Remember life before motherhood? - Judy Rumbold revels in pictures from a new book showcasing the fabulous hairstyles and clothes of women before their children came along and changed everything
When I was a little girl I cherished an occasional glimpse of the stylish woman my mother might have been before five children came along and wreaked havoc on her wardrobe. There would be the rare evenings when, en route to a dinner dance (was there ever a juxtaposition of words that promised so much glamour and intrigue?), she'd sweep into my bedroom, floor-length dress rustling, hair piled up, and blow me a lipsticky, whisky-tinged goodnight kiss.
Maureen Hart in a home-made swimsuit in Fiji in the early 1950s
The next day, much to my dismay, it'd be business as usual – home-sewn cotton dresses of indeterminate shape built large to accommodate serial pregnancies, the faded pinny pebble-dashed with ancient mashed potato, hamster poo and eviscerated-worm juice.
As my flustered mother herded us from bed to table to school, I remember feeling faintly disgusted by her distinct lack of breakfast-time sartorial aplomb. I promised myself I would never let myself be seen in the same state of mad-haired disrepair.
A few decades later I sit writing this in a frightful school-run outfit – barely one step up from pyjamas – fully aware of why a maxidress in Lurex-shot pink brocade isn't necessarily practical everyday wear. Yet I blush at the thought that this is how my children will remember me.
The photographs in Piper Weiss's book, My Mom: Style Icon, serve as a cautionary tale to all mothers; make sure lots of photographs are taken while you're not too hideous to look at and still relatively on-the-ball, fashion-wise. That way you will avoid being immortalised in family-album history as a snot-smeared, baggily sweat-panted frump.
Which is roughly how Weiss regarded her mother until she discovered a stash of clothes and photographs from her youth. Pre-children, before her wardrobe was sequestered for hide and seek and complex Narnia reconstructions, it transpired that Mrs Weiss had been a leggy, photogenic chick with a keen eye for a chain belt and a psychedelic print. Not such a drudge then, after all.
'That?' she said, when questioned by her daughter about the story behind a fringed suede waistcoat. 'I wore it to a party in the West Village in the late 1960s. I remember Barry Gibb was holding court by an indoor swimming pool in the middle of the living-room. Lots of pot smoke.'
Subsequent conversations between Piper and her friends sparked talk of other mums with adventurous fashion histories, and a blog, momstyleicons.blogspot.com, was born. Soon, classy mum photographs featuring bikinis, bell-bottoms and enormous prom beehives were being sent to the blog from all over the world, accompanied by touching stories and recollections.
One submission pictured a mum, Myrna Stone, showing off her long legs in high-waisted shorts in 1968. The story went, 'She sent this to my dad when he was stationed in Vietnam right after they were married. It kept getting stolen from his stuff, so she had to keep reprinting it and sending it again.'
One mum was a dancer on The Dean Martin Variety Show. Another ran away from her strict Texas family to get married. Now the blog receives 50,000 page views a month and is visited by speakers of 87 different languages. It has been featured on Urban Outfitters' website, the Los Angeles Times online, the Huffington Post, and is published as a book.
Equal parts hilarious and affectionate (I tell a lie – hilarious wins out) the photographs from the 1960s and 1970s strike the most familiar chord with me. That resolutely flat colour and total lack of nuance in lighting or depth lend them, to today's technology-pampered eyes, irresistible kitsch appeal.
And photographs were precious then. They speak of a time when film was expensive, every pose counted and there was no such thing as Photoshopping or a delete button. The gestation period of the average photograph, from clicking the shutter, to fannying around with film, to sending it off to be developed and waiting for the package to be returned home again, was roughly the same as that of a human baby. And, in most cases, just as eagerly awaited.
Although not necessarily in our house. My dad was terrible with a camera and his eccentrically inept picture composition rarely captured its intended subjects in any recognisable way.
But now, looking at those images, I realise how gratifying it is to be able to see a whole lot less of the family (five self-consciously gangly teenagers during the 1970s. We didn't scrub up well. The few surviving photos fairly crackle with Crimplene static and adolescent hostility) and a lot more of the skirting boards, the scuffed wallpaper, the astoundingly ugly Welsh caravan – everyday stuff that brings so vividly to life our family's fraught Kodak years.
The same is true of most of the pics in My Mom: Style Icon, whose fat-fingered shutter operators were probably as new to cameras as my dad, and to whom judicious cropping was an alien concept. Which, in this book, is a treat for lovers of peripheral period detail. Things that, these days, would be removed from view for their distracting lack of aesthetic finesse are all there for the studying: the half-built porch, random corners of furniture, wonky curtain rails and a whole range
of fabulously intrusive telly sets.
The images in the book prove that advances in photography don't necessarily produce the most memorable pictures. Next time you're being painstakingly photographed looking pensive and 'off-guard', make sure to include the recycling bin and some pointless kitchen wall furniture.
