1978 : the Annie Hall influence

The end of yet another era




My V70 and I had a long winter last year, including a backward slide in the snow and a head-on deer collision...

...but our historical railroad research took us to some interesting places in the summer.

True story: not three days ago I was recalling how minivans nearly killed the station wagon in the eighties, and thinking to myself, "Thank God Volvo didn't succumb to the temptation."

Then today, I read this on Yahoo! News...

"Volvo, the company most associated with station wagons for the last 20 years, will stop selling wagons in the U.S. The market is drying up.

The Volvo wagon had been on life support for months. After dropping the larger V70 Volvo in 2010, Doug Speck, CEO of Volvo Cars of North America, told Automotive News he was giving the V50 another year because there 'is a bit more energy in the small wagon segment.'

Not enough, apparently. Volvo, which was sold to China's Geely in 2010, sold just 480 V50s last year, about two per dealer.

Other makers have been quietly dropping wagons for years as their customers flee to more utilitarian vehicles."

Utility, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. But this does prove one thing: nothing really is sacred.

For the complete story, click here.  

Reality check

Saturday, we were ready for this...

Today, it's back to this...

Down with pejorative spellings

Seen three years ago in front of a gift shop in Charlottesville, which closed soon thereafter. Hmmm...

Photography, lifestyles, and the 70s prep

We’ve all had to make certain concessions to the digital age.  It’s unavoidable, and up to a point I understand.  What nobody foresaw, and is so profoundly disturbing in my opinion, is the degree to which that fealty has robbed us of our choices. Analog television broadcasting, for example, is now illegal.  Land-line telephones are sure to follow. The reverence enjoyed just a few years ago by real-world bookstores and libraries is fading fast. Even early digital products such as compact discs and DVDs are in trouble.  But absent the marketing gurus' clever rhetorical demonization of the “single-use device,” the only discernable flaw of any of these technologies is their failure to line the pockets of the post-modern technology industry. Therefore, it is decided, they must go.



From a film print I took about three years ago. In the 1970s, most railroad enthusiasts shot slides.

On January 1, the last processing lab in the world that handled Kodachrome slide film discontinued the practice. The event would have passed with very little notice but for a Sunday Morning piece detailing the historical context of what we were losing. But being the format on which the most iconic images of the 20^th century were rendered, and at a level of quality which even professional photographers today admit is unbeatable, is no longer enough. Indeed, it seems to count for very little.

 

Stuart Hall students at Staunton, Virginia's Camera & Pallette. From 1972 Inlook.

Forty years ago, things were a little bit different.  For a time in the 1970s, amateur film photography and the support systems that facilitated it were big business. On one end of this spectrum, of course, lay Fotomat and its many imitators; but on the other existed a network of mom-and-pop camera shops and processing labs that operated at the local level in communities all over America. As professional-grade SLRs became more accessible and their ownership became increasingly part of the upscale lifestyle zeitgeist of the period, being the dealer who stocked and serviced the latest cameras and accessories and could teach his customers how to use them came to carry real prestige. Even Kodak itself, which could have washed its hands of its film once it left the factory floor, offered a start-to-finish lab service which not only developed Kodachrome slides better than anyone else thanks to the company's own patented process, but for an additional fee would also convert them into breathtaking full-sized prints, matted and framed to the customer’s liking.

 

Kelly green peacoat and matching MG. Once again, Nikon understood its market.



Apple Day at Mary Baldwin College, from the 1975 Bluestocking. SLRs in those days were literally bulletproof.

So have we once again traded quality craftsmanship for bling, gadgetry, and sleight of hand, or is digital photography a sign of egalitarian progress? It depends who you ask. Much like the death of department store service, it seems to me personally to indicate how the rush for instant gratification and rock-bottom pricing has gained us the world at the cost of our souls. As technology picks off specialties at will and makes us all into do-it-yourselfers, it has also taught us to care far less about quality, absolved manufacturers of accountability, and severed the personal connection they once enjoyed with their consumers. This, plus a simple nostalgic love affair with film cameras as objects of a lost analog age, has only made me more resolute in my devotion to print film for non-blogging projects.

That the circumstances have enabled me to pick up some interesting hardware hasn't hurt, either.







Fair Isle fun, 1977

Lucky guy.

Further adventures in creative layering

Recently F.E. Castleberry at Unabashedly Prep was quoted as saying that the 1984 prep school comedy Making the Grade is the one movie that has most influenced his personal style. Cartoonish as the film’s narrative is, aesthetically it would be difficult to think of a better choice. How can you not love the breakdancing scene where a roomful of Fair Isle and wool kilt-clad women swoon over the bad boy? Or the fact that most of the guys wear pastels and sport tucked-in oxford shirts layered over polos?

