All posts tagged: 1936

Rate the Dress: Norma Shearer as Juliet in Botticelli

Last week’s Rate the Dress discussion was everything I could hope for from a blog post: lively debate, outside research, and a little mischief. Opinions on Charles James’ anatomical dress differed greatly, even among individual people, mostly because of the colour.  Was the dress palest peach and marigold orange, as in the image I posted?  Or was it pale peach and dark peach, as in the Met’s current image?  Most of you liked it better as the second, but Cecil Beaton’s photograph of James’ frocks for Vogue suggests that pale and orange was the designers intention (thanks Steph for finding it!).   With ratings ranging from 1 to 10, the frock evened out with a rating of 7.2.  Not bad for a dress that was described as ‘labial folds’ and ‘baby poo’! This week I move away from young girls dressed as women, and very womanly dresses, to a womanly woman dressed as a young girl.  Norma Shearer was 34 when she played the teenage heroine of Romeo and Juliet.  As much as I adore …