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Kelly Doust

Kelly Doust

Category Archives: Fashion, markets & shopping

Fairfax interview for SMH, The Age & Canberra Times

03 Sunday Apr 2016

Posted by kellydoust in Books & films, Fashion, Fashion, markets & shopping, Inspirations, Publicity & events, Writing

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Book publicity, Fairfax newspapers, Karen Hardy, Precious Things, Ruby Star Traders, Sydney Morning Herald

A few weeks ago I had a lovely chat with Canberra Times journalist Karen Hardy about writing Precious Things. Here’s the resulting article, which was syndicated across Fairfax newspapers last weekend:

Kelly Doust’s love of fashion finds its way
into her novel Precious Things

Photo by Amanda Prior on location at Ruby Star Traders, Glebe

Photo by Amanda Prior shot on location at Ruby Star Traders, Glebe

By Karen HARDY
2 April 2016

Kelly Doust is the first to admit she has a weakness for vintage clothes.

She has always been intrigued by the history of a piece, who wore it, their story, and what first drew them to that dress or jacket.

“Ever since I was about 12 years old, I’ve been collecting old frocks,” says Doust. “I’d take whatever fashion magazine I could find to Vinnies and try and recreate certain looks.

“I’d find these amazing dresses which looked like they’d never even been worn and I’d wonder who the women were who owned them.”

But with the collecting comes the editing process – wardrobes “bursting at the seams” takes on a different meaning when it comes to fashion – and one day she was selling some pieces at a flea market and she found herself wondering about the new lives her old clothes might lead.

“One day I’ll write a book just like Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes, or the film The Red Violin, about a cheeky little frock who gets about and lives in more cities than I ever will. Wouldn’t that be fun?” she wrote on her blog later than afternoon.

A few weeks later, she received an email from a publisher friend asking her if she’d really be interested in such a project. And the seed for the novel Precious Things was planted.

As the author of several non-fiction books about vintage clothes, craft and recycling, including the best-selling A Life in Frocks: A memoir and The Crafty Minx: Creative recycling and handmade treasures, Doust had always dreamed of writing fiction.

“But I’m enough of a realist to know that fiction is a totally different process to non-fiction. I had all these lovely ideas and stories, but I didn’t have a solid plot, or any real idea of how to get from A to B.”

But then she stumbled across her hero piece. She was visiting her friend, artist Jessica Guthrie, who used to own a vintage clothing store, Coco Repose, and saw a beaded headpiece.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about it, it enchanted and inspired me,” Doust says.

“How many different adventures had it seen in its lifetime? It might have originally been a collar on a wedding gown, but then refashioned into a crown or a choker. It could have been worn as a bracelet wrapped around a girl’s wrist or added as a bodice detail to a latter-day dress. Or displayed as art upon the wall.”

In Precious Things, it becomes a collar, and we follow its journey from Normandy in 1891, as a young girl sews her wedding dress; to Shanghai, in the 1920s, where it belongs to a flamboyant circus performer; in the 1950s it belongs to an artist’s muse.

At the centre of the story, however is a totally modern woman, Maggie, an auctioneer, juggling marriage, children and a demanding job, who finds the crumpled, neglected collar in a box of junk and sets out to discover more about its past.

Doust loved researching the historical aspects of the novel, indeed is fascinated by how fashion reflects the changing lives of women through the ages.

“Through research I’d done for a previous book, Minxy Vintage, I’d already learned how intrinsic the link is between fashion and social change, and wanted to explore this further,” she says.

“It’s far more than just hemlines lowering or raising with the economy – the women of the 1920s chose to cast off the restrictive, corseted styles of the Belle Epoque in favour of a sportier aesthetic.

“This was championed by Coco Chanel in Paris fashion, but only occurred in the mainstream because women were finally entering the workplace and taking on men’s work.”

Doust is already working on a second novel which has many similar themes: family; women looking for love, direction and purpose; history and fashion.

“I think I’ll always weave my books around these themes to a lesser or greater degree because that’s what I love, and because the question of, ‘What am I going to wear today?’, is such an enduring, constant preoccupation for many of us.”

 

Running away with the circus

23 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by kellydoust in Art, theatre & culture, Fashion, markets & shopping, Inspirations, Writing

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Circus Factory, Historical Novel Society Conference, Powerhouse Museum

Merry go roundIt being school holidays my friend Jess and I decided to take the smalls to Circus Factory at the Powerhouse Museum. We thought it might be more fun for them than us. How wrong we were!

Wending our way through two lower floors of amusements, performances and other curiosities – including an authentic Gypsy caravan from the early 19th century – we finally arrived at the costume collection.

Gypsy caravan

Situated on the third floor, we realised this extraordinary archive of circus costumes and accessories was the lemon butter on top of a prizewinning cake of an exhibition. Definitely up there with a V&A presentation, it made me wish I’d bought a season pass so I could visit another few times to soak it all in. At AU$35, the one-off entrance fee is a bit pricey but hot damn it’s worth it.

I was so enthralled, an attendant was obliged to warn me of Olive running up and down the viewing paths, hooting at the top of her lungs… I was so totally lost reading up on all the descriptions, off in a fantasy imagining where those pieces might have been. Who were their original owners, I wondered, and where were they now? How had these incredibly hard-worn threads managed to survive all these years?

