Vintage Fashion Magazines: My FT Blog

I've been guest-blogging for the Financial Times How To Spend It sine the beginning of the year - a wonderful opportunity for me to write about one of my favourite things: vintage fashion! My latest blog is about collectable vintage fashion magazines and books, in particular the iconic style magazine of the 1970s, Nova. 

Described as 'The new kind of magazine for a new kind of woman', Nova was politically engaged and beautifully designed. 

You can read my latest blog by clicking on this link. The next missive will be about Art Deco costume jewellery. Stay tuned.

The Great Gatsby: A Movie History

Vintage fashion fans have been going crazy waiting for the Baz Luhrmann adaption of the 1925 novel by F Scott Fitzgerald...  and the trailer is finally here! His production is the fourth cinematic version of this classic American book. 

The original (silent) film adaption was released a year after the book was published.


A second adaption was filmed in 1949, with costumes designed by legendary Hollywood costumier Edith Head.

Gene Tierney was originally lined up to play the role of Daisy Buchanan, but was dropped from production when the studio decided her beauty would be a distraction from the plot. Here's the evidence:

In 1974 it was remade with the leading stars of the time, Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, from a screenplay written by Francis Ford Coppola (although Truman Capote was also lined up for the job). Despite the heavyweight names and sumptuous sets, the movie was not a success.

Here is the trailer for Lurhmann's new movie, starring Leonardo di Caprio, Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire. It looks fantastic and although the Jay-Z soundtrack won't sit well with everyone, Luhrmann made Fatboy Slim work for Moulin Rouge back in 2001. 

The movie's costume designer is award-winning Catherine Martin - Lurhmann's wife and longtime collaborator. The fashion in the film had a strong influence on the Spring Summer 2012 runway shows, in particular the Ralph Lauren collection. 

We have got our hands on an original 1920s ivory ostrich feather cape, in fantastic condition. The cape won't be online for a few weeks but if you want to make an appointment for our studio, please get in touch. To give an idea of what it looks like, it's almost identical to the one from Ralph Lauren's SS12 show: 

But ours would have been worn to all those Jazz Age parties... if clothes could talk! To quote the book: 'They looked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life'. A beautiful piece of fashion history. 

UPDATE: the ostrich feather cape sold earlier this year. Here is a photograph of our model wearing it with this dress:

Vintage Reading List...

Over the years I've built up an extensive collection of books on vintage fashion and I often tweet about books we recommend at Juno Says Hello. A friend introduced me to LibraryThing.com recently - an online service to help people catalogue their books. The site almost operates like a Facebook for books, where you can check out other people's libraries, swap reading suggestions, write reviews and so forth.

I decided it was time to upload our books to a virtual library so my customers and other vintage aficionados would have access to the all the titles I recommend online. If you click on this link, you will see Juno Says Hello's profile page on LibraryThing.com. If you want to see a list of all the fashion and style books that we recommend, click here.

Here is a small selection of the books in our online catalogue:

Fashionista: A Century of Style Icons

Bals: Legendary Costume Balls of the 20th Century

The Golden Age of Couture

Vintage Paris Couture: The French Woman's Guide to Shopping

American Fashion

The Secret Lives of Dresses

The Fashion File by Mad Men costume designer Janie Bryant

A new addition to the catalogue is Naomi Thompson's Style Me Vintage: A Guide to Sourcing and Creating Retro Looks. Naomi is a friend of Juno Says Hello and she really is a vintage fashion guru - this book is a great introduction to those who are new to the world of vintage as well as long-term aficionados.

Another great book is Costume Design in the Movies by Elizabeth Leese, a lavishly illustrated tome covering costume designers from 1910 to 1970 including Theoni V. Aldredge (The Great Gatsby) and Edith Head (All About Eve, To Catch a Thief).

There are many more to be uploaded to our catalogue. Our studio is full of books at the moment and they're beginning to compete for space with the rails of clothes! I really love this photo of a cluttered floor... somehow piles of books are so much nicer to look at than boring old carpet.

Customers are welcome to browse and borrow books from our collection at any time. To make an appointment in our Bloomsbury studio, please contact us via this link. If you have any suggestions then feel free to add them in the comments.

Fashion Illustration Special

Since our launch in November 2009, Juno Says Hello has collaborated with three fashion illustrators. Our first commission was with Ellie Foreman-Peck, a brilliant artist whose illustrations have appeared on CBBC, The Telegraph and Guardian.

The above illustration by Ellie was her interpretation of one of our dresses - a stunning 1960s black evening gown with gold braid trim on the neckline and wrists.

