Obsession: JW Anderson’s Chain Mules

I love the color green and these are a gorgeous wear-everywhere neutral. Also: I am blogging from my phone, and will adjust if necessary from my computer eventually.

On the Other Hand: a Devotion Dress I Love

 And here is it, in two colorways: 

Rachel's Pink Dress: Devotion Twinning, Anyone?

I confess: I did look for the Devotion Twins pink dress worn by Rachel in the final episode of The White Lotus. It was easy enough to find and, that night, was still in stock. The next morning, though, gone.

I don't have any lack-of-buying remorse, though. Would I really want to wear something that this trapped character wore? And then there's the fit: it's short and voluminous, which is not necessarily flattering.

Still, this is a very popular dress. I first noticed it a month or so ago while browsing Anthropologie (see their Petra dress) and even own something similar (with short sleeves) from Roller Rabbit (the Pamela dress). In fact, voluminous dresses have been having a moment over the past year, whether for ease and comfort or perhaps love of textile: it's pretty to see all those flounces swirling about.

But the Rachel dress? Like the Rachel hair, better enjoyed from the filter of a screen (for me). Plus, if Rachel is hopelessly devoted to Shane, I can't be Devotion Twinning with her.

Petra from Anthro

My Pamela from Roller Rabbit

Rachel in her dress; image from wornontv.com

Quilting Olympics

It’s a bit of a tradition that during the Olympics I make something. 

Once during the Winter Olympics when I was working on my PhD qualifying exams in the US and Mr C was on a Fulbright in Iceland, I made a lopi peysa out of some beautiful wool he mailed me. I can focus on the sports when I want, and tune out the commentators and interviewers by focusing on my project.

with Marilla, in my rather generous lopi peysa (1994)

This Olympics I have taken apart a quilt top that I made a few years ago but could never finish because it wasn’t right. Here is the original post in which I introduce the fabric—from 2013!

I removed the elaborate border that was in place and added this solid, simple one. The main fabric is, fittingly, from Japan, and really more of an upholstery weight. The inlay stripe (one at each end of the quilt top) is from Liberty. Everything is (and will be) hand stitched.

Here it is, in the top corner, folded over our garden gate. (This is why I do not take photographs for my blog.)

Now I must venture into my armoire to see if I can find the quilt back I made—again: some years ago.

Should I quilt it in rings?

Woven Bags (Via Mail Bag, Colombia Collective) and Salt Straps

Remember that 2019 article in the NYT about Park Slope mums' new uniform: clogs and Salt bag straps? It came to mind the other day when I saw a gorgeous collection of woven totes from Italy, each with a Salt-like strap.

I do love woven totes. I purchased my most beloved one at a long-gone boutique on Sparks Street. It had a generous woven bowl and the final third was soft leather, secured by a drawstring. The tote had two long handles that I could put each arm through and carry the tote as a modified backpack as I biked through town. I carried my workout gear in it and even my schoolbooks, until it finally wore out.

These first two totes (above and below) are more refined (I wouldn't stuff them with workout gear) as they look to be more for wallets, etc. They are by ViaMailBag and I discovered them, ironically enough, considering yesterday's post, through a pop-up ad for Mirta on social media.

The next totes are by Colombia Collective and come as an oversized basket (think laundry hamper) or a carry tote. These I discovered this morning through Vanity Fair, as they are a favorite of Hermés creative director.

Have any readers adopted a Salt strap for their bag? I have a slim, fairly large LV mailbag that I'm considering one for. My strap isn't removable, so I guess I'd just tuck it inside the roomy bag itself.  So: add some salt or is the bag seasoned enough?

Online Sales Strategies: Passive Aggressive and Personification

As I've been more active on fashion websites these past weeks, I've increasingly noticed how different sites attempt to convince one to sign up for emails or texts: through the promise of 10–15% off a purchase. 

I've signed up for these on occasion, usually if I'm buying my children clothing or a gift but more often than not, I want to bypass and simply go to the site. 

