Peacock feathers and underarm hair

The key to style is the unexpected.  This was a tip conveyed to me offhandedly by a college friend, whom i shall call, B.  "Someone has to wear things that make you think, 'Well I never!' and that," B. said matter-of-factly, "is good style!"  B. for example, was an expert in this field, and I, a child of the suburban midwest, spirit broken by years of shopping malls, had much to learn.  

I can still see her leaning her red head back against the railing of our porch and when she lifted her arm, I noticed how nicely her red underarm hair complemented her peacock feather earrings.  Underarm hair as a fashion accessory.  

In spring of 2003, as we were graduating and preparing to launch ourselves into the real world, there was a red and white velour romper from H n'M, worn for days in a row, proof indeed that H n'M is often ahead of its time.  B. was rocking the romper in 2003.  Now, after two summers of rompers, they are just beginning to wane. (And oh the number of people who can pull of a ROMPER, is, to be generous, 2 in 10? Maybe?)

I remember waiting around in thrift stores while she tried on and purchased items which were downright ugly. And she knew they were and because she was so beautiful, with the kind of alabaster skin and red ringlets and effortlessly slim (and I do mean "effortlessly"), she played, as beautiful people can do, a kind of double dare with the beholder.  It looks great doesn't it? said her tapered pants and large glasses, long before the Sartorialist was photographing big glasses and tapered pants.  And you to admit it did.

The key of course is that you have to be very pretty in a conventional way achieve the irony that is essential in good style.   Style isn't any more democratic than beauty.

Someone less likely to work in fashion than B., I cannot imagine.  But I can't think of anyone who had better style.

Some thoughts about FASHION, Andrej Pejic, Fashion Week and other things

Jean Paul Gaultier shows Andrej Pejic the love - Telegraph

This fall 2011, as the media forces my attention on yet another Fashion Week, the highlight for me is that a man, Andrej Pejic (shown), is modeling as a woman. Not a fact of striking interest in itself (although many editorialists are trying to frame it in such a way as to show the liberated, openminded mentality of the fashion industry), but it seems to affirm what I have always suspected: that designers really would like women to look like young boys.  We've been dancing around the issue for years and now it's done.

After all the inflammatory reports about anorexia among fashion models and halfhearted attempts to impose minimum weight limits, snarky comments by Karl Lagerfeld about "fat mummies" and brave ripostes by editorialists, designers have finally settled on the smoothest, cleanest way to eliminate those pesky hips and breasts:  let's use boys.

Everyone has a blog these days.  Until now I have avoided doing so because I keep my secret garden secret.  

The entries will be carefully edited, and while being as frank and honest as possible, I am challenging myself to also be discreet.

about the blog...

Paris, juin 2010

The title of the long-awaited blog, which is supposed to both rescue my moribund career and resuscitate my sense of myself a writer, is actually inspired by an excerpt from an Adrienne Rich poem, "Song," in which the poet describes herself as a

"rowboat ice-fast on the shore

in the last red light of the year

that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither

ice nor mud nor winter light

but wood, with a gift for burning.”

Of course, the poem starts with Rich's own loneliness and sense of isolation, and I used to identify with the Rich's rowboat,  but this is no longer true as I am in love, in my "année de coton" (first year of marriage) and living with in Paris, and I love him.