Yes, so I have a couple of dolman-sleeve sweaters, one a nice dusty rose angora sweater I bought on the street in Hong Kong years ago, earmarked for reuse for dolls due to some actual moth holes in the back; wouldn't it have been simple enough to do with it what I already had in mind, use it for doll clothes? Take a picture of it in its original shape and then duplicate it at 1/3 the size. But nooooo, why take the easy route? I figured that when I finished another more elaborate dolman project, a jacket-dress, I could make the sweater to wear under it.
"When I finished another more elaborate dolman . . . . project . . . ????" It has kicked my ass. Eighteen hours straight, finishing what I spent I don't know how many hours straight just making the embellished cloth, the altered fabric, and . . . .
O.K. the inspiration was one from many many years ago, the design for the fabric, which I've been collecting labels for for forty years. The labels on this are not those I collected; those are set aside, probably in my old brocade sewing box.
A stronger inspiration, or a more recent one, is Bill Griffith saying through Zippy when Zippy visits Japan and finds his non-sequiturs to be most appropriate. At one point, he exclaims, "What's yours is mine and what's mine is labeled."
Last, then, another part of the label theme is, "O.K., so ask me who I'm wearing [just try it, I tell you, just try it]."
My leftover turkey gravy is about to boil over -- got to get something in my stomach and get back to finishing up this "elaborate dolman project."
added later more notes and I forgot to add "Idiocracy" to the inspirations:
More of these labels had been cut out of garments than I had anticipated, which added to work time considerably. Ideally, they would all be stitched together, one by one, to make a more fluid garment. Washing this garment will serve to do that somewhat. As it is, in the try-on, I see a lot of the iron on tape not completely melted to the fabrics.
I could have used glue and didn't, because I didn't want it to thicken or stiffen the garment too much. At the moment it looks like one of those Japanese men's butterfly vests from the Warlord era in Japan. Hmmmm . . . that may well have been a part of the inspiration, come to think of it. The other part of the inspiration has to be Harajuka (Harajuki??) Girl, which is Evelyn herself. What a gorgeous client she is.
Then there is also my love for patches on my HHH Jacket -- more like Girl Scout Badges than advertising as on race car drivers' jackets (which this has an odd resemblance to too, in spite of all the time I spent arranging and rearranging those labels by value and color). In reference to it looking like the race car drivers' sponsors logos on their clothing, there is also, just for a bit of "The Future is Now," the fabric worn by everyone in "Idiocracy." Hopefully we are emerging from that future period just this year . . . .
I remember when it started, that branding, in the late 1970s, early 80s. I spent most of the 1980s in Taiwan, so I was able to maintain a certain purity of spirit in regard to labels. Many of them were made there anyway and more recent arrivals on the island would exclaim, "Oh, that's a Liz Claiborne" or such to my mumbled, "Oh, yes, it is. Is that a brand that people know?"
Now people speak of branding themselves, making themselves marketable by being a brand, a type, more or less: I first noticed it on "I Know My Kid's a Star!" when one episode of the show was devoted to the children's seeking to work out their "branding."
I don't know. The Sepulveda Girls and I just call ourselves Rancho de Doble (also Rancho D Doble) for our clothing brand: special clothes for the fit and big breasted woman that won't make you look dumpy: built like that, you have two choices, button it up to the neck and look dumpy so that women won't glare at you and men won't talk to your breasts, or tighten up the top and lower the neckline to compensate for Big Girls' Blouse Syndrome and just let men talk to your breasts and women sneer with their eyes, in sidelong glances.
That's different too: a whole generation of females, several generations it seems, go out and buy two focal points for men to talk to -- and they don't seem to get tired of it.
I saw an article some time this year that correlated high IQ with big breasts: maybe that's the difference in the attitude toward men talking to your chest. If you have something to say, you'd like someone to focus on your eyes and mouth for a little bit.
branding . . .
let's get back to that as it applies to clothing labels. When it first started, I laughed long and loud on reading an article about a man going to play tennis and getting all the stuff he was supposed to have, each with a label on them. To paraphrase from a thirty year old memory, he said he put on his tennis whites, his Adidas shoes, his white branded Nike tennis shirt, his (op?) white shorts and his (brand name) Titanium tennis racket and by the time he arrived on the court he was a walking identity crisis.
