A fashion spread, Hollywood movie or advertisement usually doesn’t reflect with accuracy what everyday people actually wore at a given time. Historically speaking, to really get a sense of the fashions of the times, old newsreels, photojournalism and catalogs offer more true-to-life examples of what was in style.

The cover of Joe Brainard’s I Remember

One literary source is the book-length poem I Remember, by writer and artist Joe Brainard. When it was originally published—in three parts between 1970 and 1973 by Angel Hair Books—the small print runs sold out quickly. Most recently it’s been published by Granary Books. The 1,000 entries in this work all begin with “I remember . . .” and each describes a single memory from Brainard—growing up in Oklahoma in the 1940s, arriving in New York in the ’60s, making art, making friends, making a living.

As the poet and his lifelong friend Ron Padgett explains:

…the repetition in I Remember proved to be a springboard that allowed Joe to leap backward and forward in time and to follow one chain of associations for a while, then jump to another, the way one’s memory does. Coupled with Joe’s impulse toward openness, the I Remember form provided a way for him to lay his soul bare in a confession that is personable, moving, perceptive, and often funny.

The book is a time capsule, a beautiful and candid catalog of one person’s memories, however fleeting. Incorporated into those recollections is documentation of how people dressed—some styles are still worn today, while others were passing trends that are relegated to fashion history. They all share Brainard’s funny, insightful and accessible style. Michael Lally of The Village Voice agreed: “Joe Brainard’s memories of growing up in the ’40s and ’50s have universal appeal. He catalogues his past in terms of fashion and fads, public events and private fantasies, with such honesty and accuracy and in such abundance that, sooner or later, his history coincides with ours and we are hooked.” What follows are a selection of favorites:

Sack dress, 1949. Image from carlylehold via Flickr.

I remember sack dresses.

Singer in pillbox hat, 1958. Lesley University Archives via Flickr.

I remember pill box hats.

I remember thinking how embarrassing it must be for men in Scotland to have to wear skirts.

I remember old women’s flesh-colored hose you can’t see through.

I remember when girls wore lots of can can slips. It got so bad (so noisy) that the principal had to put a limit on how many could be worn. I believe the limit was three.

Woman with beehive working an IBM accounting machine, 1960s.

I remember when “beehives” got really out of hand.

I remember when those short-sleeved knitted shirts with long tails (to wear “out”) with little embroidered alligators on the pockets were popular.

I remember plain camel hair coats that rich girls in high school wore.

Ad for Flagg Bros. shoes, 1970s.

I remember having a crush on a boy in my Spanish class who had a pair of olive green suede shoes with brass buckles just like a pair I had. (“Flagg Brothers.”) I never said one word to him the entire year.

I remember sweaters thrown over shoulders and sunglasses propped on heads.

If, after reading I Remember, you crave more information about the work and life of Joe Brainard, who passed away in 1994, watch filmmaker Matt Wolf’s short documentary  I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard. Described on the website as “an elliptical dialog about friendship, nostalgia, and the strange wonders of memory,” the film combines archival images, audio recordings of Brainard, and an interview with poet Ron Padgett. Download the film here or check it out at the following upcoming screenings:

April 18 – 28, 2013
Festival IndieLisboa, Portugal
Screening TBA

April 25, 26, 27, 2013
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
Screening Times TBA

Emily Post (left): Photo by Philippe Halsman, 1946, National Portrait Gallery. Diana Vreeland (right): Drawing by Richard Ely, 1989, National Portrait Gallery.

This weekend, I saw the documentary, The Eye Has to Travel, a portrait of the legendary fashion editor and larger-than-life eccentric Diana Vreeland. Just like her friend Coco Chanel, who was well-known for her quips, or Chanelisms as they were often called, Vreeland also had her own one-liners on life and style.

Frequently during the film Vreeland tossed around the word “vulgar.” “Never fear being vulgar, just boring,” was one of her familiar sayings. Another was “Vulgarity is a very important ingredient in life. I’m a great believer in vulgarity—if it’s got vitality. A little bad taste is like a nice splash of paprika. We all need a splash of bad taste—it’s hearty, it’s healthy, it’s physical. I think we could use more of it. No taste is what I’m against.”