If the same costumes had been around while I was researching and writing my last novel, I’d have been in heaven. Or at least camped out at the Powerhouse for a week. I had to be satisfied browsing through books on Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes instead, and ended up scouring the markets, with only one or two really good finds to show for my days of toil. That was about this time last year. And I spent tens of hours lost in an Etsy wormhole researching vintage dresses and dancing paraphernalia from the Belle Epoque era to 1920s, without much success. It wasn’t a hardship but I really wish these had been around then, because one of the characters in my new novel is a trapeze artist (I may as well introduce you to her now; an Austro-Hungarian beauty who falls in love with the circus’ resident Strong Man).

My character started off being inspired by Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, but she definitely grew into herself as the writing wore on. Actually, it’s not fair to say the writing wore on at all, because at times she almost wrote herself. It was a matter of my fingers keeping up with her story – always a blessed relief when others seem so difficult to wrangle onto the page.

Anyway, back to the costumes. Designed and embellished and meticulously repaired, I had to be pulled away from these exquisite pieces (literally, Olive had grown quite bored by that stage), but I may go back soon. Here’s some of my favourites – the photos don’t do them justice.

Tightrope costume

Circus headpiece

Repair kit concealed under porcelain doll's skirt

Repair kit concealed under porcelain doll’s skirt

Capes

Send in the clowns

Send in the clowns 4

Band leader

Send in the clowns 2

Send in the clowns 3

History is what’s always drawn me to vintage clothing. So much more exciting than new things, don’t you think? Dangerous, even.

I once bought a fringed tan leather skirt from a willowy actress-slash-model, and she told me that skirt had seen some wild parties in her day. Whether it was the preface she’d given me, or something ingrained in the supple leather hide of that barely-there skirt, I’ll never know, but I went on to have a good few nights of partying wearing her myself. I hope she’s still making memories (alas, I passed her on when I feared I was becoming too old for miniskirts, but have since bought two or three… there goes that theory; today I simply don’t care). And my love of vintage is what caused me to start writing fiction with an historical element in the first place. I don’t know why, but I feel the inexorable pull of the past whenever I see or touch a vintage dress… it’s my form of catnip. That and Reese’s butter cups.

This is probably a good time to mention Australia’s first Historical Novel Society Conference, to be held between 20-22 March this year. What can fiction writers learn from historians? A lot, I imagine. I’m looking forward to hearing authors such as Kate Forsyth, Colin Falconer, Toni Jordan, Jesse Blackadder and many more speak on the theme, ‘The Historical Novel in Peace and War’, and will be thinking about what characters were wearing, at all times.

More on that later, but have I convinced you for the time being to visit Circus Factory? Make haste – this wonderfully curated show won’t be on forever.

Programme

Home again

21 Monday Jul 2014

Posted by kellydoust in Art, theatre & culture, Fashion, markets & shopping, Food, Inspirations, Travel, Writing

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Clara Button, Italy, Natural History Museum, UK, V&A Museum, Vanity Fair

Shakespeare shoes, V&A Museum

I’ve only just regained my equilibrium after an overseas holiday and find myself starting to sink into old routines again with pleasure and a little sadness.

Being on the road is lovely. Visiting new places every few days and catching up with old friends and family… It’s always a surprise to find I enjoy the nomadic lifestyle when I’m such a homebody at heart. I miss it – even the annoying bits like airports and disappointing meals. But one can’t travel forever (one can, of course, but I doubt it would suit me and we’d end up very poor!) so here we are, home again.

Tile detail, Bangkok's Grand Palace

It was a wonderful holiday. There were a few days spent exploring Dubai, a week in England visiting London, Oxford and tripping about the countryside catching up with everyone, four days in Rome alone with James (bliss), a week in Umbria with the extended family and another couple of days in Thailand on the way home, just us three. It felt like being away for twice as long. The key was to keep moving; nothing felt stale.

Roman rooftops

 

Special of the day: lunch in Rome

Our Umbrian villa

There were so many favourite moments: England was all nostalgia for me, my second home. Visiting my husband’s family farm in Somerset, wandering about the galleries in London with essential trips to the V&A, Natural History Museum and Liberty (yes, I’m a grown-up Clara Button) and a day in Oxford with my treasured friend, Meiling. Dubai was a blast of heat and strange luxury, Bangkok humid and delicious (oh, how we ate) and Italy was, as always, sumptuous, inspiring and seeped in the sort of history that makes my mind boggle. Get this – in Rome we were staying in a little hotel (a former Palazzo with soaring ceilings) opposite 2,500-year-old Etruscan ruins. With a bus stop and busy thoroughfare roaring only a few feet away. It felt like madness that it wasn’t cordoned off or treated with more fanfare.

Hairy fella, Orvieto

Country girl, Somerset

Drooling over designer vintage, Liberty London

After pouring everything I had into the novel I’ve been working on for the past year or so, I was feeling so empty; emotionally and physically drained. It came not a moment too soon.

Vanity Fair’s May issue featured an article about Salman Rushdie, and went into much depth about the circumstances surrounding the release of The Satanic Verses and the subsequent fatwa placed upon him by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. One passage struck me as very true: “One holds so much of a novel in one’s head during the years of work that when it’s done and the thing in your head evaporates it’s a little like having your brain removed. I felt lobotomized.”

While my novel is certainly not on the scale of Verses and didn’t take me five years to write, I have to say that I do understand how he felt.

Kelly Doust

IT’S COMING!

Next book publishedNovember 5, 2019
The Power Age, Published by Murdoch Book

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