Sunday 15 November 2020

Somewhere Elsa

Sorry it's been so long!  Posts may be sporadic on here until at least the end of the year but I am still around...  just a little too bogged down with work.

However, there is a strange and fanciful other-world which I’ve been visiting lately, just sometimes when I get chance to briefly press pause on the repetitive cycle of mundane reality. We must each have our own other-world, I’m sure - or many. They may be trips back in time, or forwards perhaps. Dreams, daydreams, places where regrets are addressed or fantasies fulfilled… Nothing is out of bounds. 

In this one, I’m of non-specific age in an indefinable location, but it's a weird and wonderful artistic illusion where the me who lives inside my head slips comfortably into her groove. Here in this safe space, feeling uncharacteristically confident, vibrant and eternally youthful of course (it is a figment, after all), I will pour myself elegantly into a Lobster dress...

(1937)

and go to a party where maybe I’ll be introduced to Salvador Dali and Frida Kahlo. Perhaps it will be in Paris?

In my version of events, of course, I won't be pathetically dumbstruck (I mean, I can't even think now what on earth I'd say!) -  and there will be none of the dark, nightmarish backdrop of  war or insanity...  or pandemics.   I'm doing 1930s Lite.  But it's the fashions of  designer Elsa Schiaparelli  which are drawing me in.   A slight obsession with her led me here. I bought a little book a while back; fell in love with her cutting edge ideas and was intrigued by her extraordinary life (definitely worth reading about.  Her personality was so adventurous that even as a child she had quirky ideas - she once threw herself out of a window with an umbrella in the belief that it would act as a parachute, only to land unceremoniously but uninjured in a heap of manure... )  

Her imaginative, playful collaborations and creations (although she objected to the word 'creation', thinking it pretentious)  and her eccentric style are just the escapism I crave, even if it is only to be in my head. Maybe it's spurred on by the simple desire to dress up and venture out somewhere special, something I suspect none of us have done in a verylong while.... 

So, just for now, when I could really do with a little taste of  alternative reality (or should that be surreality) far, far away from 2020 for obvious reasons, it may be one in which I would happily get away with wearing these gloves:

(1936)
this hat

(not sure of the date - 1950s?)


 these shoes

(1938)

these glasses

(1952)


 this brooch 

(1952)

this coat

(1937)
this bra!

(1930s)

and carrying this bag


(1938)

All thanks to Elsa.

Where would you go right now if you could?
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