clothes and the Marlows

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

Partly because of the changing timeschemes, I always have difficulty envisaging the Marlows' clothes, especially the non-handmedowns and the various special party dresses of Run Away Home and Doris's fabrications in Peter's Room.

I don't have a copy of the latter, but in RAH, Nick gets as a Christmas present of a dress of 'green and white striped silk', while Lawrie's has 'a black velvet bodice and black taffeta skirt sprigged with roses', both with matching velvet 'wraps'. Miranda's dress, given to Nicola after the Changear row (with its very specifically seventies tunics with pea-green swirls and tartan trousers), is 'cream-coloured silk, finely pleated, falling from a high yoke' and makes Nick look ravishingly like Ginty. AF is always attentive to fabric and colour, but I, for one, have absolutely no sense of what any of these dresses would look like in practice, other than the fact that Miranda's dress is clearly (at least for Nick) a version of The Platonic Dress which makes the wearer look endlessly beautiful.

(a) Is AF being deliberately non-specific on these, with the aim of not dating her work? Or because she is not all that interested in the specifics of people's appearance, famously non-specific on Esther's beauty etc?
(b) How does anyone else picture these garments?
(c) Bonus points for incorporating references to the Bridesmaid's Horror, anything from Mum's Chest, or their ideas on how an entire school uniform could possibly be scarlet and not make Kingscote look as though it is drowning in arterial blood.

Comments

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

I've always wondered about this too. I find it hard to imagine how any of these dresses look good on anyone. Particularly the cream silk. Though Ginty's peacock blue sounds utterly fabulous.

There's so much detail given that I assume AF had a clear picture of these garments in her mind's eye, though with the shifting timescale, it's hard to know quite what to compare them too.

Does the whole uniform have to be scarlet? I've sort of imagined scarlet jumpers with perhaps a grey skirt and a white blouse. Scarlet blazers, of course, and games kit.

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

Yes, is that cream silk some sort of empire line? It also baffled me slightly that Miranda used to wear it when her mother's friends came to tea, while the dim au pair thought it constituted an appropriate school supper dress, and Nick ends up wearing it to a fairly dressy Twelfth Night party. Please can someone give me such a protean garment?

Ginty's peacock blue

[tabouli.livejournal.com]

With you on that one. Judging by the need for necklace, Mrs Bertie's disapproving reaction, and Nicola's mental mutter of "Look at that dress you wore to the Merricks' party last year", I gather it was not only a great colour, but low-cut and either strapless or off-the-shoulder. Better still.

For my bonus point, my vision of the Bridesmaid's Horror is cobalt blue with big, shiny puffed sleeves sticking out of an over-pinafore thing in matching 80s-esque fishnettery (what *is* "net" in AF speak, anyway?) with contrasting pale pink roses at the neck and hem. Heh.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Maybe in summer there's a white blouse with tie (which helpfully tells you whether the wearer is a prefect or on the netball team) with the presumably scarlet skirt, which wouldn't be so bad. They probably all look very dramatic sweeping around in uniform red cloaks in winter, but I do find it all very hard to picture. And hard on the likes of Jenny and Isa Cardigan besides.

I can absolutely see Lawrie's black sprigged with roses, and think Lawrie is always going to be the type who insists on wearing dramatic black from an unsuitably young age and never mind what it must do to her colouring. Though she and Nicola are described as 'sun-bleached' in Autumn Term so might, I suppose, be the darker end of blonde going true blonde in the sun rather than blonde going platinum.

I honestly don't think AF worried that much about dating her work - if she did, I don't think Lawrie's shift (which I can't see suiting her either) wouldn't have made the cut, and she wouldn't have been so specific about the amount of money Ginty was prepared to spend on Ann's present, and so forth.

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

I suppose I see Lawrie as so much enjoying dressing up for its own sake that she'd be interested in trying on a certain kind of trendiness along with her shift, whether she looked awful or not. It just clashes most entertainingly for me with the endless faded yellow ginghams of other parts of the novels - which I find odder than the different moneys, somehow.

I do agree about AF not minding about dating, which I think is a thoroughly good things. Someone - can't now recall who - posted here ages back about the various abtruse pieces of literary/musical/sports lore to which AF introduced them, and some of the 'dated' details constitute much of the interest of the novels, and certainly stretched me as a (admittedly slightly baffled) child reader. That's why the re-tweaking of the Harry Potter novels for the US market makes me rather cross.

damnit, lj ate my first comment

[anstruther.livejournal.com]

I've never been able to picture a green and white striped silk dress that looked anything other than dreadful. And in particular, I can't imagine green and white suiting someone with fair colouring. I've always imagined that AF was referrring to specific dresses that she had seen on other people or worn herself. Not that this helps the reader, of course! Perhaps she (unwittingly) subscribed to the DWJ school of thought that holds that as long as the author can visualise the scene clearly, the reader will pick up the essentials.

"Lime green and cream!"

[mrs-redboots.livejournal.com]

I would think that more or less all white with very thin green stripes - almost pinstripes - would look good. It does depend on the shade of green, of course.

Re: damnit, lj ate my first comment

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

She tends to describe the effect of something on a looker-on, rather than any kind of objective account of what is being looked at. We get Miranda and her entire dormitory, Peter on his way to the bathroom at Trennels, and then Patrick mistaking Nick for Ginty, and even Nick herself not really recognising herself, all absolutely wowed by what she looks like when wearing the cream silk. Generally I find this emphasis on the subjective fascinating, and it allows us to have lots of fun arguing about what colouring Esther Frewen has, when all we know is that she's beautiful, but some terribly literal bit of me wants to know whether the green and white stripes were horizontal or vertical, and whether it had sleeves or a sweetheart neckline...

