On the Radar -- Latin Influence

We Blackbirds get inspiration from many places, and we recently watched "Anchors Aweigh" one night when it was on TCM.  (Hey -- if Gene Kelly is on the TV, we're going to watch it.  Unless it's "The Pirate." Then no, no, no!)  Now, I'm sure you know by now that we love us some color and pattern.  The more, the better!  And what I had never really paid attention to when watching this movie is the 1940s fascination with Mexico that runs throughout.  Kathryn Grayson's Aunt Susie character works as a singer at a Mexican restaurant, and the backdrop that the restaurant provides is full of amazing inspiration, from clothing to music to the village-like atmosphere outside the restaurant, which even has a little lonely senorita for Mr. Kelly to dance with around a fountain. 

When I decided to write this week's On the Radar (finally!), then, of course, I just had to talk about the resurgence of Mexican, Spanish and otherwise Latin print, patterns, and colors.  Designers pulled it out for Spring 2014, but it's not really going anywhere quite yet.  Here's a roundup of some of my favorites, new and vintage -- and I'd like to think Aunt Susie would approve of everything!

Nicolas Jebran, 2013-2014 Couture

Valentino resort, 2015

Valentino resort, 2015

Mara Hoffman, 2014

Embroidered tunic, from Living Textiles on Etsy, here

1940s jacket from Red Poppy Vintage Shop on Etsy, here.

1970s Purse from Sunday Girl Finds on Etsy, here.

1970s rug, from our shop, here.

1980s embroidered caftan, from our shop, here.

Junk Love: Dior Drama

When the Blackbird girls go shopping for junk, we like to start out the day with a little fantasy element: In a perfect world, what would we find today? The answers usually involve fantastic mid-century furniture (signed of course), really good costume jewelry, and Robert Downey Jr. (oh please, like you didn't know this about us already). And then we close our eyes and chant vintage Dior, vintage Dior. Someday, there will probably be a rain dance of sorts, but our chances are still pretty terrible of actually finding any. But while we keep the dream alive, we like to spend a ridiculous percentage of our free time looking at photos of Dior dresses. Today's collection features dramatic skirts, starting with Dior's iconic scalloped ladies: Junon and Venus, both of which are in the collection of The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Dior "Venus" dress, Costume Institute

Richard Avedon's photo of "Junon"

"Junon" dress, Costume Institute

And a few variations on the scallop theme:

For drama of a different length:

A bit of basket weave:

And...her.

Junk Love: Welcome Back!

So, you may have noticed that the Blackbird girls took a break for a while. We had a good excuse--promise! It all started back in February, and it is because of Liam Neeson. This will make sense eventually.

I was supposed to go to a movie with my mother. We had our date, time, and restaurant nailed down, so all we had left to do was agree on which movie to see. The problem was that there was no movie in theatres that either of us cared about in the slightest. But...Non-Stop was due out the following weekend, and neither of us can resist a Liam Neeson movie. So, we rescheduled. That is why I was at home at 2pm on a Sunday for the first time in months (I am a 7-day a week workaholic), and even more importantly, why I was bored.

When one is crushed by the weight of boredom, there are several potential cures: television, a good book, trolling the Internet for good junk, or actually leaving the house to go junk shopping. I decided to go with Option 3, and thereby ended up on the eighth wonder of the world: Craigslist, that magical artificial universe of junk, both good and bad. And, occasionally a place to find real estate.

We Blackbirds have dreamed of opening a store since day one, and I am the one who likes to torment us both by looking at commercial real estate online about once a month. We inevitably fall in love with a place that is geographically and financially impossible, and then we end up depressed and elbow-deep in pizza. So, on this particular Sunday at this particular time, because I am a masochist, I clicked on Real Estate. The very top listing was for a 1300 square foot shop in a nearby town for a ridiculously low monthly rent. I immediately called the other Blackbird, who ordered me to instantly-right-this-minute-why-are-you-wasting-time call the number on the ad. Two hours later, we were sitting in the car on a deserted street waiting to meet a strange man that we had met via Craigslist. And while we waited, we fell in love with our building.

