white

Blue and White Convertible-Sleeved Evening Dress From “In the Year 2000: Clothing of the Future”

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Erin at A Dress A Day linked to this video from the 1930s, “In The Year 2000: Clothing Of The Future” and, well, convertible sleeves FTW. Or, to quote the video, “One idea is a dress that can be adapted for morning, afternoon or evening. It’s the sleeves what does it!” So the white part is actually the inside of the sleeve, secured by the little silver hangy thing at the top and threaded underneath the belt. You’ll see if you watch the video a couple of times. We didn’t really get a good look at the skirt, and I think the original is a little fuller, but what the heck, I lived through the year 2000, I can take some liberties.

The rest of the video, which promises to show us “what Eve will look like in AD 2000,” is well worth a watch, too. I wish we got a better look at the aluminum dress…

Oh, and Go Fug Yourself is holding the Fug Madness tournament soon, so if you have a high tolerance for fugly, don’t forget to vote. I predict at least one paperdoll will come from the contest. (I’m not so sure they’ve got room to talk with those horrendous American Apparel dress ads on their site, but I guess money is money. Ooh, I hope that doesn’t show up in my ads now…)

Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique Formal Dresses, Part 1

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I find myself, at the time of this writing, with a terrible headache and no drawings stored up in reserve… so instead of silence I thought I’d post some of my old Boutique dresses and one of the dolls.

When I was in high school and college, I ran a site called “Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique” for which I drew dresses and dolls. It got to be really rather sprawling, and was great fun, although my laziness, perfectionism and inability to really focus on more than one thing with  all my heart caught up to me and it slipped away at some point. These are from that old site.

I don’t remember which birthday it was when I got my set of 120 Prismacolors — though I bet my mom could — but in any case, these date somewhere to maybe sophomore or junior year of high school, 1997, 1998. (I’m very bad with dates…) I still remember details about some of them… the blue dress was a request from some paperdoll fan, and the gold dress was my first try at gold, and really my technique hasn’t changed too much. Also, I don’t do the outlines with black ink anymore, and I use the colorless blender instead of white… I don’t think my dolls look a lot better, though, and I post this one with some embarrassment, but hey, it’s history!

Princess Ashe’s Wedding Dress from Final Fantasy XII

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So I started playing Final Fantasy XII again recently. (It works nicely with my job. For my fifteen minute breaks, I do dishes and pick up, and on my half-hour break I go beat up some skeletons.) I think the thing I love most about the game is the lushly textured world design… everything is just so pretty. Funny, then, that I don’t really like the character designs for the main characters, except Fran and Balthier. (Don’t get me started on Penelo’s weird leather wings … or Ashe’s little sailor collar… or Vaan the most well-dressed orphaned urchin ever … or Basch’s potholder) I was thinking that I should paperdoll the NPCs, because each major area has its own style, and the female townspeople always looked really cool to me, especially the Arcades women. Luckily, I found a great Ashe shrine that has screen captures of the dress, plus the original concept art, which meant I got to abandon my half-hearted sketch of her regular costume and go for this one instead!

This is Ashe’s wedding dress, and you see it in the very first part of the game, followed soon after by her mourning dress. If I didn’t do the wedding dress, I’d have done a white dress she wears that I also liked, which as it turns out is just a white and grey version of her mourning dress. Maybe another day…

Scanner messed this one up too, but I fixed it up well enough. Does anyone have any idea why it does that? It scans intially sort of softer and the colors are true to the page, then when the scan or preview is done, the colors get more saturated and it looks kind of like someone ran a sharpen filter on the whole thing…

Lily Bart’s White Edwardian Tea Gown with Pink Rose Sash from The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

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Now that I’m done with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, I do think it’s time for another depressing period piece. This time I’m listening to The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, read for Librivox by Elizabeth Klett. I’ve read it before, but I’m actually preferring audiobooks lately because I don’t skim so much and get more of the details, and I’ve been thinking of this book since I read this New York Times article about Lily’s fate…

So far there hasn’t been much description of individual dresses, but there’s so much about the culture that those dresses form such a part of. Here’s Lily Bart talking about marriage with Lawrence Selden: “Your coat’s a little shabby–but who cares? It doesn’t keep people from asking you to dine. If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like: they don’t make success, but they are a part of it. Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop–and if we can’t keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership.”

Well, even if the book does promise to be melancholy, there is a silver lining: the dresses from the Belle Époque are beautiful, even if Sylvia isn’t quite the desired S-shape. I remember later on she wears some form of white dress, but there’s not a lot of physical description in the book so it’s based more on vintage gowns from 1904 and 1905 I’ve been looking at, particularly this one.