Lusiana Fashion

having a dress up moment RED

.
the only fashion advice you'll get this december~

Audrey Hepburn by Richard Avedon

" When in doubt wear RED."

Bill Blass

along with a little look at the Bill Blass Spring Collection from 1995-surprisingly fresh & ladylike

Bill Blass Spring 1995 - .

"As I plop my too-young-to-watch-TV 18-month-old son in front of YouTube to enjoy a couple of minutes of Sesame Street clips, I feel comforted that what he’s going to see represents the world I want him to live in. He’s transfixed, bopping and swaying to Ray Charles singing the ABCs. He claps when the song is over. He's too young to tell me what he's thinking or feeling, but it's nice to know that his companions on his journey of childhood include a big yellow bird, a counting vampire, a garbage-can-dwelling misanthrope and a multiracial cast of human beings who value his worth as a child of color in this world. What a village." -Lome A. Aseron

Celebrating its 40th anniversary this season, multiple Emmy Award winning Sesame Street - OBG's POW (Place of the Week) - is the preeminent educational television program for preschoolers, a pioneer of the contemporary standard which combines education and entertainment in children's television shows, and a fictional place in the slightly idealized New York City. The central characters - Susan, Gordon, and later, Miles; Maria, Luis, and later, Gabi; and in the basement apartment, Ernie and Bert - live at 123 Sesame Street and to the right of 123 Sesame Street are the somewhat more unusual abodes of Muppets Oscar the Grouch (and his pet worm Slimey) and Big Bird. Other beloved Muppet characters include Mr. Snuffleupagus (aka Snuffy), Grundgetta, Ernie, Bert, the Twiddlebugs, Papa Bear, Mama Bear, Curly Bear, Baby Bear, monsters Telly, Zoe, Mexican-born Rosita, Elmo, Cookie Monster, Prairie Dawn, Count von Count, Humphrey, Ingrid, baby Natasha, bellhop Benny Rabbit, Kermit the Frog, The Two-Headed Monster and more (whew)! Currently, Grover's regular segment, "Global Grover," follows the self-described "lovable, furry pal" around the world exploring local cultures and traditions.

Tying in with its multiculturalist perspective, the show pioneered the idea of occasionally inserting very basic Spanish words and phrases to acquaint young children to the concept of knowing more than one language with Sesame Street's reach ultimately becoming global. [Source: Muppet.wikia.com]

a Tree inheritance

Mrs. Tree's Sitting Room at Ditchley

Nancy Lancaster stated " I was always searching for beauty wherever I've lived, wherever I've gone. I wasn't interested in the houses as I was in their ambiance. In the furniture, in the history, in the garden. You never really could put your finger specifically on whatever created beauty-it was too elusive-but house were where I found it the most." In all of her homes she found it-Haseley Court, Kelmarsh Hall and likely her most triumphant Ditchley. In 1933-Ditchley became Nancy's- her husband-long fascinated with Ditchley purchased the property. It is fascinating to note- the house was filled with furniture collected for over 350 years. After some of the important and stellar pieces were tagged to go along with the sellers-leaving the rest to the Trees, Nancy shrewdly drew the line, telling her husband "we buy the house with everything or completely empty: one or the other, it was their choice. In the end they decided to sell it lock ,stock and barrel."

Nancy during her Ditchley Reign photographed by Cecil Beaton

Serebriakoff painting

During Nancy's tenure at Ditchley- the room once referred to as the Tapestry Room became Mrs. Tree's Sitting Room. Here she attended to the daily business of running the house. The most important design element in the room was the exotic Chinoiserie Rococo carvings. Assisted by Stephane Boudin of Jansen in Paris, Mrs. Tree used him more as "contractor" and not decorator. She had no intention of creating a decorator's room- but a room of her own. The results were decidedly feminine, pale yellows, golds, whites and pinks for color and an 18th century Axminster carpet with birds, bouquets of flowers and wheat sheaths. Her design for the curtains-an elaborate Chippendale to do with pelmets- was loathed by Boudin-but Mrs. Tree insisted. The walls were covered in bleached out red Victorian damask, giving it a "sort of hardly pink color." A grand bureau plat with Austrian fauteuil, various pieces of black lacquer rounded out the room's design and lastly Nancy's witty addition of a oyster coloured felt embroidered table skirt with animals dressed in 18th & 19th century costumes- including Madame de Pompadour dressed with a goat's head.

The work was embroidered from the artist J J Grandville's drawings LES SCENES DE LA VIE PRIVEE ET PUBLIQUE DES ANIMAUX published in 1842. The satirical caricatures drawn by Grandville provide an insightful commentary on society using animals- The inclusion of the table in Nancy's room at Ditchley and subsequently reappearing in her Saloon at Haseley Court in 1954 says a great deal about Lancaster's ideas about the bon ton. The Grandville embroiderys also tell us Nancy Lancaster got it right the first time-continually using her favourites, recycling pieces she loved and reinventing them in new settings. The Saloon-considered the most formal of the house again became an eclectic mix: girandoles from Ditchley (appearing in the first photograph above), aquamarine silk walls and a pair of aquamarine curtains that hung in the blue drawing room at Ditchley-being remade for Haseley. Nancy acquired the large Elizabethan paintings of the sisters Fitton for the Saloon at Haseley. Once again these reappear in Nancy's future homes and are now owned by Annette and Oscar de la Renta.

scenes from the Saloon at Haseley Court

Grandville's Scenes

Imagine my surprise when recently perusing forgotten books- I found in The Englishwoman's House, photographs of Anne and Michael Tree's Shute House-the same embroidered table skirt. Anne Tree "inherited" the whimsical piece from her mother in law Nancy Lancaster and placed it in her drawing room- referring to it as a "winner." Not too shabby- those hand me downs. "My husband was lucky to inherit a lot of furniture and carpets from his parents and over the years his mother has given us endless presents of beautiful things." Along with all the beautiful things inherited-also a pair of Ditchley bedroom curtains mentioned by Madame de la Tour du Pin in her diary written while residing with her relations at Ditchley after she fled the French Revolution.

the embroidered skirt in Anne Tree's drawing room

detail of Anne Tree's tablescape

Anne Tree had no plans to redo the house in future-obviously believing like her famous mother in law the only three essential ingredients for a successful interior-" a wood fire, candlelight and cut flowers." - and a table skirt.

suggested reading- the wonderful biography Nancy Lancaster Her life, her World, Her Art by Robert Becker, read about her life with many accounts of her world in her own words.

Nancy Lancaster English Country House Style by Martin Wood.

The Englishwoman's House edited by Alvilde Lees Milne

all photographs from one of the above books.

Nancy Lancaster here

Madame de la Tour du Pin here

Ditchley here

Kelmarsh Hall here

a must read- what's Lady Anne Tree up to?

march of the English Penguins

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Why one can not find these darling little PENGUINS in the States-I can not say? Never fear- head right off to ENGLAND for this most delightful series- PENGUIN'S ENGLISH JOURNEY. Twenty classic English romps through the countryside.

All available at AMAZON uk here
or PENGUIN here
.

Farmer In The City: New York's Tradition Trend

Last Friday I went with friends to Henry Public, a new salon-style bar/restaurant found in Cobble Hill. First we were served tasty beers from a staff clad in checkers and suspenders, and then we took in an ambiance of crickety wood and photos of Frederick Douglass while devouring "hamburger sandwiches" and "french fried potatoes." In short, the experience only furthered the suspicion that any new establishment opening in new york with traction among the aged 30 crowd will most likely be old-timey.

This is not news to anyone in New York with an appetite and the ability to leave their apartments: antique is in, marked by an abundance of speakeasy-style bars and rustic-tinged restaurants: see Freeman's, Marlow and Sons, Hotel Delmano, The Richardson, Walter Foods, etc. Here a predilection for old stuff in interior design is matched at the same time by a drive towards craft in food production. There are several other places in New York culture where old-timey reigns as well. My point here is not to announce several well-observed recent trends, but to group them together in an attempt to analyze their origins and consequences. It's not hard, for example, to connect the dots from the restaurant world to the rise of old-world bakeries and butcheries, to the growing interest in locally-grown, organic food products - the rise of the so-called locavore, who out of both health and environmental interests makes locally-grown products an essential priority. Dovetailing in with locavore-ism is a broader trend towards craft and self-reliance - homemade, hand-constructed, DIY, the sorts of projects found in books like "The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living In the Heart of the City"

The contemporary value of such drives towards urban farming, local foods, and general self-reliance cannot be underestimated in light of urgent environmental and global economic problems, such as those brought to light in the riveting documentary Collapse: through his analysis of the looming deadine of peak oil production, Michael Ruppert, the engaging, slightly paranoiac expert, effectively makes the case that "urban homesteading" is more than a youthful trend, it represents the possibility for humans to continue to survive once oil production and the modern life which it sustained begins to irrevocably decline. Old-timey or traditional food production is thus in fact quite cutting-edge - it will undoubtedly play a major factor in the restructuring of society which will most likely occur in the wake of peak oil.

You'll find the old-timey vibe on city streets as well these days, thanks to an abundance of beards, solid footwear, tweeds and flannels. Sidewalkers in Brooklyn can bear a passing resemblance to The Band:

Interestingly, The Band's look in this 1969 photo is already retro, a re-do of cowboy-era duds, and their folk-rock sound at the time already a throwback in an era of plugged-in psychedelia. A recent NYT article highlights the expansion of influence by nineteenth-century styles from restaurants to men's fashion: "This Just In From the 1890s." On a further musical note, it should be pointed out that, as is often the case, music was in on the old-timey thing before restaurants figured it out: witness the blossoming of recent subgenres like "freak folk" and the "New Weird America." Before all these guys, though, there was Animal Collective, whose band name is only one example of their ingenuity, a prescient forerunner of cultural trends towards both the rural and the communal. "Sun Will Shine" by Akron Family epitomizes both these qualities, a gospely, twangy folk-rock tune expands into a choral-voiced stomper, drawing out the blues chords in a grand expansion reminiscent of Spiritualized. Akron Family specializes in shambolic folk jamborees, and they're not alone: bands that emphasize collectivity are all the rage, as are group-vocals and afro-inflected tribal beats. In this way, "Animal Collective" isn't only a particular band name, it's almost a description for a kind of band that has emerged in the past five-ten years.

Akron Family - Sun Will Shine

What do these trends, musical, ecological, and gastronomic, share in common? We might detect in them a distrust or weariness with modernity, with the excesses of industrial society and the alienated life that it perpetuates. This is prominent in discourse on contemporary food production: the large-scale industrial farming complex, documented for example in the excellent Food, Inc. wreaks havoc not only on the earth and our biological life, but our existential life as well, obliterating a sense of connectedness. The ground beef that appears in the burger I consume has traveled an invisible path, the result of an obscured production process. In all the antique restaurants, farmer's markets, beards and folk-tunes one can sense an almost a prelapsarian hearkening for a simpler time, a simpler life, a life connected to its own roots, to the past and the traditions that engendered it.

But why now? Why has this urge become so manifest? It's been in the works, you might say, ever since Sept 11, 2001. If you buy the logic behind Time Magazine's latest cover story, the decade that will close at the end of this year represents nothing less than the 'dimming' of the American dream: "Bookended by 9/11 at the start and a financial wipeout at the end, the first 10 years of this century will very likely go down as the most dispiriting and disillusioning decade Americans have lived through in the post–World War II era." The tradition trend, you can say, is in part a widespread reaction to this passing decade of American decline, an attempt to hide-out among the nostalgic ruins of the past from the bleak forecasts of the future. Such a hiding-out was acutely felt in the wake of last year's economic collapse, when at the time the highest-grossing movie in the country was "Paul Blart: Mall Cop," a comedy in which, fittingly enough,the lead character is a fallen authority figure, an incompetent, arrogant boob in the seat of power tasked with protecting the public. The American public flooded the theaters for a bit of cinematic escapism, only to get their loser president thrust once again in their faces.

Worth noting here is a concomitant but distinctly separate trend, the rise of cuteness, whose trajectory was recently expertly traced by Jim Windolf in an article for Vanity Fair, "Addicted to Cute." Here Windolf points out that cuteness exploded in Japanese culture after the end of WWII, a result of a widespread feeling of the loss of political supremacy. The same causality, Windolf argues, is at work in the rise of cuteness in the US since 2001: our entitled sense of global hegemony shattered by the attacks, we in part sought refuge in innocent, calming visions of lolcats and other adorable internet memes.

In this historical context, what cute and old-timey share as cultural values is that they mark a feeling of the loss of authority. In her essay "What Is Authority?" from the late fifties, Hannah Arendt called attention to the broad collapse of traditional authority in the twentieth-century. This collapse led, she argued, to the generation of new forms of domination, most notably the strains of fascist and socialist totalitarianism. Authority, Arendt claims, takes its strength from being beyond argument. Authority doesn't try to persuade you, it doesn't try to violently force you, it just holds an almost mythic sway over your actions and obedience. You follow authority just because. It's not hard to see how a cultural hankering for tradition might result from a certain sense of a recent loss of American supremacy in particular and a decline in political authority in general. Tradition, Arendt says, is central to maintaining authority, because authority is all about the continuing legitimacy of the past. In the wake of the hollowing out of the American dream of the past ten years, American culture began to re-organize itself, like cells in an organism working to close over a wound.

Oddly enough, I would argue that the cute trend in part reflects the same need for authority. Cuteness affects you prior to your ability to judge it. Cuteness does not persuade or force, cuteness acts on you in a primal, biological way. You cannot evaluate or criticize it, and its effect is immediate. To experience a cute thing is to take a momentary respite from the adult world of responsibilities and decision-making: neither you nor it can be criticized or taken to task. Cuteness provides a similar escape from the demands of independent, critical thinking that submission to authority does. While the tradition trend can be seen as a reaction to contemporary circumstances, it is neither inherently good or bad, productive or harmful. Like any trend, the tradition trend contains a mixture of ideological and progressive elements. In part, it is undoubtedly an escape, a national version of going to see Paul Blart for ten years. The past remembered is never the past taken place: memory, whether personal or cultural, is always a stand-in, a cheap substitute for real events. The "good old days" evoked by Henry Public and other such places were never really that good, as Merle Haggard once sang:

While recently discussing these matters, a friend remarked that an acquaintance of hers, an internet food writer of some renown, had been sharing with her dreams of moving from New York and starting a farm. An inevitable consequence, it would seem, of a rural-obsessed metropolis: move out to the sticks! wear Hunter boots! raise vegetables while wearing a beard! Pure heaven. As Merle's song points out, such images neatly leave out all the thankless toil, labor and dedication characteristic of rural life which spurred the drive for modern technological convenience in the first place. On the other hand, the correlate drives towards local produce and self-reliance generated by a cultural interest in the lifestyles of the past will be invaluable in the near future. The American dream, insofar as it has been shored up by sixty years of geopolitical arrogance and the unshakeable dogma of free-market capitalism, has proven untenable, and hopefully the trend towards tradition will provide the grounds not for regressing to an old America, but for thinking it anew, out of the possibilities left still half-buried in the past.

Finally, there's a great Scott Walker tune, from Tilt, whose title encapsulates the beards, tweeds and speakeasies of New York 2009: "Farmer in the City." This stirring and unsettling tune is carried by a protagonist, an outsider moving across a disorienting landscape, who feels like a farmer in the city, unfamiliar with his surroundings. If the tradition trend imagines us as happy together in the past, planting crops and singing in a big group, Walker imagines the solitary farmer alone in the future. In this context it's a reminder that the wilderness is not only the rural idyll we might see on the wall of a rustic-themed pub in Williamsburg, it is also the historical future which we must venture into in order to solve the problems of today, a wilderness ultimately without the comforts of a mythic past or anthropomorphic feline.

Scott Walker - Farmer in the City

Teamuncool fashion likes: The Makeup Artist : Alex Box + Rankin

VIA

Teamuncool fashion likes: vibskov emenius

VIA

Slutty Pilgrim is a Monarchist!

Black patent Pilgrim shoe by Roger Vivier, with a platform and 4 ½” heel. Buckle is embroidered with “God Save the Queen” and R.V., $1125.

The Pilgrim shoe was first recontextualized when Catherine Deneuve wore the original Roger Vivier design in her role as a prostitute in Belle du Jour. Today's version has a platform and an almost 5" heel, so the sinfulness is built right into the shoe. Leave it to RV, to once again play with the Pilgrims by invoking allegiance to the very monarchy whose rule they fled.

Perfectly ironic footwear for Thanksgiving, yet practical enough for pole-dancing.

Thanksgiving: Reality or Myth?

"For an Indian, who is also a school teacher, Thanksgiving was never an easy holiday for me to deal with in class. I sometimes have felt like I learned too much about 'the Pilgrims and the Indians.' Every year I have been faced with the professional and moral dilemma of just how to be honest and informative with my children at Thanksgiving without passing on historical distortions, and racial and cultural stereotypes. The problem is that part of what you and I learned in our own childhood about the 'Pilgrims' and 'Squanto' and the 'First Thanksgiving' is a mixture of both history and myth." Read more here.

Of eBay and Empires

Awesome animated graphic of the rise and fall of world empires from 1800 by Pedro M. Cruz. I did a double take when I saw this because it looked so much like the "found palettes" I'd been collecting from eBay. It's a category I think of as "graphic cousins" or "visual homonymns"--they have visual similarities, but little in common beyond that. If there is a word for this phenomenon, I'm not aware of it.

Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

Fisher Price records

Enamel skillets

I tried to come up with possibilities for what the word might be, and started googling. "Homograph" is already taken and refers to words that have the same spelling, but whose meaning can only be known from the context in which it is used. "Homoglyph" is also taken. It refers to two characters or sets of characters that appear very similar and can often appear identical. Examples are the numeral zero and the letter "O", or the letters rn and m. "HOMO pict" has somethig to do with chemical bonding. "Homopict" has to do with another kind of bonding.

When I tried working with “icon”, Greek for "image", I found out that "Homicon", is an annual convention for fans of Homicide: Life on the Street, while "Homocon" is short for “homosexual conservative” an oxymoronic political identity. Google assumed there was a space missing in "homoicon", so I was taken to an art essay in the Independent, Arrows of desire: How did St Sebastian become an enduring, homo-erotic icon? “Sebastian's appeal to gay men seems obvious. He was young, male, apparently unmarried and martyred by the establishment." "Homoiconic", however, is a word used in computer coding. According to Wikipedia, "Homoiconicity is a property of some programming languages, in which the primary representation of programs is also a data structure in a primitive type of the language itself, from homo meaning the same and icon meaning representation."

Alas, being at a loss for one word, has caused me to use many.

Rubber Stamp Catalog

One of my vintage ephemera finds from Buenos Aires.

Israel Fashion, The Street Walker vs. ILook (Tel Aviv)

In between threats of terrorist attacks the people of Tel Aviv style it up like there's no tomorrow. I came across two blogs based in the hip Hebrew city. Lets have a face off and let you decide who's the better of the two. Presenting:

ILook - http://israblog.nana10.co.il/tblogread.asp?blog=387973