You Don't Have To Be Beautiful; or Go To Hell, Trump!

The rain is back. We get so much rain in this city, that we refer to it not as rain, but as The Rain, the same way one would refer to The Sun, or The Moon: an inevitable fact of life, its return as natural as the return of night after day. I don't adore the rain but I don't mind it. I focus on the fact that it won't snow in winter, and on the year round green that comes with the rain, and I am content.

But I do prepare. Very few locals here carry umbrellas but we do like our hats. This is especially true for me, since carrying an umbrella is painful at best, and, when I'm using my mobility scooter, nearly impossible. 

When I put this outfit together, I was mostly thinking of some wonderful, 1970s fashion icons -- Carly Simon, Stevie Nicks, and Faye Dunaway -- and I had fun trying to emulate them. But then a tape of Trump arrogantly bragging about sexually assaulting women was released to the press, and I felt differently. These icons of mine are, like me, older now. To Trump and his ilk, they are used up, spent, valueless -- and so am I. In an environment like that, should I really be emulating women in their youth and not in their age too?

When that tape hit the news, I was in the middle of an extreme pain flare. I was using a wheeled walker just to walk a few feet in my own house, when usually I don't even need a cane at home. I was literally, painfully aware of what happens to the human body -- most often the female body -- when it is used as an object. And make no mistake: Trump was talking about us -- you and me -- as objects, and people, many people, were saying that his doing so was just a-okay.

It's been a long time since I've felt like an object, but I felt like an object that week. And I'm still getting over it.

Beau and I were overcome with helpless, frustrated rage. We talked to Beau's adolescent sons about consent and rape culture. I made my little memes and reshared important messages on social media, but it felt useless.

I just had to get my mind off it. So I started this blog post, just a light, fun emulation of older women in their beautiful youth. And I felt guilty. I comfort myself by reminding myself and you, dear readers, that I do often write posts about the beauty of older women, but that's not the point. The bloody point is that we don't have to be beautiful to matter! We are a hell of a lot more than our appearance, but try telling the world that. Just try. Heck, try telling yourself that and really, truly believing it.

So that's the back story to this post, just so you know. Now I'll try again to write it, with respect, for youth and age, for beauty and its absence -- with respect for women, all women.

So. I bought a new rain hat.

I was particularly excited that the thing actually fit on my massive head and puffy hair. It doesn't even give me a headache. I can even ... wait for it ... have a hairstyle underneath and the hat won't ruin it!

It's wool, which isn't water proof, but I treated it with a waterproof spray and it's served me well so far. Besides, I love wool. It's old-fashioned, classy, beautiful, warm, and a lot closer to being waterproof than you'd think. Trust me I know. I live on the Rain Coast, remember?

As with all my hats, I often add a brooch to it to match my different outfits. This brooch is such a pale pink, it almost glows ...

... as does this dress.

Dress: Jessica Simpson; Boots: Keen; Hat: Brixton; Sunglasses: Aldo; Earrings: bespoke, Etsy; Right hand ring, jacket, and brooch: vintage

... or, at least, it would seem to glow if it weren't so dark ...

... but, you know, you kind of have to expect that with all this rain. It can get me down a bit, but not too much. I hate long, cold winters more than I hate dark, rainy days.

I think it's no coincidence that people in my city seem to be far less afraid of wearing colour than people in other cities. It's our way of brightening up our dark days. I've lived in Montréal, Toronto, and New York, and in all three cities, I was struck by how much black, grey, and navy people wear there. It just seems so dreary!

So, to add to the glowing pink look, I wore the rose quartz, and pink tourmaline earrings that I got for our wedding ...

... and this pink, Lucite, reverse-carved bangle. I got the same one in lavender at a thrift store so, when I saw this one on Etsy, I knew I had to have it. Sometimes I wear them together. I love the 3D effect of the reverse-carving.

But back to the hat. It makes me feel like a cowboy.

I kept wanting to touch it and call people ma'am. You know, like Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise.

I kept tipping my hat low to be cool. I have it in my head that's what cowboys do.

When I wear it, I'm also prone to singing, "I'm a cowboy. On a steel horse I ride," especially when I'm using my mobility scooter.

Beau kept telling me to lift my head, but I was having too much fun leaning on things ...

... and pretending I was Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain.

When I wasn't pretending I was a cowboy, I felt quite sophisticated ...

