Vintage Voyager

Tassenmuseum III: brandishing the exotic

2011-05-23T11:08:00.002Z

One of the strengths of the Tassenmuseum's pithy but business-like presentation is that the visitor can pursue their own threads of interest through the chronological and themed displays. Characteristically, my radar was sweeping the area for adopted exoticisms, purses that functioned as brandishable badges of the prestige of distance, by import or travel. These little nineteenth century purses

Tassenmuseum II: 'I don't know any of these people'

2011-05-22T11:05:00.001Z

I think my fixations at the purse museum are pretty predictable to be honest; I homed in on the luggage/travel-related paraphernalia, and the borrowed exoticisms and souvenirs. Neither of the types of (very much NOT high-end) purse that I tend to collect were presented in the collection, but the themes were there. First of all, luggage nostalgia: What a great display. Recently, and I guess

Amsterdam & the Tassenmuseum - vintage purses & leaning gables

2011-05-21T13:11:00.002Z

There's not been a lot of time for recreational design history or vintage buying lately, but a very brief spell in Amsterdam recently allowed me to check out the Tassenmuseum. A private collection built up by the antiques dealers Henrikje and Heinz Ivo, it has been housed in a seventeenth century mansion on the Herengracht since 2007. The house has been sympathetically refurbished, so that the

At night, in the kasbah: a never-ending chase...

2011-03-19T17:24:00.001Z

I've got to show this brilliant 40s novelty print. It came in the form of a back-buttoned blouse, complete with little shoulder-pads, by Alice Stuart, courtesy of the super Luna Junction on Etsy. Here you see a street scene repeated in Escheresque steps across the cloth. It's a total contrast to the line-sketched illustration frenzy on silk crepe that I pegged as a Ballet-Russe take on the

Mirror on the wall - a Shaheen and a Katzenbach & Warren landscape

2011-03-18T17:29:00.002Z

Back in July 2010 I posted a sample of vintage wallpaper produced by Katzenbach and Warren, entitled (only generically) 'Persian Landscape' The other week, I spotted this Alfred Shaheen garment for sale on Ebay; it's from a variation on a two piece South-East Asian-styled lounging outfit, a quilted long tunic with high side slits that would have been worn with slim-fitting pants (Maggie of

The Return of the Flying Carpet

2011-02-06T23:24:00.001Z

Almost a year ago now, I talked about how magic carpets floated into the design imagination from nineteenth-century Arabian Nights translations, turning up especially in fashion imagery in the 1940s and 1950s. I have a new novelty print on the same theme to share: This one is more effusively romantic than the black-backgrounded ones I've previously seen. But without the flying carpet, I might

Goldenhair by Goldworm (with bags of gold?)

2011-01-30T17:00:00.002Z

I bought another Goldworm dress from an Etsy seller a few months ago now. But the fact that it had been slightly awkwardly shortened wasn't mentioned in the listing. Some untouched Goldworms seem to feature coordinated lace edging on the underside of their hems, although I'm not sure whether the absence of this is always a giveaway for the shortening. Here's the hem on an unshortened 1960s

Les Guides Rouges 1958

2011-01-06T21:41:00.001Z

My brain has been stolen away by flu, so I'm just posting a handful of grainy shots from a New Year Alpine expedition. The chalet-hotel was hilariously ramshackle, sporting its outdated endorsements by the door. The carousel in the centre of town had a camel as well as horses. And I liked the elemental style of this clothes store window display/front of house equipment: Happy New Year!

There Firebirds sing by night

2010-12-26T19:59:00.000Z

At a seasonal visit to the Diaghilev exhibit at the V&A, I managed to snap a quick reference shot of Goncharova's backdrop design for Stravinsky's Firebird (also splashed across wrapping paper and novelty bags in the gift shop). Here's the complete image, which was reproduced with the Daily Telegraph's review. I'm still digesting a lot of what I saw, but I wanted to post this archetypal view of

A sports sweater and abandoned knitting needles...

2010-10-27T18:42:00.000Z

More from the attic. Am I the only person to find it slightly sinister that this small cache of patterns and mementoes, ending about 1953-54, included two pairs of abandoned knitting needles? A slightly meek model, but the lighting and angle of her body remind me of Lauren Bacall's famous Harper's Bazaar cover of 1943. Is she standing in an open door/window because the sweater is for the

Ghost Negatives

2010-10-25T15:04:00.001Z

This couple seem to have lived in our house for less than two years, c. 1952-1954. They married in September 1952, while living at another address further south, on the other side of the local park. Another couple bought this house in 1955 and, it seems, stayed for a very long time (our neighbour talks of finding the old gentleman, expired in the 'morning room' in the early 1990s). In more

Attic Treasures

2010-10-24T22:51:00.000Z

So little time to post lately, but here's a taster of one thing to come. Today we cleared out the attic of our new home. The seller of the house should have done it, of course, but we didn't force the issue because... I kind of thought we might find some interesting things up there. And we did. All this time, the house has been holding fragments of an archive in its attic. Some horribly

A Persianesque Tanglewood Print

2010-10-11T19:20:00.001Z

I have a pretty monumental, stiff-sided suitcase in which I've been transporting most of my novelty prints in the recent moves. It was donated to me some years ago now by a housemate who was emigrating to Canada for a new job - he'd transported part of his life and belongings in it from India over a decade before. It's one of those archaic types that looks like it's constructed entirely from

