When Virginia Woolf was fed up with the Bloomsbury world and everyone in it, she wrote two suicide notes — only a weirdo (or a writer!) leaves two drafts — and jumped into the river wearing her husband's raincoat weighted down with bricks. The notes, scrawled in sinister, spidery handwriting, are on display at the National Portrait Gallery in Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision (July 10 - October 26, 2014).
Virginia had such a nice life. Why did she want to leave that room of her own for the damp riverbed and say goodbye to being sucked up to at parties by T. S. Eliot and Lady Ottoline Morrell, she of the famous 'bird's beak vagina.' The great thing about being a novelist is that you get to diss your ex's genitalia and call it fiction — but the lady is dead, let's not rake over old bags.
Woolf started as a blue-stocking but turned into a fashion junkie after her affair with Vita Sackville-West. Like Princess Diana after her, she was dressed by Vogue, whose editor sourced Matisse print dresses and mannish tailoring for her to wear with her big flat shoes.
To be fair, Mrs. Woolf had lost all her teeth by the time she ruined her hair jumping into the River Ouse. So many parties, so little sanity! She left the gossipy Bloomsbury world behind to be cruelly treated in death, being played by Nicole Kidman and a big prosthetic nose in The Hours. The exaggerated nose was supposed to make Kidman look intelligent, but instead it dominated the film, leaving the audience to wonder if Sam Taylor-Wood was her stand-in.
While poring over Woolf's suicide notes at the NPG, a lady wrapped in mink — despite the heat wave — shouted in my ear, "I knew her...and her sister. That one ran off with a poufta." Well, I doubt if Vanessa Bell ran anywhere, not in those Victorian skirts. But my new crumblie friend is at least 124 — she probs knows lots of dead people. Stinky Minky pressed her nose to the glass, trying to sniff Woolf's suicide note while I tried to avoid inhaling her. Why do old people whiff? Does everyone over 40 go off? I couldn't resist holding a mirror up to check if she was a vampire.
Dying is a good career move. Sylvia Plath wasn't a best-seller until after her suicide. Marilyn was immortalized after dying in her Chanel No 5 — though we only have Karl Lagerfeld's word on that. She might have been wearing mascara as well.
Jumping and hanging are seen as male deaths, while pills and razors are considered more feminine. Dorothy Parker bandaged her slashed wrists in pink ribbons before deciding she 'might as well live.'
Death is something that can't be controlled. It's as unpredictable as walking in Vivienne Westwood platforms or falling in love with someone evil. But at least you can decide how and where to be buried. There are worse ways to spend a holiday than visiting the dead glamorous graveyards of Europe full of celebrity corpses. A cemetery is sexier than cremation, which is so suburban. Glamorous graveyards are as hard to get into as Upper East Side mansion blocks.
It's almost worth buying Byron's leaky palazzo on the Grand Canal to qualify for burial in San Michele with Stravinsky and Diaghilev. Venice's Island of the Dead has more famous creatives in it than Florians. Though top art slut and Venice resident Peggy Guggenheim rejected the offer of a plot in San Michele, preferring to be buried with her dogs in her palazzo's garden. Ah well, at least Peg had good taste in art.
Lighting a candle for jowly Jim Morrison in Pere Lachaise is a bit too American-tourist for me, but I do take lilies to the pure and impure Colette's grave nearby and absinthe to Oscar Wilde — in case he's bored in hell. And I can never resist a trip to the cemetery in the ancient village of Heptonstall, near Wuthering Heights, to see Sylvia Plath. Did Sivvy leave a suicide note? Was it destroyed, like her last diary, by her troll husband Ted?
Would I write my suicide note in lipstick or blood? Or leave a cryptic tweet like L'Wren Scott and Peaches Geldof? But of course I'm too shallow for suicide. I've missed the deadline for dying young, but I can still have old boyfriends crying over my glossy white coffin. It's just a shame that so many undertakers are necrophiliacs.
Being fitted for a coffin is probs easier than being fitted for a dress. You don't have to hold your breath. And deciding what to wear to my own funeral is just another thing that's not my problem. But I will probs leave strict instructions with the manservant anyway. Of course the audience is all that matters. A funeral without a crowd is like a celebrity without a stalker. Naturally, the inscription on my tombstone that so many disciples will cry over: Shallow Not Stupid.
Read more Vivien Lash in the new e-book version of Spying on Strange Men — at less than half the price of a classic martini cocktail.
