transretrogurl

No rants on Covid, Trump or life in general, I promise, but a quick intro to explain why I haven’t written much lately. Actually I have, I have a gorgeous post about fetishes I’ve been trying hard to finish for at least six weeks, and given I normally sit down, bang out a post in twenty minutes, then carry on that gives you a little inkling into where my mindset is at the moment. The whole Covid thing is tough on all of us, but it’s tough on me, and in my defence I can’t sit in other people’s heads and experience their daily lives, because it just feels like I’ve been put on pause; everything I want to do, drab and femm, has been effectively made illegal and that, as someone who has spent a career in defending the realm and standing up to fascists, feels, well, a little fascist.

I understand why. I understood why coming up to a year ago. But that doesn’t make it any easier, especially when we get little hints of normality that fly away in a deluge of bad news. The reason I haven’t written anything of merit the last couple of months is that it isn’t fun; you start typing about lovely dresses and the wonderful experiences and it just highlights how damn wretched it is right now. Chuck in the fact it’s midwinter, which is the lowest time (and we have blue Monday to look forward to) and it gets hard to breathe, let alone do anything constructive.

So, pushing that aside and trying to embrace a new Year, hopefully one where at some point I get a nice 4888 base-pair RNA strand injected in my arm and can go back to entertaining my delicious fetishes in some way. And an aside; there’s a fantastic article out there on t’Interweb that describes the exact coding in the 4888ish base pairs and what they do, and it’s s stunningly interesting read; I’d link it here but I’m pretty sure people read this blog for the fashion and not the genetic-manipulation science (I’m more than happy to go through what they did with the vaccine RNA, replacing most T-pairs with the alternate pair to neuter the spike protein, added a tonne of A-pairs at the end to act as a telomere, I’ll stop now).

Right, whinge aside – you play the cards you are dealt. So, while I wait for Boys Will Be Girls to be legally allowed to re-open, at which point I will be in London so fast my petticoat will spin like a helicopter, I’m going to delve into the near-archive for some Frock Tale fun with the three sessions I failed to talk about.

First off is the first two looks I did at the session in September, when it was still warm (we had very good weather for the first two lockdowns, this time it has been consistently below freezing). They are both unique in their own ways; I often take a ‘warm-up’ outfit to wear as the first one to get into the swing of wearing a dress before we get to the fun stuff, but this time I dived straight in with a lovely dress that had been hanging patiently in my cupboard during the six months of ‘stay at home’ fun we had between March and July.

The 1940’s Hollywood Bombshell look

What a gorgeous frock. I actually have a couple of this style from Rock and Romance, but this pattern was delightfully Hawaii-en-esque and just felt like Summer in a satin fabric. Cindy had got a proper 1940’s blonde bombshell wig, that a very good friend of mine had a go with first (it arrived literally the day after I had a session in July I think, my friend was there and tried it to glorious effect – never thought I’d get the chance to enjoy real female envy but surprise, surprise, there it was; she looked good enough to eat, if she doesn’t mind me saying…), and I had some plan during the session to model it with some proper 1940’s femme-fatale outfits; in fact later on we did just that; Cindy darkened up the make-up with some smouldering eye-shadow and we did a whole ‘I knew the dame was trouble the minute she shimmied into my office, her doe eyes and pouting red lips a contrast to the tale of venom and spite she told around her ex-husband’ kind of way, but my plans to wait until later on in the session dissolved the minute I saw it sat on a wig stand.

It was one of the wigs you look at and think ‘I could never pull that off’. It oozed 1940’s era sexuality and sensuality and having seen it my instant thought was ‘right, I’ve brought a lovely floral frock that would work with that’, and on it went.

I love the effect of styled hair; in drab I have the same hairstyle I had when I was fifteen, watched ‘Robin of Sherwood; and went ‘yep, that 80s mullet will never go out of fashion’. Luckily I’ve spent most of my career and life in places where it hasn’t (looking at you, Darmstadt, Germany) so it’s been fine, but Sarah, she’s a different animal.

