Elegance and vintage

[BombshellBella]

I did a search and couldnt really find a thread on exactly what I was looking for so I am starting one, please feel free to merge if need be.

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I feel like the times of yesteryear people were more polite and elegance and grace were demanded for men and women.

Today with women and starlets we have lost that je ne sais quoi. Hardly anyone dresses properly and I live in NYC. I mean there are the elegant rich looking women, but I can't say I am impressed often. Maybe Im picky. Sweats... bad manners... ick, Ive had enough [huh]

If you can transform public style and behaviour what would you do?

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not that I want clones or anything just some class.
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1) Everyone would have to atleast look like they cared what they looked like...
-clean, manicured, shaved, nice scent

2) Clothes that made a statement, not just some lazy gym clothes

3) Polite, good customer service, respect...

ahhhh, utopia...

 

[Paisley]

More gravitas. While watching The Untouchables today, it struck me that the federal agents wouldn't seem nearly as serious in modern hipster clothes.

 

[Lillemor]

Even if they dress elegantly, many still forget their manners at home. I don't expect everyone to have perfect manners. I'd certainly be the first one to admit that my manners could do with some fine tuning but just making an effort to be polite, considerate and courteous surely isn't too much to expect of people?

There's no need to have anything on display in public! I don't agree with those who say to flaunt it if you have it. I know; I'm a prude.

I don't mind people who dress in alternative styles. My style leans towards gothic at times, strange combinations, unusually coloful at times, but it's casual blandness and vulgarity in the public place that I mind.

Hmmm...I think I'm saying the same as you just in a different and more long winded way which is typical of me.

 

[Macheath]

Hmm...

The term common decency comes to mind. I don't know that it actually means anything today, but I like to throw it around. [huh]

I dress vintage or vintage expired (when I'm not lazy, which is coming to be a majority of the times I'm out, thanks to the Lounge) not because I want to be unique, but because I long for some level of conformity, like they had in the olden days.

I like the comfort of knowing what to expect from people, and conforming to a code of decency should not take away from individual expression. People can find subtle and more effective ways to express themselves, without being boorish.

 

[Bubble Cheeks]

I understand what you're saying. I live in Astoria, and I like to dress up when I go to the movies. It reminds me of a more elegant time, when people were polite enough to want to look nice at the movies. I recently went to see Coraline 3-D, and was asked by people in the line, as well as the woman who sold me my popcorn, "Whatchoo so dressed up for?"

I just smiled and said, "It feels nice". I actually got some EYE ROLLS from that.
Why the eye rolls? It made me feel so embarrassed, and then I reminded myself that THEY should feel embarrassed, not I.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I understand what you're saying. I live in Astoria, and I like to dress up when I go to the movies. It reminds me of a more elegant time, when people were polite enough to want to look nice at the movies. I recently went to see Coraline 3-D, and was asked by people in the line, as well as the woman who sold me my popcorn, "Whatchoo so dressed up for?"

I just smiled and said, "It feels nice". I actually got some EYE ROLLS from that.
Why the eye rolls? It made me feel so embarrassed, and then I reminded myself that THEY should feel embarrassed, not I.

If one of my popcorn kids said something like that to a customer, they'd be on the street so fast their head would spin. Sheesh.

We have a big photo on display in our lower lobby, taken c. 1944, showing a capacity audience waiting for the feature to start. They aren't wearing evening clothes by any means, but 90 per cent of the men are wearing coats and ties, and of the ten percent who aren't, maybe half are sailors in uniform. The women are all in dress coats and hats. And this is in a small, working-class Maine town, where people wore overalls and oilskins to do greasy, smelly, dirty jobs. They'd no more go out on the town in their work clothes than they'd have danced naked in the street.

I wouldn't go so far nowadays as to think customers should all be wearing ties and dresses and such -- but is it too much to hope they'd at least change out of work clothes before an evening out?

 

[Lotta Little]

I think the trouble is there aren't any real rules anymore. For people who would like some style or even behavior guidelines to follow, they are somewhat on their own in today's society.

I also think this is where the backlash kicks in if you are dressing or acting as if you believe there to be "correct" behaviors. I once wore a nice day dress to an afternoon wedding, an example of what I believe to be correct, and was taunted by two of the other guests, one of whom was wearing capri-length jeans and a lace-up corset top. I just ignored them-we weren't at a barbecue, and I think seeing me dressed appropriately perhaps shamed them a little.

 

[kyda]

I think the problem is if anybody dress's differently you are classed as "weird"and if you use good manners you are classed as a snob so people have let their standards drop. There would have been a point in history that this all started, when I have no idea but it is a shame that it has happened.

 

[i_am_the_scruff]

I don't think how you dress is the problem the majority of the time, as long as you're polite. Alot of people seem to think that unless you're dressed "properly" (whatever that means), that you can't be a nice person, or a polite person with manners. I think we covered this in the "unemployed look" thread.

 

[BombshellBella]

WOw...I was so excited to see all of your responses.