Vulgar. I don’t hear the word that often. It doesn’t appear much in the lexicon of fashion writing these days. But I have been more attuned to it since I’ve been reading excerpts of Etiquette by Emily Post for the series on dress codes and etiquette. The lady of manners uses the descriptor repeatedly and relentlessly in the chapter “The Clothes of a Lady.”

The Oxford dictionary defines vulgar as: “1) Lacking sophistication or good taste: a vulgar check suit, 2) making explicit and offensive reference to sex or bodily functions; coarse and rude: a vulgar joke, 3) dated characteristic of or belonging to ordinary people.”

I’ve excerpted a few (amusing) quotes from the 1945 edition of Post’s Etiquette from the chapter, “The Clothes of a Lady.” (Italics are my own.)

“The Clothes of the Lady” chapter introduction:

Not even the most beautiful background could in itself suggest a brilliant gathering if the majority of those present were frumps—or vulgarians! Rather be frumpy than vulgar! Much. Frumps are often celebrities in disguise—but a person of vulgar appearance is pretty sure to be vulgar all through.

Vulgar Clothes

Vulgar clothes are those which, no matter what the fashion of the moment may be, are always too elaborate for the occasion. . . . A woman may be stared at because she is ill-behaved, or because she looks like a freak of the circus or because she is enchanting to behold. If you are much stared at, what sort of stare do you usually meet?

The Sheep

Frumps are not very typical of America; vulgarians are somewhat more numerous; but most numerous of all are the quietly dressed, unnoticeable men and women who make up the representative backbone in every city.

On the Woman Who is Chic

’Chic’ (pronounced sheek) is a borrowed adjective, but unfortunately no word in our language expresses its meaning. Our adjective ‘elegant’—which before it was vulgarized, most nearly approached it—rather suggested the mother of the young woman who is chic.

On Principles of Taste Apart From Fashion

A lady in a ball dress with nothing added to the head looks a little like being hatless in the street. This sounds like a contradiction of the criticism of the vulgarian. But because a diadem or a jeweled filet or other ornament is beautiful at a ball, it does not follow that all these should be put on together and worn in a restaurant—which is just what the vulgarian would do.

Emily Post, obviously an anti-vulgarian, and Diana Vreeland, an advocate for that trait over dullness, would have had a heated debate about its merits or lack thereof. I’d stand on the sidelines, enthralled and entertained, as both of their maxims feel so far removed from my life, and, in my opinion, the way we describe—and clothe—ourselves today. Though I would side with Vreeland.

Maria Snyder, Italian Vanity, Versace, 1983.

“I’m from the generation that came to New York to meet their idols. In my case it was Andy Warhol and Antonio Lopez.”
—Anna Sui

What do Jerry Hall, Jessica Lange and Grace Jones have in common? Antonio Lopez. Without him, these women, along with other “Antonio Girls,” as he called his coterie of beauties, might not be the household names they are today. An influential fashion world figure from the 1960s to the ’80s, Antonio had an eye for spotting talent and illustrating beauty, transforming aspiring models and actresses into pinnacles of glamour.

Fernand Leger series, the New York Times, 1966.

Spanning three decades, the Puerto Rican-born, Bronx-raised fashion illustrator’s work could often be seen in the pages of the New York Times, Vogue, Women’s Wear Daily and Interview. He effortlessly invoked surrealistic, abstract and Pop art, and referenced contemporary youth culture with ease. Using pencil, ink, charcoal, watercolor and film, Antonio captured the human form and the fashions adorning it, bringing a breezy, sexy sensibility to his fashion imagery.

After working in the late ’60s with his “Girls,” Antonio moved to Paris in the early ’70s and steeped himself in French culture. That boiled down to night-clubbing with the likes of Karl Lagerfeld (whose apartment served as his crash pad), Yves Saint Laurent, Paloma Picasso and others, many of whom were subjects of his drawings, Instamatic photographs, and Polaroids from that time.

Norma Kamali campaign, 1986.

What was particularly striking about Antonio’s work was his uncanny ability to morph his illustration style from one subject or designer to the next. So by the early ’80s, he’d been hired to execute ad campaigns for YSL, Norma Kamali, Valentino, Missoni and Versace. And in a cyclical turn of events, his interpretations frequently influenced those designers’ collections the following season.

