Princesses of Sweet Rhyme and Pure Reason's White Gown and Crown from The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

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I reread one of my favorite books,The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, the other day. I love it because I always notice something new every time I read it. This time around it was the bells on the Soundkeeper’s dress — I should like to paperdoll her outfit now, but I’m not really in the mood to draw a million little bells tonight. As you see, I was in the mood for something much easier, which is the dress that Rhyme and Reason wear. Since they wear about the same thing, the dress can be for either of them. Make Sylvia Rhyme and Iris Reason, or the other way around, as you please.

Don’t forget, I’m liveblogging (or as Eleanor has it, live-dolling) the Oscars this Sunday. I figure that will consist of drawing red carpet dresses until my fingers drop off. To get everyone in an Oscar mood, let’s have an Oscar poll. Check out the oscar.com Costume Design nomination information if you need a refresher.

Halloween Costume Series Day 14: Christine Daae's Star Princess Masquerade Costume In Black, Blue and White with Black Domino Mask

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Kathleen asked, earlier this month, that I do one of Christine Daae’s outfits from the Phantom of the Opera, which was a timely request because I recently got the musical soundtrack from the library. (One of the sad things about the times when I am not drawing is that I must mourn the Outfits which Could Have Been. I listened to the original text many months ago, and then I forced Brian to sit with the recent movie version with me. That he endured as a proof of his love, but he was much more enthusastiac about the next Phantom spinoff we watched, The Phantom of the Paradise. Tagline: “He sold his soul for rock’n'roll.” Anyways, I do regret that I didn’t do a paperdoll series of these Phantoms and Christines. But I digress.) So since I got the soundtrack, I’ve been singing along — portions of my brain which went on strike during geometry class apparently devoted themselves thoroughly to memorizing the whole musical, it seems — even getting Brian in on the fun, singing Phantom duets along with him to which we make up the words. He’s joined in with me a couple times as I trilled “Music of the Night” in the shower, scaring the living daylights out of me each time (“didn’t you ever see Psycho?” I asked) and gamely followed along with Raoul’s part to “All I Ask Of You.” (“How can anyone LISTEN to this? No one will FIND you? Your fears are far BEHIND you?” he asks. “Just be quiet and sing it,” I reply perfectly logically and reasonably.)

Of course, for Halloween I must do a Masquerade dress, the first step of which was blithely breaking the “no research” rule once again. The movie dress was a pink concoction; I read somewhere it was supposed to represent the influence of the scarlet-garbed Phantom, but I personally didn’t think it quite worked that way — I thought it just looked too conventional, kind of like “Totally Ingenue Barbie!” although certainly it was very beautiful. The stage outfit was rather more what I would prefer, for a masquerade ball — a blue and pink silver-starred ballet outfit, referred to as her “Star Princess” dress. Here you can see a picture of the costume design sketch, some images from the stage and a fan’s reproduction of the dress, and this forum post includes a discussion of the dress and links to pictures of it from different productions. I liked the shape, but didn’t want to just copy one of them, and so looked to the original text for further inspiration. Now, the thing I should have quite liked to paperdoll from the original text was the Phantom’s “immense red-velvet cloak, which trailed along the floor like a king’s train; and on this cloak was embroidered, in gold letters, which every one read and repeated aloud, ‘Don’t touch me! I am Red Death stalking abroad!’” But as for Christine, the only thing described is her black domino mask, and re-reading that scene, it is such a very dark time for her… So here she is, as my Star Princess for the masquerade, but not the stars giving way to dawn as on the stage; the night has laid claim to this Christine.

We are coming to the end of the zombie slaughter poll, so vote…

Cornflower Blue 1927 Dress with Handkerchief Skirt inspired by Lucia in London by E.F. Benson

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Sorry, sorry, I’ve been playing with my bike too much and not drawing enough, I know. But you see, as the new toy novelty wears off, I return to my Prismacolors…

I am reading Make Way for Lucia now, which is a collection of the Mapp and Lucia novels all in one doorstop-sized book. I listened to Queen Lucia first as an audiobook from Librivox, and then, since that book stops so abruptly, was dying to have more, more, more. Luckily there is more more more — Make Way for Lucia includes seven books total. They’re quite funny in a dry, snarky kind of way; as a matter of fact, it occurred to me more than once that it’s a shame the word “snark” itself wasn’t used in the 1920s, because there are so many places where a speaker says something described as “ironical” or “sarcastic” and the proper word can be only “snarky.” So far it is about a small English community and its queen bee, Lucia, and although living with the gossipy, snarky, hypocritical residents of Riseholme would be a sort of hell on Earth for someone like me, socially clueless hermit that I am, it’s delightful to read about it. The characters are mostly so quite dissembling, thoughtless and haughty that I rather hope that they get their comeuppance, and the author then kicks them around quite so thoroughly. So thoroughly, actually that I start to feel bad for them and hope they don’t get hurt too badly, even if it was coming to them, because their gossip and vanity is really all very harmless and none of them are bad, just silly. There’s a comparison to a Jane Austen novel here (especially because now I’m listening to Persuasion), if she was a shade more malicious and didn’t focus on romance.

