Artist Feature: Charles Gates Sheldon

Greetings Blogoverse!

We’ve decided to start a series on illustrators and painters and photographers whose work we really love and admire. Most of them will be posted over the next few weeks, but from time to time as we discover/are reminded of new artists, we’ll add more. Hopefully this doesn’t bore you – but I think these artists will have wide appeal to the vintage crowd, after all, all the ones we’re featuring are vintage aged or antique! 

So here’s the first artist: Charles Gates Sheldon. I don’t know much about him (he hasn’t a Wikipedia page! Gasp!)… He was born in 1889 (one site says 1894?), died in 1960 (another says 1961!). The height of his fame as an illustrator was around the 20s and 30s, and he painted a lot of female celebrities and magazines covers, but he did work before and after those times. And that’s about all I know, besides that his portrait illustrations were stunning. Here are a few of my favorites, below. 

Enjoy!

The wonderful Katherine Hepburn.

Gorgeous Jean Harlow.

Whaddya know! The illustrator of our blog header! (Not specifically for us - I wish! - but you know what I mean.)

More Vogue in the Mid-Late 30s

Here's more from the fashion magazine archives. This set is also all from Vogue, circa the mid-late 1930s. Click on the images to get the highest resolution.
Enjoy the loveliness!

Oh, the prettiness. I adore both of these. I had to make this smaller so it wouldn't be overlapping with the sidebar...

Look at that second the the right one! Isn't that such an interesting shape? 

*Drool*... the black and white ones on the nearest pair of feet.

Dramatic, feminine, and full of little details... of course I love this one!

A Bit About Weddings

I love weddings. Or the idea of them at least. I actually have only been to one wedding in my life. I was 7 so I sort of hated it. Anyway, I now appreciate them because they are one of the few times large groups of people get together and have to dress nicely, and that makes me really happy. Also, there are some really pretty weddings so I am really excited to go to any weddings in the future (my cousin just got engaged so I will going to at least one soon).
Anywho, I was snooping about in my Grandma Ana's stuff and found her wedding album so I took some pictures of the photos. She was married in '52 I think... and must have gotten knocked up pretty quickly since my mom had two older brothers, and she was born in '55.
... anyway...

Have to Have Hats

Here’s another photo-heavy post. After doing a post on shoes, I felt that I must do one on hats, in order to honor the special place they have in my heart. Hats are the only accessory that can compete with - or, dare I say it, outweigh - my love for vintage shoes. Unlike shoes, which play a more practical role in everyday life, hats aren’t exactly necessary. But, as the title of this post says, I simply must have them. I love them. The right hat can complete any outfit, can change the mood of it, can flatter or disguise certain features. Hats can be serious, plain, feminine, or frivolous, though I tend to favor the latter two categories of hats. And they’re just freakin’ awesome, to put it inarticulately. People today seem to really notice hats – for better and for worse. Many times I’ve worn the same outfit in public, without a hat and with a hat, and when I wore it with the hat, the nice comments (and the rude stares/stinkeye) increased manifold. I suppose this is because nowadays hats simply aren’t done, unless you wear a doo-rag/baseball cap or are British nobility at a wedding or day at the races. But this shows just how polarizing modern hat styles are – they’re either extremely casual or very fancy. There’s not much of an everyday nice-casual presence of hats. How I wish this wasn’t the case.

I don’t own many hats that I like to wear out (not the right era – I got a huge lot for nearly pennies of Craigslist last winter, but I couldn’t see most of them before I got them, only to realize they were mostly 50s and 60s. Poo.), but I’ve got 3 or 4 I’m very fond of, mostly from vintage shops. I’ve also gathered pictures of hats I pine for over the past year or so – the folder in my iPhoto is currently hundreds strong. Below I’ve shared a few (ahem... twenty-five) that I do wish I could miraculously find during my next visit to my friendly local antique or vintage shop.

What type of hats do you like? Do you have a particular era of millinery that makes you weak with materialistic longing?

Note: I don't know the sources of many of these pictures! I've just collected them over time via Google images and other blogs. If I took someone's original image, let me know and I'll give credit/remove it!

Especially the top red one!

Carole Lombard. I love this one!

