V&A’s toy stories

I spent the bank holiday weekend at my friend’s house in Southport, getting up in the face of various toys with my camera. My friends, Vince & Aileen (we’ll call them V&A) are the old and tested kind of friends who make holidays easy.  Nothing more extreme than mooching through Southport’s plentiful supply of second-hand book shops followed up by visits to the towns many and various café recovery venues.

V&A’s toys are an odd mix of bought-in charity shop finds. Yet a delicate layer of dust and worn patina makes them seem like authentic childhood relics. They look as if they have always sat on their particular shelves. It used to be that all toys were childhood relics. But collect-ability has made toys an increasingly adult pursuit, to the point where you have adult toys never meant to meet a small, sticky hand. And toy fairs where there isn’t a child in sight.

The rationale behind buying this selection of toys wasn’t value though, at least not the fiscal kind. V&A know what they like. They are arty types. The toys most likely radiated a certain something sat amongst the random selections of tat found in charity shops. They tweaked an aesthetic memory. Amused with a skew-whiff facial expression. Snuck up on a childhood memory. Were seen on TV once.  Or made famous as figures behind an advertising campaign.

Sindy (most of my generation had a Sindy or a Pippa – none of your other-world-glamour Barbie) came from a charity shop in Southport.  As did the Homepride flour man, red plastic donkey and wooden giraffe (at least I think it is a giraffe). The Bill and Ben flower pot man (I am envious of him in particular) came from a care home summer fete bric-a-brac stall.  The pottery cat pictured here (which crawls, surreally, up their bedroom wall) was from an antique fair.

The two wooden figures (one with a red top hat and redder nose, one with a rather startled expression on her face and a big red bow in her hair) were purchased in Paris on a rather glamorous 40th birthday trip. It was A and not V that was 40. I was present on that trip. The paper dog was a present from me. The feet belong to long-time sofa-bound Sindy dolls.

So they just had to be photographed and given a set on Flickr.  And (I think) the camera loves them.

Cheerio!

Having just had a holiday, the first thing I do when I get back is plan the next one. A self-perpetuated circle of travel thoughts.

And I just unearthed this paper tag from a pile of things waiting to be put into my scrap-book files (yeah, yeah it is that bad) and it exacerbated my travel itch.

I do like my tags.  The idea of giving someone a bon voyage, or in this case a ‘Cheerio!’ card or tag is something long gone, I assume.  Bon voyage these days means a proper emigration. Or at the very least a year off abroad.  Obviously this card was intended to attach to someones suitcase. To send them off, happily annotated, on their cruise.

This small tag is signed with the name Jan Lavies.  Now. I follow blogs by the poster-obsessed inteligencia. And Lavies was a poster designer proper. A Dutch one. He worked for several of the big travel companies, including the Holland America Line  from 1950 – 1970. So he obviously did a nice line in luggage tags as part of that work, some of which are nicely documented here. This card has ‘Holland America Line’ on the back.  I guess you got sent one when you booked a ticket for someone?  How nice.

Lavies was a stylish chap. He designed stylish posters, too, though in a very dutch manner – heavy on the typography.  But I prefer this little tag.  I like the shape, the way it unfolds to tell its story, the gasping orange-lipped fish, the happy sailor pulling in the message in a bottle.  I even like the string.

Obviously it never got used, so somehow never fulfilled its promise. It missed out on telling that extra part of its life-story, of what suitcase it attachted itself to and whom it accompanied on their cruise.

Yet, unused, it remains an object of potential, of holidays to come and voyages to be taken.  Mine, hopefully.

Under 10cm

A recent holiday mooching in Normandy provided lots of new things to look at. The landscape was somewhat familiar but the houses and markets and history were not.

A favourite visit was to the Manoir de Saussey. A lovely house and garden. Complete, when I was there, with a rather exotic artist sat in said garden, painting the scenery. Although not painting it very well.

The Manoir has a few exhibition rooms open to the public. One was full of fraying textiles and shell ladies. One had a display of antique glass in it.

But the other – the other! – two rooms of miniature figures and scenes that got my camera finger twitching. I love small things, models, toys, furniture. I like to see how much detail can be crammed in to one small figure. And I like the surreal images that sometimes result from photographing them. I did a set of models in the Science Museum. And now I have a set of Manoir de Saussey models, too.