Marc Jacobs has always done adolescence very well, and his Marc by Marc Jacobs men's spring 2015 collection was no exception. Co-designed by Luella Bartley and Katie Hillier, the show plunged a relaxed Polynesian vibe, with its "surf punk" aesthetic and recurring "angry tiki man" graphic. (Read our complete show review at Style.com)
The collection video went a decidedly more languid direction, emphasizing an artfully bored look, the well-practiced kind so often on display at today's music festivals. You can practically hear what they think: Will the band ever start? Will the molly ever kick in? Will my celebrity girlfriend ever stop posing for any camera shoved in her face?...
Illustrator Lauren Rolwing puts pep in Raf Simons' step for Adidas with these colorful renditions of the spring 2015 men's collaboration...
Willy Vanderperre's latest video for Dior Homme, Notes of a Day, explores that louche place between Savile Row and the street, featuring Thibaud Charon, Louis Bauvir, Laurie Harding, and Jake Lucas...
Fun is the name of the game for MSGM designer Massimo Giorgetti. It permeates every thread of the street-influenced Milan label, extending even to its extracurricular activities. Giorgetti's second and latest collaboration with Toilet Paper — the image-driven cult magazine by (former) artist Maurizio Cattelan and photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari — is so colorful, so bright, so pop that you might think you're in a Skittles commercial. "When Maurizio and Pierpaolo work," Giorgetti told Hint, "they are like two children. They get excited, they get thrilled, and they show a lot of passion for what they’re doing."
For the new collaboration, the threesome built upon the first, rounding out those sweatshirts with beachwear and bedwear splashed with prints, prints, and more prints, reinterpreted in acid colors. "When I saw the Toilet Paper image of the rose with an eye inside" says Giorgetti, "I thought there couldn’t be anything more MSGM than that." But after playing around some more, they added still more prints to the capsule. "The picture of the apple with the picnic tablecloth is colorful and nostalgic — perfect. Then I saw prints with the wings of birds — also perfect. Everything we do is fun. It should make you smile!"
Suzy Menkes seems to have done some harm when, in her review of Maison Martin Margiela's couture show in her new position as Vogue's International Editor, she revealed by name one of the collective's designers, even including a pic she took backstage. It was painful to read for anyone with knowledge of the house's strict code of anonymity, begun at its very founding by the highly reclusive Belgian designer. Clearly dismayed, the house issued the following statement...
“In light of the recent rumors regarding individual members of our design team, we ask you to remember that the long-standing communication policy of the Maison has not changed and that MMM does not communicate on any individual member of its collective, as our work is done by a team and is credited only to this same collective. This is our official spokespeople policy, and it remains our only comment on this subject.”
The Met's Costume Institute, ushering in Halloween and perhaps nodding to the gothic drama of its own Alexander McQueen show, has announced a fall exhibition exploring mourning fashions in the century between 1815 and 1915 — an epoch associated with the Industrial Revolution, the advent of photography, and chaste Victorian standards.
“The veiled widow could elicit sympathy as well as predatory male advances," said curator Harold Koda, who's pulling primarily from the Costume Institute’s permanent collection. "As a woman of sexual experience without marital constraints, she was often imagined as a potential threat to the social order.” Most often dictated by sitting royals (i.e. Queen Victoria), mourning attire and its cultural implications will be highlighted through the progression of appropriate fabrics and the introduction of shades of gray and mauve.
Death Becomes Her is the Costume Institute’s first fall exhibition in seven years, a return to two special exhibitions a year: a major spring show and a smaller fall show. Approximately 30 ensembles, many of which are being exhibited for the first time, will reveal the impact of high-fashion standards on the sartorial dictates of bereavement rituals as they evolved over a century.
Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire, October 21 - February 1, 2015, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Anna Wintour Costume Center
Elie Top, Lanvin's jewelry designer extraordinaire, has announced he's starting a line of his own. Calling it Joaillerie de Haute Fantaisie, he seems to be going a step beyond the baroque eclecticism that has brought him accolade after accolade at Lanvin, where he'll remain.
Top began his career in jewelry design in 1997, working with Loulou de la Falaise at Yves Saint Laurent and collaborating closely with Alber Elbaz, the house's creative director before Tom Ford arrived. It was Elbaz who pushed Top, an illustrator at the time, to start thinking about jewelry. When Elbaz became creative director of Lanvin, he asked Top to head up jewelry design at the maison.
"It’s easy to get caught up in the design itself and forget reality," Top once told us in an interview. "There’s a lot of economy in getting just the right line." How he'll reconcile that sense of minimalism with his gift for eccentricity will be closely watched at the Paris couture collections in January, when the line will be unveiled.
Designed by lions and tigers and bears, oh my! To help raise money to renovate a zoo in Hitachi, Japan, admirers of the animals (particularly of the sharp-toothed predator kind) have launched Zoo Jeans, using denim gnawed and mauled — aka distressed — by the zoo's residents. Jeanius! Like something out of Rei Kawakubo's wild imagination....
