I hate it when my specious and shallowly provocative prejudices come back to bite me on my self-important although deliciously exfoliated ass. Having once been, OK, a little snippy about Daisy Goodwin in the Guardian, I must now shamefacedly acclaim her evidently brilliant Off By Heart children’s poetry recital scheme.
Poetry was invented to be conjured on [...]
Archive for the ‘Fashion’ Category
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Posted in Fashion, Literature, tagged Beowulf, Daisy Goodwin, Off By Heart, poetry recital, Seamus Heaney, Shakespeare on October 30, 2008 | 3 Comments »
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Posted in Art, Dance, Fashion, Theatre, tagged tate modern, caroline trentini, rothko, simon russell beale, kenneth branagh, galileo, ivanov on October 20, 2008 | No Comments »
One of the defining features of reality is weight. Fantasies have all the gravity-defying pleasure of an oxygen deprived high, but trying to recreate them in life evokes the spine-shrinkingly horrible sensation of throwing a piece of paper as hard as you can. Maybe it’s why fashion models are parchment light, as epitomised in Arthur [...]
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Posted in Art, Fashion, tagged Loewe, Stephanie Seymour, Keira Knightley, Arthur Elgort, Steven Klein, fashion photography, horses on September 4, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Animals in fashion shoots are the consummate couture quick win.
I may be an advertising-savvy cynic, but throw a load of big fierce creatures at some trembling sylphs in pretty threads, pour on a savannah-load of symbolism involving freedom, danger, dirt, sex and more sex, and my brain fuses into one big consumption-happy erogenous zone. I’d [...]
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Posted in Architecture, Art, Fashion, Film, Literature, tagged palaces, stately homes, Versaillles on August 19, 2008 | No Comments »
I have a love/hate affair with what Virginia Woolf called ‘those comfortable padded lunatic asylums which are known euphemistically as the stately homes of England.’ Surely even those without a mother prone to riff on the earnest, sweaty idealism of her days in the SWP must feel the chill fingers of the little match girl [...]
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Posted in Architecture, Fashion, Film, Literature, tagged Antony Gormley, Dickens, Don DeLilo, Heath Ledger, the city, The Dark Knight, Underworld on August 1, 2008 | 3 Comments »
In the moist, muggy days of England’s sort-of summer, when I should be out playing croquet with hedgehogs, bathing my milky, sun-shy skin in cucumber-plump Pimms, and wearing a little something like this, I’ve been mentally rooted in the subscape and the skyscrape of the beast we call City: that bustling, shadowed playpen filled with [...]
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Posted in Art, Fashion, tagged credit crunch, In Memory of the Late Mr and Mrs Comfort, Paris couture, Richard Avedon on July 7, 2008 | No Comments »
In publishing the first English reproduction of Richard Avedon’s In Memory of the Late Mr and Mrs Comfort this weekend - a spectacular, spectral death-and-the-maiden photoshoot starring Nadja Auermann and a saucy sartorial skeleton - The Sunday Times Magazine seems carrion-ripe in its timing. With conspicuous consumption as passe as leggings and smocks, and shops [...]
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Posted in Fashion, Music, tagged Elaine's, New York, New York fashion, super, VICE party on June 24, 2008 | 1 Comment »
In America, even the subs are super. As a Brit committed to the cause of underestimation, deprecation and bullishly blase back-footedness, I baulk at the insidious infiltration of that asinine adjective into the Queen’s E. Once the preserve of consonant-clipped, gym-slipped gals from Hampshire, super has been adopted by gloss-lipped, French-tipped, semi-illiterate US fashionistas and [...]
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Posted in Fashion, Literature, tagged alan garner, Anna Sui, Bernard Cornwell, Conn Iggluden, fantasy books, J.V.Jones, rosemary sutcliffe, th white, Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin on May 12, 2008 | 5 Comments »
It’s time I came clean. Despite my fastidious facade as an A-List arbiter of aesthetic excellence - nay, the veritable Taste Tsarina of the zeitgeist - I have a sordid secret.
I am reading a fantasy novel.
I’m not talking Tolkien, with his musty, spunk-smelling arcania and fey, gay little songs. I don’t even mean the semi- [...]
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Posted in Art, Fashion, Literature, Music, tagged asparagus, bank holiday, blind boys of alabama, C J Sansom, cans festival, Delilo, junipero, thomas hope on May 2, 2008 | 1 Comment »
A Bank Holiday alone: a shimmering, cerulean depot of dreams. Plans are afoot.
Tonight I will spray an HB tag on Lambeth Tunnel at the Cans Festival, Banksy’s international street art gathering; on Saturday I will wander round Thomas Hope: Regency Designer at the V&A, drawing lissom little sketches in my Moleskine, before getting folked with [...]
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Posted in Fashion, Film, Literature, TV, Theatre, tagged Casablanca, iPlayer, 4oD, ITV Catch Up, Little Nell, David Tennant, John Galliano, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bungalow 8, Experimental Cocktail Club of Paris, Mad Men on April 16, 2008 | No Comments »
The line is Play it once, Sam, not Play it again, and now I know why. If the iPlayer had been around in 1940s filmworld Casablanca, Rick would be watching reruns of Sam on Later with Jools in his riad whilst Ilsa shunned gin joints to binge on out-of-season Desperate Housewives.
Introducing the ‘watch again’ concept [...]
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