Warm and Woolly September

      . . . . Ay-up, in the 80's, fuerza sunshine.  Of course this is the day to trek to REI and buy serious wool sox, and hit the shops on Broadway for cashmere sweaters. To balance this out, my personal air conditioning unit is arriving tomorrow.  I'll continue to have use for this for at least another three weeks, I suppose.

     . . . . .Other significant news: CNN reports that as of today, 1 in 500 people in the US have died of Covid.

~~~~~~~~~ Books

Some serious reading has arrived in la casa, because people send us books. 

Just today we received Libros Y Grabaos De Artistas Cubanas: 1985-2008, the catalog for the exhibit held in a different world, held at the Museum of Modern Art, and funded by the Grolier Club of Manhattan. It's a beautiful volume, splendidly fabricated, with equally beautiful content.

Illuminating antiquity, somebody I don't even know -- though I do know his name, I've never met the person -- sent me a copy of the massive, annotated, mapped, appendiced and encyclopedic indexed The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories (2007), edited by Robert B. Strassler.  It's so big it's too heavy to hold. It has to rest on a lap desk or some other support. A reference resource. I have read Herodotus's Histories -- or at least read widely in them. The Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuściński has read them all, many times.  He annotates Herodotus with his own book, Travels with Herodotus (2004) which focuses on a lifetime of reading Herodotus on the road, studying and reporting. He never traveled without the Histories. Even if one isn't familiar with or care about Herodotus, as with all of Kapuściński's writing it well worth reading, because so goo.

Now for the busy, busy 19th Century.

The title is unfortunate because it make the book sound like a Victorian sensationalist 'true crime' tale, when The Irish Assassins: Conspiracy, Revenge, and the Phoenix Park Murders That Stunned Victorian England (2021) by Julie Kavangh, is a serious work of history. In Serbia it was the Black Hand, the open-secret society that funded and planned the assassination of Duke Ferdinand and his wife in 1914.  Here in 1882, it's the Irish American funded, Invincibles, the militant arm of the Irish Independence Movement. At the moment when talks between the Movement and the British government were making headway, the day after Gladstone's emissary, Lord Frederick Cavendish arrives, he and the Irish undersecretary, Thomas Burke, are assassinated by the Invincible in Dublin's Phoenix Park.

The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politic (2021) by Mae Ngai, traces the anti-Chinese racism in the gold fields around the world 1848-1899. It was remarkably the same in South Africa and Australia as it was in California.

People still buy our books. We just heard a school in New Orleans is purchasing two hundred copies of The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square. In the meantime, most of New Orleans's power was restored by the end of last week, but not so out there in Cajun Country.  People we know have organized a truck convoy to take supplies to Thibodeaux and Houma. With our contribution I requested sanitary supplies in various sizes be included. People, even when women are part of the organizing and planning, tend to forget this necessity.

~~~~~~~~~~~ Watching

Tomorrow Postmambo Movie Night presents The Rumba Kings, followed by a conversation with filmmaker Alan Brain.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~My Favorite Thing This Week (so far)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, at Monday night's Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Gala (part 1), in a borrowed dress from her designer girlfriend and 'escort':

The meta and the irony of this.  So much reading one can do -- "I don't really care - do you?"  That one has never attended any Met Costume gala!

 

Leslie Jones Most Glamorous of 2017 Emmys!

     . . . . My one and only Emmy vote goes to Leslie Jones, for the most stunning and glamorous at the Emmys of 2017.

Here is why:

Few could carry this, but O Lordessa, can Leslie Jones ever!

Runner-up, Jane Fonda:

Front

And

Back

And

Side

Trifecta Win for Discrimination!

Female, black, not skinny (but certainly NOT overweight! Not even!).

We are making a party to see the Ghostbusters reboot Friday. 

Leslie Jones is a favorite in our house, btw. We cite her in The American Slave Coast at one point for one of her first sketches when she joined SNL.

Eternal, Immortal Egypt

Ancient Egypt is eternal because they had the best make-up and design and had it first and had it longest.

That's my opinion and I'm sticking to it.

