Audrey Hepburn

 

Update: Every dress but one is Givenchy. The long-sleeved mini-dress, of silk and lace, is a Valentino, the same style worn by Jackie Kennedy when she married Onassis in 1968.


From an article in yesterday's New York Times:

“Like Christmas 1,000 times over,” says Tanja Star-Busmann, referring to the “cavalcade of boxes” she would receive from her friend Audrey Hepburn.

Out would spill the spoils of celluloid fame: little black dresses, sleek and sculpted or crusty with lace; slender evening gowns in fresh sorbet colors; snug hats, bobbing with tassels; and the occasional personal items from the gamine movie star, like a striped matelot sweater or a herringbone tweed coat in which she would walk her Yorkshire terrier Famous.
This cache of clothes, kept for over half a century, including a letter by Audrey to her friend, sharing her stage fright before her “Gigi” debut on Broadway in 1951, comes up for sale at auction next week.

More pictures at Kerry Taylor Auctions.

Tarzan by Charlotte Ware

Don't forget to check out my other blog where I've begun to post pictures from the convention competition, such as this comic strip paper doll. The competition is where collectors bring in their rare treasures. You'll see paper dolls and toys you've never seen before, I promise! Sam McKay did a great job of documenting the event with his camera.

The artist Charlotte Ware does such elegant women, and she brings the same finesse to Tarzan.

Joan by Helen Page

  From A Box of 10 Cut-Out Dolls with Dresses, c.1946.

Style Notes by Madame Louise

Love the wordy ads of the old days. People read back then--there was a bounty of newspapers and magazines. One could argue they had less time, too -- not as many conveniences, cooking from scratch, making pillows, darning socks...
Madame Louise was no doubt the figment of an adman's imagination.
From Pictorial Review magazine, Nov. 1912. Click to read larger copy.

The Brinkley Girls by Trina Robbins

Peek inside with this slide show:  The Brinkley Girls

I was going to post this later in the week, but Fantagraphics has a special offer on this large size book: $20.99 instead of $29.99 today only.

Here's the publisher's description:

For over thirty years Nell Brinkley’s beautiful girls pirouetted, waltzed, Charlestoned, vamped and shimmied their way through the pages of William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers, captivating the American public with their innocent sexuality. This sumptuously designed oversized hardcover collects Brinkley’s breathtakingly spectacular, exquisitely colored full page art from 1913 to 1940. Here are her earliest silent movie serial-inspired adventure series, “Golden Eyes and Her Hero, Bill;” her almost too romantic series, “Betty and Billy and Their Love Through the Ages;” her snappy flapper comics from the 1920s; her 1937 pulp magazine-inspired “Heroines of Today.” Included are photos of Nell, reproductions of her hitherto unpublished paintings, and an informative introduction by the book’s editor, Trina Robbins.
In 1907, at the tender age of 22, Nell Brinkley came to New York to draw for the Hearst syndicate. Within a year, she had become a household name. Flo Ziegfeld dressed his dancers as “Brinkley Girls,” in the Ziegfeld Follies. Three popular songs were written about her. Women, aspiring to the masses of curly hair with which Nell adorned her fetching and idealized creations, could buy Nell Brinkley Hair Curlers for ten cents a card. Young girls cut out and saved her drawings, copied them, colored them, and pasted them in scrapbooks. The Brinkley Girls took over from the Gibson Girls.
Nell Brinkley widened her scope to include pen and ink depictions of working women. Brinkley used her fame to campaign for better working conditions and higher pay for women who had joined in the war effort, and who were suffering economic and social dislocation due to acting on their patriotism. Unlike most of her contemporaries, she drew women of different races and cultures.
Except among a small group of avid collectors, she has been unjustly forgotten... until now.

This has been a long time coming from Trina Robbins, and glad it's finally out there. 

For how to order, reviews, interviews with Trina and a PDF file with more pages to view, go to
this Fantagraphics link.

No, I don't get a cut. I'm just a big Trina Robbins fan.

More Dixie Dugan, 1938

More from that unwieldy page. The layout is very clever, with skis and dresses overlapping into neighboring frames. There's one more panel I need to stitch together.

Zelda and Scott stamps

This wonderful photo illustration accompanied a book review in today's New York Times. Yours Ever, by Thomas Mallon, is about the lost art of writing letters.