Recently in Vintage Category
Maybe it's wearing the genuine 1940's blue pin-striped suit today or maybe it's that the semester is almost over. Maybe it's that I just don't have enough to do during the day that I wanted something else to manage.
Whatever it is, I've decided to start a new discussion board for vintage clothing enthusiasts. You can talk about suits, ask questions of other vintage enthusiasts to sharpen your sartorial chops, post links to eBay auctions you're interested in and find out if that suit the seller is passing off as 1940's is actually 1960's, and sundry other topics.
The one thing that's annoyed me about other forums for vintage clothing enthusiasts is that you can't post links to live eBay auctions. I understand the reasoning behind that, but it's hard enough for someone just getting up-to-speed on vintage clothing to find something that's really Golden Era vintage and not '60s or '70s. This discussion board aims to complement online communities like The Fedora Lounge et al by allowing enthusiasts to post links to live eBay auctions they're interested in to solicit input from the vintage community.
This forum software also supports RSS feeds. A major deficit of other message boards, in my opinion.
If you're already a vintage clothing enthusiast, then please sign up. Send me an email and we can work on getting some articles or how-tos posted to help out new folks. If you're just looking for a community of vintage enthusiasts that want to complement what other message boards are doing, then try us out and let's see if we can't help each other figure out what Golden Era style is all about!
Bookmark it: Vintage Clothing Discussion Board
It's taken a lot of concerted effort, but I've gotten the kids hooked on classic comedy this past year. Believe it or not, the kids love silent films. We've gone through a lot of the classics of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Charlie Chaplin. Keaton's The General is a favorite of theirs (mine too). The kids know Harold Lloyd as "Speedy" from his film The Freshman. We also enjoy the rough comedy of Laurel and Hardy.
Of course, they also love Abbot and Costello. I recently found a huge collection of their half-hour radio shows from the 1940's and early '50s. I downloaded them all and put them in iTunes (they've been copying to the phone/MP3 player all day today). The whole directory is something like 700MB, so you'll need a broadband connection to download them all, but they are well worth the wait!
Thanks to the Internet Archive.
Life is about relationships. But you know this already, right?
One of the ways we maintain our interpersonal relationships is through the magic of photography. We take snapshots of our vacations, our friends, our family. We stuff them away in a shoebox and when we die, our children and grandchildren go through them and have to throw most of them away because they don't know who's in the pictures and you didn't write it down before you died.
Well, not all of them get thrown away. Some of them get posted on the Internet as glimpses into the past. Square America is a fantastic site that I stumbled across the other day. I'm spending way too much time just browsing through the hundreds of photographs of people I don't know. But I'm developing a relationship with them, just the same.
I've always loved vintage photographs (as you can tell…this blog is covered with them) and now I feel validated that others also see the value in preserving that time before the World Wreckers — those selfish Hippie monsters — ruined everything they could get their hands on.
Visit them. Spend some time. Tell anyone that comes into your work area/office/cubicle to go away, you're taking a break.
I've been getting into vintage suits this year. As you can tell from the design of this blog (and as you'd find out right away if you've read any of my fiction) is that I have a thing for all things Golden Era. If you're still wandering around in the netherworlds of "modern" society and don't know what's afoot in my generation (roughly — though there is significant overlap), then you might not realize just how many people there are that pine for (and often wax nostalgic about) that time in American history when men were Men, women were Women, and the times, though hard, bred the Greatest Generation.
Classic Style is honestly not something I ever thought I'd be interested in — until I realized what it was. More than just wanting to look nice when everyone else around you looks sloppy (sorry: comfortable), it really is, as the saying goes, a state of mind. Sure, I wear a suit and tie and a fedora most days, even though my employer doesn't specify that we dress up (business casual is the law of the land), but it's not just about drawing attention to yourself. Part nostalgia, part egomania, part self-respect, emulating the styles of the 1930's and '40s is almost addictive.
I don't have much in common with most people my age. I love old movies: noir detective, pre-Hays code, even silent. It's a glimpse into a world that is utterly foreign to me, sitting here typing on a fancy laptop, updating my website. Pining for the olden days in this age of techno-modern-charlatanry (think Fritz Lang's Metropolis) is, I fully admit, somewhat of a contradiction.
So do I pine for the days of the Great Depression, with the bread lines and rampant Socialism and sad state of affairs for foreign immigrants? No, I don't pine for that. If I had been alive during the Depression, chances are I would be dirt poor and lucky to own one suit and tie, let alone a half-dozen. But, thankfully, grasping at the styles of the Golden Era isn't about trying to look like a poor farmer who's been tractored off the ancestral homestead and has to move the whole family to California to pick peaches for $0.10 a bushel. It's about acting like you care about what you look like when you go out in public. You might not be the Arrow Collar Man but it doesn't take more than $35 to get pretty close.
At your local Goodwill, you can get a nice suit for $10-15, a couple Golden Era ties (I picked up two genuine 1930's ties at a thrift store on Saturday for $1.00 each), a pair of leather shoes ($7-8), and a crisp, white shirt from Wal-Mart ($11). Add an optional gray or brown fedora (got my Stetson on eBay for $19) and you will look better than anyone else you'll meet on the sidewalk, I guarantee you (unless you happen to run into Cary Grant or Fred Astaire, which I doubt). Modern suit styles simply cannot stack up to Golden Era styles. They don't look as good on you and the material is so thin and cheap that they won't last long at all (certainly not the 60 years of suits that regularly appear on eBay — modern suits can't last nearly that long, no matter how few times they get worn).
I promise you, if you have problems with self-esteem, just put on a suit and tie and you will feel a lot better about yourself. Go to work in a three-piece suit. Bask in the compliments on how nice you look from the people you see every day. Get people to notice you not for the nose rings or the dyed hair, but because you look like your grandfather, with the high-waisted pants and the gray fedora.
It feels great. You should try it. It's worth every cent.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that you should definitely get over to the Fedora Lounge and find out what all the fuss over Golden Era style is about. Spend a month or two perusing the "Suits" section and get an education on what's so different about suits from the Golden Era and why they're so desireable, even today — and not as costuming in period plays, but as every day attire.
