A dress story...
It’s a wet, wet, wet, wet morning here! Unexpected…with soft, gentle rain…the kind that creates a silence, a dullness to the atmosphere. I can see large droplets of water clinging to the underside of the verandah beams from my desk; citrus leaves bowed down beyond the window, while the last bright yellow Jerusalem artichoke flowers greet the rain with happy faces upturned to the sky in a display of good cheer, though their spent companions form bedraggled balls of exposed pollen beside them.
I had been toying with the idea of continuing with a thread of decorating tales today…afterall, that topic has been occupying my thought process with the chaos of these last many weeks (still everything is not back in its place!). But…with all the fuss of tomorrow’s impending visit to my Sydney hat makers, Axel Mano (in the name of the Woollahra Festival), my head is rather more filled with another tangent altogether…one that involves neither house or garden. And as the weather may be a bit gloomy for you too (at least if you’re on the Eastern seaboard, though how I worry for those in the Western Districts of Victoria and South Australia who are doing it so very tough at the moment in severe drought conditions) this may provide a bit of light relief to your upcoming weekend, which could apparently be quite wet!
So…to the story of the dress…the Essential Work Dress as I came to call it, as that is…what it is! Not a gardening smock (goodness I’d kill off such a thing in an instant!). But a work-a-day dress. No frills, practical, comfortable, yet elegant.
Come to think of it…I’ve never really written or talked about the dress at any great length. I guess no-one has ever asked! The story is always condensed, I guess…into sales-pitch language; though by now many, many peeps have one. Some peeps have multiples, and over the years they’ve written to tell me of the compliments they receive when they wear theirs. Which is always so lovely to hear. (I have a funny feeling one might even have met the King this week, in a combination of multiple layers!).
But…a dress designer I am not! Hmmm….maybe once upon a time it may have been a thing that interested me…crossed my mind. Actually…if I think right back…yep, obsessed. I was totally enraptured with clothes! Which was hardly surprising given the way I grew up. But designing myself was never an option. At least it didn’t seem to be and suggesting it would never have crossed my mind. I cannot draw (although funnily enough, I can draw dresses - just not to scale!). Nor do I have the patience for minute measurements. I may know how I want something to look (to feel, to fall), but I am completely incapable of draping and making myself. Unless of course, it’s a simple skirt with a gathered waist, which I’m disinclined to make because they make me look like a balloon tied in the middle! I did make, I admit…with great patience, skirts for the girls when they were little (and even a couple for their school father/daughter ‘balls’). I set days aside in preparation for those - when either turqoise taffeta or bright spotted cotton was draped across the kitchen bench and I fussed with pins and needles and thread. Uggghhh….!! I remember too, sitting in the little attic room I rented in the early months of my years in London all those years ago, whizzing up some concoction - a skirt with wide contrasting bands attached, that could make either a very fabulous wrapped waist or….be pulled up and over the bust to make a kind of backless, halter-neck top! I must have been feeling very brave for wherever it was I was off to! I wonder what happened to it? It’s probably at the bottom of the dressing up box! And the bloomers I copied from the pages of Vogue…I know they’re still around because Clemmie still wears them from time to time! It’s always funny to see them hanging on the line…very pale grey shot through with a fine mustard stripe - a beautiful cotton whose purchase I recall feeling indulgent about, as I watched the heavy scissors cutting the small meterage across the wide bench at Liberty (probably measured as a yard back then!).
When I say hardly surprising given the way I grew up…I’m sure for my generation I am not alone, though we may be the last generation to have spent many an hour as young children being ‘pinned’. Whether by grandmothers or mothers. “Stand still”, “arms up”, “turn around” my grandmother would request at intervals as I tried not to fidget. “Ouch” I’d squeal, if she inadvertently pinned me by mistake!
Oh but it was worth it for a new dress! Which probably sounds very ‘Anne of Green Gables’! How I loved and related to Anne’s desire for puffed sleeves when I read those books at ten or eleven (my Mum’s original copies that she’d have read I guess, when that series was first published…OK no! The first was published by Lucy Maud Montgomery in 1908, and those very discoloured volumes I have must date to the 1940’s!).
In the early / mid sixties, it was rare for me to have been bought clothes from a shop. At least special ones. I’d not have gone to a birthday party in something ‘bought’. It would definitely have been made. Velvet perhaps, with broderie anglaise strips threaded with ribbon as contrast; or fine wool with a little cotton lace edge to a collar or sleeve and a flurry of embroidered flowers. Matching coats with self-buttons for very special outings. As I grew older, persuading Nanna to make me something (or help me to make some more ‘groovy’ creation) became a thing. She was always up for a challenge!
