Kristine Houston at Elsewhere Vintage has a write up on the site TODAY'S VINTAGE about her new shop in Orange, California.
THE COMMERCIAL DISPATCH mentions VFG member K.K. Norris will be one of four presenters at the "The 2008 Decorative Arts and Preservation Forum and Antiques Show and Sale", Nov. 6-9 in Columbus, Mississippi where K.K. owns a shop called "The Attic".
The magazine's contest has been running a couple weeks now, with readers registering online to vote. Maggie is in the top 3 and an article was recently written about her involvement in the contest in THE SPOKESMAN REVIEW. After reading the article, head on over to THE CONTEST at MORE MAGAZINE to cast your vote for Maggie and vintage finery!
"They have purchased and renovated a house, put the collection in storage here and assembled a board of directors to tackle the mountain of legal paperwork necessary to create the museum. They are also building bridges with others in the fields of contemporary fashion and museums. Their work is already beginning to bear fruit as they are now in the process of accepting donations from the UK and United States. They have also established a healthy working relationship with several major American fashion museums.
The museum's collection has approximately 8,000 artifacts that reach back as far as 1200 BC with an Egyptian textile fabric fragment, but also articles of clothing from the 17th to 20th century."
Read the rest HERE
Go Jonathan! We'll keep you all updated and will be the first to toast the Grand Opening!
"[the team is] working to conserve and catalog Nebraska’s collection of roughly 3,300 Native artifacts. The project, which started in January, will take two years and will cost close to half a million dollars."
Read the whole article HERE, and kudos to Tina for her passionate work to preserve Amercian heritage!
the VFG
"Dorotheasclosetvintage.com is a meticulously archived vintage shopping site organized by decade, from the 1800s through the 1980s. Browsing through the site reminds me of digging through the closet of the glamorous great-aunt I always wanted."
Quite the compliment!
We applaud Cate for preserving both the history of fashion AND her city!
for Christmas., published by Thames and Hudson., is being featured in Neiman Marcus' 100th Anniversary Christmas Book along with other fashion related books such as Dior, Valentino and Ralph Lauren.
VFG member Alexandra Reynolds aka evadress is credited with the "Working With Vintage Patterns" article. The piece explores the "stunning Butterick Starred Pattern 5156, A Katharine Hepburn Frock, designed in 1933. This design was modeled after an actual garment worn by Katharine Hepburn in the film Christopher Strong."
| Written by Vintage Fashion Guild | |
| Jonathan has also written the new Vintage Fashion Guild Feature article, Dyeing to be Fashionable. JONATHAN WALFORD is a fashion historian, curator, and private collector and was the founding curator of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto. He is currently writing a book on the history of fashion during World War 2 and is in the process of founding a museum of fashion history in Cambridge, Ontario. You can pre-order The Seductive Shoe by clicking here and you can see his Dyeing to be Fashionable article by clicking here. |
. Lara Zamiatin | April 2, 2007 As the proud owner of more than 300 pairs of shoes, it’s little wonder the Sydney fashion designer Vivian Chan Shaw is nicknamed “Imeldific” after the infamous Filipino footwear-fixated Imelda Marcos. “Some women just have a shoe thing,” says Claudia Chan Shaw of her mother’s obsession. “In the 1970s my mother wore outrageous flares. Beneath the trousers you had to have the mad, gigantic platforms hanging out so they could be seen. One of her platforms had a seven-inch [18cm] heel. I used to think she was much taller, but now I know why.” From next week 38 pairs of shoes from the Vivian Chan Shaw collection – including a pair of 1970s Brazilian platforms with vertiginous heels and a pair of Parisian Charles Jourdan leather shoes with an incredibly distorted metallic wedge heel from 1980 – will be on show at the Queen Victoria Building. The exhibition, Two Centuries of Fabulous Footwear, celebrates antique, vintage and modern shoes with 100- plus pairs from design houses such as Versace, Maud Frizon, Stephane Kelian and Bruno Magli. Also on loan for the exhibition are 57 pairs (dating from 1760) from the Darnell Collection’s 3500 vintage garments and accessories, owned by collector Charlotte Smith. There are contemporary items from QVB retailers and several final-year students at TAFE NSW – Sydney Institute. Shoes that made the grade had to be dramatic, says Claudia Chan Shaw, who is acting as the Australian curator for Fashion Group International, the global organisation presenting the exhibition. “Some of my mother’s plainer shoes, the grey ones and dusty pink shoes, didn’t do it for me,” she says of the pairs that were rejected. “The shoes on display are fine, visually amazing shoes of their era. Shoes from Vivian’s collection were