Mettler organized the book into seven tomboy style archetypes. I have a photo of her in her waders sitting outside on the ground.” But she also had a ranch in Oregon where she fly-fished and canned her own vegetables. “I always thought of her as Fred Astaire’s dance partner, this super-feminine, glitzy woman. “There are the obvious icons you’d expect, but there’s also Ginger Rogers,” she says. She consulted out-of-print fashion books and the Life magazine archives. I noticed a broad range of women, but a neat thread that bound them together was a rebellious, adventurous confidence,” Mettler says. “I was looking at everything from 1980s movies like ‘Some Kind of Wonderful,’ in which the drummer Watts is a huge tomboy, to photos of women skiing from the 1950s. These women include Katharine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich and Jane Birkin, as well as those we’re not so used to seeing in the style pages, such as Amelia Earhart, pictured after a deep-sea dive off the coast of Block Island in 1929, and presidential progeny Susan Ford, barefoot in shorts and a T-shirt in 1976, washing her car in the driveway of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Mettler had a particular interest in how tomboy style pertains to the past, “to women who pushed the boundaries,” she says. It’s not just wearing men’s clothes.”Īnd it’s not just wardrobe it’s substance too.

“Tomboy style is about a woman who channels her tomboy childhood, and mixes masculine and feminine elements in her wardrobe. By borrowing some of Kingsley’s things and mixing them with her old favorites, many of them borrowed from her older brother, Mettler found her own style vocabulary, epitomized by a shirtdress cinched with a men’s ribbon belt. In her research, Mettler realized she discovered her own tomboy style while at boarding school, trading clothes with her frilly best friend Kingsley Woolworth, who favored bubble-gum pink bed linens and diamond stud earrings. The book is a visual history, documenting 80 years of women who blur the gender lines. That blog, launched in May 2010, inspired the book “Tomboy Style: Beyond the Boundaries of Fashion,” which was published this month by Rizzoli.

Tomboy style lizzie garrett mettler