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Saturday, Aug. 05, 2006 - 12:51 p.m.

Yesterday, I went to Le Musee de la Mode et du Textiles - roughly translated, the Museum of Fashion & Fabric...only there was no actual fabric on display, just fashion - jewelry and Balenciaga. I'm not a fan of Balenciaga, but it was interesting looking at haute couture from the 30's thru the present. It would have been much more awesome if it had been Chanel or Dior, but whatever. The museum has like 80,000 items of clothing and 70,000 pieces of jewelry and only a very small space to display it all, so they only put out a little at a time and rotate it all. The jewelry was on the upper floor, in two smallish galleries, and the clothing was on the floor below that, in this labyrinthine space you had to wend your way through. I have to say, btw, that the stuff Balenciaga did for this spring was pretty freaking awful stuff. The only way a person could wear it would be to have tiny little stick legs and no hips to speak of. And I'm not kidding about that. One or two things were actually not bad, except that I'm not 16.

The jewelry was divided into two galleries, the old - from the 17th century to the early 20th - and the contemporary, from about 1950 to the 80s. And the male designers way outdid the chicks. We complain that men design highly impractical stuff, but the chicks have them beat in that regard, hands DOWN. I'm just sayin'. Also, a great deal of fine jewelry is nothing but rehashes of the stuff from the early 20th century. It was amazing to stand there and look at Dior and Chanel designs from the 30's and 40's and see stuff that even now is being knocked off again and again.

I wish I could have taken pictures, because frankly, the gallery full of the old stuff had some insane jewelry in it. I mean really elaborate, breathtaking stuff. You see pictures of jewelry like that, and it just does NOT do any kind of justice to it at all. You really can't grasp the beauty of it and how elaborate it is until you actually see it in person, as it were. Most of it was from the 1800's, and it was really cool. Obviously as one who makes jewelry, I read up on the history of it, because it's interesting to me how it developed and how some trends have permanently changed the course of jewelry fashion. So it was really neat to actually get to look at stuff I've read about. As far as trends go, the most awesome part of the whole display was the stuff by Ren� Lalique.

For those of you unfamiliar with his work or who don't want to go read the link, Lalique is famous for his glass vases and art nouveau jewelry. He was actually a groundbreaker in the world of jewelry, because before he started freelancing and making his own stuff, fine jewelry was predominately comprised of gold and diamonds. There really wasn't a lot of color being used. Lalique wasn't really the kind of guy that let rules stand in his way, however, so he started creating these amazingly intricate, fluid pieces in the art nouveau style, utilizing gold, colored gems, enamel, pearls, and glass. He liked glass a lot, because it could be molded into the freeform shapes he needed without splintering the way gems tended to. His stuff was amazing. Like, seriously, I was spellbound by it. I'd only ever seen anything of his in books, and let me tell you, no picture on earth adequately depicts the appearance of a piece of Lalique jewelry. Every single piece really is a work of art. I wish the gift store had had a book of his stuff, but they didn't, and they wouldn't allow pictures. Most of the pieces of Lalique surviving today are in private collections or museums that don't allow images of it to be circulated, so it's also really hard to find examples on the web of what I saw. And believe me, I tried, because it was so awesome, I wanted you guys to see it. Unfortunately, there's very little available, but this page has some decent examples. Here are two images. I wish I could find better, but as I said, there aren't a lot out there.

After the museum, I had lunch in the Tuileries with my new friend Beth, who is a fabulous jewelry designer in her own right. She lives in a little village 2 hours north of Paris by train, on the France/Belgium border, and about once a week or so, she comes to Paris to buy stones. Then we went to Gare de Nord so she could catch a train home, and I went grocery shopping and came home. I'm fighting off a bug again - this one involving a lot of congestion and sore throat and general feeling of being rundown - so today I managed to sleep thru my alarm and didn't wake up until 1:30am, which on Saturday is a bit late to find things open in Paris, so I went to get my hair cut...which turned out to be more than a little arduous, and my cut sucks. I wanted the same bitchin' Sharon Stone crop that I had (which I know I hated when she first did it, on accounta it being all frizzy, but it had grown out really beautifully, and I really loved it), but instead, I ended up with Carey Lowell, License to Kill hair.

Uh, no.

So I have just written Em and begged her to print out a picture of Sharon Stone with short hair and mail it to me, so that i can take it in and get a good haircut, instead of this one. Because the only reason I went to get it cut is because it had gotten so long it was falling into my face, so now I have shorter hair, but it's all one length, so - you guessed it - it still falls in my face. Only now it's so short it doesn't look good. Now I have Mom Hair. Need I stress the horror of being on my own in Paris - surrounded by svelte, sticklike women years younger than myself - and having MOM HAIR??? I had just started to feel pretty and kinda sexy again, and then I had to go and get Mom Hair, plunging myself back into the depths of despair as a dumpy little hausfrau again. ::sigh::

And as a side note, if you must cut your hair in a country where you don't speak the language fluently, even if the stylist says she speaks english (which she didn't, really), DO NOT DO SO WITHOUT A PICTURE. ::sigh again::

I got nothin' else. Tomorrow is free day for a lot of monuments and museums, so I'm hittin' the tower at Notre Dame and hoping for good pictures. :)

Peace out,
Katie

ps. remind me to tell you guys about mr. sensitive eyebrow piercing's video

copyright 2002 - 2005 Katie Doyle; all rights reserved
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Yesterday's News - Next Stop

In which Katie shares sad news - Wednesday, Apr. 01, 2015
In which Katie returns after a very long absence - Monday, Jun. 25, 2012
In which Katie pokes her head in and brushes some of the cobwebs away - Thursday, May. 06, 2010
In which Katie asks you to write your congressman again. - Monday, Jun. 02, 2008
In which Katie asks you to please click the link and send the message to protect the rights of artists - Wednesday, May. 21, 2008

 

 

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