Merry Wanderer of the Night [Search results for silk

  • Christian Westphal Spring/Summer 2013 Women’s Collection

    Christian Westphal Spring/Summer 2013 Women’s Collection
    • Christian Westphal Spring/summer 2013 Women’s Collection
    • Christian Westphal Spring/summer 2013 Women’s Collection
    • Christian Westphal Spring/summer 2013 Women’s Collection
    • Christian Westphal Spring/summer 2013 Women’s Collection
    • Christian Westphal Spring/summer 2013 Women’s Collection
    • Christian Westphal Spring/summer 2013 Women’s Collection
    • Christian Westphal Spring/summer 2013 Women’s Collection
    • Christian Westphal Spring/summer 2013 Women’s Collection
    • Christian Westphal Spring/summer 2013 Women’s Collection
    • Christian Westphal Spring/summer 2013 Women’s Collection
    • Christian Westphal Spring/summer 2013 Women’s Collection
    • Christian Westphal Spring/summer 2013 Women’s Collection
    • Christian Westphal Spring/summer 2013 Women’s Collection
    • Christian Westphal Spring/summer 2013 Women’s Collection
    • Christian Westphal Spring/summer 2013 Women’s Collection

    Copyright by Christian Westphal | Photography Bo Johannsen | Print Design Sara Haraique | Model Emilie at Scoop
    Christian Westphal has been caught by the fuzz. Whereas last two seasons was all about cut, the story for Summer 2013 is texture and lightning. To ensure that the focus is on the fabrics, the Danish-born designer zeroes in on a few uncomplicated, graphic silhouettes: over-the-knee skirts, nylon silk jackets, pants with cut-away waistband, and the signature shirts, some of them pumped up with away-from-the-neck volumes and bringing refined add-on plisses on collar and placket pieces.
    On the other side of the spectrum, a fitted jacket comes whipped up from a weightless silk and metal blend. In the Westphal collection you’ll see a mix of minimalism, strong silhouettes and fresh accent colours that still defines the 2010’s, and this remains Westphal’s thing.
    He wants his clothes to be for the modern urban women and aside from an incongruously literal Vegas reference in a metal powder gold print on black silk, the almost-abstractions look like scatterings of city lights. Westphal wants to literalize the notion when he decorates one skirt and a blouse with melting gold to replicate the lights of a Vegas building by night. But the real inspiration is anything but pseudo-science.
    There is a school of thought which says that mystery preserves the magic, but Westphal tries to understand that if you reveal the machinery, you can enhance the mystery. That's because you're throwing a spotlight on the intangibles of creativity. But the other message of the collection is man-made: a shrugged-off casualness, and because this isn´t particularly fashion, Westphal uses the counterbalance of hyper-fashion silhouettes from Italian and Spanish haute couture of the 1950’s, however simultaneously academic and seductive.
    CHRISTIAN WESTPHAL

    VIA Christian Westphal Spring/Summer 2013 Women’s Collection

  • 'It's sexy isn't it?': Uma Thurman is in fine feather as she sweeps down the red carpet at Cannes in Versace gown

