FASHIONASTY - a brief rant

Are we back to the 'fifties? As in nineteen fifties, with those imprisoning latex girdles, cashmere sweaters, tight frocks with short sleeves? Occasionally. We're seeing some dresses that look like they were lifted from an Imelda Marcos's closet. Tight repressive lines and form-fitting by materials that don't deserve to mold a female body.

Fifties clothes were a kind of repression on steroids.

Late sixties rebellious stripes and minidresses are being referenced.

Designers are over all over the map in fashion.
It's back to the sixties in fifties pink.
Minidress + trimmings.
Note the eighties-inspired broad-shouldered jacket.
From Olympia Le Tan's Spring-Summer 2015 collection:

 

Below? Balmain -- surprise me! Spring 2015 Paris Fashion Week--pops us back to Mondrian, stripes, Pop Art and elephant pants, but you have to admit, 21st century Balmain class.

Still and all (a lovely connector phrase my friend Janice used to use), there is flattery in imitation, and there's a whole lot of that flattery these days.
There are exceptions:  the pink jacket below makes this model's hips look pregnant, with a blocky torso effect.  Instead of the boring old tailored jackets of the past, let's have a jacket that cancels out all a woman's best features like waist, breasts, curves!

Below left a late fifties/early sixties party dress.

Right, contemporary prints, skirts in all lengths

A Lonely Heart from Sgt. Pepper?

ECLIPSE ECLIPSED

what it should have been

Toby Melville UK
what it was

Dusky skies. Like a miracle that didn't happen, Geneva was drenched in obscurity with a ghost-feather jet d'eau. 

10 am: hunched over morning coffee outside the chalet café behind the Brunschwig monument, guarded by freshly sanded stone lions and gryphons. Moms with prams, the unemployed, the rich, the retired or a combination of the above with their fresh tartines and quince jam, engaged in conversation. Miraculously only one woman squawking into a cell phone. 

10:15 am: light through haze like foreign news penetrating complacency, not quite real. 

10:34 am: sitting feeling stupid with my pinhole card, reflecting card and binoculars facing the big nada eclipse. My app let me down, informing me of a sunny Geneva at 9 am. The app subtly laid a virtual cloud over its virtual sun, but too late.

10:45 am: The grey of 68% virtual obscurity. A disappointment of sky over Lac Léman. I pay and leave.

The day of course improves, with scattered sunshine in the afternoon.

Waiting for the next one in 2026.