Nostalgia in VOGUE

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Vogue Features Director Eve MacSweeney has edited the newest tome in the VOGUE's endless collection of archives Nostalgia in VOGUE.  It is one of their best. MacSweeney has assembled a collection of essays from the  Vogue column “Nostalgia,” and the glorious photographs  that inspired the writers all celebrated artists-writers-designers-musicians such as Joan Didion, Karl Lagerfeld, Joyce Carol Oates, George Plimpton, Patti Smith.



Fashion editor Phillis Posnick remembers The Mighty Irving Penn's studio from the 1970's and his relentless quest for the perfect shot-

Irving Penn photographed by Natalia Vodianova

 John Galliano paid homage to Brassaï's famous subject from the streets of Montmartre, Madame Bijou

Christopher Petkanas gets down to the House Rules in his 1992 visit with Sister. 

Adam Green gets insight into his father by getting to know his father's best friend & The Godfather- Leonard Bernstein.

Irving Penn snapped Leonard Bernstein in 1948

Dashingly casual in his tuxedo, sitting on a group of carpeted boxes

from Penn's Portraits of people of the "New York City scene"

The great Kenneth Jay Lane talks Living Out Loud-all about Vogue's Lifestyle stories (thank you Diana Vreeland!)

George Plimpton writes about his late night literary hang-out Elaine's in The Gang was All There.

  Irving Penn, 1971

Regulars at the restaurant, Elaine's, in Manhattan, including, front row left to right: Arthur Kopit, Jack Gelber, George Plimpton and Gay Talese; second row, seated: Willie Morris, Jack Richardson, Elaine Kaufman, Christopher Cerf, David Halberstram; third row: Nicholas Pileggi, Robert Brown, Jean-Pierre Rassam (center), and Bernard Farber (far right); back row: John Barry Ryan, III, Lewis H. Lapham, Bobby Short, William Styron, and Bruce Jay Friedman.


This one is a must have- It has already been dispatched to 2 friends as a gift.  
Get this Book!

more Glimpses here at RIZZOLI

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hommage to the MASTER

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Drama is life with the dull bits left out. Alfred Hitchcock

GUY BOURDIN - Hommage a Hitchcock, c. 1962 

 

 

Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock here

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be afraid, be very afraid.

"Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy."  Kurt Vonnegut

Yes, it's almost Hallows Eve, but that is a celebration, more to fear is election day and the coming aenslag of political promises. Is it just me-or are we actually living in San Lorenzo, Cat's Cradle? I remember reading the Vonnegut book long long before anything like the reality TV invasion. It must have made an impression at the time, one I did not expect or comprehend.  Vonnegut's cradle always creeps into my psyche during the political season. The spin of lead feet and tin wings- or 999, the WE DELIVER -coming slogan-I mean how can they possibly resist? Does 999 sound like a Large Pizza with nothing on it- (It could be a better deal-but you are desperate so you take it) and when the doorbell rings you find a crust of bread left behind?

& then there is this-

Yes, run amok tomorrow evening  goblins and ghosties- and tread lightly for the next year- someone will be stepping on cracks, backs will break and old superstitions will sound like eminent threats.

"Round and Round and round we spin with feet made of lead and wings made of tin." Kurt Vonnegut 

photographs by Erwin Blumfeld, self portraits.

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"and I am Marie of Romania"

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Born October 29th, 1875.  Her Royal Highness Princess Marie of Edinburgh, Princess of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Princess of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Duchess of Saxony

Fashion exists for women with no taste, etiquette for people with no breeding.-Marie of Romania

Queen Marie was born Marie Alexandra Victoria on October 29, 1875 in Kent, England. She was the daughter of Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh and the former Grand Duchess Marie Alexandrovna of Russia. Marie was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria and married Ferdinand of Romania in 1893.  It's complicated. (read it all here)

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Romania.

(Dorothy Parker got it about right)

We can't all be Queen.

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travelling & catching Up

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last week I was in New York visiting the Museums & this week I have been catching UP, not yet on all the blogs I love to read. I will fill in some details of my trip in some upcoming posts, Soon, very soon.

don't shoot!

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The Duke and his Duchess. Poor Wallis, bored to tears captured in what I dare say is a very unladylike pose-legs straddled- &  is that fur? I can't think Aunt Bessie approved.
However, a great shot (& study), the Duke is smashing. The pants really win the day. Doing anything with Style is better than NOT.

Lucindaville a favorite read of mine, shared Lady Troubridge's preferred etiquette for a grouse shooting party in Scotland after 1930:


The ladies at a shooting party are expected to amuse themselves during the morning after the men have gone off shooting. ... As a general rule, however, the hostess and the ladies of the party join the shooters for a picnic luncheon out of doors. If a lady cares to go out with the men in the morning and watch the shooting it is permissible for her to do so if she is sure that she will be welcome. Some ladies walk with guns after luncheon. If a lady goes out with the guns she must not talk during the shooting or wear brightly colored clothes.(quote from the book & linked to Lucindaville.)



