Monster Head: Dealing With Problem Wigs

Once upon a time I cut my hair short. Really short. As a costumer, this presents certain challenges, which I decided could and would be solved by embarking on a journey into the world of wigs.

Wigs are lovely. They're like big furry hats that take care of looking period-accurate, covering any vestiges of your pixie-cut mop-top, and taking a costume from a-okay to awesome. They can also be a pain in the neck...especially when what arrives in the mail is *not* what you thought you ordered.

Such a thing happened to yours truly late last Summer, when I ordered this 19th century curly-ass wig, to wear with all my mid to late 19th century outfits. I ordered "dark brown," but instead ended up with BLACK (or very near it), which did not blend with my real hair at all, and also did not work with my skin tone, making it look like I was wearing a dead crow on my head. In addition to the bad color, the shape of the thing was so bizarre and unflattering. I did wear it...regrettably...and then shoved it into the back of a cabinet, feeling snarky for having wasted the money on it.

Yet even REALLY BAD wigs can be saved! This excessively curly wig happened to be perfect for late 18th century styles ("hedgehog"), and in a matter of minutes, I clipped it and teased it into the "Duchess"-style fro we all know and love, gathered the back into a curly ponytail with a temporary ribbon bow, and pinned a few stray bits up in the front.

The last bit to transform this wig from MONSTER to magic is to powder it (not shown). Powdering the wig will take it from way-too-dark to greyish brown. I will be able to blend my own reddish-brown hair (also powdered) into it, and achieve the wig glory we all dream of!

So, next time you've got MONSTER HEAD lurking in the back of your cabinet, think about how to turn it into something completely different! Pull out your curling iron, your teasing comb, and your talc powder, and give it a go. Even monsters deserve to be loved...:-)

American Duchess on Etsy

I haven't yet posted about the new American Duchess shop on Etsy. This is a combination of yummy things readers of this blog may be interested in, and the online shop for American Duchess Apparel, the rococo-inspired clothing line. I'm just beginning to add more than just graphic tees, and have put up a couple scrappy-ephemera greeting cards that you can print at home.

Other goodies I hope to add to the AD Etsy shop include sewing patterns, embroidery patterns and kits, ribbon and feather cockades, more graphic tees, and maybe even vintage teacups and saucers (a reason to hit the flea markets!).

Go and have a look, and if you have any suggestions, just let me know by leaving a comment. Thanks!

Great Basin Costume Society - Events Plug

What: GBCS Chit-Chat Tea and Cakes
When: Sunday, February 28, 2010 - 11am to 2pm (or later)
Where: Josef's Vienna Bakery & Cafe - 933 W Moana Lane - Reno, NV

Interested in joining or learning more about the Great Basin Costume Society? Come have a chat with us, and learn more about the upcoming events this Summer and Fall. Plus there's CAKE!

Costume is admired but never required. If you would like to dress up, casual attire from the 1930s to the 1960s is suggested.

This event is not catered, so if you'd like tea and CAKE, come prepared. We will supply you with exciting news and information on costuming and silliness!

Not sure about any of this nonesense? Just come and see! The GBCS is *NEW* to Reno and always open to suggestions, input, and ideas. Invite your friends, your sisters, your mothers, and come see what it is all about.

If you are on Facebook, join the group by clicking HERE, and RSVP to this event by clicking HERE.

Why We Costume, Part 3: A Dream of The Past

There seems to be a fading of memories, after about thirty years, that turns otherwise horrible decades of fashion into inspiring vintage goodness, causing the fashion industry to launch revivals and thrift stores to become meccas. This is a late 20th and 21st century phenomenon - we look backwards for our trends, and somehow then twist these fashions of the past into completely new ones that define our current mode.

Remember when 1950s style dresses were all the rage (2005-ish)? Remember when bell-bottoms were back in (1998)? How about the 1980s revival that's splashed all over strip-malls right now? These are our Dreams of The Past.

Simply put, it's "Romanticism of Fashion," or "Fashion through Rose-Colored Glasses." Costumers take this to the extreme. We not only want to wear the clothing, we want to feel what it *might* have felt like to live a day in the life of a woman of the distant past. However, many fabrics that were used in the past are no longer manufactured today, or they have changed considerably. We do not have the same constrained and deformed bodies of women who were made to wear corsets every single day from a young age. We have neither the carriage, the bearing, nor the poise (no offense, ladies!), and our societal infrastructure does not support this type of dress anymore. Despite all our knowledge, learning, experimenting, and portraying, we are simply incapable of fathoming how women in the past lived in these clothes.

So we are left to our dreams. BBC productions of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens novels provide us with a visual smorgasbord to base our dreams upon, while literature, fashion plates, and history fill in the gaps. What we create with these sources is a far more enjoyable experience than the *actual* past. It is an amalgamation of modern convenience and antique style, creating a pleasurable experience to be looked back upon the next day as we lounge in jeans and t-shirts.

