Sphinx: Utterances #204-206

The latest observations:

#204. The accoutrement will take on renewed prominence over the accessory.

#205. It's time for a Tina Chow retrospective. Actually, we're overdue.

#206. German fashion is still under the radar.

- AP

53 BCE

The coin you see here is from Alexandria. It is a Ptolemaic coin, before Cleopatra. I wonder, with the current talk about currencies (be they up or down), if we might return to coinage.

I will admit that I miss having marks, guilders and francs; it was so easy to have some of each--just in case one decided to take a train that crossed 2 or more borders. I am not suggesting a return to those days, however.

But it is nice to hold in your hand something that isn't paper. Can you imagine if the Greco-Roman world had money made from papyrus? Doesn't it sound outlandish?

Paris Moment #1

 

Tourists can get so caught up in the guide book image of a place that there is a real danger of missing the reality. This is not a fashion moment, but it is real life in Paris. Photographed near the Gare Saint Lazare.

Eternal Fashion

 

This blue military jacket is the hottest fashion item in Egypt. The photo, I must admit, does not do it complete justice. That jacket, though it is standard issue, does not bore. I've wondered how an item can be repeated endlessly, retain a standard and still reveal individuality. When an article of clothing is always in fashion, does it not cease to be fashion? Or does it belong to a category known as eternal fashion? Chinos, by they way, also fall into this category.

The pyramid shown is the smallest of the Giza Three, that of Menkaure. Pyramids also have lines that do bore, but continue to fascinate. If you are familiar with any of the statues of Menkaure, you know that he too belongs to eternal fashion.

Congo Couture

 

The global brands are presenting "the now". In far-flung places away from the fashion capitals of today, there are designers who are looking at a "now" that is quite different...a sort of not-now/anti-future/post-past, where a fatigue and feather ball gown is a possibility.

- AP

Paris, 1912

 

We often forget that Paris was the absolute center of an empire; those streets created in the Second Empire are the deliberate intention to make an Imperial City. It is this era that the city never seems to forget. Put it another way, Paris continually reminds tourists of an importance that is no longer.

La mode, however, remains as one of the city's temporal powers.

The photo is the top of the Grand Palais, an exhibition hall. This "wedding cake" architecture was the official style of the time; the Impressionists and succeeding waves of movements (post-, Fauvism, Cubism) must have seemed like the counterculture to the pouffed, stuffed, trussed and befeathered creatures who ordered clothes from Doucet, Callot Soeurs, and Poiret for their morning walks in the you know where.

Sometimes it is better to be correct than to be exact...exactitude can "nail" a look, a style, so well that it suddenly becomes dead and relegated to the past.

Of course, I could be wrong.

-AP

Shopping at KaDeWe

Sometimes a quick sketch can convey more than a photograph of the real thing. For Fall, a violet satin duchesse saharienne with black wool pants. It's just a nice suit to wear this October while at KaDeWe, the department store in Berlin.

- AP

ps: the jacket is lined raspberry silk twill.