The individual figures I photographed were lined up in a sage green taffeta-lined wall case. No idea of their provenance, my French doesn’t reach that far. But they were lovely, camp, Fragonard-esque and even a bit dark (see the ‘wolf and the lamb’ and the ‘ram’). The chap with his eyebrows was particularly memorable. They were all made in the 18th century and none were bigger than 10cm. Small yet beautifully wrought.

The other photographs I took were of scenes built in glass cases, mostly religious in origin. They were fantastic; layered with detail, paper buildings, glass bead houses, paper men, paper insects and glass people. Again most were made in the 18th century.

The combination of the setting of the Manoir, the sunny-after-rain day and a supply of rare, small, wonderful things to look at -  made this one happy snapper.

Fornasetti if you please

My first and only piece of Fornasetti is a scarf.  Being me, I’d either want a bit of textile or paper designed by him, so that’s OK.  I got the scarf a long time ago and it has remained in a bit of archival tissue paper until recently.  I finally got around to mounting it on unbleached calico. And it has just come back to me framed for my bedroom wall.

The design is a Rebus a ‘kind of word puzzle that uses pictures to represent words or parts of words.’ But it is rather feminine in a way I don’t normally associate with Fornasetti’s work.  He did do a fabric design called ‘Rebus’ on a yellow ground, but it is quite different. I’m not sure if he wrote the text on this scarf but I guess he hand-drew the words out.  The pictures are lovely, things from a boudior – slippers, comb, scent. I really love illustrations of domestic items and these have a very particular personality.

The Fornasetti signature sits in the lower left corner next to the Jacqmar name. Jacqmar did some great scarves in the 40s and 50s. Very middle-England, wear with your Jaeger camel coat sort of scarves. I’m thinking my scarf must be early 50s. I can’t find anything else about it. It’s not in my ‘Designer of Dreams’ book on him.  But I did hear tell recently of a cased two volume coffee table book on him. That might help if I can track it down in a library.

But for now I remain happy to have it on show at long last.

It’s in the bag

Of all the department stores in London, Selfridges certainly has branded itself up strongly.  Those yellow and black paper bags stand out nicely in busy crowds. Such a big shop with so many strands on offer in such a competitive market needs a big bold identity tying it all up.

I’m not convinced the bags denote fabulous content anymore though.  I find Selfridges is less and less inspiring to mooch around.  The fashion floors are pragmatic these days, with high-street names taking up most of the space. But these really don’t sit well next to the few expensive brands they still carry on the main floors. A handful of Celine beautifulness does not a fashion department store make.

Elsewhere in the store, those small, unusual accessories and homewares (awesome Japanese kitchen sponges, anyone?) have gone. Space has been sold off to concession after concession. Ironically early department stores developed out of covered market stalls.  So we go back to that pile it high and sell it (not so) cheap ethos. Is it really what the Selfridges public want?  They obviously think so. But for me it’s not so very special any more.

I don’t want to be all about a golden era of shopping.  If any industry needs to move fast, it’s retail.  But – like Mary Portas – I enjoy nice service. And people who know, and like, what they are selling.  I like to see an ‘eye’ behind products on offer. And if it isn’t my taste, I still appreciate a good display.  And I also feel more inclined to part with money to a nice shop keeper.  To be honest, buying online means you don’t have to engage with surly staff or feel like such a sucker for buying from someone who can’t even manage ‘hello’.

And all this results from my re-discovering and photographing a tatty old Selfridges paper bag? It doesn’t take much to light my tinderbox of retail rant, does it?

The bag seen here is small (about A6) wrinkled and from about 1929. A delightful illustration of two definite flappers – they’re always described as having boyish hair and no hips – promotes rather lovely bathing costumes and wraps. I like to think this bag had a small haberdashery item in it when it left the store all those years ago. And that it sat, complete with unused content, in a wicker sewing box for some 75 years.  Then a canny eBay seller thought to see if some sad shop-ephemera-spotter would pay a pound (plus postage) for an old, stained – and now empty – paper bag.

Erm…