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25 May, 2014

tth blooms

 
 

Taylor Tomasi-Hill is killing it on Instagram. Adore her mixture of grown-up preppy with a '90s touch. Adore her Adidas Stan Smith's (Who didn't own a pair of these back in the day? Answer: no one.) and her neon slip-ons. Dare I say she is a kind of grungier, cooler Carrie Bradshaw in all her daring fashion combos?! Anyway - adore that she opened up her own flower business & the Instagram account that comes along with it.

"After I left Moda [Operandi], I started meeting with people, and as a thank you I would make miniature floral arrangements for a more personal touch. All of a sudden, I hear that Honor Brodie [the creative director at Tory Burch] and others were passing on my information, and I was getting requests for my blooms. It's something I love and I found it quite therapeutic."
Taylor Tomasi-Hill (x)

23 May, 2014

the stella mccartney beckett


I have to be honest & say when I first got the Beckett (named after Stella's youngest son) in the mail my reaction resembled my mom's a lot: "You paid €... for this? Not much to it, is there?" It's one thing to want to build a classic wardrobe of staples & quite another to actually shell out the money for it.

Over the last couple of days I have become so affectionate towards it, though - for all it's humble- and subtleness.

The bag looks all structure & business, but I think it's a lot less so, when actually worn on the person. So it's the best of both worlds, really.

I am not going to pretend I never wear leather etc., but it's obviously quite a nice bonus that ethically and environmentally the bag is a-okay as well.

P.s. Stella recently talked to one of my favorite journalists Vanessa Friedman & the video is quite interesting to watch.

"I was brought up on an organic farm in the countryside and the whole family was vegetarian. So it sort of came without thinking, I guess. But then when it came to my having a career, starting a job and starting a brand in fashion, I guess it wouldn't have sat comfortably with me to be hypocritical. I guess that was the starting point. The seeds were already sown in my personal life, and then they came into my business life."
Stella McCartney (x)

14 May, 2014

cannes opening ceremony: sofia coppola

 
(x)

13 May, 2014

a grey state of mind

 
 
 

Wooly jumpers, a fuzzy cat & rows and rows of LPs. 
Supposedly summer is coming, but you couldn't tell from the way the sky looks today.
And in all its greyness, this editorial styled by the formidable Clare Richardson feels so very right.

It's a day for reading Kafka, listening to Blowin' In The Wind & borrowing his big, bulky sweaters.
The apartment is freezing. As it always is  naturally you can't afford any heating.
So you pretend to be the Girl from the North Country & put on a thick pair of socks.
It is a day for walking down a street in Greenwich Village in a brown suede jacket, stuffing your hands into your pockets to keep them from the cold & huddling together. Maybe you'll try your hand at busking. Maybe you'll look at"a photograph that inspired countless young men to hunch their shoulders, look distant, and let the girl do the clinging."
It's most certainly a day for rubbing the palm of your hands together, while the smoke from your cigarette cuts through the crispy autumn air.

Also:

Please see if she has a coat so warm 
To keep her from the howlin' winds
 Please see if her hair hangs long 
If it rolls and flows all down her breast 
Please see for me if her hair's hanging long 
For that's the way I remember her best
Girl from the North Country, by Bob Dylan (
x)

Matthew Bell & Sigrid Agren photographed by Lachlan Bailey for Man About Town (x)

11 May, 2014

favorite faces of the moment


Oh, to have such beautifully sculpted cheekbones!

Favorite models of the moment:
  • Andreea Diaconu
  • Carola Remer
  • Crista Cober
  • Daria Werbowy
English roses (not pictured):
  • Rosie Tapner
  • Edie Campbell
  • Sam Rollinson
(x/x/x/x)

10 May, 2014

in love lately, part ii

Lucy Laucht for Waiting for Saturday (x)

 In love lately with:
  • Susie Boyt's column for the Financial Times. She's Lucian Freud's daughter & such a lovely and smart writer.
  • Can't wait for Sam Smith - some call him the male Adele - to release his album In The Lonely Hour on May 26th. His intonation & voice in general make my heart hurt. Especially on Make It To Me & Stay With Me.
  • Hadley Freeman is, as always, spot on - whether it be on Kate Upton or George Clooney. Both of these articles are definitely worth a read.
  • BBC period dramas have such a wonderfully calming effect on me. Especially after a day at work. The Crimson Field - all about nurses serving in the War to End All Wars - has been doing it's magic lately. "This is how you heal. Saltwater and fresh air."
  • This Stella McCartney dress. Lace always.
  • White peach & blackberry tart - will definitely be trying this soon.
  • Reading right now: The Mitford Girls by Mary S. Lovell. My Mitford Sisters obsession has increased tenfold.

"Afterwards I met my lovely long-lost cousin Augusta for a drink in a nearby hotel and from the revolving doors to the bar seven people said, “I love your scarf,” or variations thereof. I went to to the National Gallery wearing it, and I swear no one was looking at the paintings, only at my scarf."
Susie Boyt (x)

09 May, 2014

from innocence and insouciance - a boarding school


Photography by Jamie Hawkesworth. With special thanks to the staff and pupils of Christ’s Hospital and Oundle School. (x)

03 May, 2014

there's something about daria


The most individual of all the models, these days Daria hand-picks her jobs & doesn't seem to compromise much. Mind you, after taking time off modeling and crossing the Atlantic in a sailboat girl pretty much has the word 'character' stamped on her face. She got an anchor tattoo as apparently all sailor's do, moved to West Cork in Ireland to live with her carpenter boyfriend, quit drinking and now stays bendy with Ashtanga Yoga. To describe Daria as leggy would be nothing but lazy & yet she is basically the word's incarnation. 

She keeps her face about as minimal as she does her Instagram (no filters, just complete unadorned nature). Her whole being is basically an ode to raw beauty, unequivocal freedom & fierce independence. In that respect she reminds me a lot of Viking shield-maidens

She's also that most-sought after of words: cool & as such seems truly comfortable in her own skin. There's something almost grungy about her. As we all try and emulate her, it certainly doesn't hurt that fashion seems to be going through a '90s phase right now.

(x)

"I was so relieved. I was like, I can do and say and be whatever I want now—because I'm 30. There was a lot of surrendering." (x)


02 May, 2014

the london girl, by lisa armstrong

 

After years of having the international beauty standard set by glowing superwoman, of trying to match the tans, the curves and – most self-deludingly of all – the hairdos of Cindy Crawford and Claudia Schiffer, London Girl has finally come into her own.

This means that it’s now OK to look a bit ragged around the edges. It’s even fashionable to wear slightly fraying cardigans from the menswear department at Marks & Spencer and to mix poor-boy sweaters with Spandex trousers.

Japenese film crews have jammed the flight paths to Heathrow eager to ask Kate Moss, a tiny waif from Croydon with limp hair, wide eyes and a million-dollar contract with Calvin Klein, the questions they put to Linda Evangelista two years ago. Meanwhile, Corinne Day another scrap of a girl with a whispery south London accent, and a great mate of Moss, has had to sign off the dole [unemployment fund] since she replaced Steven Meisel as the photographer on the hugely prestigious advertising campaign for Barney’s.

And there are hundred, probably thousands more girls like them in this country: pale, laconic creatures with fine bones, hair the colour of tea, faces that look lived-in at fourteen and an almost maddeningly cavalier attitude to their own good looks.

Upper-class girls all of them: they would be – after all, Britain is famous for the down-at-heel appearance of its aristocracy. But in keeping with the egalitarian spirit of the day, there were scores more girls across the class spectrum who began to grasp the essentially aristocratic taste for the old and tatty – two qualities that are integral to London Girl’s style.

„Even now I feel guilty about spending money on beauty treatments and coordinating clothes. It smacks of vanity when you tell people that you’ve been for a facial. You half want to tell them you’ve been boozing or at the library. Anywhere but preening yourself.“

...she is happy to spend days browsing through the rails of Portobello Market for a velvet frock coat or a droopy, floral dress that’s worn in the right places. Her pulse races at the challenge of hunting down a lace chemise that’s matured to the correct degree of creaminess and transparency.

It probably comes from being raised in a culture that reveres indiscriminately anything from the past from exquisite but crumbling stately homes, to second-rate TV sitcoms. The result can be the most remarkable synthesis of historical allusions – some days she’ll look as though she has stepped out of a renaissance painting. At other times she will look more as though she has ben modelling for the kinky artist Allen Jones.

"People think we are anti-fashion, me and Kate," says Corinne Day (...) "but we love fashion. We just don't like it when it's predictable or ostentatious. We're mad about designers like Margiela, whose clothes look like rags, and Galliano because his things are like beautiful, antique treasures."

Despite her apparent otherworldliness, London Girl will stake out bargains in the most expensive shops and barter with a steely predatoriness that would have done credit to Baroness Thatcher in her EC negotations – which is why an instant way of recognising London Girl is that she’s always wearing something „absolutely amazing“ that she bought for 45 pounds reduced from 1,500 pounds in Browns last season.

While Paris style is all about looking sophisticated and New York’s about looking rich, London Girl’s is an altogether more complex, acquired taste, perverse even – which for all its apparent understatement is no less about one-upwomanship. According to Andrew MacPherson, „It’s the result of years of inverted snobbery, of deliberately seeking out beauty where average people wouldn’t see it.
London Girl takes pride in being misunderstood by the masses and the energy invested in achieving this equals the efforts of women pursuing a more obvious type of beauty.

Supreme messines combined with some of the best complexions in the world – it’s an art-school sensibility, „ says John Galliano, „but you see it everywhere in this country, from the girl serving you in McDonald’s to the pupils hanging around Camden Schools for Girls.  Occasionally you see versions in Paris of New York but it’s much more laboured.  The nails will be too perfect, the hair too neat, and somehow the don’t have the gall to mix things in the same way that British girls do. And they don’t have the gift for that sublime kind of shabbiness."

Bella Freud discovered this when she went to Milan recently in an unravelling coat that all her friends in London had told her was the find of the year. „The Italians just kept asking me if I realised my seams were coming undone. I thought I looked wonderfully chic; after the thousandth fur-lined parka you do long for something a bit unpredictable. The reason you get so much of it here is that there’s no tradition of preening – not openly anyway. God forbid you should be seen as vain at school, but ten out of ten for being a tomboy.

Peek into London Girl’s Prada handbag – or more likely, a cheap imitation from Whistles – and among her used tube tickets and matches (she doesn’t actually carry cigarettes because she’s permanently on the verge of giving up and thus prefers to cadge from other people) is a battery of beauty products designed to make her look as though she’s not wearing any. This invariably includes jars of Prescriptives foundation and powder that don’t look or feel like foundation and powder; some neutral eye-shadow; a pair of Cutler  & Gross sunglasses for days when the dark circles are beyond poetic-looking; a hairbrush  you wouldn’t necessarily want to sweep your floor with; an Evian spray (despite the fact that the stuff falls from the sky in this country with more frequency than almost anywhere elese); a tin of Phytoplage oil to rectify hair that looks too clean; a pot of Blisteze and a shade of lip colour that, once on, looks less like lipstick and more as though she has drunk too much wine the previous night.


„In New York you could tell a girl to cut off her head because it will improve her chances of getting bookings and she’d do it. Here you tell them Ralph Lauren’s on the phone and they dither about whether or not they can bear to leave their boyfriends.“

excerpt from Fashion's New Spirit, by Lisa Armstrong
Vogue UK March 1993 (x)


P.s.: Condé Nast Fashion College is having a debate next Tuesday titled "What Makes Kate Moss So Enduring?" and I think this article goes a long way in explaining her appeal.