Having never seen the phenomenon before, this last item struck one commenter as particularly educational. Indeed, the oxford-over-polo look has been conspicuously missing from the current generation of preppy buzz. It’s in the movies, the Handbook, and all the other known documentation, so where has it disappeared to? Even some well-intentioned young people I’ve seen recently have the concept totally backwards, wearing the polo over the oxford instead.  To those of us who grew up in the 80s, this makes no sense. What if you wanted to subtract a layer? An oxford is much easier to get out of.  What if you wear your polo collar up? Over a buttoned-down oxford collar it just looks like a mess. And the folly of short sleeves over long should need no explanation.



Even a shy girl could be cool in the 80s with the right layers--to say nothing of two-tone jeans and Sperrys.

From about 1983 to 1985, the original interpretation was extremely widespread at my school, particularly among girls. One of my favorite recollections is of the girl who commonly sported the style untucked, but started tucking it in like everyone else when she got an Aigner belt for Christmas one year. Its androgynous nature and alleged “frump” factor probably makes it a tough sell in the post-modern age, but I always found it very appealing.  It was over the top without being contrived, the way multiple-polo layers or “go-to-hell pants” can be. And although it was seldom a consideration at the time, the style's practicality speaks for itself.

I may just have to be a trendsetter and start working this into the rotation.  Anybody with me?

Classics

Spotted in the parking lot after an oil change for the Volvo this afternoon. 

Steeler Nation

Professional sports these days are a mess. Between the thuggish, overpaid players, egomaniacal owners, ineffectual commissioners, and overhyped media circuses, it's enough to make one turn their back on the whole sorry business and not waste their time. And believe me, I've tried.

So when I sit down tonight to cheer for Pittsburgh and its controversial quarterback, I can offer no rational explanation. Sometimes, the heart simply leads down roads where the head dares not follow.

Let's just say tradition dies hard around here. And I'm remembering something nobler.



I hope everyone watching enjoys the game, regardless of their allegiances!

Making sure

Love-hate relationship

OK, it’s kind of like this.

I hate the 80s.

Let me rephrase that.  I hate what the 80s became.

Personally and aesthetically, I view the decade with mixed feelings.  After all, any era that began awash in Fair Isle, corduroy, and The Knack can’t be all bad. But considering the upheavals that followed, for good or for ill, it couldn’t last forever. Eventually, hazmat hair, stonewashed jeans, and Flashdance would all have to run their course. As Lisa Birnbach herself was recently heard to remark, "That was an ugly, ugly time."

But like the 70s reality that disappeared beneath the disco-and-pet-rock cartoon that preceded it, an authentic 80s culture which everyone remembers and no one talks about has gone largely overlooked, and included some relatively innocent departures from the preppy script that still make me smile in retrospect.  Remember the girl with the closet full of Esprit sweatshirts and Benetton rugbys we all had a crush on starting around 1984? Sure, she was logomania run amok, but unlike the many imitators who have followed, her wardrobe was rendered primarily in the name of good clean fun rather than in-your-face ostentation. And she usually paired it up with Sperrys, Tretorns, or penny loafers anyway.

Consequently, I seldom feel guilty about wearing this:

Swatch watches, as most of us know, were an 80s staple that crossed all boundaries.  Introduced to the American market in 1982, they experienced an enormous surge in popularity from the middle of the decade until the subsequent dawning of the Age of Killjoy. Still, the company itself couldn’t be killed: the variations on the design had grown too numerous, the collector market was too strong, and there were still too many people left with enough sense of humor to stand by the accessory long after the matching outfit had found its way to Goodwill. 

Personally I’ve witnessed a bit of a Swatch renaissance of late, if indeed they could be said to have ever gone away.  New Swatches are still being designed and made, and people of all age groups wear them.  I have at least two friends who wear theirs constantly, one of whom inherited a collection her daughter wore at prep school in the 80s. They run accurately, go with everything, and are great conversation starters. I often get comments about mine, and they’re the one 80s fashion statement I’ve never heard an unkind word about.

There are far preppier watches out there, but I can’t imagine wearing anything else.

Adventures in creative layering

I had hoped to post something more meaningful today but have been pressed for time. Consequently I’m forced to resort to shameless exhibitionism.

Affected? Maybe. 80s overload? Probably. Lovin' it? Definitely.

One of my favorite sartorial solutions for the winter blahs is to layer a rugby shirt over an appropriately-colored polo shirt, as shown above.  Indeed, rugbys are quite versatile this time of year, either as stand-alone pieces or layered over polos or oxfords (and in the womens’ case, turtlenecks).

I have a decided preference for the traditional awning-stripe pattern, and was fortunate to pick up a few different colors in Ralph Lauren’s classic-fit model before it was discontinued.  I’d like to see Polo offer this product again—it’s a pretty essential wardrobe staple in my opinion, and they always had the best selection of colors.  In the meantime L.L. Bean has made some structural improvements to their men’s rugby that are worth a look, and although the color choices are, as usual, woefully limited, they are rendered in fairly “collegiate” palettes.  Even more amazing, they actually have white collars.

I’m waiting for the return of the 80s version that had the eye-popping, varying-width stripes.