During those early years of my childhood though, my Mum was dressmaking…for a private client or two from time to time. On the side for extra pin-money, on the days she wasn’t working alongside Pat Woodley, taking classes in deportment, etiquette, training models or compering fashion shows at department stores (you know…”Mary is wearing a two-piece jacket with matching skirt in finest mohair”….or some such, etc. etc.!). I would sometimes accompany her to a tiny upstairs room in one of the old Gaol buildings (before they became the campus of the Sydney Art School) for fittings. I still remember one very heavy sateen-lined, brown and white checked ‘cloak’ with side pockets…I wonder why that’s lodged in my memory? She was really very adept, and how I used to love dressing up in the beautiful clothes she’d made for herself as a young woman. I still have some of them stored away, and have worn many of them on special occasions throughout my own life. They’re made of fabrics the like of which one just doesn’t see today…crisp cottons, shot taffetas. Ooooh and one pair of lovely hot-pink Capri pants with a side zip and narrow belt of the same fine polished cotton. I wore those on our honeymoon in Italy all those years ago (and all those years after she’d have made them)…no doubt channelling some kind of ‘Roman Holiday’ vibe - that was very much my Mum’s era! (In fact my Dad proposed to my Mum, or as good as…over lunch in Capri in 1960!).
All this making and sewing activity was wrapped up in visits to ‘town’ as my parents and grandparents were in the habit of calling a visit to the city (as we call it today). But my grandparents would have grown up at a time when Sydney was likely referred to as Sydney Town. It was during their lifetime that cars were introduced and modernity must have escalated at such a pace! My maternal grandparents were married in the 1930’s, and took what was probably considered a rather rash (flash, fast?) decision at the time: to move from the verdant western suburbs where their newly arrived from Europe parents had chosen to put down tenuous new roots in an unfamiliar land to raise their respective broods; to a modern flat in Double Bay! How free they must have felt! How outré!
Of course my grandfather (Gargie…see a couple of posts back!) went ‘to town’ every day - where his hat business consisted of a lively team of women - all extremely competent seamstresses, who would whizz up a dazzling array of hats. And how I loved to visit that hive of activity! A likely ‘trip to town’ for me as a child, would be to catch a double-decker bus (they were green and faded yellow in those days) with my mother and grandmother…no doubt all three of us dressed for the occasion and each of them clinging to one of my hands. We’d alight in Elizabeth Street near Market, and…make a bee line for the pattern books at David Jones department store…perhaps on the fifth or sixth floor back then. How I loved those pattern books filled with illustrations - huge and heavy, I’d turn each page as if discovering a new fairy tale. I’d balance on one of the stools placed for adults to sit, and pour over the pages, pointing out the outfits I liked. It doesn’t mean we always left with a pattern, or fabric! Just looking was fun enough. As I tip tap here, I now recall the process coming back to me…of the hefty tables that supported those pattern books: there were small pads of paper (and pencils attached by a piece of string to the tables so they couldn’t be nicked!). One would write the number of the pattern, always clearly displayed next to the illustration of the outfit, then take that number to the assistant, who would rifle through enormous drawers to find the packet containing the pattern. Inside, neatly folded, were all the sections one needed…of crisp tissue printed with definite lines, dots and arrows and placements indicated, to lay out and pin to the chosen fabric, before cutting and piecing together as directed.
Looking at (and choosing if I was lucky!) the material we might use, was next! All those bolts of yardage…rows and rows of colour, pattern, texture. I thought them as enticing as a sweet shop!