Plus, the Ancient Egyptians seem to be the first to understand  the fundamental feline character

is divine.

They also dressed sensibly for their climate, in clothes woven from sensible textiles.

However, Himself and I got into a long discussion at dinner Friday night, after leaving the museum: he seems to believe in Egypt the Eternal and Unchanging. I cannot understand how he could, after the very many times we have walked through the galleries of the old, middle and new kingdoms of Ancient Egypt, in the Met, the Brooklyn Museum, the British Museum and some others.  The dynamics of art and design change over the centuries and millennia, so other things do too.

What to Wear While Exploring, Fairyland Geography -- See Yesterday's Post!

At the Museum of Fashion Institute of Technology:

Inspired by The Snow Queen, naturally -- and purrfect for today's 18º F.

[ " . . . . Fairy Tale Fashion features more than 80 objects placed within dramatic, fantasy-like settings designed by architect Kim Ackert. Since fairy tales are not often set in a specific time period, Fairy Tale Fashion includes garments and accessories dating from the 18th century to the present. . . . " ]

[ " Fairy Tale Fashion is a unique and imaginative exhibition that examines fairy tales through the lens of high fashion. In versions of numerous fairy tales by authors such as Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen, it is evident that dress is often used to symbolize a character’s transformation, vanity, power, or privilege. The importance of Cinderella’s glass slippers is widely known, for example, yet these shoes represent only a fraction of the many references to clothing in fairy tales. " ]

[ " The exhibition’s introductory space features artwork that has played a role in shaping perceptions of a “fairy tale” aesthetic. These include illustrations by renowned early 20th-century artists such as Edmund Dulac, Arthur Rackham, and A.H. Watson. Several recent, large-scale photographs from Kirsty Mitchell’s award-winning Wonderland series are also on display. . . .  Connections between fashion and storytelling are further emphasized by a small selection of clothing and accessories, including a clutch bag by Charlotte Olympia that resembles a leather-bound storybook. " ]

Fairytale Fashion Magazine.

A video of a runway Fairy Tale Fashion show from 2010:

We Can Lay A Wager That No One Else Woke Up Today With This Question

Why did European at the start of the medieval period begin to wear hats, and caps and ever more elaborate (and frequently downright silly and other times downright ugly) headgear if they were the privileged classes?

The Greeks and the Romans didn't wear big silly things on their heads by-and-large, other than hoods from their cloaks and battle helmets. True, the odd laurel leaf crown showed up at drinking parties and ceremonies honoring poets, generals and dictators.

But not this sort of thing.

Or these.

Now this is quite attractive.  Naturally, it's Italian, who drew many fashion ideas from both Africa and the Turks.

But this sort of thing (poor Katherine of Aragon!) is downright hideous, and surely most uncomfortable (but since when has fashion ever been interested in comfort?).


Men generally had more attractive headwear, it seems, though the head on which the hat was hung may not have been so attractive.  Thinking Henry VIII.

Where did this thing begin?  With the Church?

It's hard not to think Monty Python made these up.

Cods

IN the Guardian, by Kathryn Hughes: how can a news cruiser resist the following --

During Henry VIII’s reign, codpieces became so large that it was impossible for men to bend over to pull on their shoes.

The sentence was provoked by a survey of Fashioning the Body

a collection of scholarly essays written to accompany an exhibition of the same name in Paris in 2013 and that will be mounted again at the Bard Center, New York from next week. 

So many terrible events crashing one-upon-another this week. The beginning was my own building escaping burning down thanks to stupid tenants and building owner (prevented only by the quick work of my across-the-hall neighbor and myself calling the fire department -- yet owner still thinks making it possible for drunk young males to play with fire is an excellent thing). Yesterday afternoon four East Village buildings just like this one were destroyed in a terrible conflagration, thanks to people's greed squeezing more and more profit out of buildings that aren't equipped to handle that much gas, while refusing to hire qualified plumbers and electricians -- not to mention the constant pounding the infrastructure of buildings, pipes and lines receive from constant renovation for wealthy people and high-rise building where there shouldn't be.