The problem is that some of these sites are passive aggressive, offering a "Yes, I'll take 15% off" option or a "No, I don't want to save money on my purchase" option, the latter of which is designed to make the potential customer feel foolish and coerce them into signing up for emails they don't want.

The other tactic I've noticed is the overly intimate pop-up--usually when I'm scrolling through social media. One business admonishes "Don't forget about me!" which I find particularly invasive. This company uses personification, so a handbag either makes a plea (as above) or appears in stalkerish fashion: "Me again!" It's the 2021 corollary to Clippy.

While I enjoy the freedom of online browsing, I don't like when it's accompanied by a soupçon of guilt or talking products. How do gentle readers approach/experience such online sales strategies?

Those Chanel Tipped Colorful Cardigans from Summer 2019

I'm not the biggest fan of wearing logos in earnest: I like my Gucci watchstrap precisely because it's made from a recycled bag and looks somewhat ridiculous on my tech-y boxy watch. 

Still, I have been coveting these Chanel logo cardigans ever since I saw them on not one but two Real Housewives. (Actually a third has one but she doesn't inspire me.)

I love this one tipped in blue on Gizelle (from RHOP)

and this one tipped in red on Garcelle (from RHOBH) is a close second.

It may seem illogical, but these logos represent logos to my fashion eye.

A Latte Chai (Celebrating the Japanese Quartet's Style)

Sometimes a beautiful image and the promise of a pun is enough. Images are by Shina Peng for the NYT from Jeremy Gordon's article about the Japanese quartet Chai.  

When punning, please pronounce "latte" as "latta" (Dickinson slant rhyme?).

Reprise: My Story on Stella McCartney’s Olympic Designs

 I can’t believe it’s been eleven years since I wrote this story for what remains my favorite textile/style and magazine, Selvedge.

Emma Corrin's "Quirky Blue Jumper": A Bloomsbury Mystery No More (Designed by Feben)

I just love clothing that evokes Charleston, the country--handpainted and embellished--home of Bloomsbury notable Vanessa Bell (and Duncan Grant). 

Sometimes the clothing makes a deliberate reference, which I find to be less compelling than those serendipitous connections. 

I like my clothing to be as an Emily Dickinson poem: "Tell all the truth but tell it slant––." And adding a bit of mystery only steepens the slant.

To wit: I have been captivated by this trompe l'oeil sweater that Emma Corrin wore to the premiere of their play Anna X. The same details (indeed, the same story) have been run in multiple sources, describing it only as a "quirky blue jumper." 

If anyone knows the designer, I'd welcome that information. (I was thinking maybe Miu Miu since Corrin is their new "face" but haven't found confirmation.)

*Update: Thanks to Sue, who let me know that Feben is the designer! Here is the image from her Instagram:

And here is a link to an interview.

Ocean View: Clothes by Sea

I grew up on the beaches of PEI, as gentle readers may know, and the sand/surf combination is what I consider home, wherever it may be. 

This summer I'm finding it via Sea, a new-to-me label that evokes coral reefs, 

the inky beauty of an octopus, 

and the cheerful stripes of a beach blanket or beach hut. 

Waulk this Way: The Pungent Charm of Harris Tweeds

I grew up with a grandfather who wore Harris Tweed jackets every day. He had deep Scottish roots: his family moved from the Highlands to Cardigan, PEI, where they settled.

Harris Tweeds were a part of our home; I didn't think they were anything remarkable until I stepped out as a twentysomething and learned that they were made by hand, in the Outer Hebrides. 

And as recently as last month I learned that Harris Tweeds undergo a process called "waulking" or "fulling." The setup reminds me of a quilting bee: a group of women sit around a table (or a quilting frame), working together on the same textile. But instead of adding quilting stitches to layers, "waulkers" rhythmically beat the tweed cloth against the table to cleanse it and, I've read, to slightly felt/strengthen it. 

And part of the process is to soak the tweed in urine, which would help set the dye of the yarn (and soften it). A video is here:

The blog Glamourdaze.com (from which this video comes) is one useful source; "waulking" has also been included in the show Highlander, a video of which is here:

My grandfather used to take daily walks in his Harris Tweed jackets. I wonder whether he knew that the fabric had been on a "waulk" of its own.