Next though, on such a day, was to visit the caffeteria (so unusual then!) where it seemed such a treat to take a tray and slide it along the low shelf, choosing from behind the glass what to eat! Sometimes the three of us would lunch there, (the aroma of coffee and caramel filling the atmosphere) but other times…we’d buy cakes (my favourites the heavily pink-iced cup cakes!) and take them to Gargie and the girls…further down Elizabeth Street (we’d have to catch the bus to Central)…where I’d then spend the afternoon picking up pins (that had got caught in the grooves of the well-trodden boards of that huge warehouse space) with a giant magnet! (Errr…not sure that pastime as distraction for a child would be encouraged today!). That light-filled space was filled with shelves of cardboard boxes - all of them labelled and containing treasure. A veritable haberdashery of ribbons and bows, of velvets and silks and hail-spot tulles…of ric-rac braid and bling-worthy diamente designs that could be attached to a hatband with glamorous effect! There were hat pins and combs…every possible thing you could think of with which to decorate a hat. And so it continued ‘til I was about six or seven, maybe eight…when the fashion for hats began to evaporate. As it was, Gargie (having seen that business through the war years, when all hands were turned to making army supplies over frivolous headwear) decided it was time to go fishing. Literally! How Nanna fretted over his fishing off the rocks at Bondi! Many an afternoon I’d join him on the wharf at Double Bay or Rose Bay, dangling a line in the water (though if we hooked any fishy there, he’d throw it straight back in, no doubt having given it a dreadful fright, as he deemed fish from the harbour unfit for eating). Ocean caught fish however, were fine and he was never more proud than when returning with a fish or two he’d caught for dinner!
But all of this brings me (because I guess in a very roundabout way, it’s relevant background) to…the Essential Work Dress! I’m not sure I’d have embarked upon such a whim (given so much of my headspace is devoted to the garden and other people’s houses!) had I not had those childhood experiences! And I’m prompted here to relay this story today, because…the dressmaker who has so kindly been making my dresses in very small batches for me these last…goodness…it always seems like yesterday but maybe twelve years…is in a not dissimilar situation to that which faced my grandfather. The time for her to close her long-running business has alas, arrived. Which is a sadness not only for me, but for the Sydney rag trade, for whom she and her team have been ‘making’ for a good, good many years. As for her longterm employees, how I hope they will find jobs. Equally, there is a skills shortage in this area of manufacturing (and not only this area). Patti was finding it difficult to find new workers which is a deeply concerning issue, for those of us who appreciate the skills and patience required for small batch making. Long gone are Gargie’s days…already by the 70’s the writing was on the wall.
The whole of the dress story in a way, has come full circle. I hadn’t truly thought of it ‘til now but, perhaps my writing here today is a timely culmination of the dress story, combined with Axel Manos’ invitation to spend the day with them tomorrow at their eponymous hat shop in Woollahra, where they make exquisite, bespoke hats. It was they who suggested I ask Patti to make the dresses for me…when interest the dress was causing each time I wore it, meant I needed to get beyond the initial ‘prototype’ phase and handful of sporadic orders up ‘til then, completed by my curtain-maker (see below!).
The concept for the dress began quite simply…with the introduction of Kitchen Gardening Days at Glenmore; when all of a sudden I found myself standing in front of groups of participants for what were (still are!) very full days of diverse and often very physical activity! You may have gathered by now that, well…I guess presentation is part of my DNA. Yet I don’t like to worry about what I’m wearing…I’m more interested in getting my message across in whatever situation I may find myself (that goes for decorating as much as gardening or giving a presentation or a garden tour). My days are likely to go from one of these situations to the other…from meet & greet to presentation to demonstration…and everything in between with great rapidity. While dressing for such days in the cooler months is a no-brainer here (jeans and shirt or jumper) I needed a dress for warm weather that did not look like I was on holiday…was not revealing…arm cover for burning sun, and no bra or backside visibility (no-one needs to see my undies whether I stretch up on tippy-toes - think tying a wigwam, or when I inevitably bend over to pick produce!). Also…when not in front of a group, my days still lurch from doing some inevitable job that gets me filthy, to needing to rush out at the drop of a hat. And so the dress…is something I don’t need to think twice about throwing on in a hurry. I can change into it in the blink of an eye, and go pretty much anywhere.
When the kitchen gardening days began, I did have a favourite dress, but it was too short! It was fine as long as I didn’t bend over (and of course I was younger then!). But it got me thinking that perhaps I could come up with something. I’d long been enraptured with the detail of antique French linen smocks, and had a beauty, though the weight of it literally weighed me down and the shape made my feel like the hunchback of Notre Dame! I wonder? I thought to myself…if the yoke was a little different here? The hem shorter there? The sleeves not so voluminous and maybe…a little bracket at the back, to pull in for some gentle shape without making a proper waist? I did love the freedom of that old smock - bend, stretch, carrying the shopping - nothing to impede movement. Aha I thought…the bracket could be on buttons, one easily disengaged for free movement - which is exactly how it’s been since the very first prototype. To this day, as soon as everyone’s gone and I start moving the furniture, or each time I get into the car to drive, I undo one button at the back and the whole dress becomes like a loose sack - with nothing to impede big gestures!