    'It's sexy isn't it?': Uma Thurman is in fine feather as she sweeps down the red carpet at Cannes in Versace gown
    By BAZ BAMIGBOYE in Cannes
    ©Full length and fabulous: Uma Thurman looked angelic in a floor-length white Versace gown as she took to the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival tonight
    Uma Thurman rocked to the beat as she sashayed along the red carpet for the opening of the Cannes Film Festival tonight.
    The actress looked stunning in a white silk Versace gown that up close appeared to be see-through.
    'It's sexy isn't it', Uma responded when the MailOnline complimented her on the low cut, strapless gown.
    ©Flawless: The actress, who is serving as a jury member this year, was attending the screening of Midnight in Paris by director Woody Allen on the festival's opening ceremony
    With that she did a twirl and much leg and thigh was revealed.
    'I had to have it made because you know how it is for us tall girls. It's impossible to find anything in a store,' she said with a giggle.
    The sheer whiteness of the dress was off-set by a pair of dangling emerald earrings from Chopard.
    ©Flashbulb frenzy: Uma told MailOnline that she she felt sexy in the dress and was hoping to get a chance to dance in it later
    ©
    Dressed to impress: The actress joins jury members (left to right) Martina Gusman, Robert De Niro, Olivier Assayas, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Jude Law, Linn Ullmann and Nansun Shi
    ©White theme: Uma started the day in Dolce & Gabbana, right, before switching into Versace for the evening
    The hem of the dress was decorated with fine white feathers.
    Asked about the provenance of the plumage, Uma joked,' I don't know. Maybe somebody lost their feathers', before proffering, 'maybe chicken'
    She added: 'I feel so good wearing the dress, I hope I get a chance to dance.
    ©Glamorous: Rachel McAdams, who stars in Midnight in Paris, wore a flesh-coloured gown with red embroidery, pictured right, Indian actress Aishwarya Rai
    'It's a dress that moves well when you dance. I was doing a quiet little dance all by myself on the carpet just now,' she explained.
    Uma was in Cannes as a member of the festival's main jury.
    She arrived with the panel's chairman, Robert De Niro and other jurors who included Jude Law and Linn Ullmann, daughter of Liv Ullmann.
    ©Stunning: Salma Hayek slipped into an off-white pleated dress as she lit up the red carpet this evening
    ©Distinguished: Jury Members Nansun Shi (left), Law and Linn Ullmann chat at the opening ceremony
    The stars were attending the festival's gala ceremony and opening film, Woody Allen's Midnight In Paris starring Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Michael Sheen and Carl Bruni, although Bruni did not attend.
    Others at the red carpet event included Salma Hayek ,wearing a shimmering Gucci gown and Antonio Banderas with wife Melanie Griffith.
    Bandares was in Cannes to launch the animated film Puss 'n' Boots.
    ©
    Posing for the cameras: Melanie Griffith and husband Antonio Banderas and, right, actress Lea Seydoux and Midnight In Paris director Woody Allen
    Happy couple Rachel McAdams and Michael Sheen kept their romance off the red carpet but shared a romantic moment once they were way from the cameras.
    The actors, who star invAllen's Midnight In Paris, which is a sublime love letter to the city, stole a kiss as they walked into the opening night party overlooking the Cannes beach.
    They met last year while filming Allen's film in Paris.
    Rachel looked divine in an embroidered red silk organza dress with a tulle ruffle skirt with a long train.
    Aishwarya Rai Bachchan at the opening ceremony of the Cannes Film Festival - 2011

    Aishwarya Rai Bachchan - Cannes Day 1 - 2011

    Tapete vermelho de Cannes

    Cannes (11/05/11) : Envers du décors de la montée des marches de Wody Allen

    Hollywood Goes Cannes Crazy as Rachel, Jude, Angelina, and More Get the Festival Underway!

    Lady Gaga à Cannes quitte la plage du Martinez après les répétitions

    #114 - Cannes Tag 1 - Midnight in Paris

    source: dailymail

    VIA 'It's sexy isn't it?': Uma Thurman is in fine feather as she sweeps down the red carpet at Cannes in Versace gown

  • A variety of towels in our life

    A variety of towels in our life
    Round us it is a lot of prophetic. Of them we so have strongly got used to many, that often we do not give them any value though it's not always justified. First of all it concerns towels which the person use constantly throughout all life.

    Towels are necessary in each house

    Bella CosaIn any house there are some various towels with which tenants and visitors wipe hands, the body, ware...

    The towel is the textile product of the rectangular or square form created specially for a wipe of any subjects, including bodies of the person. Towels have appeared many years back. About them there are mentions in the Bible and national legends of any people.

    Towels on appearance are very similar to wafers (therefore them and name wafer). They well absorb a moisture (three times better, than terry towels), perfectly mass, promote microblood circulation and a lymph. They can be used both for a wipe of ware and hands, and in a bathroom. In Hotel Bedding Collection Set — are often included wafer and terry towels.

    For massage special massage towels from the flax which unique structure helps a body to relax are created. With their help also it is possible to pound a body well.

    SobellaWell, and on a beach we, certainly, take a beach towel on which it is possible to sunbathe on the sun and to be wiped after swimming. Allocate also special towels for hands. These are towels of the small size which hang up in a bathroom or in a toilet about a bowl for a wipe of hands.

