Costume Envy: You Know You Have It

I often find myself nudging friends/the beau in movies and whispering ‘costume envy!’ with one eyebrow raised high enough to graze the ceiling and my fingers digging into the arm rest with excitement (or something less disconcerting).

It’s a fairly self-explanatory term, but if you’re not on board allow me to word you up. ‘Costume envy’ is that rush of admiration you feel when you see an amazing (usually historical…at least in my case) costume in a film, which is followed by an equally powerful rush of envy/hopelessness, as you know it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to wear such a garment in the course of day to day life, (which in my case tends to involve more working/commuting/shuffling down to the bakery than swanning around at balls/lavish dinners/being present at events of historical importance).

The recent news that Keira Knightly’s green dress in Atonement has been rated the greatest movie costume of all time has gotten me thinking about costume envy. Why did this dress win?

Marie-Christine Pavone Jewellery: The Mystery Has Been Solved

Some readers will remember that I recently posted about how difficult it is to find information on French plastic jewellery designer, Marie-Christine Pavone.

Well, you’ll be glad to hear that with a little googling, a little emailing and a whole lot of willingness-to-mildly-annoy-people, I’ve come up with some answers.

First up. I emailed Carter’s (they of ‘Everything Vintage’) to ask about their exclusion of Pavone designs. Here’s the Pavone section of the reply I received from the General Manager (yes, I did bug them on other jewellery topics, but that’s for another day):

“As far as Marie-Christine Pavone items are concerned, we are at the mercy of the dealers who supply us with items as to what is available for inclusion in the books.  We certainly will keep an eye out for it and see if we can get some into our future editions.”
 
A nice response (in fact, his whole email should be commended for being polite and gentlemanlish and deserving of some tea and cucumber sandwiches at the very least), but clearly I was barking up the wrong tree.

Stakeout: The Vintage Detective Hits Geelong

There is only one thing you really need to know if you want to go op-shopping in Geelong on a Saturday. Get there early – like, really early. Everything is shut, shut, shut by 12.30pm – which means that your detective’s remarks are based on a lot of peering through windows and taking photos (and she is now mildly concerned that ASIO is keeping a file on her…the things I do for this blog…).

Anyway, I’ll backtrack for a sec. The reason I was in Geelong in the first place was to check out the legendary Mill Markets. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Mill Markets, they’re kind of like Chapel St Bazaar on steroids. I’ve only had a very cursory look through the Daylesford one (they were closing, I got hounded out), but I have very fond memories of rifling away for hours on end at the Geelong one. It’s the same system as Chapel St – lots of individual sellers with stalls and a central desk where you buy stuff/prod someone to fish something out of a cabinet for you/ask questions to which they respond ‘I dunno you have to ask the vendor and they’re not here’.

I’m going to put in some directions (dicey…I couldn’t direct my way out of a hessian sack) because it really is a bit of a dog to find. You take the freeway, and then take the left where a sign reads ‘Geelong city centre’. Soon you’ll hit an overpass, and as you’re going over it you’ll see a silo of some type with a banner stuck to it that reads ‘Antiques next left’. Do as the banner says and take the next left, and then you can’t miss it.

So we arrived at the market, and I’m positively humming with the glee of anticipating a good scavenge. Then we walk through the door. In the interests of accuracy and transparency, I believe the first thing I said was “What the #$!@ has happened here?”

Investigation: The Case of the Annoying Mystery Signature

Like it or not, signatures, tags, hallmarks, stamps and numbers matter when you’re talking vintage. This goes for a number of things – silver, glass (if you can find one on a glass item…good luck), furniture, clothes (obviously), figurines and so on and so forth. And nowhere is the hunt for a name more intense than in the field of costume jewellery.

