal). An article quotes Hair Department Head Camille Friend who says, “In the book, she has unruly hair, and it’s a pivotal story point, so we decided on a blonde, curly hair texture for her lace-front wig” (American Salon, July 2011).
Okay kids. In the mid-60s, you did NOT want curly hair.
This was an era when they didn’t know how to deal with natural curl. Artificial, styled curl? Yes. Natural curl? Find ways to smooth it out via brushing, cutting, large rollers, you name it. I can’t even find any images of women with naturally curly hair in this era. If I could, it would look more like this:
Or this:
Or this:
It would NOT look like this:
That is all.
My review: 3 (out of 5)
If you like this era, you might also want to check my 20th C. Costume Movie Reviews. If you’re in the mood for better done mid-century, check out An Education (2009), Far From Heaven (2002), and Revolutionary Road (2008).