    Towels from velour weave from five threads. Four threads form the top and bottom basis of a fabric (them in pairs bind with each other), and the fifth — pile (it is a velvety thread more often). After end of weaving a fabric cut to separate the top basis from the bottom. Other name of these towels — Luxury Hotel Towels.

    Besides, towels differ on a material of which they are made. Certainly, most widespread of them is the cotton fabric from which weave towels many centuries successively. The cotton fibre well absorbs a moisture, does not collapse during the big number of washings and is steady against a friction which is inevitable at towel use. On Queen Bed Blanket always at a headboard put a cotton towel.

    SovillaTowels also make from silk, a bamboo and a paper. Silk towels beautiful, gentle and improbably magnificent, but badly absorb a moisture and instantly stick to a body. Bamboo towels very soft and gentle.

    From a bamboo weave beach towels since the bamboo fibre possesses cooling effect more often. From a paper make disposable towels for a kitchen room which perfectly absorb a moisture and effectively clear ware of a dirt and the food rests.

    The terry towel is the most favourite towel, gentle and soft in which it is pleasant to be turned after a shower or a bathroom. Weave such towels from the terry fabric which pile turns out for the account of free giving of loops of leaky tense basis. Terry towels perfectly well absorb a moisture, quickly dry and long do not wear out.

    Certainly, always it is possible to manage one towel for all occasions, always it is possible to buy not so expensive towel of so low quality, but, you see, when it is a question of such important subject as a towel, it is wrong and very unreasonable!

    Luxury Hotel Towels Here!

    VIA «A variety of towels in our life»

  • Central Asia: Copper mining threatens Afghanistan's Mes Aynak

    Central Asia: Copper mining threatens Afghanistan's Mes Aynak
    Treasures from Afghanistan's largely forgotten Buddhist past are buried beneath sandy hills surrounding the ancient Silk Road town of Mes Aynak - along with enough copper to make the land glow green in the morning light.

    Copper mining threatens Afghanistan's Mes Aynak
    In this Sunday, Jan. 18, 2015 photo, Abdul Qadir Timor, director of archaeology
     at the Ministry of Information and Culture, left, looks at the view of Mes Aynak 
    valley, some 40 kilometers (25 miles) southwest of Kabul, Afghanistan. The hills 
    overlooking this ancient trade-route city, where the buried treasures of 
    Afghanistan’s Buddhist history hide beneath sandy soil, are so 
    rich in copper that they gleam green in the morning sun 
    [Credit: AP/Rahmat Gul]

    An estimated 5.5 million tons of copper, one of the biggest deposits in the world, could provide a major export for a war-ravaged country desperately in need of jobs and cash. But the hoped-for bonanza also could endanger rare artifacts that survived the rule of the Taliban and offer a window into Afghanistan's rich pre-Islamic history.

    "The copper mine and its extraction are very important. But more important is our national culture," said Abdul Qadir Timor, director of archaeology at Afghanistan's Culture Ministry. "Copper is a temporary source of income. Afghanistan might benefit for five or six years after mining begins, and then the resource comes to an end."

    The government is determined to develop Afghanistan's estimated $3 trillion worth of minerals and petroleum, an untapped source of revenue that could transform the country. The withdrawal of U.S.-led combat forces at the end of 2014 and a parallel drop in foreign aid have left the government strapped for cash. It hopes to attract global firms to exploit oil, natural gas and minerals, ranging from gold and silver to the blue lapis lazuli for which the country has been known since ancient times.

    Beijing's state-run China Metallurgical Group struck a $3 billion deal in 2008 to develop a mining town at Mes Aynak with power generators, road and rail links, and smelting facilities. Workers built a residential compound, but were pulled out two years ago because of security concerns. Nazifullah Salarzai, a spokesman for President Ashraf Ghani, said the government is determined to finish that project.

    Archaeologists are scrambling to uncover a trove of artifacts at the site dating back nearly 2,000 years which shed light on a Buddhist civilization that stretched across India and China, reaching all the way to Japan.

