Hello all! Long time no post! I’ve been a bad, bad, blogger.
We’re currently working on a new production of His Girl Friday at the La Jolla Playhouse. I’m so excited, and feel so blessed to be working on one of my favorite movies in one of my favorite time periods and years for fashions! They’re setting the play in 1939 and I’m loving the costumes we’re building. Of course, that means I’m wanting to make all sorts of 1939 fashions for myself! Here’s some great images that I’m inspired by, from the Spring and Summer of 1939 Chicago Mail Order catalog.
What I love about this, and several other fashions from the late 1930s, is how some of them actually look like seperates but are actually a dress! These dresses often include a few different fabrics in order to get a very tailored look. In these pages it’s called the “basque styles”.
Even if matching different weight or style fabrics isn’t your thing, these pages are inspiring for what to do with trims. Bows, buttons, ruffles… you can take a relatively simple dress and add a lot of whimsical details to make it more fun.
Although these styles are aimed at juniors, you can tone the proportions or styles down in you don’t want something so playful or “youthful”.
Hope the rest of your weekend is wonderful!
WendyBee
April 23, 2013 at 3:06 pm (11 years ago)Love the dress on the right of the first page, and the center dress on the last page. Now if I just had a junior figure! I’ve had TCM on all day, and as today is Shirley Temple’s birthday, they’ve been playing her teenage years movies, starting with The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer. Any of these dresses would have been perfect on her in these movies!