Treasures From Yesteryear : Back when <i> elegance</i> meant plumed hats and gloves, Dona Evans collected. And now her stuff is back in style.
Dona Evans opens a faded gold hatbox and pulls out a billowy creation covered in ostrich feathers that has been preserved in tissue paper for 40 years.
Like a time capsule, the box and its contents recall the days when a woman without hat and gloves was not considered fully dressed.
Evans remembers the era well.
In the ‘50s, while still a teen-ager, she developed a love for glamour and began to cultivate an extensive wardrobe. Although her claim to royalty was limited to a stint as Miss Chevrolet and Miss Yo-Yo for Duncan Yo-Yos, she often dressed like a queen in flamboyant hats and gloves that matched her outfits to perfection.
That age of elegance all but vanished in the mid-’60s, but the 58-year-old Santa Ana resident had saved almost everything she had worn since 1953, including a few bustiers and bras.
Evans has stacks of hats--at least 50 by her rough estimate--in their original boxes. She snaps open an old suitcase stuffed with gloves of every length and color, at least 200 pairs in all. And an immense shoe collection, which has taken over her linen closet, is intact. In four decades, she has worn out and discarded only two pairs.
She has held onto all of these things for one reason:
“I always hoped they’d come back in style,” Evans says. “And they are starting to come back.”
Not until one of her friends encouraged her did she begin to unveil her treasures. She says she is thinking of forming a club with others who share her love of vintage clothing and hopes to loan her items to a museum for an exhibit. What she has could fill a small gallery.
She owns picture hats festooned with ostrich plumes dyed deep shades of fuchsia, royal blue or purple, and others with silk organza cabbage roses covering their wide brims. A turquoise garden-party hat with a square brim decked with silk roses is a real head-turner.
Among the purses she has saved over the years: funky foot-long envelope styles in such metallic ‘50s colors as pink and turquoise; hard plastic handbags, some with mother-of-pearl and metallic confetti inlays, and a tiny brass bag that looks like a miniature bird cage.
She has boxes filled with costume jewelry, including complete “suite” sets of matching earrings, necklaces, bracelets and brooches.
“I always wanted things to match,” she says.
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She has unusual pieces, such as a single leaf-shaped earring of thin gold-toned metal and faux pearls that curl over the top of her head like a miniature hat, or a leafy pair of black-and-white sequined clip-ons that extend above the earlobe instead of below it--designed to be worn with a swept-up hairdo.
Some of her ‘50s-era shoes look new, such as the clear plastic mules with colored rhinestones or the pumps covered in a floral-printed black and ruby silk.
Vintage dresses, most of them fitted sheaths and a few of them originals designed by Mr. Blackwell and left over from Evans’ modeling days, still hang in her closet.
“I still drag them out and wear them because they keep coming back in style,” she says.
Among old gloves filling bags: a bright orange short pair and an above-the-elbow avocado pair from the ‘60s, as well as assorted gloves in almost every shade of blue, from robin’s egg to royal.
Evans’ collection was born out of an appreciation for elegance, a word that turns up often in her vocabulary.
As a child, she played dress-up with her mother’s hats, handbags and clothes. She loved watching such old movies as “Gone With the Wind,” featuring actresses in beautiful ball gowns.
“I thought, ‘I would love to get into those,’ ” she says.
Evans grew up in an affluent part of San Diego, but she says her family was not as wealthy as many of the neighbors. She recalls envying in high school the girls with huge wardrobes. She can still remember the name of a classmate who had “endless cashmere sweaters.”
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How Evans acquired her inventory is a tale of hard work, determination and a passion for fashion.
To earn money to buy clothes, she sold flowers, washed dishes, knitted and sewed for others as well as worked part time for the phone company. She spent the money on hats, handbags and her beloved cashmere sweaters, items she could not make on her sewing machine.
“I sold telephone stock to buy a white fox fur stole,” she says.
A receipt for a blue feathered hat found tucked in a hatbox reveals that Evans never scrimped on her wardrobe. The price of the hat, purchased at Bullock’s in Santa Ana in 1956, was $62.40--no small sum in those days, especially for a working girl. Yet Evans quickly points out that many of her hats cost more than $100.
Evans always wore the clothes well. Although she complains of having “football shoulders,” her 5-foot-6 frame with its hourglass shape was tailor-made for fashion.
As a teen-ager, she modeled for the Fashion Quarter, a tony store in San Diego. Models were expected to supply their own gloves and shoes, which only added to Evans’ inventory. Through her modeling work, she acquired such gems as her Blackwell originals.
Now an income tax expert, Evans still adds to her wardrobe. She frequents Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom, looking for elegant merchandise. She saves the new items too.
Still, she misses the glamour of the past. She complains that people don’t “dress” anymore. Even Hollywood actresses look “trashy.” Few women, she says, have the elegance of Princess Diana (“she almost always wears a hat”) or the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
“Elegance is being lost,” she says, “and I don’t think it should be.”