    "The more we look, the more we find," archaeologist Aziz Wafa said as he scanned hilltops pock-marked with bowl-shaped hollows where copper powder once was melted down and painted onto ceramics. Excavators have found silver platters, gold jewelry and a human skeleton as they have uncovered the contours of a long-lost town that once hosted elaborate homes, monasteries, workshops and smelters.

    Behind Wafa is a cave in which three Buddhas are seated around a dome-shaped shrine known as a stupa. Two are headless; one was decapitated by looters who entered through a tunnel. The other head was removed by archaeologists and placed in storage along with thousands of other items.

    Movable objects, including sculptures, coins and ceramics, are stored at the National Museum in Kabul. Larger objects, including stupas measuring eight meters (26 feet) across and statues of robed monks 7 meters (23 feet) tall remain at the sprawling site, which is closed off and protected by a special security force. The roads are lined with armed guards and the archaeologists have no telephone or Internet access.

    Experts believe that proselytizing Buddhist monks from India settled here in the 2nd Century A.D. Like today's miners, they were enticed by the copper, which they fashioned into jewelry and other products to trade on the Silk Road linking China to Europe.

    The site was discovered in 1942 and first explored in 1963, but the excavations ground to a halt for two decades during the Soviet invasion, the civil war and the brutal rule of the Taliban in the late 1990s. Osama bin Laden ran a training camp at Mes Aynak in the years leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the subsequent U.S.-led invasion.

    Until the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan were dynamited by the Taliban in 2001, few knew that Afghanistan was once a wealthy, powerful Buddhist empire. It still does not feature on the local education curriculum, which ignores the country's pre-Islamic past. But at Mes Aynak the eroded remains of enormous feet testify to the colossal Buddhas that once towered over the valley.

    Low world copper prices and a slowing Chinese economy have bought time for the archaeologists to uncover more artifacts, while the government seeks to find a way to unearth the copper without ruining relics.

    The government has asked the U.N. cultural agency to survey mining sites and draw up plans to protect and preserve cultural heritage, said Masanori Nagaoka, UNESCO's head of cultural affairs in Afghanistan.

    The request is rooted in hope for better days, when tourists might replace the tense guards scanning the valley.

    The archaeological value of the site "will outlast the life cycle of the Aynak mine," an anti-corruption group called Integrity Watch Afghanistan said in a report. "The relics found could be a perpetual tourist attraction and would provide a new symbol of the historical foundation of the region and people."

    Author: Lynne O'Donnell | Source: Associated Press [February 06, 2015]

  • Central Asia: Disputes damage hopes of rebuilding Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Buddhas

    Central Asia: Disputes damage hopes of rebuilding Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Buddhas

    It is always a shock reaching Bamiyan, coming face to face with the two huge cavities in the cliff face. The upright tombs stare out over the valley, a splash of vegetation surrounded by wild mountains. The town straddles the Silk Road, close to the point where it used to enter Persia, dwarfed by two massive mountain ranges, the Koh-i-Baba and Hindu Kush. The void left by the two destroyed Buddha figures is appalling, it rouses an emotion almost more powerful than their once tranquil presence did for centuries.

    Disputes damage hopes of rebuilding Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Buddhas
    The giant Buddhas of Bamiyan, which stood for over 1500 years, were destroyed by the Taliban in March 2001
     in an 'Islamic' mission to destroy ancient statues. They were reduced to rubble over a period of about 
    3 weeks using dynamite, rockets and tank shell [Credit: Getty Images]

    To understand what happened you must go back to the beginning of 2001. The Taliban-led regime was on very poor terms with the international community and increasingly tempted by radical gestures. The decision to destroy the two monumental Buddha figures at Bamiyan was just part of the drive to destroy all the country’s pre-Islamic “icons”, an act of defiance to the outside world.

    Demolition work at Bamiyan started at the beginning of March 2001 and lasted several weeks, the two figures – 58 and 38 metres tall – proved remarkably solid. Anti-aircraft guns had little effect, so the engineers placed anti-tank mines between their feet, then bored holes into their heads and packed them with dynamite. The world watched this symbolic violence in impotent horror.

    Now almost 14 years on, reconstruction work has yet to start as archaeologists and UNESCO policy-makers argue.

