I’ve been watching Grey Gardens nonstop for the past 72 hours. I’m unsure about whether these two women are completely possessed by their undiagnosed schizophrenia or the sanest women I have ever observed. In any case, there is something so enviable about total surrender to a life unaffected by the world’s opinions. I can’t figure out whether these women are my terrifying failure-deterrents, or who I should strive to become. Line after unscripted line, they seem to get life just right:
Big Edie: Oh, look. That cat’s going to the bathroom right behind my portrait.
Little Edie: Ughh, how awful.
Big Edie: No, I’m glad. I’m glad somebody’s doing something what they want to do!
I don’t particularly like window shopping. Unless it involves acquiring some of Géraldine Gonzales’ crystal paper jellyfish. The l’Ecole Supérieure d’Arts Appliqués Duperré graduate and super sculptress dresses Parisian windows for some of the city’s finest – including Printemps, Sonia Rykiel, Christian Lacroix, Hermes, Baccarat, Van Cleef & Arpels, Guerlain, and Givenchy. I’ve never wanted a paper flamingo so desperately. It scares me how I’ve managed to make even window-shopping cost money.
(Love the ibis and red fish skeletons!)
The 98-year tour de force that was the life of Bonnie Cashin left an enormous, oft-overlooked, inspiration-riddled legacy for American fashion designers. One visit to her website delivers to you a landing page that plays an interview where Cashin straight-talks about women’s design needs in her Kate Hepburn-esque chic yet all-business tone.
Born in California in 1908, Cashin was raised by a dressmaker mother and never received any formal design training. After a short stint designing costumes for chorus girls in Los Angeles, her carreer hit its stride when she took as position as costume designer at Twentieth Century Fox in 1943, eventually wardrobing over sixty films including including Laura (1944), Anna and The King of Siam (1946), and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1946). She used Fox’s libraries and leading ladies to develop ideas for “real” clothing and returned to ready-to-wear in 1949.
Her collections were a testament to her unsuppressable joi de vivre and fiercely independent nature. As the late and very great Amy Spindler wrote in her Cashin tribute for The New York Times:
To say that the fashion designer Bonnie Cashin was a colorful character is an understatement. Her clothes alone were so colorful that she used them, in open closets and exposed shelves, as her apartment’s primary decor. That decor blended beautifully with pieces by the designers of the day she considered her peers, people who didn’t make clothes at all — the Eamses, George Nelson and Isamu Noguchi.
Get the whole story »
The only fashion show I want to see.
I am in love with Mel Kadel‘s pen on paper illustrations. Part moral-based storybook, part sad and scary, they are perfect for little kids and grown ups too.
The gorgeous Sara Montiel is perhaps the hottest actress to have graced the Spanish screen. Born in 1928 in the Castile-La Mancha region of Spain, she was the first woman to flaunt her sexuality at a time when even a low-cut dress was not acceptable and went on to become the most comecially successful Spanish actress of the mid-twentieth century despite her tumultuous private life, string of divorces during the incredibly conservative and Catholic Francisco Franco dictatorship. Get the whole story »
As I was shopping for Christmas gifts this weekend, I realized that Halle, my youngest, didn’t have a proper copy of Madeline. I loved Madeline as a little girl, when Paris was still – literally and figuratively – a world away. So I picked up a copy. Interestingly, the author and illustrator, Ludwig Bemelmans, was the man that my favorite bar in my favorite New York hotel was named after. (How I never made this connection is beyond me, as apparently everyone on the planet was hip to this.) In any case, it makes me love Bemelmans Bar and the Carlyle even more. Get the whole story »
Dave Decat draws some of the most amazing caricature-esque portraits I’ve seen since my favorite Vanity Fair prints of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The 37-year-old Belgian illustrator’s portraits of tattooed, rough-hewn “men of leisure” are just insanely beautiful. He doesn’t have a website but he’s got a MySpage page, where you can see a much more of his work. Also check out his awesome reel HERE.
To take my mind off my boyfriend in Paris (during Thanksgiving!) I’m taking imaginary trips to some other capital cities. First off, Brasília, the spectacular mid-century seat of Brazil. The UNESCO World Heritage Site was planned and developed in 1956 with modern design diety Oscar Niemeyer as the principal architect. The city looks like Mies, Saarinen, Le Corbusier, Eames, and Breuer all took a few more classes and vomited all over a two thousand square mile swath of land.
At the age of 100, Neimeyer is the last living modernist design legend. The centenarian has been invited by president of Angola to design a new capital city for his country, four times the size of Brasilia. In a recent interview Neimeyer laughs, “Four times the size of Brasilia? So it could take four times as long -That’s 16 years!” If he took the commission he would be 115 years old at the time of its inauguration.
These days Neimeyer is apparently happy to sit around and keep in touch with old friends including Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. (He’s a member of the Brazilian Communist Party since 1945, and was presented with the Lenin Peace Prize in 1963.)
Brasília became the capital of Brazil in 1960 and is the seat of all three branches of the Brazilian government.
An awesome article on Neimeyer HERE. More pics after the jump. Get the whole story »
Syrupy sixties chanteuse France Gall was the quintessential face of Sixties French pop. The Serge Gainsbourg and Michel Berger collaborator released over 65 singles and twenty albums during her singing career. Though many see Gall as a purveyor of fast-food audio fare, Gall was actually the innocent vehicle for Gainsbourg-written lyrical practical jokes, resulting in a string of hit singles with hidden meanings that tarnished her image. Songs like “Les Sucettes” (about a girl eating lollipops) and Bonsoir John John (written to a deceased JFK and tinged with hints of necrophelia) caught her unawares and hurt the success of subsequent releases.
I love her voice, her dress, and of course that hair only French chicks can pull.
My favorite song of hers was the Gainsbourg collaboration, “Laisse Tomber les Filles” (“Forget the girls”)… Get the whole story »
