Cherry Picking

Last year I stumbled across a fantastical image by fashion illustrator Helen Dryden, featuring a lady wearing a cherry hat and surrounded by butterflies. It was a serendipitous discovery, for I had recently purchased a delicious little burnt orange straw hat trimmed with cherries on eBay from Tarnished Past.

Cover illustration by Helen Dryden, British Vogue, July 1914I decided to make a picture in homage to Dryden, for I had also bought a cherry print vintage dress on Etsy (I had gone on a bit of a cherry rampage). Both hat and dress are 1940s, and the cherries on the hat are made of celluloid. They make a lovely clicking sound when I move my head, and although the glaze is cracked and they feel terribly fragile yet heavy, I adore the hat. The onyx bauble earrings match quite nicely. I couldn’t match all the colours exactly however. The red paper umbrella is one I purchased from Chinatown last Chinese New Year for a couple of dollars.

It was difficult trying to match the pose of the woman in the illustration, contorting my body without being able to look through the viewfinder. It was almost impossible to hold the umbrella at that angle, nor could I manage to defy gravity and tip the hat on end – and my neck certainly is not quite that long! It goes to show that sometimes illustration can do a little more than photography. 

Heeeere Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!

Kitty, where are you?I was looking for kitten heels for a long time. But not just any kitten heels: I had a specific picture in mind. They had to be black, pointy-toed and thin, with delicate sling-backs. I was on this self-appointed mission for a year or more at the height (no pun intended) of the mania for the toweringest platform heels it was humanly possible to build. (I actually own some of these too – so big a crane is required to lift my foot into them.)

I searched every brick-and-mortar store, glimpsing neither hide nor hair of a pair. Exhaustively I trawled every shoe emporium online, to no avail. My hopes were dashed, my crest was fallen. I read, in online forums, of a curious antipathy many women have towards kitten heels: they are judged to be inexcusably dowdy. But I had nothing but fond recollections of a pair I owned many years ago. Who were these women taking as role models? I wondered in surprise.

I have only to think of Audrey Hepburn who must always be considered stylish, and another actress of the 1960s, the Italian Monica Vitti to be convinced that kitten heels are elegant, as well as comfortable.

Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’sMonica Vitti wears kittens in Michelangelo Antonioni’s classic L’EclisseMonica Vitti in kitten heels only looks cooler with Alain Delon at her side, on the set of L’EclisseHistorically, kitten heels were intended for teens. They were introduced in the late 1950s as trainer heels for teenagers, and also because higher heels ‘would have been considered unseemly for girls as young as thirteen because of the sexual connotations’ [Wikipedia]. By the 60s though, women of all ages were wearing them; the aforementioned Audrey Hepburn helped make them popular. They re-emerged in the 1980s and again briefly in the noughties. Of course since then the wedge and the platform have driven them firmly out of the fashion landscape.

Manolo Blahnik’s elegant rendition of kitten heels, Vogue Australia, May 1999I finally found my obscurely-branded pair on a sale site a couple months ago, but the leather is soft and they are comfortable to wear and walk in. Patently the fashion world has finally begun to tire of monster shoes, for once more the demure kitten heel is having a renaissance – I wouldn’t mind adding a pair of nude kitten heels (that sounds so naughty!) to my arsenal of shoes. It will be a novel sensation to put away the platform and feel the pavement beneath thin-soled shoes once more. 

The Isabel kitten peep toe pumps, by Jimmy Choo – click to buyDaniel beige slingbacks, the polar opposite of my black pair – click to buy

Nostalgia Day

Australian Vogue's first stand alone cover, shot by Helmut NewtonToday on Australia Day I’m looking back on Aussie history with a fashion perspective. Australian Vogue was first sold as a supplement to the British title, and its first stand along issue was published as Spring/Summer 1959. In the editor’s letter of this issue Rosemary Cooper refers to it as a ‘double number tied to the British issue’. The magazine features Helmut Newton’s photography and there are also plenty of fashion illustrations still being utilised, many of them in advertisements.

