Paris Vogue Recommends: Gray's In

Continuing in a series of style points offered up by the August issue of Paris Vogue (more entries below):

Here, a look as cool as a straight-up martini, with a twist of Adam Ant.

I believe stylist Tom Pecheux is attempting to show, via an outfit by Gucci, that it's possible to be extraordinarily interesting in monochrome, as long as there's a strong variation in texture. See how the wool-silk fabric reverbs against the snakeskin bag, the calfskin shoes, the sequinned top--all within a fairly narrow chromatic range.

It's a nice trick to remember, especially if you have a good stock of basics in the same neutral shade. The accessories don't need to be as high-end as these, they just need to refract light in a similarly variable way.

[the photo--marvelous--is by Inez and Vanoodh. The model--and I hardly ever worry about models--appears a tad undernourished.}

Silk Scenes

While I like seeing some friend's 2-second-old Facebook upload taken by iPhone midway through a bungee jump down some New Zealand gorge, I'm old enough to remember slide shows, and these were pretty awesome also.

This time of year, in the backstretch of August, friends and neighbors would disperse to various ports-of-call near and far. Once everybody was back home and the transparencies returned from the developer, we'd have a round of get-togethers down in the rec rooms, reliving the adventures along with them.

I loved these parties, and not just because we got to stay up well past dinner and watch the grownups get snockered.

Here's how it would go. After the inevitable ten minutes of futzing with the projector and the slide trays and screen (the latter always snapping back up its roller after the first few attempts to stretch it), the French onion dip would land on the table, the lights would dim, and the projector's lamp would go on, throwing a hard, bright beam through the darkened room, which, just as in Mad Men, soon filled with swirls of cigarette smoke.

And then the pictures would click on. If my family was hosting, they were in no particular order, surprising even Dad, who'd be doing the man's work of supervising A-V. We'd go through several trayfuls. If the slides were blurry, thumb-filled, unflattering, or overexposed nobody cared--imperfection was part of it, and the ribbing was a good leveler among those who weren't lucky enough to get a holiday that year.

For a kid, it was magical--the dark room, the off-the-cuff narration, eating onion dip, hearing your mom squeal at a particularly gruesome candid, and best of all, that wonderful few seconds of anticipation as the tray ratcheted forward and the next slide dropped into place.

So, a bit of a long introduction to today's entry, Around the World in 80 Scarves (Actually More Like 5).

In no particular order,

the backstreets of Paris, in a lovely shade of bordeaux



The Canadian side of Niagara Falls--the boat (not painted to scale) is called "The Maid of the Mist":



The Trevi Fountain (with lots of coins for wishes!)



The Via Condotti, also in Rome (cue envious ooooohs from the ladies, yawns from the kids)



And last but not least, good old London, now my home town . . . in glorious (and true to form) monochrome:



Have a great Wednesday, and don't hog the onion dip.

Top Flora

As lovers of Hermès scarves and Ossie Clark/Celia Birtwell vintage dresses know, patterns can have as significant a history in fashion as the garments themselves. One of my favorite pattern stories is that of Flora, Gucci's now-emblematic array of delicate garden blooms scattered across a white (or less commonly, black) ground.

How it came about: as the story goes (many thanks to the delightful scarf-specialty blog Musings on things That Matter to Me), decades back Grace Kelly rushed into a Gucci shop in search of a floral scarf as a wedding present for a friend. The house did not make any at the time. Rodolfo Gucci went on to commission renowned illustrator Vittorio Accornero to design a sublime botanical in honor of Grace, who had then become Princess of Monaco.

Here's a wonderful photo of her daughter, Caroline, wearing the pattern created for her mother. (well done American Vogue picture editors!)

With 37 different colors and a garden's worth of delicately rendered blooms, the scarf became an enduring favorite. When Frida Giannini became Gucci's head designer in 2002, she revived the pattern on bags, shoes, and dresses.

Vintage Flora scarves are still highly affordable on eBay. Here's a lovely example, with a navy border, that I was able to find a few months ago for about £35 ($51).

Fashion DNA: Gucci Bamboo

I'm always interested to see how those at the helm of today's great design houses employ the motifs and signature materials of the brand's past. Karl Lagerfeld famously sketched out the handful of emblems that inform Chanel, including the camellia and the cross-backed Cs. I've talked earlier on this blog about Celine's linked chains.

Today, the spotlight is on Gucci, which has made bamboo a signature element of its bags since 1947, when founder Guccio Gucci first used it as a handle on a leather purse. The question: why would a Florentine saddle purveyor employ a material far better known in the Far East as a decorative element?

Initial digging around the internet doesn't yield much. I suspect there's a good story here (fashion historians get on it!). The little I've found: bamboo's natural beauty, ready-finished natural state, low cost, pliability, and extreme strength means it can be used for pratically anything. In Scandanavia, for example, bamboo has been used for ski poles. In the Far East, stouter versions of the grass are used as scaffolding in construction. Centuries ago, Hindu royalty boasted their rank through the length of the bamboo handles on their umbrellas. In Bangladesh today, 73% of the population lives in houses made of bamboo. You can fish with it, walk on it, wear it, tattoo with it, even eat it: bamboo shoots are tasty, and not just for pandas.

But back to the question. How did Guccio Gucci first hit on the idea of using it as a handle for fine handbags? A guess: at some point, maybe during his formative stays in London and Paris, he saw some Japanese Ikebana baskets, which make an art out of woven bamboo strips and gracefully curved bamboo handles. These would have been displayed as art objects in Europe with "Japonisme", the love affair with Japanese design, that swept through the capitals in the early part of the century. And so a signature emblem was born. Maybe.

As for the practicality of bamboo handles on bags, there's a hilarious discussion on the subject over at The Fashion Spot. The upshot: beautiful but unyielding bamboo and fashionably bony shoulders do not get along! The moral: as long as you're not a panda, a little bite of bamboo goes a long way.