Wally Funk and the Flying Bunch

 

Actually just Wally Funk. 

This 82-year-old astronaut, should she wish to wear it, would look smashing in Vivienne Westwood's green Harris Tweed suit from her Time Machine collection.

The suit can be seen at the National Museum of Scotland, from where these images are found. 

Of Mare and Mères: Notes on Mothers in Mare of Easttown

SPOILERS THROUGHOUT For a lover of puns, Mare of Easttown provides: say the title out loud and the title character becomes the "mayor"—which is a stretch, but if we consider the French pronunciation (mère = mother), it all makes sense: Mare is Easttown's unofficial mother: she grudgingly but dutifully goes to their homes in response to issues minor and major (remember in Episode One she tells a community member that she's a detective and shouldn't call her for such small things); she is a maternal figure to her grandson; however, she cannot mother her own children due to feelings of guilt: her son committed suicide and her daughter found his body in response to Mare asking her to check up on him. 

Indeed, we could add an "s" to the title (Mares [Mères] of Easttown), for this is a story of mothers and both the potential and limits of their love for their children. Erin carefully squirrels away money—even considering selling her body—to afford ear tubes for her son; Carrie, whose story is bookended by leaving and reentering treatment, wants the legal right to parent her son; Dawn considers stealing from her employer to pay ransom for her kidnapped daughter (but she won't break her best friend's heart by identifying her brother as the hoax-kidnapper); Helen, a crusty soul who fought her way through her marriage, banters and battles with Mare; Lor agrees to mother the child her husband fathered during an affair, and Lor and Mare come to the worst types of knowledge for a mother: that one's son has killed; that the other's son has killed himself.

I used to watch shows like Law and Order in graduate school, but once I had children, I stopped: as a mother I couldn't bear seeing children suffer as "entertainment." I feel the same way about using kidnapped or killed women as plot devices; even though I smirked along with SNL's "murdur durdur" skit, I remembered that a (fictional) young woman had been killed for this spoof to exist. Still, the show drew me into theorizing: Mare's daughter? Guy Pearce (who does not seem to have a character name, according to Twitter)?  Mare herself in a blackout night-mare-ish turn of events? 

        Maybe this is a humblebrag, but I did identify Ryan as the killer (didn't see Mr. Carroll's gun coming at all; thought it was Mare's father's), and while that ID was OK theoretically, seeing Ryan run home and tell his mother that Mare knew was one of the most terrible moments I've even seen on screen because it was so real, so not played for drama. And Mare's face when she realizes that Ryan killed Erin, when the knowledge comes into her ken, to borrow from Henry James, is another terrible moment because she knows that she has not solved a crime; she has broken a mother, her best friend Lor.

The penultimate scene, with Mare holding Lor in a twisted pietà tableau—Mare is no Virgin Mary; Lor is no Christ figure, though she did accuse Mare (a Judas figure?) of betraying her—shows motherhood at its perhaps most complex: Mare cannot release herself from guilt over her son's suicide; she can comfort Lor, whose son she has had arrested for killing the mother of the baby Lor has agreed to mother. That scene, even more than the final one, sticks with me.

Valentino (Rosso) Red Story for Selvedge

In October a story of mine on Valentino's use of red (with an injection of Schiaparelli's Shocking Pink) was published in Selvedge Magazine, and I believe the charming textile illustrations were commissioned for the article.

Inside/Out: A Beautiful Susannah Hunter Bag in Reverse

 

Sometimes my favorite discoveries are the opposite of what's put forth: the B side of a 45" record; an orange chiffon scarf with fuchsia felted embellishment that I wear underneath-side out (In fact, that's how I thought it was supposed to be worn).

The same could on occasion apply to Susannah Hunter's beautifully appliquéd leather bags. Although I do find the front of this Sunshine Dahila bag appealing, it's the reverse side that I like so much.

But really, either side would go well with a Sunny Day-hila.

