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The Perfect 1930’s Fashion of Woody Allen’s Cafe Society

cafesociety

If movies were beverages, Woody Allen’s Cafe Society would be a cool glass of smooth Champagne; sparkling and decadent. A beautifully enchanting and bittersweet film, set in 1930’s Hollywood and New York. This latest Allen offering has his usual perfectly paced wit and charm, with Jesse Eisenberg captivating in his lead role, particularly personifying a younger Allen, a modern embodiment of the man himself with his faultless delivery of the dialogue and eager awkwardness. The film has a gorgeous, subtle and easy pace alongside the scintillating quickness of the script. Blake Lively and Kristen Stewart are the fashion in this film, gah, what era is more cinematically superb than the 1930’s? This is a feast of fashion indeed.

Floaty, feminine fabrics, dainty and fragile details, the 30’s clothes in this movie are so expertly selected, with pastels and ditzy florals in abundance for day wear and jaw dropping glamour when it comes to the evening wear. We’re watching the Bette Davis era, the elegance and sophistication is magnified and each outfit creates heart-shaped eyes for the viewer. Frilled cape sleeves, floppy neck ties, slim lines and below the knee hemlines conjure up a time when fashion was neat and beautifully effeminate. On a fashion note alone, this stunning film is worth watching just for the red silk gown worn by Lively, which in my opinion easily rivals that green dress worn by Keira Knightley in the film Atonement. Oh my.

You’ll come away from this movie with the 30’s on your mind, eager to add some of that look to your wardrobe, trust me, you really will. You’ll want sherbet colours, delicate details and prim gloves, you’ll be inspired to add a bias cut to your repertoire – which is flattering for every shape – you’ll want a neat short curled bob in your hair and a beaded bag on your arm. The day wear is cute and accessible and the evening wear is pure luxury on your skin, be it crepe or silk, no gal can feel unnoticed in a 30’s gown. Scour sites like Etsy for originals and replicas, or seek out online vintage fashion stores like mine which have done the hard work for you and have found the best pieces. To wear authentic items can be a pricey affair, but these pieces are a true investment with their value constantly on the rise, they’re an excellent addition to any collection, plus if you take the time to search you can find amazing items at fair prices or you can simply invest in some accessories of the era to add to your modern look, giving a discreet nod to this perfect period.

Cafe Society is available to own on DVD, Blu-Ray and digital download from 26th December 2016, courtesy of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, and I defy you to watch it and not be inspired to dress and dream as though you are living in the utter delight of the decade. Swoon.

 

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Get Married Like A Movie Star – Injecting Some Hollywood Glamour Into Your Wedding Day

Weddings are such joyous occasions. They are also one of the rare chances we have in this life to go all out and really bask in some old world glamour. Whether you go for a few Hollywood touches or completely live that Movie star fantasy all day, it’s always good to get glamorous!

Red Lipstick – So one of the most glamorous thing you can do in to make yourself into a gorgeous Hollywood starlet from the 50’s for the day. It is all about the makeup, which is so classic it goes with a lot of different style dresses, as well as just the 40’s and 50’s ones. The most important feature of the look is a gorgeous red lipstick. This looks so timeless against the white or cream, of your dress. But to rock a red lippy, you also have to get the rest of the face right. First, you will need to make sure that your teeth are pearly white and in the best condition. You will also need a good full coverage foundation, which you have left to set on your face. This will stop it smudging off on your dress. Then you need perfect dark shaded eyebrows and a strong mascara, along with that gorgeous cat’s eye flick of eyeliner. Use a matte lipstick shade for that will last all day even after kissing your groom.

Dress – If you are looking for some serious old Hollywood glamour, then go for a satin bias cut 30’s style gown. These are usually well fitted and often have a low back.  This is the quintessential movie star outfit to slink down the aisle in. Gooorgeous! If you prefer to wear something with just a nod to star glamour, then pick something that makes you feel like a beautiful bride. Lace or satin work well, as do 60’s style chiffon gowns. Remember it’s your time to utterly shine!

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Make an entrance – Don’t forget that movie stars like to make an entrance. We are talking Limos and red carpets here. Organize your car well in advance by contacting a company that offers Limousine Hire. Ask your reception venue to provide a red carpet that you and your guest get to walk on. Just make sure they know not to put it out if it is raining!

