Category: Fashion

Try New Things, They Said

LIFE 12-10-51

Blindfolded college student Pat Mann bravely jumps from a floor plank to a pan of ice water during a tropical party. Her lei is made of carnations, while the skirt is not grass, but rather nylon and “shrouds of parachute.” Have you any parachute shroud clothing in your closet?

Decorating The Nativity

1963 Comet

Everyone knows the manger was lined with marigold silk. It’s just a matter of draping.

Shepherds watched their flocks by night, gripping staffs of Reynolds Wrap.

What do you suppose that fellow on the ladder is doing?

Basting Belle Of The Blast

Texas Highways

It’s April 1983, and Terri Garlitz is basting lamb during San Angelo’s annual Lamblast, while “Buffalo Hunters” look on. The event takes place at the Goodfellow Air Force Base on Lake Nasworthy, with its can’t-miss infamous leg of lamb contest, as well as games and beauty contests. The Cole Younger Band is coming down from Abilene to start the cookoff with a bang, so everyone, head out to the San Angelo Coliseum for both country and western dancing. Bring your aviators, fringed jackets, and cowboy hats. Yee-haw!

P.S. The Cole Younger Band currently has 14 monthly listeners on Spotify, so they’re evidently still kind of a big deal…

Ayds Keeps You Trim

Mona, that’s all well and good, but before you get to the weight loss secret, please explain why your child appears to be both barefoot and topless in a nationwide ad-VERR-tiz-mint. Surely a Hollywood A-lister such as yourself could spring for a blouse and sandals, unless you spent all your money on Ayds.

1954

Now, see here, we’d usually end this post at this point. But I fear you’ll go Googling Ms. Freeman, and you might wind up at WikiFeet by accident, as I did, a site for freaks who enjoy celebrity feet. So to spare you such heathenism, I’ll share this shot of Mona and Tony Curtis learning sign language on the set of the movie “Flesh and Fury,” wherein Curtis played a deaf-mute prizefighter.

Bend Bulletin

And here she is with Roy and Dale, wearing a belted gingham dress that shows off her Ayds waist.

In this shot, she and Jane Russell talk smack about the peons at Paramount.

And finally, a shot of her with leading man, William Holden, while filming “The Streets of Laredo,” incidentally also the name of a New Zealand folk band.

Oh, to be young and lithe!

Twinning With Your BFF Post-Pandemic

Nat Geo 9/64

Ed Price, the person of nominally lighter color, volunteers in ceremonial dress while a Sarawak gives him a temporary sample of sea dyak tattoos, tribal art from Borneo. What do you think? Too much?

People Who Didn’t Get The Johnson & Johnson Vaccine

Portrait of an Era

The Roaring 20s (which seemed exponentially better than these current less-roaring/more rioting ones) offered these ladies the hedonistic pleasure of mounting a punt on the Thames during the Henley Regatta. To this day, if one is seated in The Stewards’ Enclosure, members must abide by a strict dress code of lounge suits for men and dresses or skirts ( with hemlines below the knee) for women. Culottes are specifically cited as unacceptable. This is a regatta, not a hootenanny! Clearly these gals were less about decorum and more about revelry.

Smooth Operator

This is quite the hairless couple, trim and athletic and healthy. I have never before witnessed such a sheen on a man’s oiled limbs; usually, they are too furry to reflect light. This delightful artwork reminds me both of Vargas pin-up girls, as well as actress Jean Harlow, who shared the platinum hair and pale skin (although rarely a smile). Swimsuits had made leaps and bounds by 1938, with vastly less fabric and stretchier than those of the generation before. Today’s styles hardly differ from these wisp-o-weight Jantzens so many moons ago.