Head to Toe: Fashion Tapas

All these little Fun Fashion Facts do accumulate! We always want to tell you right away, as soon as we find them out, but as so often happens in life, there never seems to be enough time. So this little midweek post is as good a place as any to tell you all sorts of things you never realized you needed to know about dressing. We've got a little something for everybody today: tidbits on hats, glasses, shoes, and what Annette Tapert calls the well dressed woman's uniform. We've posted a photo of the fabulous Millicent Rogers to set the tone. Let's start with the glitziest, in good editorial fashion.


EYEWEAR

Eyewear designer Moss Lipow has a new book out on (drumroll here) EYEWEAR!





















The cover, above, is very staid compared to what's inside. The book is published by Taschen, known for yummy and outlandish books. (They should publish Life Dressing: The Idiosyncratic Fashionistas!) We just happened to have a copy of the Taschen catalogue, and noticed that they'd put the most fabulous selection of glasses in the catalogue to whet the appetite. This picture, below, has some of the glasses from the catalogue. Some of those featured in the book are from Moss's own collection; some are from other "world class collections".























Those of you with a really sharp memory, if you've been reading our blog forEVER, will recognize Moss's name from the time we took a trip to the optometrist's to get Jean a new pair of glasses. After trying on maybe two dozen different styles, Jean finally chose a Moss Lipow design, below.





















For more fun with eyewear, check out this link to Studio Thirsty Crow. Most of it is too fabulous for us. (Can that be??!!)



FOOTWEAR

Going from one extreme of the body to another, waaaaaaaay back in July of last year, The Wall Street Journal did an interview with Marianne Faithfull, who will, despite a very successful recording career, forever be known as Mick Jagger's former girlfriend. It was a very interesting interview, but the passage that grabbed our attention was this one:

Ms. Faithfull said she caught up with Ms. Pallenberg at [Kate] Moss's wedding, though bad feet prevented both of them from kicking up their heels like they used to.

Not that we would wish bad feet on anyone, but isn't it comforting to know that if you have bad feet, you're in really good company?

We thought it would be great to show you what their feet used to look like.

Here's Marianne Faithfull:





















Below is Anita Pallenberg. (For those of you young enough to be our kids - or grandkids - Anita Pallenberg was Keith Richards' girlfriend waaay back then.)


















If you'd like to read the full interview, click here.

For the record, last year Faithfull released an album entitled "Horses and High Heels". One never loses one's taste for some things.


THE UNIFORM

Turning once again to the Wall Street Journal, not for financial tips but for fashion news (we'd really need a book of incantations to set our finances straight), there was an article by Annette Tapert about a woman's "uniform".

Anna Wintour's consists of "shades and jewels";























Michelle Obama's is "a waist-cinching belt and cardigan"






















Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis wore "oversized sunnies"























Daisy Fellowes wore Schiaparelli.

















Tapert quotes the Merriam-Webster definition of the word uniform as "a dress of a distinctive design or fashion worn by members of a particular group and serving as a means of identification; broadly: distinctive or characteristic clothing." It's that last part that "really resonates", she says, and she's right.

We all need to find our own uniform, and for each of us it will be different. The women she cites found theirs, and serve as excellent examples.

If you'd like to see the full article,




































17th century Englishman wearing beaver fur felt hat.


2. Beaver fur felt hats were so prized by the elite of Europe that not only were beaver populations decimated, the fierce competition over the beaver trade led to the loss of human life as well, both among the European colonists and the Native American tribes.







































3. And, as many of you may already know, the milliner's trade involved the extensive use of mercury, so when, in Alice in Wonderland, we read about the Mad Hatter, that was not a mere flight of fancy on the part of Lewis Carroll.


For more about how the fight over beavers arguably helped lead up to the American Revolution, click here to read the article by Stephen Brumwell.