Samuel J H Froggatt

Old clothes and the communities of people that cluster around them, at cold rainy markets, in town halls and hotel function rooms, pawing at old lamés and and checking linings. Friendships built on foundations of petticoats and satin slips, garments and stories traded across generation and place. I felt so grateful for it yesterday at @clerkenwellvint , where I saw two dear friends from down west, @fenelasadlervintage and @scarletscarletvintage . Firm friendships found by collapsible rails, friends that anchor, and remind you who you are and could be. To effusive? Perhaps. But it really is true. I wore quite a lot, but then it’s unseasonably cold. 40s ‘Hike’ thermal, not visible. 1930s overdyed French shirt with trim detail. Date unknown geometric hand embroidered Chinese(?) jacket. 1990s Hannoh Wessel Harris Tweed jacket. 1960s highwayman collar pea coat. 1964 dated Danish army surplus wool trousers. With Comme des Garçons trousers worn over the top. Tatty shoes And Wolsey leather travel bag Christ that’s a lot of clothes.

Living in London is hard. So I’m doing another Instagram story sale tonight at 6.30pm. - This one includes some great minimalist and more contemporary designer pieces. - 1980s Valentino 1990s Jil Sander 2000s Yohji Yamamoto - etc. - It’s only a smaller one, I think 7 pieces. - See you then. - xxx

I’ve moved to London. I arrived into Paddington station last week wearing a deep blue 1960’s swing coat from @theladyevevintage and a 1930s soft wool felt hat in golden brown. I had a jar of my mothers marmalade in my suitcase. Please, London, look after this bear. I’m enjoying finding my place in this city. I’m staying for the next six weeks in Deptford, in a flat on the Crossfields Estate. The red brick buildings were built as early social housing in the late 1940’s, in the late 1970’s members of the bands Squeeze and Dire Straits lived and performed here, and between the 1980’s and 90’s it was known as particularly queer estate with multiple flats occupied by gay and lesbian groups. Though I’m not here for long, it feels like the right place to land. For my first Friday in the city I wore this outfit, a messy off-white assemblage of 30’s and 40’s thermals, Land Army breeches and Margiela jeans topped with a 1946 Military fencing jacket. I caught the train to Portobello Market, the canvas-topped jewel box where so many of the vintage sellers I admire set up shop weekly. For this little Dick Whittington, places like this are the real gold paved streets. I went from there to the V&A, where I have been coming since I was a teenager on school trips. My favourites are the Medieval Galleries, where The Hildesheim Cope, one of my favourite historic textiles, is on display. A museum feels like an inappropriate place to take a picture of your outfit. Despite the NPG just this week playing host to a fashion week presentation, and the halls of our major art institutions routinely playing host to fossil fuel funded late-night events, it feels that for lay folk these should be halls of deference and respect, not places for selfies, taking a call or making dance videos. In fact, this caption was going to be more about that, about ‘FitPics’ and making content in public, my own apprehension about it and the deep embarrassment I felt waiting for a family to walk past so I could put prop my phone against my bag and put it on self timer. But I’ve run out of space. I really should start that blog..

6PM 02/02/24 BIG STORY SALE NEUTRALS BRIGHTS BLACKS PASTELS 1940S - 2000S FROM £20

I keep a list of ways in which clothing can humiliate the wearer. The treacherous betrayal of pale blue cotton if the wearer sweats, a suicidal button that leaves the belly exposed. It’s a wide-ranging list, but underwear recurs again and again. Indeed ripped gussets and popped flies are humiliating *because* they threaten to reveal the underwear. On a nude body underwear acts to preserve modesty, but when it is revealed on a clothed one it only emphasises the existence of the thing it serves to hide. Deliberate acts of humiliation - giving someone a wedgie or pulling down their trousers on the playground - utilise the intercessionary role of underwear between genitals and outer clothing as a punchline. The joke can also be unwitting; when the greedy elastic of the underwear catches hold of trouser or skirt, disrupting the correct order of garments in a slapstick fall through the stage curtain. There is also a gendered component, which I dressed through today. The genitals implied are not my own, a castration which in the hands of a fratish hazing would heighten humiliation. However, in these queer hands it becomes a way to express a truth, that underwear, and the genitals they enshroud, are a marker of sex that crumbles at the complexity of gender - how it is felt and how it is expressed. Sometimes I start writing here and don’t want to stop when I hit 2,200 characters. Maybe I’ll find somewhere to write in more long form. I could certainly talk about clothing and humiliation ad infinitum. I’ll likely post another picture of this outfit, but here’s the basics: 1950s letterman sweater, worn over a rollneck and with a 1950s cotton lace bra pinned to the front. 1940s satin Twilfit girdle, worn over 1968 dated wool Swedish military trousers. #fashionhistory #underclothes #humiliation

What I wore yesterday. A kind of Breton biker/Rebel Without a Cause/Querelle de Brest type of idea.

Katharine Hepburn on the RKO studio lot, wearing blue jeans and a mink coat. [Feb 20, 1933.] Forever Inspiration. (Photograph courtesy of the Judy Samelson Collection and the Connecticut Historical Society Museum and Library) #katharinehepburn

A working outfit for a boy that doesn’t work. I wore this outfit to the disused church where and about which I’m making work. The trousers are 1945 dated Women’s Land Army breeches that I bought from @themarketcartel in Penzance. The fine button up underneath is actually a vintage ‘Pesco’ wool and silk knit all-in-one retailed by ‘Bobby & Co Ltd.’ in Eastbourne. The jacket is a 1930’s black velvet evening jacket with raglan sleeves and a decorative gathered bow at the back. The apron, worn about the waist, was the apron that I wore in art classes at secondary school, from the age of 14-18. When I left school my art teacher let me have it. I enjoy outfits that give an impression of utility awkwardly combined with elegance. A fantasy I often toy with when dressing is that of the debauched eldest son, on the death of his father forced to leave his bright young lifestyle in the city and return to his familial seat and charged with running a country estate.

