Costume Meltdown

Olivia and I spend a lot of time watching movies and TV together, and sometimes we get sucked in to some pretty ridiculous, trashy, stupid stuff. I'd say I'm embarrassed about it, but I'm not really. I mean, this summer I've basically told everyone who would listen that Magic Mike XXL is amazing and they should run out to the theater to see it right now.

Seriously you guys, it is so good

On the other end of the spectrum is the Hallmark channel show When Calls the Heart which we discovered on Netflix. It is cheesy, chaste, "heartwarming" television at its shlocky best. It takes place in 1910s Canada, and follows a rich young woman who comes to a small mining town to be a teacher. We decided to give it a try because the promo picture prominently featured this:

Hot Mountie? Sure. 

Once we finished Season 1 on Netflix, we discovered that Season 2 had just aired and it was super easy to hunt down on YouTube. Now the costumes in Season 1 had been questionable at times, but about what you would expect from a television cheesefest with a limited budget.

Sort of like a movie musical version of the 1910s

I'm not the kind of fashion historian who can't bear to watch inaccurate costumes. I reserve the right to make fun of them, but can also make allowances for limited funds and artistic interpretation. No costuming is ever going to be 100% accurate and I am capable of chilling out about it.

So believe me when I say that the costumes for this show have a full on historical accuracy meltdown in Season 2. Bizarrely, it appears to coincide with an increase in the show's budget. It is like half the accuracy for twice the money and a huge dose of WHO EVEN KNOWS.

First off, they just decide that all women wear their hair down all the time:

Sometimes with messy side ponytails:

A whole bunch of inexplicable coats show up:

Really? Blue fleece?!?

Then men all start dressing like they are models for L.L. Bean:

I mean, it's a good look, and technically jeans, henleys, and wool plaid shirts all existed in this time period. BUT NOT STYLED LIKE THIS AND WORN AROUND TOWN JUST HANGING OUT.

Most hilariously, Jack the mountie (why are hot historical cops always named Jack?) has this hipster shoulder bag and they DON'T EVEN BOTHER TO CUT OFF THE STRAP PADDING THINGY. 

If I just showed you this picture out of context, would you know this show is set 100 years ago?

But perhaps most ridiculous are all the "fancy" clothes we get when Elizabeth goes home to visit her family. Sometimes costumers do this thing where they fudge a little (or a lot) and try to pick psedo-period styles that align with contemporary aesthetics to appeal to the modern viewer. That's definitely what they were going for with the hair and the menswear, but the "rich lady" clothes look recent but outdated-- like mall prom dresses from 2000 with extra crap glued on. 

The 1910s were all about silver belts and plastic beaded trim, apparently.

Sort of hard to tell here, but this skirt has a high slit and a sheer black overlay. Why???

And SHRUGS! So many shrugs. 

SHINY SHRUGS

The most horrendous looks appear when everyone is dressed up for the evening: 

They bought these dresses off the rack, right?

Maybe the brown one from the JC Penny Mother of the Bride Collection?

And the blue one from...some store...in 1999?

And then I have literally no idea what is happening here:

In the Shadow of the Dome

This weekend I took a trip to Tacoma with my mom, and was perhaps more excited than a Seattleite is allowed to be about visiting Tacoma. (For my out-of-state readers, Tacoma is a large city about an hour drive south of Seattle. The two cities got in a vicious fight in the 19th century regarding a transcontinental railroad terminus and we've been throwing shade at each other ever since).

My mom's choir had a concert on Saturday and a late rehearsal the night before, so a bunch of choir members decided to stay the night in between. I came along in order to hear the concert and hopefully visit a museum while we were there. And Tacoma really rolled out all its grandeur for this trip. We stayed in a hotel with a glorious view of the Tacoma Dome:

(what this photo doesn't capture is the grime on the window)

But I was still excited about what Tacoma had to offer because it is home to the Washington State History Museum, which happened to have a clothing exhibition on view! The show was called Pomp & Circumstance: The Clothing of Transformation and when I heard about it I thought the concept was brilliant. It was all about special occasion clothing, which is exactly what every history museum has coming out of its ears. So why not put your wedding dresses, christening gowns, uniforms, inaugural gowns, and weird ceremonial gear from fraternal organizations on display together and come up with a theme that encompasses it all? GENIUS.

WORK IT GOV GREGOIRE

The exhibit was a little smaller than I expected and it looked like it had been put together on a tight budget, but there was a lot of interesting and unexpected stuff. It was the perfect topic to showcase their collection and I was really impressed by the loans they got. Including...

IS THAT...

 JINKX!

