Wedding Photos

It's Spring, and after Spring comes Summer and all the weddings both seasons imply. To celebrate the beginning of this festive season here are some of the photographs from the McCord Museum's collection on the topic. 

The first image from 1925 is particularly striking: the Church representative is prominent and the bride and groom are native. Compare his shoes to her shoes, the priest's face to the groom's face and to the bride's posture. Seems like the image encompasses the complexities of colonial rule in a nutshell. 

The rest of the images are more flamboyant. The 1930s wedding party on St. Urbain Street is terrific (again notice the bottines of the little boy of the right side of the frame - that very same model is doing a real fashion come back in that same area today). The 1895 bridal party looks like a mash-up of Tommy Hilfiger's happy family meets Grace Coddington's version of a funeral. Finally Miss Ryan's wedding photograph is adorable because of the size of everything: the girls' dresses, the girls' hair (it was after all les années folles - flap girls) and the size of the four protagonists relative to each other.

Vive les mariés!

Wedding, English River, ON, about 1925

Wedding party on St. Martin's Church steps, 730 St. Urbain Street, Montreal, QC, about 1930

Mrs J.E. St. Binney's bridal party and guests, Halifax, NS, about 1895

Miss Ryan's wedding, Montreal, QC, 1921

Porselli Ballerinas: Authentic, Timeless and Decay, How to Insure the Consumer Will Consume Again

These ballerinas are the result of a collaboration between Collection Privée and Porselli, the equivalent of Italy's France's Repetto. The Italians are a little late on the whole ballerina come-back collaboration thing - an on-going trend spearheaded by Repetto owner (and ex-Reebok VP) Jean-Marc Gaucher. Gaucher is smart and banked right into a now common branding strategy: he stressed Repetto's authenticity (we have been making dance shoes since the 1930s) and gave it edge with exclusive collaborations. In 1999, when Gaucher bought Repetto, the company was near bankruptcy but his séries limitées and exclusive deals with Comme des Garçons, Vanessa Beecroft, Colette, Opening Ceremony or Rodarte have led the company to record 27 million euros in profit in 2008. Not bad in a decade when the rest of the European industry survived by offshoring.

Needless to say not offshoring is in many ways a very good thing. I am also a victim of Gaucher's and Bardot's charm and believe ballerinas (and Mary Janes) to be the next best thing to come out of the 50s for women after de Beauvoir. But the reason for Repetto's survival is part of a current within contemporary consumption patterns that isn't as charming. 

Today's consumers reward products linked to notions of authenticity ("the piece has a history"), quality ("this is a lasting") and timelessness ("the is a classic piece") or at least products with the image of being such. Paradoxically however today's fashion makers find money and fashion buyers find meaning from trends that are as short-lived as possible. The shorter the better - apparently more trends means more sales and more outfits means more identity. While I'm suspect of such logic it's obvious that if Repetto stops producing new collaborations to increase sales and stay hip, the consumer will in all likelihood forget about the timeless qualities of the Repetto and rapidly adorn its feet with Porselli such as these:  a pair that is (illustration) totally banking on its 'timeless' credentials by literally accelerating the time process (aka decaying) the shoes.

Buying new decayed shoes means that if they haven't been replaced by another collaboration resulting in an other authentic timeless and quality pair, the consumer will have no other option but to replace the pair because of its uselessness (read - unwalkable). Brands are so scared (as if they should) that their marketing and trend producing devices wouldn't sellout their next season that they preemptively ruin their creations so that consumers to HAVE to buy new. And shoes aren't the only pieces affected by this trend - the torn tights, the ragged jeans, the bobby-pinned jackets, the see-thru cotton aged t-shirts, and the list goes on.

In present day fashion, time, its value and its look, seem to be a very convoluted dialectic - the look of decay is in because it rings authentic, although authenticity is only a manufactured concept originating in our present, and repairs might be the most timeless activity there is in costume yet it is overrated because our time is directed by an endless appetite for consumption from fear of our future's lack (of money, of identity). 

Time for a new model (and I'm not talking about ending anorexia)?
Brigitte Bardot, originally a dancer, allegedly asked Rose Repetto in 1956 to conceive shoes as light and comfortable as her chausson de dance but sexier. Rose added the heel and voilà the Cendrillon was born:

La Peau Douce de Truffaut and Shoes

In competition at Cannes in 1964 and at the time severely criticized as an antipoetic idea of love, François Truffaut's La Peau Douce is often neglected although the rawness of the characters, the compelling desperation of the plot and patience of the director's frames make it certainly more poetic than the often tedious romanesque of Jules and Jim. 

Either way like most Nouvelle Vague productions La Peau Douce remains a beautiful window into the everyday of a time past. Among witnessing defunct activities like smoking in airplanes, waiting for public phone-booths to be freed, dancehall restaurants and the rare times Françoise Dorléac's (Catherine Deneuve's older sister who died in a car crash at 25) character is allowed to wear jeans, there is a wonderful shot of shoes aligned in front of hotel bedrooms. If this scene is an undisclosed tribute to feet fetishists, for anthropologists in love with things it is surprising how pointy the toes and how low the heels are on 1960s shoes.

La Peau Douce - bande annonce (2005) from Julio on Vimeo.