An oasis mirage on the Saharan horizon

2010-09-23T10:08:00.002Z

Life has been interrupting these posts rather a lot lately. I've had a spell of travel and an ongoing spell of work overload, and to top it all off, my camera has gone on the blink. So when this curious and lovely new dress arrived from evfunes on Ebay, I was stuck with a brief, grey few minutes in the morning with the phone to take pictures. Oh dear! Nevertheless, I think you might get the

Very late to Tammis Keefe's party: her 'Persians' and Fritz Butz's mystery destination

2010-08-25T15:20:00.002Z

I wrote recently about my current fixation on small decorative pieces and textiles. I can't possibly think about scarves and handkerchiefs without acknowledging one of the key textile designers of the 50s, Tammis Keefe. I'm definitely late to the Keefe-collectors' soiree (who sent me my first Keefe hankie - was it you, Lizzie? I think it was...); I'm now using the few Persian-themed textiles

Interior Re-decorating, 1954

2010-08-23T10:31:00.000Z

By way of explanation of a lack of posts on design/fashion, let me offer this: You're looking at fragments of a 1954 London newspaper, pasted onto the underside of the first of two layers of kitchen vinyl in our back room. Some of the timbers underneath are now rotten, so the whole lot needs to come up. There's a lot of work ahead, so I should probably stop getting distracted by the 1950s ads

Fashion quoting Art: Goldworm's Moulin Rouge dress

2010-08-18T15:45:00.005Z

One of the great things about keeping up with the blogging is that I can indulge in long-range, intermittent but rambling conversations with my fellow vintage-chroniclers beyond the realm of the comments box. This last week, Lizzie at the Vintage Traveler posted some fantastic Toulouse-Lautrec cocktail napkins. I can't help but post one of my favourite frocks in reply. I've long lost any

Stray Vignettes: my lengthening foray into scarves and handkerchiefs

2010-08-14T13:00:00.001Z

As my desire for nifty novelty scenes on textiles continues, it gets more and more specific. I started picking up the odd silky scarf from Etsy, where it became easier to shop for these alongside dresses, because of their flexible keyword search and blurry categories. Then, I started to get interested in the abbreviated, decorative designs that jumped into small bits of home decor. I think we

Destination Purses: a voyager's round-the-world round-up

2010-08-12T16:25:00.008Z

My old post on my own destination purses looks to me a little dated and general now, and I'm afraid that I've done little to find out more about the dating and context of this trend... You know, the only thing I noticed (the other day when we put it on the stereo) is Frank Sinatra's 1958 concept 'travel' album, 'Come Fly with Me', every song constructed around the idea of a different, distant and

the mild boredom of order: books

2010-08-05T14:57:00.000Z

There was a discussion over dinner the other week, on the topic of digitized books. Too much to summarize here, but one major impression emerged: that everything will be digitized pretty soon. Now, I'm sure Google's Everything-Scanner is progressing apace, like some galaxy-gobbling, interstellar, vacuum-powered assimilator, but I've got lost in some pretty obscure libraries and archives in my

The Gardens of Shalimar

2010-08-04T20:16:00.006Z

Matters of interior decor keep cropping up at the moment. My attention has been caught by elegant mid-century Persianizing characters popping up on everything but clothing. You're looking at the tablecloth from a 'Luncheon Setting' (with six accompanying napkins) from Leacock 'Quality Hand Prints'. I watched it covetously for a while in Gingham Life's Etsy store, before rationalizing 'hey, we

An exciting new 'gallery' of fabrics

2010-07-23T12:22:00.003Z

fine art fabrics, originally uploaded by Millie Motts.I'm flicking through a series of mid-fifties scans on flikr at the moment and came across this fantastic gallery ad for a new range of 'Fine Art Fabrics'. Art on the wall, art on the skirt. Here are some relevant links for this Lowenstein line of 'art' fabrics. A detailed post on a 1952 American Fabrics feature by Gypsywearvintage. The

Wallscapes: a 'Persian' print?

2010-07-20T16:57:00.003Z

Design Archives, on Etsy, is a great source of all sorts of random vintage imagery and ornament. Here's my find in their virtual treasury: a fragment of (I think) block-printed wallpaper from Katzenbach and Warren: You can see that it looks like a series of oblique layers of figures-in-landscape - one layer is a horseman and a deer, the other layer with standing female figures. It's a beautiful

Pages from a Persian manuscript: 1960s panel-print shift dresses, a catalogue

2010-07-15T14:34:00.007Z

So an idea bounced to me out of cyberspace, courtesy of Samsara at plastic paradise, who blogged last week about another fine Persian-miniature-inspired print on cotton. Thinking about that example, I realised I was leafing haphazardly through a badly-filed mental memory-bank and vowed to become less forgetful. A cluster of these prints seem to have been produced in the mid or late-1960s, and I

A Room of One's Own & a writing life...

2010-07-13T19:04:00.000Z

I'm supposed to be writing texts longer than blog posts right now, but an uncluttered but well-stocked, stable study is hard to come by. One potential home after another slips through our fingers and we camp out in the midst of the city. The other week, escaping into the countryside on a bicycle ride, we came across a retreat acquired and designed for self-sufficient writing just under a