Mannequin dressing nitpick though: I would have put this dress on a slim male mannequin. If you add foam boobs to existing mannequin boobs you get: 

AGGRESSIVE FLOATING TORPEDO BREASTS

After basking in all the clothes, it was time to check out their core Washington State history exhibit which I hadn't seen since the 8th grade. It was light on artifacts and heavy on sets and props. Not my cup of tea but I realize that school groups are a huge part of their audience, and sitting inside a fake covered wagon is way more engaging for a kid than a real wagon wheel behind glass. But where they really lost me was with the full-size plaster people. These things were like creepy mannequins taken to the NEXT LEVEL.

So many plaster ruffles...

That is one pissed-off frontier drag queen

So remember how I said that there is a bit of a rivalry between Seattle and Tacoma? Because obviously Seattle is better and Tacoma is just bitter about it? 

Well, since this was an exhibit about the history of Washington State they obviously had to at least mention Seattle. So how did they do it? 

Welcome to Seattle! Land of hopeless slums!

Yep, they put the spotlight on Seattle for the section on the Great Depression, illustrating the era with a reproduction "Hooverville" shack. When you went inside there were two plaster men talking about how everything was terrible, accompanied by an audio track of heavy rain falling on a tin roof. 

NICE TRY TACOMA.

My favorite –polis is Indianapolis

This last week I was in Indianapolis for my college roommate’s wedding. I went a few days early to hang out with her and another college friend and we spent pretty much the whole time talking, eating, and drinking. All three activities were off the charts awesome. I have to say, I was looking forward to Indiana food—thinking it would be all Chinese buffets and mayonnaise macaroni salad. Instead, roommate and her fiancé took us to every hip spot in the city and we dined like cosmopolitan foodies. I had brussels sprouts and goat cheese in a crepe at a Belgian restaurant, cheese and charcuterie at a deli that sold quince paste, a turkey burger with arugula and caramelized onions, and drank several kinds of local craft beer. The only buffet we went to was all-vegetarian Indian food. I was just about ready to move when we passed a neighborhood of beautiful old Victorian houses and my roommate remarked that they were “very expensive” and started at as much as $500,000. 

Me, thinking about tiny $550,000 condos next door in Seattle

On Friday I moved into a hotel room and that too, was awesome. There is nothing quite like checking into a nice hotel to make you feel like an adult. After rolling around on the multi-pillowed king-size bed, I decided to go out and explore. The hotel was literally across the street from two museums on my must-see list, which means I was in vacation heaven. One was the Eiteljorg museum of American Indians and Western Art, and the other the Indiana State Museum.  The latter had a touring exhibit titled American Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, which I had to check out because the next stop is little ol’ MOHAI. I walked through with 100 screaming school children, and tried very hard to be delighted by how much they were enjoying the exhibit rather than grumpy and wishing they would DIAL IT DOWN A FEW NOTCHES. But overall I really liked it and look forward to it coming to Seattle. I think I can do better dressing the mannequins though...

(The 20s ideal may have been lean and columnar, but women did not actually defy biology and turn into shapeless poles)

To be fair, I also don't know how to keep male Dorfman forms from leaning

Saturday was wedding day, and I ended up as a last-minute bridesmaid because the regularly scheduled bridesmaid was stuck in Australia. She is from there, had gone for a short trip, and had lost her wallet and her green card and couldn’t get the appropriate paperwork to return on time. It was a sucky situation and I know the bride and the groom really missed having her there. But I was happy to step in, get fancy hair, wear a borrowed dress, and clutch a bouquet in front a bunch of people. 

Trying my hand at this whole "selfie" thing the kids are talking about

It was a Catholic wedding, which was a new experience for me. Sometimes something familiar would happen and I’d be like “Ooh! Ooh! I know this one!” and then I’d say some response out loud and it would be totally different that what everyone else was saying and be like, “Nope, guess not.”

#AWKWARD EPISCOPALIAN

Fortunately I didn't ruin the wedding, everything was beautiful, and the reception was at a German restaurant so there were heaping plates of sauerkraut for everyone. Win-win-win. 

The Five Stages of Reading Bad Fashion History

About a year ago I was asked to review books for a publication called Choice, which is used by college and university librarians to pick books for their shelves. I don't get paid, but I get to keep the book they send me to review. So, every few months I get an email that is like "Hey Clara, this hardcover edition of a book you wanted to buy anyway is in the mail right now." Awesome.

In addition to the concise 190-word review, I'm supposed to say if I recommend the book and for what academic level. This month, for the first time, I labeled a book "Not Recommended." Here is how it played out:

Stage 1: Excitement

Latest Book Has Arrived!!!

There are so many photos of actual surviving gowns!!!

Stage 2: Cause for Concern

"Poiret is credited with freeing women from corsets"
"[Vionnet is] credited with inventing the bias cut"

Ok, not technically incorrect (because you say "credited") but you are implying that those statements are true and are therefore perpetuating those myths. Fashion never happens in a vacuum, so a red flag goes up for me whenever a designer is said to have singlehandedly invented something. 

