Pink for a girl, blue for a boy

I think I'm becoming mildly obsessed with all things pink. I'm not really sure why. Anyway, it's lead me to purchase an amazing pale pink tweed coat from Zara which I love. Think 1950's presidents wife. I also got a cute 60's style pink top from River Island which I've been looking at for months. I love having birthday money.   

In the future, everyone will be famous

Even Andy Warhol faced the odd set back. But he never gave up.

A diamond is forever

I'm not sure if you caught it, but there was a fantastic documentary on channel four this week about last year's auction of Elizabeth Taylor's spectacular jewelry collection.

What was perhaps most amazing about her jewelry is that she didn't buy these things because she thought they were beautiful, they all marked a particular time or event in her life. Gifts from husbands, lovers and friends, souveniers from trips with her family, celebrations of movies she made or the births of her children.

Elizabeth Taylor had an extraordinary life with its fair share of blessings. However she also had more than her share of heartache, something which is often glossed over in favour of talking about her eight marriages or scandalous love affairs. But at the heart of it all Elizabeth was an incredibly strong and generous person, and someone that I've admired for a long time. If you haven't read it, her book My Love Affair With Jewelry, is well worth a read, telling her story in her own words. We'll never again see a star like Elizabeth Taylor, a woman who demanded people's admiration just as surely as any diamond ever could.

The simple truth

Bonjour!

Apologies for the lack of updates, I've been busy with meetings the last week or so. Also, with planning a summer trip to Paris, which we've finally booked up! We're staying in Monmartre and I'm so excited. The Marc Jacobs x Louis Vuitton exhibition is top of my list of things to do. Well, that and Disneyland of course.

A life less ordinary

I know what you’re going to say, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. But alas, it was the cover that first attracted me to Swanson on Swanson, the autobiography of Hollywood legend Gloria Swanson. Found in my favourite second hand book shop, I paid the grand sum of £1 for the dusty paperback, yet it has become one of my favourite books.

Despite having never heard of Miss Swanson prior to reading the book, I loved it, and have read it a number of times since. Gloria Swanson has a unique perspective on Hollywood having worked in the movie business from 1915 through to 1950, in both silent movies and the talkies’, alongside some of the biggest names in movie history, such as Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino and Cecil B. DeMille. But what I really loved about this book was Swanson’s honesty. This is no fluffy Hollywood fairy tale. Swanson’s career weathered multiple marriages, affairs, scandals and financial problems, but Swanson doesn’t hold back on a single detail. Profiling both her brightest and darkest periods, this book tells the story of an amazing woman. Strong, talented, beautiful and incredibly smart, Swanson is the stuff from which legends are made, and in my opinion she doesn’t get half the recognition she deserves.

Happy Easter everyone!

Whether you celebrate it in the traditional sense, or just as an excuse for chocolate, I hope everyone's having a lovely day.

Flawless

I dream of being as flawless as Dita, but I just can't quite manage to look this put together all the time.

Your day will come

"When shipped abroad, a Christian Lacroix wedding dress travels upright in a cloth case, each layer resting in a bed of tissue. Such extraordinary care and attention to detail is the foundation of couture."

Words fail me...

Mellow yellow

Balenciaga, 1967

This dress is the reason I love Pinterest so much. I wasn't looking at anything in particular, but stumbled across this dress from the Metropolitan Museum collection, pinned by Nina Garcia. I'm almost lost for words to describe how amazing I find this dress. I thought it was amazing before I saw the date underneath it, but discovering it's from 1967 only increased my love of it.

The colour, the shape, the edging, nothing about this dress gives you any indication that it is over fifty years old. The scalloped edging is reminiscent of a Chloe collection from a few seasons back, and the mullet shape has been seen on runways the world over for the last few seasons. In my opinion this is exactly what makes this dress so special. It's incredibly beautiful, but it isn't obviously from a certain era. Despite that it's couture, and would have cost thousands of pounds to buy, if you could still be wearing it fifty years later, surely that makes it a worthwhile investment? And how much of todays fashion could you say that about?