Which would you have been? I would have wanted to be the bad girl on the right, but I know I would have been the good girl on the left.
I know, I know. I’m the last person on the planet to see Mad Men, just nominated for 16 Emmys. (Season 2 premieres Sunday night on AMC.) So I spent more than eight hours over the weekend watching part of the all-day, first-season marathon. And can I just say? I so crave a martini and a cigarette right now.
I told my editor today that I wish the newsroom was like the Mad Men ad agency. Highballs after every meeting. (Would make the layoffs go down smoother.) Smoking at every turn. (OK, maybe that part I could live without. Oh, that and all the sleeping around with folks who are married to other people. And men treating women like they were stupid.) But an office water cooler full of creme de menthe? Way, way cool.
My favorite part of the show, just as with Sex and the City, is the fashion. The tight sheath dresses and even tighter skirts. The belted day dresses with big, round skirts. The heels. The gloves. The structured purses. (Guess what designers will be showing this fall?)
Watching the show made me think of my mother’s shoes that my sisters and I used to clop-clop-clop around the house in. Most of them were pointy-toed. Most of them had heels. Who knew that my sensible, Catholic, Montgomery Ward-shopping mother had apparently been so chic? (See what burping out five children does to a woman.)
As I got my Mad Men fix, I started to wonder what style I would have worn if I had been my mom’s age in the 60s. The sexpot sheaths? The plain, belted, best-friend dresses? Would I have been Jackie O or Brigitte Bardot? Something tells me I would have been Lucy’s friend, Ethel.
Mad Men makes the early 60s seem so glamorous. But I just read an interview with the show’s costume designer, who revealed this little tidbit. The look is all about the foundations, the undergarments, she said. All the actresses on the show wear girdles, those weird bullet-shaped bras, stockings, everything that women in the 60s were trussed up in before they burned their darn bras. All that structure “behind the scenes” makes the actresses stand up straighter, walk prouder. The 60s had nothing to do with comfort, she said. It was all about formality.
And apparently pain.
No wonder they drank so much.
glindagirl