Personal study, Space People, 1965.

In 1987 at age 44, Antonio died far too young from AIDS-related complications. Because of the stigma at that time associated with AIDS, the fickle nature of fashion and the lack of Internet, his work had been fading into fashion history—until now!

Through October 20, you can see some of Antonio’s most renowned illustrations as well as some never before seen in Antonio’s World at the Suzanne Geiss gallery in New York City. Concurrent with the show, in September Rizzoli published  Antonio Lopez: Fashion, Art, Sex, and Disco, a book of his illustrations.

All Photos Adam Reich. Copyright the Estate of Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos. Courtesy the Suzanne Geiss Company.

Cosmopolitan, August 1970

Earlier this week, Cosmopolitan magazine’s longtime editor Helen Gurley Brown passed away at 90. Brown was famous (or infamous) for bringing blunt and colorful conversations about sex and relationships into the mainstream first with her 1962 bestseller Sex and the Single Girl and then at Cosmo, which she transformed from a sober publication for homemakers into the lifestyle magazine for the modern career woman. With Brown at the helm–for more than three decades, from 1965 to 1997–you could expect to see cover lines like “Don’t Be Afraid of Men Who Whistle and Ogle You–Enjoy!” (June 1970), “Are Younger Men the Answer?” (April 1973) and “What to Do With (and To) Sexually Selfish Men” (January 1974). Beneath the titillating text was equally suggestive photography: the taped cleavage and exposed backs of models and actresses scantily dressed in fashions of the day (and quite the opposite of mouseburgers, the term Brown coined in the ’70s to describe herself and other drab, unimpressive-looking women).

Brown’s legacy is complicated. She helped spark the sexual revolution, but her emphasis on fulfillment by pleasing men was a form of empowerment at odds with the emerging era of second-wave feminism. When Brown called herself a feminist, it was very different from what Betty Friedan meant when she published The Feminine Mystique a year after Sex and the Single Girl. Friedan’s serious work, also a bestseller, established a contemporary women’s movement that stood in contrast to the pithy quips and scandalous instructions of what Brown would call the Cosmo Girl.

Reading Brown’s obits the past few days made me wonder how her version of feminism translated into changing Cosmo covers over the years. From its 1886 origins as a family magazine to a literary rag to Brown’s vision of the modern woman, Cosmo has always been about the cover.

Cosmopolitan, May 1940

Cosmopolitan, January 1958

Cosmopolitan, March 1978

Cosmopolitan, September 1979

Cosmopolitan, March 1993

It’s interesting how magazine covers, being regular and monthly, form a pretty comprehensive anthropological record, like a time lapse of cultural change. It’s a delight to flip through, and take in the period atmosphere from different decades. (Polyester! Teased hair! Nifty old typefaces! $1.50!) But you can also see how little has changed. Cosmo paved the way for the vast industry of today’s fashion magazines, and most of them have been much the same for decades. What might have been daring in the wake of the ’50s feels recycled today, and just how many Top 15 Things to Drive Your Man Crazy are there anyhow? What was ahead of its time can soon seem like old hat. Brown’s imperative for women to embrace their personal and professional pursuits with sexy abandon seems tame now that pole dancing is a form of suburban maternal empowerment, and porn is considered liberation. In that sense, Helen Gurley Brown’s old hat really was, in fact, ahead of its time.

Vintage blue and white floral-printed cotton suit, no label, used for recreational swimming, 2006-2009. Purchased at Portobello Market, London. Worn first in the infinity pool at Babington House, Somerset. James proposed in the pool. We swam around not knowing what to say to each other, went on a long bicycle ride, took pictures; then later, in our small attic room, we fought and decided maybe marriage wasn’t a good idea.

Bathing implies having some contact with the ground while in the water—propulsion and speed are secondary. Bathing. Bathing: the word itself feels like a balm, a cleanse, rather than the wavy struggle of swimming. I wonder why swimming in North America feels different from swimming in Europe.

Speedo multicolored “paper suit,” used for competition, Canadian Olympic swimming trials, 1992.

