See You Next Year!

Given that so many of you are enjoying the festive season away from your screens, Fashion Preserve is taking the opportunity to clean house. Gone all the defunct photos from auctions long past, more YouTube where I can find it, now that I know how to embed, and entries updated and relinked to make the blog more functional.

Thank you so much for your readership, support, and wonderful comments over the blog's first year. FP be back with all-new all-old fashion on January 11th.

No matter where you live between the Poles . . . Fashion Preserve wishes you warmth, wisdom and style. On to the stockings!

Mr. Dino, I Presume: More Jetset Knit Dresses

What I love best about the glorious jersey-knit frocks of 60s maestro Mr. Dino are, in no particular order:

1) The insanely great use of op-art prints right on the body, which essentially gave onlookers leave to stare at the wearer's parts with the excuse that those cubes were going to flip sooner or later.

2) As a Pucci for the masses, Mr. Dino created great-looking dresses out of nylon, double-knit polyester, and Arnel triacetate, fabrics that could be thrown into a washer, drip-dried, trampled on by a herd of elephants and still emerge reassuringly crease-free.

3) Mr. Dino was the adopted name of designer Max Cohen. He and his family chose it in homage to his wife's affection for Dean Martin.

His designs not only nodded to Op Art, but to Ming vase decoration, Rajasthani decorative patterning, Aubrey Beardsley, and, at bottom, Accornero's Flora scarf designs for Gucci, scoring himself a twofer in the Knocking-Off-the-Italians division of the garment wars.


Quick note: the images here are from Roseann Ettinger's Signature Prints: Jet--set Glamour of the '60s and '70s, which has finally come in from Amazon. If you love these exuberant prints as much as I do this is a must-have for your library. The examples are wonderfully styled with period jewellery and shoes, giving a real sense of how they were worn.

Jetset Knitwear, American Style: The Goldworm Look

Continuing in this week's look at the masters of patterned knit dresses is today's entry on Robert Goldworm, who wedded American mercantile drive to the artistry of Italian printmakers, creating a line of dresses that overturned the barriers between garment and art.

There is a wonderful interview with Goldworm's daughter Susan on the vintage site Playing Dress Up All Day Long . . . choice tidbits include how Robert came to reshape a business founded by his mother in the late 1920s into one of the most innovative knitwear operations in the world. Robert went to Milan after graduating from New York University with the idea of creating a new kind of dress. It was knit along the simple lines of a t-shirt, but finished to the highest standards of Italian hand craftsmanship in terms of seaming, closures, and other technical details.

Susan relates how her father was influenced by the stacks of art books that filled their home -- especially the near- and pure abstraction of van Gogh, Picasso, Paul Klee, Jasper Johns, Mondrian. His eye was also caught by the exotic . . . the dress at top, featuring an Indian-inspired print, would have captivated buyers eager to convey their own cosmopolitan inclinations in a time when the world was opening up to long-haul air travel.

While his lines could be categorized under the category of 'art to wear', Goldworm was also designing to a mandate of ease and suitability for travel. Knit dresses filled that role perfectly, as this extraordinary report in Sports Illustrated (which actually wrote about cutting-edge sportswear for women in the '50s) shows . . .


Seated above in a spider web of his own designs is the gentleman who is responsible for the knitted fashions favored by the American woman who travels fastest, farthest and neatest.

Goldworm's dresses are widely available at vintage outlets at prices that seem very reasonable, given their significance in American fashion history. Look around, and see if you don't catch a sense of how marvelous these designs must have seemed to women seeking to expand themselves . . . through travel, through art, or, barring that, an expedition through the rails of a great department store.



Sports Illustrated ad from Viviene18328 at Photobucket. India-print dress at riceandbeansvintage.com. Van Gogh dress from legacy-nyc.com. Many thanks to all.

Who Dressed the Jetset: Emilio Pucci

Tom Ford, please enough with the Isherwood--for your next trick make a film of the life of printmaker, sportsman, U. of Georgia aggie and politico Emilio Pucci. Born to a noble family in Florence in 1914, he maneuvered from a role abetting the Mussolini family in WWII to seeing his own Apollo mission logo land on the moon. Jackie O loved him. Marilyn Monroe loved him so much she is wearing him now (maybe). This is a big life, even for an Italian fashion designer, people not generally known for doing it small.

Pucci is best known, of course, for his brilliantly hued biomorphic prints, which, when applied to the slinky stretchiness of silk jersey knit, came to define the pack-and-go lifestyle of the late-sixties jetsetters.

This week I'd like to follow the trail of the great printmakers who catered to this particular tribe. Pucci, was, of course, the first and foremost. The impact of his signature style was so distinctive it remains instantly recognizable today under current head-of-house Peter Dundas, and is still as covetable on the streets of Ibiza and Southhampton as it was in the marchese's heyday.

Pucci's genius, I think, lies in his ability to lay down a multitude of not-necessarily agreeable colors in a pattern so jumped-up and lively that all arguments are off and they simply must get along. Nature can manage this nicely (above); it's harder for humans, as the heaps of bad vintage psychedelic prints for sale online make clear. It's a testament to Pucci's eye that he accomplished it routinely, and what's more he created a template for others to follow.


These sunglasses, currently for sale on eBay, seem a brilliant way to wear Pucci if you personally are not boarding a Cessna for a fresh island every weekend. High-quality vintage dresses will cost a fortune, but accessories (and his uniforms for Braniff, described here), offer a more affordable option.

More on the great 60s printmakers on through the week.

Art Imitates Life: What Inspires American Vogue

Was so pleased and surprised to happen across this Maurice Brange photo of writers Solita Solano and Djuna Barnes at a Paris café in 1922. I suspect Vogue's Grace Coddington and photographer Steven Meisel must have seen it too, when conceiving one of the most beautiful editorial shoots ever, Paris Je t'aime, for the September 2007 issue (and the subject of one of Grace and Anna's ongoing battles for page count in life and in the documentary The September Issue).


As for the fashion, this sort of pearly-toned, fur-and-silk styling is perfect for New Year's Eve--see if there's not something here to inspire you.

Style Icon: Charlotte Rampling

Actress Charlotte Rampling is 63. In this photo in the January issue of British Harper's Bazaar, she provides an indelible example of how to dress for one's age.

Of course she's a beautiful woman with a feline-sleek figure, but both attributes are only amplified by the long lines of the dress, which I reckon to be silk jersey or another ultrafine knit.

Most women consider ankle-length dresses only suitable for ultraformal occasions. They needn't be, as long as they're as simple as this one. Consider covering up, all up, in a figure-skimming dress if the situation calls for a dramatic look. With a massive cuff on your wrist and a slash of bright red on your lips, you'll be the best-dressed woman in the room.

To find examples online, keyword vintage and silk jersey, and/or look for the designs of the knitwear specialist Goldworm, or Vera Maxwell.

(photo by Sofia & Mauro, styled by Carmen Borgonovo, in Harper's Bazaar, Jan. 2010)