She was distracted by a passing young woman in shredded jeans. “You know how much it costs to rip ’em up that way?” she said. She prefers less mannered, more classic dress, like the tangerine V-neck sweater she was wearing with tailored pants and sneakers.
Sure, she once played the indomitable Mademoiselle Chanel in a television drama, but offscreen, she said, “I’m not into gourmet dressing; who has the time to keep up that facade?” Her major concession to style: “I match my sweater to my shoes.”
From: The Past Lives of Shirley MacLaine. The New York Times. March 28,
The Significance of Clothing in Film.
Excerpts from the film Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984. Director, Michael Radford) I always think of the boilersuits...everyone dressing to code. I’ve never liked uniforms, and with the exception of one job in my early twenties have spent my life avoiding them. Being someone who generally dresses first and foremost for comfort and practicality I can see why some people are drawn to certain uniforms. My husband has said after his required time serving in the Bundeswehr he was reluctant to give up wearing a tanksuit each day...comfortable and practical. On the other hand I never have liked being told what to do, and definitely not what to wear; how a person dresses communicates something about who he or she is as a person.
Two minutes hate. First, the group hate scene.... Boilersuits.
Do you like me? Contraband clothing, a dress.
Caught in the Bedroom. Naked. The boilersuits are gone.
Excerpts from the film Brazil (1985. Director, Terry Gilliam) Having originally seen the films around the same time, knowing they were filmed in the same period and even shared filming locations for a number of scenes, as well as clear overlap in a dystopian sci fi view of a totalitarian (future) state I always recall the playful differences in the approach to clothing and general art direction...obviously stemming from the director’s own aesthetic mash-up of proto-steampunk meets Fellini.
The anti-Christmas Story: A receipt for your husband.
Harry Tuttle’s ‘rouge-boilersuit’.
Central Services: the ‘official boilersuits’.
Street Scene and the renegade female.
Not the ‘I love you’ of Winston and Julia
True or Fake?...The suit thing. From: What’s with all the suits? 7 strange facts about Donald Trump’s personality. Salon. December 23, 2016.
Trump is never seen in anything but a suit, and since he doesn’t sleep much, he probably doesn’t even don silk pajamas at night, a la Hugh Hefner.
A suit is fitting attire for a businessman, but he reportedly also violently demanded that his college-age son wear a suit to a baseball game by one account. Donald Jr.’s college dorm mate recounted the story on Facebook during the campaign. “Don Jr. opened the door, wearing a Yankee jersey,” Scott Melker, now a Florida Realtor, wrote. “Without saying a word, his father slapped him across the face, knocking him to the floor in front of all of his classmates. He simply said ‘put on a suit and meet me outside,’ and closed the door.”
Don Jr. was a freshman at the time, and yes, they were going to a Yankees game.
None of the Trump sons have been seen in anything but suits ever since, except when big-game hunting in Africa. Ten-year-old Baron is sometimes seen in a polo shirt, though even he is often seen in a suit, which is weird.
A few collected stories of attire:
A man retired and vowed to only wear shorts and sneakers between May and November. He gave away as many suits and ties as he could, keeping one for funerals -not for his own, he plans to be cremated. Winters are jeans, flannel shirts and fleece-lined hooded sweatshirts. Sneakers remain but are a variety of black leather shoes designed for diabetics and covered by an annual Medicare shoe allowance.
A couple retired to the suburbs. They did not have to wear suits and ties everyday or probably even most days to work. Still, upon retiring and exchanging the single shared closet for a house with 3+ closets they found most of their clothes landed in one closet now dubbed ‘city work clothes closet’. Most of the clothes in that closet they do not intend to wear again and have hung them there until the day they can bring themselves to cut the ties hanging within to their past. Meanwhile they purchased jeans, flannel shirts and fleece-lined hooded sweatshirts from the wholesale club they had recently joined.
After a childhood where the future appeared anything but secure a man with artistic interests but not the temperament studies architecture in the late 1950s; a safe path to a secure future. More security was to become a civil servant which required him to dress the part each day...suit and tie. Eventually, the times changing, the man phased out the suits and ties replacing them with sports coats, comfortable pants and open-collar shirts from which a colorful t-shirt peeked out at the base of the neck. Most of his male colleagues still wore the ‘old style’, but they weren’t creative types -architects like himself. And besides, now there were women too.
A woman who has chosen another profession finds herself needing a steadier paycheck. She gets a job doing administrative work in offices of academic institutions and other related businesses. She is required to dress in ‘proper business attire’, skirts, dresses, panty hose, pumps and button-up blouses. Fridays were ‘dress down days’. The CEOs, CFOs and the other folks from corporate wore suits, the HR director too. Those in between, the higher ranking members of the office, dressed as if they were in the lab wearing whatever they wanted, minus the lab coats or aprons. Eventually the woman moved up the ladder, now supervising and assisting with the hiring process she did not tell the new administrative staff about the proper business attire rule; it’s doing the job that matters. With each hire she herself shed some of the properness in exchange for comfort, convenience and brightly colored and fun socks with black jeans, tunics and clogs.
There once was a woman who wouldn’t be caught dead without her girdle, and she wasn’t.
Why children play dress up:
A parenting magazine's’ website article on Why Kids Love to Play Dress-Up
Dress up play is serious business, kids learn through dress up life skills they’ll use for years to come.
Dress up play as other living creatures could teach empathy for animals and humans.
Objects and articles of dress up could become talismans to the children, offering security as s/he navigates the world.
Kids are drawn to shoes...bigger shoes….”potent symbols of Mom and Dad”. Here is an image of a shoe similar to a pair of my mother’s that occupied my childhood’s cardboard box of costumes. They were my favorite.
A means to explore gender identity. “Before about age 4, children may be able to identify a picture of a person as either male or female, but they may think that if the subject changes clothing or hairstyle, he or she changes sex as well. Dress-up helps kids test out theories and arrive at the more mature understanding that clothes don't make the man (or woman).”
Aides in the development of gross and fine motor skills, language and social skills, thinking creatively to problem solving and further to thinking symbolically.
All children have the capacity (and interests to varying degrees) to play dress up. It is not related to sex. “.. former Yale senior research scientist Dorothy Singer, Ph.D., who coauthored the classic The House of Make-Believe. What is true, she says, is that some preschools (or parents) might consider dress-up to be chiefly girls' domain and stock up accordingly on aprons or feather boas, inadvertently defining who gravitates there. But given the right props—Singer is a fan of hats—many boys love this kind of play, too.”
It is about experiencing control and power for a change. “This type of play can encourage lots of healthy physical activity (running, wrestling, leaping tall buildings in a single bound), teamwork, and hands-on exploration of big issues such as fairness and right and wrong. "In particular, kids can learn to balance their desire for power and control with their need for relationships," says Hoffman [Eric Hoffman, author of Magic Capes, Amazing Powers: Transforming Superhero Play in the Classroom.]. "Lots of adults have trouble with that!"
“At what age do kids grow out of dress-up? Around first grade, pretending often becomes "miniaturized"—acted out more through dollhouses and action figures, with dress-up duds less frequently in circulation. But think of Halloween, and it's clear that the urge to play dress-up never really leaves us. Adults, too, are desperate for a chance to don a new identity—if only for a single, mysterious night.”
Yes, and while dress up could be a means to explore different identities and roles, depending on (in the words of Bruner after Vygotsky) the scaffolding provided, dress up play could introduce children to a way to conform or to accept an ideal image of an identity or role.