There's a clothing store in Lincoln, NE in the basement of the Rococo Theater called Ruby Begonias which for Nebraska is somewhat of a miracle. There just aren't many people living in Nebraska, there never has been. So when you want to open a vintage clothing store, you're hard-pressed to find enough stock to make your store presentable. If your storefront is too small, or too empty, or God forbid both, people aren't going to stay in your store for more than a minute, because they will have already seen everything you have to offer.
But somehow, Ruby Begonias defies the odds stacked against it. I have no clue where they get so much old clothing in such high volumes, but the stock seems to be constantly rotating. Granted, most of it is not of much interest to me. More than half the clothing there are women's clothing, so that's off the board. They have a few suit jackets and coats, but even if they were my size there's a good chance with the age they're made with real animal fur, and I don't want to be that guy. (Really though; there, Goodwill, or anywhere, all the sports coats and blazers are sized for either the very fat of the very buff.)
And when you realize what few men's pants they have are not my size, because around these parts European sized men such as myself are the minority, all you have left are the shirts. Now if you're a woman or wear woman's clothing, Ruby Begonias is in fact the miracle I proclaimed in the first sentence of this article. But for lean men such as myself, there isn't much to look at any second hand clothing store -No matter how objectively spectacular- other than shirts.
Now to their credit they have a plethora of men's shirts of a fine vintage in every size. And when I say fine vintage I mean it! At any Goodwill in town you'd be blessed to find anything that existed outside the current millennia, and sitting here down the stairs behind an understated shop window in an alley are shirts from as far back as the 1950s, and boy, do you have options! Any colour you like, in any size that fits or may later fit you. Long sleeves on the top rack, short sleeves down to the floor on the bottom.
Now me, I'm always on the lookout for the "costume" shirts. Ruby Begonias selection of men's shirts mostly range from the 60s to the 80s by quantity, but with most of them you probably wouldn't get many comments from people on the streets, because guess what? Nebraskans have historically been conservative sticks-in-the-mud, and we never bought any of that fancy Hollywood-style clothing, oh no! So many of the shirts at Ruby Begonias despite being authentically retro are a product of the culture the clothing is sourced from... rather plain.
Now me, I'm a big fan of the 1970s. Mainly the music, with the decade being the creative height of my two favorite genres: Prog rock & Jazz Fusion. But I also enjoy the clothing too, as moreso than any other decade in living history the clothing was wonderfully absurd. Double knit, daggered collars, leisure suits, sideburns (One day I'll get there!), normalized serial killer glasses, and everything had to be flame retardant because of how much smoking there was. And the wild idea that you would dress up in any of this, spending hours of your time ironing your best dress shirts and fixing your hair just to go to your neighbor's cocktail party. Don't even get me started on the design language in the American automotive industry.
Back to Ruby Begonias. After a while of going I finally found a 1970s shirt to my liking. Seafoam green, long sleeve, polyester dress shirt with a fairly large dagger collar. Not quite Dr. Peter Silberman's shirt from the original Terminator, but it's unmistakably 70s. Just how large is the collar? Using the terminology I found on multiple webpages which hopefully are actual technical terms, the key elements are
So yeah, pretty big. Here's a picture:
That photo is actually a screenshot from a lighting test for a video I intend to make once I have a proper lav mic. I'm thinking when I film the final product I'll go with a regimental tie in gold with cream and red stripes. The intent is to dress like I'm a cocaine-fueled infomercial salesman who can't coherently pitch the product he helped invent. Hmm, wonder who that could be?
After a while of owning this shirt, I started getting curious about its origins. The tag on the inside of the collar says JCPenney. Surely it must be in one of the JCPenney catalogs, then? Fortunately, christmas.musetechnical.com comes to the rescue, as it always does in such situations. The tag says "No Iron", so I thought that would surely be a selling point in the catalog this shirt belongs to. So I went through each JCPenney catalog starting with 1960 just to be safe, working my way to the 1980s. Armed with only the search term "no iron" and a hunch, I searched every catalog with that keyword until I finally got a hit.
It was featured in the 1975 JCPenney Christmas book. Case shut then, right? It's from 1975.
Right and wrong. I think.
It definitely seems to be the same cut as the shirts in the 1975 catalog, going by the distinctive curve going down the bullet collar, and the identical tags which looking throughout other JCPenney catalogs from before and after 1975 seems to have changed every year. But the difference is in the pattern. The shirt in the catalog is striped. Mine is a checkerboard pattern.
Pictured above is the scan from christmas.musetechnical.com. The disputed shirt is section B, 25 Green. It's JPEG'd to oblivion, but you can read the text easy enough to see it clearly says striped. And while you can barely make it out, there does seem to be a stripe running down the collar of the green shirt. Meanwhile, my shirt has no such stripes, but it does have this subtle checkerboard disco pattern in the fabric.
Yes, I did indeed run my shirt through my flatbed scanner. But that brings me to a recurring problem with this shirt: getting any camera I own to render the color correctly. Here's a picture of the matching tag I took with my iPhone 8:
Looks pretty silver, doesn't it? It's not even close to the color the flatbed scanner was producing. But I have a photo of me shot on Kodak color film, certainly that would show the colors better?
No! It's actually too desaturated! Oddly the closest any of my cameras has gotten to the true color of the shirt is the crappy 2009 digital point and shoot camera I took the "Jackson 5" picture on. I really can't show you the true color of this shirt, but simply put it's a vibrant but subdued seafoam green. Additionally, most cameras I shoot this shirt with barely show the pattern.
But yeah, that pattern. It's not mentioned in the catalog at all, but I thought maybe since the Musetechnical scan is so terrible I would be able to see if the fabric of the striped version also had the disco pattern if I had a high quality scan. So I set a saved search on eBay, and less than a week later someone put a 1975 Christmas book up for auction, sans the back cover (Dog must have gotten it.). I bid on it mere minutes after it went live, and one week later I won with the only bid. So, here's my scan:
And as I should have expected, you can't see any more detail because of the limitations of laser printers in the 1970s. But the question remains: where was my shirt sold if not in the catalog? The evidence seems to all but confirm it is from 1975, so maybe it was an exclusive for in-store buyers? Who knows. Also, I just realized there's a good chance this shirt was purchased at the JCPenney at Gateway Mall, which is still there. I should wear it around there just on the off chance I took it home just for a bit.
One last photo I should share, you may have noticed in the catalog the shirt is described as 80% polyester and 20% cotton. You would think it's 100% polyester from the sheen and feel, so where is this cotton located? Behind the button flap, of course. I have to wonder why this piece in even here.
Looking back over this article, I can see it's a wall of text about Ruby Begonias and a bunch of pictures of my disco shirt. I originally titled this article "Argot's Disco shirt" but clearly this article has outgrown that title. That's the curse of being an autistic in Nebraska, anything even remotely interesting gets me excited enough to write a full exposé on it. Next time, I read an outdated self-instruction book.
Argot
Page created: Thursday, October 20th, 2022
Last modified: Friday, November 24th, 2023