In Which Miss Cavendish Explains Why She Will Not Be Watching the "Sex and the City" Feature Film

From Sunset Boulevard:

Joe Gillis: “You used to be big.”

Norma Desmond: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”

Chris Noth is Big and he used to be big, back when Sex and the City was a mega hit on the small screen.

The small screen worked for the actresses, too, none of whom, with the exception of Cynthia Nixon, truly possessed acting chops; it worked for the clothes, which ran the gamut from boring business (Miranda) to expensive skank (Samantha), from uptight prep (Charlotte) to urban boho (Carrie); it worked for the locations—the restaurants, the bars, the shops, which filled the screen with energy.

To riff on Norma Desmond, this is a picture that should have stayed small.

On the small screen, the clothes wouldn’t have to feel like props—the gigantic scrunchie Carrie wears across her body, for instance, or the gigantic flower she pins to her dress.

Indeed, even the length of this film is extreme (2 hours 22 minutes), desperately calling attention to its “big” ness.

But like that maddening oversized scrunchie (remember when regular scrunchies were once a delicious plot point on SATC?), this film smacks of a pretty fabric exterior with an elastic center, one that’s been stretched too far to make it fit the big screen.

When Big was small, he was big. When this picture was small, it was big. Now that it’s big, I suspect it will be, well, empty.


**Smart and gentle readers: please feel free to disagree; Miss Cavendish may still be feeling punchy, but she is open to dialogue!

Lost City: Fabrics to Find

Just look at these gorgeous fabrics!

Their designer, Afshan Durrani, is standing in front of them. Go now and read the NYT story about her and her extraordinary fabric company, Lost City!

Their large-scale embellished beauty gives my perennial favorite, Liberty, a real run for (my) money . . .

Literary Fashion: Mod Madame Bovary

Have you read Gemma Bovary, the 2005 graphic novel by Posy Simmonds?

I’m reading the—ahem—original Madame Bovary as I write this and am, comme toujours, seduced and repelled by Emma’s desperate passion for beauty and refinement.

Gemma’s an update, with a heroine who’s equally urgent as Emma, with a bad case of postmodern ennui.

But this post concerns literary fashion, so here is Charles Bovary’s first glimpse of Emma:

“A young woman, in a blue merino-wool dress with three flounces, came to the door of the house. . . . Charles was surprised at the whiteness of her nails. They were lusterous, tapering, more highly polished than Dieppe ivories, and cut into an almond shape.”

Perhaps the image above could be Emma and Gemma’s middle sister, Maud. ("Madame Bovary--c'est Maud! [with apologies to Flaubert].)

"Rouge"

The more I consider the palette of this film, well, the more I consider it.

I’m currently infatuated with this shade I’m calling “rouge,” which means, to me, a faded genteel red/pink.

It’s especially beautiful in the poster for the film, and you can see it in the initial moments of the film, as Jean-Do slowly brings his eyes into focus, through the end.

I’m seeing it against the cool aquas of the therapists’ jackets, the blue of the sea, and the snippet of Emmanuelle Seigner’s dress in this photo.

But right now, I really want a lipstick in this shade.

It’s got real charm.

Any recommendations?

The Diving Bell and the Product Placement

For a long-weekend treat, last evening I screened Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

I loved the director’s palette, soft aquas with moments of faded rose. The muted reds remind me of a vase full of dried old pink roses that I saw in an antique store vitrine on the flat of Beacon Hill; the decaying pinks were so romantic that they trumped the fancy furniture.

But I digress.

Interestingly, for a film about the former editor of French ELLE (that qualification may be redundant for some readers), there was strikingly little about the fashion world. But for his glimpse into that oeuvre, Schnabel made a good choice: Azzedine Alaia pinning a model (Lenny Kravitz added a little rock-star glitz too).

Yet fashion was indeed a part of the film, and here’s where Miss Cavendish dons her critical hat.
As he has in the past, Schnabel cast his lovely wife and linen designer Olatz in the film: she played a speech therapist who visited the hero in his hospital room. And while in his hospital bed, the hero wore some luxurious pyjamas designed by Olatz and sold in her New York shop. If my eyes didn’t deceive me, I’d say that her sheets appeared on the bed too—pink edged in chocolate brown.

It’s this kind of product placement that annoys me, especially in a film that involves fashion.

As I’ve said elsewhere on this blog, I think Olatz’s linens and bed clothes are absolutely lovely, but seeing them in the film (while she plays a hospital employee) smacks of too much Schnabel; the viewer cannot suspend her disbelief and enter the film when the designer of the very products on screen is pretending to be something else.

I’m also quite aware that Schnabel’s first wife. Jacqueline, has a long relationship with Mr. Alaia; she used to sell his clothes in her NYC boutique in the 1990s. But Alaia gave the film an injection of authenticity and cool, whereas the Olatz pyjamas simply made me think of merchandizing.

For me, this gratuitous flash of Schnabel self-promotion lessened the film; I was alert waiting for the second pyjama bottom to drop, so to speak.

An (E)Toile in the Making

I found fashion inspiration in the unlikeliest of places for me: the Home and Design section of the NYT. While I certainly admire a well-styled home, I don’t put any pressure on myself to follow suit, with a just-turned-three-year-old lad and two lassies under nine chez moi.

However, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about something I saw on Thursday.

The Times did a brief profile of Richard Saja, a textile designer who has, in the words of the NYT, been “interfering with toile for years” (that sounds so naughty, doesn’t it?).

In a nutshell, Saja embroiders whimsical designs on the veddy serious toile figures; he puts fur on humans, clown costumes on people, and bugs on flowers. His bug-on-flower pillows were seen in the Bill Murray film Broken Flowers.

As I just happen to have, in my reddish-pink fireplace room, three ten-footish-tall narrow windows, all adorned in red-on-white toile, I now have a new project.

I can see embroidering romantic rose vines on the rope swing that one comely lass is sitting on. And then, to punk it up, I’d give one of her companion sheep a sleek yellow head and a purple French-knotted body. Maybe green hooves.

I’ll do only a couple of images on each curtain, as I think less is more in this case. But this will be fun, and a great way to postmodernize my ladylike curtains.

Wouldn’t a formal ballgown be cool if it were customized in this manner?

Comment Contest Winners!

As I’m back in blogging action, it’s time to check out the clever comments on the contest images I posted—eek; too much unintended alliteration there.

I've vetted the comments, and thought that the following entries were most in the spirit of the contest.

Image One:

"Why on EARTH did I think wearing this dress would be a good idea when I knew I'd be traipsing through the moors?" --enc

Image Two:

"I was thinking it was half 'chicken-dance' (tacky dance done at Oz weddings) half The Mission! Maybe I need to get out more often!" --Imelda Matt

"Practicing my scarecrow jettés on the dirt is difficult. I wish I had a decent field of corn to work with." --enc

It seems unfair to judge between these two lively commenters, so if enc and Imelda Matt would each care to email me their snail mail coordinates, I'll send them each a Miss Cavendish tiny cake. Note that I will be making these from scratch, so to speak, so there may be a bit of a wait . . .