The Eternal Head Scarf

I don't know about you, but I go in and out of headscarves darling! I wish I was joking. I love the things because Jacqmar silk squares featured strongly in my childhood. My mother's bridge friends would come round in the afternoon and leave their scarves with their scented fur coats over the banisters. I would compare the designs, try them on and replace them very carefully. I also remember being amazed when my eldest sister was given half a dozen Jacqmar scarves for her 21st birthday.




I had some gorgeous Hermes scarves in the 70s, the most conventional era of my life, and then suddenly got embarrassed by them so they ended up in the dressing up box, or as the world's most upmarket security blanket for one of my kids. Ouch. Ouch. Who would have guessed they'd be rehabilitated in the 1980s as must-haves and collectors' items?

And now, apparently, headscarves are the fashion accessory du jour, or were when I last looked. All over the autumn/winter collection catwalks, tied conventionally under the chin. Kate Moss has been known to wear one! This reminded me of a delicious book I have, The Scarf by Andrew Baseman [pub. Stewart, Tabori & Chang NY 1989] and I shall now revisit it and indulge my nostalgia.




The One That Got Away. Hermes 'Promenade de Longchamps' (1970)


Elsie de Wolfe moves the scarf knot from under the chin to the side of her neck



Diana Vreeland styles the model Bijou (1942)



My all-time favourite. Dior's "Roses sur Paris" (mid 1950s)



Bernard Buffet design (c 1959)


Emilio Pucci (1960s)



Detail: 'Hera' by Liberty. The famous peacock feather pattern was designed in 1887 by Arthur Silver




And finally, the world's most iconic wearer of the headscarf, Queen Elizbeth II with USA President Ronald Reagan riding at Windsor 1982

Photo copyright Arthur Edwards

Image at top courtesy shesinvogue.blogspot.com; Jacqmar scarf at http://www.samayalingvintage.com

The Acme of Chic

How elegant is this? I asked what had happened to opera gloves in my first post and this looks like the perfect way to reinvent them. Harriet Quick is Vogue's Fashion Features Director and here she stands out as a beacon of le bon ton. This photo comes from an article in this April's issue of British Vogue contrasting the 'Alt[ernative] Chic' chicks with the 'gilded priestesses of high chic'.

"High chic is a step beyond just looking pulled together: it's about pulling back, too. The rule of thumb is to dress simply. Let statement shoes or jewellery - and a glossy beauty regime - do all the work. Nothing short of perfection will do." Hmmm.

Sunday Supplement: My Wish List

When I long to own things I draw them instead. It helps.



A Hastens bed from Sweden




A Bestlite



Lantern inspired by the Brighton Pavilion from Lucy and Michael Vaughan at vaughandesigns.com





Plaster cast from The British Museum shop


Image top: vase from a museum in Beijing

What Are You Hiding?

Green Pagoda by Simon P Scott

I love screens. My inner bad girl used to fantasise about throwing delicate items of lingerie over the top and then.. no, no, le'ts not go there. I am much more interested in them now as a decorative conceit to hide the telly in the corner or as a back drop to a double bed, to divide a room or simply to attract the eye to a gorgeous panel. I found these in this April's World of Interiors and present them for anyone to place in their own mind's eye. My favourite is the surreally draped resin-plaster number which evokes dressing, undressing, the body, the bed, the angel, the... whatever you may please.

Yellow Bute Cube from Heal's

Hanami by Carlo dal Bianco

Anna by Julian Chichester

Puzzle by Egawa & Zbryk

Contemporary resin-plaster screen by Marc Bankowsky

Scaletta by Piero Fornasetti

How do you like this?

Sweeter than a bag of liquorice allsorts or a bubblegum dystopia? This is designer Karim Rashid's new loft space in New York in which he invited his new wife Ivana Puric to select her favourite pieces of furniture. On one condition however, that they were all his own designs.

I love the playful atmosphere, reminiscent of Charles and Ray Eames, and the use of pink is definitely very grown up. With tangerine, with scarlet, with black and white, with li'l hints of turquoise I think it becomes gender neutral but Rashid puts it this way: "So many men have issues with anything they consider feminine. I'm trying to break down those gender differences. I want every product I design to soften the world. It is already so masculine." Well I guess you're spot on, Rashid.

In an interview with Guardian Weekend he gives this advice: "Colour is an inexpensive decorative tool. Too often people are afraid to use it. You don't have to coordinate it - you might just paint one wall. Muted colours or pastels work easily; primaries are obviously more of a challenge." We kind of knew that but we could give his palette a try perhaps. Fasten your seatbelts ladies and gentlemen.

Image taken from Guardian Weekend 21.03.09

Back Soon

I've been nursing a little ill person and then had to take to my own bed. Back soon.

