Costume designer Janie Bryant cooked up some excellent frocks and trousers before her fateful commission to dress the first 2007 television series of Mad Men. Her way with 19th-century underwear in the atmospheric, quasi-Shakespearean, wild west TV series, Deadwood, springs especially to mind. She wove unnerving poetry into the drooped frills of hookers' cotton corsets and bloomers, and pride thick as hide into the elaborate Sunday best and travelling gowns they dragged through Deadwood's mud and dust. The men also wore Bryant's grimy duds like extra flesh, or her discordant jigsaw of gentlemanly tailored bits like armour against the chaos all around.
Bryant's intuitive work on Deadwood was worth every gram of the most outstanding costume design Emmy she won for it in 2005. But you could not say it has whipped up demand for drooping bloomers and waistcoats with fob-watch pockets ever since. You could, however, say precisely that about her first costumes for Mad Men. They tripped a revolution that has swept around fashion, barely faltering for four years.
Next month, an exhibition at Chadstone shopping centre in Melbourne of original Mad Men costumes, titled Icons of Style and curated by Bryant, will again plug into our devotion to the era, to circle and pencil skirts, girdled hips, beehives, twinsets and torpedo brassieres.
Costumes worn by the mythical men and women of the Sterling Cooper advertising agency will be shown from September 8, in one of the Melbourne fashion events collectively called ''In Season''.
The organisers' faith in our Mad Men obsession is implicit and why wouldn't it be? Fashion is still peppered with frocklets that have skirts gathered on to the waistline, pencil skirts, tuckable blouses, beltable sweaters and swinging jackets. Dozens of designers, as disparate in taste and geography as Miuccia Prada and Alannah Hill, have evoked the era.
Mad Men nostalgia twangs heartstrings and touches nerves. A fresh blast of Mad Men-esque swimwear is due in wide-strapped brassiere tops, high-waisted briefs and ''pin-up girl'' maillots. The looks' impact on lingerie is also well into its fourth or fifth season of pre-feminist, girdle-like knickers and corselettes. We are without doubt besotted by the cartoonish glamour of Mad Men's core era but Bryant, speaking from Los Angeles, where she is working on the fifth series, admits she cannot explain precisely why. ''I'm thrilled, I'm surprised, I'm not sure,'' she says.
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