The Grandeur & Frivolity programme for Radio NZ is starts today, there is a little video with a Baroque dancer, and Mandi’s fabulous images are on their website, so to celebrate, here are a few more of my out-takes. Missed my first set of photographs? They are here.
Last week I was privileged enough to do a photoshoot with Mandi of A La Mode Photography for Radio New Zealand. The photoshoot will be featured on the Radio NZ website to coincide with a programme developed by Clarissa Dunn, who collaborated with me on the Grandeur to Frivolity talk. The day was just fantastic – three gorgeous models, and Clarissa as an (also gorgeous) advisor and model all in my 17th and 18th century outfits, hair and makeup fully done. Mandi took a whole series of formal studio portraits while I madly ironed and laced and did hair while all the models who weren’t in front of the camera helped. She’s posted a sneak-peek of the shoot on her website, and now I’m even more excited about seeing the rest, if that is possible! After the formal studio shots it was time for fun. We ventured out into the streets of Petone, and I captured a series of very un-serious and un-historical, but totally fabulous, images of the models blending modern life and historical …
While a la mode may mean ‘in the fashion’ it was also once the name for a fabric. In the 17th, 18th & 19th century alamode was a thin plain tabby weave lustred silk, usually black. It was used mainly for mourning, and for the linings of expensive garments, as well as as the outer fabric, especially for outerwear such as hoods and mantuas. A 1691 theft included “”two blacke allamode hoods worth 5s”. Eighty years later, in 1770 Mary Berridge’s London house was broken into, and one of the items stolen was “One Black Allamode Clock Lined in the Blue Latestring” In early histories of 18th century fabrics it is described as being like lustring or surah silk, but more loosely woven (which may be a very non-technical way of saying that it is a plain tabby weave, rather than a twill like surah), and some references even describe it as the same fabric as lustring, but period advertisements make that very unlikely. While usually spelled allamode or alamode, the vagaries of 17th …