... like Faye Dunaway.

But the first person I thought of when I got this hat ...

... was Carly Simon, obviously. Her album, No Secrets, was around when I was a kid so the image of her in this hat must have been burned into my vast, internal, fashion rolodex.

Given my primary fashion inspiration, a 70s look was in order, so this brutalist, quintessentially 70s ring was a must. Plus, it picks up the darker reds of my boots and hat.

Faye Dunaway and Peter Wolf

I felt kind of bohemian too, as one often does when going for a 70s look. I'm the absolute last person to go for a hippie look, but I'm perfectly fine with the fact that I am and have always been quite bohemian. I have no problem with the floaty, pink, 70s thing, for example.

As with the fashions of any decade, I pick and choose what works for me, aesthetically, physically, and emotionally.

But, if I were to go for a hippie look, I would go for a Stevie Nicks look. Wouldn't everyone?

She was and still is the queen of gauzy, floaty, mystical fashion. It's not really my thing, but she does it so well, and with such sincerity, I have to respect it.

When such breezy fabrics match one's skin colour, they create an almost intimate feeling, an almost nude effect or, to be honest, an effect of wearing one's underwear in public, but in a good way, if there is such a thing. 

This underwear as fashion look was taken all the way in one of Faye Dunaway's most iconic looks: the one created for her in the wildly popular movie, Bonnie and Clyde. This movie was set in the 1930s so, ostensibly, its fashions were those of the 30s. But don't kid yourself. As with many historical movies, the outfits in Bonnie and Clyde were wildly anachronistic, very much of the time in which the movie was made, and not the time in which the movie was set. In other words, this is a 1970s look, through and through, so I have no problem using it as an inspiration for my 1970s sartorial choices.

Ginger Rogers

You'd have to squint a heck of a lot to see anything particularly 1930s about it.

Of course, I couldn't hope to really duplicate any of the looks that inspired me. I'm too old.

Carly Simon's iconic, fresh-scrubbed look was a look of youth and that elastic, buoyant beauty that comes with it.

Not even Carly Simon could duplicate this look -- anymore.

Still, I did my best, as many of us do, with my high boots and my fitted, pink jacket to accent my waist which is, let's face it, not as defined as it once was, especially not since menopause started.

Carly Simon now

Of course, many of us older women learn and employ various tricks ...

... to try to pretend we still have the same kind of beauty we once had. We learn about certain head tilts and photo angles.

Faye Dunaway now

We learn about using gauzy fabrics ...

... to disguise the crinkly skin of our décolletage ...

Stevie Nicks now

... and sunglasses to mask that tired look around our eyes.

We learn about poses that hide our double chins. Some of us resort to plastic surgery, something I refuse to do; I worry about the message it would send to girls and young women. I want them to know that it's okay to age. I don't want them to fear it.

But you and I know, know in our bones, that our culture is viciously cruel to the ageing woman. Some men, like a certain vile, American, presidential candidate we know, would prefer it if we older women would just disappear altogether.

But that's really not an option for me. Is it for you? I didn't think so. Not only do I continue to exist, I continue to thrive and contribute to society. I refuse to blend in to the background. I even, gasp, draw attention to myself with my fashion choices. 

What is wrong with a culture in which half the population is valued primarily for its beauty? And not any kind of beauty either. No, it's got to be thin, white, youthful beauty or nothing at all.

My God. Screw that!

I was thinking about all this when I posed with this statue at my local café (which, bless its owners, also sports statues of well-built, naked men, much to the amusement of -- well, everyone). When I posed, I was trying to create an image of mutual affection and friendship between my older self and this young, alabaster beauty, with her single, artful bum dimple. I've never been one to have adversarial relationships with other women, no matter how young or beautiful, or old and wise, they may be.

I didn't want to show you this photo because my face looks kind of wan and plain, a bit saggy and, well, middle-aged. But here it is. This is me. The way my face looks does not constitute my value as a human being. This should be so obvious, it is not worth mentioning. But it's not. In our culture, it's not.

Trump's attitudes toward women is so overtly, blatantly offensive, that it has caused me to reassess the importance I place on my own appearance. He divides all women into two categories: those he'd like to fuck (their consent or lack thereof being irrelevant to him), and those he wouldn't. The former have value -- as sexual conquests only. The latter have no value whatsoever. They -- we -- might as well not exist.

