The Best One Yet

Samuel Winston silk 1950s dress - sold.

Every vintie has a tale of the Best Vintage Find. Mine is minor compared to some I've seen, a recent story about access to one of the oldest theatre costume departments in New York is hard to beat. But I went to a sale in Santa Fe last fall, and it ranks right up there for me.

It was a semi-private sale in a large old adobe home very close to the Santa Fe plaza. The woman that lived there was an artist and avid shopper. She traveled to New York and California to find her clothes, and some had the tags of an upscale Santa Fe store, now closed. One room was full of shoes. Just shoes. They had labels like Herbert Levine, Ferragamo, Charles Jourdan. But I got stuck on one closet, all by myself. In it I found a Paganne, several Estevez, two McCardells, a Samuel Winston, and a whole collection of dresses by Tina Leser. Sure it would have been fun to find a Chanel or Dior, but for New Mexico this was a score!

The story gets even better. A friend and I drove back up to Santa Fe the next day to attend another sale. We didn't find much to buy so decided to head back to the Plaza sale, which had already been open to the public for several hours. We still found things to buy including a couple of Dalton cashmere twinsets still in the packages. Just before we left, I walked into the shoe room and starting opening drawers in a chest. In the bottom drawer, I found three swimsuits. A red wool halter swimsuit with fagotting (famous designer name escapes me), a white and pink polka dot Rosemarie Reid with a bustle, and a 1940s Schiaparelli bikini! I nearly fainted, but still managed to hold onto them.

There is actually a sad note to this story. Five dumpsters full of stuff, mostly clothing, were hauled out of the sale before it opened. The clothing was deemed in too poor of shape to sell. I like to think that the best stuff was in that closet and well taken care of, but then I wonder if there were Puccis and more going off to the dump. Guess I will never know.

The Tina Leser dresses are currently listed in my Ebay and Etsy accounts, and the Schiaparelli swimsuit is on Etsy.

My First McCardell

Once in a while in the vintage game, you find something you were meant to find. You have that psychic pull to your favorite resell store, or a friend of a friend calls you and tells you to come over. It happened to me a couple of weeks ago. I went early to a vintage sale, and found my very first Claire McCardell dress. Just a simple cotton dress, I thought, with a cool bustle feature and an interesting abstract fish print. Still, a great find! The hubby and I did a photo shoot that weekend, and I included this dress, even though it's not in season. Resort cruise wear from a good label is always in season, right? A few days later, I received a 1949 Vogue magazine in the mail from an Ebay purchase. Old Vogues are a great way to learn more about the fashions from our favorite eras, albeit the expensive ones. Thumbing through, a picture of a plate caught my eye. It was my fish print! Credited to pottery by Picasso.

A quick search later, I learned that Claire McCardell and other designers had collaborated on a line of resort wear using textiles from the "Modern Masters Print" series. A fashion student on Ebay let me know that the artists were Picasso, Marc Chagall, Fernand Leger, Raoul Dufy and Joan Miro. The dress I had found was phtographed for an article in the November 14, 1955 issue of Life magazine, shot alongside Picasso in his studio. So it's listed. It would never fit me in this lifetime unless a time machine can take me back twenty years. It's a great story, though, and a good way to start a blog about vintage fashion, and costume jewelry, and maybe even some cooking. Stay tuned!