I am wearing this gorgeous dress from ICING for the Vintage Fair. I don't know why, but it made me think of that great old song from Louis Jordan. So there's no secret message in this post.
Oh, I got a man that’s always late
Any time we have a date
But I love him
Yes I love him
“Fashion is self-consciously sociological and frankly featherbrained. It’s classic and immediate. Nostalgic and now. Worldly and other-worldly. Whatever’s happening you are part of it and at last you can be yourself and look as you choose.” English Vogue, 1968
1968 was the year fashion run amok. Hemlines on the runway ranged from the mini to just above the knee to the midi and the maxi. Women wore midi-coats with mini-skirts and minidresses over bell-bottoms. Velvet jumped off the formal rack and raced over to casuals and was seen everywhere. Thrift store chic meant looking like you dressed in a thrift store, not actually dressing in a thrift store. Fashion became not just a way of looking good, but a signifier of political and generational divides. Tonight you can visit the wild and crazy 1968 at The Velvet from 7 to 9 SLT – as Rock per Annum moves forward one more year.
1967 was the Summer of Love and 1968 was the year of sorrow. Martin Luther King was assassinated. So was Bobby Kennedy. The My Lai Massacre revealed that the American soldiers were not always the “good guys” of the romanticized war movies. The Tet Offensive challenged the military superiority of the American army. Richard Nixon is elected president after derailing the Paris peace talks by contacting the North Vietnamese and promising a better peace treaty with him. But it was not a completely horrible year. Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in a black power salute when getting their medals at the Olympics in Mexico. The Civil Rights Act was signed. Yale University opened admission to women. Intel was founded and President Johnson ordered that all computers purchased by the government support ASCII encoding, paving the way for generations of ASCII artists. Elvis made a comeback and the Beatles released The White Album and Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In debuted.
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How did this happen? Should I call 911? I know tornadoes do strange and mysterious things, but I don’t see any other storm damage at Empress & Hierophant, but wandering the hills I came upon a three-sheep pileup and stopped to help. However, the sheep seemed immovable and I eventually left them there – stacked and waiting for rescue from someone with proper perms.
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I usually do not shoot my photos with shadows enabled. They just are not important enough to me to bother with the hassles. There’s so many little aggravations associated with it like turning system skirts into solid black in one viewer and losing all my alpha textures in another. However, the new pose prop from Behavior Body told me it wanted me to shoot it with shadows and when pose props start talking, they cannot be denied. I decided to go with this cute day dress from Indie Rose for the Vintage Fair because the prop told me to go black and white. Give a prop and inch and it will take a mile.
I even found these Lotus Pumps with Dots from Baiastice because there’s no telling what the prop would have done if i could not find some black and white shoes. Of course, I was only speaking with one of the prop’s personalities. It comes with a HUD for communicating with its inner spirit and I could have called up different walls and floor textures and released a completely different character from the prop – there’s even one that probably went to Woodstock and hung out with Jimi Hendrix back in the day.
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Down she came and found a boat
Beneath a willow left afloat,
And around about the prow she wrote
The Lady of Shalott
When I saw the Shallot pose boat at Balderdash I had to jump in and take it for a test spin. Thankfully, I got out safe and sound. I was running around the water at Oubliette looking for a good place to shoot this great mesh dress from DCNY. The boat is nice and will suffice.
I am wearing the third of the Elements necklaces from Balderdash. This one is called Bit of Water – but really, we know it the seven seas and the five oceans captured in a little bottle of magic.
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Saigye Lotus didn’t just put the world in a bottle with the necklace I highlighted yesterday. She gathered the sun and stars and bottled up their fire as well. This is another necklace with the amazing detail anyone with a passing acquaintance with Balderdash jewelry has come to expect. I am wearing it with a lovely striped sweater from Baiastice.
It’s a bit chilly, though, and luckily Baiastice released a poncho just this week. I tossed it on over my sweater and I am as snug as a bug in a rug. Probably more snug, since bugs in rugs can still get stepped on or zapped by insecticides.
Eclectic Wingtips of Eclectic Apparel is having a super sale, putting half of her store on sale at half off. Yes, 50% of the items are 50% off. Even better, there are a few 1 linden items such as this gorgeous little number to sweeten the pot. What I like best about Eclectic Apparel is that there are great basics, separates that can be combined and mixed and matched and build and extend your wardrobe. This is a stocker-upper sale.
One of the reasons I love the jewelry at Balderdash so much is that when you zoom in on it, you can find whole new worlds. Take this Bit of Earth Necklace which is lovely and attractive from a distance, but when seen in detail, reveals so much more than you would suppose. Whether you’re zooming in on a pair of earrings and finding some words from a book or tiny shamrocks, the true revelation of Balderdash jewelry is in the fine details. I showed this to a real life friend who was in awe and perhaps, for the first time, really understood the appeal of Second Life fashions. I wore the jewelry with what seems a relatively casual, everyday outfit. Which is what I thought myself, until…
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Shot with Mechanized Life's Filter Cam and Expansion Pack
Rock Per Annum moves forward another year to 1966. 1966 was a year of contrasts. The Vietnam War continued to polarize people, largely along generational lines. Star Trek made its debut, as did the Monkees. The Black Panthers were formed, and the first Toyota Corolla was sold. More importantly for our purposes, this was a year in which the notion of an album really started to be much more than just an assortment of material packaged around a couple of singles. Pet Sounds, Blonde on Blonde, and Revolver made a strong case for the pop album as an art form of its own. The Velvet Musicologist Maht Wuyts will be ending the set tonight by playing Revolver in its entirety. His plan is that most weeks moving forward, he will end the night with an important album from the year in question. The set begins at 7 PM SLT tonight at The Velvet. Be there or be square. (I wonder if that phrase began in 1966?)
There was a lot of diversity in fashion in 1966. Hemlines were up, down and all around at the beginning of the year but by fall, were pretty firmly above the knee, though you wouuld often see a long coat paired with a mini-dress. The waist was gone forever, lost in a world of aline shifts and babydolls. There was a lot of experimentation with fabric. It was the year of the paper dress and of Paco Rabanne’s plastic and wire dresses. Yes, plastic a full 45 years before Josh McKKinley thought he discovered something new on Project Runway. Most women still wore cloth, however, and it often was a bright, bold print from textile designers like Emilio Pucci and Ken Scott. This dress from Subculture by Shauna Vella is a perfect example of the 1966 look.
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1965 was a strange year in fashion with the advent of bell-bottoms and granny dresses, one-shouldered sari dresses and metallic catsuits, flowing paisleys and the Mondrian dress. It was also the year of Edie Sedgwick, declared the “It Girl” by Vogue. Sedgwick was a fashion original with a free and rebellious style. She wore tights with nearly everything and added huge chandelier earrings, heavy eyeliner and a casual short moptop cut. She has an ease and freedom to her that made her captivating in photos. How perfect, then, is this Sedgwick dress from Ingenue for Collabor88.
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