Monday 30 June 2014

Yellow and purple

Links are a lazy way of making a point, finding degrees of affinity or underlying meaning in coincidences are a substitute for profound originality. This shamelessly shallow post presents a colour-coded association between the excessive frivolity of the ancien regime and the socialist conscience of modern feminism, between Marie Antoinette’s favourite dress shop and the intellectual salon of Simone de Beauvoir, both in Paris, two centuries apart.

In the 1770s and 1780s, Rose Bertin’s shop on the rue Saint-HonorĂ© was decorated in yellow and purple, including the painted imitation marble at the front entrance.


From the late 1950s to 1980s, Simone de Beauvoir furnished her Paris studio with yellow sofas and chairs on a purple carpet.

Detail of purple cardigan and yellow dress c 2014. Private collection. Image © 2014 MHP

This leap-frogging post might be silly, but it is not ironic. By serendipity, it has landed on a revelation of women’s history through colour association. Complementary yellow and purple have been fashionable in gardening, interior and clothes design many times before, of course, and continue to be; there’s a striking use of the combination in the bed hangings of the Yellow or Velory Room at Ham House, home of the Duchess of Lauderdale, one of the most  powerful operators at the heart of government and politics during the English Restoration.

The colours glowed in dingy old rooms like dappled sunlight; our ancestors brightened their interiors with hues that in electric light we recoil from as garish. The 18th century thought the same about the Baroque, throwing out all that brooding and blazing heaviness for enlightening, subtler tints and tones, not always pastel.

In any era, any tone, yellow and purple are an imperial choice. A hundred years later, Bertin’s Rococo yellow and lavender (not girlish pale pink or virginal white or fresh pea green or sky blue but majestic purple) declared her right to dictate fashion to rich consumers: I’m new, I’m self-made, I don’t care if you think I’m vulgar, I’m as good as you, you need me to tell you what to wear, I’m more powerful than any of you duchesses and princesses, I’m modern luxury retail, based on wealth and success, not birth and education, I’m the future.

Rose Bertin was the first successful female haute couturier, despised at the time as a pushy, business-woman, a jumped-up milliner challenging the social superiority of her clientele. Marie-Antoinette herself, the despised foreign queen hovering in the background, panniered and pomaded, a fashion victim in fantastically huge skirts overladen with lace and flowers, whose dignified death is regarded as the redeeming achievement of a wasted life; the Austrian bitch, the bored, stupid, rich wife, with her ridiculous hair-dos, seems to ask for re-evaluation......

Tuesday 24 June 2014

Second Coming

Weak plotting, naff (native) British accents, His Smug Unctuousness cast as the PM, abetted by a panto villainess, cut off the frayed ends of our suspension of disbelief. Jack Bauer, the great malcontent of the early 2000s, the anti-hero of counter-everything, the TV construct that some of us cleaved to as our best friend and rescuer, is diminished, not revived. He knows it, because he is whispering more hoarsely than ever.

Wonderful, incomparable Sarah Lund, I love you, I miss you - don't come back.
THEY ARE ALL GONE INTO THE WORLD OF LIGHT

Friday 6 June 2014

contrablog (2)

"You don't call yourself a writer because you have some free time and your heart is aching....Writing is a serious activity, a profession. Not a pastime." 
Simone de Beauvoir quoted by Claudine Monteil in The Beauvoir Sisters, English translation © 2004 by Marjolijn de Jager. 
The same is true of painting, photography and acting. 
It should mean the end of this blog....

Young Woman Drawing by Marie-Denise Villers, 1801. 
Metroplitan Museum, New York. Image source: Wikipedia