Irreverent Anna Wintour

I really love this! It's by Lisa Hanawalt. I think I appreciate it because I have a feeling Anna herself would get a kick out of it. I mean, following The September Issue, when everyone was on Team Grace and bagging Anna for being a hardened mag hag, I felt like the criticism was totally unjustified. Anna Wintour is a fashion/advertising/marketing/magazine genius... and if she was a man, no one would ever get up in her grill about her decision-making process. I could never get that at all - she's in charge of the most iconic magazine in the world folks; she is going to have to be the leader and make decisions. I've met male professors who were exactly 1,000,000 times more cut-throat than Anna appears in the film, and everyone tip toes around them asking their opinions on everything from art to how best to cook a pot roast :(
Plus, I really want to stand in front of a number of stores in the city, just wearing something outrageous and flipping the bird to all the indie freaks inside. Maybe I can find an Anna-esque wig to complete my homage.

"Let me be what awaited me yesterday, and let me resist tomorrow in a fistful of poppies and dust"

- Pablo Neruda.

Images made by the Beautiful Ricor.

The Powder Room

You'll be Tough to Replace

Spent many an existential crisis listening to this. Especially out the back of the family ranch; on the trampoline, with cigarettes and my faithful hound. My little dog, Bearsy, would cough at the smoke; but she stayed with me while we played this song on loop, and counted the stars, and dreamed about what we would do when we were 'well' again. I always believed it was written just for me. I still do.

They Shoot Horses Don't They?

From Alexander McQueen's iconic 2004 collection They Shoot Horses Dont They?

Via the very wonderful Cat Party.

A song for my... lovers...

Out of this world: Isabella Blow by Noble and Webster

This is unbelievable. This is a 'portrait' of the late, iconic fashion stylist and troubled genius Isabella Blow, by the duo Noble and Webster. It was donated to the National Portrait Gallery, London, by Blow's estate following her tragic suicide in 2007. It's made of 15 taxidermy animals (including a rat, a snake and a number of birds), and is a reflection on beauty and death... "which embody Blow's own complex preoccupations".

Read more here. I'm COMPLETELY infatuated with it.

Daniel Pinchbeck on Survival

'...As Wangari Matthai, winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for starting a movement that has planted 45 million trees in Kenya, notes, "The word 'craving', so implicated in the physical exploitation of our environment, indicates psychological desperation and spiritual weakness. It illustrates a want that goes beyond simply filling one's belly or satisfying one's thirst." In order to survive, our species has to graduate from insatiable consumerist craving and choose self-limitation and self-sufficiency...'

(From an essay by the writer Daniel Pinchbeck, in Dazed and Confused, January 2011.)

I was having a conversation with a good friend on Sunday about emotional self-containment and survival. We were in awe of her boyfriend who is a hero of containment and well being... we were discussing how he manages to move through life with an inordinate capacity for maintaining his own inner peace despite what's going on around him. Needless to say, he lives with a mindfulness for the environment and a willingness to censor his desires for the preservation and aid of the natural life-force. Then I found this essay by Pinchbeck and I think it's a reminder to me that I need to strive for mindfulness despite what society dictates - that more is more is more and we all want more... I think I want a lot less in my life. I feel so much freer - emotionally and certainly creatively when I'm able to maintain my integrity on every level of my life; physically, emotionally, environmentally, psychologically etc etc. And I'm also far more able to adapt to altered circumstances when I'm not trying to stuff-up the holes in the well of my (imagined) emotional needs. My naturopath has been trying to convince me for years that reality is a myth to get us detached from our true selves, and I think I'm beginning to understand...

"Le Cirque" by Wendy Bevan for Marie Claire Italia, April 2010

Taki Bibelas for Marie Claire Italia, January 2011.