How Not To Sell a Vintage Frock on Ebay, Part 1

To the right is Steven Klein photograph I love--a gorgeous haute couture dress covered with silver-bead sea urchins, by Lagerfeld, ethereally styled by Tonne Goodman, worn by Cate Blanchett. I find it transportive. It lives on the side of a file cabinet just alongside my terminal. I look at it several hundred times a day and imagine being in that world, in that dress, that beautiful.

Meanwhile, back on the screen, are scans of the offerings on eBay's vast closet. As often as not, I decide to click away from particular vintage dress, not because of any flaws or sizing problems, but because it's being worn--modeled--by a nonprofessional. To post any examples would be unkind . . . they're easy enough to find. The models are typically vintage store owners, or the owner's sister, or the owner's babysitter, somebody who has been told that they're cute enough to model. Most of them are attractive. The thing is, in the pictures, they look way too much themselves.

When I see the pictures, I think "oh that's a cute dress on them," or "that doesn't quite work on them," and cannot make the perceptual leap to imagining the dress on me. This is because so much of their personality infuses in through their appearance, stance, tattoos and piercings, hairstyle, distracting bric-a-brac in the background. I've spent much of my professional life in pursuit of other people's old clothes, and yet. The clothes become tainted by the reality of who is wearing them.

Roland Barthes remarked about fashion magazines, and photographs such as the one of Cate above, "Printed fashion functions . . . as a true mythology of clothing . . . one could say its Utopia."

EBay scans featuring an amateur model are less Utopia we'd all love to live in than the neighbor's backyard, strewn with the neighbor and her things.

My advice: if you want to sell old clothes successfully on the internet, invest in a nice, faceless dress form.

Fashion DNA: Gucci Bamboo

I'm always interested to see how those at the helm of today's great design houses employ the motifs and signature materials of the brand's past. Karl Lagerfeld famously sketched out the handful of emblems that inform Chanel, including the camellia and the cross-backed Cs. I've talked earlier on this blog about Celine's linked chains.

Today, the spotlight is on Gucci, which has made bamboo a signature element of its bags since 1947, when founder Guccio Gucci first used it as a handle on a leather purse. The question: why would a Florentine saddle purveyor employ a material far better known in the Far East as a decorative element?

Initial digging around the internet doesn't yield much. I suspect there's a good story here (fashion historians get on it!). The little I've found: bamboo's natural beauty, ready-finished natural state, low cost, pliability, and extreme strength means it can be used for pratically anything. In Scandanavia, for example, bamboo has been used for ski poles. In the Far East, stouter versions of the grass are used as scaffolding in construction. Centuries ago, Hindu royalty boasted their rank through the length of the bamboo handles on their umbrellas. In Bangladesh today, 73% of the population lives in houses made of bamboo. You can fish with it, walk on it, wear it, tattoo with it, even eat it: bamboo shoots are tasty, and not just for pandas.

But back to the question. How did Guccio Gucci first hit on the idea of using it as a handle for fine handbags? A guess: at some point, maybe during his formative stays in London and Paris, he saw some Japanese Ikebana baskets, which make an art out of woven bamboo strips and gracefully curved bamboo handles. These would have been displayed as art objects in Europe with "Japonisme", the love affair with Japanese design, that swept through the capitals in the early part of the century. And so a signature emblem was born. Maybe.

As for the practicality of bamboo handles on bags, there's a hilarious discussion on the subject over at The Fashion Spot. The upshot: beautiful but unyielding bamboo and fashionably bony shoulders do not get along! The moral: as long as you're not a panda, a little bite of bamboo goes a long way.

All I have to Say About the Oscar Dresses

While Penelope Cruz won an Oscar for her role in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, her gown had a more mixed reception. Cathy Horyn, blogging for The New York Times, felt the 60-year-old Balmain creation "wore her." Others deemed the style too bridal, due to the white color and heavy overlay of lace. Tim Gunn, trying to be complimentary, noted that it belongs in a museum, which some proceeded to twist into slight on Cruz herself . . . miaow!

