While I like shooting pictures with a fairytale-feeling, you might notice I don’t usually go full fantasy shoot. There’s something about more elaborate shoots with stylized hair and settings that makes me feel a bit nervous and frankly inadequate. I’ve always admired the more whimsical shoots of Tim Walker, but whereas he has models for subjects to pose in his photographs, I only have myself and of all the aspirations I have held at one point in time being a model has never been one of them. I smile in my photographs rather than try for a more editorial pout and most of my favorite pictures of myself are of the back of my head! But when I saw this vintage dress appear in Klara’s shop, Apple Thief Vintage, dreams of a gothic fairytale shoot began to dance in my head. I wasn't sure I could capture the vision in my head in a handful of photographs, but I knew I wanted to try.
I’ve followed Klara online for years now from her early days of blogging about personal style and sewing projects (I even interviewed her back in the day) to watching her launch her own vintage store. She had a really great eye for unique pieces and I love admiring her vintage finds, even if it means fighting constant temptation to spend spend spend (she has an apple print dress coming to her shop soon that I am dying over). She was kind enough to loan this dress to me for this shoot and then patient enough to wait while I took ages to photograph it—I mean ages, I think I’ve had it for over a year now! It will be working its way back to her soon, so if you love it you’ll be able to purchase it from her. It’s from the 1960s and I love the detailed sleeves and the gold foil patterning. Although different in style from Valentino F/W 2015 (my favorite collection) it has a similar feeling—romantic, gold-tinged, and dramatic. That collection has always reminded me of fairytales; of swan maidens and trapped princesses and twisted curses. As soon as I saw this dress I could see it in a castle shoot, all mist and mystery and gothic architecture. In addition, to not seeing myself as a model, a more thematic shoot such as this one calls for more specific conditions. I can go wander with my dog through misty marshland in a linen dress any old day; there’s no specific vision other than to capture what’s there and try to highlight the beauty in a region most people would overlook. The goal of most of my photographs is to capture what is there: to find the beauty in an ordinary scene or moment. But the goal of this sort of shoot is to create the scene and make a mood and that makes me infinitely more nervous! A ruined castle (or in this case manor house) is easy enough to find, but to give it an eerie, gothic mood, to get the fickle smoke bombs to comply with your vision, and then to bring it all together in a dark fairytale…much more difficult! Which is probably why I kept pushing this photoshoot back again and again, choosing easier and more natural things to shoot, but being nervous you might fail at your vision is no reason not to pursue something. So armed with a small pack of smoke bombs, a couple of messy braids, and my gold-spangled dress I finally went forth to make my dark fairytale vision a reality...

I can still remember the first time I stumbled across a vintage dress at a thrift store. It was one of those frothy chiffon numbers from the 1950s, either a prom dress or bridesmaid gown that looked like the fashion equivalent of a cupcake. I was thirteen, in the thrift store looking for jeans after tearfully telling my father I *needed* a new pair and being informed that I certainly didn't need a pair but if I wanted a pair I could have $10 and a ride to the local thrift store. I didn't buy the dress that day. It seemed more foreign than a dress from a bygone era, it seemed like the dress some other species of girl than myself would wear. Some type of female who didn't feel painfully shy and turn bright red whenever called on in class. I let my fingers caress the delicate chiffon layers and then walked away, back to the more standard racks of clothes in search of simple jeans and a tee shirt that would help me disappear in a crowd. I didn't get up the courage to start wearing vintage until I was in university, but once I started it was a hard habit to break. Vintage dresses fit my frame the way modern ones never did, making me start to realize maybe there wasn't something wrong with my shape but rather the clothes I was forcing my body into. Finding perfect dresses also felt ridiculously easy; I was spoiled for choice with thrift stores all in a near radius to my campus stocked with affordable finds and late night eBay browsing always led to incredible scores. These days vintage is still a common theme in my wardrobe although it's become harder and pricier to find. There aren't many vintage or thrift stores around me and the virtual world has caught on to the allure of vintage with prices that better reflect the worth of the covetable pieces. Vintage remains the same, but the way we shop it keeps changing. From my early teen years of thrift stores, to my uni days of eBay stalking, to more recent years scouring Etsy, to today where so many sellers have started to move to Instagram. My dress today is from Sweet Bee Finds--an excellent Etsy shop I've raved about before, but her Instagram is also worth noting as she often updates there with her gorgeous finds before they even hit the shop. I don't know how I'll be shopping vintage in another decade's time, but there is one thing I am certain of: my love for vintage will never die. From that first decadent prom dress I admired from a distance, to the first simple vintage shirtdress I wore and felt good in, to the small, varied collection of vintage dresses I treasure today, vintage has always been a siren's call I couldn't resist...

You can't really talk about vintage models without covering Suzy Parker, whose icy sophistication defined glamour in the 1950s on dozens of magazine covers. Known for her elegant, aloof appearance in front of the camera (likened to Grace Kelly), in person she was a chatterbox dubbed "my most challenging muse" by Richard Avedon. When she later became an actress photographer Horst quipped that "maybe she could do for the movies what she never did for me--hold still." Audrey Hepburn's beatnik-turned-reluctant-model character in Funny Face was actually inspired by Suzy Parker (who also makes a cameo in that film). Still despite her chattering tendencies, Suzy Parker became the first model to earn more than $100 an hour and more than $100,000 a year. Some of my favorite photographs of her come from later in her career, where she is studying scripts for films--her natural beauty shines in those images--red hair, green eyes, an abundance of freckles, and a sort of elegant repose. The fancy clothes are packaged away, there are no professional hair or makeup artists on call, and yet you still can't take your eyes off of her...

I'm picking up my erratic series on vintage fashion photographers and models. I love looking at vintage photographs, but I think it's much more interesting when you know more of the story--when you can identify the figures, designers, and people behind the lens that created that timeless image you're still admiring 50+ years later. Today's featured vintage photographer is Georges Dambier. A French photographer who worked at Elle for 20 years and is known for being one of the first fashion photographers to take models out of the studio and out into the world, shooting his subjects in exotic locations and city streets. His work mimics street photography, capturing models in motion and enjoying the moment or scene, rejecting the trend of more stoic and frozen poses that were popular at the time. His pictures almost seem to tell a moment; like stills from a film or candid moments glimpsed in passing.  

It's quite fitting to be wearing a beaded 1920s inspired dress with my new bob haircut quite in the style of Louise Brooks, although I'm still nowhere close to looking like an authentic flapper girl!