Editor’s letter from Australian Vogue’s first issueContents page in the first Australian Vogue magazine

In the late 90s, Australian Vogue ran a story featuring photographic spreads from its archives (focusing on white fashion). Nothing beats a Little White Dress for summer in Australia after all.

Erm, except for today. Today’s weather on this day of all days was about as unAustralian as you could get: chilly, windy and overcast with a pathetic day high of 21.7°C. And I did in fact have a little 50s style white sundress to wear, with the cutest little print of tiny strawberries and black polka-dots and wide bow-tied straps. I guess it’ll have to wait til Melbourne gets more into the spirit of things.

Happy Australia Day!

Click on images for larger versions.

Seventies Sarah

When I was a child I collected illustrated swap cards, along with the majority of my peers. The most coveted cards of all were those by Sarah Kay. I made it my business to collect as many as I could, and I have always wanted to create a picture in homage.

Here I am with some serious Seventies styling, in a striped poncho style top and fedora. I’ve even done two thin braids on either side of my face. And nothing says Seventies décor more than a rattan chair and a potted palm.

All of these classic Sarah Kays were part of my original collection

The Travelling Eye

Diana Vreeland with Marisa Berenson during her tenure at Vogue from 1963–71It took three attempts for my friend and I to see the Diana Vreeland The Eye Has to Travel documentary film. The first time the session was sold out, the second time the projector broke down ‘because it was too hot’. (No, we didn’t buy that one either.) We were determined to see this film, and third time we struck lucky.

I didn’t know a great deal about Diana Vreeland. I knew she was the editor of Harper’s Bazaar in its heyday in the 1940s; that she started out with her witty and outrageous Why Don’t You column; that she, along with Alexey Brodovitch and some great fashion photographers changed magazine publishing forever. I also knew that the demanding magazine editor in Audrey Hepburn’s film Funny Face was based on her. (Ali MacGraw, one of Vreeland’s junior assistants has some amusing anecdotes on this subject.)

Diana Vreeland in the studio, 1946The story is told through archival footage and hundreds of interviews with people who knew and worked with her, and the film features Vreeland’s voice near the beginning, caught on tape in an interview in the 70s. I loved her opening statement: “Darling, the first thing you must do is arrange to be born in Paris at the beginning of the Belle Époque …” What a fantastical picture this immediately conjured up! I was even more enchanted when I learned she eventually made her way from the Continent to New York, where she spent the entire Roaring Twenties dancing in the jazz clubs of Harlem.

Why Don’t You …In fact, Vreeland was dancing when she caught the eye of Carmel Snow – because she was wearing Coco Chanel you see – who suggested she come work for her at Harper’s Bazaar. She waved away Vreeland’s protests that she had never worked, let alone in journalism. And so she started her climb up the career ladder with the aforementioned column Why Don’t You…? (Her granddaughter charmingly reads out some examples in the film.)  

Diana Vreeland with Richard Avedon, 1955Diana in her office, 1965At Harper’s Bazaar Vreeland quickly rose from columnist to fashion editor – the fashion editor, because there was only one. She discovered Richard Avedon, Lauren Bacall (of whom you could not take a bad picture, ever); she advised Jacqueline Kennedy on matters of style; she worked with all the famous models of the day – Veruschka, Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton and Penelope Tree. She stayed at the magazine until 1962, when she left for better prospects at Vogue. She was editor-in-chief there until 1971, after which she went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and shook up the Costume Institute.

Her extravagances with photographic budgets were legendary, for she believed that the reader wanted a fantasy, to be taken out of their world into another extraordinary one, and no expense should be spared to achieve it, for: “The eye has to travel.” Indeed. She was, on her own admission, an ordinary-looking woman with a great sense of style, and she lead an extraordinary life. 

Read more about Diana Vreeland at the official website.

Fashion spreads from Vogue featuring Veruschka