In private, in the glow of my screen or terminal, I'm as guilty as the next fashion lover of nitpicking stars and their stylists' fashion choices. But I don't see the point of scolding them publically into the refuge of safe, columnar frocks--cool and conventional as a carton of popsicles--which may be perfect lens candy for the paparazzi but betray little personality or subtlety of detail beyond.

I think the gown is perfectly lovely, and its critics overly harsh, especially given that the dress is vintage and not ready-made for the Oscar mill. What's more, its virgin-queen propriety ought to be viewed as counterpart to the far racier slashed white number Cruz wore to the afterparties.

What truly interests me about the Balmain gown is that it appears to stem from the time in his career when he was still very much in step with his rival Dior's New Look, and embraced a heavily embellished style that was to diverge markedly in the 1960s into a more clean-lined approach, harkening back to his formative training as an architect (a background he shares with Armani). "Couture is architecture in movement," he once said. I'd love to know more about the exact history of this dress (where Cruz got it, who originally wore it) but this seems unlikely, given that professional fashion critics are tasked to provide instant analyses over longer-form follow-ups.

Anyway, if you happen to hanker for a vintage Balmain of similar elan, here's a link that you'll love. The Frock is a San Francisco vintage house with a spectacular array of gowns, wedding dresses, and old-school LBDs. All wonderfully photographed and expertly researched . . . feast your eyes, and learn a little more about what Hollywood queens wore to the Oscars before the entire world had something to say about it . . .

This Old Dress: Hymn to a Battleaxe

I'm currently selling a used tank on eBay. Not an actual Panzer, of course, but a dress. Specifically, the kind of dress that rendered its wearer socially impermeable. Able to soldier through charitable ball planning meetings, or lunches with visiting royalty, or trips to showrooms with the decorator, in full knowledge that she was correct from wrist to neck to kneecap.

The actual frock is an early 70s (I reckon) coat dress from the house of Galanos. Trained in Paris (Piguet), perfecting his trade in New York (Carnegie), James Galanos became one of America's greatest dressmakers, famed for using couture level details in the garments he fashioned for high society dames. The fact that he, along with Arnold Scaasi, was one of Nancy Reagan's go-to dressmakers says it all about the kind of lady who sought his work out.

The dress is an A-line with flap pockets, french cuffs, domed beaten brass buttons and a slight wrap effect. The fabric is a wool tweed, so heavy that it literally feels like body armor. The dress is lined in silk. What really puzzles me is that it came out of Dallas. How somebody could wear something this substantial in that heat is beyond me . . . but as my brother-in-law likes to say, with a heavy fake Greek accent: "sometimes it eez better to loook goood than to feel goood."

I'm selling the dress because the sleeves come up short. The original owner must have been elfin, like an Olsen twin, but none of this sloppy, droopy, hide-in-a-pile-of laundry-look favored by Mary Kate and Ashley. Nope--military bearing, helmet hair, alligator bag locked and loaded. Sister of the travelling Galanos, I salute you.

Spots On

Clothing, as we all know, sends messages, some less subtle than others. Take, as an example, animal prints, especially the feline variety worn by tigers, leopards, and cheetahs.

Decades ago, owning an authentic big-cat coat was a sign that in fashion terms, you had arrived. Check out Edie Sedgwick in this YouTube clip. Though clearly seeing triple at the time, she delights in putting on "the most beautiful coat in the world."

Bob Dylan, a lover of Sedgwick's, was less enamoured of the fur, and of the girl who wore it, when he wrote these lyrics:

Well, I see you got a new boyfriend
You know, I never seen him before
Well, I saw him
Makin' love to you
You forgot to close the garage door
You might think he loves you for your money
But I know what he really loves you for
It's your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

Couturier Christian Dior, in his classic The Little Dictionary of Fashion, hinted ever-so-discreetly at the trouble wearing the fur could cause: "to wear leopard you must have a kind of femininity which is a little bit sophisticated. If you are fair and sweet don't wear it."

