Judi Quelland Art Collections

Retro Fashion

Do you remember back when women and girls wore dresses most of the time? You rarely saw women running around in blue jeans or slacks. They wore dresses to work (those who DID work, that is) they wore them around the house and to go shopping. The dresses were flirty, feminine and fashionable. Back in the 1950’s, when I was a young girl, my mother, Ethel Quelland, designed and made nearly all of her clothes and mine too. In fact, I didn’t have my first “store-bought” dress until I was about 12. Eventually the sketching of the dresses became more interesting for my Mom than the sewing was and her art career began. Painting grew to be her passion and her profession. Over the next several decades she displayed and sold her work in art shows from Cape Cod to Miami – and quite successfully. (Do I sound proud? You bet!) I recently rediscovered 52 of these charming pencil sketches and decided to share them. They’re mostly sketched on typing paper, most are pretty faded and some have gotten stained over the years. (After all, they are more than 50 years old!) I’ve cleaned them all up so you can see the lovely dress designs. I even remember both of us wearing some of them. Well . . . I couldn’t leave well enough alone and did a bit of digital tinkering on them to turn them into artistic pieces . . . those are shown here as well. These dress designs are very reminiscent of a different time when both women and men tended to dress less casually than most of us do now. I wonder what it would be like if these fashions were back in style today . . . hmm. I hope you enjoy them! By the way … my brother and I not only inherited the sketches but also the copyrights to these designs.