Christopher John Rogers' Oscar-Winning Dress

 

Well, maybe the dress itself didn't win the Oscar, but the woman wearing it did, and since this dress has sent me back to the blogosphere (because I can't stop thinking about it), it's clearly taken hold.

I love playful proportions, and while it seems that voluminous sleeves are setting sail this spring/summer, Christopher John Rogers has added an ideal touch of hot air balloon just below the waist of this dress. 

Then, taking a closer look, the textile actually looks boater casual--a sunny seersucker? I had a seersucker skirt suit once. It was beige and white, from Brooks Brothers, which must have been on Madison not too far from 42nd St. The skirt was a pencil; together with the jacket I felt too too. 

Indeed, I remember running out at lunchtime one day in this suit to search for a pair of shoes that would cut through its business-like earnestness. I returned to the office with a tall, chunky heel that sounds unappealing from this description, but which transformed the seersucker.

This dress, however, stands on its own.

Miss Cavendish's Hats for Thanksgiving (Annual?) Post

American Thanksgiving is a time for thanks and hats. In pre-pandemic times, local elementary schoolchildren would deck themselves out in bespoke “turkey” crowns, the playgrounds full of happy gobbling.

I’ve always been a hat girl, growing up on Prince Edward Island, Canada, where the ocean breeze kept a chill in the air. There, my Scottish grandmother would bundle me in coarse tam o’shanters, made from scratchy undyed wool. During my university years in bilingual Ottawa, I graduated to French berets in jet noir; loden festooned with a raccoon’s tail (what was I thinking?); creamy cupcake pink. 

On bitter days, and there were many, I’d pull the beret over my brow, slap on a pair of ear muffs, and ice-skate down the Rideau Canal toward my campus. I’d share the ice with various Members of Parliament (Parliament Hill was just beyond the university), their long winterized trench coats parachuting around them, their briefcases somehow not throwing them off balance. During her lunch break one senior MP would don a racing suit and make slow, steady strokes up and down the canal, stopping later at the stands selling deep-fried beaver tails, a Canadian winter delicacy.

I wore berets throughout my undergraduate and graduate education, from Ottawa to the United States. They were functional, fit my generous head, and, I liked to think, marked me as “other” in my new home: a beret was a subtle symbol of Canadian pride.

But this steady relationship was rattled when I went to New York City to visit my husband’s family one Christmas. After visiting the requisite art galleries, I ducked into my favorite store, Bergdorf Goodman, to check out some living art—the impeccably dressed patrons who glided through the corridors—and, of course, the fantastic displays of merchandise. Getting somewhat lost among the mirrored walls on the accessories level, I took a turn and found myself gazing at a hat: a Philip Treacy design. To be exact, an asymmetrical trilby, with navy cotton exterior, pewter satin lining, silver unicorn logo on the brand, provenance England. I was smitten. 

For a Philip Treacy hat n’est pas un chapeau. Rather, it is an idea. Picture Treacy’s former muse (and sadly, departed) Isabella Blow wearing a large orange acrylic disk that overwhelms her face, a slender wedge of pie extracted for her mouth and nose, or a model wearing a sculpture—a representation of a gently askew top hat spelling out h-a-t in lissome, sky-scraping letters. But this Irish-born, London-bred milliner known as the mad Hatter for his confections also makes wearable fantasies; hence the—no, my—asymmetrical trilby. 

Reader, I bought it. What else could I do? And I carried it down Fifth Avenue in its glistening silvery BG hatbox, feeling, perhaps for the first time, like a lady rather than the feminist scholar that I am. I, who critique Sister Carrie’s seduction by the snug little jackets in a Chicago department store, fell prey to the same siren song. And like Hortense, in another Dreiser novel, I wanted the hat so badly that my lack of cash didn’t stop me; whereas Hortense lures her boyfriend into purchasing her a coat with vague promises of affection, I used my BG charge card, with half-hearted assurances to myself that I’d pay if off in no time.

