I should start a separate category for all the museum shows I wished I could have seen but didn’t. Here’s another: Frida Kahlo’s wardrobe at the Museo Frida Kahlo in Mexico. Of course, every fashion lover knows that Frida Kahlo had amazing style, but it was a revelation to see these images of the beautiful [...]
http://www.encyclopediaoftheexquisite.com/?p=1464
If I had a movie theater I’d happily go broke showing films like “The Last Days of Pompeii” ( or “Gli Ultimi Giorni Di Pompei”) a 1926 silent movie with hand colored frames that recently had its first US showing at the Harvard Film Archive. Stars included Rina de Liguoro, who cavorted topless, playing an [...]
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As I wind down writing my second book (!), I’m taking some time to go back through my files & to post some of the photos I had hoarded while writing Encyclopedia of the Exquisite. Perhaps you’ll remember the entry on Felines? Well, here are some photos of famous feline lovers, like Josephine Baker and [...]
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The great editor and grande dame of New England gardening, Katharine S. White, gives her opinion on dahlias in Encyclopedia of the Exquisite, but she loved this time of year here in Maine almost as much as she did full-blooming July, and for one reason—the seed catalogues. As she explained in her inaugural New Yorker [...]
http://www.encyclopediaoftheexquisite.com/?p=1174
Encyclopedia of the Exquisite’s entry on Milk Baths introduces the Ziegfeld sensation Anna Held, who was famously sued by a milk farmer for the amount she owed for keeping her bath tub filled with milk. She’s one of my favorite characters in the book. So today, because I missed her a bit, I decided to [...]
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Did you ever fantasize that the watchman would forget about you and that somehow you’d get to stay on in the museum all alone after closing time? That’s what it feels like virtually prowling through the emptied museum galleries included in Google’s new ‘Art Project,’ which applies the gliding and peeking 360 technology of …
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In 1818 the formidable French etiquette writer Madame de Genlis (1746-1830) reminded proper ladies that when lounging on a divan, chaise longue or daybed, they’d better hide their feet under a couvre-pieds. “Decency demands it because, stretched out like that, the smallest movement may uncover the feet and even the legs. Besides, a pretty couvre-pieds [...]
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Encyclopedia of the Exquisite’s entry on Heels focuses on how Marilyn Monroe wore them with such va-va-voom back in the mid-20th century. In Niagara, a film noir shot in 1952, she played a vixen with a walk so provocative that it sparked controversy. “The uninhibited deportment in the motel room and the walk seemed …
http://www.encyclopediaoftheexquisite.com/?p=1116
A friend sent me this image of Heddy Lamarr for Christmas. It’s from her 1949 performance as Delilah in Cecil B. De Mille’s Samson & Delilah, which, naturally, involves much lounging on divans—an entry in Encyclopedia of the Exquisite—and brooding in the boudoir (another entry). To watch Heddy in action cut to around the 7 [...]
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Harry Houdini makes an appearance in Encyclopedia of the Exquisite as an origami lover. But, as ever, his devoted wife and stage assistant Bess Houdini is all but overlooked. As successful as the great magician was in making his big escapes—from jail cells, straight jackets, handcuffs, from below ice and from airtight coffins—he might not [...]
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