Puffed Sleeves & Shoulder Pads
Hello and welcome to Little Stories Vintage.
This is our first blog post ever & we are as excited about the blog as we are about vintage & thrifted fashion.
We are two women who love to bring vintage clothing to life in our personal collections & in our online stores.
Here at little stories vintage we travel far and wide to source a diverse range of vintage clothing.
We don’t just sell clothes, we live with them & get to know them. We mend them when they need a button or a new zip. We fix beading, take up hems, re-dye & bring life to vintage & preloved clothes.
If you’d like to find out more about us go to our profile page.
In this blog we will bring you fashion tips and historical information about clothes & trends. Expect great photographs & information from all eras in fashion. So bookmark us and join us every fortnight for a feast of fun and fabulous fashion
We believe that every garment has a story & we hope to bring you some of these stories in our blog
It was hard to choose a worthy topic for our first post. After days of fretting and worrying we decided to start with a simple fun topic. We wanted to showcase awesome photographs of fabulous fashion & what could be more fabulous or larger than life than a puff sleeve and a square shoulder pad.
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| 80s Houndstooth power jacket |
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| Joan Crawford the queen of shoulder pads |
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| 80s Taffeta evening dress |
Puffed sleeves and shoulder pads were very big & very popular in the 1980s. Taffeta was often used in evening wear & prom dresses. Taffeta is a stiff fabric that moulds perfectly for a puffy sleeve. You will never see a taffeta puff sleeve sag. Taffeta holds its shape due to its stiff texture. Taffeta is always shiny which makes it very appealing for evening wear. There is no era other than the 80s that taffeta has been popular. However puffed sleeves have been in & out of fashion for decades. |
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| 80s jacket |
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| 1980s floral dress |
As a vintage clothing seller & collector my observation has been that not many clothes from the 1980s come without shoulder pads. From power suits to summer dresses shoulder pads ruled the 80s. |
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| Joan Crawford |
the 1930s & 1940s. Joan Crawford, a glamorous movie star was self conscious about her shoulders & began wearing puffed sleeves & shoulder pads to disguise them. More than disguise them these shoulder pad details brought attention to her shoulders. When Joan entered a room her shoulder pads and ruffles entered first. |
The movies are bigger than life and so were Joan Crawford’s iconic shoulder pads
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| Joan Crawford in the 1940s film Mildred Pierce |
Shoulder pads can extend out further than the shoulder itself making them larger than life. Some say that the precursor to shoulder pads for women were the shoulder pads worn by American football players.
Shoulder pads can also be combined with a puff sleeve for a less severe look that is nonetheless striking & very feminine.
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| Feminine fashion from the 1930s |
It’s doubtful that in the 30s & 40s many regular women would have worn such decadent shoulder adornments as the movie stars. Most women would have worn elegant cotton dresses with delicately tasteful & feminine puffed sleeves. And many women would have sewn their own dresses.
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| Vintage sewing pattern from the 1930s |
Check out a range of vintage dresses & fabric at our Little Stories Vintage online stores
Shoulder pads, a classic icon! Love it!
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