I get Dorothy comparisons all the time, and it’s not hard to see why with my penchant for red sparkly shoes and gingham prints. That being said, the good news is that it’s therefore pretty easy to make a Dorothy costume, and since the film was made in 1939 Dorothy herself is already vintage, so we don’t really need to give her a pinup makeover.
There’s a few different magazines around aimed at the different facets of vintage style and culture, one of which is In Retrospect. Launched at the end of last year, I attended the launch party in January with most of my British Belles lovelies, where we had a fabulous night watching a screening of a vintage style short film, meeting some new pinup lovelies, and getting our hands on a copy of the new In Retrospect issue. The next day all the Belles seemed to be reading through their issues as they each travelled home on their respective trains, sending messages to one another about how impressed they were with the quality of the content in the magazine.
Fast forward a few months and I was super excited in Spring to be asked by owner Mat Keller to be a part of their Autumn/Winter issue cover shoot. The theme was murder mystery/film noir so it took me all of maybe 5 seconds to agree to take part.
The shoot took place in July at two vintage themed railways stations in Tunbridge Wells, (for international readers, that’s a medium-sized town in the south of England.) There were four of us modelling for the shoot, pairing up to make two couples; Danielle and Ernie playing the innocents, and Tom and I the murderous duo. The clothing was provided by Chester Cordite and Revival Retro, and it was beyond gorgeous. Hair was styled beautifully by Natasha of Pretty Me Vintage, whom managed to give me incredible finger-wave style pronounced waves from the tight pincurl set I had turned up in. Consequently, I have since decided this is another style I need to learn to master. Continue reading
The first part of this pinup Hermione post focuses on the trip I took with friends to the WB Studio Tour, all in vintage styled Hogwarts costumes. While preparing for that event and ruminating on what exactly I would wear to be a pinup style version of literary badass nerd Hermione Granger, I found myself thinking up a lot of different ideas for this costume that could all be kept and worn again as my normal non-costumed self after the trip. I wanted something that would look school reminiscent when styled that way but wouldn’t be too uniform-feely outside of that context, so that I wouldn’t be paying out for something I wouldn’t wear again. Looking at all my costume options with that in mind got me thinking ahead to Halloween. Continue reading
Today’s blog post comes to you in two parts for a double whammy of pinup Hermione goodness. This post focuses on the trip I took to the WB Harry Potter Studio Tour in London with 3 of my nerdiest and loveliest pinup friends.
After meeting Kayla and Laura at The Pinup Picnic In The Park in June I fell in friend-love with them. Two wonderful, witty and sweet ladies, Sophie (my British Belles wifey) and I were both thrilled to discover the girls are big Potter fans just like we are. ‘Why don’t we do a Potter meet up then? We could go to the tour,’ it was suggested after we had all recovered from the Picnic. ‘OMG! Potter Pinups tour!’ was the response. It was almost immediately suggested that we go as pinup wizards. There was talk of representing all Hogwarts houses, or specific characters. In the end I opted for being Pinup Hermione, something I had been wanting to do for a year or so, and Soph, Kayla and Laura all chose to be vintagey Hogwarts students.
Casual Knight Bus ridin’
On the train up to London I couldn’t tell whether people were staring because they’d spotted my time turner and understood I was vaguely in character, or whether it as the usual that-girl-seems-to-be-from-a-whole-other-era stares. Once we got to the studio the states intensified–but that might be because Kayla and Laura were so excited they were spinning in their circle skirts and shrieking as we approached the entrance. We calmed it down a bit once we were indoors, but the staff immediately shared their appreciation of our outfits by handing us each a Potter Passport–a little booklet you get stamped as you walk round be studio, usually reserved for handing out to children. Clearly the Studio staff understood the calibre of the grown-women-children they were dealing with. Ha! Continue reading
It’s been a long time since I’ve done an edition of my newly discovered makeup faves, but there hasn’t been a lot to update you on as I’ve been mostly using my favourite products from the last editions on repeat. I have found a few good new products here and there, though, so it’s finally time for another round.
