WIDE WORLD

If you are in Sydney, you will have noticed it is unseasonably wet and glum right now (the coldest May in 41 years!). If you're in Europe, you probably don't believe me. But it's true! Bleeding freezing, I tell you. No sun and surf for us.
Anyway, creative genius to the rescue...the sight of Mary Katrantzou's glorious mini lampshade skirts for SS11 blew the clouds away for me - temporarily at least.

Volume rocks really doesn't it? Add wire, and you're away. I know it must have been crap to be strapped into an S-Bend corset with a bustle padding your arse, but it sure looked grand. And as for a giant crinoline? The bomb, no? I love Paul Poiret's revolutionary lampshade skirts of the 1910s (2nd and 3rd pic), and I even love the Studibaker Hawk wired taffeta prom dresses from the 80s. In fact, I've got one. But best of all must be Alexander McQueen's wooden fan dress, seen below in a shoot for US Vogue and currently part of the Savage Beauty show at the Met. Who cares if I can't get through a standard doorway in it? Pas moi!

SMART THINKING

I spend a lot of time trying to explain why style is important, why it is possible to be a sensible person and still care what shoes you wear. Why the way we dress is important, why, as an extension of ourselves, it is powerful. Anyway, I jumped for joy when I read Alexandra Shulman's insightful words on this very subject for her ed's letter of the June issue of British Vogue. Shulman is by far my favourite Vogue editor, and her magazine is always full of new thinking and brilliantly written features, as well as magical pictures.

Here, she makes perfect sense of the reasons why skirt lengths and the season's hot new colours still matter when we are bombing Libya and there's a nuclear power station leaking in Japan. "It can seem, at times," she writes, "as if the task of putting together a fashion magazine might appear like Nero's proverbial fiddling while Rome burns.
"Yet when you look back through the past 95 years of British Vogue, you can see that fashion does not exist in a vacuum; like all culture, it grows out of the general mood and events of the time...
"Fashion is one of the great pleasures in life and it clear that, no matter how difficult the times, the urge, for many of us, to make the most of how we look is primal. You need only think of the elaborate jewellery and costumes among impoverished tribal peoples to see that fashion and style are not about money but a demonstration of self, a way of sending a message about who you are. It is this that will continue to drive fashion in the same way wonderful art and literature thrive in adversity.
"As countries struggle to right themselves in this period of extreme turmoil, I hope Vogue provides a welcome does of escapism and inspiration - while also being, like fashion, a product of the age."
Hear, hear!

RAMBLING ROSE

If you haven’t heard of the wonderful, wacky Rose Cumming before, you’re about to: her niece Sarah Cecil, a New York-based designer, is working on a book with Architectural Digest’s Jeffrey Simpson about Cumming’s extraordinary talents, while US deign firm Dessin Fournir has launched a series of her classic designs, including her ‘Zebrine’ zebra print wallpaper.

Rose Cumming was one of three sisters born on a sheep station, each possessed of a hardy ambition and wanderlust which saw them up sticks and reinvent themselves in the US. They never returned to Australia, although they retained sentimental ties, organizing the annual Anzac Ball in New York during Wolrd War II.

“These three terrific young sisters got off the sheep ranch in Australia, came to America and made it in New York and Hollywood,” says Cecil. “My grandmother was an advertising whiz, the baby sister Dorrie was a silent film star.”

Rose fell in with the Manhattan fashion crowd of the roaring 20s, gadding about with the likes of Vanity Fair’s first editor Frank Crowninshield. It was he that suggested that Cumming translate her innate flair into a career in interior design. So the story goes, her response was to whoop, “What on earth is that?”

She soon learnt. “Rose pioneered ‘eclectic’ interiors,” says Cecil, who recalls a childhood spent in her aunt’s Upper East Side shop, a cluttered corner that attracted a starry clientele including Andy Warhol, Nureyev and Jackie Onassis. By the 1930s Cumming, garbed in exotic oriental robes, gowns by Worth and elaborate horse-hair brimmed hats by society milliner Adrian, was dressing rooms for the likes of the Duchess of Windsor. She had developed a fabric line, and was designing furniture, which she produced and sold out of her shop.

“Prior to Aunt Rose, Elsie DeWolfe was on that track, but Rose took it to another level,” says Cecil. “She had a dramatic sense of colour, often mixing colours like lavender and blue, which was new. Her rooms glowed and were filled with stunning antiques of diverse provenance, and yet there was a simplicity to them that makes them timeless.”

Perhaps, but in her own home simplicity often took a back seat in favour riotous experimentalism and a wild sense of fun. Her ‘Ugly Room’ was a style zoo lit by black candles and showcasing her more outlandish finds rejected by her clients: stuffed birds of prey, art works depicting animals in traps and an elaborate coil of serpents climbing around the fireplace.

The house and shop are now gone, but the Cummings legacy lives, on a macro level via the new thrill her work is causing in design circles, and on the micro, in Cecil’s house. “Her Audubon quatrepeds from the great “Ugly Room” climb the walls of my dining room, keeping company with the Russian child’s sleigh from her old dining room. Our cat sleeps in it.”

