Inaugural Hats

I’ve been waiting for an excuse to post the beige pillbox Jackie wore at JFK’s Inaugural fifty years ago today.

It may not be as famous as the pink pillbox she wore in Dallas, but this one has such an appealing sculptural simplicity. The nobility and purity it conveys exemplifies how expertly Jackie created not just a style, but an iconography with her clothing. According to Oleg Cassini, who famously dressed her while she was first lady, Jackie's signature pillbox, sitting back atop her bouffant hair, was inspired by images of Nefertiti. This one, I think, is more “white chess queen.” The top hat Jack wore that day completed the coronation/wedding couple "look." What a perfect symbol for our love affair with America’s royal family.



See other items from the Met's 2001 exhibit Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years.
Visit the JFK Library and Museum for the Inaugural Exhibit online.

Bergdorf's Windows

Bergdorf’s Holiday windows are, so over the top this year that they are a challenge to behold. ‘Labor intensive’ doesn’t even begin to describe this extravaganza of passementarie, quilling, encrustation, and taxidermy, with a dose of steampunk.


During the day, the reflections of Fifth Avenue
upon the glass offer some dreamlike surprises ...


But the general effect is dizzying.


If you visit after dark …


and get up close to explore …


you’ll be transported to a world of fantastical detail.










































Glorious, but exhausting, much like the Christmas season in New York!

Natural High Fashion

German photographer Hans Silvester has documented the Surma and Mursi people of southern Ethiopia and their creative DIY/haute couture tradition of body decoration. "Natural Fashion," a book of the photos was published in 2008 and there is a small show of these works in New York through January 8, at Marlborough Graphics, 40 W. 57th St.

The exuberance with which the tribe members employ animal, vegetable and mineral for mark-making and other adornment is stunning in its inventiveness and sophistication. The images, which celebrate the art and physicality of people who wear nothing but fingerpaint, flowers, and seedpods, are utterly enchanting. You might very well find yourself inspired to frolic in nature and take up crafting.

Or, alternatively (since you are probably dressed entirely in black), you’ll be mentally placing Silvester’s photographs within the universe of ethnographic images made by Irving Penn and Leni Reifenstal, or those we’ve seen in Vogue, National Geographic and modern advertising. Before you know it, you’ll be pondering post-structuralist anthropology, the Western gaze, and the entire artistic/fashionistic industrial complex.

Perhaps we simply are what we wear.














Much thanks to Vito Zarkovic for posting about "Natural Fashion" on his FB page. The images here and many more can be seen here.

The Dame Game

Don’t you want to know the woman who counts among her style icons Bjork, Chaka Khan, Vivienne Westwood and Janis Joplin? Meet “Dame” Lori Sutherland, the pleasure visionary who knows that style lives not in your closet, but in your soul.

Find out who else inspires Dame Lori at The Dame Game. See which other men and women have achieved iconhood, and follow all of Dame’s soul-styling escapades. How can you help but be curious about someone who has managed to corral Ed Koch, Bootsy Collins, and Jean-Paul Belmondo onto one page!

A.M. Cassandre for Harper's Bazaar

In 1936, MoMA held an exhibition of Paris-based A.M. Cassandre’s poster work. That’s when Harper’s Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch, contracted Cassandre to create the numerous surrealistic covers he would produce over the next three years.

Among the handful below, the first two are definitely the trippiest. For a few more, go here.