VintageGent’s Menswear Daily

LA Time Machines: Where to Wear

Los Angeles Time Machines is a site that we have been watching for awhile that we think our readers would enjoy. It focuses exclusively on pre-1970s restaurants and bars that are still in their original state. Occasionally, there are updates on when folks can make a big difference in saving a historic vintage landmark so stay plugged in!

It mainly focuses on the many sites in Los Angeles, California, but has extended to includes spots in Nevada, Maryland, Arizona, Washington and beyond. So, go look up a historic place and show up in your vintage clothing! It would make a great retro photo!  I usually try to look up places along every route I am planning more than a two hour car drive, just in case I should come across something classy or outrageous.

http://latimemachines.com
Stay Unique

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr., Day

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr., day.   As a special treat, here is the “I Have a Dream” speech in its entirety for you to gather the family around, watch, and enjoy.  When I was in college, we were the first class to have Martin Luther King, Jr., off.   It was suggested that we spend the day at the art of historical museum, volunteer in one of the local soup kitchens, or follow another pursuit that revolved around learning or volunteerism in honor of Dr. King.    The grade school children, I recall, didn’t have the day off yet, and parents were encouraged to take their children out of school to go on a field trip of a similar nature.  Of course, now, they all have it off, but they didn’t always.   Of course, most kids are thrilled for any excuse to get out of school, but families were encouraged to make it count.

Inscription Found in Lincoln’s Watch

This week, the history world was abuzz with the news of family lore confirmed. An inscription that was rumored to have been in Abraham Lincoln’s pocket watch was proven true.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A gold watch owned by Abraham Lincoln bears a message marking the start of the U.S. Civil War, but the president never knew of the “secret” inscription uncovered on Tuesday at the National Museum of American History.

The engraving, by watchmaker Jonathan Dillon, is dated April 13, 1861, and reads in part: “Fort Sumpter was attacked by the rebels” and “thank God we have a government.”

The museum said it agreed to open the watch to find out if the message really was there after it was contacted by the watchmaker’s great-great-grandson, Doug Stiles of Waukegan, Illinois.

The American Civil War began when Confederate troops opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861.

Forty-five years later, Dillon the watchmaker told The New York Times that he was repairing Lincoln’s watch when he heard that the first shots of the Civil War had been fired.

Dillon said he unscrewed the dial of the watch and used a sharp instrument to mark the historic day on the president’s watch. He told the newspaper that, as far as he knew, no one had ever seen the inscription.

“Lincoln never knew of the message he carried in his pocket,” Brent Glass, director of the National Museum of American History said in a statement. “It’s a personal side of history about an ordinary watchman being inspired to record something for posterity.”

Lincoln was elected the 16th president of the United States in November 1860. In the lead up to the Civil War, South Carolina and six other states seceded from the Union before Lincoln’s inauguration in March 1861.

(Reporting by JoAnne Allen; Editing by Patricia Zengerle)

Does this make you want to go verify all of Grandpa or Grandma’s old stories to see if they were true? You never know what little piece of history you might unearth.

History: Debated on The Internet

There is a short, to the point website that has been brought to my attention.  Apparently, a group is wanting to get some information out about Golodomor (which means mass hunger in Russian, also referred to as Holodomor).  This occured in 1932-1933.  What had happened was not an environmental dustbowl.  On the contrary, it involved the seizure of grain in a plan cooked up by Stalin.  The grain was taken from the farms and the people to sell abroad, in order to fuel Russia’s industrialization.  It is estimated that 6-8 million people perished as a direct result of hunger.  Some sources report up to 10 million.

Those are the facts.

Now what the website is debating is the underlying motive.  It has been believed by some that the motive of this was to act as a genocide against the Ukraine.  The website is debating that it was not a deliberate genocide, that people died because of the faulty and ill executed policies of Stalin.   The former was supported by Viktor Yuschenko and others.  The latter is supported by the EU.  When a resolution was made, I wasn’t too versed on all the details of it, but do know that it was hotly debated in the areas densely populated by former Russians within the United States.  The United Nations resolved that Golodomor, also referred to as Holodomor, was a crime against humanity.  It was more than coincidental that even though people in central Russia died, that the deaths were more concentrated in areas where nationalism was rising, such as the Ukraine.

