One of our favorite daily reads is Remodelista, a fantastic blog that features the very best and most inspired design content on an international scale. It also has some pretty great city guides as well. Remodelista’s gorgeous new book, Remodelista: A Manual for the Considered Home, was published just last month. Well edited, beautifully photographed, relevant and accessible. WE LOVE IT. Design books don’t get much better than this.
Remodelista: A Manual for the Considered Home by Julie Carlson (Artisan, 2013)
 |
Hats by Philip Treacy from the personal collection of Isabella Blow (1958-2007).
Photograph by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images for Somerset House. |
If we were in London right now we would definitely be going to see Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore!, opening today at Somerset House. An editor, patron and muse, Isabella Blow was one of the most recognizable and important influencers in the world of British fashion. Perhaps best known for launching the careers of such luminaries as Alexander McQueen and Philip Treacy, Blow’s career spanned thirty years, during which time she was also a serious collector of fashion and art. This exhibition, presented in collaboration with the Isabella Blow Foundation and Central Saint Martins features over one hundred pieces from her personal collection, now owned by her close friend, Daphne Guinness. The exhibition catalog, with newly commissioned photographs of her tremendous assemblage, will be published by Rizzoli in February. We now have our fingers crossed that this no doubt fantastic and inspired show will make its way across the pond in 2014!
Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore! runs through March 2.
www.somersethouse.org.uk
I often think about and grapple with, and I know a number of my writer and artist friends do as well, if the way in which I work each day is the most effective and efficient given a very full life and work schedule. I was so intrigued when I discovered Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, a new book by Mason Currey. Born from his blog, Daily Routines, Daily Rituals is a compilation of how some 161 of the world’s most brilliant creators work or worked, or in some cases didn’t, on a daily basis. I must say, after reading these fascinating and quite diverse accounts (we’re talking Simone de Beauvoir, Igor Stravinsky, Haruki Murakami, Louise Bourgeois, Andy Warhol, Albert Einstein…), I found myself inspired and reassured to carry on with my own daily ritual very much as it is, with a few more mind-clearing walks thrown in to the mix.
Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2013)
We are planning a trip to Montreal in November, we think one of the best times of year to visit one of North America’s best cities. We thought we would share some of our favorite spots in Montreal this week, quite hard to narrow down in fact because there are so many!
We should start by saying that we eat very well in Montreal. Our go-to restaurants include Olive + Gourmando for lunch and L’Express for dinner, always. This next trip will also include Au Pied de Cochon, a place we have been meaning to go to for years. At the very top of our list is Joe Beef, hands down one of the restaurants we most enjoy, anywhere. It’s not just the food, which is consistently amazing and enlightened and changing daily, but the total experience. The first word that comes to mind is authentic. The vibe is relaxed, friendly, unpretentious, and thoroughly cool. One immediately gets the sense that every person in the building loves being there, staff and guests alike. Joe Beef and its neighbor, Liverpool House, are owned by great friends and Montreal restaurant veterans David McMillan and Frédéric Morin. It feels like a very personal extension of themselves and it is such a pleasure, if only for a meal, to be a part of their fun and happy world. Take a look at their fantastic cookbook and love letter to Montreal, The Art of Living According to Joe Beef. We guarantee, after reading it you will be booking your own trip to their great city.
The Art of Living According to Joe Beef (Ten Speed Press, 2011)
www.joebeef.ca
One of our most recent brides wore this butterfly printed taffeta gown in white by Zac Posen. It was breathtaking, we literally gasped at the first look. She descended the massive sweeping staircase inside the New York Public Library, in the evening, amidst lovely projections of butterflies — fantasy indeed of the highest order. Serendipitously, I am right in the middle of reading Studio Saint-Ex, by Ania Szado. It is a brand new novel about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, his exile in New York City in the early 1940s and the writing of The Little Prince. It is also very much about the fashion world during the war years. A certain collection of butterfly gowns is a central element at the start of Studio Saint-Ex, a character in itself, just as Zac Posen’s gorgeous butterfly gown was a most fabulous guest at the wedding.