Wallis might have be saved by John Galiano's vision of the Duchess in his Pre-Fall 2011 Collection. Menswear-inspired separates & maybe just a touch of fur.

I just finished the book The Shooting Party by Isabel Colgate.

Lady Troubridge's etiquette certainly reflects the tenor of this book as the Ladies are concerned. Colgate's book captures the fading perfect English landscape yet shattered by war and politics and social upheaval. The book is pretty brilliant, with Colgate's not copious- but deeply drawn story just before the Great War. The Shooting Party convenes in autumn on Sir Randolph Nettleby' shoot famed Oxfordshire country estate. The novel balances in depth character studies with foreboding-young Osbert & his ethereal sister of 19, Cicely, reflect the innocence of the era- and its loss in the trenches of World War I. I saw the movie years ago and should watch again, however with James Mason playing Sir Randolph Nettleby how can I criticize. His on screen grappling with privilege of rank and the decay of  that privilege brings the subtlety of the novel's handling to life.

After a careless death brought about at the shoot, Cicely her flirt Count Rakassyi are leaving the field  and returning to the house. One of the beaters of the shoot, villager Tom Harker is dead.

“She continued to walk rather fast in silence. It appeared that she was angry, rather than shocked or distressed as he had anticipated.

‘Come, Cicely,’ he said in expiation. ‘He was only a peasant.’

There was another silence. She gave a long trembling sigh. 

Then she said softly, ‘Yes, he was only a peasant. But we all knew him, you see." IC from The Shooting Party

 & about guns- 
Chicks with Guns by Lindsay Crum is  a new book that reveals the portraits & stories of women & the guns in their lives. 


I was only 7 or 8 months old when I received my first gun, a gift from a longtime friend of my parents ... For my seventh birthday, my father gave me my first BB gun ... I studied hard with my dad’s help and completed the hunter’s safety course at the California Department of Fish and Game so I could receive a lifetime hunting license. I was so proud when the certificate arrived in the mail three weeks before my 10th birthday!-Greta from Chicks with Guns

 Greta , on the cover of Chicks with Guns, with her English Forsyth system scent bottle pistol, ca. 1820

A more apt name for the book might be Chic with Guns-these women simply put-are as good looking as any models in a fashion glossy-even the Chicks that don't dress well. Well- as in Lynn International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame Wyatt. In the book- she's just Lynn from Houston.

I think my philosophy of hunting has always been about the adventure itself. During the years we’ve been married, my husband Oscar and I have been on some amazing hunts. At the North Pole we stayed in an ice house built by our guides, ice brick by ice brick, before our very eyes. ... We’ve hunted from our log cabins in Colorado and Utah, and we’ve also hunted in Georgia and of course Texas. Once in 1982 on an African safari I tracked a lion for 10 and a half hours. It was exhilarating! I love the juxtaposition of stalking game one day and then dressing for a glamorous evening the next. Lynn from Chicks with Guns

Lynn from Houston with her Texas Sako .308 bolt-action rifle with scope

 She said ‘Supposing there are some other people somewhere, people we don’t know?’
He had looked at her seriously. ‘What sort of people?’
‘Perfectly charming people. Really delightful, intelligent, amusing, civilised… and we don’t know them, and nobody we know knows them. And they don’t know us and they don’t know anybody we know.’

Bob had thought for a moment and then he had said, ‘It’s impossible. But if it were not impossible, then I don’t think I should want to know such people. I don’t think I should find anything in common with them." IC  from The Shooting Party

I can think back to an evening I was returning home very late in the autumn driving along a dark rural road passing those oddly high perched machines-trucks- pulled just off the road parked at odd angles- waiting.
Waiting for the deer.
I said a silent prayer for the deer. They populate the woods in mass in the fall and I am just as likely to encounter one mesmerized by the oncoming light. I could just as easily be its killer.

"The tears which momentarily filled her eyes were tears of tremendous rage. How dared they? What right had they? All those men with guns after one poor little duck. IC from The Shooting Party

That is something to grapple with on a lonely highway. Oncoming threats & chance.

"You were not shooting like a gentleman, Gilbert.” IC

What the wore: the Queen & Mr. Dickens

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Probably every new and eagerly expected garment ever put on since clothes came in falls a trifle short of the wearer's expectations. Charles Dickens

painting of Marie Antoinette by Alexandre Kucharski, 1792, Versailles This pastel was made at the Tuileries, but it was left unfinished. A pike's blow by a revolutionary is still visible low on the drawing. Many people said that the Queen had lost her beauty  & Kucharski showed her as her  more than her 36 years, but not so . It is a knowing that makes her appear not as the light hearted girl we imagine her to have been- but as a woman of the world.