But how to get from concept to reality? Although my longtime curtain maker Nathalie, is not a dressmaker, it was Nat I approached in the first instance! Afterall, she employs seamstresses to make her beautiful hand-sewn curtains (see last week’s post and there will be more on that score to come). It just so happened that, one of the women working for her at the time, had not long been in Sydney. She’d followed her partner from France who had followed a work opportunity, and in the process Elizabeth had closed her Paris atelier, from where she’d been making bespoke wedding dresses. Could she make a pattern? Of course she could! And so it was I found myself in a back room in Coogee, feeling like I was four years old again, being ‘pinned’. “Arms up”. “Spin around”!! It doesn’t matter what language it comes in…it’s the language of dressmaking!
The first dresses came in only one size…my size! And Nathalie, Elizabeth and the curtain making team made the tiny batches for me. Sourcing the fabric was a challenge. The very first prototype was in furnishing linen and I wore it to death! I tried one in denim, but felt like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz!
I began to source more expensive dressmaking linens - some beautiful Italian ones from Tessuti, who import a vast array of fabrics. But it wasn’t ‘til the Axels suggested I ask Patti to make the dresses, that she revealed a source I might try for a really suitable linen (the one I’ve been using ever since) and that the patterns were made professionally for all sizes…XS, S, M, L, XL. The whole story seems like it began only yesterday. I’ve no idea how many dresses have passed through my hands…and have always been surprised at the number of coat hangers I’ve returned to Patti when I visit to set a new order in train! Over the years she has been so accommodating…even making some with additional length from time to time for those who love the dress but truly felt it was still too short for them…even after I lengthened the hem by several centimetres from the original! Sure…even I’m older now than when this all began!
From the outset though, each sleeve and hem ‘pleat’ detail has incorporated the selvedge edge from whichever batch the linen has come. Some have been more colourful than others, but they each represent the batch, making each dress unique.
I have a sad feeling though, that the dress chapter is coming to an end. I had no idea when Patti called just a few weeks ago, to tell me her decision to close the business, that the batch I currently have is likely the last (her last anyway). I also had no idea the Axels were about to invite me to take dresses to their shop in Queen Street tomorrow, by way of making a fuss as their contribution to the Woollahra Festival. Which in itself is a trip down memory lane for me…the old Queen Street Fair of my childhood was something my school friends and I would save pocket money for, and was perhaps one of the first activities we were allowed to attend when our parents allowed us to roam around free of supervision! So Queen Street Woollahra, has long been a feature of my life. No more so than the late 80’s / early 90’s when the top end was Decorator land - with fabric houses and antique shops outnumbering other businesses. Indeed….Axel Mano occupy the very same space that once housed Colefax & Fowler - which was always my first stop on a work-day visit to Sydney; where Clemmie spent many a happy hour (before she was of school age) hiding between the huge drops of chintz hanging from the ceiling, while I put together ideas to present to clients.
Funny…how so many threads can come unexpectedly…full circle. I don’t feel like it’s quite the end for the dress though! Already I’ve worn my ‘denim’ blue three times and washed it twice this week! Change the shoes, change the mood - once with loafers and silk scarf (smart), once with converse sneakers (decorating on the coast) and I’m guessing tomorrow, given the prediction…after a quick iron tonight, I’ll be wearing it with wellies! With ballet pumps - it goes to dinner. I have a friend in the UK with a glorious clothing company, who copied it for a summer season - she amplified some of the features, made it in a floral and it looked sensational in the photos (sadly I couldn’t afford to buy one!). I hope anyway…that the dress hasn’t quite yet come to the end of the road. But if you’d like to get your hands on one…they are in limited supply and I fully intend to put a couple away for myself!
