Holly Rose Swinyard meets Vintage Egyptologist Colleen Darnell to discuss Egyptology, vintage fashion and 1920s women.
What was it about Egyptology that originally interested you and how come you decided to take the fashion of the period on as well?
Egyptology is my main field of academic research, so I received both my BA and PhD in Egyptology. That interest definitely came first, and then over the years, particularly with the interest of my husband John, we really started to get into the vintage fashion and the vintage scene. 20s and 60s are kind of my favourite eras, as well 30s evening gowns, for sure!
When it comes to the fashion do you have the pieces made or is happenstance, because in the UK it’s often tricky to find that sort of stuff because vintage seems to be 80s now, so is your wardrobe actually pieces from the 20s and 30s or is it reproductions?
The vast majority of my vintage pieces are true vintage, from the 20s and 30s, and we know quite a wide network of vintage dealers in Connecticut and New York so we often go their stores or see them at vintage shows and even at events like The Jazz Age Lawn Party over the summer, so we often get pieces at various shows or events. Two of our favourite dealers are Noble Vintage Clothier and Wildfell Hall, are both out of New York, and they just have amazing pieces.
In regards of your style, do you find yourself being inspired by the female Egyptologists of the 20s and 30s or is it more of an old Hollywood vibe? Where do you find that love for the fashion comes from?
It works really well that Egyptology was so prominent in the 1920s and there are some very important female Egyptologists, like Nina de Garis-Davies, who did some of the more important artistic recordings of Theban tombs. They’re still the best and most accurate records of these gorgeous paintings from roughly about thirty-four hundred years ago. What she did was incredible! And she worked with her husband, so that’s kind of fun. There was also Natacha Rambova, who was married to Rudolf Valentino, and was actually responsible for creating Valentino’s star status essentially, his kind of look. She got into Egyptology in the 40s and 50s and also did some very important work, and it’s nice to find those connections but even outside of that, I love the 20s aesthetic.
Do you find that involving the fashion has brought more interest in your subject, because you teach Art History at Connecticut, since fashion is very tangible link to the past?
I think that’s a really important point! John and I were actually discussing this the other day because we’ve been researching some Ancient Greek fashion design. John is amazing at draping and visualising what fabric is going to look like in three dimensions, and I’m actually not very good at that. There was one time he picked out this gorgeous dress by an Australian designer named Camilla, and the dress really gives this 1930s vibe, and I saw it on the hanger and I couldn’t visualise it at all and he could really see it because of his study of historical fashion. We were messing around, actually with a sheet, so he could show me how a chiton, the Greek chiton, was draped because those elaborate Greek draperies and the dresses are one piece of cloth that they just pin and then belt. I have two dresses by Bill Gibb, a British 70s designer, and his notion of classical revival is phenomenal, so I definitely think with teaching and studying historical fashion, it does help because it gets you in the mind set of “what was it like to put on something that way” or how transformative was it in the 20s not to wear a corset or put on a pair of tap pants and be able to Charleston! You really can see the social change in the clothing.
Do you think that the social movement of women in the 20s and 30s was connected to the fashion of the period as well?
I think definitely. It’s too much of a coincidence that right after World War One and the economic prosperity, the right to vote in the US in 1920, all of that is tied into the fashion and women moving into the workplace. I want to empathize something, which is that some people confuse wanting to revive particular aspects of a period or style with endorsing all parts of that period, including prejudices and inequality. It is important with vintage to separate the joy of the aesthetics of a period from other aspects of life at that time.
There’s something of a parallel between the women of Ancient Egypt and the women’s rights movement in the 1920s, as there were lots of powerful women in Ancient Egypt. Do you think that there is any crossover there, since we see a lot of inspiration taken from Egypt in women’s fashion in the 20s, especially the flapper dress?
In the 1920s, in the field of Egyptology, not enough was known about the position of women to really say that there’s a connection there. Although it is true that in Ancient Egypt, it seems as though women had more rights and freedoms than in virtually any other ancient society. So it is interesting because you do have female pharaohs like Hatshepsut, but that’s not the whole story. My favourite Pharaoh is Akhenaten, simply because there is so much that we don’t know about his reign and he decided to radically change the form of solar worship in Ancient Egypt. Women had a very powerful role, especially Queen Nefertiti, in Akhenaten’s reign, and it is possible that by surrounding himself with Nefertiti and his daughters that he’s saying something additional about his role as creator god and solar god. It’s really neat to see the intersection between political power, gender and religion all together in one of the more unusual episodes in Egyptian history.
Do you think that modern fashion, as compared to vintage fashion, has lost something?
I guess what I feel is really different post 2000, let’s say, is that previously each decade had its own look, but also looked back. I mean when you look at Blade Runner, the suits worn by the female replicant is super 40s, and as crazy as some of the 80s stuff was, it still looked back to the 40s. I was in a vintage store the other weekend and there was this 1940s suit, and it was clear the skirt had been severely shortened in the 1980s and repurposed. I think it’s both good and bad that there’s no longer a defined style, because it means we have a greater diversity of fashion. But at the same time we’ve lost that sense of an era. There’s no piece from say 2005 where you can say “oh yeah that was 2000-2010 and that’s the style that defined that era”.
Have you ever managed to find any vintage fashion gems in Egypt itself?
I’ve never seen vintage clothes for sale in Egypt, but I have found some great vintage accessories in a store called Nomad in Cario. There might be vintage shops but I’m not actually aware of any but there are very nice designer boutiques in Cairo. Cairo is an awesome place to shop, I just don’t know of any vintage clothing stores. But I will say when I wear some vintage with the people who work with us in Egypt, they love it. I also feel that a lot of vintage fashion can appeal to people of any age, any ethnicity, that everyone can find something, that everyone can find something to celebrate in the aesthetics of the past. I feel like in Egypt some of our friends really reacted positively like “oh wow that reminds of when I was a kid and people wore that sort of clothing”.
I have to ask, do you have a favourite piece of kit that you take out in the field with you?
Oh boy, I can’t really think of anything! I love my Frye boots out on the expedition. The thing is a lot of archaeologists will have kind of their favourite trowel or something like that and we do a lot of epigraphy, where we’re copying inscriptions on walls, on cliffs in the desert so there isn’t so much like one tool that we use. And now we do almost all of our copying digitally with an iPad so the tools have actually changed a lot because we’re recording things rather than conserving objects like in a museum. One of the things I want to emphasise is that, while I like to incorporate vintage fashion into archaeological work, I do not stick with vintage techniques! We’re using some of the most cutting edge recording techniques, where we photograph the rock art, transform the 2D photographs into a 3D model, import the 3D model into an iPad and then draw the inscription on the photograph on the iPad. So I fully encourage the most up to date technological techniques for research.
