What Not to Wear

Chevreul died in 1889, 121 years before Instagram was invented, but had the platform been available to him, I think he would have done very well on it. There, and elsewhere on the social web, millions of people are still trying to figure out which shades look best on them. They are doing it via seasonal-color analysis, a quasi-scientific, quasi-philosophical discipline that holds that we all have a set of colors that naturally suit us, and a set that do not—that wash us out, make us look ruddy or green, emphasize our flaws, and minimize our beauty. Ellen Cushing, The Atlantic

Bring No Clothes

When Virginia Woolf invited TS Eliot down for a country weekend in 1920 she concluded with “Please bring no clothes”. This was not a suggestion that “Tom” should arrive in East Sussex naked. Such a possibility was unlikely anyway since at this point the poet was still working as a buttoned-up clerk at Lloyds Bank. Eliot was famously wedded to his three-piece suit to the point where, Woolf joked, he would have worn a four-piece one if such a thing existed. What she meant by “bring no clothes” was that at Monk’s House they did not dress for dinner, change for church (there was no church), or worry about getting their best clothes grubby in the garden. This was Bloomsbury, albeit a rural version, and the clothing conventions to which the rest of upper-middle-class society had returned after the first world war had no place there. Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian

recensione di un libro su come si vestiva Virginia Woolf e il suo gruppo, Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion, di Charlie Porter (Particular).

I baffi di Dickens

A sharp, detailed daguerreotype profile portrait of Dickens sporting his moustache was made in around 1852-55, when he was writing Bleak House and Hard Times. It was donated to the Charles Dickens Museum in London by a private collector last year, and the museum has put it on display for the first time, until 31 March, limiting the time it is shown to ensure its conservation. Alison Flood, The Guardian

sempre sul Guardian, l'arte della convalescenza (con una chiosa sul significato di "aftermath"): 

Getting better is rarely something that happens all the time. Whether we’ve been seriously ill or injured, everyone has to experience the complexities of recovery as the aftermath. Aftermath is an old agricultural term meaning “a second crop” growing unexpectedly in the space left by the main harvest and it can entail difficult decisions about what should be done with these remnants. Emily Mayhew, The Guardian

 infine un libro sulla difficile arte del vestirsi, Sofi Thanhauser, Worn (Allen Lane):

One of the great pleasures of this panoramic history of getting dressed is Sofi Thanhauser’s ability to spot moments like these where human desire and material culture collide.

Roots of Style

La geniale e bizzarra stilista cubana (ora residente a nyc) Isabel Toledo ha scritto un libro, Roots of Style: Weaving Together Life, Love, and Fashion (Celebra). " ... an idiosyncratic book that, like her clothing, doesn't fit neatly into a category. Her dressmaking can be lavish or stark; stately or subversive; tactile but conceptual; demi-couture or, in the case of her recent collaborations with Payless and Target, populist. Valerie Steele, the director of the museum at FIT, has called Toledo a 'genius,' noting that she can do the kind of spatial modeling in her head that a computer does.

Toledo seems to have approached the story of her life as she would a pattern - the pattern, say, for the coat-and-dress ensemble of lemongrass wool lace that Michelle Obama wore to her husband's Inauguration". Judith Thurman, newyorker. Nella foto Isabel Toledo con il marito, Ruben Toledo, artista e illustratore.

FashionEast

In un recente, bel libro, FashionEast: The Spectre that Haunted Socialism (MIT Press), Djurdja Bartlett ha studiato la moda in Unione Sovietica e nei paesi che le ruotavano intorno. "The Bolshevik revolution in 1917 was in many ways a modernist project. Lenin’s Western suit and his tie demonstrated a dynamic and still open relationship with the West, while Stalin’s uniform, resembling a traditional Russian peasant tunic tolstovka, was an iconographic symbol of the society freezing back into conservative and immutable forms. Socialism eventually dressed men in conservative, monumental suits, which visually corresponded to its totalitarian ideology and aesthetics. Men's fashion was much less controversial, as it is, in general, less prone to change. Socialism was mostly afraid of women’s fashion and its penchant for seasonal changes. As a system, socialism could not deal with change. Once the revolutions settled into quiet societal patterns, the regimes were not interested in change any longer." newyorker.