collectables 30 years ago; now they’re museum pieces.” One of the aims of the exhibition is to show that shoes in past times “really mattered”, Shaw says. She talks fondly of a pair of her mother’s bottle green embroidered Christian Dior boots from the 1970s that are included in the exhibition. “In the 1960s and ’70s the shoes were so exciting and individual,” she says. “Not only did you make a statement up top with your outrageous hair and big jewellery, but the shoes made a statement. They were not shy shoes; they were outrageous.” Charlotte Smith’s vast vintage collection comes from her American Quaker godmother, Doris. For the exhibition, Smith has focused on shoes that are typical of their era or whose origins are surprising, such as a pair of intricately embroidered silk shoes from about 1890 that look almost modern. Highlights from the Darnell Collection include black silk ankle boots from about 1790 and a pair of 1920s silver lame flapper shoes that were custom- made for the Chicago socialite Mary Vaughan Williams. There’s also a rare travelling shoebox from the 1930s complete with six unimaginably tiny size 3 shoes. Comfort was another matter. Smith says that before 1822, shoes weren’t made with a right and left foot, and no consideration was given to the shape of feet. Shoes came in two sizes: slim and stout. In 1856, an American, W.S. Thompson, patented a machine that could sew soles to uppers and this led to mass production of any style, shape and size. “From 1880, it was acceptable in society for women to wear shoes which mirrored their natural shoe size and shape,” Smith says. “There were obviously women who continued to wear shoes too small and too tight, but several of my shoes in the exhibition show this larger foot size in the 1890s and so on. “Shoes in the earlier days were really worn as foot corsets, intended to make the foot look delicate and narrow which was a sign of good breeding. Now, with our sporting lives, shoes are made for an active lifestyle.” An admirer of the renowned Parisian shoemaker Maud Frizon, a couture shoemaker in the 1980s, Smith refers to Frizon’s take on footwear as sexy statement dressing. “[Frizon] used to say that certain shoes where a woman’s toe peeped out are the equivalent of a plunging neckline,” she says. Of course, some shoe styles, sexy or not, never go out of vogue. The Sydney shoemaker Jodie Morrison, who makes shoes for film and theatre productions, says the lace-up boot and the court shoe are classic styles. “The court shoe is the little black dress of the shoe world,” Morrison says. “It’s not the comfort or the fit. By tradition, you make them half a size down so they stay on. But they’re simple and they just keep coming round.” Morrison has several of her creations on show, including a pair of thong boots she created for Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (the stage musical) and a pair of shoes that Cate Blanchett wore in the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Hedda Gabler. Janis Dahto, of the family- run custom-made shoe business Dahto Shoes, cites an elegant stiletto sandal as a style that never falls from grace. Keep them simple, she suggests, with one strap across the toes and a sling-back heel. Toe cleavage does it for Mary-Kyri Pallaris, 27, an Adelaide newcomer who launched her footwear label, Mary-Kyri, last April. “A beautiful pump – no matter what the colour – that’s cut back just enough to show the beginning of the toes is sexy and will always remain in fashion,” she says. Sometimes, though, comfort wins over style and there are some shoes that remain in the spotlight regardless of their aesthetic appeal. A case in point: Birkenstocks. 
(Thames & Hudson), the Canadian vintage fashion historian Jonathan Walford talks of the popular German shoes with the orthopedically enhanced contoured foot beds. “Although Birkenstocks are regarded as being plain ugly, they show no sign of falling from favour,” Walford writes. “Sales for the original, contoured foot bed sandals were higher in the 1990s than the 1970s, inspiring trainer and sport-sandal manufacturers to use contoured foot beds.” But they are an exception. As most footwear obsessives will testify, it’s not usually the comfy shoes that garner a cult following. When the supermodel Naomi Campbell took a tumble on a Parisian catwalk in 1993, dolled up in Vivienne Westwood mock-crock platforms 25 centimetres high, the shoes were used for British Safety Council posters, with the message to workers: “For your job wear safety shoes.” Westwood, however, went on to sell 300 pairs of the gravity-defiers. Such stories aren’t confined to international models. Claudia Chan Shaw recalls a show-stopping incident in 1970s Sydney, when her mother, who was running for a train wearing a pair of spongy crepe sole shoes, bounced all the way down the ramp at Ashfield Station and slammed into the indicator board. Alas, Shaw says, this particularly perilous pair is now too well-worn and tired to grace the exhibition. But, she asserts, “the right pair of shoes will always make a statement”.