Decorations – One you have made your entrance, then you can make your way into the main reception space. If you want your guests to get to feel like movies start as well, you can theme the decorations in a Hollywood style. Maybe consider naming the tables after famous film star couples like Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, or Kirk Russell and Goldie Horn? Just maybe don’t use Brad and Angelina though! You could have an Oscars-themed wedding cake? How about life size cardboard cutouts of your favorite film stars from history like Garland and Monroe? Or, what about having a projector screen with your favorite movies playing in the background during the meal? Whichever way you choose to inject Hollywood glamour into your day, you gotta know that it’ll be you who feels like the true star…and so you should!

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10 Places That I Really, Really Love (…or would love to be)

We all have favourite places, places we’ve been to and loved and places we wish we go to. Here are 10 of my most favourite places in this crazy World.

1. Jayne Mansfield’s home in the 1950’s. I adore the kitsch and pink-ness of this place, I obviously have never been there, it got bulldozed a few years ago..!!!…but, it pretty much epitomizes my dream house, the heart shaped pool is dreamy and the pink fluffy bathroom is a place that dreams are made of.
Jayne Mansfield

bathroom

 2. The Savoy hotel in the 1930’s. I bloomin’ LOVE hotels, I love the fantasy and the lux of them and they don’t get much cooler than this. I’d like to zip back to the 1930’s and see its splendour.

savoy

 3. Central Park, New York. I’m a city girl and NYC is a place that makes my heart beat like a drum, I am in love with that city, and I love the fact that in the fastest city in the world you can place yourself in a big open tranquil park in the middle, perfection.

Central-Park-from-above

4. Skorpios Island. On a holiday with James, to Greece, we took a boat around the islands and both fell in love with this place. Known as the island that Aristotle Onassis and Jackie O married and lived on, it is like a private paradise trapped in the 1960’s. As idyllic as it gets.

scorpios island

5. A kitsch motel in Vegas in the 1950’s. I love Vegas, I love it’s glare and sparkle, but the Las Vegas I love is the old one, transport me to a vintage motel and I’d be a happy girl.

vegas

 6. London in the rain. My heart belongs to London, and I especially love it on a rainy day, so British and handsome, there is great atmosphere in a soggy city.

London in the Rain

 7. Graceland, Memphis. This is another place that has become trapped in a different era, I’ve been twice and as soon as you step foot in there, away from the tourist trash, you are in a different time. I love the decor, the extravagance and the history, and of course the super cool basement room. Spellbinding.

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 8. Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco. One of my favourite US cities, this bridge has great memories for me, on a very lovely long holiday when I was 16, my family all sat in this exact viewpoint location and spent hours taking in the enormity of this place. Stunning. I love this city, great bohemian vibe and Lombard Street is the coolest street in the land.GoldenGateBridgeSF

lombard street

 9. Patisserie Florentin, Edinburgh. Edinburgh is pretty damn special to me. With a big part of my family living there, it’s a city I hold dear. Great size, great buildings and a great coffee and cake shop too that I could hang with loved ones in for hours

edinburgh10. At my home with my boys. I love cities and I get itchy feet for travelling, which I have been lucky enough to do all my life, but, hand on heart, sitting at home in my own place with my cats is as good as life gets. This is what I love the most.

Malla & Me

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Prada Dresses Daisy; The Great Gatsby Costumes

 

 

‘Cant repeat the past?…..Why, of course you can.’  The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald

Great Gatsby

 

Whoopie-dooo! I am so excited to see Baz Lurhman’s The Great Gatsby, and the release date is very nearly here! I adore the F Scott Fitzgerald book, it is quite possibly my favourite book ever, and Lurhman is one of the most sumptuously beautiful directors of our time, so I am pretty damn certain the wait shall be worth it.

For many of Lurhman’s films, including Romeo & Juliet and Moulin Rouge, the costume designer was the supremely talented Catherine Martin. For this film, set in New York in the 1920’s, Martin has teamed up with the legendary Miuccia Prada. Super; we are in for a treat. Transforming over 40 dresses from the archive collections of Miu Miu and Prada, Miuccia says she was fascinated by how little adaptation many of them needed, even though none had originally been designed with the 20’s era in mind. These costumes are about character and the story of those characters lives, rather than blatant glamour.

Great Gatsby

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With this yellow sequin dress from a past Prada collection, we can see how easily suited the original design was for this film, the perfect choice of costume collaborator.

