Vintage Photos – Page 14 – Swing Fashionista

Yves Saint Laurent did not invent the tuxedo for women!

We’ve been enjoying a fashion comeback of tuxedo styles for women over the past few seasons, bolstered by the passing in June 2008 of famed designer Yves Saint Laurent. It’s true, in the 1960s and 70s, YSL was responsible forÂ re-popularizing suit and tuxedo styles for women, in particular his 1966 creation, “Le Smoking”, a tailored tuxedo suit with a long, slender 1960s silhouette. But, with all respect, it’s ridiculous to say he was the style’s inventor!

I caught Elle Magazine with this little diddy from last year: “Itâ€™s no coincidence that in the week when fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, the man who designed Le Smoking (the first tuxedo for women) passed away, the A-list are paying their respects in a way he would have loved- by wearing tuxedo jackets at every opportunity.”Â And even my beloved Wikipedia has this to say: “the Le Smoking tuxedo suit for women was the first of its kind to earn attention in the fashion world and in popular culture.“Â What’s going on here? Yves Saint Laurent did NOT invent the tuxedo for women, and the 1960s was not the first time women fashionably wore suits and tuxedos. Every swing girl knows this!

Above and below, we have Marlene Dietrich, who wore this tuxedo in the film Morocco in 1928. In the scene she sings and even kisses a girl…

And here we have Josephine Baker, Gloria Swanson, Anna May Wong and Katharine Hepburn in the 1920s, 30s and 40s…

Rant aside, it’s brilliant that the look has been having a fashion comeback (even with mistaken origins). Here are a few celebrities, mostly care of Fashionising.com, who have been toying with the trend. We have Ashley Olsen, Diane Kruger, Naomi Watts, Anne Hathaway, Rihanna, Blake Liveley and Dita Von Teese.

If the Fall 2009 and Resort 2010 collections are anything to go by, it seems as if the trend will be with us for a while longer. Viva Le Tuxedo!

The Real Ava Gardner

Ava Gardner

We’ve been getting a lot of hits from our post about Kate Beckinsale playing Ava Gardner in The Aviator. So here’s a few photos of the real thing: Ava Gardner herself.

Ava Lavinia Gardner (24 December 1922 – 25 January 1990) was an American actress with MGM in the 1940s and 50s. Her notable films include The Killers (1946),Â Mogambo (1953), Bhowani Junction (1956), On the Beach (1959) and The Night of the Iguana (1964).Â She was married to (in order) Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra (yes, he left Nancy for Ava!). After Sinatra, she had a long relationship with Howard Hughes (as depicted in The Aviator), and later with famed 1950s Spanish bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguin. A lifelong smoker, she died in 1990 of pneumonia (a complication of her emphysema) at the age of 67. She was buried in her hometown of Smithfield, North Carolina, where there is an Ava Gardner Museum.

Anna May Wong is heartbreakingly beautiful

Care of Wiki:

Anna May Wong (January 3, 1905 â€“ February 2, 1961) was an American actress, the first Chinese American movie star, and the first Asian American to become an international star. Her long and varied career spanned both silent and sound film, television, stage, and radio.

Born near the Chinatown neighborhood of Los Angeles to second-generation Chinese-American parents, Wong became infatuated with the movies and began acting in films at an early age. During the silent film era, she acted in The Toll of the Sea (1922), one of the first movies made in color and Douglas Fairbanks’ The Thief of Bagdad (1924). Wong became a fashion icon, and by 1924 had achieved international stardom.

Frustrated by the stereotypical supporting roles she reluctantly played in Hollywood, she left for Europe in the late 1920s, where she starred in several notable plays and films, among them Piccadilly (1929).

She spent the first half of the 1930s traveling between the United States and Europe for film and stage work. Wong was featured in films of the early sound era, such as Daughter of the Dragon (1931) and Daughter of Shanghai (1937), and with Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932).

In 1935 Wong was dealt the most severe disappointment of her career, when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer refused to consider her for the leading role in its film version of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, choosing instead the European Luise Rainer to play the leading role in “yellowface”. Wong spent the next year touring China, visiting her family’s ancestral village and studying Chinese culture. In the late 1930s, she starred in several B movies for Paramount Pictures, portraying Chinese-Americans in a positive light. She paid less attention to her film career during World War II, when she devoted her time and money to helping the Chinese cause against Japan. Wong returned to the public eye in the 1950s in several television appearances as well as her own series in 1951, The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong, the first U.S. television show starring an Asian-American. She had been planning to return to film in Flower Drum Song when she died in 1961, at the age of only 56.

Swing Era Retouching – Yes, They Did It Back Then Too

Much like any fashion photograph today, Joan Crawford got the swing era equivalent of today’s digital airbrushing. Bye bye freckles, wrinkles, dark circles and brow furrows! The difference? This retouching was all done painstakingly by hand, and took around 6 hours. Click here to read more about Hollywood photographer-to-the-stars George Hurrell.

Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers All In White 1937

The world’s most famous Lindy Hop troupe in history. Manager (and former Savoy Ballroom bouncer) Herbert ‘Whitey’ White – is the man in the middle. The troupe was performing at the New Cotton Club in Culver City, California while filming ‘A Day at the Races’ with the Marx Brothers.