"Irregardless"

Oh dear. Did your editor take a nap?

Stage 3: Huh...I thought that...

"Despite the inevitable press coverage, there does not appear to be a surviving example [of Schiaparelli's Skeleton dress] and it would fetch six figures if discovered"

There is one at the V&A. To be fair, you have to scroll all the way down to the FIRST hit on Google, so I can see how you could miss it. 

"From 1963 [Lanvin] employed the Spanish couturier Antonio Castillo"

Just a few weeks prior, one of my volunteers discovered a wonderful Lanvin-Castillo dress in the MOHAI collection which was sold in the designer room at Frederick & Nelson. I read the line above and thought...hmm...wasn't that dress we found from the 1950s?

Turns out 1963 is the year Castillo left Lanvin. 

Stage 4: Horror

"In 1926 Coco launched the perfect backdrop for jewels, real or fake—the little black dress"

Any book/documentary that pulls out the 1926 Chanel LBD date instantly and irreparably looses credibility. 1926 was the year a particularly famous Chanel LBD appeared in Vogue, but as soon as you look at the evidence you find simple black dresses from Chanel and other designers long before 1926. In fact, this book, after citing the 1926 date, shows a 1924 LBD example on the very next page. For the love of Coco look at the evidence in front of you!!!

Stage 5: Gleeful Search For Other Errors

“Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto, and Issey Miyake – debuted in Paris in 1981” 

True of Kawakubo and Yamamoto, but Miyake had already shown in Paris by '81.

"The anti-fashion movement known as 'grunge' was a mismatched, layered look of denim jackets, granny-style floral dresses, low-waisted thong-revealing jeans, combat trousers..."

Britney Spears: Grunge Icon

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the low-waisted thong-reveal a late-90s/early 2000s trend? 

"At 1968's Woodstock..."

Ok, now you are just embarrassing yourself 

Austen Translation

If you know me, you know that I love Jane Austen.* Even if you don't know me or Jane Austen, you probably know that her works are something of a pop culture cash cow. I have mixed feelings about this. Sometimes I take a purist "don't mess with Jane" attitude, but sometimes I willingly buy into it. I mean, I own a modern-day Pride and Prejudice movie made by Mormons which I have watched more times than I'd like to admit. There is a right way and a wrong way to mess with Jane, and I'm going to lecture you on it now.

Last Sunday, my roommate and I decided that we wanted to enjoy all the fun parts of the Super Bowl (snacks, spending time with friends, sitting around in oversized shirts, Beyonce) but skip the boring parts (football). So we bought some food, rented some Friends (the TV show, not the social concept), put on some Destiny's Child hits, and danced around in our favorite dumpy clothing (for me it was a gigantic shirt with raccoons on it). Our video store rents everything 2 for 1 so we had to get another show or movie. I advocated for Lost in Austen a miniseries in which a modern day fan of Jane Austen finds herself transported to the world of Pride and Prejudice. I thought it might be fun.

It turned out to be pretty unwatchable. The main character was unpleasant and obnoxious and as she wreaked havoc in the P&P world, I just got more and more disgusted.

Her period-inappropriate bangs were particularly grating

I resolved to give it a full hour, but only made it 40 minutes. I then tried to skip ahead and see if it got better, but instead ended up at a point where Jane was miserably married to Mr. Collins and Bingley was running off with Lydia. Ugh. Bleh.

Strangely, in the same week, I had a second opportunity to be entertained by the mangling of Miss Austen. Local theater company Jet City Improv is donating something to the museum collection, and the guy facilitating the donation told me about their latest "improvised play" called Austen Translation. It sounded intriguing, so on Friday I went.

Photo from the Jet City Improv website

There was a narrator and every actor had an assigned first name, but how they were related to each other, their social status, and who falls in love with whom was all made up that night.

It was awesome.

My night was the tale of Elinor Quackenbush, who was courted by new-in-town clergyman Frederick Fredericks and local braggart Walter Cavindish. Scenes were regularly stolen by her dim-witted twin sister Harriet, and elder sister Violet who was of "a sickly constitution and often near death." In the second act, Violet kept appearing with new arm-slings and eyepatches, and when Elinor said something particularly cruel to her she ran off stage sobbing "You know I'm allergic to my own tears!" It really looked like Elinor was falling for Mr. Thomas, but after a twin-based mistaken identity marriage proposal, Thomas and Harriet ended up together and Mr. Cavindish made a surprisingly charming declaration of love ("All my life I've known I was better than everyone else, but that changed when I met you"). It was ridiculous yet satisfying at the same time.

Austen Translation was more irreverent with Jane's work than Lost in Austen, yet somehow it was way better.  I think Lost in Austen went wrong because it messed with things that make Pride and Prejudice good in the first place. Watching the story unfold incorrectly because Elizabeth Bennett has been replaced by Annoying McStupidBangs wasn't fresh or exciting, it was just sad. But Austen Translation poked fun at Austen tropes while creating something new. It was goofy, awkward, romantic, funny, and exciting because no one knew exactly where it was going.

