La Coquette

Oh hi, it's fashion week again.

They should start serving CC stamped peanuts at the Chanel shows.  What hoopla!  The invite had a sketch by Karl of a polar bear, and then the set included a couple of whopping icebergs (imported from Sweden).  Karl’s Dr. Zhivago princesses walked on the sop of the iceberg’s melt, trailing long coats and making a wake with their fur boots.  While the icebergs were real, the fur apparently was fake.  At the end Karl minced around to “Say Captain, Say Wot”!   I thought that was a riot. (I suppose I should say: wot a riot.)

Afterwards, I headed up to Paris 8 at Saint Denis for a littérature comparée class.  I haven’t mentioned this previously on the blog, but I’m working on a master’s degree in literature.  We were studying travel diaries (récits de voyages) and Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques.  How did Tristes Tropiques change the field of the travel diary in 1955?  By postulating the death of exoticism, the end of travel, and the deconstruction of otherness – all this without abolishing the possibility of the travel diary.  The first line is “Je hais les voyages et les explorateurs.”  I came home from class to read Cathy Horyn’s review of the Chanel show:

“The Ice Hotel in Sweden provided inspiration. When asked backstage if he had ever visited the hotel, Mr. Lagerfeld, dressed in a Dior peacoat and bleached jeans with a vintage Cartier stickpin in his black tie, shivered and said no.”

Chanel F10 Finale from coquette on Vimeo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes

There’s this ironic, ahead of its time Serge Gainsbourg song, En relisant ta lettre, in which he coldly points out each grammatical error in a desperate letter from his lover. The song came to mind when reading about Sophie Calle’s installation at the 2007 Venice Biennale, Take Care of Yourself, where she invited 107 women to interpret a breakup email from her lover according to their professional expertise.  See the article on Calle in the recent, French-themed T Style.

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The subject of my newsletter for Département Féminin this month is Brooklynite Sophie Auster, daughter of Paul.  Smokey-eyed and beloved by the French, just like her Dad!

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I’m feeling poetic of late, and so I looked up the top 11 poems in the American literary canon, according to Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece on genius and youth (he mentions the poems at the bottom of page one).

 T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” (note: with the often quoted "Every woman adores a fascist" line), Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Williams’s “The Dance.”