Example: I recently saw a Lea Stein fox head brooch (brown and white, for those who are interested, which screams mid-1970s to me) with an unsigned clasp for sale on eBay. The price? US$19.99. Now, given that just about ANY Stein will have the trademark v-shaped ‘Lea Stein Paris’ pinback – and even really small pieces have a tiny, straight bar that reads ‘Lea Stein’, and these fox heads are usually signed – this low price is probably due to the seller expecting some (reasonable) suspicion that the piece is a fake. But there were several photos and a ‘Made in France’ sticker, and the thing did look genuine. Its signed value is probably anywhere between $60-$80 on eBay or similar, or $100-$120 retail.

What this goes to show is that signed pieces are usually going to sell for a higher price than their unsigned counterparts (unless the lack of signature is due to the piece being very early – and as there are so few signatures on really early pieces, the lack of one is never taken as a sign of mass-production or poor quality).

So given this thirsty hunt for a name, it’s highly frustrating when you have pieces that bear some kind of signature that you either can’t decipher or can’t get any information about.

Are You Fur Real? The Never-Ending Fur Coat Debate

For some people, the rules about fur coats, stoles etc (ie they are bad) change when the item in question is ‘vintage’. Why is this?

Because if anyone is familiar with that scene in Ghostbusters II where a snooty woman’s white mink fur coat gets into contact with some of the pink goop and turns into a bunch of snarling minks eager for revenge, you’ll know that ‘vintage’ fur was once as alive and kickin’ as ‘new’ fur.

I think that those who only buy vintage fur rely on two main arguments, namely:

1) The money I spend on this item will go to a charity/vintage shop, not a fur producer, and will therefore not support the ongoing production of fur, and:

2) It’s vintage baby!

This, of course, is complete codswallop. The continued glamourisation of mink, fox, ermine or whatever other pelt one fancies draping all over oneself is an endorsement of the trade as much as going to one of those sleazy fur boutiques on Collins Street or in Crown Casino (these are the people you’re mixing with, vintage fur lovers…). And even if you do feel like Marilyn Monroe or Ava Gardner sashaying around in an oversized, plushy fur garment, the reality is that you probably look a whole lot more like a pimp/J. Lo/someone who shops at Crown Casino, only on a budget.

How Much is Too Much to Pay for Bakelite?

It’s no secret that Bakelite anything is hot as hot can be right now. Even op shops have cottoned on to this fact; when I was in Sydney recently  I managed to unearth a Bakelite buckle at the St Vincent de Paul in Paddington, which was green and in a bow shape. When I asked the cost, I nearly fell over. It was $95!

In fact, there is so much Bakelite love happening around the world right now that some madcap genius has actually gone and done what we were all thinking of doing, and established a Bakelite museum (which features, among other things, a Bakelite coffin. You read it here first).

Here’s a bit of background info on Bakelite. It was developed between 1907-1909 by one Dr Leo Baekeland (his name makes me think of a magical land filled with baked goods, but that’s irrelevant). The manufacture of Bakelite is actually fairly labour-intensive. It involves combining phenol and formaldehyde (with a wood flour filler) under pressure and heat. It was the first plastic made entirely from synthetic components, and was used in a vast array of household and industrial applications for its heat resistant properties. Now, of course, these things have become highly collectible, particularly Bakelite radios, jewellery and household utensils.

Another aside – “Bakelite” was actually the brand that initially produced ‘phenolic resin’ products, but nowadays (in a phenomenon similar to that I describe in my rant about Glomesh) anything made of this material is referred to as Bakelite. And don’t expect it all to be signed.  

This brings me to my dilemma. At the well-known Melbourne vintage shop Shag (actually I think there’s one in Sydney now as well, but a NSW reader may have to sort me out on that one), I have spied a collection of Bakelite brooches so fine that they are well worth investing in. There are ladies walking greyhounds. There are cats, and elegant dogs, birds and fruit and strange, “native” faces. They are in standard vintage colours – red, black, and that murky yellowy-brown colour that seems so characteristic of Bakelite.

But – garn – they are $249. Each.

Death and Nudity: The Ruder Side of Op Shopping

When I began op shopping about 12 years ago, I was but a wee bairn. I’d come home with plastic bags straining against the weight of cheap Kurt Cobain-esque (or at least so I thought at the time…they may have been manufactured by Katies) cardigans and ‘old man pants’ which were neither ‘retro’ nor sanitary.