Maiko

These sublime photos of Maikos, apprentice Geishas from Kyoto, come courtesy of an amazing Italian blog called Occhidaorientale. I am unable to translate it! Please just feast your eyes on them as any description from me would no doubt be redundant.

Get Your Eye In: Green

I had a bit of a green period in the early 1970s. I painted one wall of a small bathroom something between emerald and viridian gloss with pale peppermint on the others. Coordinating curtains with a splash of yellow in them jollied the whole thing up and rescued it from looking like a municipal bath house. I did blush at the memory of it in later years however.

But now that award-winning interior designer Tobi Fairley (see her blog) has used bright green in her own sitting room with fantastic elan, I decided to revisit that earlier era to see where I got my own inspiration from. In my bookcase, in what might be called the 'quaint' section is the Good Housekeeping complete book of Decorating by Mary Kraft published in 1971. You may smirk at some of the design solutions here but they are kind of wonderful, n'est ce pas?

Oh dear, who put that wrought iron chandelier there? Try to imagine this without it.

The white chair makes this look work

Coordinating carpet a spot unneccessary here?

The beamed ceiling doesn't do this room any favours

Imagine the conversation round these faux lime tables!

Pretty gorgeous

Great Opening Lines

Just stumbled on this site which gives the 100 Best First Lines of Novels.  Remind yourself of your favourites (a cause to be a little smug too?) and discover other books that look incredibly tempting.  Here are some of my favourites, not that I have necessarily read them all, I confess.

"Call me Ishmael."  Moby-Dick by Herman Melville 1851

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen 1813

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"  Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (trans.Constance Garnett) 1877

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." 1984 by George Orwell 1949

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." David Copperfield by Charles Dickens 1850

"One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary." The Crying Lot of 49 by Thomas Pynchon 1966

"Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu." Waiting by Ha Jin 1999

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Neuromancer by William Gibson 1984

"For a long time, I went to bed early." Swann's Way by Marcel Proust (trans.Lydia Davis) 1913

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C S Lewis 1952

"Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression." At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien 1939

  

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."  The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath 1963

"If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog."  Herzog by Saul Bellow 1964

 

'“Take my camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.' The Towers of Trebizon by Rose Macaulay 1956

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."  The Go-Between by L P Hartley 1953

"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."  Scaramouche by Raphael Sabatini 1921

I am grateful to the editors of American Book Review for all these gems   

 http://www.litline.org/ABR/index.html 

found at http://www.infoplease.com

Whimsy

I googled whimsy, a concept I am rather fond of, and came across this charming company Whimsy Press with a great website and cheeky products.  It's American which won't help my British pals but worth  goggling at I hope. For those with dollars to burn I notice that there's a 60 per cent-off-every-product clearance sale right now. That was clever of me.

This box of cards would look nice on one's desk

 

And this too

Cupcake crazy  notebook

A non-cheesy giftwrap for dudes

Fab double-sided giftwrap

'You are way less  annoying than most people'  

 suggested as a sexual-harassment-free greeting card

And my favourite (oh surely not) The Bitch Box of  cards

Check Whimsy Press for all manner of witty and pretty gifts, giftwraps, cards and even 'onesies' for babies.  Also find handy hints on presentation. (Guys, this will save you money on expensive giftwrapping services. Perhaps.)

Time-Suck

card courtesy of someecards

There was a good Doonesbury cartoon by Garry Trudeau in Saturday's Guardian. Mike is asking his girlfriend to explain the appeal of Twitter. Her bubble says:

'It's just a simple oversharing tool.. It's like a frisbee - harmless interactive fun. It has its practical use. But I predict most people will come to realise it's a banal time-suck and move on.'

Two excellent expressions there: 'time-suck' (what's happening to you right now as you read this) and 'oversharing'. That appears to describe the redundancy of communicating the minutiae of daily and emotional life to other people. Like when you bump into somebody you know in the street and ask how they are, only wanting to know if they're still alive basically, if that. When you get hit with a mind-numbing saga of the telephone engineer not turning up, the wait for the bus and their issues with the HR director at work, isn't that what's known as 'twittering on'?

I got the best advice once on a creative writing course. I don't know who said it, but the gist was 'The world doesn't need another description from me.' Sorry? But when you think about it, I guess it really means 'Don't state the flaming obvious.' Enough said. For now.

Sunday Supplement : My Sketchbook II

British Cartoons of the 1950s

[Sorry if the quality here is not too brilliant. Try double clicking for a bigger image]

'Good Heavens Lavinia! It says here the East Wing was burned down last night'

Michael ffolkes 1950

'The roof garden was perhaps a mistake' Shelia Dunn 1957

'Poor Henry misses so much being deaf' Kenneth Mahood 1953

'Are you sure we brought him?' Sheila Dunn 1950




'Last year it was seaweed flies' George Sprod 1954

All these cartoons taken from 'The Best of Punch Cartoons' Ed. Helen Walasek, published Prion 2008