FAMILY ALBUM FASHIONISTAS

One of the final projects in my Wild Summer Art class -- the "Bloomer Project" -- turned up a few surprises. Junelle said she originally dug out the old family photos just looking for examples of pinafores and bloomers to sketch, but ended up being quite shocked by some of the ensembles she found, once she really started paying attention. The same thing happened with me. 

Is this dress gorgeous, or what?

This first photo is my great-great-aunt Katie, whom my mother was named after. I never met her, of course, but I heard a lot about her since she was pretty much Mom's idol. Apparently she and her hubby were wealthy world travelers, who often brought little gifts back to my mom.  I'm guessing this photo was taken around 1898 or so, when Aunt Katie would have been attending a lot of parties, meeting all the eligible young bachelors in the Dallas area, while her parents negotiated the best possible match. Apparently they did a darned good job of it, for my mom always described them as a happy, fun-loving couple.

This is Aunt Katie about twenty years later. Not only is she sporting one of those daring new bathing costumes, but she even allowed herself to be photographed in it, there at the Murdoch Bath House in Galveston, Texas, had it turned into a postcard, then mailed it home to the relatives back in Dallas. Notice she is also smirking a bit in the photo. How many photos have you seen from that era, where people were smirking rather than glowering? Yep, I bet that Aunt Katie was more fun than a barrel of monkeys!

This last photo was the biggest shocker in the album, and I can't believe I never noticed it before. I remember my grandmother Ruth (we called her Modie, for some unknown reason) as being a rather stern woman. She was a business woman who always dressed in business-like suits -- nice expensive ones once her three boys were grown and gone, but business suits nonetheless. She was probably the very last woman of her generation to finally cave in and purchase a pantsuit and, even then, I'm sure it would have been a very business-like pantsuit. So imagine my surprise when I discovered this.

Modie is the one on the right. She's certainly not the classic "wilting flower" beauty of that era. Instead, there's something rather feisty in her look, like she was ready to take on the world. Which is a good thing indeed, since the world did not go easy on her. She married a pharmacist who had, as it turned out, an escalating taste for alcohol. After her third son (my dad) was born, she divorced him -- a thing that just wasn't done in those days -- and raised the three boys on her own. She also helped to raise a younger sister when their mother died way too young, and their father abandoned her to start a new family. So yeah, I guess she was justified in having lost her spark by the time I knew her. I'm just happy to have discovered that it was there to begin with!

Now I'm off to see if I can sketch of few our family's fashionistas. TTFN!