Collection of original illustrated sales brochures for the raccoon coats, beach capes, and cocktail suits of influential gay menswear designer Bill Miller's Greenwich Village boutique.
Very good plus.
Price: $950.00
"The average man would like to dress as smartly as the homosexual." — Miller
Christian William (Bill) Miller, research subject of Alfred Kinsey and friend of Auden, Cocteau, Coward, and Gore Vidal, was famously once the most beautiful man in Manhattan. Though Miller was a Fullbright scholar and photographer whose remarkable design career ranged from plastics research for the Coast Guard to advertising and stage sets to modernist furniture and menswear, his personal accomplishments are still eclipsed by his association with Kinsey and the many photographs taken of him by others: a cautionary tale for anyone tempted to be too beautiful or to have too many famous friends: "Paul Cadmus drew him, George Platt Lynes photographed him, and everyone wanted him" (Kaiser).
Described in one contemporary trade publication as "a testing ground for avant-garde men's fashion ideas," The Village Squire was co-founded by Miller with Frank Lawrence in the late 1950s and made its reputation by shrinking shirts, ironing out the pleats of Ivy style, and lowering front rises to dangerous levels. These collected brochures sell Miller's Italian-influenced hopsack blazers and fitted everything-else with a knowing, camp worldliness, while the Spring and Summer lines bring in an increasingly outré line of "masculine playsuit[s]," tapered knitwear creating "muscles you never suspected you had," and lace-up briefs in corduroy, denim, and leather, all illustrated on strapping young men somewhere in the South Pacific.
Read more: Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis 1940-1996; Cole, 'Don We Now Our Gay Apparel': Gay Men's Dress in the Twentieth Century;
(New York): (The Village Squire), (1960-1963). Four original [16]-page folded sales leaflets with black and white illustrations, with additional [3]-page "Slack Anatomy" brochure and one-sheet order form. Light soil and dampstaining to one leaflet; all others show minor edgewear only.
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