My dad used to call dresses frocks. In my recent reflecting on dresses, I remembered that my dad sold women’s clothing for most of my life – he owned dress stores in Lithgow (Plum Junction) and in Coolangatta (the Bird’s Nest) and also sold door to door in country centres (like Tupperware parties, he’d find someone who’d consent to having some friends over to try on dresses and sell from there. I worked in the Coolangatta store from 14 to 18. For that period of time I was paid in dresses. Once I went to university it was a big change to suddenly have to buy clothes.
Dad would go to Sydney to the warehouses in Surry Hills and buy “stock” which he would bring home and we’d open it up and we’d all try everything on – because often he’d buy it from the hanger basically. An extension project from this is to maybe find the photos i still have of me wearing dresses from that era. Some of my high school friends thought i dressed “too old” for my age at 14. Maybe I did, but it was always lovely and still is, to wear something luxurious.
Technically this is an altered book, in that I gutted a book (Flawless Consulting by Peter Block) which is a pleasing size. The insides are a collage work from 2008 which had sufficient interesting texture – the base was general collage (i see some old national geographic offcuts of houses, a heinz tomato sauce bottle, some photos of fabrics), then pattern tissue and some acrylic washes. By that time it was all too dark, so i added gold highlights. That was all in the piece i broke up to make these pages! Then I added some now familiar dress shapes, and integrated them into the design as if they had always been there (Cathie’s suggestion).
Meanwhile I had torn up a book called Fashion (image below) I found in the street maybe 5 years ago. Beautiful book. In it was a little panel showing the 1950s Dior designs – they had a new collection every 6 months, and each look had a name (there is a post-it outlining the names, but not matching them with the pix, sorry). Many of these designs were Audrey Hepburn in many of her movies – i think in fact most of them appear in the film Funny Face, one of my favourite (Audrey and Fred Astaire go to Paris, what’s not to love?).
I was planning a whole book for the Dior, but in the end I put them in here because they are just pretty. I have photographed them, so in theory i can still do the other book. i wrote the name of each line on the back of the images though, and I stuck them down, so if i care which is Ligne H, Ligne Souple, Ligne Muguet, I’ll have to google it or ask AI to do it.
I did stick the pages back to back. This was partly so i didn’t have to decorate the backs of the page. i have extremely limited success in making the back of the page look like it was intended to be with the fronts of the page.
Also have to stop and say how much I’m loving the input of my artistic friends into these works – BAG (maybe Mandy?) suggested hanging the dresses, Cathie and I meet weekly and she is constantly making my ideas better and adding some of her own. It’s a privilege to part of such a scenius.
If I did this again:
- Make it from a single page (don’t double it over) so it opens more easily – or think of that in advance and set it up to open (I made this decision on the fly after gluing it in)
- I had to attach a label to show the front of the piece – if i use another altered book I could just find one with an obvious front and back
New ideas from this one
- my own dresses from dad’s store
- make a book that’s a dress store?
- use the cat walk stills from Fashion to make another one (what about a top and tail book?)
Here’s a tour of the book:
and the images
