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.

[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.

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.

[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.

[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?

"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.

[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.

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).

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

It seems to me to be a deplorable closing-down of the imagination. Obviously childrens' books should be accessible to children - I can remember persistently trying to read Lorna Doone as a child and being unable to get past the first chapter - but once the child's actually away and reading, they're likely to take Miranda suggesting that Ann probably won't mind Bach, or Patrick referencing Jan Palach, or whatever in their stride.

It's my firm belief that children fed pap grow up into the sort of teenagers who say, with an affronted smug-face like a comedy pensioner, that Jane Austen isn't relevant, and who go on to drive everyone who ever has to work in an office with them totally insane because they think that anyone who doesn't share their particular views and bugbears is either morally wrong or personally vindictive.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

I always assumed that the high yoke hit above whatever kind of bosom the thin and athletic Nicola has at the age of fourteen, but then wouldn't the small pleats make it look a bit like a lampshade?

[(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.

Definitely diagonal, with puffed sleeves

[anstruther.livejournal.com]

I much prefer AF's onlooker approach to the novels/fanfic where the author spends a conscientious paragraph describing each character's looks on their first appearance - it so often bogs the narrative down. Although I do wish AF had said whether Esther was fair or dark...

Going off on a complete tangent, I have a bit of a problem with an entirely stripy party dress, surely it would have been better if Nicola's dress had had a green bodice and a green and white striped skirt... I always think of the green as emerald, because of Miranda's elegant black and emerald striped dress. /off-topic>

[helixaspersa.livejournal.com]

I think the implication is that Miranda's home life is very smart and chic and quite dressed up - so what she could wear for tea with her mother's friends - ie grown-up women of a smart and expensive kind - would look quite wrong and showing-off at school supper. The au-pair is dim not because it is not smart enough for supper, but because she fails to imagine the ways in which it would be inappropriate (understandable I would have thought, if she is not English and of the right kind of class herself - but then this kind of casual snobbery in the characters if par for the course).

However, since it is both stylish and suits Nicolas particularly well, she can reasonably wear it to the smart (but provincial) house party; and they are all surprised when they see her in it, which is obviously partly because she looks amazing, much older etc, but also presumably because the dress is so much more sophisticated and also obviously expensive than she, or her family in general, would usually be wearing. Does that work?

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

I suppose I was being obtuse - yes, it works. The rest of their schoolmates appear to be wearing 'Mummy's Friends to Tea dismals'(who says that?) for supper, which suggests an entire subset of teenage girls' - polite attire - now lost to posterity. It does help to think of Miranda's mother's teas as rather more like glamorous version of a Victorian 'at home' than happening to have digestives and coffee in your socks with your friend's toddlers (which would be my immediate picture of Mummy's friends to tea...)

How old is the West money, do you suppose?

(And I have always felt desperately sorry for that unfortunate weepy au pair girl and felt like suggesting to Miranda that the way to make sure she had the right portion of her enormous-and-elegant wardrobe with her would have been to pack it, or at least oversee the packing of it, herself.)

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

I think it's explained somewhere. Grandfather came to the UK after/during/around WWII and starts The Shop.

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

Yes and something in a tubular pale blue. Ugh

Re: damnit, lj ate my first comment

[theminky.livejournal.com]

I think that she wasn't too specific in the descriptions of the dresses and of the appearance of characters because of personal taste; everyone has slightly differing ideas of beauty in both people and in clothes and by leaving a bit of room for imagination she allows people to project their own tastes onto the characters/clothes.

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.

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.

[(Anonymous)]

It must have been before, becaue the reason Miranda was at Kingscote was that she and her mother were evacuated there during the war (I think this is discussed in End of Term, towards the beginning where Nick and Miranda are getting to know each other)
-geebengrrl

[elizahonig.livejournal.com]

I had a whole discussion with forester48 on this topic. I said that the money probably came from somewhere other than The Shop because art/antique dealers who are at the top end generally start off with money from someplace else. Also, I don't think we know when the Wests came to England, only that they lost their complicated Polish name on the way.

[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!)

Re: "Lime green and cream!"

[leapingirbis.livejournal.com]

surely it must be a dark green, because didn't it have a matching green velvet cape? And I can't imagine lime green velvet ...

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.