Dress Down Sunday: More from Bond Street

LOOKING AT WHAT GOES ON UNDER THE CLOTHES

the book: Bond Street Story by Norman Collins

published 1959







Irene Privett was lying stretched out full length on the bed. Her chin was resting on her hands. And her feet were spread out across the pillow. Her two shoes had gone slithering across the floor when she kicked them off. One was lying half-way over to the fireplace. The other almost underneath the chest of drawers. It was her dress that had saved her right shoe from disappearing completely. Taken off hurriedly and simply slung into a chair, the dress had gradually straightened itself out and collapsed limply on to the strip of Axminster….

At the moment Irene was wearing simply the foundations of dress, the pale pink brassière and pants which she had bought for herself and of which Mrs. Privett had disapproved. She had a good figure. Still only schoolgirlish, of course. Nothing mature or magnificent. But supple and healthy-looking. Against the whiteness of her skin, her hair seemed darker than ever. And it was her hair that was the trouble. A thick lock of it kept falling forward, slanting across the book that she was reading.

commentary: So here’s Irene: her father is delighted with himself that he has found Irene a job at the department store where her works, Ramell’s in Bond St. He has sorted out her future. But – she wants to be an actress, not work in a shop. She is not going to respond in the way he hopes.

This is one of the opening scenes of the book (my first post on it was a few days ago) and sets up the excellent storylines for the future. This is not a novel in which Irene is going to have much chance of achieving her dreams – it is light-hearted, but also realistic.
Irene will, though, have endless clothes panics during the course of the book.

First of all, what will she wear for her job interview? This book is very much set on a cusp in time: her mother assumes she will make all their clothes – ‘It was one of Mrs. Privett’s proudest boasts that up to now nothing ready-made except winter overcoats had ever come into her house.’

The dress that Mrs. Privett finally made for Irene was from an American pattern called Miss Manhattan. Mrs. Privett was secretly very pleased with it. It had a certain discreet flair. Irene, however, disliked every single thing about it. In her view it was all too young-looking. It was distinctly teen-age.

I had a good look at sewing patterns of the era, especially those marked Junior Miss, and they all looked lovely to my modern-but-vintage-focussed eyes. Some of them looked very sophisticated – but I have chosen this one for Irene:



Then, later Irene has a huge problem when the Staff Ball comes around: at first she thinks she has no dress to wear, but then she ends up with 3 possibilities, and a difficult decision. That is going to need its own blog entry later.

She goes to work in Rammell’s fur salon:

Irene loved it there. It was scarcely like being in a shop at all. More like being seconded to Buckingham Palace. Holiday relief for one of the ladies-in-waiting, as it were. Thick, mossy carpet. Walnut chairs. Little, elegant tables with just the least fleck of gilt on the corners. Flowers, gladioluses mostly, in white vases on thin pedestal affairs. Mirrors that might have been doors. Discreet private rooms with still more mirrors. And silence. A plushy, expensive silence hung over everything.

Furs feature a lot in the book, particularly mink, and there a slight dichotomy on how to treat it. Marcia the model (see previous entry) has trouble when she wears mink on a bus:

And in those parts, mink stoles, real or artificial, meant only one thing. People who passed her kept thinking terrible thoughts.

But at the same time Marcia’s talent is that

Seven-pound-a-week typists learnt from Marcia the right way to drape themselves in two or three thousand pounds’ worth of mink, so that there was an easy, almost nonchalant informality to the whole effect. Mothers with young children, and all the ironing still to do, saw just how they should stand when they next found themselves up against the radiator of a big Rolls-Royce in front of Blenheim or of Chatsworth.

Very different from Irene and Marcia - there is an exuberant, outsize (in all respects) character called Hetty, who would fit in perfectly in the rooming house in London Belongs To Me, Collins’s other masterpiece.  It is seen as rather unlucky that she is so large, because the diamond in her engagement ring looks small by comparison. Hetty wears wonderfully unsubtle clothes, for example:

a bright, peach-coloured coat, with a fox fur slung over one shoulder

-with ‘a little hat with a veil’ for demureness.

And she relaxes in

a pale blue dressing-gown with a lot of swansdown round the neck and cuffs. And—delightful touch of intimacy—her hair tied up with a piece of baby ribbon.

One thing about the book is that I kept having to remind myself that it wasn’t set in the 1930s (as London Belongs was) – it has a very 1930s feel, and then suddenly there will be a mention of a ‘BBC TV Knit-Wear Gala’.

More about the women’s fashion industry in Eric Newby’s wonderful Something Wholesale, and various of Noel Streatfeild’s books for adults as Susan Scarlett (the ones that I rudely say are less realistic than Ballet Shoes).

Lingerie picture from Kristine’s photostream.
Fox fur stole, same.
Fur salon, same.