The Scarf Moment has a new website!

We are excited to announce our new website: http://thescarfmoment.com/. Click on NEWS when you get there to find out which craft shows you will find us at, in Fall/Winter 2013.

Surrealism from the thirties

The surrealist movement of the 1930s extended from art into design through jewelry and fashion, particularly in the work of Elsa Schiaparelli. Here are two scarves I made from a 1930s silk with a surrealist influenced design. Biomorphism and microscopic images are characteristics of surrealism and these characteristics are apparent in this print that has the appearance of strange blood cells under a microscope. This is one of the earliest fabrics I've found and I've made it into a number of scarves with different backings. This image shows one with a sheer black wool backing and another with a teal blue wool, mirroring the teal in the print.

Tziporah at Bullock's Wilshire

I showed you Tziporah's visit to the old I. Magnin store in an earlier post. Here she is a few blocks east at the former Bullock's Wilshire, the art deco masterpiece which was thankfully preserved, and converted into Southwestern Law School. Tziporah is emulating the fashionable shoppers of an earlier era with her head wrap made by The Scarf Moment from a Valentino couture fabric.

Fuzzy thought bubbles

I come across some unusual fabrics in my search for interesting materials for The Scarf Moment and I count this print amongst the most unusual. It's a 1940s silk with a design that features what look to me like thought, or speech bubbles that you'd find in a comic strip. There are no characters expressing these thoughts and not even any words in these speech balloons. Just scribbles. A very enigmatic print. I've made some scarves with this fabric using a cashmere backing, and some, like the one shown here, with a sheer wool and silk voile that allows the print to show through the back.

More Douglas Ram Samuj Abstract Expressionist Scarves

Two more scarves made from rare 1970s hand-printed fabrics by Douglas Ram Samuj. See my previous post for a photo of Tziporah Salamon in a purple version of this design.

Abstract Art, by Douglas Ram Samuj, converted into a scarf, by The Scarf Moment

The scarf in these photos is made from vintage fabric designed and hand-printed by the late textile artist Douglas Ram Samuj. He was an Australian emigre to the United States, of Indian descent, arriving here in the 1960s. He established a workshop in Los Angeles where he made limited amounts of hand block-printed fabrics in abstract designs. In fact, his designs have a very abstract expressionist look. Douglas Ram Samuj fabrics are rare now and The Scarf Moment was fortunate to acquire this purple and black cotton, which we've made into the dramatic scarf Tziporah Salamon is wearing here with a Chinese coat from her extensive collection of vintage ethnic clothing. I have two other color variations of this Douglas Ram Samuj design that I will show in an upcoming post, and you can see some earlier scarves I made from Ram Samuj fabrics here and here.

Fantasy shopping at I. Magnin

Tziporah Salamon (our featured model for Fall 2013) and I explored what remains of Los Angeles' grand department stores on Wilshire Blvd. This is the interior of the former I.Magnin store just west of Vermont. It's now a Korean mall of sorts, but we fantasized about what it was like to shop there in its heyday. A shopper might have found a scarf like this one by The Scarf Moment, made from a vintage Italian striped wool backed with four-ply red silk crepe.

Winter white

Here I am, the Scarf Moment maker, in a wool plaid scarf backed with hemp silk, which is a satin weave fabric made from a blend of hemp and silk. This is a good example of the scarves that I make that are suitable for the wool-sensitive. You can keep the hemp silk side next to your skin while the wool layer on the outside keeps you toasty warm.

Channeling Huguette Clark

Our Fall 2013 model Tziporah Salamon is seen here on a visit to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in the West Adams district of Los Angeles. Tziporah is wearing a scarf made from a wool fabric with a fascinating houndstooth weave in cream and greyish brown, backed with sheer silk chiffon. The library was established by William Andrews Clark Jr. and named after his father. They were, respectively, the half-brother and father of Huguette Clark, the wealthy, reclusive heiress who died in 2011 leaving behind multiple mansions that she had not lived in in many decades.A visit to the formerly private library and park-like grounds, gives a glimpse into the lives of the members of this very wealthy family.

Tziporah Salamon for The Scarf Moment!

Our featured model for Fall 2013 is stylist and story-teller Tziporah Salamon. Well-known in New York for being a walking-work-of-art, Tziporah has been collecting vintage clothing for years and appears frequently in Bill Cunningham's column in the New York Times. She visited Los Angeles this Spring and I had the opportunity to photograph her wearing scarves by The Scarf Moment. Here Tziporah is wearing a scarf made from a vintage mohair fabric with a floral print, backed with yellow silk.

The Scarf Moment Fall/Winter 2013

Welcome to The Scarf Moment, Fall 2013! We've been working all summer, sourcing exquisite vintage fabrics and sewing them up into beautiful scarves. Wonderful fabric acquisitions that you will see in upcoming posts include some truly unique Douglas Ram Samuj hand-printed fabrics from the seventies, 1950s Japanese printed silk, Swiss and Italian wools in stripes and plaids, and a 1930s American silk with a surreal biomorphic print. I look forward to sharing these with you here at The Scarf Moment blog, at our pinterest page: http://pinterest.com/revoile/the-scarf-moment/, at craft shows (to be announced soon) and, in Los Angeles, at Simply Vintageous on Melrose.
Logo designed by Suzanne Stokes.