It seems completely plausible that they died by byproduct, which further proves that communism and extreme socialism do NOT work.  However, the trend of denying genocide is dangerous and irrefutable.   Either way, I do believe whether the seizure of grains was a deliberate attack of certain groups of people, or whether that was just a byproduct, Stalin, with all the scientists around him, was not stupid, and he had to know that deaths would toll in the millions.

What do you think, dear readers?   Will modern events be refuted and changed by who can make the most noise on the internet?  And what do you think about the actual event? Click to read the website in question about Holodomor.

The Doubledecker Bus Returns to London

In anticipation of the 2012 Olympics, the streets will be bustling with retro, nostalgic double decker buses with a new twist.  Two designs were chosen, one by Capoco Designs and one was a collaborative effort between Aston Martin and Foster & Partners.  Instead of calling it a tie, the two designs will somehow be melded into one.  It will take the aesthetic sensibility of the latter, and take internal ingenuities of the former.  I am not entirely sure what the end result will be, but the intent is a modernized, possibly hyrbid update on the classic.

Doubledecker buses are a common site in classic films, and if you go there, you can ride comfortabley with the sun out of your eyes.  More properly, since it is London, it will more likely keep the rain off of your hair.  At right is one of the “modern” concepts.

I recently found doubledecker cufflinks on Amazon.  They are under thirty bucks. Very cool to remind yourself of London.  They are offered by Cuff-Daddy and they have a lifetime guarantee.  Women are wearing cufflinks for funky outfits too these days.

January 6, 1947: (Don’t) Burn, Baby, Burn

What exactly happened on January 6, 1947?  No, I am not going to trick you with one of those “on this date at this spot, nothing happened” signs.

I have recently learned that The California Flammability Act went into effect. (Exciting, huh? Well, it certainly changed the fabric and clothing industry)

Retailers were ordered to clear their shelves of any clothing and “yard goods” were constructed of a flammable fabric. Some retailers purchased or were provided with test equipment to determine which goods were at risk. Not all retailers immediately complied.

Fabrics were not graded on the failure to protect the individual from a large scale fire (such as a house fire or those also involving flammable liquids), but the sudden catching of fire from a very small source such as a heat glow or a spark. Fabrics were considered flammable when they caught fire in less than 6 seconds. Materials most targetted were, according to Fairchild’s Mens Wear Magazine of March 7, 1947, “long napped rayons, sweaters and robes with the same characteristic, or with short or finer nap, nets as used in evening gowns, and thin, coated fabrics.” In fact, for a time, any synthetic fabric more flammable than natural cotton was banned.

The ban did not include hats, gloves, shoes, purses, or interlining materals that were not exposed.

Not only mills in the state were barred from producing them, retailers were fined or penalized for carrying flammable clothing and purchased or supplied with equipment to test fabrics. They were ordered to clear their shelves and check their insurers for liability.

Retailers did not all immediately comply. There were some questionable fabrics that individual stores inquired the fire marshall about. In doing so, the retailer could probably sell off the remaining forbidden items because it took 6 months at times for the subsequent ruling.

It is very interesting to think about the presence of particular fabrics lending towards accurately dating a garment. However, since the regulation did not immediately spread across the country, nor did it become federal law, fabric content alone cannot be relied upon to accurately date a suit or a nightie, except perhaps in the case of California Designers of the times.

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.

The World’s Most Famous Watch

The most famous watch in the world was donated to the Smithsonian in 1998 by Don Hewitt.

It is a Minerva stopwatch previously owned by a Mr. Arthur Bloom. Mr. Bloom was a television director and one of the founder’s of the perennial news magazine “60 minutes.” He lent it to the production crew and on Oct. 22, 1968, the familar tick of Bloom’s stopwatch greeted America for the first time. The watch is an icon, and has been dramatized and parodied hundreds of times over.

