You talk like Marlene Dietrich and you dance like Zizi Jeanmaire

When Peter Sarstedt sang 'Your clothes are all made by Balmain, and there's diamonds and pearls in your hair', it's a pretty safe bet his muse wasn't wearing tartan bondage trousers and a lame singlet [much as I very, very much love Balmain's most recent offerings]. I want to live an elegant life like his St Moritz-hopping, Picasso-robbing heroine!

I like to think she would have looked like a cross between Grace Kelly and a Rene Gruau drawing.



I've become fixated on Gruau's drawings since a friend bought me a charming Gruau-illustrated birthday card the other week. They look the way I wish, WISH I could draw [and look] - all nonchalant, fearless brushstrokes, cigarette holders, inkpot eyes, insouciant, pointed little chins and ingenious bolts of colour. These are not chicks, girls, ingenues or even women - these here is LADIES.



He was the son of an Italian count and a French aristocrat - after they separated, he spent his childhood travelling Europe with his mother before pursuing a career in fashion illustration. Throughout the 1930s and early 40s he worked from Paris & Lyon, drawing for Marie Claire, L'Officiel and Vogue. After WWII, a meeting with Christian Dior injected his career with new energy - he created the inimitable image for the Miss Dior fragrance, and immortalised the New Look of the 40s & 50s and the designs of Dior, Balenciaga, Balmain, Schiaparelli and Givenchy. Right up to his death he was still illustrating for Elle, Figaro and Vogue - he never seemed to run out of inspiration and ideas.











[Images: Operagloves]

1910-2004. What a life!

Girls on film

I find I have been drawing out my birthday over as long a period as humanly possible, and to that end, I will be celebrating at the end of the coming week with a costume party [I will be a flapper, if I can find a cigarette holder]. And I just spent a week in Belgium, enjoying its many shops and birthday-gifting myself. More of that later, when I've photographed what I bought.

Meantime, here is a picture of the unutterably fetching birthday present a close friend gave me yesterday. I am more charmed by it than I can describe. It just remains to be seen whether I can find the requisite 4x4 127 film [some places in Canada still make it...?], flashbulb and funny looking flash battery and capacitator. If not, it will just be the prettiest ornament I ever did see.



Beautiful, beautiful 1958 Sawyer's Mark IV twin lens reflex camera. You open the top and look down into the camera, and out through the top lens [the bottom takes the photo]. Sawyer's was the American branded version - it's basically a Japanese camera, otherwise known as the Primo Jr.



I can't find a picture of the superb flash unit, but it's basically a version of the below, except not Ricoh - Sawyer's, like the camera.



The camera and flash unit come prettily housed in brown leather cases. I'd so love to request a photopass for a generic indie gig, turn up in the photopit with this and catch the looks on the pro photographers' faces. They'd be pitched somewhere between "WHAA" and "LOL".

For now I will put it next to my old Russian Zenit camera and let them pose it out in a walk-off. Zenit can be Stiller, and my Mark IV baby can be Wilson.

Patent and silk, satin and ribbons

Four things very dear to my heart.

Unfortunately for my attempts to save in this darkest of recession-shadowed times [--Side note - is it just me that's really not gotten into the spirit of the incoming poverty panic that's sweeping the nation? Is it unpatriotic of me? Perhaps as someone in a not well-paid or secure job who is hoping to buy a house in the next 12 months, I should be hiding behind the sofa right now, but I can't shake the thought that if I just keep saving and secreting £50 notes in envelopes around my house, I'll be okay...--]

Phew! Sorry about that. Where were we?

Ah yes. My inability to keep my debit card in my pocket in the face of shiny shiny patent. I've already got a pair of nude patent shoes [and blue patent shoes... and black patent shoes...] and really didn't need these, but there was something friendly-looking about them, and when I buckled them onto my feet, my tootsies smiled and introduced themselves to the leather with surprising cheer. Plus they remind me of Chloe shoes, though I'm sure I don't know which particular style, and that makes them more appealing, being as I certainly can't afford Chloe shoes.



