kasia smutniak in valentino

 

 

 

laetitia casta + léa seydoux in dolce & gabbana

 

 

the mad englishman

“I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting is, no comparison, and yet after hunting we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened.”

Love in A Cold Climate, by Nancy Mitford

travel is glamorous only in retrospect

While everyone else on the northern hemisphere is getting ready for fall, I am preparing for a bit of a longer trip (two months) traveling around Southeast Asia & Australia. This has meant money spent on vaccinations (extremely expensive!), a special travel towel, a proper backpack etc. etc. 

On the nicer front, I thought the trip called for a new Heid Klein bikini (via mytheresa), which looked marvelous on the model & absolutely kept its promise, as it looks almost as wonderful on me (almost being enough in this case). The U-cut shape of the top has a somewhat '60s kitten-ish look to it, while all in all it's a model of simplicity, which I rather like.

All the beauty product travel sizes assembled over the years are coming in very handy right now, as they aren't as heavy and won't take up as much space as original sizes & should be more than enough for the two months. Plus, I can just chuck them out as I go along.

I have posts scheduled for the two months I will be gone, so this space won't become a complete ghost town.

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”

Cesare Pavese

the modern muse

How dreamy is this Estée Lauder short film providing insight into Arizona Muse's life, who is the star of their current perfume campaign.

A lovelier-than-thou picnic scene with her closest friends dressed in pink and white in London, sitting on the steps of a New York apartment, being chauffeured around in a cab with nice old leather seats, rhapsodizing about childhood holidays spent at her grandparents house picking strawberries, strolling the Massachusetts pastures with her horse and cherubic son Nico in hand, spending tender moments on a white wooden porch with her family.

No, it wouldn't hurt to be the soft-spoken Arizona Grace Muse - a name she didn't like as a child. "It was a big name for a little girl." These days, however, it perfectly encapsulates her work as a modern muse. 

"To see a world in a grain of sand 

And a heaven in a wild flower, 

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, 

And eternity in an hour."

excerpt from Auguries of Innocence, by William Blake