A Frilling Story

This fashion story is all about customising the clothes in your wardrobe – by adding bows and frills. Dolly even gives us Simplicity pattern numbers. Bedazzler, begone! The illustations, made in the 1980s, nostalgically look back on the 1940s, not only in style, but in the ‘make do and mend’ ethos of the war era. They didn’t throw out unfashionable clothes then – they refurbished.

Before Jayson Brunsdon was a fashion designer, he was a fashion illustrator – I wonder if he came up with the concept of this editorial, or if he was briefed. I rediscovered these pages, torn from Dolly magazine’s special supplement Making It.* 

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I love these illustrations. They strongly remind me of the work of Carl Erickson and René Gruau, who undoubtedly must equally have inspired Brunsdon. I also remember my mum had a Croatian sewing book with coloured plates of 40s fashion illustrations so similar to these. I loved them and often would flip through the book – I’m so sad that this relic of my childhood has vanished. 

Brunsdon’s illustrations are so evocative of a bygone decade that our present obsession with all things quaint, and retro, has infused with glamour. His black lines are bold and decisive; the colours so playful that it is very easy to ignore the fact that the clothes depicted are of the brash 80s – except perhaps for the fact that the colours are so bright they could have come unmixed from a child’s paint palette. Yet if one came across these in a modern fashion magazine, they would not look out of place at all. Delightful!

*There is no publishing date printed in the magazine, but going by the reproduction of an INXS concert ticket printed along with a picture of the band, it is late 1986 or early 1987.