Our Dreams of The Past involve things that seems lost to our modern society: chivalry, romance, always being beautifully attired, a grace of behavior we no longer see today, a slower speed to life, and an appreciation of nature, philosophy, poetry, and calmness. We seek to revive these things by dressing in the manner that inspired them. And, indeed, they ARE revived! Gentlemen seem to act much more like gentlemen; romance (or at least harmless flirtation) crackles in the air, and a picnic with friends becomes the best possible use of a Sunday afternoon.

Perhaps our dreaming all together is what keeps us sane in our fast-paced, ruthless, modern world; it allows us to believe that beauty, grace, and good manners are not completely dead, and that there is hope afterall, that doors may still be opened for ladies, that gentlemen will still offer their coats, that men are still men and women are still women.

1770s Hair Help From the Interwebs

The Dreamstress is seeking advice for big 1770s style hair. I haven't done a wig in this style yet, but I did find this video tutorial not only extremely well-done, but very helpful!

Lookin' Spiffy

To celebrate 99 followers, I've revised the layout to the blog. I've added another side bar, hopefully to keep relevant information from getting lost "down below," and also to keep it more organized in terms of links and banners, etc. Yay graphic design!

For those of you who wonder about these things:
-I googled "blogger 3 column template" and found a "minima" template that could be loaded into the HTML section of Blogger.
-The pretty background is from Shabbyblogs.com, under "3 column designs."
-I reformatted the header image (it was saved as a PSD file, so it made it easy). That's it!

Lastly, Concraft and AmericanDuchess are trading banner ads this month. Here's the one I made :-). If you love American Duchess, and want to help support the blog, please feel free to snatch the banner and post it on your own blogs and pages. Cheers!

Why We Costume, Part 2: Because We Don't Have To.

When I was in college, I got into dressing up in vintage and retro clothing. I tried to "live the lifestyle" that was Rockabilly - polka dot dresses, high heeled shoes, red lipstick, stockings with garters...all the time. I would walk to class and spend the day feeling quite pretty and often a little in pain. I'd field questions about why I was dressed up, why I wore "old lady clothes," what the occasion was, and so on. Usually my answers were along the lines of "because I wanted to," "because they're pretty," and "just because."

My mother found this amusing. She told me she thought I was crazy, and that she had found wearing dresses every day quite tedious, and that she never could abide such an uncomfortable underpinning as a garter belt. Girdles, BLAH; high heeled shoes, ALL the TIME? blah! However, there was a distinct difference: as a girl growing up in the 1950s and attending college in the 1960s, she HAD to wear those things. They were expected, required even. Myself? Naw, it was by choice.

In the last thirty years, the restrictions and constrictions of ladies' clothing have disappeared. We can wear pretty much ANYTHING and get away with it, including men's clothes, ballet flats all the time, hats (or no hats!), you name it. Fashion has exploded like an alluvial fan, sending its silts in every direction and providing us with an incredible number of styles to choose from. Compare this to the fashions of the past, where everyone was trying to achieve the same shape, and clothing, though creative within the bounds, stuck to pretty much the same style. Styles would change about every decade, with subtle transitioning periods (with the exception of the 1790s into the 1800s), whereas these days, styles change every year, and drastically every second or third year.

So what is it about our fashion culture that makes us desire that of the past? I believe it has much to do with the FEELING of wearing these clothes, the way in which they make us move, stand, and hold ourselves. The clothing dictates our poise, our carriage, and often times our attitudes. When you dress up, you feel better. There is something magical about sporting a sharp skirt, clicking around in heels, or wearing a finely tailored jacket. When you add the element of *vintage* to it, it becomes something even more special. It's completely unique, for one, and the knowledge that you are wearing something exceptional is broadcast to everyone else, just in how you carry yourself in those clothes.

Yet we don't HAVE to. That is exactly why we DO. Some readers commented that they wouldn't mind if fashion swung back towards those of the past, but I have to disagree. If we were required to corset every day, don incredibly restricting dresses (admit it, at the end of the day, you're happy to peel that long-line bodice off yourself), and try to function as modern women - doing sports, going to the grocery store, raising our own children, picking up dog droppings, working 8 hour office jobs, even just driving our own cars - I think there would be a violent, bloody revolution and quite possibly the apocalypse! To return completely to the styles of the past would mean a return to the LIFEstyles of the past, and that's something I doubt many modern women would truly want.

So we pretend. And pretending is fabulous. Wearing our "new old clothes," getting a glimpse into how women (and men) felt in their own bodies, in the past, looking beautiful and carrying ourselves accordingly, is all a part of an experience that takes us as close to yesteryear as we dare get. But ripping those clothes off and putting on a nice comfy pair of pajama pants and eating cake for the rest of the night?.........mmmm, it's good to be Thoroughly Modern, to indeed have our cake, and eat it too.