Today wearing the actual skins is a no-no due to issues of endangerment and anti-cruelty. Faux versions are the default, at prices that make them an option for most everyone. Still, a certain kind of woman tends to wear animal print. Fashion writer Hadley Freeman gets her claws out and rips: "Animal print clothing is even more grating because the message is so embarrassingly obvious and so cringingly stupid. Yeah, we get it, babe -- you're just wild, you are. In the sack, yes, yes. Like on Discovery Channel -- we got it!"

Well, she's got a teeny point here. All the ladies I know who frequently sport jungle spots and stripes do like a prowl and are big into toying with their prey. But so what? They're also great company, and a helluva a lot more fun to hang out with than their more tasteful counterparts in a pastel twin-set and pearls.

And not every woman wears feline print solely to catch some game of her own. One of my heroines is Georgie White, an adventuress who became the first person to run white-water rafting in the Grand Canyon as a commercial business. Her style signature was a leopard-skin swimsuit--not because she was looking to get lucky on the river (which, considering, she probably had to beat them off with a paddle), but because the spots "disguised the oil stains" from the boat! Great company, for sure.

What Fresh Heel is This?

OK, back at the desk after a week in fresh mountain air. Thanks to the childrens' slavish devotion to their DS, I was able to use the flight time to sink into the glossy depths of my own drug of choice, the fashion magazines. Having more time than usual to contemplate the front-of-the-book ads only reinforced how deeply silly, and out-of-touch, the coming season will be. This is nowhere more evident than at the ground floor level--the shoes.

Much to blame: last year's Balenciaga's gladiator sandals-cum-shin-guards, and Prada's (admittedly pretty) piranha-plant heels. These set dizzying heights for fellow designers to match, which they have met this year with stilt-like heels and even more outlandish design.

Take, for example, the footgear offered by Yves Saint Laurent. It's been described as "iconic" in several places, which is apparently code for hideously expensive and essentially unwearable. What was the genesis of the design? I've gotten a stiletto stuck in a grate more times than I can count. This seems a nightmarish extension where the entire foot gets embedded, and the grate somehow vacuum-molds around it. More likely--the shoe was designed using a computer-aided grid; some smartyboots thought it looked cool without a structural skin, and voila, your feet are trussed like a round of beef ready to roast (and blister in an unusually decorative way, if you're walking much farther than a couple yards).

The photo actually makes me laugh. If the poor model took two steps to the left or right, the sticks, burrs and sand of the Hollywood Hills would get so deeply embedded in the latticework that the shoe would look less like a sleekly modernistic structure than beaver's dam.

Now on to even more egregious little numbers from Dior. At first, the heels seem similarly architectural, though in this case more Frank Gehry than modernist grid. But look closer (click on the picture) and you discover that the heels actually take a human form. Like the female caryatids at the Acropolis acting as columns for a pediment, these little figures support the superstructure of Giselle Bundchen.

The problem? With their pendulous breasts, ripe stomachs and ample backsides, the figures harken to the primitive, fertility-goddess sculpture most commonly associated with sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania. Hard on the heels of an outcry over the lack of non-European models on the catwalks and fashion-magazine pages, John Galliano has seen fit to put the inarguably Aryan Giselle hard on the heels of a totemic Black figure, a figure which, needless to say, would never pass muster at a high-fashion casting call.

To me, it's emblematic of the deep cluelessness of the fashion establishment. And why, given the option, most women would rather wear flipflops.

Vintage Philosophy: Roland Barthes

On the cycles of fashion:

"Every year fashion destroys that which it has just been admiring, it adores that which it is about to destroy. Last year's fashion, now destroyed, could offer to the victorious fashion of the current year an unfriendly word such as the dead leave to the living and which can be read on certain tombstones: I was yesterday what you are today, and you will be tomorrow what I am today."