All of this was much to my mother’s chagrin. As I stumbled through the door with yet another crap-jackpot, my mother would raise two main objections:

1) That thing may have belonged to a person who is now dead, and/or:
2) That thing may have touched someone’s “rude parts”

Of course I responded with the level of maturity you’d expect from an 11 year old; somewhere between ‘But mu-uuuuuummmmmm’ and ‘Who cares?’

But I do ponder these fears every once in a while, and now I raise the question – to what extent do these objections, raised so often by those who don’t frequent op shops, matter?

Stakeout: Biccys Op Shop, Brighton

First things first. Please excuse the lack of apostrophe in the above heading. I know it should be there. I’m itching to put it there. But I am merely the transcriber of someone else’s mistake: Biccys (aargh!) is plastered with yellow and black signs bearing this exact title, and I don’t want to confuse matters.

So anyway…

Given its position in the heartland of Brighton (148 Church Street to be precise), the content of this op shop is hardly surprising. It’s neat. The racks appear as a symphony in colours ranging from charcoal to chocolate, with brief forays into fawn and lilac. It’s certainly not overcrowded with elderly cardboard boxes spilling their contents all over the floor (the mark of a truly great oppy). And forget about finding ‘Sexpo ‘98′ t-shirts or barbecque aprons with fake boobs hanging off them. ‘Respectable’ is the word that comes to mind.

The Four Ways that People Shop in Op Shops, or: Don’t Be a Gleaner

Everyone has their own way of tackling op shops/thrift stores/Savers (in a class of its own). The basic types of thrift-shoppers are:

1) Wanderers – those who go in and wander around, waiting for some stray piece-of-eight to catch their eye

2) Specialists – those who only want to look at one or two sections. These people usually plonk themselves down on a nearby easy chair or banana lounge waiting for their associates to finish up after they’re done.

3) Strategists – those that have a methodical plan that they follow (and who get slightly irritated if this plan is interrupted by friends/significant others yelling out ‘hey! Come take a look at this!’)

4) Gleaners – those who shadow other shoppers, snatching up things they’ve discarded, much in the style of a moray eel shooting out to snarfle a passing crustacean.

Madeleine Albright Sez: Read My Pins

Here’s something I didn’t know: Madeleine Albright, ex-US Secretary of State, is an avid brooch collector and wearer.

The following is an extract from CNN news, including Ms Albright’s comments on her brooch fixation:

“I have a lot of different pins … and it all kind of started as a joke,” Albright said. “I do like jewelry, but when Saddam Hussein called me a snake, I happened to have a snake pin. And I was doing an interview, actually with CNN, and your cameras picked up that I had on a snake pin, and I was asked why and I said, ‘because Saddam Hussein has just called me a snake.’”

Soon, the whole world watched the brooches that Albright affixed to her lapel as some kind of signal, a sort of international reading of the tea leaves.

“When people asked me what kind of a mood I was in or what I was working on I’d say, ‘read my pins.’ So, then it kind of got to be a thing in itself, and I now have a lot of them and they mostly have wonderful stories attached to them …”

Apparently she also wore a snake with a dagger through it after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Ouch.

She’s also been known to wear a gold eagle brooch when feeling patriotic, and a dove brooch (pictured here), given to her by Leah Rabin, when giving speeches in the Middle East.

I found all of this especially interesting, particularly in light of Ms Albright’s comment that: “Fifteen years ago, the first President Bush suggested that the way to keep our bearings was to read his lips. When I was Secretary of State, I asked everyone to read my pins”.

As an avid brooch collector and wearer myself, this struck me straight away. I had only ever chosen which brooch to wear by how well it matched an outfit, or via some vague sense that ‘i felt like’ wearing a certain brooch on a given day. This is a whole new world. Actually, it’s kind of olde-worlde too - the idea that jewellery has the power to communicate something about its wearer is both ancient and potent.