Celia Hammond

via http://weheartvintage.co/

Edith Wharton in Vogue

I wrote a long, glowing and exhaustive post about my love for Edith Wharton, Vogue and my love for this Edith Wharton-inspired editorial in US Vogue. Then WordPress ate it. Curse you WordPress! Here instead are simply these pictures representing EW and her friends, including Henry James. I leave you with these words from The House of Mirth, with my recommendation to read it:

“They had paused before the table on which the bride’s jewels were displayed, and Lily’s heart gave an envious throb as she caught the refraction of light from their surfaces—the milky gleam of perfectly matched pearls, the flash of rubies relieved against contrasting velvet, the intense blue rays of sapphires kindled into light by surrounding diamonds: all these precious tints enhanced and deepened by the varied art of their setting. The glow of the stones warmed Lily’s veins like wine. More completely than any other expression of wealth they symbolized the life she longed to lead, the life of fastidious aloofness and refinement in which every detail should have the finish of a jewel, and the whole form a harmonious setting to her own jewel-like rareness.”

If you like tragic rich people and poetic descriptions of beautiful things, you’ll love it. Also, I hope that Edwardian is going to be a big trend.

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All the pretty pastel birds

I am in colour palette heaven at the moment with all the pastel, rosy pink, pops of neon and general fluff around. I appreciate it must be driving less whimsical souls a bit mental but I really enjoy “pretty” and so do the magazine editors. Funny that Elle and Vogue feature the same outfit, especially as it bears a similarity to the ubiquitous Miu Miu pastel dress of a couple of years ago.

I especially love the Elle cover with Alexa for it’s soothing colours and promise of shopping pages that will lead me to my perfect bow-embellished shoes and sheer or lace dresses. And I always love the Vanity Fair starlets cover – I love a starlet, especially when they rise to prominence via a teen drama. British actress Felicity Jones features on the cover. Sadly, Chalet Girl was a pretty hateful film so she’s yet to win me over and frankly they underestimated how my (and surely all viewers’?) love for Sophia Bush would derail any storyline that slights her.

 I have no idea where we are with the Lana Del Rey love or hate, you have to check Twitter hourly for that, blogs are such a slow medium! But I’ll still get this issue for its promise of introducing “fashion’s most fabulous florist”. I am a very committed consumer of flowers and am considering taking a course in flower arranging, plus I’m very bored with supermarket flowers and need to head to a cut flower market if there is such a thing to provide myself with resources. The downsides of floristry includes bug immigrants and very cold hands but I am prepared to suffer for my art.

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Dots and scribbles

Agyness Deyn in Vogue, May 2011.

Automatic drawings by William Anastasi.

Rococo

This lovely Teen Vogue cover with Alexa Chung gives me an excuse to post lots of pictures of rococo and rococo-inspired stuff, some of it in my favourite colour-combos of pastel and neon. Strangely, I haven’t seen Marie Antoinette, but its visuals increasingly seem to be influencing fashion in ever-widening circles.

This final image is one of my favourite paintings, the legendarily uncool “The Swing” by Fragonard, which you can see in all its silly glory at The Wallace Collection. This painting was commissioned by some skeezy dude who wanted a picture of “a priest pushing a girl on a swing while her lover watches”. Very well, each to their own. The original artist, Doyen, was so shocked by the request he refused, but Fragonard was willing to comply. You can see her GARTER.

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The lilac time

/\ This was taken on my walk home yesterday and the lovely colours of the sky reminded me of one of my favourite editorials ever, this one from Vogue February 2007, featuring Finnish model Suvi Koponen. \/

And furthermore-

/\ From my long-time favourite The Cherry-Blossom Girl blog.

/\ And photographs from new favourite Andrew B Meyers. His eye for colour instantly attracted me but his still-lifes are also very funny. I’d love to be photographed by him – I feel that if I am ever immortalised in art it should be in a manner at least part comedy, even though, as Edith Wharton said, “humour is the quality which soonest loses its savour.” Therefore I must put on an exceptionally good lolface if/when I am portrayed by an artistic genius, so that I will not ruin the art for future generations.

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Adelage

Firstly, I am so poor I cannot buy this Vogue and that basically places me outside of fashion, looking in, like Ebeneezer Scrooge gazing in at Tiny Tim and about as sartorially relevant. This is my favourite Vogue cover of 2011.

Secondly, Melanie Rickey has addressed just what I suspected when I saw this cover, because I am the suspicious sort and from my alienated fashion vantage point can see much: that Vogue has pointed its camera directly at Adele’s beautiful face while sticking its fingers in its ears and going “la la la we can’t hear you we don’t know what a size sixteen is”. It’s not an insult to acknowledge Adele’s figure the way it is, she is gorgeous to look at. And I want fashion shots – you know, of clothes. Vogue historically thinks only certain types of people are good enough to wear clothes and here we go again. Rickey’s blog is ace by the way.

On a lighter note: LOL that Amy Childs is in the issue as well. Well jeal of anyone who has it. Cannot wait to see what they’ve done with her.

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Vogue August

I thought KM was going to be on the September issue but here she is, looking retro in pink Miu Miu, rather than the usual Cool Britannia nonsense. Okay, it’s not exactly startling to see her on the cover of Vogue but it’s always pleasant and I love a pastel cover. So who is getting September?

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Model railway

I am trying to make a new “model”-based default pun happen, to replace “model behaviour”. I’ve been watching The Model Agency and aside from making me gawp at how models are spoken about by the people who work with them, it’s reminded me how important those beautiful thin ladies are who wear the clothes.

It’s Gemma Ward on a magazine cover! She’s an actress now. Still got it.

It’s also been a while since I saw Agyness in any magazines. This shoot from this month’s Vogue wedding special was beautiful. I don’t buy every Vogue anymore but I recommend this month’s – I got the Freya cover – it is full of guilty pleasure wedding dress features and I pretty much read the whole thing short of the puke-making “Catherine Middleton - the making of a princess” feature.

I wish this Valentino spotty dress wasn’t about £3000 because I’d really like to own it.

If you watched  Dr Brian Cox’s The Wonders of the Universe you’ll recognise the location of Agyness’s sandbox as Kolmandskopp, a ghost town in Namibia that he uses to describe the concept of entropy. Entropy is basically a theory that states that everything tends towards disorder. I recommend not taking my word for this if you are about to take a physics exam.

And one for the booker on The Model Agency who talks, in a daunted voice, about a “big-boned” girl who “must be a FULL C-cup”. Lara Stone is working with at least that, as you can see to your heart’s content in this photoshoot from Self Service [Style Souk].

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HydrangeaWatch

Hydrangeas, and Jessica Stam, in this month’s Vogue.

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