Studio Saint-Ex by Ania Szado(Alfred A. Knopf, 2013)
 |
Edmund de Waal, Atemwende, 2013, copyright Edmund de Waal
Photograph by Mike Bruce |
For the past month, Gagosian Gallery has presented Atemwende, the first exhibition in this country of the work of notable British ceramicist Edmund de Waal. This is most certainly a show worth seeing. The vessels themselves are completely modern and seemingly free of historical and stylistic reference. However, the complete works and installation, in vitrines as collections, are perhaps a nod to the past, his own family history. Edmund de Waal is, afterall, the author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, one of my favorite books of the last few years. It is the remarkable, beautifully told story of de Waal’s Jewish family and the collection of Japanese netsuke (miniature carved sculpture) that has passed down through five generations beginning in 1870s Paris, residing presently with the artist himself in London.
Atemwende runs through October 19 at Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Avenue, NYC.
www.gagosian.com
It took a while, but I have just finished reading David McCullough’s most recent book, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris. It focuses on the years 1830 through 1900 and is wonderfully dense, tremendously researched and completely absorbing. McCullough, a brilliant narrative historian and Pulitzer Prize winner, chose a formidable group of Americans to focus on including doctors, politicians, writers and artists. I especially loved reading about the artists, most of whom were at the very beginning of their careers when they first traveled abroad. However the reactions of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin) and Emma Hart Willard (founder of Emma Willard School and the leading proponent of girls’ education in the United States) to the beauty of and reverence for art, architecture and culture in France were, for me, most resounding.
The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (Simon & Schuster, 2011)
 |
| Photograph of Diana Vreeland by George Hoyningen-Heune |
In the midst of the world’s fashion weeks — New York ended yesterday, London starts today and Paris on September 24 — I’m thinking not so much about present day fashion culture but instead about the trailblazing fashion editors and retailers from the first half of the 20th century. Foremost in my mind is the unequaled Diana Vreeland whose twenty-six years as fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar starting in 1936, subsequent seven years at Vogue, and final eighteen years at The Costume Institute were legendary. Her work in fashion and publishing remains among the most impactful and influential in history. Her great style, huge personality, vitality and curiosity transcended well beyond. I own several books about Mrs. Vreeland, but what brought her most to life for me was the intoxicating 2012 documentary, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, by her granddaughter-in-law, Lisa Immordino Vreeland. And the newest book about her, Diana Vreeland Memos: The Vogue Years by her grandson Alexander Vreeland, is coming out in October. It will definitely be on the top of my reading list.
www.dianavreeland.com
The perfect day in Portland starts at Standard Baking Co. Opened in 1995, it is the best kind of French-style bakery — gorgeous food created with fresh, simple ingredients; a relaxed, friendly vibe; and absolutely no pretension, in the space, the baked goods or otherwise. It is straight up and straight forward and we adore it. And, we were thrilled when they published their first and very beautiful cookbook last year, Standard Baking Co. Pastries. We now always have a batch of chocolate walnut biscotti (page 122) at the ready, although it is certainly not the same as being there!
Standard Baking Co., 75 Commercial Street, Portland, Maine
Still thinking about Zelda Fitzgerald after the recent Gatsby craze I decided to read Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, a brand new work of historical fiction by Therese Anne Fowler. It was quite well researched and very much reminded me of The Paris Wife by Paula McLain (Random House, 2011), a novel about Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley Hemingway. Both told in a first-person narrative, two shared themes were immediately apparent to me. Each of these novels gave their protagonists a voice, FINALLY, which has historically been hidden behind that of their famous husbands, most particularly so for Hadley. And second, Zelda and Hadley were, regrettably, very much living in patriarchal relationships, despite the fact that both were often the essential first readers of their husbands’ groundbreaking work and they both seemingly lived very modern lives, especially Zelda, who was considered one of the first recognized “flappers” of the era. This begs so many questions and must be one of the reasons that Z and The Paris Wife continue to stay with me.
Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (St. Martin’s Press, 2013)