Actually,after reading all of your comments, I do believe that there was a level of conformity back then that has since disappeared and people kind of do whatever they want... but I can add that I think it has a lot to do with maybe your economic class or atleast trying to appear in a different economic class....

For example I am in Rochester, NY now and I was shopping today and noticed a lot of the people a bit overweight, tight boot cut jeans and a sweatshirt hoodie thing, with sneakers. To a lot of people this was uniform and pretty much working class.

In NYC, you tend to see groups of looks depending on where you go. Rich upper east siders, grungy villagers type of thing.

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I also agree withthe person who said that people that hold up some sort of ettiquette are regarded as snobs... urgh.

Anyway, what was my point...

oh yes, when I dress lady like, you know, where you look like you made an effort, whether its vintagey or not, I tend to feel better which has me speaking a bit softer, a bit more confident, a bit more polite, a tons more elegant and refined and much more sexy, in a discreet way.

--- Oh I really hate the flaunt it thing, the whole thong showing or icky things like that... uh women... I wish that some women would realize they are worth more than they think. Is aweful how they cheapify themselves :eusa_doh:

 

[lazydaisyltd]

I think the trouble is there aren't any real rules anymore. For people who would like some style or even behavior guidelines to follow, they are somewhat on their own in today's society.

I also think this is where the backlash kicks in if you are dressing or acting as if you believe there to be "correct" behaviors. I once wore a nice day dress to an afternoon wedding, an example of what I believe to be correct, and was taunted by two of the other guests, one of whom was wearing capri-length jeans and a lace-up corset top. I just ignored them-we weren't at a barbecue, and I think seeing me dressed appropriately perhaps shamed them a little.

I think you are so right...dressing nicely when others don't reminds them that they look sloppy, and people react to that.

 

[BombshellBella]

I thought this article was appropriate to post on a thread about elegance and dressing proper...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/15/AR2009041502861.html

Demon Denim
By George F. Will
Thursday, April 16, 2009



On any American street, or in any airport or mall, you see the same sad tableau: A 10-year-old boy is walking with his father, whose development was evidently arrested when he was that age, judging by his clothes. Father and son are dressed identically -- running shoes, T-shirts. And jeans, always jeans. If mother is there, she, too, is draped in denim.

Writer Daniel Akst has noticed and has had a constructive conniption. He should be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He has earned it by identifying an obnoxious misuse of freedom. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, he has denounced denim, summoning Americans to soul-searching and repentance about the plague of that ubiquitous fabric, which is symptomatic of deep disorders in the national psyche.

It is, he says, a manifestation of "the modern trend toward undifferentiated dressing, in which we all strive to look equally shabby." Denim reflects "our most nostalgic and destructive agrarian longings -- the ones that prompted all those exurban McMansions now sliding off their manicured lawns and into foreclosure." Jeans come prewashed and acid-treated to make them look like what they are not -- authentic work clothes for horny-handed sons of toil and the soil. Denim on the bourgeoisie is, Akst says, the wardrobe equivalent of driving a Hummer to a Whole Foods store -- discordant.

Long ago, when James Dean and Marlon Brando wore it, denim was, Akst says, "a symbol of youthful defiance." Today, Silicon Valley billionaires are rebels without causes beyond poses, wearing jeans when introducing new products. Akst's summa contra denim is grand as far as it goes, but it only scratches the surface of this blight on Americans' surfaces. Denim is the infantile uniform of a nation in which entertainment frequently features childlike adults ("Seinfeld," "Two and a Half Men") and cartoons for adults ("King of the Hill"). Seventy-five percent of American "gamers" -- people who play video games -- are older than 18 and nevertheless are allowed to vote. In their undifferentiated dress, children and their childish parents become undifferentiated audiences for juvenilized movies (the six -- so far -- "Batman" adventures and "Indiana Jones and the Credit-Default Swaps," coming soon to a cineplex near you). Denim is the clerical vestment for the priesthood of all believers in democracy's catechism of leveling -- thou shalt not dress better than society's most slovenly. To do so would be to commit the sin of lookism -- of believing that appearance matters. That heresy leads to denying the universal appropriateness of everything, and then to the elitist assertion that there is good and bad taste.

Denim is the carefully calculated costume of people eager to communicate indifference to appearances. But the appearances that people choose to present in public are cues from which we make inferences about their maturity and respect for those to whom they are presenting themselves.

Do not blame Levi Strauss for the misuse of Levi's. When the Gold Rush began, Strauss moved to San Francisco planning to sell strong fabric for the 49ers' tents and wagon covers. Eventually, however, he made tough pants, reinforced by copper rivets, for the tough men who knelt on the muddy, stony banks of Northern California creeks, panning for gold. Today it is silly for Americans whose closest approximation of physical labor consists of loading their bags of clubs into golf carts to go around in public dressed for driving steers up the Chisholm Trail to the railhead in Abilene.

This is not complicated. For men, sartorial good taste can be reduced to one rule: If Fred Astaire would not have worn it, don't wear it. For women, substitute Grace Kelly.