The consequence of the East Village catastrophe include evacuation all around the area, hundreds of homeless, two people missing, 19 in the hospital, four with critical injuries.

At the same time, the Germanwings tragedy-crime -- and our city at least is observing cancer week, and all the media is booming non-stop the most terrible stories of people dying of the most terrible things and how it all would be prevented and / or cured if we had a decent health care system and people could afford medical care and drugs. Our foods,even organic ones, are filled with cancer-causing pesticides and our wine is filled with arsenic.

These things have rather jangled my nerves this week -- plus, el V is where communications can happen only infrequently and for very short bursts. 90 miles off the U.S. coast and we can't skype, make phone calls, and hardly can e-mail, there's so little bandwidth in Cuba, thanks to we know whom.

So this light-hearted look at our historical fashion and style preposterousities has been welcome -- the paragraph's last sentence is particularly delightful.

No sooner had codpieces reached their most gargantuan proportions than they were at risk of bursting under their own pretentions. Not for nothing did Montaigne call them silly and even worse, a kind of “falsehood and imposture”. Yet just 250 years later – a mere blink compared with the millennia it takes to produce a permanent swerve in the body’s skeleton – they were back in fashion. In the Regency period, skintight trousers for men were teamed with narrow coats (rather than Henrician puffed shoulders and barrel chests) to create a long, lean line broken by a wide buttoned flap that puckered and pouched much like an impromptu codpiece. The effect was to draw attention to the phallus while nonchalantly pretending that it was the last thing on your mind.

Egypt in 1862 -- Photographs

"Francis Bedford’s astonishing photographs of the 1862 royal tour" --.

These are photographs of the four-month tour of the Middle East in 1862 of the 20-year-old Prince of Wales -- sent off by Queen Victoria and Albert, as both punishment and cure for Bertie's discovery that he could have sex.  Before the Prince of Wales set off, Albert died, and Victoria disliked her son and heir even more.

Click the link for more photos of the from the trip in the Guardian photo gallery.

Talking about this article with a friend, her take away was that nobody in the royal family could even sneeze without the Royal Permission, and how stifling and suffocating this had to be.

1862. Alix and Minnie with their mother Queen Louise of Denmark.

Which led me to observe that the clothes alone, for both men and women, were stifling and suffocating, and the higher up the social scale, the more clothing was heaped upon the body, concealing its natural shape and form, making it the more difficult to move -- particularly for women.  Good thing that servants were cheap in those days and one could mistreat them pretty much at will ....

Thoughts about European clothing of 1862 are prompted naturally by an observation in the article about the Christian (Druze) and Muslim conflicts in Lebanon:

Even the cheapness of English cloth had sharpened resentments between the various groups, enriching the Christian agents of the Manchester houses and impoverishing Muslim weavers – unintended consequences of the Industrial Revolution and globalisation.

Now I'm curious as to what happened with the Muslim weavers in the next few years, as this was 1862, and the British factories were soon going to starve as the Union blockade of the Cotton Kingdom's product got more effective. This, in

Mehmet (Muhammad) Ali of Egypt, who began the large-scale cultivation of cotton in Egypt.

turn, set off in Egypt, what is still historically called the "cotton boom," to supply the English textile industry.  Note: the Egyptian cotton boom was accomplished by slave labor ....

Buckskin Breeches

My only claim to productivity today is I have learned about the deer skin trade of colonial Carolina and territories, where it went, and the market for it.

It was indeed huge.

Partly it was driven by the crash in beaver furs -- which happened in the New World as it did in the 16th century in Europe, due to over-hunting.  So something  had to come to take the place of beaver to signify rank and fashion,

Cocked hats were buckskin -- if I'd thought of them at all as to materials I would have assumed wool ....

especially in (men's) hats.  Deer skins, i.e. buckskins, played that part.  Not to mention his breeches, his gloves, the bindings of his books, and many other items of clothing and personal use signifying "gentleman."

Do I need to say that by 1750 the deer trade also collapsed to the regional scarcity of the animal by then?  As had, not coincidentally, the trade in slaving Native Americans to the Caribbean, as the population of many of the tribes that had extensive contact with the Europeans in the territory collapsed.