Until the late seventeenth century, the sea was regarded as a place of danger and death, the aspect of houses was directed inland, sailors were not taught to swim, in order to foster in them a true respect for the sea. The ocean stank, was dangerous, belched up seaweed and flotsam, and was full of marauding pirates and monsters. The value of any coastline was in proportion to how fortified it was. Swimming instruction as military drill for men and horses began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in northern Europe, accompanying developments in toilets and indoor plumbing.

Rachel Comey, gray and black print two-piece, 2009. Traded for designing prints for Rachel’s Spring/Summer 2010 collection, not yet worn.

In The Springboard in the Pond: An Intimate History of the Swimming Pool, Thomas A. P. van Leeuwen talks about the impression physical activity made on European visitors to the United States in the 1890s: “Americans seem best to express their spiritual energy by moving their bodies, by running, walking fast, and competing in sports.”

Vintage blue and white one-piece, no label used for recreational swimming, 2000. Stolen from Banff Upper Hot Springs, Banff, British Columbia.

I think of the only time my medals have come in handy, at the U.S. border crossing in Buffalo. As Jason and I pull up at the border after inching through a traffic jam from Toronto, a guard eyes us suspiciously and asks for our passports. We look a mess; the car reeks of B. O. and chicken nuggets. Vintage clothes are strewn across the backseat, moth-eaten blankets lumpily cover Jason’s camera equipment. One of my father’s art-college paintings is jammed between our luggage. I’m certain we’ll be pulled over to the side, as I often am, and interrogated. The guard gets out of his booth and asks me to pop the back. I do. Shuffling sounds, then: “Who’s the swimmer?” I smile at Jason. “I am.” The hatchback shuts quietly. The guard hands us our passports with no further questions, just “Drive safely.” Before I left my parents’ house I heaved a large tote bag into the car; in it were eight years’ worth of gold, silver, and bronze swimming medals.

Aquarapid purple tank, bought in Turin, during the 2010 Artissima art fair, used for recreational swimming, 2010-2011. Worn in a Holiday Inn pool, Minneapolis, before attending the opening of Jason’s first solo museum show, at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Taped to a wall near the pool is a piece of paper that reads: POOL NOTICE: The black marks on the bottom of the pool were caused by a guest, who was an art student, and experimented with a waterproof marker. The pool is clean and safe. In order to remove the marks, we have to drain the pool. We have chosen to do that at a future slow period so that our guests can now enjoy the pool. Thank you, Management.

While visiting Berlin, I meet an artist who swims every morning, so I ask him about the city’s pools. He quickly makes a list of those he likes in my notebook. His daily laps are done at Stadtbad Mitte, in Gartenstrasse.

I head first to Stadtbad Charlottenburg– Alte Halle, a small, pretty pool nestled in the leafy streets of western Berlin. I borrow a pair of children’s goggles from the lifeguard booth and swim short widths beside a thick red rope bisecting the pool. A labored mural of Hylas and the Nymphs overlooks the deep end. The pool is beautiful but feels heavily furnished, like a parlor. The other swimmers seem to be annoyed by my splashing.

Lyell black smocked bathing suit, used for recreation swimming, 2010. A birthday present from James, worn swimming with Jason in Tunkhannock Creek, Pennsylvania, after stopping at an antiques store, coming across a Ku Klux Klan robe for sale, and leaving as quickly as possible.

Stadtbad Mitte, completed in 1930, is a soaring, gridded glass box. It is bright and unusually airy for a pool, thanks to its high mullioned transparent roof. (In 1945 its roof was struck by two Allied bombs—conceivably dropped by my grandfather or some friends of his—that failed to explode.) The deck is tiled in small pale gray squares; there are slurping gutters along the sides, two staircases that lead to a very shallow end, and a three-foot drop from the deck to the water’s surface that makes the pool feel contained, tanklike. There are only eight other swimmers, most doing relaxed but steady laps. In the deep end I sink to the bottom and look around. The swimmers glide calmly overhead, my bubbles rise, glittering. I push off the bottom.