Vogue, Mid-Late 30s

Here are some more images from my school’s archives of old magazines. Again, sorry for the weird quality of a photographed page instead of a scanned page. I’ve got a lot more to upload, but I want to space out the hundred or so images over a few posts so as not to hit you with a photo overload. This set is all from Vogue – in my eagerness start looking through the books and photographing them, I forgot to mark down the exact issues I was flipping through! But I remember the Vogue I grabbed (I took one Vogue and three McCall’s, and within each book there are anywhere from two to five issues bound together, depending on how thick they are) was from the mid-late 30s, so there’s a point of reference for you.

Enjoy!

I'm just nuts about this one. I love the repetition of scalloping and the overall styling of the suit. 

A cute advertisement.

Another advertisement. This time for comfy heels that will help your feet last all day at the fair. 

Going Hollywood (1933)

Due to the wonders of TiVo, a few weeks ago I watched Going Hollywood (1933) on TCM, starring the beautiful Marion Davies and Bing Crosby. 

Davies and Crosby - a still from one of the musical numbers. This one isn't mine - I found it on Google. 

It was light, cute, annoying in parts (why does she like Bing’s character? He’s a bit of a jerk! But you have to allow some suspension of disbelief in order for the inevitable reunion in the end to be bearable), but overall a fun movie – Patsy Kelly was great as usual as Davies’ wise-cracking friend. What especially did it for me was the costuming – there were some real stunners in this movie. I wasn’t able to get a good shot of the nightgown Davies was wearing at the beginning (sometimes you really just have to see something in motion to get a good feel for how it looks), but I tried to take a snap with my camera anytime something beautiful caught my eye – be it an outfit, face, whatever. I’ve actually got a few movies I’ve done this with – used my camera to photograph the screen during pretty scenes, which I will share over the next few weeks. Anyway, please excuse the weird look of a photographed TV screen – it’s the only way I know how to get an image off of my TV or computer when I can’t take a screen shot. As always, click on the image to get the highest resolution.

Bobby From Boston

Come one and come all! – Chaps, mostly.

Last week I went to check out Bobby From Boston, a vintage shop in Boston I had read good reviews about online, via Yelp. And I was certainly not disappointed.

I should note up front that the store is mostly for the fellas – about 85% of the stock there is for men, but there’s a small women’s section that is very well selected. I would be annoyed about how small it is, but I realize that most vintage vendors focus on the ladies, so this is a nice change.  Also, Bobby has a warehouse nearby in Massachusetts and that is apparently very well stocked in women’s items – I plan to visit there as soon as I can.

Anyway, back to Bobby’s in Boston. Walking into this place was like a dream – its wonderful to see a place that presents guys with a chance to dapper-ify themselves. And any guy that dresses himself here would have no choice but to walk out dapper as hell, to borrow the title of Solanah’s husband's (Samuel's) blog. I never before gave much thought to men’s clothing, except to ruminate on the sad state of most modern guy’s wardrobes. But Bobby’s made me wish I had a fella to dress up – there was absolutely everything here. Shirts, ties, suits, bags, cuff links, shorts, pants, suspenders, shoes, and hats-a-plenty. I can guarantee you I’m forgetting a lot of the stock, since again, I am not well versed in men’s clothing, but I could tell this place was a haven for the Well Dressed Chap. The chronological range of vintage runs from turn of the century military garb to 60s menswear, and it is all in very clean and new-looking condition.

One thing I especially like about Bobby’s – a lot of shops that call themselves vintage are really consignment, or stock mostly 70s and 80s stuff and think that this qualifies as vintage. I suppose you could stretch it and say 70s is vintage (even though I really don’t like it), but 80s absolutely is not, not at this point. Bobby, the owner of Bobby From Boston (whodathunk?) told me that he tries not to go past the 60s, but stocks a wee bit of 70s as it is somewhat in demand.

So, my final verdict? I recommend – no, I implore – any and all guys who would like to step up their daily spiffiness factor to head over to Bobby’s whenever in the Boston area and contribute to the beautification of the world by dapper-ify themselves in clean, quality, vintage garb. Preferably from the 40s and before. But you know, whatever floats your boat. Just stick a hat on top of it to doff, and you’ll catch the world’s (and my) eye.

Now I’ll let the photos do the talking. I had to cut out a LOT, so this is really just a peek at what lies within...