Now Burning: Book Smelling Bougie

"With all the things I know, one could write a book. Although, one might also say that, considering all that I don't know, one could create a library." - Sacha Guitry
If you are like me and love candles AND books, you'll agree that it makes perfect sense (scents!) for Paris publisher Assouline to make a range of scented candles for bibliophiles called Book Scented Candles which includes Bibliothèque, Wood, Havana and Leather. They are meant to evoke the unique fragrance of a library, and the reading experience. (Price: USD 45)
Wood, for instance smells of a wood-paneled library; Leather distills the soft smell of leather, comfortable leather couches, the scent of an old manuscript. The candle glasses come inscribed with book-related sayings, such as these. "I must say that I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book." - Groucho Marx"Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have left me." - Anatole FranceProsper Assouline of Assouline Books
"God is a smoker of Havana cigars. I see his grey clouds. I know that he smokes even at night." Serge Gainsbourg

Drag Attack

Gathering momentum: Fashion magazines are really making a case for drags and freaks. Is it the end of the decade thing?Isabelli Fontana in Western Drag. Acid washed stretch jeans anyone?Giselle in Cher Drag. That's a Bob Mackie if I ever saw one.Last but never least, the Goddess of Good Taste herself, Anna Dello Russo, who appears to be in Victorian Drag. Her mobile phone looks mighty like a purse, does it not? Hullo, hullo, are you there Good Taste? These, and other atrocities, appeared in 10.

He Said She Said

"Perhaps in order to write a really great book, you must be rather unaware of the facts. You can slave away at it and change every adjective to some other adjective, but perhaps you can write better if you leave the mistakes."

"I have known many poets here who have written well - very fine stuff - with delicate moods and so on - but if you talk to them, the only thing they tell you is smutty stories. They take things for granted. They know they have to write, then, well, they have to suddenly become rather sad or ironic."- Jorge Luis Borges(1899 – 1986)

Enter Cowslip with a Bowl of Cream

Satirical cartoons by the wonderful James Gillray (1756 – 1815). sketch of Lady Buckingham, 1795
The First Kiss, 1803
Following the Fashion (no date)

Old People

Susan!Jane!V Magazine gets on the Old People case... Commmendable, but I'm really not sure about the wigs and that cap!
Sigourney!

Debo!

Deborah Vivien Freeman Mitford Cavendish, 90, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, at home at Chatsworth.She's grandmother of Stella Tennant, of course."Darling Paddy,
Stella came. We had to be together in a photo for Vogue's 90th birthday come Christmas. So one Mario Testino, famous photographer, came in a helicopter with a crew of makeup, hairdresser, “fashion editor”, etc from London.
I've got a really beautiful dress, grand evening, given me by Oscar de la Renta, so that was my kit. They bound Stella's legs, up to where they join her body, in tartan. A Union Jack flag hung from her waist & her top was what my father would have called meaningless.
Hair skewbald/piebald, all colours & stuck up in bits. THEN they produced “shoes” with 6 inch heels. More stilts - she could hardly put one foot in front of the other, wobbling & toppling.
We looked just like that Grandville drawing of a giraffe dancing with a little monkey. I was the monkey.
Much love
Debo
(Letter from In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor)

"My Grandmother can carry anything off" - Stella Tennant

Spanish

Jon K shot by Peter Lindbergh in Spanish Vogue.

The Grumps

Anna Dello Russo has taken to bed with a serious case of the Grumps just a day after learning that Vogue actually had the nerve to award Kate the Best Dressed Woman of the Decade. I think she forgot that she's not a woman.
Her new year's resolution: Wear even more stupid things... yes, even in bed. (In this case, it's Philip Treacy/ Valentino)

Joyeux Noel

The Tom Ford guest edited Vogue Paris. The model is Daphne Groenveld, the photo by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott. Carine Roitfeld: "Tom has an eye like a scanner. He took his role very seriously. He is truly multitalented.”
For this issue, Mr Ford photographed the likes of Lauren Hutton, fresh off the runway for a fashion story about his muses, all wearing Tom Ford, and devoted to mature women who have resisted plastic surgery (below). “He very much likes beautiful wrinkles,” said Ms Roitfeld. Mr Ford wrote articles, photographed and styled well features, cast models and art directed everything in this highly anticipated issue. He even spent a couple of days in Condé Nast offices on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré to supervise the proceedings.

Best Dressed Woman of the Decade

In the first list of its kind compiled by Vogue, Kate has been honoured with "The Best-Dressed Woman of the Decade" award in their January 2011 issue. (Yikes... it's 2011 already!)That's got to be one potent Bloody Mary! Cheers, Kate! Anna Dello Russo is not very pleased, because she also want.
"At every moment Kate Moss has looked chic and cool. We chose people who were thinking out of the box, women who look as if they're wearing what they really wanted to wear. No one has had more influence for the past decade on the way women have dressed than Kate Moss." - Alexandra Kotur, Vogue style director

He Said She Said

"A poet must take as his material his own language as it is actually spoken around him. The music of poetry, then, will be a music latent in the common speech of his time." - T S Eliot
That would mean Singlish to you and me.

Daisy

Baz Luhrmann has cast Carey Mulligan in the role of Daisy Buchanan in his remake of The Great Gatsby. Leonardo DiCaprio has already signed on as Jay Gatsby and Tobey Maguire will play Nick Carraway."He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher — shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.” " - F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 1

I was left with no doubt that this was indeed just the first part of the last installment of the Harry Potter series - and that would be my only beef with this film. It in no way stands as a movie by itself, and I feel it should. However, it's a mouth-watering starter (albeit a 146 minute salad course) that left me hungry for the finale. Deathly Hallows Part 1 is something of a road movie (we've left Hogwarts behind) as Potter & Co hit the road to seek out a series of artefacts. Which can be a problem as this is the darkest Potter film yet (unbroken by comic relief), featuring many deaths, a sustained nightmarish tension (is this really for five-year-olds?), with the promised show-down between Potter and Voldemort only available in Part 2, there is a certain lack of forward momentum.The performances, thought are uniformly delightful and excellent, especially from Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort and the three young leads (who would have thought Emma Watson could turn out to be an actress and not just a pretty face?) who make even the non-set pieces watchable. Director David Yates has made a beautiful film, from dazzling special effects and visuals that always seem fresh, to exciting storytelling, to chills and scares to gorgeous art direction and breathtaking scenary - it looks like a movie with a non-stop budget, rich and dense and detailed, and very much a labour of love.

Tom Ford

“There’s a continuity from what I was doing at YSL at the end; that’s the customer.” - Tom Ford“It’s about individuality. Real clothes, real women. For a fashionable woman aged 25 to 75. That’s why I literally put many of my own muses in the show.“I want this to be somewhere a woman knows she can go when she wants a great jacket—not a fake expensive jacket, something that has intrinsic value. I don’t think fashion has to change every five minutes. I’d like these to be clothes you can wear for a long time—ten, 20 years; pass on to your daughter. Why buy vintage when you can open your own closet!”Tom Ford and his debut women's collection as featured in Vogue December. Mr Ford’s comeback to womenswear after six years (his last was with Gucci Group) was shown achieved in top secret-style in New York on September 12. Anna Wintour should just have put any one of these images on the cover instead of Angelina Jolie. The photos by Steven Meisel of this collection were shot the morning after the presentation on September 13.

Inspire

Don't Rain On My Parade

Weekend Reading List

New territory: I've not been travelling - at least not the way I used to - for two years already and feel rather left out when I hear friends making plans for trips. But never enough, I must say, to want to make a trip myself. Instead I read travel literature. I didn't know, did you, that Evelyn Waugh wrote many travel books? I picked up Waugh Abroad: Collected Travel Writing with an introduction by Nicholas Shakespeare. It's quite thick as it contains seven book-length travel pieces including Labels, which is a Mediterranean journal to A Tourist in Africa. In these pieces, you can glimpse some of Waugh's experiences that colour his novels, and this is fascinating for me. Studying Antonio's People, by Paul Caranicas, is like being transported to New York City in the 1980s (Antonio Lopez died in 1987, age 44). Not only is this book full of Mr Lopez's amazing drawings (accomplished, witty and sensual), they are placed side by side with photos of his models - many are Hispanic, a few are Japanese, including a pair of beautiful brothers, who are both. It's really a good book to own. I'm also reading The Paris Review Interviews, a collection of interviews with Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, Jorge Luis Borges, T S Elliot, amongst august others. Writers are a different continent altogther, don't you think?I'm happy to discover an Agatha Christie I don't remember the plot of, althought I must have read it at some point. Sad Cypress, a Hercule Poirot story, couldn't have escaped me - I spent a couple of teenage years obsessively reading all Dame Christie's books. Now reading them late at night, I'm transported back to those days of Ribena and Cadbury chocolates. What innocent, simple joy I enjoyed!

Trend: Matured Men and Drags

Stephen Dorf (he's in the new Sofia Coppola movie, no, don't roll your eyes yet) exemplifies the trend towards featuring the matured man in magazines: T and then V magazines put him on the cover. The recent fall Vogue Homme International dedicated its entire issue to the matured guy, making a convincing case for growing up, growing old, with grace - and beautiful clothes. The trend for drags has actually been a long while in the making and has truly come out of the closet with the fall Arena Homme + and this Industrie cover with Marc Jacobs in drag. Shouldn't it be 'Ms' Jacobs rather than 'Mrs' though. The 'Mrs' sort of throws me off - she's married to... Marc?

Fire & Ice

Before: Revlon’s 1952 ad for the Fire & Ice Collection, shot by Richard Avedon, featuring model Dorian Leigh wearing a silver gown framed by a sweeping opera cape (a copy of a Balenciaga original), her hands drawing attention to her red nails and lips.
Its like a Rene Gruau drawing, isn't it?
After: With Fire & Ice back on shelves (Revlon has re-released three “lip-and-tip” pairings). The recreated ad, shot by Mario Testino, features actress Jessica Biel (it's challenging to even try to think what she's ever been in. TV movie, maybe?). It just looks so tawdry. Is it her? Is it him?

Holiday Kate

New Kate pictures in Dec British Vogue, by Mario Testino.