Speedo black nylon, used as a doubling suit for training, 1988–1992. We’d wear two, sometimes three suits to train in, the extra layers and weight providing drag. The suits were made of nylon, more durable and less flexible than Lycra. Some men’s suits were built with mesh pockets that caught the water and billowed out in small cups at the hips. Before practice, we would keep our drag suits resting down around our hips. At a meet we’d roll them down wet after warm-up, as ballerinas roll legwarmers up over their knees and then down around their ankles. A black nylon suit would fade to a grayish-brown over time; a blue nylon suit to pinkish-gray.

In Bath, England, for a literary festival, I visit the ancient Roman baths. Usually, any ruin filled with algae- greened water thrills me, but as I walk through the boxy displays and past the projected re-creations of “Romans” wearing too much mascara, I am bored. Even the two-thousand-year-old skeleton with cavities from eating honey does nothing for me. The statues the Victorians erected around the terrace overlooking the large outdoor pool upstage the real Roman stonework, the bath’s cruder but authentic roots. What I love, however, are the Roman curse tablets: tiny outrages scratched into pieces of lead and pewter and nailed to the wall, requesting that the gods visit misfortune on the heads of whoever stole their stuff while they were swimming. One reads:

To Minerva the goddess of Sulis I have given the thief who has stolen my hooded cloak, whether slave or free, whether man or woman. He is not to buy back this gift unless with his own blood.

I could relate, remembering the time my coral-pink Club Monaco sweatshirt was stolen from the Clarkson pool women’s locker room when I was thirteen. One minute I belonged to The Club of Monaco. Then suddenly I didn’t. My father was furious at the theft; on the chilly drive home his incredulity at my trust in other children vibrated in the car. I cursed the girl who had taken it.

Bathing chapter excerpted from Swimming Studies, copyright 2012 by Leanne Shapton, courtesy Blue Rider Press. Images: Michael Schmelling

(Another excerpt can be found at The Paris Review. Thanks to Rob Walker for the tip!)

Joan Didion’s work and lifestyle set the tone for a generation of women. Image: Incase

I was in that stage of packing where the suitcase was empty and the bed was piled haphazardly with clothes and the closet looks ransacked, when I suddenly and fondly recalled preparing for summer camp at Timber Tops in the Poconos. Every year we’d get that list from Timber Tops, a numerically descending inventory of summer: 15 pairs of socks, 15 pairs of underwear, 10 T-shirts, 5 pairs of shorts, 3 towels, 2 bathing suits, 1 pair of long pants, 1 long-sleeved shirt, 1 pair of sneakers, 1 pair of flip-flops, toothpaste, toothbrush, sunblock, bug spray. It was such a methodically satisfying process, gathering those items: Here was everything you needed for fun and freedom, and all you had to do was go down the list, cross the items off, fold them neatly into a duffel bag and head into the woods.

Today, no one gives you a list. What should the young professional woman in New York City pack for her frequent and varied travels? If only someone would itemize the few basic pieces I could throw in a bag at a moment’s notice that would accommodate any location or circumstance, garments that are easy and flexible but still feel stylistically appropriate (which, for me, discounts the ever-popular pants that unzip into shorts). Looking at my suitcase, I wanted a Timber Tops list for adulthood.

And then I remembered Joan Didion’s packing list from The White Album, which I quickly found on my bookshelf:

To Pack and Wear:
2 skirts
2 jerseys or leotards
1 pullover sweater
2 pair shoes
stockings
bra
nightgown, robe slippers
cigarettes
bourbon
bag with: shampoo, toothbrush and paste, Basis soap, razor, deodorant, aspirin, prescriptions, Tampax, face cream, powder, baby oil

To Carry:
mohair throw
typewriter
2 legal pads and pens
files
house key

This is a list which was taped inside my closet door in Hollywood during those years when I was reporting more or less steadily. The list enabled me to pack, without thinking, for any piece I was likely to do. Notice the deliberate anonymity of costume: in a skirt, a leotard, and stockings, I could pass on either side of the culture. Notice the mohair throw for trunk-line flights (i.e. no blankets) and for the motel room in which the air conditioning could not be turned off. Notice the bourbon for the same motel room. Notice the typewriter for the airport, coming home: the idea was to turn in the Hertz car, check in, find an empty bench, and start typing the day’s notes.