Another month gone and it’s been a cracker! This month not only did I host Jenny July, which means there’s a whole host of Jenny centric outfits to go over in this post, but I also had the pleasure of meeting Pinup Girl Clothing’s founder, owner and head designer, Laura Byrnes. If any of you have ever noticed just how PUG heavy some of my outfit wrap up posts have been some months and goggled at how much PUG that must mean I own, I can assure you that nothing was more difficult than deciding which pieces to wear to meet the Supreme Overlord of my favourite brand.
That glory aside, July has been a weird month of temperature fluctuations, with some hottest-day-of-the-year highs and some drizzly, autumnal lows, so this wrap up should involve a strange mix for a mid-summer month. It also features me wearing my hair up more times in one month than I have probably done total for the entire rest of the year up until now.
Click on the pictures for a closer look! You can find links in the description to any item that is still available to buy. Anything not linked is from a past season and cannot be found for purchase any longer and/or is not available to buy online.
Discontinued Pinup Girl Clothing Spanish Fan Print Jenny dress, PUG cropped cardigan in mint, PUG red sateen grommet belt, and New Look mint flats
We pinups love to get our glam on, so you’d think an invite to a wedding would be a lovely excuse to bust out our best finery and indulge in our utmost glamour. Depending on the formality of the wedding in question, the temperament of the wedding party and the guests, and the glam level of your aforementioned finery, sometimes, though, being a pinup invited to a wedding can be a difficult situation in terms of clothes.
The 50s style is feminine, classic and elegant, but it’s also equal parts glamorous, sexy and attention-grabbing. A swing dress that displays no cleavage and little leg can still easily make you the centre of attention by pure virtue of the fact that it’s an unusual style for anyone to sport head-to-toe these days, let alone factoring in the attention a petticoated full skirt is likely to garner.
In my daily pinup life I dress however I want and it doesn’t bother me to get stares, but as a woman attending a wedding I like to look both lovely and appropriate in the photos without being perceived as attempting to upstage the bride by out-glamming her or overdressing–never something I would do deliberately, but some people can come to weddings in rather casual dress, automatically making others looked overdressed by comparison. Given that, as it’s someone else’s special day, I prefer to dress as if part of the beautiful set dressing of the day as a whole so I can focus on sharing the joy with everyone rather than dressing intentionally to wow and then worrying if I’ve overdone it.
Thus, my personal rule with weddings for my own attire is that it’s easier to err on the side of caution and find a way to represent my true pinup self without inviting strangers to cast their own opinion. If you, too, share those same feelings when you get a wedding invite, I wanted to share with you my two top tips for keeping your style on point without unintentionally eliciting sharp tendencies in others. My two style rules for wedding attire is to dress sweetly or dress chicly.
There is absolutely no reason for you to give up your pinup sentimentality when picking your outfit for a wedding or reception, but if you opt for something demure or classically stylish then you’re likely to evoke a more wedding-appropriate vintage vibe than if you go full force for the glam or the kitsch. These days people are gleefully adopting fascinators at a wedding, but when you add a fascinator to a full pinup ensemble it can look burlesque and glamorous and fabulous–three things that the stylishly-challenged can get offended by. So, you don’t have to be scared of wearing a fascinator, but be prepared to have to tone down your look in other areas to soften your style overall. Maybe swap out your red lipstick for a softer shade, or wear a smart swing dress rather than a tight wiggle. Wear lower heels. Leave off the seamed stockings. It often only takes one tweak or two to achieve a quieter but still polished version of your usual look.
I’ve been to two weddings for friends so far this year, and I took a different dressing tact for each. To attend my friend Steph’s wedding in March I decided to go soft and demure in this feminine and wistful mint spotted Unique Vintage Garden State dress.
Unique Vintage Garden State dress in mint, vintage box purse, old Monsoon heels, handmade hair flowers
For those of you who may not know, earlier this year I began an Insta-event called Jenny January. Lovers of the Pinup Girl Clothing Jenny skirts and dresses were invited to wear their Jenny pieces during the week of January 12th-18th. I asked ladies to post their Jenny outfits on Instagram and to use the #JennyJanuary hashtag so that other ladies could check out their outfit combinations for style inspiration, to share stories about what their first Jenny was, explain why their favourite Jenny is their favourite, share why a certain Jenny print took a while to win them over, etc, and to generally chat to new ladies on the app they might not have yet come across.