Geography, though, was the wild card I hadn’t counted on. Although my eccentric new navy asymmetrical trilby didn’t stand out on the fashionable streets of New York, it practically screamed “Outsider” when I returned to the Midwest farmland where I then lived and taught college. In the Midwest, where people pride themselves on four-post homes, three square meals a day, and unwavering moral values, asymmetry isn’t exactly a virtue. Rather, it makes people suspicious of you. 

Usually I tend to court my outside status. I quite like to be contrary, and have ever since I was a teenager, when, yearning for the black velvet pants and pastel pink satin blouse that all my friends had, my chic grandmother returned from Montreal with forest green velvet trousers and a burgundy satin shirt. I wasn’t immediately sure about this combination, but quickly saw how one could work within a fashion concept while executing your own take on it. Couldn’t my asymmetrical trilby coexist with the John Deere farming caps and the German Baptist bonnets? After all, I’d worn a beret for many a year and the Midwest wasn’t exactly a bastion of French style.

But whereas my beret was looked on with grudging acceptance, my trilby was more a source of humor. No-one actually said anything directly, but locals would talk to my hat instead of my face; colleagues would be overly smiley when I’d stalk around campus. I felt self-conscious and soon found myself wearing my trilby only at home, happy to catch surprise glimpses of my reflection in the windows as I’d go about my evening. And eventually I put it away, nestled inside its hatbox, which sat at the bottom of my armoire, as I gradually forgot about it.

Until, that is, last November, when, in a burst of enthusiasm for cleaning out my closets via eBay, I rediscovered the box and its contents. I listed the hat on eBay, enjoyed a mild bidding war, and prepared to ship the trilby and box to its new owner, known to me only by her excellent feedback rating. But when I received the eBay-generated message containing the winner’s email and home address, a different kind of feedback quickly flashed in my mind. For the new owner of my Philip Treacy trilby was a Famous New York Personality of TV and Movies, she of the high cheekbones, sassy persona, and megawatt smile. 

A celebrity bought my London-via-Bergdorf’s hat. A beautiful, edgy New York celebrity. We must be soul sisters! We could bond over our love of Philip Treacy hats! She would totally “get” me; we could chat over email like fashion insiders; we could meet, even, when I returned to New York on my twice-yearly pilgrimages! We’d go hat shopping together and she could show me how she sports my—our—no, her hat in the city and makes it her own. 

Or I could mail her the hat with a note saying that I hope she wears it in the best of health. Which I did.

Like Chaucer sending his “littel book” out into the world, I sent my hat back to New York, where it is meant to be, with its citified asymmetrical attitude. Perhaps it will go dancing, to a movie premiere, to a little bistro. Perhaps one night it will even get tipsy (umm—symmetrical). And I am thankful that it is with its rightful owner, someone who can take the hat out of her closet, who can enjoy it out in public. And I can enjoy it too, from the distance of my imagination.

It’s not chilly enough here yet for my beret. But it will be soon.

All images from Philip Treacy AW20.  Hope all readers celebrating Thanksgiving this week have a lovely day!

Wishful Slinking: Sleeper Feather Pink Pyjamas

I've been up until 2 a.m. many a night (morning?) over the past couple of weeks, working away on all things literary--reading, grading, copyediting. 

No complaints, but this late-night schedule has me thinking of something pretty to slink around in whilst thinking about books. I've had this image saved on my computer since last January or so, and publish it here so I can remember it.

Oh, Henry: An Anniversary Gift Exchange

 

Mr. C and I celebrated twenty-nine years of marriage earlier this month. We don't usually give each other gifts, but, curiously, both of us did this year.

I gave Mr. C a teaching shirt (we're both literature professors). It's a handsome brown check, and was designed in Canada, as am I.

Because I'm 100 percent Canadian, I don't have a vote in the upcoming election, so Mr. C bought me one. Actually, he gave me a symbolic vote: a lovely sterling silver VOTE necklace by ByChari, who designed Michelle Obama's gold version of the same.

I have been wearing my silver version daily and intend to war it every day henceforth, as a reminder that women didn't always have the right to vote.