VintageGent’s Menswear Daily

Planning a Boardwalk Empire theme party for the season premiere

Guest post written by Janet Thomas

Thre are few occasions when it seems like I don’t really find an excuse to dress up. It’s so much fun and I’ve loved playing fashion and dress up since I was a littel kid. Well that’s definitely carried on into a lot of theme parties that I started having when I was in college and have just kind of continued over the years.

As you can probably guess, I really love following all of these costume period dramas and checkin gup on all hte different things that are going on with my new favorite show Boardwalk Empire with my wireless internet Chicago. It’s just so interesting to see and hear the things as they’re reimagined during that time.

I’m planning on throwing a Boardwalk Empire season premiere party. I think that it’s going to be so much fun and I already have a few great outfits from my Grandma that I’ve already picked out. Now finding vintage pieces from the 20s or that look like they belong in the 20s can be pretty tough, but that’s a challenge I love taking on.

Father’s Day Gift Idea #2: Cobwebby Mysteries

S.S. Van Dine was quite a colorful character. Lore tells us that he fell gravely ill for two years, and wrote the Philo Vance mysteries while bedridden. His biography tells us that he was actually bedridden because of a cocaine addiction that he was under the grips of or needed to kick. At any rate, he was confined and read many crime stories, hence the novels were born smack dab in the art deco era!

This set of mystery novels was lovingly collected by a fan back in the day. It appears that they bought each Philo Vance novel as it was released. In the novels, author Van Dine appears as a Watson like character to the bon vivant Vance. Philo Vance was a fencer, archer, connoisseur of Chinese ceramics, polo, fine cuisine, and student of crime history.

This set is available on Etsy. They would be a great gift alone, or pair them with slippers or a robe, a magnifying glass, or Dad’s favorite kind of coffee. They would look very fashionable in a bookshelf or on a side table, just as well as they would do being actually read.  Imagine that…actually reading them!  The collection includes: The “Canary” Murder Case, The Greene Murder Case, The Bishop Murder Case, Gracie Allen Murder Mystery, The Garden Murder Case, The Kidnap Murder Case.

To get a closer gander at them, click HERE.

Backyard Baseball

Sports competitions, and casually knocking around in the backyard with a ball have been the subject of film from the time the very first reel of was placed in a camera. Looking at old films gives us a real glimpse into how people lived. We get a look into how they dressed everyday, as in golden age Hollywood movies, actors were dressed to promote designer clothing to the people eating popcorn. Luckily, a lot of old sports clips were converted into sports videos and dvds so they are more stable and better preserved.

I was looking around on the SportsVids site and came across this casual gem from the 1920s. They always say people dressed more formally in decades past, which is true, but I have a feeling that this game just spontaneously broke out in front of someone’s house:

I hope more people will go to SportsVid, an online sports videos site, and share the gems that have been languishing.  Maybe they had their camera ready at a historic match up of famous athletes, or perhaps someone somewhere has footage of a lost sport that we just don’t play very often today.  You may just have an important piece of the past for someone to jog a memory or to research a time past.