—Joan Didion, The White Album

That list has stuck with me since I read The White Album and Didion became one of my favorite authors. I had the opportunity to meet Didion once, and in person she is a smaller-than-small apparition who speaks in a whisper, but you could still hear her robust, unceasing voice: Hers are words powerful enough to shift the way I saw the world. And this here, her packing list, was an itemized lens through which she saw the world. Her traveling uniform, her stuff—bra; nightgown; Tampax—could just as easily find their way into my own suitcase. I love how the simplicity of the list, what she travels with, stands in contrast to the complexity of the writing that comes from those travels.

And I’m not the only one! A January/February 2012 article in the Atlantic by Caitlin Flanagan captures the sentiment as well:

I once watched a hysterically sycophantic male academic ask Didion about her description of what she wore in Haight-Ashbury so that she could pass with both the straights and the freaks. “I’m not good with clothes,” he admitted, “so I don’t remember what it was.” Not remembering what Joan wore in the Haight (a skirt with a leotard and stockings) is like not remembering what Ahab was trying to kill in Moby-Dick.

Women who encountered Joan Didion when they were young received from her a way of being female and being writers that no one else could give them. She was our Hunter Thompson, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem was our Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He gave the boys twisted pig-fuckers and quarts of tequila; she gave us quiet days in Malibu and flowers in our hair. “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” Thompson wrote. “All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better,” Didion wrote.

Author and poet Meghan O’Rourke, mentioned in this Atlantic piece, also shared my enthusiasm about Didion’s packing list. I asked her why. She responded via e-mail:

There’s something about the precision of that list, and how the intimacy of the domestic detail broke the 4th wall between writer and reader, reporter and her text—making it all seem more real. I think it was also seeing myself reflected in it: the way I always worry over what to pack and wear when about to do something professional. One would never see a man write about his packing list—so there was a jolt of the familiar, of making a space for women who do this work. Also, frankly, it was the appeal of the uniform—going out into the world can be so vexing; Didion had found this kind of armor, a feminine armor, and I responded to that.

In Didion’s list, there was an intimacy in her plain documentation. Some telling detail in mundane disguise. And it made me curious about other packing lists in literature, art and so forth. I’ve dug up a few others that I’ll be sharing over the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, what would you include in your list?

John E. Kaughran & Co. was a dry goods merchant with three locations in Manhattan, at 765, 767 and 769 Broadway, and a robust mail-order business. According to the 1884 compendium New York’s Great Industries, by Richard Edwards:

To meet the demands of the thousands of out-of-town customers, Mr. Kaughran issues a large and beautifully illustrated descriptive catalogue, which is promptly sent all over the country, and it is not only an active price list, but a fashion guide, and is highly prized by the thousands whose mail orders form an important feature of the business.

So it turns out that Kaughran’s was a fashion rag—keeping ladies from Pennsylvania to Ohio to California en mode and on trend—as much as it was a mailer for peddling dresses, cloaks and wraps, a kind of Victoria’s Secret catalogue of its day.

We modern Internet shoppers are used to purchasing sight unseen, but it still seems risky that women spent their $23 on “a very stylish and serviceable suit for Spring wear” pictured only in illustration (despite being assured that this “stylish Costume is made from cashmere or ladies’ cloth in all the newest shades and colors.”)

.

But John E. Kaughran thought otherwise, providing helpful guides for elaborate self-measurement—a couple of dozen numbers are needed for the intricate garments to provide proper fit (and coverage)—and assuring readers in the catalog’s introduction:

A careful perusal of its pages will, in no doubt, convince you of the superior inducements we offer to secure your patronage, and as the enormous volume of our business enables us to dispose of immense quantities of merchandise, the facilities which we enjoy of being able to offer them at the very lowest prices, must be apparent.

And, by the way, yes, you read that right: cashmere. In summer months, ladies wearing John E. Kaughran & Co.’s finest, were bedecked in cashmere, wool, silk and velvet. All natural, breathable fabrics, true, but layered in bustles and skirts and overskirts, braided and brocaded, and then tightly corseted for that lovely hourglass figure, it seems that Kaughran’s wares were more stylish than serviceable.

Images: Smithsonian Libraries