    The two cavities resemble open wounds, a blemish on the long history of Afghanistan, which experienced the fervour of Buddhism long before the arrival of Islam. For 15 centuries the two mystic colossi gazed down as the trading caravans and warring armies streamed past. Monks came from China to worship here. Others meditated in nearby caves.

    The two Buddhas, draped in stucco robes, are testimony to a unique case of cross-breeding, which flourished in the early years of the first century AD, drawing on Buddhist influences from India and Greek aesthetics left behind by Alexander the Great. It gave rise to the kingdom of Gandhara and made a mark so deep that even the disciples of Allah, who reached here in the ninth century, made no attempt to disturb it.

    Today the site has recovered a certain serenity. Children play volleyball below the cliffs and archaeologists work unhindered. Whereas a low-intensity war is still rumbling on elsewhere in Afghanistan, the central Hazarajat region and its capital Bamiyan (population circa 60,000) has been relatively spared. Most of the inhabitants are Shia Muslims and they had little sympathy with the Sunni Taliban from the Pashtun south. In the 1990s there was fierce fighting between the two sides. In Bamiyan there is a fairly enlightened view of Islam, and few women wear burqas. They proudly explain that 40% of girls in the province are in education, the highest proportion in Afghanistan.

    So the outrage perpetrated by the Taliban came as a huge shock, a blow against a tolerant community that sees itself as unusual in the country as a whole. “The statues symbolised Bamiyan,” says mullah Sayed Ahmed-Hussein Hanif. Bamiyan had adopted and integrated the statues, making them a part of local legend. They had become an allegory for unhappy love, a foreshadow of Romeo and Juliet set in the Hindu Kush. He was Salsal, prince of Bamiyan; she was Shamana, a princess from another kingdom. Their love affair was impossible so, rather than live apart, they turned into stone, beside each other for all eternity.

    “Local people had completely forgotten they were figures of the Buddha,” says Hamid Jalya, head of historical monuments in Bamiyan province. The Taliban and their dynamite reminded them of the original story. Ever since, people here have been unsure what to do about them.

    An incident in 2013 demonstrated the sensitivity of the subject. A decade ago UNESCO authorised archaeologists and engineers to consolidate the two niches, with props and grouting. But nothing else. Almost two years ago someone noticed that, on the site of the small Buddha, a team from the German branch of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (Icomos) was beginning to rebuild the feet. This was contrary to UNESCO policy, based on the 1964 Venice charter for the conservation and restoration of monuments and sites, which requires the use of “original material”. If work on the Bamiyan remains disregarded this rule, then the site would be struck off the World Heritage list. The Afghan authorities ordered the Icomos team to down tools, leaving the remains even less sightly than they were before.

    The incident highlights the lack of a clear consensus on the future of Bamiyan both internally and among the international community. “Bamiyan seems emblematic of the way international aid has treated Afghanistan,” says Philippe Marquis, former head of the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan (Dafa). There has been endless dithering, underhand rivalry, pointless discord and mistakes.

    The Buddhas are a powerful symbol – of confessional tolerance, Buddhism in a Muslim country and the remains of the Silk Road – with scope for considerable political kudos, so academic quarrels have been diverted to serve strategic aims. The Afghans have watched this spectacle with growing amazement: Germany and its experience of post-war reconstruction; France and its archaeological exploits in Afghanistan; Japan and Korea, with their interest in the origins of Buddhism; UNESCO and its byzantine bureaucracy. The various parties have sometimes cooperated with one another, but more frequently waged secret wars. “All these endless discussions among experts are pitiful, yielding no positive results,” says Zamaryalai Tarzi, a Franco-Afghan archaeologist who has been in charge of the French dig at the foot of the Bamiyan cliff for many years.

    Behind the squabbling there is, however, a very real controversy as to how best to honour the fallen Buddhas. How should we go about making sense of an obscurantist crime the better to vanquish it? Or, in other terms, how should we mourn the martyrs? There are two opposing schools of thought: complete reconstruction or keeping the status quo. For now, the latter camp have the upper hand. “The two niches should be left empty, like two pages in Afghan history, so that subsequent generations can see how ignorance once prevailed in our country,” Tarzi asserts. Many other sites have adopted this approach, in particular the Genbaku dome in Hiroshima and the former summer palace in Beijing.

