elegantly dressed grandparents
Well, I don't think anyone has ever said these grandparents of mine were elegant (the others were, rather, though not so much in the clothes department even then). They were simple people in a small working-class town way upstate, and had - and declared they had - no pretensions whatsoever.
At least half of what now looks like elegance in these kinds of old pictures lies in fact in our reading of them: it is our nostalgia for a time when no one except Stanley Kowalski (and a relatively new kind of disreputable people called "teenagers") wore T shirts, and even their T shirts had no cartoon characters or sexually explicit sloganeering on them. People wore proper shoes; jeans weren't considered townwear; fabrics were simpler and were also of better quality; and, frankly, the tailoring and finishing were better. Clothes, like everything else, were made to last.
Look at these coats! And both my grandparents, snapped this snowy day in January 1958, are wearing hats. Not the panic-hats we now wear if it gets cold - wear resentfully, convinced they are ruining out hair, or apprehensive that they look funny, aren't flattering, or diffidently, because really we are a bit embarrassed to be wearing anything as recherché as a hat - and wear only because it has got cold. No. These are proper, unironic, unembarrassed, hatlike hats.
And don't even get me started on Grandma's white gloves, her hard little handbag, her shawl collar and that brooch - which I may find, if I look at it closely enough, is sitting even now in my jewellery box. I just think she looks beautiful.
Here are my grandparents a year and a half later, arriving - we think - at my other grandfather, the Reverend's, church in White Plains for my parents' wedding. In this picture what passes for elegance is in fact happiness. Look at it! My grandparents are resplendent with it. (And the sweet frock doesn't hurt, either.)
11 comments:
Funny it was 1958 - I'm still wearing my grandfather's suits and coats he had made in that year (according to the labels in the inside pockets). Going strong thanks to the workmanship of Messrs Thresher & Glenny.
I love these old photos. I've just been sent a load, including one of my other (paternal) grandfather in a Northumbrian kilt. Breathtaking stuff.
Where is way upstate?
Quink, it is so true.
Bobby - Sidney, near Oneonta. Note I only said "way" upstate, not "way, way" upstate, which I believe is the correct terminology for anything approaching Buffalo or Binghamton.
Teleplane scene, brief switch transendance occurs,
Lens moving eye to the faded snapshot-rim, conjuring life Electronic scene population
actor on a set, gold yellow
Green thread, triad, triskel liminal winding draw, frame
Fanilial scene of enhanced
mirror and zero, Incredible
Life, pulling us home smoke-
screen au la nuveaux of NE Leicesteshire in a whisp
of fabric, invisible one
Can imagine the smoking ban
a national tap-room light
Inner affirmation transport
to an upstate annonyomous
Place, a brief stay perhaps fleeting grasp of central
50's americana, "there.."
I think there's definitely touches of elegance there. One you didn't mention was the elegance of the vehicles - could that be a Studebaker, or a Chevy, or something similar immediately behind them?
And of course behind that is the VW Beetle, designed by Porsche, commissioned by Hitler, and key to Germany's post war economic revival. It could have been British. Being either very magnanimous in victory or very stupid, they declined the design on the ground that it was outdated. Then a British officer helped set up and organise the VW factory ... and by 1960 the German economy was larger than the British, who had had to borrow from the Americans ... It was killed by Ralph Nader as far as the USA was concerned in the 1970s, but was still being made in Mexico in the 1990s and might still be today for all I know. Either way, the shape and rear engine layout survives in the Porsche 911, whose direct predecessors were built around Beetle parts because that was all that was available.
My favourite t-shirt has on the front "VW Beetle. Not just cool ..."
And on the back
"... It's AIR-cooled"
P-Ump, bottom of the class for the T shirt - really, you aren't even paying attention!
Top marks for the cars, though. I didn't mention them only because I couldn't work them into the text. To be honest, I love the houses, too. I still pine for these dwellings. And the effortless spaciousness of the street, along which these huge cars could glide like dreams...
Anyway, my grandmother may have been without one kind of social pretensions, but she definitely liked things nice. Oh, yes.
Very lovely Ms B.
xxx
Pants
That 'hard little handbag' is FANTASTIC, and the FolksWagon has whitewalls.
Hats and brooches, just like Australian 1958 Grandparents.
They are just wonderful.
"Dignified' appears in definitions of 'elegance'. Yes.
No unseemly behaviour by people wearing clothes like those.
Is it hard for us to realise that in 1958 people's lives were not run on CREDIT (as they are today) ?
Well I'm not so sure. On the one hand, I have photos from a family reunion slightly spoiled by someone's logo t-shirt ("Alien Lesbian something" ...).
On the other hand, I've only ever uploaded one picture on my blog. Junior ump can be seen with his rippling torso bulging through a striking turquoise uv-proof swimsuit/t-shirt, and you can't say fairer than that; meanwhile the person standing over him isn't wearing a shirt at all. A t-shirt in those circumstances would merit EDW on its own. Except it was Florida in the summer, so exemptions can be made. And it wasn't Wednesday.
Thanks for sharing those gorgeous old photos with the world, Ms Baroque. There is something delightfully austere about black and white photos. Is it my imagination, or did no one smile in photographs before colour film came along?
I like your blog, but I think that this subject is the most interesting of your last posts (for me). Bye, Lucy Relatos.
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