By the by…in attempting to put together a reel for instagram earlier this week (a challenge to say the least and on checking a couple of hours after I thought I’d successfully uploaded it and imagined it done and dusted, I noticed to my horror that the app had installed blocks of text over the images with the lyrics of the song I’d chosen to accompany them, and also altered the version of the song - it had a completely different rhythm! I mean really….after all that effort????!!!!). But I mention it here only because…the result of the search for a song had me (and Clemmie) in such peals of laughter! And it may have you doing the same…
For the purpose of my visit to Axel Mano (dresses aside) is, of course HATS. AXEL MANO HATS which make another story altogether! So I went googling to see if I could find a song that referred to hats (as I could not think of any off the top of my head!). Only children’s songs popped up and they did not seem quite right. I messaged Axel Mano to ask if they knew of any ‘hat’ songs. (The obvious one also, does not seem appropriate). No, they couldn’t think of any either. “Why don’t you try googling French hat song?” suggested Clemmie. Well of course! What was I thinking? Naturellement! Bien sûr…the French have the perfect song! And as we watched an old clip of Sacha Distel animatedly sing his way through Mon Beau Chapeau, our faces crumpled with delight! So silly…so charming…oh so funny! (But maybe we have a peculiar sense of humour?). Oh how my Mum would have loved all this…and there’s probably an old Sacha Distel record of hers right here, hiding in one of the piles I’ve yet to go through. These are the days I regret her decision to move to England. Needless to say I’ve had Sacha’s voice on natty replay in my head ever since! Mon Beau Chapeau…and I don’t mind at all if this hat and dress business reaches a crescendo tomorrow…after that, no doubt the excitement will dissipate…life will return to normal. I’ll continue to put my hat on my head each time I step off the verandah and don my dress each time I need!
I did have so much to tell you this week too, of produce and planting. I’ll complete the productive notes below of course…because it’s imperative that as productive gardeners we keep up. The season is moving on!
What a funny post today. I hope though, that my ramblings convey a sense of time and place. Each of our fragments of memory contribute a microcosm to the colour of a place in time that can never quite be recaptured, though may resonate with some of you who are of a similar vintage. I was in the city proper a couple of weeks ago, and there’s a lot of building work occurring, which in turn has prompted a slew of huge black and white images of an earlier city of Sydney to be displayed around the sites. I smiled to myself, at the image of a number 327 bus on Elizabeth Street…
If you’re in Sydney, although they say it’s going to be wet…do don your wellies and come and visit Axel Mano at 46 Queen Street, Woollahra tomorrow! Susie, Graham and I would love to see you! And if I can just get this finished…I might try to whip up a Chesnut Flour, Rosemary, Raisin & Pine Nut Cake to take along to share!
With warmest wishes
Mickey x
Productive garden notes:
Eating from the garden:
Potatoes (stored in the cellar), onions, garlic (have been hanging in the potting shed since dug late last year), aubergines, zucchinis, tomatoes, coloured chard and spinach, lettuce (finished the old and carefully prising early leaves from the new), rocket, red elk mustard (is back…popping up all over). Basil, lovage, mint, rosemary, thyme, chives. Calendula and nasturtium petals have returned and…a flush of fine, new, pale green nasturtium leaves popped up with the rain (I find them too strong once the colour deepens but when apple green, they are tangy, though mild). I once had an older visitor to the garden who assured me she ate bread, butter and nasturtium leaf sandwiches as a young girl…I haven’t done so but I’ll hazard a guess they’d be delicious!
Going / gone: beans, potatoes, fruits of the Jelly Wine palm
Seed saving: parsnip
Sowing: peas, broad beans, cima di rapa, carrot, beetroot, parsnip (if we ate them, turnips but I decided a few years ago to skip growing them)
Planting: brassicas (kale, cavolo nero, cabbage, broccoli, kohl rabi, cauliflower), lettuce, radicchio, fennel (bulbing) and bok choy seedlings, leeks. With round one of all these in the ground for a month, I planted the next round earlier this week. I want to plant out the flowering Stock I sowed into punnets but have yet to make space. I’ll talk more about all of this in next week’s post
Ornamental garden notes:
Picking for the house: frangipanis, tansy, dahlias, Cottonwood hibiscus, amaranth, ginger
Perfumes and aromas: frangipani, nicotiana, more buds of white flowering ginger have opened, but I haven’t been anywhere near the pool to know if the Osmanthus fragrans is still doing its thing! I can see the night scented Jessamine is still in flower, but the perfume is less obvious with the cooler evenings…so lucky we had visitors to stay last week when the nights were still languid and summery…
Pruning and other: The great olive pruning has continued all week for Thalia, as well as weeding the Park trees. I did all the kitchen garden tweaking and tying on Saturday, then planted out in the Kitchen Garden on Monday…
And I love you in your dresses dear India. So we're all happy 🥰 And we all love our Axel Mano hats 👒
Well...on the hats we can agree Sally!!!! I won't excommunicate you - promise!