I am so deeply disgusted by this objectification of women, that I am noticing all the ways in which I objectify myself every day. In other words, I'm noticing all the ways in which I've taken my culture's sexism into my own heart and learned to value myself by my appearance, and by not all my other admirable and questionable qualities, faults, and quirks.

I didn't want to show you this photo because you can see my middle-aged belly in it. But here it is. That's me, personality, belly, brain, heart, soul, and all.

Many times a day, I catch myself worrying about some aspect of my appearance. This is not because I am vain or shallow. It is because my culture has taught me, in a million big and small ways, that my appearance is of the utmost importance. But now, when I catch myself thinking this way, I stop myself. I explain to myself why I feel this way, and why I'm working to free myself of my own internalized sexism.

Me, at about 27

I know what I'm talking about. I was a quite beautiful young woman, so I know, first hand, all the perks and advantages, as well as the prejudices and harassments that are heaped upon beautiful young women. I was aware of all this, and have so much to say about it, it should be saved for another blog post.

Me, at about 31

But I will say this: I knew that I was beautiful, or at least that a lot of other people thought I was. It's not polite to say this, but it's the truth. As soon as I became aware of this fact about myself, I promised myself that I would not let my looks define me. I would become the best person I could be and not coast on the perks afforded to me because of my appearance. I thought I did just that. I did do just that, I guess. But I did come to care about how I looked. I got used to the perks even as I disdained a culture that valued me more for my looks than for my degrees, my career, my good works, my writing, my courage, and all the other things that defined me far more than my looks did.

When my looks started to fade, I grieved. I wish I could say I didn't, but I did. I still do. And my self-esteem, my sense of self -worth, plummeted. How could it be otherwise, in a culture like ours?

But the events of the last few weeks have made me more aware of the cultural forces that cause me to feel poorly about myself, instead of honouring myself for all my many accomplishments. I have value as a human, no matter how I look. I am far more than my appearance.

So are you, and don't you forget it.

Kisses, darlings!

(I'm sharing this with Fashion Should Be Fun, Adri Lately, Not Dressed as Lamb, Tina's Pink Friday, High Latitude Style, Not Dead Yet, Style Crone, and Rachel the Hat.)

Dropped Waists and Miss Fisher's Earrings: the Highs and Lows of 1920s Fashion

I don't often go for a 1920s look, not a very authentic one, anyway. It wasn't a good decade for stout women, or mature women, or breasts, or waists. It wasn't even the best of decades for skinny, flat-chested women. Trying for this look reminds me that we should always wear what works for us, not what's trendy. 

But sometimes a 1920s style can work, at least from certain angles, so I went ahead and had fun with it for once. Ironically, my wedding dress was also of a very 1920s style, so I'll tell you a bit about that in this post too.

It all started with the earrings ...

Essie Davis as Phryne Fisher

... which will always be my Miss Fisher Earrings. 

Every time I watch Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, I crave everything I see in the show, from the clocks, to the cars, to the coats ... but mostly I crave Miss Fisher's green, teardrop earrings. I've searched and searched for some like them, to no avail.

Finally, out of desperation, I entered "miss fisher earrings" in an Etsy search and lo! I found a woman who was making them! I think she did a wonderful job, don't you? She makes replicas of jewelry from other shows too. 

Long, teardrop earrings were a staple of 1920s, Art Deco fashion, and, since my wedding dress was strongly influenced by Art Deco, I wore a similar pair in rose quartz at our wedding. 

Once I'd finally found the earrings, my next step was finding a dress to wear with them. This one from Value Village was already in my closet and, at least in my mind ...

Sunglasses: Aldo; Dress, headband, shoes, and bracelet: vintage; Earrings: D Baker Jewelry 

... was transformed by the addition of the earrings. 

Its most notable, 1920s features were its dropped waist (a mere accident of old elastic in the dress) and its colours.

There's a lot of my least favourite blue in the dress but it's redeemed for me by the pale green background colour, which was obviously a good match with the earrings.

Since I highlighted the green of my dress with the earrings, I did the same with these shoes. 

T-strap and mary-jane shoes were en vogue in the 1920s and I swoon for them on a regular basis. Before I became disabled, I had a few such shoes, but their heels now prevent me from wearing them. 

I searched forever before I found these, flat soled shoes for the wedding but I think they really fit the bill, as did Beau's. He adores his wedding shoes. I think he was more excited about them than about his bespoke suit. I love them too and would happily wear a pair just like them in my size.