Artie Bloom passed away but the Minverva…now computer generated (as the article informs)…ticks on…

reprinted from http://www.cbsnews.com

‘60 Minutes’ Founder Arthur Bloom Dies

NEW YORK, Jan. 29, 2006

Arthur Bloom (CBS)
Arthur Bloom (CBS)

(CBS)Arthur Bloom, the award-winning CBS News television director responsible for the distinctive on-screen look of >60 Minutes since its debut 37 years ago and who led the modernization of on-screen graphics at CBS News, died at home Saturday of cancer. He was 63 and resided in Grandview-on-Hudson, N.Y.

He was one of the last remaining original 60 Minutes founders still working for the program. Bloom also played a role in helping to train Dan Rather to succeed Walter Cronkite in the CBS News anchor chair in 1981.

Bloom spent his entire 45-year career at CBS and used his keen eye and a symphonic vision of camera work to become one of the medium’s best directors of live political event coverage. His outstanding talent was recognized with the first Lifetime Achievement Award in News Direction from the Directors Guild of America (DGA) in 1995. The same organization had honored him twice before, once for news direction of CBS News coverage of the 1976 Democratic and Republican conventions and, before that, in 1973 for his work on 60 Minutes.

Most of Bloom’s time was devoted to 60 Minutes; he helped to create and then honed the consistent, classy look of the broadcast. Each week he worked in Studio 33 in the CBS Broadcast Center monitoring the program’s studio production and directing the 60 Minutes correspondents as they taped introductions and tags for their reports. He influenced some of the broadcast’s most basic elements, starting with its famous ticking stopwatch.

The first stopwatch was Bloom’s own. The timepiece symbol began as part of 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt’s idea for “60 minutes of reality” and came to life when Bloom filmed his own Minerva stopwatch. The concept worked well enough to be used at the beginning of the broadcast’s third edition on Oct. 22, 1968.

Soon it was shown between segments, eventually becoming the iconic logo recognized by generations. Bloom updated the logo, but only in barely noticeable ways at intervals of several years. His modernizing touches included the use of slimmer typography and the addition of subtle shading and texture to the logo’s background. He oversaw the stopwatch’s transition from a filmed image to a computer-generated one.

“Artie had an eye for what worked visually and what didn’t – he was invaluable to me,” said Hewitt. “I depended on him to make the broadcast as visually appealing as it turned out to be. He was at my side every step of the way.”

Bloom also helped Hewitt execute the graphic concept for 60 Minutes as a magazine for television, deciding on a mock-up of a magazine page to put behind the correspondent to begin each of the broadcast’s segments. Now also computer-generated, the magazine concept has essentially remained the same.

Fashion Defined: Argyle

The design was first seen on the tartans worn by members of the Campbell clan from Argyll, Scotland. The clan found popularity when it was mentioned by the Scottish novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott. By the late 18th century, the knitted pattern of the argyle was beginning to be adapted by manufacturers as the argyle plaid and socks knitted with the patterns became known as “argyle socks.” Although the original pattern of the Campbell clan was a traditional green and white, today argyle socks can be a combination of any two or more bright colors.

Save that for a cocktail party. You are sure to dazzle someone with your knowledge!

Always on a Monday

Quotes from the Archives:

Harriet, of TastyVintage presented the following quotation from “The Art of Window Dressing” on the public forum at Vintagefashionguild.org that we found rather interesting…

“A certain draper in a large provincial town had for very many years alays changed the neckwear window on Mondays, and it was not until recently that, on account of his window dresser being called away, he had occasion to leave his display in over Monday.

He then discovered that he sold more better-class neckwear on that particular Monday than of any other day of the display. Monday is now the best day for neckwear, and the window display is never changed that day.” Have mondays been “mondays” throughout time and they could use a new accessory to lift their mood, just like it is said more stereotypically of women? Are men more “refreshed” on mondays? Were more men “in town” on mondays reporting to the office before the rest of the week took them away to meetings uptown or in another city? What are your opinions?You may not live near a place like that, but do you find yourself in a buying mood out of necessity or fancy any particular time than others? I think it would be an interesting discussion.