It’s nearly Mardi Gras already, so it’s high time that I gave a nod to the Venetian masquers of old, who eerily drift through Encyclopedia of the Exquisite. For over half the year, from early October through Lent, the nobles of that city wore masks during the early 1700s. Cloaked, hooded and capering around in [...]
http://www.encyclopediaoftheexquisite.com/?p=1179
Plenty of stylish types have worn top hats—an entry in Encyclopedia of the Exquisite—over the years. But did anyone ever wear a top hat with more panache than Marlene Dietrich did? She made her American movie debut in 1930 in Morocco, playing a cabaret star, and thrilling audiences with her audacity. She appears swaggering around [...]
http://www.encyclopediaoftheexquisite.com/?p=1133
With the fashion collections just around the corner, it seems an appropriate moment to pay homage to Charles Baudelaire, fashion’s first poet, who recognized that fashion is integral to portraying modern times in art, and who swans his way through Encyclopedia of the Exquisite. “What poet would dare in the depiction of the pleasure caused [...]
http://www.encyclopediaoftheexquisite.com/?p=822
There’s an entry on the top hat in Encyclopedia of the Exquisite, but the story of the rise and fall of the bowler, the topper’s successor, is just as compelling. Created in 1850 by commission for William Coke II, Earl of Leicester, so that his gameskeepers could ride without catching their hats in any low [...]
http://www.encyclopediaoftheexquisite.com/?p=805
In the summer of 1973, following in the success of his Ziggy Stardust triumph, David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane album was unleashed on the world—and his Ziggy persona got that much wilder. Bowie had debuted his flaming red mullet the year before, inspired by an image from a Kansai Yamamoto fashion show. “I couldn’t afford the [...]
http://www.encyclopediaoftheexquisite.com/?p=770
I can’t wait to put my hands on a copy of this reprint of Honoré de Balzac’s Treatise on Elegant Living , just out from Wakefield Press and translated into English for the first time. It’s a guide for the 19th century’s dandy on living the poised life, just like the legendary Beau Brummell, who is [...]
http://www.encyclopediaoftheexquisite.com/?p=123
