BACKSTAGE: Erdem Spring 2012
I think I had this dress in 1985. It was from Laura Ashley. I was 12.
Posts tagged "Fashion"
1950s Dorothy Gray lipstick advertisement.
My grandmother worked for Dorothy Gray in the 1940s, designing packaging and even tiny soaps shaped like corsets. I wonder if there are any ads featuring those…
Glamour glasses! Glorious cat’s eyes spectacles, 1954.
What was I saying earlier about glasses? I would buy those blue and white lizard frames tomorrow.
Grace Kelly in glasses.
Self-flattering, I know, but I love the way all these pretty women look in glasses. Why did we all get contacts when we were 15? So much more to say with frames.
Onesies and Crime: Design Observer
I know there are bigger problems in the world than unnecessary machine embroidery, but bear with me. It isn’t about the femininity — I know many a little girl who truly loves pink, sparkles and tutus, and I would never repress aesthetic choice — it is about the ornament. Tulle and ruffles, butterflies and hearts are like the tattoos of the under-one set, tribal markings to ensure that no one ever ever calls your daughter “he.” Loos offensively grouped the Papuan and the child as the only people who could acceptably be ornamented, but it is adults buying this clothing. There are larger lifetime messages in the color and texture and vocabulary of what we buy our babies.
Observers Room: From the Cabat to the City
Last week’s New Yorker profile of Bottega Veneta designer Tomas Maier opens with a set of personal fusses with which I think most design people would identify, from a publicist who removes lint from writer John Colapinto’s suit (“If that’s there, he won’t be able to think of anything else.”) to the news that Maier removed the H from his first name to achieve lettristic balance (Oddly, I have also always found Tomas more attractive than Thomas).
For instance, the coffee saucer at the Bulgari Hotel, in Milan, where he used to stay. “It drove me crazy,” he told me. “Every morning. You lifted up the cup and by the time you put it down — because the saucer was too curved up — the spoon had always slid down.” With a certain fierce pleasure, he pantomimed the entire act. “Not, in this hand you hold the newspaper, and with this hand you lift the coffee up and have a sip, and you want to put it down and you put it crooked on the saucer because this spoon is underneath. You drip half the coffee overm so that means you have to put the paper down, you have to take the glasses off, pick up the spoon —” He threw up his hands. “I mean, hello! Whoever designed that should have designed it right.”
But the following paragraph sums up the quest of a certain species of industrial designer in language everyone can understand.(I hope the Bulgari Hotel is ordering new china as we speak.)
Read the rest, a plea for more fussing about architecture and design, not just handbags, here.
The headline ICYDK is a design geek reference to Italian architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers’s famous phrase, “dal cucchiaio alla citta” or “from the spoon to the city.” Cucchiaio has always been one of my favorite Italian words, such a mouthful on the way to a spoon.
Commentary on the visual world by Alexandra Lange. Can include design, architecture, parks, movies, TV, books, kids.