Two James - Henry and Charles - Women in Society and Fashion

As an amuse-bouche  for the eyes, ears and brain, I've been watching BBC Affairs of the Heart, Series I (1974) and Series 2 (broadcast 1974 and ?; available in U.S. on dvd 2008).

Diana Rigg and Jeremy Brett in "Grace" - Affairs of the Heart

The series feature fine casts of familiar players. However, though the stories are based on some of Henry James's (1843 - 1916) shorter works, the titles have the stories have been changed to female names.  For example, The Aspern Papers became "Miss Tita."

As the title of the series indicates, these are all tales of love, love in all its permutations, many of which are wry, ironic and twist in directions that confound the expected romantic resolution of happy pairing. These stories are not for an audience that wants comfort romance, fast action and physical violence

The writers and director, Terrence Feeley, strip the James's stories to their bones, focusing solely upon the strange ways of men and women of a certain class all too frequently drive right past each other while desperately wished to bond.  These being James works, many of them are culture clashes of how the old English monied classes and the newer American monied classes just miss each other. Everything else is told through impeccable production values of location, set dressing and particularly what the characters wear.

Which brings us to the second James, who has been featured extensively in this city's media this week, the designer, Charles James, about whom more here.

From the catalog for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute exhibit of Charles James:

James, who was born in England in 1906, began as a hat designer and settled permanently in the United States in 1939, building his art on the simplified lines and bias cuts of the early-20th-century French modernists Paul Poiret and Madeleine Vionnet. He also synthesized forms from the deeper past — the imposing split skirt of the 18th-century robe à la française, several kinds of bustles, army greatcoats — but his best garments exude an undeniable modernity. They are, in their own way, as organic, forward-looking and self-evident as a Brancusi sculpture, an Eero Saarinen tulip chair or a Pollock drip painting. They transcend yet celebrate function, elucidate while mystifying form, and reveal by adorning the female body in sometimes startlingly erotic terms. In the exhibition’s lavish catalog, James describes fashion as “what is rare, correctly proportioned and, though utterly discrete, libidinous.”

Similar references dot the walls of the galleries where James refers to his innovative shapes as “a high form of eroticism” and describes his driving passion “for form related to movement and, above all, to erotic grace.” He notes that bluejeans are “functional and, being functional, highly sexual” and that the true function of fashion is as “a rehearsal for propagation.” After all, what could be more crucially functional than the propagation of the species? . . . .

The ball gown gallery, where each dress is a feat of engineering, is one of the great demonstrations of how shape and color convey meaning and pleasure. James is at his most erotic in a 1948 ball gown partly inspired by a Georgia O’Keeffe retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946.

"The dress is an explicit yet elegant combination of vulval drapes and labial folds in pale peach silk faille and orange silk taffeta.

These gowns are made for dancing, which is why they are designated ball gowns. Ball gowns have featured on the page of novels and journals that include women, written by women since before Jane Austen, and ever since.* Can anyone describe better the why of so many words given over to dress up clothes, balls and dancing in fiction featuring women than Charles James?

... describes his driving passion “for form related to movement, and, above all, to erotic grace.” He notes that bluejeans are “functional and, being functional, highly sexual” and that the true function of fashion is as “a rehearsal for propagation.” 

This is what went through my mind last night while watching a ball room scene in one of the tales in the Affairs of the Heart.

-----------------------

*   This is why too, though Henry James is an American, why so many BBC series have dramatized his fiction. In this context of love, dancing and gowns,  I adore that Affairs of the Heart chose to include in the Aspern Papers in the series -- reaching as it does, back to the age that saw club-footed Lord Byron spending his time in the ballroom sneering at those who danced, while being adulated by all and sundry young ladies for his dashing poetry.