It was old, with blue paint peeling down in huge strips. The dark windows looked sad, and the door was painted a psychedelic lime green. But we loved it, and as long as it didn't have a giant hole in the ceiling and snakes writhing on the floor, we were going to have it. The very next day, the lease was signed, we had keys in hand, and suddenly we realized that we had less than two months to be up and running in time for the local antiques festival (a perfect weekend to open a vintage shop, right?). This is when the blog died. It is also when we stopped sleeping regularly, speaking to our families, or eating vegetables.

 

After a lot of paint, a couple of new ballasts, and every possible Money Pit moment that you could imagine, we managed to get to what I would now lovingly refer to as Hell Week, during which we went to work, went to the shop, stayed up all night, went to work, went to the shop, stayed up all night, and pretty much survived on pizza and Snickers bars in order to get everything cleaned, priced, and placed for opening day. But we made it, and the shop has been buzzing like a little baby bee for two months now.

Now that I have blown the dust and cobwebs off of my laptop, it is time to get back to our regular blog schedule. I will try my best to get back into the habit, especially since I just noticed that we managed to get 4000 page views when we were not blogging. Check back if you can, or better yet, if you're in North Carolina, stop by the shop and say hello!

Blackbird Vintage
122 W. Swannanoa Ave.
Liberty, NC 27298
336-622-4775

Technical Difficulties

Sorry, Blackbird fans, for the extremely long wait on new blog posts!  We have a couple of things keeping us from writing:

1.  We have no internet.  We didn't have power for four days following a tiny (but dangerous) ice storm last week.  Trees fell all over town, knocking out power for over 21,000 people.  When it finally came back on, we realized that (as we have an electric hot water heater) a shower was the first, and most important, thing we needed.  After we handled that, we realized we had no cable.  Crap.  No internet when you run an online business sucks.  I've been handling Etsy with my phone, and I've had to wait in line to ship things the old fashioned way at the Post Office.  Shock! Horror!  No online postage!!  I've been getting the runaround from the cable people, but maybe we'll get it back soon.  Hmmmm....maybe.

 

2.  We're opening a store.  We're very excited about this!  I had elaborate plans to write some blog posts about our progress, but since we haven't had internet (see above), that hasn't happened.  We did have power at the shop during this whole mess, so we've been working hard on getting it ready to open.  Our goal opening date is April 24th, right before Liberty Antiques Festival.  Did I mention our shop's in Liberty, NC?  Come see us!  We promise we'll have it all painted and pretty by then! 

 

 

Hopefully we'll back to our regularly scheduled blogging soon, if I can ever get Time Warner to actually fix the cable...

Junk Love: Time Machine Tuesday

You might have noticed by now that I have a thing for time machines, so today when I was sitting on my couch, this thought process actually happened:

(Inner monologue) I really love that chair. It makes me feel like I live in the 1950s.
But then that other chair makes me feel like I live in the 40s. It's like my living room has its own time machine. Oh, my gosh. I wish my living room was a time machine, and then I could change it to any decade I wanted....

And so began the great Google search of living rooms by decade. Since it is currently 2014, I decided to visit 1934, 1944, and so on (but I stopped in the seventies, because we all know 1984 did nothing good for living room decor). Now, let me find that flux capacitor. I know it's around here somewhere....

In 1934, my room might have looked like this:

1944:

1954:

1964:

1974:

The Skinny: It Happened One Night

Yesterday, I had the privilege of falling in love with It Happened One Night, a 1934 Claudette Colbert/Clark Gable love story about a really long bus ride. I'm not generally into bus movies. (I hope lightning doesn't strike me now as I say that Bus Stop is one of the worst movies I've ever seen, despite having Marilyn Monroe. Maybe it's because they make give me motion sickness, and the exhaust smells so terrible, and the bathroom situation (or lack thereof) gives me anxiety. But I digress....) However, I do love Claudette Colbert, so I decided to give it a shot. I'm glad I did, because it was fantastic. It also gave me the refreshing opportunity to see Clark Gable being funny and romantic, because (*gasp!) I kind of hate Gone With the Wind (did you just feel the earth tremble?).

