Fashion
Grandma Dagmar’s Fashion Tips
An ode to a DIY fashion icon from her granddaughter
Grandma Dagmar grew up with a mother who believed that boys were more important than girls, and I have a feeling that my grandma’s sense of independence started there.
The photo above is her senior picture from high school. She was in high school in the 1930s, and everyone called her Jean because she looked a lot like Jean Harlow, a Hollywood actress who was very famous at the time.
When I was a kid, one time she showed me her high school yearbook and how her friends had signed “Dear Jean…” alongside the compliments they’d given her and the “See you this summer!” promises they’d made.
She was a true original. Throughout my childhood and until the day she died at age 96, I never saw her without her hair done up in a tall, carefully sprayed style. Not a beehive, but a couple inches taller than other hairsprayed styles that I’ve seen.
She wore shoes with a thick sole or heel, to give herself more height. She always claimed to be “five foot two / eyes of blue” like the old song, but she owed a couple inches to her shoes as well as her hairdo.
If she’d had the money, she’d have bought herself new clothes more often. As it was, she took good care of the clothes she had, and dressed them up with costume jewelry. I remember one year around the holidays my parents bought her a beautiful red wool coat, and she always wore it on special occasions after that.
She wore one ring, a deep purple amethyst in a simple setting she had made for herself. At Christmas, she always wore red enamel jewelry in the shape of poinsettia flowers: earrings, a necklace, and pins.
She told me that when it came to fashion, she always wore what she liked and what she felt looked good on her, not what the trends were. This is the crux of her fashion advice.
Her more specific advice to me was to wear more colors. Once I became a teenager, I started wearing a lot of black, so anytime she saw me wearing something more colorful, she’d tell me how good it looked and how I ought to wear it more.
She herself wore a lot of black as she felt it looked good on her, and let’s be honest, we both knew it was slimming. I inherited her body type, and just as she loved her black fuzzy sweater and wide leg slacks, I love my black button down shirt and black jeans. And maybe we both got the idea that an uninterrupted line of black made us look a little taller, too.
There’s a difference between feeling ashamed of your body and looking into the mirror and seeing yourself as you want to look. We both learned to choose for ourselves, setting aside whatever anyone else might have said to us and their ideas of what we were supposed to be.
Whenever my brother and I asked how old she was, Grandma Dagmar used to tell us that she was “39 and holding.” I was 39 the year she passed away, and when I turned 40 the following year, I missed her handwritten encouragement in my birthday card when I suddenly needed it most.
This article is a little different than the previous posts in The DIY Diaries, but I kept thinking about the idea of writing about people in our lives who have inspired us with their independent do-it-yourself spirit.
I’d love to publish other posts along this line if anyone else wants to share stories of people who have modeled DIY ideas to you. Please consider this to be an ongoing call for submissions. :)
If you’d like to be added as a writer to The DIY Diaries, you can let me know in the comments of this post or the welcome post which has more info about this publication.