At the end of August I moved to Cornwall, where I’ll likely be based for a little bit now. This moved has meant that I’ve finally consolidated my possessions from both Scotland and Devon, which has been/still is a pretty Sisyphean task. I have more than I thought I did and figuring out where to store it all has been taking a lot of time and energy. There’s been good surprises and bad, from discovering mould in boxes opened after over a year spent in storage to the blissful rediscovery of things I’d forgotten I own. It feels like a bit of a junction for me with this hobby/collection, and I’m faced with the certain knowledge that for this to be sustainable in my life, I’m going to have to sell more seriously, rather than just collect. So you’ve got that to expect/look forward to/dread. In the past weeks I’ve also found myself driven to make work as an artist again, a drive that I’d grown unsure would ever return, so I’m also trying to balance that, along with this, and searching for a new job. Perhaps it would have sufficed to say that I’ve got a lot to think about, and I’m a bit overwhelmed.

Collage made from fragments found in the bottom of a paper bag of antique fancy dress masks made by Raphael Tuck & Sons. My (abeit brief) research into the company founded by Raphael Tuck yielded richer results than I had anticipated. I humbly direct you to TuckDBPostcards.org , where there is an extensive and enagingly written history of the company. For my purposes, this much will suffice. Raphael Tuck was born in a town in Prussia, present day Poland. Jewish, his early years were devoted to the study of Hebrew and the Talmud. It might be considered an irony that on immigrating to England in the 1860’s, he would found a printing company which in time, would come to define the modern Christmas card. A director of the Royal Academy during the 19th century states that ‘Mr Tuck’s graphic productions were likely more effective than all the galleries in the world’. Tuck’s produced art prints, picture postcards (which enjoyed particular popularity in the 1890’s and early 1900s) among countless other printed products, listed in the print advertisement on the second slide of this post. Raphael Tuck & Sons, a commercial print company, defined the visual tastes of the western hemisphere around the turn of the century more comprehensively than any gallery or lofty art institution had the power to. On a side note, it is due to the lobbying efforts of Adolph Tuck that the postcard as we know it takes the form it does today. Adolph lobbied to have the accepted size of postcard in England increased, and then for the space for the stamp, address and message to be on one side, with the image alone on the other. Tuck’s ‘Half Masks’ were one of many products they offered, and at @relove.restore there is a paper bag containing several original ones. Though only one of their many products, the impact of this product alone is demonstrated by the fact that when you search for ‘vintage masks’ online, you are flooded with modern reproductions, not of a generic design, but of the designs created by Tuck & Sons. As they’re old the paper is fragile and a fragments have gathered at the bottom of the bag. I took some of these fragments and made this collage.

MARSHALL AND SNELGROVE. ASSISTANT: Ward FITTER: Galagher CUSTOMER: Radford DATE: 8 - 12 - 34/7(?) [1934/7(?) dated Marshall and Snelgrove faux astrakhan shoulder cape.] Marshall and Snelgrove is one of many dead department stores. It was founded in 1837 by James Marshall, a former shop assistant. John Snelgrove, who much like the founder was working as an assistant in what was at that point Marshall, Wilson and Stinton, became a partner on the retirement of Mr Stinton in 1848. There’s an ‘assistant’ - likely an assistant fitter, named on this label - ‘Ward’. You wonder whether they, during the economic turmoil of the 1930’s, felt afforded the same opportunities for upward mobility that both Marshall and Snelgrove had. Like many luxury retailers Marshall and Snelgrove struggled to survive during WWI, and in 1918 they merged with Debenhams. At the time this shoulder cape was made in 1934, Marshall and Snelgrove held a royal warrant to Queen Mary. Regional stores continued to open, but by the end of the 1970s the Marshall and Snelgrove nameplate had been dropped, with the stores all rebranded as Debenhams. Ending a 243 year history, the final Debenhams department stores closed in 2021. I was recently in Liberty, in the small and very expensive luxury vintage department. There I saw a 1920s jacket from the also defunct Bourne and Hollingsworth department store. I found it quite sad, finding a remnant of a department store that had perished in another department store that has survived. Department stores had a shining moment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, much like malls did in the 1970s-80s. Throughout the 20th century they have increasingly struggled, devouring each other in mergers, bloating then dying of indigestion. Places like Marshall and Snelgrove exist now only through the memories of those who worked and shopped in them and through the items they bought there, which seemingly, if they’re lucky, end up in one of the department stores that survived. #fashionhistory #1930sdress

[1934/7(?) dated Marshall and Snelgrove faux astrakhan shoulder cape] *featured in yesterdays post* The construction of this cape is fascinating, the silhouette contemporary in effect. The horsehair shoulder pads here are sausage shaped, like an internal Tudor bombast. The resulting is a defined shoulder preceded by a dip, reminiscent of a 1970s Cardin pagoda shoulder, or those shown more recently at Balenciaga. The hemline is higher at the back and plunges into a point at the front. This is a piece that speaks to its age in a tongue with many more recent derivations, Rick Owens, Ann Demeulemeester, Martin Margiela. Sitting both unmistakably in the mid 1930’s and completely out of time, it reminds me that vintage neither has to date *vintage* or adhere to some bland notion of ‘timeless’ or ‘classic’ - it can be a peculiar reflection of the fact that there exist atemporal languages which clothes speak in, if spoken in different times with different voices. (There will follow a more comprehensive post on the Marshall and Snelgrove department store, with images of the label, recto and verso.) #fashionhistory #1930sfashion #rickowens #martinmargiela #anndemeulemeester