I wrote this for Vogue Living a while back but thought I'd share it here. I keep thinking about Rose lately for some reason. Isn't she fabulous?

FAN FUN

I love a fan. I mean the pleated paper number, not the crazed one. Ho ho. Anyay, fabulous fan moments: Kaiser Karl peeping out from behind his signature fans back in the day. The coquettish splendour of the Chinese fan dance. Her hotness Scarlet Johansson in Lady Windermere's Fan.

The other night I was lucky enough to be a guest at the Chandon Supper Club event at Guillaume at Bennelong. I dined on scallops and fillet mignon and a whisper-light passion fruit souffle with the uber glamorous Elisabeth Drysdale and my new favourite woman Miss Chu. Anyway, at the end of all this feasting and boozing and carousing, we stepped out to the afterparty on the terrace in front of the opera house, with wonderful views and...fans. What a fab gift. So here's a gratuitous pic of me, avec said instrument of chic. Must get me a Louis Vuitton fan, me thinks.

Museworthy: PENELOPE TREE

Today's chic challenge? To experiment with eyeliner & falsies so I look fashion-sad like Penny. Don't cry, baby. Just swoon...

POP-UP FABRIC FUN SUNDAY MAY 29!

MRS PRESS S/S '11/'12 SHOW

Mrs Press 'Pineapple Princess' from Alice Wesley-Smith on Vimeo.

ENEMY OF THE STYLE STATE

The other day I caught Hitchcock’s Rear Window on the telly, which was fabulous for many reasons, not least the chance to
ogle Grace Kelly’s outfits. In one scene, she slips off a ladylike green jacket
with bracelet length sleeves to reveal a backless white halter-top and a sexy
expanse of Rivera-tanned skin. Then she nips into the kitchen to warm some brandy. Now that’s style to admire.

But it’s not all plane fashion sailing. The film’s final scene loses the
costume plot. The drama is over; the murderous neighbour has been caught,
and Grace’s character Lisa is at last able to relax at home with her man,
Jimmy Stewart (who, as wheelchair bound photographer L.B. Jeffries, spends
the whole picture in his striped pajamas). It is time to regroup, calm down,
or in contemporary parlance: chillax. But what to wear to do so? PJs, like our
Jimmy? Not Grace.

A peignoir perhaps? With a marabou trim? Or a couture evening gown, but with
her high heels kicked elegantly under the sofa? Grace/Lisa is reading a copy
of Harper’s Bazaar, which seems absolutely believable. She is reclining regally
in a window seat (believable too - for this was 1954 and within a year she
would be Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco). She is wearing a red
shirt and jeans. JEANS! Outrageous! Implausible! Frankly it’s just plain silly.

Now I know Grace is acting, and that as an actor it is her job to pretend, but
it all ended with me feeling rather duped. Grace would no more don denim than
she would burlap. Grace represents supreme chic – as denim is its sworn enemy.

Jeans can be many things: tough, rebellious, comfortable, the appropriate attire
for cowboys at rodeos, the favoured attire of middle-aged women doing the garden,
the dressed down choice of marketing managers and art directors. These days jeans
are ubiquitous, but they are not chic.

I know because I’ve tried every shape of jean known to womankind, and I’ve never looked like Grace in Rear Window. Jeans are evil. There, I’ve said it. Laugh!
Heckle! Write to complain. I don’t care. I speak the truth.



Boot cut jeans make me look like an escapee from a 1990s sitcom. Skinnies, like a
baby seal. Boyfriend jeans make me look like a sack of potatoes.
Or a potato farmer. Or, worst of all, a woman who has eaten too many potatoes, most of them smothered with mayonnaise, and now packing that most unwelcome accessory: the muffin top. Jeans are the enemy. And no amount of ironing them down the middle will render them a valid alternative to tailored pants.

Deep down we all know this, just as we known the calamity of stepping out with
frayed hems, or worse still paying extra for them. Those carefully distressed
designer jeans from Japan serve only one purpose: to make skateboarders laugh at
us in parks.

If you’re 18 with a hot body, go for your life. Cut off your denims and wear them
with a bikini top. Giggle at the mums squeezed into Sass and Bides and the dads trying to look cool in their slogan-strewn Ksubis. Enjoy it while it lasts. But
if you’re a grown up, perhaps it’s time to consider growing up, and buying a smart frock. Grace Kelly no more wore jeans than she washed up those brandy balloons when Hitchcock called “Cut!”

KEEPSAKES

I just bought this de-lovely book, Keepsakes, by Frances Hansen (Hardie Grant). Frances is Fleur Wood's sister and this book grew out of the wedding present scrapbook Frances gave Fleur. It's inspiring and fab - full of handwritten notes and recipes passed down through the family. And look at their mum on her wedding day...doesn't she look divine? I'm off home to make their Hokey Pokey Biscuits.

RAfW HIGHLIGHTS

Toni Maticeveski show = gorgeous.

AN EXTREMELY FABULOUS HAT (or two)

The divine Suzy O'Rourke has been sharing our studio these past few weeks. She is extremely inspriring. The things she can do with a salad bowl! These lacy beauties are from her made-to-measure winter collection. AH-mazing.

Visit www.suzyorourke.com.au