Month: June 2016

An entertaining coincidence

Erin2 Comments

About a month ago I managed to see the Oscar de la Renta exhibit at the DeYoung Museum here in SF, and it was lovely. If you like that sort of thing, it’s the sort of thing you really like, etc.

As I exited through the gift shop I checked out the postcard rack, and was struck by this image of an Oscar de la Renta dress featured in Harper’s Bazaar in 1969:

OdelaR-postcard

I was struck not so much by the dress (which is lovely, of course), but by the fabric—it was the same as some Marc Jacobs fabric I’d bought a few years ago! (I blogged about a dress I made in a different colorway of this fabric back in 2015 here.) It’s silk/cotton, not organza:

Untitled

You can tell better in this color image:

image from rarevintage.blogspot.com
image from Rare Vintage

Or in this of another Oscar de la Renta piece in Vogue:

I think this is a jumpsuit?

It’s not uncommon for designers to revive print fabrics—most designers don’t create their own prints, but instead work with fabric houses to select fabrics for their collections. (Here’s an interesting article about the process.) Some French and Italian print houses have been around for hundreds of years, and have catalogs going back pretty much forever.

It looks like this fabric was used in the Marc by Marc Jacobs line sometime before 2009; you can see a dress made with it here:

image from FashionFuss.com
image from FashionFuss.com

Rashida Jones even wore something in this fabric in an episode of Parks and Rec! But I’ve only found one thing from the orange colorway—a strappy top.

I still haven’t made up this fabric, and probably the upshot of learning all this is that I will wait even longer to find the “perfect” pattern. (But I can tell you right now, it probably won’t have ruffles …)

Book Review: Sunday Sews by Theresa Gonzalez

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SundaySewsCover

The lovely people at Chronicle Books sent me a copy of Sunday Sews, by Theresa Gonzalez recently, and it’s a beautiful book. I would love to live in the perpetual Sunday of this book, where everything is suffused in a kind of mid-morning sunlight and you still have hours and hours left to get through all your weekend errands and projects before Game of Thrones comes on. In this particular world of Sundays, you spent all day Saturday clearing the decks for a Sunday of sewing by cleaning and flower arranging and bathing adorable impish small children (with maybe some baking thrown in) and exiling the menfolk to a corral somewhere on the rear of the property. (Don’t worry, they’re happy there. Poor dears, they don’t really appreciate Sewing Sundays, and you can’t really trust them around sharp objects.)

The projects in Sunday Sews are nicely thought out: they’re very simple, of course, but there’s enough leeway for creativity (I hate simple-projects books that are nothing more than ‘hey, make this pillowcase and then glue some rick-rack on it!’) In particular, there’s a boxy tee that has separate sleeve and hem bands that would be perfect for bias treatment or contrasting fabric:

Sunday-Sews-PicnicTee

There are also four different dresses, of which my favorite was the Weekend Wrap Dress (despite its lack of pockets—two of the other dress projects include pockets, though, very respectable).

Sunday-Sews-wrapdress

Unfortunately, though, the sizing in this book runs small—the “Large” is about a US size 12-14. There’s also not a lot of shaping in general; the garments are fairly boxy. Not a problem for the willowy models in the book, but …  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So if you’re on the slimmer, taller side of the spectrum and are looking for some thoughtful, simple projects with a fair amount of scope for creativity, this would be a great book for you. (It’s certainly very pleasant to look at!)