Links for Fun

Around 1 pm I got out of my last class for the week and now face the (delightful but slightly  overwhelming) prospect of another three-day weekend in a row.  And only the second of many to come.

Wear What: Paris

This is extremely cliche.  The whole legendary chic of the Parisian woman is very cliche.  So of course I was very serious to go to the city and examine these mythical women like Elodia plant cells under a microscope.

An aside: I’ve seen a lot of love for Elodia on baby name websites. Does nothing for me (except remind me of high school biology, which was great, but not that great).

Okay.  So first to “debunk” the myth of the chic Parisienne. Kind of/almost.  My parents and I were kind of anxious about going to Paris.  One of the attendant anxieties was the fear that we wouldn’t fit in- that we would look like uncivilized/barbaric/slobbish American tourists.  We were American tourists, just without all those adjectives.  And hopefully not too touristy.  (Maybe even hopefully not so very American).

I don’t want anyone to look at me and say “I bet she switched to following Duck Dynasty when Honey Boo Boo was taken off air.”

Bowie Ballads

Heyyyy everyone! Guess what?
That’s right, I’m back at Yale.  For my senior year. Ah, the inexorable passage of time.

But more exciting- I ordered myself a David Bowie shirt. Finally. It’s been a long time coming.  A really long time coming, given that I’ve been a Bowie fan and singing along to Starman since some time in elementary.

Paris Packed Perfumes

Hello hello hello (bonjour)!
I’ve been in Paris the last week so I haven’t posted at all- I haven’t been here ever before and I feel in some ways as if my heart has finally found where it belongs, so I’m completely unapologetic.

…Even if my heart felt exactly the same way in Venice last year.

I’ve made a lot of observations of the city and am hoping I can boil that down (or flesh that out) into one or two (or 10 or so) lists for your perusal.  In the meantime, I’m going to stick with something that takes little mental energy on my part, because my days have been long and my nights short.

The Eye Must Travel

Oh, Diana Vreeland. Such an inspiringly wacky and elegant woman. Those are the best kind of women (well, hello there, Iris Apfel).  Those are the women I want to grow to be. Hell, those are the kind of women I want to be NOW.

Pants You Can’t Wear In Lab (and an aside)

• capris
• shorts
• leggings or yoga pants
• heavily destroyed denim
• babuchas
• assless chaps

 

And the aside:
Why do we call them assless chaps?  All chaps are, in fact, assless.  It is, as they say, ‘repetitive and redundant’.  Like saying assless assless pants.  You might imagine a world in which the double negative confers upon the pants an ass.  But this isn’t such a world.  I move to eliminate the adjective ‘assless’ from application to the noun ‘chaps’.  Who’s with me?

Manus Ex Machina

My Mom and I met up in Manhattan this past weekend for one night and one day of fun and hijinks.  Actually, the aim was to see this year’s Costume Institute exhibit, Manus ex Machina, whose theme is the intersection of work done by hand and work done by machine.  Somewhere along the line, the fashion world realized that most clothes now are machine-made, and aren’t very artistic or interesting at all, so somehow discussions about technology and the future had to come into play (because science isn’t interesting unless it’s science fiction?)
Which made for a very interesting/embarrassing Met Gala.  If Hiddleswift was the most embarrassing thing spawned by that event, I feel I can guarantee that the faux-space suit fashion was a close distant second (sorry, Hiddlewift, it’s too much).
Thankfully, the exhibit itself is gorgeous and not all of the Met Gala dresses were atrocious laymen’s ideas of what fashion in the age of machinery looks like (Claire Danes, you did good).  But entirely too many starlets and starlos sashayed that red carpet with the conviction that if the outfit was a) metallic and/or b) had cut outs, it must be technological.  I mean, you want something machine-made kids? Walk over to Kmart.