    There is also a practical side: any attempt at reconstruction would be extremely complex. The original material, as required by the Venice charter, would be a major obstacle. The 2001 demolition left a heap of scattered fragments. Barely a third of the smaller Buddha has been saved, consisting of a pile of rock behind a wire fence. Furthermore, some of what does remain is from more recent additions. Over the centuries, long before the coming of the Taliban, the two figures were damaged and defaced. In the 1970s Indian archaeologists rebuilt the feet of the smaller Buddha using new material. Given this, how can the Venice charter rules be applied?

    The final objection is that it may be a mistake to focus so much attention on the two Buddhas, given that the Bamiyan valley boasts many other exceptional sites, as yet little known. The ruins of the Shahr-e-Gholghola fortress, and probably monastery, perched on a hillock across the valley from the Buddhas, and the fortified town of Shahr-i-Zohak are both at risk, worn down by weather and earthquakes. “The priority is to save all the endangered sites around Bamiyan,” says Amir Fouladi, of the Aga Khan Trust. “There is no urgency about rebuilding the Buddhas.” The economic development of Bamiyan, due to gather speed with the projected launch of the Hajigak iron ore mines, makes it all the more important to adopt an overall strategy.

    Meanwhile, the advocates of reconstruction have not wasted their time. Although the current mood is hardly in their favour, the small structure resting on the remains of the small Buddha’s feet suggests that the German branch of Icomos has not given up hope. Its president, Michael Petzet, a professor at the Technical University of Munich, has made many statements in favour of at least rebuilding the smaller of the two figures. The local representative of Icomos Germany, Bert Praxenthaler, sees the controversy about the small Buddha’s feet as salutary in that it “stirred debate about what should be done with the Buddhas”. “We must be ready the day a decision is taken,” he adds. He is referring to the possibility that an ad hoc UNESCO group may give the go-ahead for “partial re-assembly of the fragments”. His organisation sees this as an opportunity to demonstrate the quality of its restoration work in combining old and new materials.

    Local residents are in favour. The idea of leaving the larger niche empty but rebuilding the smaller Buddha appeals to them, particularly as they take little interest in quarrels about original material. They are more concerned about boosting tourism in a relatively isolated area in desperate need of revenue. But there is symbolic value too. “By rebuilding a Buddha we could regain possession of our history and send a message to the whole world in favour of reconciliation between religions,” says Shukrya Neda, who campaigns for a local NGO. “By leaving the other niche empty we leave a testimony to the damage done by the Taliban.” Kabul has officially approved this approach, but some in Bamiyan feel its support is rather timid, for ethnic reasons. The Hazara population of Bamiyan distrust the Pashtun leaders in Kabul. “The government doesn’t want Bamiyan to develop its identity and economy,” says Riza Ibrahim, head of the city’s tourist board. “It’s discrimination.”

    UNESCO has tried to steer a cautious middle course on the issue of reconstruction. Its ad hoc expert committee has warned against rushing to make a decision. “It is neither for nor against reconstruction,” says Masanori Nagaoka, head of UNESCO’s culture unit in Kabul. The committee has ruled that before considering partial reassembly of the small Buddha, a thorough technical and scientific study would be required. All of which favours keeping the status quo. Will the reconstruction lobby finally succeed in resurrecting Shamana (the small Buddha)? Perhaps, by dint of patience, but everyone seems to have overlooked an essential detail: the legendary prince and princess wanted to stay together forever. If Shamana rises again, but without Salsal, it would break their oath.