Former VFG Member, Jim Smiley has retired and is selling off his amazing collection!
The long awaited launch of the redesigned vintagegriffin.com website is here!
Lei has also been recently featured in the Antiques Trade Gazette as shown in the article above. Swing by the VFG Public Forums thread to congratulate her!
VFG long time member, Jonathan Walford of Kickshaw Productions joined us for an interview on his upcoming book "Fashion Footwear, a History From 1600 to Today".
Welcome and thank you for taking the time to talk with us, please tell us about your upcoming book.
My book is due to be released for Christmas of this year although it might not make it out until the spring of 2007. It is titled "Fashion Footwear, a History From 1600 to Today". I had originally suggested the title "Well Heeled" but the publisher (Thames and Hudson) felt it should have a title that reflected the broader history of fashion footwear. Although the book covers the history of women's fashion footwear from when heels were first introduced around the year 1600, it isn’t just about heels so their suggestion is better.
How did you get involved in collecting shoes?
I started collecting shoes as well as antique and vintage clothing in the late 1970's. To be perfectly honest, I can’t remember what the first pair was that I collected, however, I do remember buying lots of stiletto-heeled shoes from the late 1950s and early 1960s in the early 1980s at garage and church sales when the New Wavers were buying them as well, so there was a bit of a rush at the door for those! Quite early in my collecting career I was given two pairs of shoes from the 1780s by the descendent of an aristocratic English family that was selling off the family home in Yorkshire. She had received some of the historic clothing from the household and gave them to me. I treasured those shoes but have since given them to the Bata Shoe Museum, where I was curator for eleven years.
What"s your favorite or most coveted shoe in your collection? 
It’s so difficult to pick one favourite shoe from my collection because I have several that I would never willingly part with. I suppose my oldest shoe always holds a lot of interest. I acquired it from an American collection and although the shoe was probably made in Holland, it might have been worn in the American Dutch Colonies in the 1670's, site of present day New York State. This would make it one of the oldest existant shoes from European settled America. It’s a brown ooze (the old name for suede) latchet shoe with an elongated toe and stacked leather heel. I also adore a pair of 1920's custom made shoes that sport a receptacle for lipsticks on the quarters (back part of the upper). This was obviously custom made for a client and one can't help but think that she must have been very vain and silly – perhaps her "occupation" required a constant "sprucing up", if you know what I mean… Both these shoes are in my book and the 1920s pair even graced the November page of the Costume Society of America's 2005 calendar.
What are some of the best shoes to collect?
I always think that you should collect what you love, regardless of what is trendy. Sneakers don't have any appeal for me and I don’t have any in my collection, however there are collectors of them out there and that is great because they should be kept for posterity. After all, athletic footwear was the biggest seller in the last quarter of the 20th century. I don’t necessarily collect designer shoes because designers don't necessarily hit a home run with every one of their styles. I have seen some Ferragamo and Vivier shoes that really aren’t that attractive. The mid 20th century (1930 – 1970) was a golden age of American shoe design but American shoes are often overlooked. Specifically, Seymour Troy, David Evins, and Beth Levine came out with some really fantastic styles in the 1940s – 1960s and just because these were mass-manufactured doesn’t mean they weren’t good shoe designs. Perugia is my favorite French shoe designer and his shoes are hard to come by but I haven’t seen one pair of Perugia shoes I didn’t like.
How will your book be different from other books on the market?
Books on shoe history are plentiful but they tend to specialize on designer footwear, act as market guides for collecting, or are too broad a history and too brief in content to really learn much. My book focuses on women's footwear and the true hits from fashion footwear history. Okay, I do have a few silly styles thrown in to keep the reader awake, but the focus of the book is on what women really wore and what was available in the stores, as well as a few of the "Edsels" of shoe history that made a loud thunk when they hit the shoe stores. The book is sumptuously illustrated with over 400 colour illustrations of shoes so for anyone interested in footwear fashion history from 1600 to today, this will be a perfect addition to their libraries.
Come by and see Jonathan at the VFG Public Forums. Or check out his amazing vintage for sale in his eBay Store "Kickshaw Productions".
