Re-cycling hats and dresses like Gone With the Wind

Gone with the Wind is and will always be a most favorite fashion inspiration. Tattered or dripping in gold, either way, the clothes play a supporting role. This week two associations with this movie popped up.

In the last room at the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition “American High Style,” one finds the hat created by Mr. John in 1939, for Vienne Leigh. With a can-do spirit, this hat was industriously re-fashioned with proud determination and glamorous style.

Perched on top is a rooster feet ornament (barely visible in this photo due to the dimmed lights and no flash.) They have been lightly dusted in gold, blending artfully with a grand swash of gold cord, fringe and green velvet upholstery fabric.

Then in “My Mother’s Clothes” by Jeannette Montgomery Barron, on page 45, the writer explains that her mother, who wore only the finest designer clothes, fashioned the below elegant dress from upholstery fabric.

Suggesting that it was motivated by …perhaps a divorce, Barron connects the curtains of Tara to her mother’s defiant creation of this re-cycled dress as her vehicle to show she can conquer a painful personal war.
I just posted a review here on Barron’s book – which I most highly recommend. Visuals and prose combine high style with human thoughts and feelings about mothers, daughters and life and loss.

Re-cycling, re-fashioning with energy and resolution is tremendous and beautiful.