a curated resource for designers, dandies, and historians
Thanks to Harry in the costume shop at Yale, we have some more of those red lapel ribbons! Ingres was our source, and we believe they are Legion of Honor medals, and at least on some of them, the ribbon is pulled through the button-hole on the coat.
Extra bonus – Yves Saint Laurent must have looked at the same research for one of the jackets in his “Le Smoking” collection sometime in the 1980’s!
I was in Detroit last week for a wedding, and I made a visit to the Detroit Institute of Art, which was nearly worth the trip in itself. What a great museum! A beautifully designed space with an inspiring collection of some real treasures. I hope for Detroit’s sake they don’t have to sell them. In an appropriate-to-the-weekend-highlight was this fantastic painting “The Wedding Dance” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1566). Of course I’ve seen it before, but not until it was in front of my face did I notice the amazing detail of this gentleman’s codpiece – with what appears to be a money purse in it! There are so few painting sources for codpieces used as pockets that they are precious to come across:
If you’re interested in learning more about that fascinating fashion, you can visit this video I made about the History of the Codpiece.
