Rockabilly Entrevista A Coleccionista

POP CULTUREFASHION ART & DESIGNTECHHISTORY
Good Girls and Bad Boys: How to Achieve That Cool ’50s Rockabilly Look
March 4th, 2010
By Maribeth Keane and Brad Quinn

In this interview, Kim Casamassima discusses the rockabilly fashions of the 1950s and explains how the vintage rockabilly look has been revived and adapted over the years. She also discusses the stylistic clichés and misperceptionthat often stand in the way of an accurate understanding of the decade, a time when even tough guys wore penny loafers and pompadours were the exception rather than the rule. Read her vintage-clothing blog, The Girl Can’t Help It.

Jayne Mansfield is buried in my hometown. You could drive past the cemetery and see her heart-shaped headstone from the road. We had our own historical society, atiny little museum, if you can even call it that. I remember going on a class trip there once. Some of her things were displayed, like long sequined cocktail dresses and some of her little personal effects. That stayed with me into my adult years: “Wow, as cheesy as my little hick town is, Jayne Mansfield is buried there.”


This Carolyn Schnurer strapless and boned party dress from the 1950s ismade of medium weight Everglaze cotton.

My parents were hippies who refinished and sold Art Deco furniture. So I’ve had an appreciation for old things since I was a kid. I’ve been around antiques and vintage pieces my whole life.

I think the first classic 1950s movie I saw—I was maybe 17—was “Where the Boys Are.” I loved the campiness and the clothes. It struck me like, “Oh God, I love thosedresses.” It was a relatively short hop from wearing them to eventually selling them.

About three years ago I quit my “real job” in retail and started selling online fulltime. When you first start out, you assume the thrift stores are going to be a goldmine for vintage, but you end up buying things that don’t sell. So you move on. I’m at the point now where I place newspaper ads to buyvintage. I go to church rummage sales, hand out business cards and say, “This is what I love. Give me a call.”

In fact, I’m going on a vintage-clothes buying call this week. A woman said she had a cedar chest full of her grandmother’s clothes. That’s how I do business now, but you never know what you’re going to find when somebody claims to have old clothes. It could mean bad polyester from the ’70s,or really great stuff.

Collectors Weekly: What styles are you particularly drawn to within 1950s fashion?

Casamassima: My whole shtick is the rockabilly, bad girl/bad guy thing. It starts with the B-movies, the rock-and-roll movies, the hot rod and juvenile delinquent movies from the ’50s. The characters are always teenagers. They listen to rock and roll and tick off their parents by drivingfast, smoking cigarettes, and wearing their clothes a little too tight.

It wasn’t called rockabilly in the ’50s. It wasn’t even necessarily a lifestyle. The word rockabilly describes the lifestyle as we see it now. Back then, it was just teens being teens.

Collectors Weekly: When was the term rockabilly coined?


Novelty prints were very popular in the 1950s. This foldover-collar blousefeatures bowling pins with the numbers 1, 3, 5 or 6 on them.

Casamassima: It comes from the combination of rock and roll and hillbilly music. I think the first time it showed up in a song was around 1955 with “Rockabilly Boogie” by Johnny Burnette. It wasn’t really a word that was thrown around a lot back then. Rockabilly music as a genre never really took off, but there are a few very famousexceptions, namely Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis. But even their rockabilly heyday only lasted for a few years.

The word was revived in the ’70s. People were reacting against disco and some of the other musical genres of that time. They just wanted to get back to classic rock and roll. There was a ’50s revival then, and a lot of rockabilly bands started—Levi Dexter, the Polecats. In the ’80s, of...