Underneath all that Elegance

"...I knew I had discovered a man of fine breeding after I talked with him an hour.  I said to myself: 'There's the kind of man you'd like to take home and introduce to your mother and sister.'" He paused.  "I see you're looking at my cuff buttons."


I hadn't been looking at them, but I did now. They were composed of oddly familiar pieces of ivory.


"Finest specimens of human molars," he informed me.

Meyer Wolfsheim,   in the Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

And this, I've made from the finest specimen of human hair.

Inspiration can come from many places; in this case it was in the form of a weave.  The entire piece looked so beautiful and bizarrely elegant hanging from the chandelier that I wondered why designers haven't explored this medium more thoroughly.  I realize it's remotely disgusting, but really, is it?  

Above photograph: Daniel Lehenbauer, modeling by Henrietta at Next Model Management, Hair & Makeup by Alice Malone.  Hair dress and collar, headpiece (IN)DECOROUS TASTE.

Birds of a Feather

Givenchy Mens Spring Summer 2012. Love or Hate? People seem to be polarized on this one but I'm not, really. I'm into it, but not the plastic Jesus sandals, go figure.

Images via style.com

Head Augmentation

A quick stop to Sally Beauty and roughly $15 yielded this bizarre track of human hair.  (Disclaimer: the platinum one (on the table) is acrylic!  Woe to you who have naturally glowing locks. Disclaimer two! Do not under any circumstance wikipedia the process of harvesting these human hair extensions if you have even the slightest inclination that that sort of thing might make you squeamish...)

At first I wasn't quite sure what to do with it, because I really don't have confidence in my ability to sew, glue, weave, or otherwise attach this thing to my head in any permanent fashion.  So, I did what any industrious girl who has no intentions of looking like Paris Hilton does with fake hair, and  I ended up making a massive pony tail out of it!  Marvelous! It's huge! Like a full-on second head!

Designers and artists speak all the time of things like proportion.  Heads are not immune to these games of proportion.

And, just in case you have any desire to make it yourself (really? Let's be friends!) it's quite easy.  Just buy one of the tracks of hair intended for sewing, and a little bottle of weave glue.  Apply the weave glue to the tracks (the fabric-y part at the top) and fold the weave over itself in half, and then in half again, and again, until you have something that you can roughly manage to pin around your ponytail. 

From where?!

I used to be one of those people firmly against the idea of wearing sleepwear outside of the house, but here I am in my new silk jammies, without even the slightest intention of wearing them anywhere even near a bed.  How silly I was.

The funny thing is that they're from Victoria's Secret, past season, on eBay.  But they're silk and inexpensive (under $50.00 for the set? Just search "Victoria's Secret silk" on eBay), so no one's the wiser...

Veruschka x Playboy '71

This is the supermodel Veruschka, daughter of the Countess Gottliebe von Kalnein.... as a rock, in Playboy '71.  Weird and wonderful.  But is it erotic?

"The body does not arouse me sexually. . . I regard it simply as one element in nature. But... that doesn't mean I'm frigid."

                                                                            - Veruschka

Boticellophane

Still kickin, oh yes I am.  I'm working on lots of new things, and there will be posts galore in the coming weeks.  We have lots to catch up on.  

As the curtains opened on the avant-garde opera event of 1934, Virgil Thompson and Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts, the audience faced a vast sign of the production's cutting-edge modernity: fifteen hundred square feet of sky-blue cellophane was draped from the sides and ceiling of the stage, creating a semitransparent cyclorama, glittering under bright white lights.  The stark artificiality of the stage design proclaimed its relationship to the modern world and its unsurpassed hold on the new: 'The cellophane set, brilliantly lit to evoke a sky hung with rock crystal, defied comparison to anything the audience had ever seen. 'Some thought that [Florine Stettheimer's] costumes outdid the Ziegfeld Follies, and one quipped that the sets were 'Botticellophane.'" Plastic, that most twentieth century of materials, here transformed the stage into a powerful blend of art, glamour, and the latest technology.  We've lost, in the intervening decades, the ability to read the early-century semiotics of plastics, and particularly of cellophane.

For now:  the spring collection is up at the new shop: shop.indecoroustaste.com .  I know, I keep moving the thing around.  But really, I think you'll find that this is much easier to use/navigate.   Let me know what you think?