It was a huge success, with hundreds of photos being shared, and at the time I was so thrilled with the event I came incredibly close to announcing that we should do it again in June. I put the idea aside for a few months, decided June was too busy for me anyway, and then when I was asked by a few different girls whether I would consider bringing it back during the summer J months, I cracked. Jenny July was on!
This time around the main week long event was July 13th-19th, and once again it was a wonderful event. Since January Pinup Girl Clothing have released 7 new Jenny skirts thanks to their limited edition Mary Blair line, so July’s event looked different, literally, to the event we had just a few months before, with MB dominating.
Below I’ve included a gallery of all my outfits from the week, with all the outfit and accessories details to come during my usual end of the month wrap up, but below that is the gallery of just a selection of the week’s wonderful entries, including a few of our little animal friends who decided to take part.
Being a vintage lovin’, retro-style-sportin’ modern woman already tends to mean you are more dressed up than anyone else in your general vicinity. It means petticoats and pincurls and red lipstick where other people are rocking skinny jeans and boyfriend cardigans and top knots. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the way we dress nor the way anyone else dresses, but because we pinups are already pushing the formality envelope sometimes our heart yearns for the truly glamourous, the achingly old hollywood, and our sensible side tends to tell us to calm down.
It’s one thing to see a gorgeous gingham repro dress with a huge gathered skirt, pockets and a cross strapped neckline and know you’ll wear it to the supermarket if you have to just so you can own it, but another to talk yourself into the floor length velvet gown with the flattering draping and the plunging back. We all know how that feels. You want it. It looks amazing. But really, honestly, realistically, when are you going to wear it? I’ve been in this situation plenty before, most recently in the Collectif changing rooms on a London visit in March as I stood in the velvet green Claudette gown, turning this way and that, telling my friends Sophie and Giselle that I did love it, and yes, it was a steal reduced to £37 from £75, but was I just buying it for the sake of it? Should I be sensible?
God no, they said. And so they should have! “Get it. Get it. You have to get it.” I didn’t take much convincing. And that’s no great surprise. Because I am a loud and proud advocate of wearing what you want, whenever you want. And I don’t just mean wearing a pretty dress when you run errands or being the most overdressed person in your friend group when you go out for coffee. I mean if you have to create an occasion to wear something you love, then you should do it. Not only because that means you get to indulge in dressing up and putting on something that, presumably, makes you feel incredible, enough so that it got stuck in your head in the first place. Also because in this life, this short space of time we have that is not only definitely not infinite but also of an unknown length for each of us, I fully support anything that means you decide to make a random, typical day or night special just for the hell of it.
For me, that meant telling my three best friends that I wanted to wear my fancy new gown and I thought it would be fun for us all to get dressed up on an early summer’s eve and wear glamorous things while we ate a three course meal by candlelight and fairylights in my garden, watching the sun set. Just deciding we were going to do that for the pure sake of my Claudette gown was fun and exciting, because I know any evening I spend with my best friends is bound to be a great one.
It’s been a couple weeks already since The Pinup Picnic in the Park and finally I’ve found some time to do a little write up of our day.
It was weird to finally be going to an event we had been organising and talking about since February–right at the beginning of the year my friend Giselle, who wasn’t yet my friend, commented on one of @thebritishbelles pictures on Instagram asking if we were open to organising a British event as an alternative to Viva Las Vegas for all we British girls who wouldn’t be going and would be jealously stalking the hashtag on IG. Way back in December when I had first met up with most of the Belles I had mentioned how it would be nice to do a public event in future where other pinups could hang out, as we Belles were already having regular friend days together vintage shopping and eating diner food. With Giselle’s request we decided we definitely wanted to make something happen, but with VLV happening in April we couldn’t think up a free idea that wouldn’t take place outdoors and, thus, possibly be in with a chance of being ruined by the great English weather that early in the year.
It was for this reason we chose to host an event in June, deciding upon a quintessentially British picnic. Holding it in London’s Hyde park meant it would be free and easy for a lot of people to get to. As of the day before we had absolutely no idea how many people would be turning up, as 600+ had RSVPd yes on Facebook but we considered that unlikely.
The pinups starting to gather by some excited BBs
Miss Amy May 