Another Observance From May 5 -- Metropolitan Museum's Annual Costume Institute Gala Fund-Raiser

It seems whatever era we are in things remain the same: ridiculous, useless wars, financial panics and depressions as the ruling elite gets richer and richer and the poorer grow ever more poor and in numbers -- and frivolity and frou-frou remain for the richer and richer.  Yesterday's date hosted a most important event in NYC, the annual Met Costume Institute fund raiser gala (complete slide show of the attendees and their sartorial choices included at the link).  Each gala observes the glories of fashion as displayed by the most wealthy social classes of the past via what this year's social - celebrity elite chooses to wear.

Cecil Beaton's portrait of women in Charles James's gowns 1948

Charles James 1958

This year it honored Charles James's (1906-1978) post WWII gowns that themselves honored

Sargent - "The Wyndham Sisters" (1899-1900)

Ena and Betty, Daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Asher Wertheimer (1901)

the Gilded - Edwardian age of John Singer Sargent's (1856 - 1925) women of the elite classes, their billowing clouds of skirt, sleeves and / or deep décolleté.

The First Lady opened the newly re-named for Anna Wintour (forever editor of Vogue) Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute earlier in the day.  She was the ribbon cutter.  She wore a plain and simple a-line dress, to the knees, and teeny heels.  The most dressy thing about the dress was that the fabric was a print. It was no gown at all.  So she must not have attended the gala.  Surely she could have, if she'd wanted to.  A scheduling conflict?

I clicked through all the photos of the celebrities who attended the gala, to which this years the men were instructed to wear tails -- which almost none of them did, saying tails made them look like short, tubbby schlubs.

However, Johnny Depp went tails all the way, including walking stick and white gloves, all just slightly exaggerated, just a bit off, retaining his dark glasses, a presentation true to his signature demented persona.

Cumberbatch looks to the tails born.

For the first time I wondered: can you use the bathroom while wearing this? Some Red Carpet walkers must have been sew into their dresses. Does that mean they went without eating or drinking for three days before (typical for Victorian and Edwardian women for ceremonial occasions such as being presented at court)? Or subjected themselves to a severe cycle of purging? Neither one is good for one's health, and is particularly bad for the complexion, one might think. On the other hand it seems to be an actress these days means never eating.

The women who looked the best, i.e. natural, in some of these gown-extravaganzas, naturally, were the professional models.

Sarah Jessica Parker's acres of Oscar de Laurenta gown covered her foot gear. However, it was big news here in NYC last year when it was revealed that Ms Sex in the City had to give up heels forever because of the damage to her feet. Then there are the shoes.  Women's feet these days all look like ballerina feet, and those feet are ugly!  Doubtless this is from a couple of decades of stumbling about in ever-more ridiculous high stilettos.

What Lupita Nyong'o was thinking -- well, we all make sartorial errors. When you're been called on as constantly as she has been to be on view on red carpets since 12 Years a Slave began its film festival screenings -- that she blew it this time, no thing. Besides it's the Costume Institute gala and attendees have traditionally gotten "creative."

Nor was she the only one, by a long shot.  A lot of these! And look at those poor feet!

Though Madonna's bandage costume this year got banned by Wintour, so Madonna stayed home.  Which is just as well.

For what it is worth, which is nothing, I liked this look (on her) a lot. Also, so not Charles James.

Back when I was young enough to wear anything and chose to wear mostly nothing (but with a tan! it was warm! it was the desert!) who would have thought I'd come to enjoy looking at Red Carpet photos of fancy dress? I've never been a consumer of fashion magazines -- unless they were from periods prior to about 1920. Now clothes from the past have always interested me. This was part of which developed me the historian, from my earliest years, pouring over illustrated books and magazines stored in my great-grandparents' basements, their photo albums, even the art illustrations in my piano practice books. After I moved to NYC I've always attended the Met's exhibits in the Costume Institute. In fact, the first, or at least among their first costume exhibits was The Horse, the catalog of which was very useful to me while writing my Horse Girl Fantasies. Since then I've always been clear there were connections between art and fashion though art and fashion are not equivalents -- just as pop culture is not the equivalent of culture.  As well as being pop culture mad, this  city has always been fashion mad, -- though generally seldom what one could call elegant. And, finally, I've come to know a few fashion designers. So those are probably the reasons I now enjoy looking at Red Carpet photos.