A flawlessly well-lit, expertly cropped style icon for a mother is one thing, but in years to come an image of that nasty but comfortingly familiar plastic light switch you always meant to replace might thrill your children even more. ( telegraph.co.uk )
When I was a little girl I cherished an occasional glimpse of the stylish woman my mother might have been before five children came along and wreaked havoc on her wardrobe. There would be the rare evenings when, en route to a dinner dance (was there ever a juxtaposition of words that promised so much glamour and intrigue?), she'd sweep into my bedroom, floor-length dress rustling, hair piled up, and blow me a lipsticky, whisky-tinged goodnight kiss.
Maureen Hart in a home-made swimsuit in Fiji in the early 1950s
The next day, much to my dismay, it'd be business as usual – home-sewn cotton dresses of indeterminate shape built large to accommodate serial pregnancies, the faded pinny pebble-dashed with ancient mashed potato, hamster poo and eviscerated-worm juice.
As my flustered mother herded us from bed to table to school, I remember feeling faintly disgusted by her distinct lack of breakfast-time sartorial aplomb. I promised myself I would never let myself be seen in the same state of mad-haired disrepair.
A few decades later I sit writing this in a frightful school-run outfit – barely one step up from pyjamas – fully aware of why a maxidress in Lurex-shot pink brocade isn't necessarily practical everyday wear. Yet I blush at the thought that this is how my children will remember me.
The photographs in Piper Weiss's book, My Mom: Style Icon, serve as a cautionary tale to all mothers; make sure lots of photographs are taken while you're not too hideous to look at and still relatively on-the-ball, fashion-wise. That way you will avoid being immortalised in family-album history as a snot-smeared, baggily sweat-panted frump.
Which is roughly how Weiss regarded her mother until she discovered a stash of clothes and photographs from her youth. Pre-children, before her wardrobe was sequestered for hide and seek and complex Narnia reconstructions, it transpired that Mrs Weiss had been a leggy, photogenic chick with a keen eye for a chain belt and a psychedelic print. Not such a drudge then, after all.
'That?' she said, when questioned by her daughter about the story behind a fringed suede waistcoat. 'I wore it to a party in the West Village in the late 1960s. I remember Barry Gibb was holding court by an indoor swimming pool in the middle of the living-room. Lots of pot smoke.'
Subsequent conversations between Piper and her friends sparked talk of other mums with adventurous fashion histories, and a blog, momstyleicons.blogspot.com, was born. Soon, classy mum photographs featuring bikinis, bell-bottoms and enormous prom beehives were being sent to the blog from all over the world, accompanied by touching stories and recollections.
One submission pictured a mum, Myrna Stone, showing off her long legs in high-waisted shorts in 1968. The story went, 'She sent this to my dad when he was stationed in Vietnam right after they were married. It kept getting stolen from his stuff, so she had to keep reprinting it and sending it again.'
One mum was a dancer on The Dean Martin Variety Show. Another ran away from her strict Texas family to get married. Now the blog receives 50,000 page views a month and is visited by speakers of 87 different languages. It has been featured on Urban Outfitters' website, the Los Angeles Times online, the Huffington Post, and is published as a book.
Equal parts hilarious and affectionate (I tell a lie – hilarious wins out) the photographs from the 1960s and 1970s strike the most familiar chord with me. That resolutely flat colour and total lack of nuance in lighting or depth lend them, to today's technology-pampered eyes, irresistible kitsch appeal.
And photographs were precious then. They speak of a time when film was expensive, every pose counted and there was no such thing as Photoshopping or a delete button. The gestation period of the average photograph, from clicking the shutter, to fannying around with film, to sending it off to be developed and waiting for the package to be returned home again, was roughly the same as that of a human baby. And, in most cases, just as eagerly awaited.
Although not necessarily in our house. My dad was terrible with a camera and his eccentrically inept picture composition rarely captured its intended subjects in any recognisable way.
But now, looking at those images, I realise how gratifying it is to be able to see a whole lot less of the family (five self-consciously gangly teenagers during the 1970s. We didn't scrub up well. The few surviving photos fairly crackle with Crimplene static and adolescent hostility) and a lot more of the skirting boards, the scuffed wallpaper, the astoundingly ugly Welsh caravan – everyday stuff that brings so vividly to life our family's fraught Kodak years.
The same is true of most of the pics in My Mom: Style Icon, whose fat-fingered shutter operators were probably as new to cameras as my dad, and to whom judicious cropping was an alien concept. Which, in this book, is a treat for lovers of peripheral period detail. Things that, these days, would be removed from view for their distracting lack of aesthetic finesse are all there for the studying: the half-built porch, random corners of furniture, wonky curtain rails and a whole range
of fabulously intrusive telly sets.
The images in the book prove that advances in photography don't necessarily produce the most memorable pictures. Next time you're being painstakingly photographed looking pensive and 'off-guard', make sure to include the recycling bin and some pointless kitchen wall furniture.
A flawlessly well-lit, expertly cropped style icon for a mother is one thing, but in years to come an image of that nasty but comfortingly familiar plastic light switch you always meant to replace might thrill your children even more. ( telegraph.co.uk )
No comments:
Post a Comment