not pretty - elegant
Erin, at A Dress a Day, wrote, some weeks ago now:
"You Don't Have To Be Pretty. You don't owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don't owe it to your mother, you don't owe it to your children, you don't owe it to civilisation in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked 'female'."
Read the whole post, it's a tonic!
As to this picture, this is Diana Vreeland, and I've pinched her also from A Dress A Day. It's a wonderful photo. Diana Vreeland, famous for her associations with New York and fashion (editor-in-chief of Vogue, consultant to the Metropolitan Museum), actually lived in London when she was young, having an English father. And what a London! Here's a quote from Wikipedia:
"Of Waugh she later recounted "I adored his books. I mean Vile Bodies - wasn't it great? He was writing about a whole society that existed in London - wonderful looking girls and wonderful fellas, some of them grew up to be somebody, some of them just didn't, but at that particular moment they were just marvellous. They were all so crazy, they were rather wild - crazy as only the English can be. That's the London I walked into - it existed from I guess about 1927, 1928, right through to about 1935 - and then it was pretty much over."
Vreeland was born in 1906, the same year as my grandmother, and died on the day my first baby was born.
4 comments:
Not quite what I had in mind indeed, but your writing certainly makes up for it :)! I'm only young and this is very educational. I mean that positively.
I have to admit, at first glance I thought that Elegantly Dressed Wednesday had decided to feature Ayn Rand.
But then I realized that I am not owed prettiness, and began to feel very guilty.
Sweetie, you and that girlfriend of yours are paying the debt for the rest of us.
Yellowduck, I meant to say earlier that I'm very glad to be able to exert a positive influence on the young... or anyone at all for that matter! As I recall from my childhood, Vreeland was the sort of Devil Wears Prada of her day, and you can see that from her fingernails. Elegant - does it really work alongside Cuddly?
But for educational you're probably better off sticking with Abe Lincoln, over at Temperama. (Damn! Can't put in a link in a comment box! Who knew.)
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