These green shoes have an extremely low heel, so they did not hurt my back, but they have just enough heel that my feet made a wonderful "clack clack clack" sound as I walked. It was a nice change. I seldom get to sound like that anymore.

It made me feel all stylish and grown up. 

Beau said it was the sound of "uh oh, a grownup's coming!" 

Meanwhile, I brought out the burgundy in my dress with these burgundy sunglasses. Sunglasses didn't come into fashion until the 1930s but, if one were to wear them, they were round, always round. This didn't change much for about two decades.

At the last minute, I added this bracelet because its colour match the dress so well. It was not, however, a good match for the 1920s; I'm pretty sure this type of enamel was invented in the 1980s!

The 20s were actually a kind of odd time for women's fashion. As I mentioned above, one defining feature of 1920s dresses is their absurdly dropped waists.

It's a very difficult look to pull off and, with its obscuration of woman's curves, not very sexy at all. Many women today claim to be going for a "Gatsby" look at themed parties and weddings, but they're not. Their dresses are almost inevitably too form fitting; in other words, they're too flattering and/or too sexy. 

I read somewhere that, if the fashion illustrations from the period were to come to life, they would be 7 feet tall, with crazy broad shoulders, no hips, no waist, and no bosoms whatsoever. This is particularly evident in illustrations of the fashions tailored for "stout" and "mature" women. (Bless designers of the past for realizing that a mature woman isn't so much stout as she is just, you know, grown up.) In these illustrations, it seems that all a woman's heft is in her shoulders. Where are her breasts!? Where are her waist and hips? (I'm quite sure many men of the period were asking the same question.)

The look really didn't work all that well on real women.

Sometimes the results were a bit disastrous. My heart goes out to this young woman. She is wearing the latest fashions from head to toe -- and they simply don't suit her.

My outfit wasn't quite so disastrous but it wasn't my best look ever either. 

This was by no means the only time women wore the uniform of the day and felt ugly, without stopping to ask if the problem was with their own bodies or, in fact, the fashions themselves. Remember muffin tops? Such disasters come and go. We haven't seen the last of them, I'm sure.

Such things worked better in illustrations ... 

... than in real life.

In an effort to force their bodies to match the fashions, rather than the fashion to match their bodies, women of all sizes frequently bound their breasts in the 1920s. I love/hate how the centre brassiere here is touted as as being able to "restrain any fleshiness." Fleshiness like breasts? So sad.

Breasts, bellies, waists, and hips, were concealed to a greater ... 

... or lesser extent, depending on the "fleshiness" of the woman.

That is just not my thing!

It took me years of painful disability to go from a 36B to a 38DD, and I'm not about to conceal the one thing I'm enjoying about my weight gain. I've been known to show them off with pride ...

... including at our wedding!

But they just don't go well with a drop-waisted, shapeless dress. The whole thing pretty much hangs straight from the breasts and, at least from certain angles, that's not terribly flattering!

I think this woman looks pretty good but I also think she would look even better if the dress were nipped in at the waist, so the lovely delineation between bosom and hips were easier to make out.

I feel the same way about these two.

Originally, my 1920s inspired, Jenny Packham wedding dress also had a dropped waist. As much as I like accurate period details in my outfits, there was no way I was forsaking beauty in order to adhere to the dictates of a fashion trend nearly 100 years old. So I had the waist taken in and raised, and put darts in the loose underslip so it nipped in at the waist. The overall effect made it a moreflattering hybrid of Edwardian cut and Art Deco fashion. 

All that said, there were times that dropped-waisted dresses worked beautifully ...  

... and not just on the very thin and the very young. 

The dresses could indeed be very pretty, especially if they had this lovely, gauzy quality to them.

Louise Brooks

It was very feminine.

It was pretty ...

... almost ethereal.

It was a strange transitionary time for women's fashion. Even as the styles look very feminine to us today, they were often understood as quite masculine at the time. First, of course, there was the fact that they obscured women's curves. Thus, the fashions and the women who wore them were frequently referred to as "boyish." But, in fact the outfits also had features which mimicked men's fashion much more than any women's fashion in the last several decades and even centuries. 

Remember, this is the sort of thing women had been wearing a mere 20 years earlier. 

Next to that, you can indeed see the angularity and masculinity that others saw in 1920s clothes.