We used her illustrations for our homepage and publicity material. Photographing a dress on a model always brings the garment to life but turning it into an illustration means we can create a specific mood. Ellie did exactly this with her film noir interpretation of one of our 1940s cocktail dresses:

The dress was made from deep red silk crepe with hand-embroidered silver and translucent beads on the shoulders and sleeves.

Illustrator Georgina Hill was commissioned to make a series of promotional cards for Juno Says Hello, featuring one of our vintage dresses as well as Juno - a wire-haired daschund - in the drawing. This was the end result:

The dress was modelled on an early 1960s cocktail dress that was consigned to Juno Says Hello with its original department store tags - it had never been worn! This gorgeous dress is available to buy here.

Our current homepage features two illustrations by Anna Halsall. As we are an online boutique we had carte blanche to create the perfect store window - and an opportunity to represent the sort of shopping experience offered in our Kings Cross studio.

Each garment was modelled on an item in the boutique. The coat worn by the girl was based on a stunning early 1960s tapestry coat with mink trim:

The dress on the mannequin in the left window is based on a 1960s pink chiffon gown with embellished bodice, available to buy via this link...

There is a wonderful gallery dedicated to fashion illustration in Mayfair, which was set up in 2007 in order to promote and sell original art works and prints. The gallery website also doubles as an online shop. Exhibitions have featured work by David Downton and René Gruau. David created the beautiful illustration on the posters for The Golden Age of Couture exhibition at the V&A in 2007.

There are two UK-based magazines dedicated to fashion illustration. Herself launched last year and is an entirely illustrated bi-annual fashion magazine and featured a 'fashion shoot' with Disney princesses:

Dash Magazine is high fashion editorial, lifestyle, illustration and art print. Their recent article on vintage fashion featured an illustration by Elisabeth A. Bukanova..

We often recommend specialist vintage fashion and illustration books on Twitter, so we decided to build a virtual library on this page. We're always looking for new collaborations so if you're interested in illustrating some of our dresses, please get in touch.

Our next ten online customers will receive a set of Fashion Top Trumps, illustrated by Erin Petson. This pack of cards includes iconic dresses, shoes and bags and their relative 'scores' - which one started the most trends, has the superior red-carpet factor and so on. Click on this link to be taken to the Juno Says Hello online boutique.

Dressing for Royal Ascot: three exquisite pieces

Royal Ascot starts today and for once decent weather is forecast for the entire week! As usual James Sherwood will be there with his camera spying the best (and worst) outfits. James has just written a book called Fashion at Royal Ascot, featuring photographs from the last 300 years at the races.

Here is Vogue model Fiona Campbell-Walter at Royal Ascot in 1953 in a beautiful saucer hat:


One of the most outrageous fashion icons in the racing world was Mrs Gertrude Shilling, aka the 'Ascot Mascot', seen here in 1969:

Here's Queenie and her gang in 1974, wearing a Launer handbag - still her favourite in 2011 - and a turban.

Martha Sitwell is a 21st century beauty who wears exquisite vintage pieces to the races:

We've picked out three outfits from our boutique that are perfect for Royal Ascot. Our first choice is a stunning 1960s silk houndstooth dress with matching jacket. See more photos here.

Our next choice is a shantung silk early 1960s dress with chiffon daisy detail on the hem.


This ultra-chic navy and cream organza dress would look sensational at the races:

To view our full collection of dresses please click here. We are able to deliver on the same day if you live in central London. If you need more inspiration here is some footage of James's show from Ascot a couple of years ago:

Our dress in the window of Persephone Books

This wonderful bookshop prints mainly neglected fiction and non-fiction by women, for women and about women. The titles are chosen to appeal to busy women who rarely have time to spend in ever-larger bookshops and who would like to have access to a list of books designed to be neither too literary nor too commercial.

They have a very pretty bookshop on Lambs Conduit Street in London. I walk down this street all the time as it's on the route I take from the studio to our dry cleaner (a vintage dealer's best friend). They usually have a vintage dress in the window, and I thought how lovely it would be if they agreed to have one of our dresses on display for a while.

When I approached the owner she was very enthusiastic. After handing over the dress I thought would work best, she told me that its pattern was almost identical to that found in the endpapers of their new book, Miss Buncle Married by De Stevenson. She very kindly gave me a copy and it's true, the pattern is almost exactly the same:



The frock itself is a beautiful 1930s tea dress with seamed bodice, made from sheer lawn fabric. There is no fastening (it's pulled on over the head) and comes with a matching belt. The dress also has drawstring puff sleeves and is approximately size 10.

