Recreating the 1940’s …

Last thursday saw the fruits of our labour come together at our 1940s inspired vintage photo shoot at Avoncroft Museum, near Bromsgrove, Birmingham, West Midlands who let us use some their amazing buildings, we especially loved the 1940’s prefab.

Our photographer was the amazing Louise Holgate  who spent the day snapping away at our model, Helena. I created her 1940’s vintage look by creating Faux Betty Bangs and victory rolls in her hair and a simple 40s makeup. I will be doing tutorials on each of these looks in the near future so watch this space.

Louise quickly worked her magic and has produced some amazing pictures for us to have sneaky peek at while we wait for the collection to be put together.

I would just like to say a big thank you to Helena, my model, whose beautiful face graces our photos (you really can’t take a bad picture of this girl. Stunning!), to Louise for agreeing to be our photographer and taking these gorgeous photographs, to Simon from Avoncroft Museum, who stood patiently by as we set up shots in the prefab and lastly to Giulia Scrimieri, costume designer extraordinaire, who came to my rescue and raided her costume collection to provide me with an original 1940’s outfit.

We found out on our visit you can also get married at Avoncroft so if you’re planning a wedding, especially a vintage wedding, Avoncroft is well worth a look.



Faux Betty Bangs anyone?

Here’s just a quick little post to share two simple how-to guides that I found by Loreal for autumn/winter 2012 trends. Yet again vintage inspired hair-dos have been seen on the cat walk and Loreal have shown you how to recreate them …

The first up is what they are billing as ‘London Wave’ but it is basically a take on the wet-set glamour waves as seen in the 1940’s and 1950s. Go for the look on its own or combine it with some victory rolls or faux betty bangs.

The second video is for Loreal’s ‘Retro Revival’ hair do, which is a bit of a modern twist on your usual faux betty bangs. Usually faux bangs are created by rolling down onto the face to emulate an actual fringe but in this video they twist up and away from the face to create more of a quiff/roll.

You will notice in this video that they use padding to create the roll you can sometime pick these up in hair supply shops but is much easier to buy a donut shaped one (much more common) and cut it. Alternatively you get get a hair net and shove it full with your old hair from your hair brush but a) takes a while to get enough hair b)you can’t always get a smooth finish as creating a sausage shape with out any lumps and bumps with the padding is hard and c) is a little gross!

These are by no means the only way you can create each look but I thought they make great little tutorials and with a bit of practice they are easy enough for anyone to be able to recreate on themselves. You can even mix and match the two looks and instead of putting your hair up at the back you could create some waves (although you may want to section off slightly less hair for the faux bangs to leave more hair for the curls if you are doing this look).

Enjoy! Let me know how you all get on …