I'll leave you with one of the best "yep, this is improvised" moments from the show. The characters we had already met were going to church, where they were encountering people who weren't yet identified.

Un-introduced male character: I find these meetings so uncomfortable. I hope I can say as little as possible.
Second un-introduced male character: Are you going to start the sermon soon?

Apparently next month they are making up a Gilbert & Sullivan opera. YES.

*I should get points for resisting the urge to start this post with "It is the truth universally awknowledged..."

The Burden of Knowledge

Yesterday I faced a difficult conundrum. I had to decide whether or not to be a bitch.

Here is the situation: Yesterday was "Bike to Work Day" in Seattle, and my museum had a booth at this big fair in the afternoon. We brought out a vintage bike, had trivia questions, gave away stuff with our logo on it, and had costumed actors there to act all old-timey. Even though the bike was from the 1890s, our PR firm apparently loves the 1920s and so said the actors would be dressed in that period. When the event started, our internal PR director sent around an email with some pictures and again said that the actors were dressed for the 1920s. So I looked at the pictures. You can maybe guess where this is going.

Ok, so the guys are all dressed in generic costumey looks that are roughly appropriate for the 1900s-1920s era. They aren't 100% accurate, but they are fun and get the point across for an event like this. Fine.

BUT THE LADY. She is wearing a long-sleeve white blouse, an ankle-length skirt, a pair of heeled lace-up boots, and she has a flat boater-style hat (her hair was up earlier so I'm not going to nit pick about that). This would all be fine for evoking c. 1900 but not even close for the 1920s.  

So here was my conundrum--do I point out the inaccuracy?  

On the one hand, it seemed very difficult to do it without being awful.  Everyone else is having fun and enjoying an exciting event, and here I am harping on some tiny detail. No one likes that person. But the thing is 1) We are a history museum. We aren't supposed to have a "whatever, no one cares" attitude about historical accuracy, and 2) People other than me would notice the mistake. Ask the general populace about the 1870s and they will shrug, but mention the 20s and they'll start talking about flappers. Maybe not the most accurate picture, but people have a general idea about short skirts and low waistlines. Even non-experts would take one look at this woman and be like "That is not a 1920s look."

Really, the whole problem would be solved as long as no one at the event mentioned the 1920s. All the costumes work as vaguely turn-of-the-century looks. So I did it. I sent an email to our PR head saying I loved the idea of costumed actors, but I thought she should know the looks were more 1900-ish than 1920s. 

She sent me back an email that included a smily-face emoticon, so I'm hopeful that she doesn't hate me. 

Really she should figure out that all this stems from deep jealousy that some woman other than me was hired to wear period clothing and walk around in public. 

Doesn't she know that I would have done that FOR FREE???

An emotional, smelly day

This morning, I was extra excited to go to work. Instead of reporting to my regular desk at the old museum, I got to go to work at the new museum. I had only been there once before since I started my job. The construction was still in full swing, it was cold, and I was forced to wear an orange vest and a hard hat. Not a good day.

But this morning it was lovely out. I took the bus part of the way and walked the rest. I walked through the revitalized South Lake Union neighborhood, passing lots of hip Amazon.com workers on my way. As I approached the park, I almost got choked up with giddy tears.

The building is beautiful and the setting of the park, the water, and sky is really breathtaking. I felt so, so lucky to be part of the transition to the new space.

The main task of the day was to set up the room where all of the artifacts will be unpacked and organized before they get installed. Myself, three other members of the collections staff, and several members of the packing company arranged tables and talked logistics. Once we had a plan, we set to work. One of the tasks was to cover each table in a padded blanket. It would later get covered with a thin sheet of ethafoam, creating an archival-safe, soft surface for the objects to sit on. Us collections people were a little wary of the blankets since they were just regular moving blankets, not some acid-free, bleach-free, chemically inert, Oddy tested, blessed-by-the-director-of-the-Smithsonian product that we are used to using. But, figuring the ethafoam would provide a safe-enough barrier, we went on our merry way. That is until we started discovering that some of the blankets smelled musty. Some of them reeked, and some of them only stank softly. Were all of them bad? We couldn't tell. Before we knew it we were sticking our noses in each blanket, calling people over to offer second opinions, debating which part of the blanket was best for smell-testing, and eventually confusing our noses so much that we couldn't tell if the smell was on everything or if we had just gone crazy.

The final assessment? We had a big batch of musty blankets that could absolutely not be used with artifacts. Instead we ordered thicker ethafoam to cover the tables.

But that was all beside the point. The point is, in a few weeks I am going to be showing up regularly to install artifacts here:

So awesome.