At this point I must apologise for the shocking photo quality. Phone photos, as my camera cable is lost in the ether, post-house-decorating. There's official photos as well so you can see what they really look like.





Until I put them on and fell in something like love, they were the fallback option for these, which are ridiculous.



I never thought I'd succumb and buy something as patently [ho ho] ridiculous as satin shoes ["Ughhh! RUIN my satin shoes, why don't you?!?!?"}, particularly a pair of open-toed monstrosities spewing forth a froth of silk ribbon at the ankles, but then, I'd never seen these.

I can't work out whether they're pretty or pretty horrific. I've got 21 days to make up my mind, but unless I invite all my friends around to my house to help me with the decision, I'll have to decide on my own, because once I touch them to outdoor concrete I'm stuck with them.



For now, though, I love them.

Also, they have patent heels and ribbon-ends and a teensy-weensy little bar of patent over the toes. It's like a textural free-for-all... patent and satin and silk, oh my!



I think I would like to try living in the eighteenth century, when I think my taste in shoes would have been highly regarded throughout the land.

Thank you, Kurt Geiger. Thank you, Carvela.

P.S. Within my own, slightly oval sphere of logic, I can justify buying two pairs of shoes at once, because I also bought a book of sheet music this week for Chopin's nocturnes, and once I learn to play them all, my soul will be repaired and I will be a worthy individual again.

1940s nonchalance

This is the best photo I've seen today:



I found it on Café Mode, from the Life In Occupied Paris exhibition, a show of 1940s photos by photographer André Zucca.

I must admit I like the photo quite out of context . I love the fit of the trousers and the insouciant way she wears them. It makes me want to take these trousers from Topshop Unique:



...and edit them, now that they've have mysteriously lost their original cut as shown here, and gotten several inches shorter. [Really, though, this is puzzling. I don't know what can have happened to them, I was careful how I washed them - but I can't wear them with high heels anymore, they're too short for it. The effect is baggy rather than louche, so I've gotta do something with them...]

Orient Excess

There's some beautiful photography in the June issue of UK Vogue. Not a particularly engaging issue this time round, but I enjoyed the fashion spreads [the Patrick Demarchelier one is also very much worth a mention - Foto-Decadent has scans here - Jessica Stam looks phenomenal.

However I think they shot themselves in their bejewelled feet in the way they arranged the Orient Excess story.




[Images: Javier Vallhonrat for Vogue UK]

Two enticing double page spreads, then a two page article by Syrian writer Rana Kabbani about the decline of the Ottoman empire, as experienced by her grandmother. The writing is evocative, fierce and deeply saddening, and makes no bones about the author's contempt for the sensationalism of the western view of the harem, and the popular view of women's place in this much romanticised world. She goes to great pains to separate her [and her family's] first-hand experiences of it from the salacious image many people retain, and describes it as a place where women of the time could convene, converse, work, entertain, rest, learn from each other and be themselves, 'relieved of the intrusive presence of their men'.


[Image: Javier Vallhonrat for Vogue UK]

Following this intelligent, thought-provoking article with 6 pages of a semi-orgasmic white model, surrounded by diaphonous silks, her hair clinging sweatily to her face and throat as she arches backwards on piles of cushions, rather suggests that the photo editor, the features editor and the person who put the page order together did not have a conversation. The images are superb in every way but they're let down by the context they're placed in. If Vogue had run these images before the article, letting them stand for themselves in their beauty and then having the article offer a social and historical counterpoint, I think it would have been more successful; as it is, I wouldn't be surprised if the author felt rather insulted.

Nevertheless, it's still a beautiful feature, and one I'll keep and look at again.

I also really love the Tim Walker feature [he of this much-adored photograph]; I want to tear out all the photos and spread them across my walls like one of his scrapbooks. I'll definitely be going to his show at the Design Museum.