That hair just made it easy to do the pout, the stance, the atmosphere of the 1940’s starlet. It was easy to feign arrogance and barely contained sexual desires; the fabric of the frock was that kind of shimmery satin-esque that borders on constant static-cling, but the way it fell across the legs and moved when I tottered around on heels was a delight; if everyone knew just how delightful it is to feel bare shaved legs under nylons and the draw of a frock across them I suspect we’d all be wearing them every day. In which case they’d stop being a luxurious thrill.

Anyway, this frock leant itself to the cigarette and ‘I’m beautiful, worship me’ attitude for the pictures. For the record I don’t smoke; I don’t vilify it, both of my parents were chimneys, but as someone who has had amusing brushes with the Grim Reaper due to chest issues (self-inflicted mostly) I’m a little protective about the lungs. But for me the addition of a cigarette in the pictures for a 1940’s/1950’s woman adds a level of realism; back then it was kind of the norm.

Plus it’s kind of sexy, but that may just be one of my many and varied turn-ons….

The 1976 Housewife look

Oh, this one was a lot of fun for so many amusing reasons. I saw this advertised, again, on the Rock and Romance site, and was in two minds about it; I don’t have the most masculine frame in real life (starting off as a long distance runner and swimmer made my frame thin and my shoulders/arms never that muscular. I have thin wrists, even when I was going through my ‘drink my bodyweight in Guinness every second night’ phase, and these lend themselves to some of the looks and poses, but I don’t think my shoulders, especially bare, are overly femm, so I tend to avoid dresses and blouses that are sleeveless.

But I loved the style of this one; there was something cute about the combination of the Peter Pan-esque collar, the keyhole, and the lack of sleeves, so I added it, at the last moment, to my cart (and again, I do a lot of my femm shopping last thing at night and often after a healthy dose of alcohol; I have had to stop myself blowing hundreds of pounds on extravagant female clothing that my inner girl says would be wonderful but I know would make me look like someone had stapled tinsel to a fridge).

It also hung in my cupboard for a while; I wasn’t sure of the colour. Green works sometimes but you have to get the hair colour right. But when it came to filling a bag for this session, and remember that this session fell between lockdowns so I wasn’t sure when I’d get a chance again, this dress made it in by the skin of its teeth.

So, after the bombshell look I fancied doing something a bit more domesticated, and this dress said ‘1970s housewife’ to my inner fashionista. We decided to go for a more restrained hairstyle, and with the hair chosen Cindy helped me slide into the dress.

And here’s where it started to get fun. See, those buttons are hemispheres attached by a thin piece of cotton, and the holes into which they slot are loops of the same cotton material. It was extremely easy to put the frock on when I was testing it in drab, but then I had normal chewed nails. Now I had my, albeit sexy, red talons on, and so did Cindy.

Doing up the dress was a nightmare. We took a good ten minutes to get two of the buttons done up before we worked out how to do it without bending our nails back, and once it was done up we breathed a sigh of relief while inner-drab me was thinking…….. how on earth do I get *out* of this frock.

Again, due to my varied and entertaining set of fetishes the idea of being trapped in a piece of clothing was, well, a lot of fun, and that reflected a lot on the poses and smiles.

Spoiler alert – undoing the buttons was much, much easier than doing them up.

Anyway, the outfit worked; not my most popular one because a lot of the people who follow me on varied social media prefer the out and out sexy, or the proper 1950’s full-fluff petticoated housewife style, but I liked it a lot; the material, again, was a cotton/synthetic blend that felt like cold silk so swishing around in it really sparked off the nerve endings, and catching sight of the slightly provocative 1970’s wife in the mirror flashed off memories of seeing my friend’s mums in similar style outfits when I was growing up.

So, there we have it, a quick frock tale where I barely whinged about Covid. More to come; there’s a need right now to reflect on stuff we all love as opposed to over-analysing things we can’t change, so expect some more of these in the coming weeks until I get a chance to pack a bag full of wonderful outfits from varied eras and strut my stuff in heels once more.

Stay beautiful, stay safe and stay sane; stick to that trinity of ideals and we’ll all get through this fine.