Edmund Burke -- what he would have thought of the denimization of America can be inferred from his lament that the French Revolution assaulted "the decent drapery of life"; it is a straight line from the fall of the Bastille to the rise of denim -- said: "To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely." Ours would be much more so if supposed grown-ups would heed St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, and St. Barack's inaugural sermon to the Americans, by putting away childish things, starting with denim.

(A confession: The author owns one pair of jeans. Wore them once. Had to. Such was the dress code for former senator Jack Danforth's 70th birthday party, where Jerry Jeff Walker sang his classic "Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother." Music for a jeans-wearing crowd.)

 

[olive bleu]

I accept that not everyone is going to dress like me.and i don't think they should. It's just that for me, if i go out without taking the time to put myself together, i actually feel conspicuous.

What does bother me though,is that there at least was a time, when people dressed for certain occasions, like church ,and concerts for example. I have actually gone to the symphony and sat next to people wearing sweat pants.Now, maybe they like music and can't afford a suit, who knows? I like to dress up for parties, and i find it awkward sometimes to be the only person at a christmas party that bothered to put on a dress And i spend the evening discussing my outfit with all the people that came in jeans.

Again, i appreciate that it takes all kinds, and i believe that people should be able to express themselves.There just seems to no longer be a distinction between "every day" dress and "special occasion" dress.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Again, i appreciate that it takes all kinds, and i believe that people should be able to express themselves.There just seems to no longer be a distinction between "every day" dress and "special occasion" dress.

I think the issue is more a cultural one more than anything else -- a sort of phony egalitarianism that's become ingrained in society in recent decades, which carries the idea that to "dress up" somehow means you think you're "better" than anyone else. Which would be hilarious if not for the fact that a lot of the folks who think this way go to great and extraordinary effort and expense to maintain their studiously "casual" style.

 

[Paisley]

Two words: cashmere sweatshirt.

 

[olive bleu]

I think the issue is more a cultural one more than anything else -- a sort of phony egalitarianism that's become ingrained in society in recent decades, which carries the idea that to "dress up" somehow means you think you're "better" than anyone else. Which would be hilarious if not for the fact that a lot of the folks who think this way go to great and extraordinary effort and expense to maintain their studiously "casual" style.

I think you hit it right on the head, Lizzie. The funny thing is, i personally know people who have this attitude, many of whom are "well-to do" and i know very well can afford to make an effort.It's almost like they think it makes them look eccentric if they show up at an event looking like they just rolled out of bed 5 minutes ago. well, ya know what folks? it's not eccentric when EVERYONE'S doing it.

 

[olive bleu]

Two words: cashmere sweatshirt.

lol lol lol

 

[Lotta Little]

I like to dress up for parties, and i find it awkward sometimes to be the only person at a christmas party that bothered to put on a dress And i spend the evening discussing my outfit with all the people that came in jeans.[/QUOTE]

I've had that experience before, just this past Christmas actually. I wore a green dress to a party and the only other woman there wearing a dress had a red one on, so we became the big joke of the night. Not really what I was going for. One other woman did tell me she wished she had dressed up more, but she wore jeans because she thought everyone else would. Eh.

 

[chanteuseCarey]

Elegant IN vintage is the 40s look I'm working on...

As I'm delving more into vintage clothes- a big part of it is deciding what my "best" vintage style/look actually is. It has me narrowing my focus- I no longer look at every interesting vintage piece. I have created in my mind's eye, from watching so many old movies and researching fashion for many years and knowing what looks best on me for my age and figure what I want my vintage look to be. The accessories and garments I choose all pass through my "vintage vision".

I was very fortunate to find on evilBay a 40s wool crepe dress that I think perfectly illustrates that elusive style I want to achieve. The dress fits me like a dream (though I need to shorten it), and I already had the vintage accessories to create an ensemble for myself. I would dress everyday in this vein if possible- really! As it is I'm going to take this particular dress to my deco seamstress and have her create for me a pattern based on this dress and have her make variations of it in other colors.

 

[SayCici]

If one of my popcorn kids said something like that to a customer, they'd be on the street so fast their head would spin. Sheesh.

We have a big photo on display in our lower lobby, taken c. 1944, showing a capacity audience waiting for the feature to start. They aren't wearing evening clothes by any means, but 90 per cent of the men are wearing coats and ties, and of the ten percent who aren't, maybe half are sailors in uniform. The women are all in dress coats and hats. And this is in a small, working-class Maine town, where people wore overalls and oilskins to do greasy, smelly, dirty jobs. They'd no more go out on the town in their work clothes than they'd have danced naked in the street.

I wouldn't go so far nowadays as to think customers should all be wearing ties and dresses and such -- but is it too much to hope they'd at least change out of work clothes before an evening out?

I don't want to be OT, but this reminds me of when my aunt told me that when she was young, people who were traveling (especially on a plane) dressed in their best clothing. Nowadays it's sweats and flip flops.