Re: damnit, lj ate my first comment

[bookwormsarah.livejournal.com]

If it was mostly green with thin white stripes it could look rather swish, a sort of jade green (and I have a feeling that the colour I think of as jade is rather different to other people's - I need a pantone sheet).

Green and white striped silk

[tabouli.livejournal.com]

Oh, I think you could track down some greens that would suit a fair complexion: a light bluish-green, perhaps. The stripes are more problematic. Perhaps vertical stripes of green and white, very thin and of equal width, such that from a distance it looks light green rather than stripy? That might just about be OK, if the dress is a flattering shape and cut.

[bookwormsarah.livejournal.com]

I've always seen Mum's Chest as very much late 1920s (I think there are references to beads and fringes?) but equally struggled with the party frocks.

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

Yes and something in a tubular pale blue. Ugh

[(Anonymous)]

I've always had major problems in visualising any of the clothes as anything but ghastly. I know everyone's supposed to have a shade of cream that suits them but I would have thought Miranda's dress would have suited her colouring a lot better than Nicola's.

And denim dresses as summer uniform? 'Strewth.

Scarlet Uniform

[theminky.livejournal.com]

My prep school had a scarlet uniform and it looked ok, but this was only for kids up to eleven; after that it was navy. The red looked quite sweet on smaller kids but would probably have been quite strange on adolescents; particularly if they suffered any acne.

Re: Scarlet Uniform

[colne-dsr.livejournal.com]

My sister's school had (in the 1980's, but I think it still has) a summer uniform of light green dresses with white diagonal check, and purple blazers with more-or-less-fluorescent green piping. Not many people thought it a great combination.

Miranda's dress

[theminky.livejournal.com]

Also, I think part of the point of Miranda's dress and the way it looks on Nicola is that it is an unlikely garment to suit her; she comes across as a bit of a tomboy and doesn't seem overly conscious of her appearance; also she is constantly wearing hand-me-downs; clothes bought for somebody else. It is suprising to see her in something that actually suits her; also, it is suprising to see what suits her.

[leapingirbis.livejournal.com]

This topic led me to search for dresses in Google, and I found a vague approximation of what I imagine the cream silk pleated dress to look like (though unfortunately only in black - and I am sure Miranda/Nicola's didn't have the sexy shoulder straps shown here). Because I didn't know how else to show it in the comments, I made this my user picture (hope it works).

Personally I always liked Ginty's description of what she would wear to Karen's wedding given the choice (short, tight, black and shiny, as far as I can remember!)

Cream Dress

[leapingirbis.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I meant to add - the cream Balenciaga dress Gwyneth Paltrow wore to some awards ceremony last year (empire waist, puffed sleves) was, for me, sufficient proof that blondes can look good in "demure" cream dresses.

[tabouli.livejournal.com]

My image of the cream silk dress is sleeveless and vaguely babydoll in shape: fitted to just under the bust, with the fine pleats falling fluidly and skimming the body (thus avoiding the lampshade effect) to the waist before flaring out to a full skirt.

Speaking of bustiness, most people here seem to imagine the Marlows to be of thin and flat-chested stock. I note, for example, that in Run Away Home the fourteen and a half year old Lawrie is wearing a vest under her blouse, not a bra, which one might expect she could wear by then. Coyness on AF's part, lack of breasts to put in a bra, or typical of flat-chested 14 year olds at the time? I was very bra-averse as a teen and delayed strapping up as long as I could, but given Lawrie's enthusiasm to embrace teenagerish ways in Thuggery, I can't imagine her being a singlet stickler. Surely she'd be more of a pad and pout?

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

Of course, she has to fit into a rather younger boy's monkey costume, so a bosomy Lawrie might have had some difficulties...?

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Yes, but having a very no-nonsense twin must be a bit of a brake on any pad-and-pout ambitions; I can't see Nicola putting up with any flopping around, but I also can't see her going bra shopping before it's necessary, and people would notice if Lawrie was suddenly two cup sizes larger than the control, so to speak.

Also, Lawrie is prone to maidenly modesty; I can see her having an irrational fear of middle-aged bra-fitters, particularly if Ginty had a nasty run-in with one and suffered torments afterwards.

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

I think that coy is almost the last word I'd use to describe AF. Part of this is also a timeframe issue. Puberty is starting earlier and earlier for various reasons. Even when I was at school twenty years ago, it wasn't uncommon for girls not to start their periods until they were 15 or 16 and many (though certainly not most) were fairly much flat chested until around the same kind of time.

[anstruther.livejournal.com]

I'm sure a Noughties Lawrie would be a pad'n'pout type, but surely even a 1980s Lawrie wouldn't have had easy access to the Wonderbra type of bra? I imagine it would have been training bras at the most for the rather slight Nick and Lawrie at 14 - and that Kingscote would in any event have had definite Views on underwear.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

I can't see either of them as the training bra type - they're far too confident. Esther would be more likely to notice bras rather than vests in the changing room and mind; but Esther is famously beautiful, so probably had no more trouble on that score than I imagine her ever having with spots.

[carmine-rose.livejournal.com]

Browsing Go Fug Yourself, I came across this vision of loveliness (http://gofugyourself.typepad.com/go_fug_yourself/2007/01/fuggylouise_par.html), which I think I'll now visualise whenever I think of Nick's cream silk dress.

Mum's chest

[theminky.livejournal.com]

I definitely see this as being very 1920's; which would fit in with the timing of Autumn term.