    Author: Frédéric Bobin | Source: Guardian Weekly [January 10, 2015]

  • Eva & Bernard Spring/Summer 2012 Women’s Collection

    Eva & Bernard Spring/Summer 2012 Women’s Collection
    • Eva and Bernard Spring/summer 2012 Women’s Collection
    • Eva and Bernard Spring/summer 2012 Women’s Collection
    • Eva and Bernard Spring/summer 2012 Women’s Collection
    • Eva and Bernard Spring/summer 2012 Women’s Collection
    • Eva and Bernard Spring/summer 2012 Women’s Collection
    • Eva and Bernard Spring/summer 2012 Women’s Collection
    • Eva and Bernard Spring/summer 2012 Women’s Collection
    • Eva and Bernard Spring/summer 2012 Women’s Collection
    • Eva and Bernard Spring/summer 2012 Women’s Collection
    • Eva and Bernard Spring/summer 2012 Women’s Collection
    • Eva and Bernard Spring/summer 2012 Women’s Collection
    • Eva and Bernard Spring/summer 2012 Women’s Collection

    Copyright by Eva & Bernard
    IN TOWN, LOOKING LIKE YOU’RE ON VACATION EVA&BERNARD S/S 2012
    In their new Spring/Summer 2012 collection Berlin based fashion label Eva & Bernard meant to focus on the ›easy‹ side of ›Easy Tailoring‹, their coined motto; to employ a less severe approach in the design process and to choose cheerful, lighthearted colors. the styles were designed to express cool effortlessness and show generous volume. the designers have been looking at images of old rural Spanish houses and architecture, and their modern renditions in places like Santa Monica in LA. the arch shape employed in them and the beautiful pastel colors of pink, light blue and ecru attracted Eva’s and Bernard’s attention, and they wanted to translate all these moods into the new collection for S/S 2012.
    Silk plays a lead role in the collection, which offers as well a great variety of fine cotton, viscose, jersey, cupro, linen, ramie and knitted cashmere. All fabrics were sourced in Switzerland and Italy, where the collection is produced. the blue color, which was missing from previous collections, is at the core of the new one, with texture and tone variations. Around the blue the designers gathered up such colors as peach, pink, orange, bronze, grey black and white. This season the brand offers leather accessories for the first time!
    EVA & BERNARD

    VIA Eva & Bernard Spring/Summer 2012 Women’s Collection

  • Thaw

    Thaw

    This kind of crept up on me but today is a day I have been looking forward to for awhile. Today Fiona Robyn will begin posting her novel, Thaw, on her blog. The book is a diary, so it's really a great way to check it out! I'm doing this today in place of a review, I hope you all give the first entry a try. Here is the first page:

    These hands are ninety-three years old. They belong to Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. She was so frail that her grand-daughter had to carry her onto the set to take this photo. It’s a close-up. Her emaciated arms emerge from the top corners of the photo and the background is black, maybe velvet, as if we’re being protected from seeing the strings. One wrist rests on the other, and her fingers hang loose, close together, a pair of folded wings. And you can see her insides.

    The bones of her knuckles bulge out of the skin, which sags like plastic that has melted in the sun and is dripping off her, wrinkling and folding. Her veins look as though they’re stuck to the outside of her hands. They’re a colour that’s difficult to describe: blue, but also silver, green; her blood runs through them, close to the surface. The book says she died shortly after they took this picture. Did she even get to see it? Maybe it was the last beautiful thing she left in the world.

    I’m trying to decide whether or not I want to carry on living. I’m giving myself three months of this journal to decide. You might think that sounds melodramatic, but I don’t think I’m alone in wondering whether it’s all worth it. I’ve seen the look in people’s eyes. Stiff suits travelling to work, morning after morning, on the cramped and humid tube. Tarted-up girls and gangs of boys reeking of aftershave, reeling on the pavements on a Friday night, trying to mop up the dreariness of their week with one desperate, fake-happy night. I’ve heard the weary grief in my dad’s voice.

    So where do I start with all this? What do you want to know about me? I’m Ruth White, thirty-two years old, going on a hundred. I live alone with no boyfriend and no cat in a tiny flat in central London. In fact, I had a non-relationship with a man at work, Dan, for seven years. I’m sitting in my bedroom-cum-living room right now, looking up every so often at the thin rain slanting across a flat grey sky. I work in a city hospital lab as a microbiologist. My dad is an accountant and lives with his sensible second wife Julie, in a sensible second home. Mother finished dying when I was fourteen, three years after her first diagnosis. What else? What else is there?

    Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. I looked at her hands for twelve minutes. It was odd describing what I was seeing in words. Usually the picture just sits inside my head and I swish it around like tasting wine. I have huge books all over my flat — books you have to take in both hands to lift. I’ve had the photo habit for years. Mother bought me my first book, black and white landscapes by Ansel Adams. When she got really ill, I used to take it to bed with me and look at it for hours, concentrating on the huge trees, the still water, the never-ending skies. I suppose it helped me think about something other than what was happening. I learned to focus on one photo at a time rather than flicking from scene to scene in search of something to hold me. If I concentrate, then everything stands still. Although I use them to escape the world, I also think they bring me closer to it. I’ve still got that book. When I take it out, I handle the pages as though they might flake into dust.

    Mother used to write a journal. When I was small, I sat by her bed in the early mornings on a hard chair and looked at her face as her pen spat out sentences in short bursts. I imagined what she might have been writing about — princesses dressed in star-patterned silk, talking horses, adventures with pirates. More likely she was writing about what she was going to cook for dinner and how irritating Dad’s snoring was.

    I’ve always wanted to write my own journal, and this is my chance. Maybe my last chance. The idea is that every night for three months, I’ll take one of these heavy sheets of pure white paper, rough under my fingertips, and fill it up on both sides. If my suicide note is nearly a hundred pages long, then no-one can accuse me of not thinking it through. No-one can say, ‘It makes no sense; she was a polite, cheerful girl, had everything to live for,’ before adding that I did keep myself to myself. It’ll all be here. I’m using a silver fountain pen with purple ink. A bit flamboyant for me, I know. I need these idiosyncratic rituals; they hold things in place. Like the way I make tea, squeezing the tea-bag three times, the exact amount of milk, seven stirs. My writing is small and neat; I’m striping the paper. I’m near the bottom of the page now. Only ninety-one more days to go before I’m allowed to make my decision. That’s it for today. It’s begun.

  • Autor Guest Post: Katherine Center, Author of Everyone is Beautiful

    Autor Guest Post: Katherine Center, Author of Everyone is Beautiful

    Everyone Is Beautiful is about a mom with three boys under four who decides to get her groove back.In the process, she learns an important thing: A good groove is hard to find. Especially for moms.It’s so easy to judge your parents, when you’re young: all the things they didn’t do for you, all the ways they let you down. It’s so easy to feel indignant and insist that you would have done a better job.

    And then you become a parent yourself. And somewhere in those early years with kids—maybe on the day your toddler flushes your new silk scarf down the toilet—you come to understand something important: That your parents were just doing the best they could. And that as the years of your childhood were ticking past, your parents’ years were ticking, too.

    By the time I was ten, my mother was forty. She didn’t press pause on her life to raise me and my sisters. Those years were happening all at the same time. My childhood was her thirties. She was raising us, but she was also, from time to time, doing a thing or two for herself. Now that I myself am a mom in my thirties, that strikes me as perfectly fair.

    But it’s tricky for women to think about their own interests while raising little kids. It feels selfish. In the abstract, giving everything you have to the project of childrearing makes a lot of sense. But in particular, those minutes are your minutes, too.

    It shouldn’t be that hard to do both: your kids’ minutes and your own. The two are connected, after all. Your children aren’t you, but they come from you, and you’re just as invested in their well-being as in your own. If not more so. But doing both—as always—is harder than it sounds. “A few years” is a long time. Right? We don’t have all that many years on this planet. And they skip by faster and faster.

    And your own interests are looking for you. They find you in dreams. In the carpool line. In the bookstore. In moments of frustration. They don’t leave you alone.You can ignore them for a long time, if you want to. In some ways, that’s easier. Figuring out how to take good enough care of everybody—including yourself—is a recipe for frustration.

    But some nights, no matter what you’ve decided to do, you’ll find yourself awake at three in the morning, Googling pottery wheels on Craigslist, or writing a poem, or reading old letters. The next morning, your eyes will be puffy and you’ll wake up with a sense of panic about how you can make it through the day on so little sleep. And you might lose your car keys. Or forget to put your daughter’s snack in her backpack. Or forget your son’s costume for the school carnival.

    You might hear yourself cursing those stolen hours from the night before. But you’ll hear something else, too: the memory of who you used to be lifting itself up, singing its own song out of a crackly jukebox across a crowded room.You can barely hear the song. But it’s there. And what’s more: You still know every word.