New Book: A Dandy Guide to Dating Vintage Menswear

[Flat Foot Floey]

This could be a truey awesome book! I am excited and really need to have this. But we will have to wait until Dezember...

http://www.schifferbooks.com/newschiffer/book_template.php?isbn=9780764338908

Vintage clothing is a part of our style history, is an acceptable way to individualize the way we dress, and is an increasingly popular way to "go green." This reference book is an easy-to-use compilation of information for dating menswear garments using label information, textiles, styles, and other available information. It is ideal for new converts to vintage and seasoned collectors of men's and women's garments. This liberally illustrated guide, featuring labels, images from catalogs and magazines, and actual garments, is equally helpful for fashion designers, costume designers, and curators. It covers the U.S. Government regulations for manufactured clothing, garment Union information, and menswear clothing by categories and decade. In addition, this unique book presents exclusive data on ACWA Union labels and a never before seen list of denim manufacturers. Anyone with an interest in collecting, dating, and caring for vintage clothing will find this book an indispensable reference.

 

[Tomasso]

I wonder if Sue Nightingale is the nom de plume of one Marc Chevalier.

 

[Flat Foot Floey]

If so we should sue him....

 

[lolly_loisides]

If so we should sue him....

lollollollol

 

[Shangas]

Surely that title should be "A Dandy's Guide to Vintage Menswear".

 

[aVenir Fashions]

Sue isn't Marc. She has posted here before, as frontmanvintage.

 

[Marc Chevalier]

.
Sue isn't me, although I would have enjoyed being her book's fact checker.

 

[Gene]

Has anyone picked this book up here? I got it as a gift for Christmas. A good reference with a lot of information, but I've already noticed a couple of discrepancies with what some of the members have posted here. I'd recommend this book as a reference for certain things, not as a "bible" by any means!

 

[Flat Foot Floey]

Thank you for the review. I still didn't buy it. How are the pictures? Are the clean photographs of vintage clothes on a dress form or are they old photographs?

 

[Gene]

Thank you for the review. I still didn't buy it. How are the pictures? Are the clean photographs of vintage clothes on a dress form or are they old photographs?

The pictures are pretty great. Most of them are old catalog scans and closeups of details like labels, zippers, buttonholes, linings, etc. A few are on mannequins but there's not a whole lot of those. It's very much about detail, which I like.

The book is for the most part accurate and is in vogue with a lot of what is said here, but there are a few things here and there that left me puzzled. For instance there is a section on price tags from the 20's up until the present, and one of the captions says the tag is supposed to be from the 50's but is clearly much newer. Maybe bad editing or a typo, I'm not sure, but little things like that kind of irk me. But if you are experienced and know what to look for they are easily dismissed and corrected.

 

[frontmanvintage]

Just popping in to see if anyone had read the book and what they thought of it.

Gene - I see what you mean about the captions on the price tags; one is missing, others are mixed up. Please consider that putting together a book with 50k words and over 600 pictures and captions was a very daunting task and being pushed to do it quickly lead to myself (and my editor) overlooking mistakes which should have not made it through to publication. Hopefully the good, usable information provided overpowers a couple of errors.

 

[Trombone]

I just received this as a birthday present...I am enamored with it. The past few hours have been sneaking peeks at it during work. The information seems to explode from the 272 pages of this large (8 1/2" by 11 1/2"). The detail given is so much more than I expected and the illustrations are perfect visuals for the text. Included are many color advertisements (something that must have been hard to locate), pictures describing how to analyze clothing (how to measure collars, the length of ties...) and well described timelines of different types of clothing and labels. I would like to personally thank Sue for your (frontmanvintage) hard work in compiling of this book. I also liked that the captions clearly show what illustration they are describing. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Vintage Menswear.

 

[kringlur]

Will there be a second edition with fixes, if so when can we expect it? Not to be rude, but as someone who's genuinely new to most of this stuff, a book where you don't know what's correct and what's not (if you also add in the price plus shipping costs) is pretty off-putting, even if only a little of it is actually mistaken. If you manage to comb through it and fix the mistakes then I'll probably buy it, or I'll at least get the local library to order it.

The idea of you and your editor being rushed with it really does make me worry though, so I don't want to get it before at least a second edition. I feel like it'd be one thing to rush a fiction book where probably the most you overlook is spelling errors, but I think it's a big mistake to do that with textbooks or non-fiction in general (I've had to use many textbooks that were wrong, including language textbooks, so you can imagine how bad something like that can get and just why I worry). Especially since it's a large book and is so detailed, I feel like it's definitely possible that "this should be the only book you really need!" as long as the mistakes are corrected, right?

Again, I don't mean to sound rude or anything so I don't want you to take offense on accident, sorry!