When Persephone Books changes its window display the dress will be available to buy from our online shop and customers are always welcome to drop by our studio on Judd Street, WC1. To make an appointment please contact us via this link.

If you're looking for gift inspiration have a look at Perseohone Bookshop's fabulous list of suggestions here.

Alligators, Old Mink & New Money

This is the wonderful title of a book about one woman's adventures in vintage clothing, written by sisters Alison Houtte and Melissa Houtte. Alison was a fashion model in Paris and Manhattan before she opened up a vintage clothes and accessories store in Brooklyn, selling everything from pre-War ball gowns to 70s glitz.

Houtte knows that every article of vintage clothing has a story behind it. This is not only the story of one woman's life in fashion, but a wonderfully entertaining guide for anyone seeking out vintage finds to add to their wardrobe.

Available to buy here.

Edith Head: Hollywood's greatest costumier

"You can have anything you want in life if you have the dress for it" according to Edith. For my birthday last week I got a couple of books on this formidable woman and after reading for 5 minutes I knew I had to blog about her!

The dust cover to The Dress Doctor reads: "Long before celebrity stylists became as renowned as the Oscar-winning film stars they advise, Head was dressing Hollywood's most fashionable women and men on screen and off and lending her sartorial wisdom to women across the country on radio and television. In 1959, she published a best-selling memoir and style guide, The Dress Doctor, in which she shared tips on style and dozens of entertaining anecdotes on Hollywood's A-list with her fans".

Edith on Audrey Hepburn: 'Audrey knows more about fashion than any actress save Dietrich. Her fittings are the ten-hour, not the ten-minute, variety. To sketches for Roman Holiday, she added a few of her own preferences: simpler necklines, wider belts.

'Audrey and I went shopping in San Francisco; she wanted me as confrere and audience. Shopping is her idea of fun, and no wonder - no matter what she tried on she looked simply delicious. "And now let's celebrate," she'd say when we were exhausted, and that meant heading for the nearest confectionery to devour two of the biggest, fattest, most chocolatey French pastries. When she lived in Holland during the war, food was scarce and she developed a passion for chocolate'

The style guide offers advice on what to wear for every kind of social occasion, from garden parties to roller skating. Even breakfast gets a mention: 'It's good psychology to start the day with bright colours, so choose something gay in a washable fabric. Breakfast coat, brunch coat, house dress, smock, skirt and shirt, or slacks and shirt + apron if you're cooking, shoes - sandals or flats'. Got that?

Of Bette Davis (right) Edith says: 'She thinks like a businessman. Hers is a truly organised point of view, and working with her I felt like I was in conference with a bank president. You can see the authority on screen, in her walk, her voice, her actions; there is not a trace of indecision - she's the same on screen and off'. Want proof? Here it is.

Edith takes her role as sartorial adviser seriously: 'Every woman's task is to be a do-it-yourself dress doctor, and the person she must know is herself. Every woman, like every actress, is capable of being visually translated into many different women. A woman in a bath tub has little personality, she is just a woman without clothes. Clothes not only can make the woman - they can make her several different women. There's no one style, there's a style for a mood: a tailored woman at work, a siren at night, a feminine, attractive creature at a luncheon, an efficient chairwoman of a PTA meeting'.

Mae West is another one of her favourites. 'I designed thirty or forty pounds of jewellery for Mae to wear as Diamond Lil in She Done Him Wrong. I first found pictures of period jewellery to show her. "Fine, honey" she said, "just make the stones bigger". You can see Mae in all her glittering glory in this brilliant clip from the movie.


'"I like 'em tight, girls," she said, and tight they were; there wasn't a costume in which she could lie, bend, or sit. To afford her some small relaxation, we improvised a reclining board; it had armrests and was tilted at an angle, and there she leaned between scenes in glittering splendour, the jewels winking from her hourglass gown, and dazzling from her throat, ears, wrists, and every finger.

'Once, I made a skin-tight black nightgown and over it, a chiffon and diamond negligee that gave the effect of a spider web. On the shoulder I perched a huge diamond spider, anchored by adhesive tape. When Mae wore this on the set, the whistles and screams sounded as if the Queen Mary were docking in New York harbour. Mae had switched the diamond spider to a more. . strategic spot. It took half an hour to quiet the hilarity and get Cary Grant and the crew back to work'.

The Dress Doctor features beautiful illustrations by Bil Donovan on every page, bringing the book to life.


Superhero costume designer Edna Mode in The Incredibles (2004) is said to be based on Edith Head, as indicated in this brilliant clip.