Anyways, the main character is Lucia Lucas, who in Queen Lucia portrayed herself as a sort of refined lady born in the wrong age who worshipped Shakespeare and Beethoven and had a perfect horror of modern contraptions such as gramophones and London, and she contrived so that the whole town seemed to revolve around her. In the book I’m reading now, Lucia in London, she and her husband inherit money and property in London and suddenly her hatred of the city, modern art and music and so on simply vanishes. She even — oh my! — shingles her hair and wears short skirts. When I was listening to Queen Lucia I thought I should do an Elizabethan paperdoll outfit in deference to Lucia’s despising of modernity (and, also, to my inability to figure out when the book was set, my normal attention to details fixing a book in time quite baffled by Lucia’s quirks and Riseholme’s sleepiness), but now that she has gone to London I thought I had better get with the times as well.

The style doesn’t fit my poor Sylvia or Iris well, as they have no access to the kind of undergarments one would likely wear with such a dress, but oh well. It is based off of a McCalls pattern from 1927, which is when the book was published.

White Gown from "Mrs. Richard Bennett Lloyd" by Sir Joshua Reynolds, referenced in The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

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I finished The House Of Mirth the other day, which I had been listening to (specifically this version, read by Elizabeth Klett). I love the book, and the reading was so well done, but… my chores really suffer when I’m listening to a depressing audiobook. When I have one that I can’t wait to return to, I do some dishes or take a walk just to have the excuse to listen to it, but when it’s one, like this one, where you can’t do anything but watch Lily Bart make bad choices, get humiliated and reach for that chloral, and you know what’s going to happen to her and you can’t skim to read faster, it is hard to listen to all twelve hours of it. It’s such a lovely book but oh, so sad…

This dress, then, is a reminder of happier times for Lily, when she triumphed in the tableaux, dressed and positioned as this painting of Mrs. Richard Bennett Lloyd (maiden name Joanna Leigh), painted in 1775 by Sir Joshua Reynolds. She was the hit of the evening: “She had shown her artistic intelligence in selecting a type so like her own that she could embody the person represented without ceasing to be herself. It was as though she had stepped, not out of, but into, Reynolds’s canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty by the beams of her living grace.” There is so much description of character and so little description of physical characteristics in the book that it seems as if this is as close as we get to Lily herself…

The two best references I could find for this dress are this full picture and this detail. Since they’re not as large as I would like and you can’t see all the detail, the dress isn’t perfectly accurate. The sash is, I think, entirely wrong, but for the life of me I cannot figure out how the bunched-up green drapery at the back actually works as part of a dress. I studied it, I sketched it, I brought it into Photoshop and played with the levels and contrast and brightness and it just seems to me like a big clump of fabric stuck to her side, so I decided to turn it into a sash and not worry about it. So please don’t use this in your “House of Mirth” book report, and should you get a chance to see this painting in person, please don’t leave me a comment about how I didn’t get it right. Or if you do, at least take some pictures for me.

So, now I’m listening to Deadwood Dick’s Doom; or, Calamity Jane’s Last Adventure, which means that there are buckskins waiting for Sylvia and Iris…

Very interesting answers to the poll so far, by the way! I wonder how much it would have changed if I had had a “from Go Fug Yourself” option… I posted the link to the Bai Ling green and purple outfit in the first few comments of the final Fug Madness post, and I got a ton of traffic for that post…

Lily Bart's White Edwardian Tea Gown with Pink Rose Sash from The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

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Now that I’m done with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, I do think it’s time for another depressing period piece. This time I’m listening to The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, read for Librivox by Elizabeth Klett. I’ve read it before, but I’m actually preferring audiobooks lately because I don’t skim so much and get more of the details, and I’ve been thinking of this book since I read this New York Times article about Lily’s fate…

So far there hasn’t been much description of individual dresses, but there’s so much about the culture that those dresses form such a part of. Here’s Lily Bart talking about marriage with Lawrence Selden: “Your coat’s a little shabby–but who cares? It doesn’t keep people from asking you to dine. If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like: they don’t make success, but they are a part of it. Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop–and if we can’t keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership.”

Well, even if the book does promise to be melancholy, there is a silver lining: the dresses from the Belle Époque are beautiful, even if Sylvia isn’t quite the desired S-shape. I remember later on she wears some form of white dress, but there’s not a lot of physical description in the book so it’s based more on vintage gowns from 1904 and 1905 I’ve been looking at, particularly this one.

Oz's Female Form From The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

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After the eighteen hour exercise in class consciousness, eternally frustrated romance and parade of death that was North and South (I tease, I tease — actually I really enjoyed it, but it was somewhat hard to take at times), I thought that perhaps I would enjoy something lighter. So I’m now listening to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Of course I’ve seen the movie, but I’ve never read the book before. I wasn’t sure about the paperdolling opportunities — Dorothy is too young, the Good Witch of the book is Munchkin-sized — and thought that I might be doing a Wicked Witch of the West outfit from this one. (And I may yet do so…) But there’s a part where Oz appears to the Scarecrow as a beautiful fairy, and the description says that she “was dressed in green silk gauze and wore upon her flowing green locks a crown of jewels. Growing from her shoulders were wings, gorgeous in color and so light that they fluttered if the slightest breath of air reached them.”

Now, after years of paperdolling, I cannot possibly read a paragraph like that one without thinking “Bingo!”…

So here is my interpretation of Oz’s female representation. I must confess, too, that if this hadn’t shown up I’d be drawing one of the Emerald City court ladies. I haven’t drawn anything green for a while, and it’s my favorite color!