The bull elephant in the drawing room

Before you berate me loudly (well, loudly in the general direction of the screen facing you, or in a sighing-tut-tut manner directed at no one in particular) over my less than measured and far from impressive track record when it comes to posting this month (and the Amsterdam exhibition piece still hasn't winged its way webward), let me just excuse myself by saying that I have no excuses and that that's as penitent as I feel like getting right now. Never look back, and all that. (Wise words, Mrs. Vreeland.)

Friday, before I'd actually even read my WWD Morning Report (I was distracted, don't judge me), my friend J sent me a link to a story titled "Paris's Marais District Draws Men's Retailers". It was, I thought, as I said to J by way of reply after reading it, a serious case of what Gawker likes to describe in mock headline manner as "Bear Shits In Woods".

What was missing, however, was absolutely any mention whatsoever of the word gay. All we got was a vague inside joke (*wink wink* does your wife like photography? is your wife a goer? *wink wink*) about monks having lived in the Marais and how men still do. Gee, what kind of men? It's political correctness gone mad. It's the freakin' gay district of the city. Could WWD, in 2009, not have the moral courage to state such a glaringly obvious fact? It's not even moral courage, it's common sense, it's a marketing tool the city uses to attract foreign visitors (yes, gay visitors, imagine), it's accepted and promoted, it's a huge generator of revenue in a city crippled by socialist ideals that discourage the spending of money. Would WWD talk about the rue des Rosiers quarter and falafel and delis and not mention the word Jewish? I mean, come on !

I'm still, and friends must be tired of hearing me mention it, utterly bewildered by the edit of the write-up I did of the first Chanel "satellite" collection (since become Paris-Moscou, Paris-Monte Carlo, Paris-Londres, etc.), which was presented in the couture salons on rue Cambon. It was a cold day in December and Carine Roitfeld showed up bare-legged under a big fur coat with, as we discovered, a smaller fur coat on underneath it. But I digress. The collection - it being the whole point of the collection - was heavy on intricate handwork and extraordinary construction. It was a late-afternoon show, so I went back to the office after and filed it and went home. The following morning I looked at it online, just a cursory glance, as they say. The word threading jumped out at me. Threading - I didn't remember writing that. I checked the copy I had sent the New York editor the previous evening. Threading was a replacement of the copy editor's doing. The original word, to describe a pretty widely-understood dressmaking term was.... faggoting. I shouted loudly in the general direction of the screen facing me.

Forget the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow - it's a competent copy editor that's the real prize.

Smells Like Mean Spirit

Back in 2003, I think it was, I went to a press presentation for Lanvin's men's scent Vetyver. It was typical of any small reception to introduce a new scent to the press: a couple of tables to sit at, some smelling strips, marketing people walking around smiling vacantly, Ladurée macarons. Perfumes with bigger hopes pinned on them call for lavish truffle-filled lunches at Michelin-starred restaurants, but this was relatively low-key.

As I loitered around, pretending to be interested, and basically just waiting for a press kit, and maybe even a tester, so I could leave and go back to the office, I got to talking to one of the marketing women from the fragrance arm of the company. She went through the whole spiel, sitting then-23-year-old me down at a table and attempting to overwhelm me with ever more fantastical adjectives and assertions. We even got to smell the perfume. And so, vetiver itself being one of my favorite scents, I smelled this juice called Vetyver. I could have been smelling something from Hugo Boss, Davidoff, Armani, Calvin Klein, any of those totally interchangeable powerhouse perfumes. What I was not smelling was even the slightest hint of vetiver. Then came the coup de grâce. This, you see, was no accident. The vetiver, which young audiences apparently don't really care for, was edited out, save for the slightest, almost imaginary, waft that occurred somewhere around ten minutes after application. This, the woman explained, was the fragrance's genius. We both sat there in silence for a moment absorbing the gravity of that statement.

I left shortly afterward.

Maybe you can't blame someone like François Robert, the Synarome perfumer who came along and "reinvented" the original 1966 Vetyver (discontinued in 1990) and made it, according to the guidelines of the accounts and marketing teams, young and contemporary. And bland. And cheap. And vile. Repulsive. Insulting. And total and utter bulls**t.

People, it appears, really are very stupid. Tragically so. The people who "make" and the people who buy. The people who buy, for their sins, are not so much stupid as they are ignorant and gullible. The people who "make" all have degrees from top universities in the art of exploitation and how to make a buck go the farthest possible. I guess what can you expect? After all once upon a time people who owned fashion houses and perfume houses were fashion designers and perfumers. Now the last two are just hired hands. The people who run the former are chosen by the businessmen/investor owners solely on the basis of the universities they went to and the track record they have in making money from garbage and in successfully selling it to a willing public.

Today, WWD proved my point, yet again. Another Friday, another beauty focus, and another two LVMH scents, one Givenchy, one Guerlain. The Givenchy - a brand extension of a product that should have been strangled at birth - is beyond a joke. There is so much text on the ad featuring Uma Thurman, and the logo so exceptionally vulgar, that one might as well just assume it's advertising a bargain drug store bottle and be none the wiser as to how close to the mark one came.








It's the other scent that's the terror. This was announced a few months ago, and there was even a launch party earlier in the summer in Paris, but WWD is announcing it on a proper global scale today. The scent is called Idylle. It is, dear reader, anything but. Does it, as one commentary on a perfume blog asks, spell the death knell for creativity? I narrow that down and ask if it doesn't simply spell the death knell for Guerlain. Creativity died long ago. Okay, I admit it survives in small pockets thanks to people like Isabel Toledo, Joel Rosenthal, Azzedine Alaïa, Nicolas Ghesquière, Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel couture, but being able to be so specific is not a good sign, and the public at large is too stupid (yes, more than ignorant, because though people have never before had more information at their fingertips, they've never chosen to be so uninformed) to know or care otherwise. When Mrs. Vreeland said to give 'em what they never knew they ever wanted you can be sure that America's Next Top Model and Project Runway weren't quite what she had in mind.

The lowest common denominator strikes again. Guerlain, once the greatest of the greats, brought to its knees. I feel too embarrassed to buy Mitsouko or L'Heure Bleue or Après L'Ondée or Eau Impériale now. And some singer called Nora Something that about twelve people in France, and no one outside of it, have heard of fronts the campaign, which might as well be for Johnson & Johnson Baby Shampoo so luxurious does it look. And Ora Ito's flacon apparently inspired by a garlic bulb.... why? Is it because it's about the only natural substance a mono-nostril can smell? Ordinarily I would love a whimsical bottle suggesting a vegetable, but ordinarily it would also probably go with a perfume with a jaunty sense of humor. This is about as humorous as a urethral catheter insertion. Have I smelled it, you ask? Is that even a requirement any more? The blurb rants about floral bouquets and Bulgarian rose, jasmine, freesia, lily of the valley, peony, chypre and musk. In other words synthetic, charmless, and certain to give me a headache.

Don't get me wrong, even I'm not naive enough to thing this is the lowest level a "luxury" perfume house can plumb. I'm almost excited to see where they'll take us to next. France"s Next Top Perfumer? Project Perfume? Make a perfume in 30 minutes! Believe me, dear reader, somebody already did.

Modern mystery

Overheard snatch of conversation when passing a restaurant terrace on via delle Carrozze in Rome:

"Now that everyone has digital cameras how do all those small shops and stands selling film for tourists stay in business?"

I was thinking exactly the same thing.

Anatomy et al

"Mummy has two breasts, but the wolf has six. So she can give lots of milk, but she needs to get lots of rest."

- Man to his inquisitive little daughter regarding a late 15th-century marble sculpture of Romulus and Remus and the she-wolf in Siena's Museo Civico.

Color and how to recognize it

Color has left our world and we are all the poorer for it.

What am I rabbiting on about? Well, looking at paintings from the past - and bearing in mind there is such a thing as artistic license, but also bearing in mind that wealthy patrons and sitters paid a lot of money for their clothes and wanted them shown to best effect - you come across such breathtakingly beautiful colors, shades that are mixed together in improbable and glorious ways, colors that don't have names and are impossible to describe. (I found myself writing down descriptions like Cornish ice-cream, wet cocker spaniel, brown lie-de-vin, moss yellow.)

Today the huge cost of creating special, varied colors for clothing that prides itself on its easy production means that we're all party to finding ourselves left with a very limited spectrum to buy into. Sure, in a season where a shade like violet is being trumpeted designers will often have very different interpretations of what that color might be, leading to at least some variety. But that's just one color and one season. The next will be orange, the following teal, the one after that emerald. It's why designers go to such pains to literally "find" colors, because if you need to explain a color to a fabric manufacturer or a tanner you're going to need to find a sample to give to them so the result comes back dyed the exact shade you want it and not just resembling it. A certain small producer of silk threads in Paris is famed for his colors and, aware that designers come to buy tiny quantities for color reference only, he's unsurprisingly very guarded about letting people come see him, almost to the point of paranoia. But I guess who can blame him when they'll never follow up after for an actual order. Even he has reduced his color range, because some tone differences are too subtle or others simply never asked for or too difficult to produce. They come with numbers, not names.


The above image (and a grainy, dulled one at that) is of a crucifixion painting by Perugino from 1492 or so. I saw the original in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. In reality the colors are more than beautiful. Why? Well, because of their subtlety and the way they're used together. Take the hyacinth of St. Jerome's drapery, or the lovely slatey blue of St. Francis' robe. And look at John the Baptist's clothing. I can't describe that red, but in the flesh it appeared to me to be more grape in nature, a certain shade of spinel. And that glorious soft brown of what might be an animal skin tunic, that rich jewel blue, and the gold that somehow unites it all together....

I don't have the vocabulary to enthuse properly, and even if I did I wouldn't have the imagery to back up the syrupy outpourings. And one only realizes the paucity of color today when faced with colors one doesn't know and can't possibly describe. You do your best to associate them with something you already know, sometimes you never find the connection and sometimes you do.

It's like in Family Guy when Chris Griffin says to his unpleasant, intolerant grandfather, "Your toenails are the same color as my school bus." Hey, it's gross, but you know what he means.

Looking and seeing

An article in today's New York Times drew my attention to something that has become readily apparent to me over the past couple of weeks: that most people when confronted with art and beautiful things look but rarely see.

My ten days in Italy, a vast amount of which was spent in museums, coincided with my own cloying embarrassment at bringing a camera with me and resulted in me doing something that previously had mainly manifested itself as a scribble or two on the back of a receipt, namely bringing a notebook with me and sketching. And as Michael Kimmelmann, the author of the NYT piece noted, people really do look at you differently. In Siena's Museo Civico, where I spent ages drawing tile patterns and motifs on fading murals, a little girl kept repeatedly asking her mother, "What is that man doing? What is that man doing?" to which her mother replied, "I don't know."

Looking at my notebook I realized I'd actually first started sketching at Drouot in Paris a few weeks ago when I went to see various cases of jewelry in the different sales rooms. I drew a few things I liked and then started (badly) recording interesting chains and links that I'd found. It's something one rarely thinks about until you go to design a bracelet or the chain of a shoulder bag and suddenly you realize the world of possibilities out there and how a specific link can make or break the final effect of an item, and in turn the ringing up of a sale.


At fashion shows, when I reviewed them, I obviously took copious notes. Taking notes at a fashion show means really having to look at the clothes, noticing details and silhouettes and looking for some sort of repeat or cohesiveness, and sometimes this is the hinge one might otherwise miss. Taking notes meant that I rarely needed to look at them while furiously tapping the review in the back of the car to the next show, and it also meant that half of what I meant to say was already written as I wrote not just descriptions but notes as I went, sketches too, so that it wasn't just a case of "gry flannel skt suit, pus-bow blse" but rather "gry flannel skt suit, pus-bow blse, Côte Basque, Paley, lunch, monied. Jkt sts away from body." You get the picture. When I go to a show now, even though I guess I don't review any anymore, I still try to take notes, to make me really see it, even if only to have a better handle when I send my sister an e-mail about it later.

In Italy, without a camera, except on one day (other pics were snatched from a friend's downloads of his photographic recordings), I went around happily with my notebook making a sketch here or jotting down a color or collar description there. I laboriously noted the name of the artist, the work, the year of its creation, usually where it was housed (if it was on loan), and what I liked about it. And so it took me literally hours to go through museums that other people with less time on their hands or less interest literally breezed through, usually with the sole goal of being able to say they'd been there. In the Vatican Museums a young American guide (possibly not affiliated with the museum, I felt) took a family through four galleries without stopping once. She had her sights set on something a few rooms away, three centuries of exquisitely beautiful art bedamned. What she ignored I gaped in front of.



Nothing may ever come of what I drew but I enjoyed doing it and I plan on doing it from now on, when I have the chance and a pen - and I always have a pen! For example, the man's collar above from a Memling portrait is to the wrong scale, but it doesn't matter, I liked the idea and I can easily find an image of the painting again if I need to.


What's curious is seeing paintings or scultures that one knows well from books, but seeing them in reality is like seeing them for the first time. Suddenly details that seemed ho-hum take on great importance, a surface texture or a color that can never be properly communicated in a glossy book photograph is beyond beguiling. (I often think of a story Donna Karan told of going to the Musée Picasso in Paris with her late husband for inspiration and after an hour of walking around suddenly shouting out, "This is it! This is what the collection should look like!" Her husband turned around to find her rubbing her hands over the sandstone wall.)

Pictures, words, etc.

Sometimes a shrewdly-placed word or two on the graffiti'd wall of an underground passage can have a powerful effect.


And sometimes a slyly snapped picture or two says more than enough.

Faith and Florence

The other side of the block, regrettably, mentions nothing about heaven.
But then I guess that comes in the form of an early morning cappuccino while standing at the counter at Gilli.

Diamonds at dawn

My friend P has just e-mailed me to say that I have to look at the following pair of earrings at SJ Phillips. His two-sentence message came with the quite impossible to misinterpret statement "I want them".


I guess I want them too.
But looking at the site (and imagining the glorious glitterings that one does not see online, or even in the store, and that are only ever shown to the most discerning and serious clients) I decide that maybe I'd like the following earrings instead. They look a little less tumorous.

P's diamond earrings - I write as if he owns them - are from around 1860. "Mine" are from circa 1890. I like the optical illusion of mine whereby the construction creates the effect of two large multi-faceted stones, instead of a large center and eight satellite stones. Whereas mine is a flowerhead cluster, P's is an orchid, and other than the charming little things that grow wild in the fields of Europe, I can't stand orchids. I always think of diseased genitalia in a very Victorian sense. Which, is of course, the era these gems come from, the culets gaping so mysteriously and invitingly, creating that extra window that makes old-cut diamonds sparkle so much more beautifully than modern brilliant-cut stones.

Yes, P's earring are beautiful, I have to concede. I love the oxidized silver (black sets off a white diamond better than anything) and how they remind me of JAR. And I think that, given the chance, I'd rather have both pairs than none at all. (Yes, I know I'm supposed to say I'd rather have his pair than none at all but, you know, greed and other human weaknesses, and all that jazz. At least I'm honest instead of pretending the current global crisis has made me a better, more spiritual person, which seems to be the general media-set line we're all supposed to so improbably follow.)

And somewhere out there is a humorless psychologist wondering what the hell two grown men are doing dreaming of diamond earrings they will likely never own and even then never wear in their ears but likely just hold in their hands, and why one of them is getting all competitive about it. And I have to tell that person that if they have to ask then they'll never understand.

Taking time in Tuscany

I must excuse my long absence, but I've been recovering from an extensive facelift, you see.

Okay, I haven't; I've been in Italy, the cosmetic surgery center of the word, or so it would appear, so I feel lifted by association.
Speaking as someone who still hasn't posted about the Russian court exhibition in Amsterdam (...) I now have to find time to write about Giotto, Bulgari, the Antichi Telai exhibition, the Doria Pamphilj, my diamond stars in the Vatican, Tuscany, Montalcino, my abortive attempted to get to Siena (will try again Thursday, after Florence tomorrow and possibly return to Rome Thursday evening), and lots of other random observances and potential nonsense.

I'm sitting writing this in the warm, flat Maremma countryside, surrounded by wooded hills crowned with medieval villages viewed through the enviously tall and thin cypress trees around the house I'm staying at. The sound of the crickets, at times almost deafening, has a soothing quality at night - maybe they make the same sound during the day, it just sounds different now as the air is different. The small, sprawling, charmless village of Montepescali is a few fields away and it has a train station that can, depending on the irregular service, get one into Grosseto, the nearest town of any size, within seven minutes. Grosseto, which has a very pretty ancient center with town walls and a ban on cars, is near the sea but not on it. It still has its fair share of naff shops selling clothing that insists upon communicating with the casual passerby, clothing that frequently seems to come with a pall of questionable copyright issues hanging over it. This t-shirt could be seen as a prime example.

It doesn't rain but it pours

An unbearably hot evening after a stultifying day.
Two flashes of lightning, a sizable wait, and then - shazam!
A big roll of thunder.
2:49am in Paris and I ask you, where's the rain?...

Oh, wait, there it is. Weak, timid, overly polite rain.
A thunderstorm should mean a torrential downpour, not a gentle watering of the lawn.
I guess we didn't have that moment when the air is sucked out of the sky and then it rushes back a few moments later as a surprise wind no one expected.
Still though, wait, more thunder !

I love thunderstorms. I love how people say that they clear the air and sweep the sky clean. And it's true. I can't wait to smell the morning.

First summer, last ever - Peter O'Brien for Awear

Yes, I know - I've sort of missed the boat on this one. (But then, I still haven't written about the Russian court costume exhibition I saw in Amsterdam two-and-a-half weeks ago...) And, yet, here goes.

























Peter O'Brien has been designing a fall collection for the Irish high street chain Awear for the past three years. It's been very successful, allowing a higher price point to creep into Awear's normally cheap-as-chips (and visibly so) offerings, and introducing Irish women to great design and correct proportions and fabric handling from someone who truly knows what he's talking about. In an almost bankrupt country that sold itself to the god of mindless greed and is now paying the price (schadenfreude) that didn't pick up many aesthetic clues along the way, O'Brien's collection has been a shining light. And this was to be his first summer collection for the chain. It will also be his last collection. Because the Irish economy being what it is, and Irish women preferring to buy three acrylic coats for €99 each instead of one in wool worsted for €200, Awear is terminating its partnership with O'Brien as of this collection. The fall collection that was underway will not now be produced.




This collection, which bowed two weeks ago, was itself reduced in scope, cutting out all tailoring so that we're left with a selection (albeit a rather splendiferous one) of dresses with a couple of skirt and knitwear options. O'Brien, as always, insists on 100% silk for his dresses, and manages to get really good silk for dresses that involve a lot more than sewing two pieces of fabric together. I love that almond-washed smoky blue he's using. Describing colors is not my forte, as is clearly evident here. Of course there's lots of black and navy, too, though Ireland is a country that tragically (and illogically) seems more open to the fuchsia, magenta and cerise spectrum for some reason that utterly escapes me. Peter O'Brien makes clothes that never make a fool out of the woman who wears them. She doesn't find herself wearing something that constantly needs to be pulled up or yanked down, or gapes or pinches, or where a wardrobe malfunction is par for the course. Nothing plays on any media-driven insecurities for the sole goal of moving merch. What she gets is clothes the way clothes should be - well-designed and well-made. And well made at this level at such prices (these dresses cost €190) is nothing short of a miracle these days when people will mindlessly hand over large wads of cash for polyester or plastic with a logo on it. One doesn't usually think of a fast fashion chain as they place to go to make an investment, but perhaps it's time to rethink our bias. After all, better to be seduced by stellar clothes than tricked by tacky marketing.






The clothes here are being worn by Laragh McCann, a model who, despite the wild generosity with the term 'supermodel' to describe any girl in Ireland who's slept with a rugby player and appeared on a non-aeronautical runway of some kind or other, actually does have an international career. She looks great in these clothes, with her own natural skin tone, clean hair and flat shoes. I think the word would be gamine.



I hope that after two weeks the collection has sold out totally. That's generally the plan - tight distribution, small one-off runs, special corners, special packaging and advertising, and when it's gone it's gone. Naturally Dublin has proven a more receptive market in the past, and choice items have tended to sell out in a day, if not less. I've looked at some Irish blogs and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. It's strange how there is price resistance among some - can they not see the difference between a silk dress with lots of volume, pin-tucks, multiple panels and wonderfully-worked bodice and one that's just a bit of polyester stretch jersey ruched with a bit of elasticated thread in the central embonpoint area? Though you sort of have to feel sorry for the young woman who thinks that anything is old fashioned if it doesn't make her look like a low-rent streetwalker.

The temporary decline of David Webb

Women's Wear Daily today has a sad article about jewelers in the US succumbing to the recession and a number of well-known names either tottering badly or declaring bankruptcy outright.

The leading photo in the article, at least in the online version, showed Henry Dunay, who's been in the business for over 50 years and whose company filed for Chapter 11 protection last month. It's obviously a very sad situation, but if I'm being honest Henry Dunay's work has never really thrilled me. The American jewelry house that I most like, and one that article points out is in equal trouble, is David Webb.





David Webb is not really a well known name in Europe. I came to know it from seeing photos of lots on the Christie's and Sotheby's websites and in the jewelry catalogues. There's something bold and take-it-or-leave-it about the house's output, almost verging on the overly ornate and yet rarely tipping over the precipice into bourgeois decoration. A lot of the pieces clearly would take a certain amount of courage to wear, they don't shun the spotlight so they're clearly not destined for wallflowers, rather for a woman who likes to have a couple of tsavorite and emerald frogs meeting around her wrist, or a slightly industrial-looking diamond ring with the reassuring gloss of luxury, or a brooch tricked out in expertly-handled enamels and splattered with diamonds.

I love enamel and when combined with diamonds in a choice manner, well... I think enamel is far too underplayed in fine jewelry today. I'm not referring to that incessantly loud and kitsch car enamel in bubblegum colors that Dior's fine jewelry seems fond of coating itself with, rather the complicated but ravishing enamels that decorated so much Renaissance and Renaissance Revival jewelry, the lacquer that was lacquer and not just a general term for something that's had its surface turned a different color. Bring back enamel, I say, and do it in an inventive and exquisite way. In the meantime David Webb needs investors if it's to survive. Any takers?

Rogier van der Weyden

Northern Renaissance painting, and the somewhat less refined and more ecclesiastical-leaning style that proceeded it, is possibly my favorite era in painting. That's something of a sweeping statement, as it relates more to a specific era in painting, and tends to tie in the styles that were widespread in what are now Belgium, Holland, Germany and France (and Italy) before the Italian Renaissance got underway, and then the stylistic answer that followed in northern Europe to Italy's forging ahead. Does any of that make any sense? Put it like this: I love anything between Cimabue, Giotto and Pieter Brueghel the Younger. But when we get to Jan Brueghel, with a few exceptions, I've stopped caring.

Rogier van der Weyden must be one of my absolute favorite Flemish Primitives. I love how he depicted women, with alabaster, utterly flawless skin, and those heavy-lidded, slightly bulging eyes, a look that even today on the street I find instantly captivating and strangely beautiful in women, but especially in men. (Andrew Scott, as you got tired of me constantly referring to your "medieval eyes", this is what I meant. The pictures will hopefully tell you more.)


I will, I can assure you, be going to Leuven in Belgium this fall to see an incredibly exciting exhibition called Rogier van der Weyden 1400-1464 – Master of Passions. It will be the inaugural exhibition at M Leuven, the city's reincarnated museum. And what a wonder it will be! Over 100 masterpieces are coming from major North American and European collections. Some of the works are returning to Flanders for the first time in six centuries.


That van der Weyden has seen his fame (he was regarded as the most influential painter in the Southern Netherlands in the 15th century) somewhat eclipsed by his contemporary Jan van Eyck is an occurrence that will hopefully be set to rights with this expansive show. Its import is not to be underestimated, certainly not when one considers the works it will contain. Van der Weyden's 1440's masterpiece, The Seven Sacraments, an altarpiece that's part of the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp started undergoing painstaking conservation and restoration work in 2006. The process is shown in a short, un-narrated film that can be watched online.



All photos courtesy of M | Leuven

Lillian Bassman

I'm suddenly insanely jealous of whoever finds themselves in Connecticut over the coming six weeks (yes, that includes you Anne Bass). Lillian Bassman, possibly my favorite photographer (yes, Mssrs. Penn, di Corcia, Horst, Hoyningen-Heune, Beaton, Blumenfeld, de Meyer, you read that correctly), at age 92, has an exhibition of her work at KMR Arts in Washington Depot that opened this past weekend and is running 'til September 5th.



Those of us who can't make it (and that will, let's face it, include me) can look forward to a book in the fall published by Abrams to coincide with a show opening October 23rd at the Staley-Wise Gallery. The book, by the way, will be titled Lillian Bassman: Women. Then, as if all that wasn't enough, November sees the Deichtorhallen museum in Hamburg mounting a joint retrospective of her work and that of her husband Paul Himmel who sadly passed away in February. They had spent 77 blissful years together.



Connecticut is a clear no. New York in the fall a maybe. And Hamburg... well, a quick glance at the SNCF travel website tells me I can take a 8h47m (or more) train in both directions and pay a huge sum while dying of inertia, or simply take a 1h30m plane there and back for just under €100. Tough choice.

Kiefer, you can keep it

So, I went to see Am Anfang, Mr. Anselm Kiefer's semi-operatic opus, yesterday evening. Mein Gott, if there ever was a case of "don't give up the day job" then this was it. Kiefer came within a hair's breath of rumbling the whole Emperor's New Clothes scenario that is contemporary art. Just as the scales were falling from people's (drooping) eyes the thing ended. And not a moment too soon.

In fact, an hour and twenty minutes too late. As the man next to me said when we stood up to leave (in fact, a number of people left half-way through), "I just really came to see the set, but then I guess after 30 seconds I'd seen it." Then he, and all the rest of us, had to sit through an interminable amount of pretension, breathtaking in its audacity, that introduced us to the Fertile Crescent on a map (well, Kiefer's version of the Fertile Crescent which seemed to leave the floodplains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers far behind and stretch off into Egypt, the Emirates and Oman) and discussed at length, in a totally disjointed manner, people and places culled seemingly randomly from the Bible, Torah and Koran. We then jumped forward to the aftermath of WWII in Berlin where a couple of women wandered around the massive stage, one miked up and droning out a monologue that I switched off listening to after about three seconds. When she moved briefly into plain chant people giggled audibly. Was that the release they were looking for? Not quite. That came when a pile of rubble fell from the ceiling narrowly, and conveniently, missing our robed narrator who had realized that the seat she'd been droning from actually turned out to be - wait for it - a big old book that related the events she herself was quite possibly rambling on about. How close she came to perishing. How close we came to being able to leave early. Then there was the girl with the long red hair who seemed to plant silver bulbs in a line through the dust. And the Trümmerfrauen who spent the whole bloody time clanking flat bricks off each other and then building a foot-high wall with them. You think watching paint try is bad - try watching a foot-high, cement-free wall being built. Then they all swarmed onto center stage (they appear to have had friends possibly building another wall just out of view, stage left, in the wings) and proceeded to sweep the set with brushes made of bunches of twigs, before disappearing off into the distance and blessedly taking the light with them, signifying the end. After so much tortured symbolism this was a sign everyone understood with many bolting for the door as the incognito cast took its bow.

Mr. Kiefer, nice idea, shame you didn't quite pull it off. The programme notes said Création Mondiale. Let's hope no other country finds itself inflicted with this tedious nonsense.


However, curiously enough, today in the NY Times, too, there was an article about the rapidly declining levels of the Euphrates river in Iraq and how this is a result of the water policies of Turkey and Syria and the mismanagement of the water in Iraq where leaky dams and ill-maintained irrigation systems have ruined the original life-source for civilization. The Tigris isn't faring much better.

But one thing the article mentioned was the marshlands of southern Iraq, where the two rivers meet, and which for five thousand years have been the home of the Ma'dan, or Marsh Arabs. Their home was almost wiped out by Saddam Hussein from 1991 in retaliation for a Shi'ite uprising. Within a short time the huge marshes were drained to 7% of what they were in 1979, systematically wiping out an entire habitat, displacing perhaps hundreds of thousands of people and almost destroying a whole civilization. In 2005 the marshes started to be flooded again, with the aim being to restore them as near as possible to their original state. This was wonderful news, but the tragedy is that now, with the state of the rapidly shrinking Euphrates, there's not enough water to fill them and the indigenous population finds itself living not on small islands but on large swathes of bone-dry land, the surrounding reeds dried to a crisp.




Wilfred Thesiger's writings were what first introduced me to the Ma'dan. Thesiger, one of the last great 20th century travel writers, was a relic almost of another era, the type of traveler who went beyond being a writer, but who immersed himself so in Ma'dan culture he was almost indistinguishable from the people whose way of life he was describing. Thesiger's book 'The Marsh Arabs' is one of my absolute favorites.

Over the course of a handful of years he spent months at a time living with the Ma'dan, moving from village to village, hunting wild pigs (not for food, clearly, plus they're considered dangerous vermin), and discovering and describing customs as he comes across them. One of the most strangely touching and rather comical things is that, because he's a foreigner, has some medical knowledge and a small medical kit with him, he finds that everywhere he goes there's always a number of boys lined up ready to be circumcised by him. This rather odd occurrence is something he becomes accustomed to, as word spreads far and wide of this foreign man's skill at cleanly performing a traditional coming-of-age practice that all-too-often had been known to lead to infection and mutilation. As a result of this he uncovers one distinct culture's interpretation of gender and sexuality as flamboyant boys dance dressed and made-up as woman, as some women adopt masculine roles and dress and sleep with other women, and as one fully-integrated 'woman' lifts up her robe to reveal a large member and the request that Thesiger cut it off and make 'her' into a real woman. And though George Jorgensen had become Christine Jorgensen by this time, they were in the middle of a marsh, prompting not-a-surgeon Thesiger to politely decline the request.

Issey Miyake's touching plea

Reading my daily NY Times concise news feed e-mail this morning I came across the Op-Ed piece written by Issey Miyake on the subject of nuclear weapons and ridding the world of them. Miyake was a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, dropped when he was seven, and his mother died within three years of the affects of radiation exposure. In the article Miyake, who says he has never spoken publicly of the subject before, says, "I realized that I have, perhaps now more than ever, a personal and moral responsibility to speak out.” It's a short but incredibly touching essay, all the more so because it takes a global political problem and strips away the jockeying for power, reducing the issue to an intensely human and evident one. There is no pretense, no publicity speak, just simple honesty and a sense of strong humility before a faceless fear.


"I have never chosen to share my memories or thoughts of that day. I have tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to put them behind me, preferring to think of things that can be created, not destroyed, and that bring beauty and joy. I gravitated toward the field of clothing design, partly because it is a creative format that is modern and optimistic," Miyake writes.

Coincidentally I happened to do a Google search for Miyake shortly after reading this. I stumbled across something that made me, though never having survived an atomic blast, encounter my own sense of despair. Let's call it despair for the future of intelligence. It cites the name of the world's least-talented architect, a woman whose fame and perceived talent totally elude me. It was a blog entry, and it started: "Most know him as Zaha Hadid’s favorite fashion designer, but Issey Miyake is quite a name himself."
No comment.

Smells like..... cat pee ?

I love books.
More than people? Well, that depends. I collect books the way other people collect "friends" on social networking sites. (Don't call my bluff on that one: I readily admit to having a Facebook account - I've just never used it.)
Today three more books in the mail. This is the problem. I think, nay, I know, that I've started repeating myself. I'm pretty sure I already have a copy (if not two) of that somewhat famous Irving-Penn-shoots-Issey-Miyake-clothes book. But by the same standards I'm 100% certain that I don't have a copy of Soviet Textiles, Fashion and Ceramics 1917-1935, a catalogue from an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford that was printed in 1984. Upon receipt I see the reproductions are rather dreary, but perhaps that gives them an unexpected charm. Perhaps.

But I'm over that already as the other book is Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. Turin is my new obsession, as I'm simultaneously reading Chandler Burr's book about him, The Emperor of Scent, which really is a gripping read. Divided into two sections it tells the story of how Turin, a scientist with a passion for perfume sort of accidentally discovered (and we have to use the word 'theoretically' here) how people smell, because there was never really a concrete agreement on that one, despite what one might have assumed. He obsessively researched and rooted and came to the belief that we smell molecules based on their vibrations, not on our smell receptors recognizing their shape, which had been the generally accepted explanation. How could this be, Turin asked, if we're constantly creating new molecules whose shapes bear no relation to anything our ancestors would have known and yet we can still smell them?


The second half of the book (I'm nearly finished - hey, it's not my fault: I clearly suffer from undiagnosed ADD, or at the very least a very short attention span) is ominously titled War and deals with the ridiculous Berlin Wall that is built in front of him when he tries to promote his quite sound theory: the scientific community shuns him and publicly humiliates him as being a pretentious, uninformed upstart, and the perfume industry, which employs huge amounts of people to predict what molecules will smell like based on their shape, reacts equally violently as his no-nonsense approach threatens to put their ivory tower lifestyles out to pasture. People really are terrified of a new, good idea, almost always to their detriment. As Lucien Lelong advised the Nazis, you can make all the laws you want but you can't stop the tide of fashion.

Turin is also a man who speaks his mind, and while this attracted a lot of people when he produced a low-key, opinionated perfume guide in the 1990s, it also repelled them when he uttered things they didn't want to hear. His comments to a French magazine about how the managers at Dior "were all scoundrels because they had their classic fragrances redesigned by accountants" cost him a major consultancy role at Quest which was at that moment hoping to secure a significant brief from Dior.

Tania Sanchez, a perfume collector and expert who shares his caustically critical mindset, has collaborated with him on this updated edition of the book. And I'm obsessed: I've devoured most of the thing within two hours. And while I greatly admire Turin I can see that we would never see eye to eye. There are a significant number of modern fragrances that he terms genius, examining them in a methodical way based on the scent construction and deployment. Most of these smell intensely synthetic to me and to have to be near them for more than a few moments will give me a splitting headache. I know where he's coming from when he lauds perfumes that have created and crowned whole new movements in fragrance, but I still can't take Angel and Tommy Girl seriously.


However, we will agree on Mitsouko, and L'Heure Bleue, on Pour Monsieur and Vol de Nuit, on Après L'Ondée and Bois de Violette, on Jicky and N°5 parfum (which smells better on a man than on a woman, if used sparingly, I think, as does Femme by Rochas, which smells far away from the original and wonderful on a man when used liberally, which I've long known and worn and which Turin agrees with).

He's not a big fan, though, of carnation, which is a bit upsetting as I'm drenched in Garofano from Santa Maria Novella most every day. And he doesn't mention JAR, which is a huge oversight that must be rectified in the next update as they are pretty much the world's greatest perfumes. With no compromise and feeling no need to please everyone, they smell like nothing else that's out there and the strong purity of their ingredients can feel like pouring treacle on your skin when compared with all the offensive schlock that people gleefully give to their loved ones for Christmas.



He totally destroys the ridiculous myth behind Creed in one fell swoop, a myth anyone with a brain would know was bogus the second they smelled a selection of the reputedly legendary house's scents and realized what vapid excuses for perfumes they are. Case in point, Original Vetiver which I remember getting a press gift of and hating instantly because, as Turin so succinctly says, it "deserves some sort of prize for managing to make whatever vetiver it contains almost imperceptible." To give him his due, he does give kudos to Green Irish Tweed (which I really don't understand as it perhaps smells of the first word but the other two are lost on me), but for me even here it's all marketing buzz as what Creed touts as some sort of legendary heritage scent your grandfather might have worn actually dates from 1985.

The brand Clean is annihilated by Turin who says of Clean Fresh Laundry, "A sniff is enough to put you off personal hygiene for a week," and of Clean Lather, "Clean's worst fragrance. Yay." Ouch. Then Sanchez deals the final blow with Clean Ultimate - "These Clean scents are like a party game: name that household product!"

So-cool-it-hurts Le Labo gets slated, too, and of Iceberg Homme, which comes with the subtitle "sad shampoo", Turin writes, "That's him all right. Now put him back in the freezer."

Of course not all perfumes get such a beating. Chanel N°5 gets nearly two pages of unrestrained love poured on it by both authors; Mitsouko gets a page of Turin's adoration; and the greatest Chanel and Guerlain scents, the ones that haven't been meddled with, consistently come out on top.

Turin, especially, goes a long way to mourn once-great fragrances that have been tragically altered to smell like so much chain store nothingness, and makes a great effort to rehabilitate others that may have passed under the radar or that he feels deserve a second look.


Of Dior's little-known Jules (little-known as it's far from being a focus-group favorite since it smells like a horny tom cat has been hanging around the back door of your house) Turin writes: "Its top note of sage on a background of cedar will either delight or shock you depending on whether sage smells aromatic or urinous to you. But it's not that simple: to me sage smells urinous and that is precisely why I love Jules. Like Caron's Yatagan and YSL's Kouros, it feels like you know your lover well enough to no longer bother closing the bathroom door."

Try explaining that to the dolt at the ad agency.

Trümmerfrauen

The above shot is from Am Anfang (or 'In The Beginning' if you don't speak German), the theatrical work by the German artist Anselm Kiefer that had its début Tuesday night at the Opéra Bastille.
I'd been looking at it for so long on the Opéra de Paris and thinking "will I/won't I" that this morning when I eventually decided to go about booking a ticket the site started acting weird, but now I've finally got a seat for Monday evening in the first parterre, nineteen rows from the stage, but I clicked on the handing "view your view" icon and it's not that bad, especially as the impressive set is unlikely to be hard to miss. It's the same general area in which my friend Fanni and I sat six weeks ago for Tosca. Well, same side, except that we, by some stroke of luck, found ourselves in the 7th row that time, so I guess really not all that general at all as areas go.

Anyway.... all this just to say that I love the above picture; not for the woman in the whole but for the costumes of the women in the background, the Trümmerfrauen (Rubble Women), who salvaged bricks in bombed-out postwar Germany. When I was sitting at my corner café yesterday having lunch with my friend Tiara and her youngest son Jurijn a woman walked past the window with a white 'headscarf' on and a black sweatshirt and black shirt to the ground, the entirely tenue splattered liberally with paint. She had clearly been painting and was maybe off to get more paint or some turpentine or something to eat, but she looked like she might have stepped right out of a Rick Owens show and in a totally random manner seemed ineffably chic.
One of those moments when I should have had a camera at hand, otherwise how would you know that I didn't make the whole thing up?