Great Gatsby

Prada

The centre piece dress in the film is Daisy Buchanan’s party dress, which is a gently revised version of Prada’s Chandelier dress from their 2010 collection, as seen here on Miss Moss. The dress was originally designed around the idea of light, but in this film it is about wealth; Lurhman wanted Daisy to be the ‘most beautiful and rich woman in the world’.

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Great GatsbyAn exhibition showcasing the costumes is currently showing in the New York Prada store, to coincide with the anticipation of the film’s release, then the exhibition goes to Tokyo and Shanghai.The movie hits UK movie theatres on May 16th. 

For more information visit The Great Gatsby and Prada.

 

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Hooray for Hollywood Costume

Most people who like fashion and galleries, are probably aware of the current exhibition at London’s V&A; Hollywood Costume. Billed as a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity to see over 100 of the most iconic costumes in the history of film-making’, my Mother and I arrived with pretty high expectations. And by heck, it certainly didn’t disappoint, this exhibition is nothing short of epic. We arrived in Kensington, had a long lazy coffee and mooched over to the V&A. My goodness it was busy, my lovely Mama is a member of the V&A which is amazing value and gets you into the exhibitions free and ahead of the queues, phew! It was bustling! I knew the exhibition had three main rooms but I had no idea how huge this show was. All three rooms were grand in size and both the curation and the styling was beyond superb. Every costume was given room to breathe, they were not behind glass which was great to see, but the security was understandably hot, no photos and no touching! The lighting was perfection, pretty dark with just the outfits given the spotlights. The information on each movie, character, designer, director and actor was really thorough and the time it took to go through the whole exhibition made us feel, at the end, as if we had been on a magical movie journey. We went into the V&A in crisp autumn daylight, and came out into the dark of the evening. Wow. We were totally absorbed and were completely unaware of time, exactly like that wonderful feeling you get after being in the movie theatre, you come back outside to real life, having just spent time in another world, gorgeous.

The amount, the variety and the provenance of all the costumes on display was literally awesome. Seeing a dress worn by Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, or Vivien Leigh on it’s own would be a great delight, but this exhibition houses pretty much every iconic outfit you could think of. From the beginning of movie history, up to the most recent Hollywood blockbuster, this has everything. It’s great for girls, guys, kids and older people, every single person who visits will undoubtedly see a costume that they have always loved.

One of the main draws of this show was the legendary costume from The Wizard of OZ, most especially the ruby slippers that Judy Garland wore in the film. This was the first time the shoes had ever been on display outside of the USA. Exhibition curator Deborah Nadoolman took 5 years to secure the loan of the shoes from the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington. Even then, they were only loaned for a very limited time, so that they could be back in their original home in time for Thanksgiving. The Wizard of Oz is shown every year in the USA as a Thanksgiving tradition. My Mother and I saw the shoes on their last day at the V&A, yay! At the very end of the gigantic exhibition, there they were, in a small glass case all on their own. Oh my, how we gazed upon them. Not as bright and vivid as they appear in the film, the deep red shoes made my heart skip a beat, so much history and value right there in a little pair of beaten up shoes. The shoes in the movie were originally going to be silver, but got changed to red at the last moment so they would be a bolder contrast to the yellow brick road. The ones we saw have since been replaced with replica shoes-made by the same company who made the originals-for the remainder of the exhibition.

With so very many amazing costumes on display and without wanting to spoil the fun for those who are yet to visit, it’s hard to choose which ones delighted me the most, but here is my pick of the exhibition.

Below is the green velvet dress that Vivian Leigh wore in ‘Gone with the Wind’, 1939.

Tippi Hedren’s suit from Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’, 1963.

My absolute favourite dress in the show, Joan Crawford’s rich red beaded gown from ‘The Bride Wore Red’, 1937.

I was pretty much mostly loving the 1930’s looks, both the original and this silk green modern one from ‘Atonement’, 2007, worn by Kiera Knightly.

Similar to thr red Joan Crawford gown, also designed by Hollywood costumier Adrian, this silver caped and beaded 1930’s dress was another one I fell in love with. From the movie, ‘My Man Godfrey’, 1936, worn by Carole Lombard.

And of course, the classic, simple, and most iconic movie outfit worn by Judy Garland in ‘The Wizard of Oz’, 1939.

Go see this exhibition, it is gob smackingly beautiful, dreamy, nostalgic, stunning, exciting, glamorous and wonderful. It is on until 27th January 2013.

 For more information visit www.vam.ac.uk/hollywoodcostume

 

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