OVERDRESSING

Reliquary cross pendant c. 1450-75 V&A Collection

The idea that you openly display your fortune has almost completely disappeared from European culture. For centuries you could calculate wealth (if not nobility) through the cost of materials and labour on your back: raw silk, shorn velvet, golden thread, seams lined with seed pearls and valuable stones reset into rings, bracelets, seals and pendants by each new owner. It must be the current rehash of 90s minimalism that is making me nostalgic for an opulence I have never experienced, being able to identify a real Celine phantom or Cartier bracelet digging in to a chubby wrist just isn't the same.

Alexander McQueen AW13  /  Anne Boleyn, Artist unknown c.1533-36. National Portrait Gallery

THIS LOOK

Half dead yucca + fish scales

DIGITAL NATIVE ISSUES

POLAR BEARS

THE ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE

POSTURE POSTURE POSTURE One of my dad's oft repeated phrases and infinitely preferable to the showbiz stalwart TITS AND TEETH! (Babs Windsor I'm looking at you). The Alexander Technique is a great basis for shoot because it puts in mind how clothes are being worn while providing a fresh contrast to the pigeon-toed slouch of tumblr. 

Once again, the brilliant Katie Shillingford at the helm.    

ROSE PINK AND DOVE GREY

I love the combination of pink and grey. This passage in the book I'm currently reading made me think about the combination in a whole new way, not entirely pleasant.

'Anne was wearing, that day, rose pink and dove grey. The colours should have had a fresh maidenly charm; but all he could think of were stretched innards, umbles and tripes, grey-pink intestines looped out of a living body... The pearls around her long neck looked to him like little beads of fat, and as she argued she would reach up and tug them; he kept his eyes on her fingertips, nails flashing like tiny knives.' (Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel)