The Menswear in “An American In Paris” (1951)

This is a blog post that goes along with the most recent bonus pod! You can listen to the first 15 minutes of the bonus pod below, but you’ll have to subscribe on Patreon to get the RSS feed of the full episode (as well as access to our Discord). This might sound unreal, but one of my earliest and most distinct memories is of a particular day rummaging through my mom’s closet looking for presents. It wasn’t my birthday or Christmas or anything like that; I just had this wild notion that maybe my parents had left me an action figure or book somewhere around the house. Outside of one lucky find (around my actual birthday), I never did find any goodies…outside of a peculiar shoe made of patent leather and clicky-clacky heels and toes. I recall putting them and becoming enamored with each percussive step, dancing through the tiled floor in the kitchen; I was very disappointed that these magic flats did not work on carpet. It seems that my mom was taking tap dancing lessons, and after she…