The ART of Clarence House...

or My Love Affair with the great fabric house as told in the new book- CLARENCE HOUSE : THE ART OF THE TEXTILE.

one of Kazumi Yoshida's "Sets" with 9 foot painted Flats (panels) that evolved into the textile Beekman Place

photograph by Francois Halard

 © François Halard and may not be reproduced in any way, published, or transmitted digitally, without written permission from the publisher

I approach each fabric design as though I were creating fine art...

Not all my paintings become fabrics, but all of my fabrics stated with original art. Kazumi Yoshida

Kazumi Yoshida, director of Clarence House since 1981, gives us all the magic of this venerable house-this year celebrating 50 years. in a glorious gift of the book- CLARENCE HOUSE :THE ART OF THE TEXTILE. Collaborating with Sabine Rothman, Style Director of House Beautiful and photographer Francois Halard, the book is a journey that looks back at the history of the House, the history of textiles & of ART, the evolution & creation of Clarence House fabrics and the Art of  Kazumi Yoshida. The prose of the book floats beautifully along with the glorious photographs of Halard with the fabrics of Yoshida telling their stories. Yoshida seems to embrace each creation and imbue them all the marked Clarence House flourishes. The fabrics are beyond replica-or document Exact -but adapted by Kazumi Yoshida's  uniquely Eastern eye & brush.

One of Kazumi's fantasy drawings of the original Clarence House townhouse
illustration from the book

 

crewel embroidered Jembala -the whimsical hand of Kazumi
& Jembala Print, on linen below

Founded in 1961, the Allure that is Clarence House was an intentional one.
The Master of Clarence House, Robin Roberts brought the luxury of European textiles to an East 57th Street townhouse in New York-allowing decorators to have hands on access to their likes in the States. The names Colefax and Fowler, Liberty, Pierre Frey, Lelievre and Canovas became bywords in the American decorating lexicon thanks to Roberts and his exclusive Clarence House.

" the Search for Grand Luxe"

Clarence House boasts the grandest of silks that Louis might have condescended to wear.
They are in essence fit for a King. These fabrics-long an allure for me- were created to do just that-to make us feel like Royalty.

Nouveau Bizarre, adapted from a late 17th-early 18th century design in the Clarence House archives, is named for a brief 5 year history around 1700, Kazumi says produced some of his favorite designs. Continuing, he says, "I gave it my own sense of fluidity and a new coloration that completed its success."

 Louis XIV dressed as a sun, Le Ballet de la Nuit:

Henri de Gissey, 1653

photograph by Francois Halard
© François Halard and may not be reproduced in any way, published, or transmitted digitally, without written permission from the publisher

Louis XIV on Horseback in the Battle of Cambrai

Jean de Saint-Jean. late 17th century

Fueilles de Chene

from the archives, one of the prettiest silks I've ever laid eyes on

Velluto Svorza in Green, 

I dedicated post to this fabric here

photograph by Francois Halard

© François Halard and may not be reproduced in any way, published, or transmitted digitally, without written permission from the publisher

Clarence House's Verlaine-at center

The book traces to fabric origins of some of Clarence House's most admired fabrics. Two I love, shown below, were found in the archives of ETRO-the Italian fashion house.

ETRO, 2009

Mosaico, above, & my all time favorite Clarence House fabric Dragon Empress, on the chair in my Library, below

When I first laid eyes on Dragon Empress in this Clarence House ad- I knew I had to use it somewhere in a house someday.

I did & I did again, & again.
First, in the color way below on a small slipper chair since sold to a friend and client.

The next time I used Dragon Empress it was for my Living Room, the room-now broken up and no more-but the chair remains (pictured below). Currently Dragon Empress, in its third incarnation & colorway, is on the chair the gilded chair in my Library.

I've always felt Clarence House presented some of the most arresting & exciting advertising images around.  Some of these ads are covered in the book.

Again, it is the allure of Clarence House.
Fabrics often appear as everyday objects-

things we use again and again -think Umbrellas!

 -or taking "Grand Luxe" & sailing away on a Summer afternoon-

& of course all done with great humor-
like a runaway packing in only the best.

This book surprised me-of course I knew I would be taken by all the images & they are fantastic, but the narrative is as good as it gets.
There is a Story here-
is it the Allure or the Art?
It's both-but more than that it's Magic-Alchemy, call it what you will- Kazumi has made it so.

Could I be more in love, after all these years?
I didn't think so-but I was wrong.
so wrong-
You see- Now, there is  CRISTOBAL.

Clarence House's spectacular Cristobal in red, based on 1920's documents, 

but I like to think maybe it's a little bit of

 Jean Dupas, 1924.

this 

 Balenciaga, 1955.

& that.

  Picasso's Jacqueline, 1954.

the book at RIZZOLI here
how I feel in love here
the photographs of Francois Halard used with express permission from Rizzoli.
photographs of the book are my own & textiles are from my Clarence House fabric Library
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