- From Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form by Judith Christine Brown

Credits: Thank you Cristin for collaborating/modeling/photographing and putting up with MADNESS.

These are the latest iteration of the (IN)DECOROUS TASTE spiked lucite platforms. This time, I built up a secondary platform for for the foot.  It looks like a mattress, just delightful.

Fend off attackers with panache!

Crystal chandelier harnesses, nude leather harnesses, and clutches available here.

Simple Math

I'm aware that this isn't an earth shattering idea, but it's a swanky little trick to avoid wardrobe boredom and the cold.

It's like a facelift! Just keep it on the simple side because a nip here, a tuck there, a bit of plumage there, and suddenly you look like Jocelyn Wildenstein, understand?  Have I mentioned I have this little fur collar collecting problem?

Collars like these are everywhere on ebay, not to mention thrift shops and hanging out on old coats. Don't be afraid to scavenge: Denning and Fourcade (the design kings of opulent, style Rothschild interiors of yetseryear) used fur scraps from old coats to piece together an entire rug.  You can find really lush ones this way; just avoid dry patches like the plague.

Wardrobe basics.

Basics that have personality (multiple personalities, really):

Simple equation, see?

Vixenish

A few new additions to the shop in time for the holidays...

I've been inspired by the texture of the brass chains against the slickness of black lacquer and faux tortoise lately; I think that that combo has a lot of sex appeal (ooooh and it's most definitely possible for a purse to have sex appeal. I mean, if a car can...).

Also, SEVEN New York will have a few of my harnesses in their Soho store shortly (the end of this week, likely?) in case you were interested in seeing them up close and fondling them personally (because I do that kind of stuff all the time.  Words of wisdom: do not fear the angry glare of sales assistants, haaa).   I'll keep you guys posted!

A clear lucite box purse with ornate heavy brass chain (you might remember it from the Mannequins post? The purse and I, we're parting ways...) :

Genuine lizard skin satchel, leather lined...

All items available at (I)D.

Mink Tongues

They told me, Francis Hinsley, they told me you were hung
With red protruding eye-balls and black protruding tongue...
Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One


Has anyone read The Loved One? Or seen the film version? (Ohhhh you must if you haven't. Liberace plays a casket salesman and if that isn't enough to make you run to your video store now, then we just can't be friends, okay?)  Certain movies are comfort movies for me (same goes for books, too); and I'm not sure what it says about me, since it's a satire about the funeral industry, but The Loved One is most definitely one of my staples.  I've seen it so many times that someone should do a remake and hire me to play a part, or maybe even 5 parts.

It's part of my capsule film collection like these black leather Converse deals are part of my capsule shoe collection.  This is a recent development, since I used to hate sneakers and until recently, rarely left my house in anything resembling a flat.  However, the Nike shoe project started me on this tangent thinking about sneakers, and I've gone from thinking that these are convenient and innocuous, to thinking of them as a staple.  Amazing the way these things sneak up on me.

When I bought them, they were simple, totally unadorned.  In fact, they were so boring I forgot to take a picture.  Whoops.  You can see them online here.  But yes, I decided I wanted to beef up the tongue.  With jet black mink.

Leather + slick black mink fur + dull black rubbery sneaker trim = ORGY OF TEXTURES.  Very few things excite me more than black on black textural orgies, by the way.  (Aside from Liberace playing a casket salesman, of course.)

Anyway, the end result reminded me of the Loved One, and so here we've come, full circle, back to the black protruding tongue!

Fairly simple, extremely gratifying.

I used an old mink fur collar.  These are fairly common, you can easily find them on ebay or even at thrift shops on old coats.



I cut it down to size so that it could wrap over the tongue on both sides, and finished the edges.  This makes for a meatier tongue, but also a more indulgent shoe.  (Also, because sometimes I fail to wear socks and the mink feels divine against skin. Things I should not divulge...)



I then sewed chamois to the back of the fur, the back of the tongue all the way into the shoe, and then partially down the front of the tongue, as far as I wanted the fur bonded to the tongue.  I didn't want to bond the fur completely down the front of the tongue...this lets you lace underneath the tongue should you feel like styling it that way.



The end result: