They broke the mold after Dumas wrote “The Count of Monte Cristo.” There will never be a revenge plot as ambitious, as smooth, as Rube Goldbergian, as violent, as tense, or as passionate as this. This is the Ur Revenge Plot. I devoured this book. Inhaled it. And it’s partly because my brain melted a bit after the election, and then I was doggedly rebuilding my spirits with Solnit’s “Hope in the Dark” (TBR) (GET OFF MY BACK), and then it was Thanksgiving, and I […]
Angry people making pretty dresses
It was a fashion battle of the bands. In November 1973, American and French designers went head to head in an ostentatious and outrageous fashion show in Paris. The competition, set up by American fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert with the assistance of French aristocrat Marie-Helene de Rothschild, was held in the Theatre Gabriel in the Chateau de Versailles. It was ostensibly a benefit for charity; the evening would be dinner and a fashion show between five French (Yves Saint Laurent, Hubert de Givenchy, Pierre Cardin, […]
Memoir. Fashion. Not for me.
This was the March pick of my book club and I went into it with much trepidation. I don’t read a lot of memoirs, and I don’t care about fashion sooo take what I say with those grains of salt. I did NOT like this book. Here is the paragraph that I have selected to illustrate the reasons I didn’t like it. “Despite all the drama, the photograph he took of Tina lounging on the sofa surrounded by parasols was not modern at all. He […]
“To Be a Godey’s Lady….”
In my continual search for quantitative research on Godey’s Lady’s Book, I came across “Mr. Godey’s Ladies: Being a Mosaic of Fashions and Fancies” by Robert Kunciov, which after the disappointment of the “Sarah Josepha Hale” book, I was leery. I was pleasantly surprised however, by the wonderful reproductions and a few color plates of the original etchings, as well as the author’s selections of excerpts from the original text. He begins with a chronology of the types of fashions, detailing the trends, colors, and […]