Back to School Clothes, 1965

 

From this picture can you guess which movie influenced back to school clothes in 1965?

Another clue...

And this darling third clue?

Naturally, it is the movie that for five years made more money at the box office than even Gone with the Wind.......

The Sound of Music!

I remember seeing the movie when it premiered at Nashville's nicest movie theater in 1965. How I loved it! RH and I had only been married a few years and didn't have any children yet but if I'd had school age children I most likely would have been wanting to dress them this way for the first day of school.

And that first day of school back then was always the day after Labor Day, not some barbarous day in August when we would have still been at Pleasant Green swimming pool or Myrtle Beach.

I loved the songs from the movie, still do. You still hear These are a few of my favorite things on Instagram, don't you? I think one of the most memorable scenes from the movie was So Long, Farewell when the von Trapp children bid adieu to their house guests one evening and disappeared one by one up the staircase, cute little Greti  going last. And then of course when the song is repeated at their performance at the Salzburg Festival when they bid adieu to the audience and escape  through the Alps to Switzerland. 

But back to fashion! Here are two more fall fashion pictures from my August 1965 issue of Ladies' Home Journal.

 

 and...

 I see a slight influence of the movie in the second woman's dress, do you? 

Would school children today be caught dead in these clothes?

Do you think the style will ever come back?

Did you ever wear a dress similar to these, as a child or as an adult?  

 

September

 

Back once again, practically the whole summer season gone. While it's not officially Autumn, it is September and that seems wonderful in itself. 

I began Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal recently in its August pages and now have arrived at MacNeice's lines I first read in Rosamunde Pilcher's The Shell Seekers back in the late 1980's--how could it have been that long?

September has come, it is hers

     Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,

Whose nature prefers

     Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace...

When I read those lines of Louis MacNeice that Richard Lomax was reading to Penelope Keeling, and the lines...

And all of London littered with remembered kisses

I just knew in my heart that Richard would die in the Invasion of Normandy and that Penelope, at war's end, would end up returning to Ambrose, poor woman.

It took me until this summer thirty something years later to order MacNeice's  Autumn Journal but perhaps it suits my mood at this age better. 

I feel a little differently about autumn this year. At my age I no longer wish July and August away in a pell-mell rush toward the season that is my favorite, but I am ready for it. 

 

I'm ready to put a few autumn touches around the house, even the browning hydrangea blossoms that I waited too long to harvest.

Should I be concerned that these brown blooms seem beautiful to me?

Or that MacNeice's foreboding poetry of 1938 both makes me quietly happy and particularly sad?

That's okay, I reassure myself.

It is September and I will savor every day, maybe even sparkle a little bit the way the chandelier does on the Karen Adams calendar that my daughter Christy gives me each Christmas. 

 

I hope you sparkle this September too!