vintage nina ricci patterns
I have to admit I’m a little baffled by my own love of Nina Ricci — the name usually calls up words like “pastel,” “girly,” “frilly,” and “pink florals,” all of which, uh, are not words which I usually call to mind. Maybe even comparisons to Betsey Johnson, if she got old and slow and toned it down a few fucking notches from walking-gruesome-birthday-cake (PLEASE) and lived inside some discarded folder on the hard drive of whoever does the graphic design for Anthropologie, or maybe just in an old abandoned manor on the moors full of weird old four-postered-beds and music boxes with ballerinas, Secret-Garden-style or something, I don’t know. You get the point: this is not the kind of stuff that you see and think, hot damn, that is just so Meg Clark it kills me.
Even since Peter Copping’s even-girlier takeover from Olivier Theyskens’ Victoriana-woodland-gothic vision of the line, I still love it. The somewhat-anachronistic vintage touches from mixed eras — Victorian high-neck ruffled lace blouses, 20s-drop-waist silk minidresses, 30s-tailored long dresses, Edwardian button details, half-size lace, fingerless silk, or elbow-length velvet gloves, and cropped rockabilly leather jackets paired with classic t-strap maryjanes, witchy lace-up boots, ankle-strap pumps… I’m obsessed.
The pastels always seem ghostly and washed out rather than lurid and unnecessarily feminine; the ruffles always seem a little bit dishevelled, rather than tacked on as extra frippery; the hourglass-shaped slim-skirted thick-belted suits in muted wool and tweed always seem more “waiting for some gypsy train somewhere in Europe in the late 19th century or maybe some other world” rather than “frumpy politician,” and the over-the-top ribbons-and-feathers-girliness of it all seems tempered with something almost sinister. I’m sure someone else shares my lifelong obsession with Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (kids, I’m not kidding, I took a yearlong seminar on it and Paradise Lost in college) — Mrs Coulter, in my mind, is always head-to-toe Nina Ricci. (And is definitely not played by Nicole Kidman.)
So it’s no surprise that I was delighted to find these images of vintage Nina Ricci patterns — while mostly it’s just part of my fascination with vintage fashion media, it’s fun to note how some of the silhouettes have been preserved even today.
More after the jump!