There were all those ties! 

I got Beau to tie mine. 

They were pretty ubiquitous and probably gave women a sense of power that they hadn't been allowed to feel in the Victorian and Edwardian periods.  

Even I felt it, all these years later, with my little fake tie flapping and becoming disarrayed in the wind. 

The more masculine fashions of the 20s were definitely seen by some as part of an early wave of feminism and women's freedom.

Then there were the bobs, the shortest women had worn their hair in ... I honestly don't know another period in western culture before this one when women wore their hair so short. Do you?

Louise Brooks' sleek black bob is the most iconic ...

Some of the cast of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries

And was unmistakably the model for Miss Fisher's bob.

They looked wonderful, peeping out from beneath the close-fitting, cloche hats of the day.

But a sleek bob is never going to happen for a curly haired, Jewish woman for me.

That's really not a problem. I've shown you Clara Bow's wonderful, curly bob before. God knows how she managed bangs with naturally curly hair. I would never attempt it! (And while we're looking at this photo of Clara Bow, I realize that I haven't even addressed the ridiculous eyebrows of the 20s! I think I may save that for another post.)

Curly or sleek, bobs weren't for everyone. They were, for some, still seen as a bit rakish, the territory of morally questionable flappers and "loose women," (a term I loathe).

Short hair, combined with the more masculine aspects of 1920s styles, were sometimes quite overtly combined by some lesbians to create what might today be called a "butch" style. Racy indeed!

More conservative women often opted for faux bobs, which were very common and really aren't that difficult to achieve.

It looks like all the ladies here are sporting them. I think the only hard part for me would be getting that bit of hair on the forehead to stay in place.

They're just a very low bun, rolled up at the nape of the neck.

Ashleigh Cummings as Dot

The sweetly conservative Dot wears them in Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries.

It's a curiosity that virtually everyone today who decides to go "Gatsby," wears some dreadful headband of this sort (and do note the awful wig too). Yet, when I try to find images of real women wearing such things in the real 1920s, I'm at a loss.

What you will find, though, is women wearing headbands pushed much further up on their heads. 

It is this look, therefore, that I went for with the freakishly short belt that came with my dress. There was no way that thing was going around my waist (or the waist of any woman wearing that dress), so I decided to go a little matchy-matchy and add it to my faux bob.

I thought the effect was quite nice, though that and the shoes bumped me up from vintage "influenced" to vintage costumed and I did get some perplexed stares while I was out. 

As if such a thing would bother me! Hardly.

Now a word about the settings for these photos. As usual, I tried to pose in and in front of settings that actually existed, or could have existed in the 1920s. This house, probably built around 1905-1910 was a no-brainer. For the most part, the owners have given it a nice, authentic look. Naturally, I also liked that it matched my dress.

I also really wanted to get some photos of me with my credenza in our living room. I'm pretty sure it was made in the 1920s and I think it's a work of art. I adore it. I spent quite a bit of money on it but I don't regret that at all. The lamp is of a Tiffany style (I could never afford the real thing!), which would date to about 1905. The radio, which works perfectly, is a replica of a style that would have been around at least by the 1930s or even earlier. (Radios up through the 1940s are themselves works of art.)

You'll notice that I've chosen to place our Shabbat candles and Kiddush cup on the credenza. They were both gifts from a good friend who lives in New York, where things are much more easily had.

I asked for a "classic" style cup so I'll bet such cups were around in the 20s, though I'm sure they were only owned by the wealthy.

You've seen our living room, including this chair and its matching sofa, in a few other posts, my favourite being this one. The chair and sofa are reupholstered but authentic, probably from the 1930s. The chair's rounded curves hug my always aching back. I got that sweet little footstool at second hand store and it really helps my back when I sit in the chair.

In my last post, I wrote a lot about my sorrow over the increasing loss of our city's houses and gardens ...

... which may be why I posed so much in our own thriving garden ...

... and in front of that glorious yellow house ...

... and a few once similar but now rundown or altered houses.

Even as I can recognize its aesthetic faults, I can glory in the beauties of the past.

Even those of the 1920s.

(I'm sharing this with Style Crone, Fashion Should Be Fun, High Altitude Style, Happiness at Midlife, Rachel the Hat, Adri Lately, Tina's Pink Friday, Not Dead Yet, Not Dressed as Lamb, Honest Mum, and Sydney Fashion Hunter.)