But regardless of the cute love story and typical wholesome characters required by Frank Capra for everything, the movie was expected to bomb. Claudette Colbert was only called in when several other actresses refused the part, and she would only agree to do it for double her normal fee (and that was really only because she was interested in working with Clark Gable). Gable wasn't very inspired by it, either, especially since he was loaned to Columbia and forced to do the movie as a punishment for being a bad boy off the lot. It was allotted a maximum four weeks weeks for production, at the end of which Colbert reportedly told a friend that she had just made the worst movie in the world.

So, it came as quite a surprise when the film was nominated for multiple Academy Awards. The shock was magnified even more when it swept all five of the major categories: Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture. It held this record for almost forty years, and netted Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert the only Oscars they ever received. In fact, Colbert hated the movie so much, she didn't even go to the Academy Awards, opting instead for a vacation. She was hastily fetched from a train station and rushed to the ceremony to accept her statue, very under-dressed for the occasion in a simple traveling suit.

Claudette Colbert & Shirley Temple, 1935 Academy Awards

But even more interesting, because I cannot resist a link to Looney Tunes, is the fact that Friz Freleng loved this movie, rating as one of his top favorite films. AND, he wrote in his memoirs that there were three moments of inspiration in this movie that were later used in the development of Looney Tunes characters:

1. The personality of Oscar Shapely, an annoyingly smooth-talking fellow traveler on the bus:

Roscoe Karns as Oscar Shapely

2. A scene in which Clark Gable eats carrots and speaks in a fast, staccato manner:

3. And a fictional mobster, Bugs Dooley, invented by Clark Gable's character to frighten Mr. Shapely away from the bus:

Clark Gable & Roscoe Karns, It Happened One Night

There were also hints that Yosemite Sam and Pepe LePew possessed characteristics derived from two other characters from this film: Alexander Andrews and King Westley (the female lead's father & husband). It's also noteworthy that for a movie with so few wardrobe changes (Claudette Colbert only has 4 outfits in the movie: 2 items of nightwear, a wedding dress, and a travel suit), Vanity Fair chose to pay tribute to the fashion:

James Marsden & Rose Byrne, August 2009 Vanity Fair

Another interesting tidbit: Claudette Colbert was a prude while making this movie. The "walls of Jericho" were only added because she refused to disrobe on camera, and she put up quite a fight about having to expose her leg during the hitch-hiking scene.

I find this quite confusing, given the fact that Claudette Colbert was also in Cleopatra the very same year (1934), and she looked like this:

Yes, that is close enough, Mr. DeMille....



Information obtained from : www.tcm.com, www.imdb.com

On the Radar -- The Mod Surrealist

The Blackbirds love road trips.  However, we don't like riding in the car for long distances with no thrift store stops.  So last weekend, coming home from our little antiquing trip, we resorted to one of our travel hobbies.  It was Sunday at 6pm -- and we had just finished at the last possible Goodwill we could get to that day.  We had more than three hours left until we got home.  So what's our hobby?  Well, we like to play these little games where we come up fantasy design projects, usually mashing up different eras.  For example, if we could design a house with anything in it in the world, what would it look like?  Or what styles could we mix together to create an amazing outfit -- from head to toe?

Mod Heels, from Salome Vintage on Etsy, here.

This weekend, we mixed Surrealist and Mod styles in our little game.  What we soon realized is that mixing the two would be amazing!  The psychedelia of the 1960s blends well with 1930s Surrealism, and the clean lines of Mod is a great foil to both.  What a concept, we thought!  And it was then that we knew we were in love. 

Vintage Telephone handbag from Cumstov on Etsy, here.

So when planning the blog today, I thought, "If only we could really find the components to our look."  I know well enough by now, that if it's on our radar (sorry, pun intended), then we'll start seeing it everywhere.  I had so much fun looking for the components for the blog post, it inspired me to do an Etsy treasury.  Take a gander at the treasury here, but enjoy some of the finds now!

1940s Glamour Lips from Curio Cabinet on Etsy, here.

  

Dior Surrealist hankie from Happy Anatomy on Etsy, here.

Mimi Di N Ram brooch from Pearl Modern on Etsy, here.

Mongolian lamb coat from Save As Vintage on Etsy, here.

70s postcard from Vintage Jenee Paper on Etsy, here.