Style Icon: Peggy From Mad Men
What can we say? Peggy we love you, your copy, and your prim quirky style!
90′s Style via Courtney Love
This girl is all hair and we love it!
Staples for your Courtney Love style:
Hair bleach
Cardigans
Tattered Dress (extra points for self tattering)
Little hair clips and flowers
Black mary jane’s
Matte lipstick in red, orange, and brown
Optional:
Eyeliner
Tiny braids
Hangovers
Jewelry
-xo
Style Icon Series No.7 – Patti Smith
Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids inspires obsession in the way great icons tend to do. It is fascinating to get glimpses into how Smith crafted her own distinctive look.The evolution of it builds and unfurls carefully throughout her narrative. Like so many of us aspiring to have our external selves speak something meaningful and thoughtful about our difficult to communicate internal experience, Smith looked toward, and contemplated deeply, over time, people, films, and books she loved: Audrey Hepburn’s beatnik librarian in Funny Face, Steinbeck’s wistful women of East of Eden, the long coats of 19th century poets. When she cut her hair on a whim one fateful day to mimic the magic she saw and admired in Keith Richards, her life irrevocably changed. The bold stroke that theatrically produced her androgyny externalized her very interior art to the world around her.
Style Icon Series No.6 – Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor is the quintessential icon- her style is dramatized and reproduced and eclipses what access we may ever have to her essential self. Her life is one of decadence, myriad eccentricities, and a remarkable devotion to realizing beauty — her book My Love Affair With Jewelry tells the story of her life refracted through her collections of extravagant baubles. Her caustic wit and flair for the dramatic never compromise her elegance, only bolster a picture of her as warm, demanding, dynamic- a real dame. She makes indulgence a seduction, an inspiration, and finally, a bravura performance. And oh, those eyes.
Velvet Brown in National Velvet 1944
With James Dean while filming Giant 1956
Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra
Reflections of a Golden Eye with Marlon Brando 1967
Dr Faustus 1967
Via Andy Warhol
Style Icon No.5 – Yoko Ono
War is over if you want it. Yoko Ono fills her twitter feed with uplifting bon mots that fulfill the best promises of that format: high concepts distilled into simple slogans that remind us to be thoughtful about our engagements with the world. It works for Ono, who has always maintained a balance of somewhat inscrutable complexity and straight shooting honesty in everything she’s produced. Her embrace of modern mediums betray long standing concerns with making the world a more inhabitably peaceful place. We look to her for a hopeful, maybe even romantic , vision of the citizens of the world as always potentially closer to being in harmony with one another.
Unstudied elegance.
Subtle nod to “Flower Power.”
A shaded visionary.
A deep cut from “Cut Piece” her most famous performance.
Vanguards of counter-culture.
Enter the 80′s.
Gloves. Peeps. Nylons. Cut-offs. Damn Girl.
We salute you.
A last look from this daring beauty.
Style Icon Series No.4 – Grace Jones
Elaborate, sculptural, ensembles that restructure bodies are everywhere in the pop fashion world today, donned on the runway and the red carpet by Katy Perry and Kanye West alike. This contemporary interest in reforming the contours of the body and seeing what it is still capable of performing in bold, innovative constructions is in fact pre-dated by the 1970s and 80s heyday of Grace Jones, an artist who skillfully toed the line between pop and avant garde. Her ensembles were more device than concealing or revealing clothing, and unlike how many machinistic, future-obsessed couture pieces seen today operate, making the body of it’s wearer object, Jones’s fashion apparatuses worked to take apart and re-simulate popular myths about what constitutes the beautiful body. Her work made beauty a wonderous, complicated, and hard to define entity, linked to acts of creativity and defying stereotypes, a sort of production that seems worthwhile and relevant to any time.
Goddess.
Contrast perfection.
Via Andy Warhol.
Nothing can distract us from her awe-inspiring lips, not even that gold record.
Effortlessly commanding our attention.
Pop art fantasy.
Style Icon Series No.3 – Marisa Berenson and Talitha Getty
Designer Yves Saint-Laurent spent a fair amount of the seventies jet-setting to Marrakesh, Morrocco, and it seems impossible to view that decade without the lasting impact of his era-defining sensibility that cultivated a love for decadent travel, indulgent partying and general wide-eyed incredulousness. He handpicked model-socialites Marisa Berenson and Talitha Getty to embody his vision of beauty- a little tragic, a little imperious, a little (or a lot) hedonistic. Much has been said on the subject of bohemian fashion, but these ladies weren’t quite or entirely fringe counterculture, they were calculated, refined visions- the free spirit reigned in. The tension between Saint-Laurent’s flower-child idealizing and remarkably deliberate editorializing was richly represented in the styles of Berenson and Getty, their faces shine as though polished, but the flowers in their hair were of course natural creations, making their wearers subject to the world in all its complicated detail.
Marisa Berenson becoming a human canvas and showcasing some exquisite extravagance.
Talitha Getty decked out in dreamy florals and royal opulence.
Cloaked in wrap dress and head wrap, Berenson becomes the picture of elegant lounging around.
The best way to wear a tunic- surrounded by authentic batik prints and with perfectly teased hair.
All kinds of wonder abound, not the least of which is this flower headdress.
Gilded rings paired with woven straw- a perfect juxtaposition of high and low.
The elaborate hairpiece departs from the sort of soft floral wreaths more typical of the time; it is a fabulously unusual construction. Even the kitty thinks so.
So many ways to play the coy chanteuse.
Rendering macrame impossibly charming- not the easiest task.
Just a bracelet, a guitar, and withering beauty.
Style Icon Series no.2 – Sissy Spacek’s Folk Revolution
Sissy Spacek started her career as a folk singer in New York City, singing under the pseudonym “Rainbo.” That life proved short lived and she went on to work as an art model in Andy Warhol’s factory, making connections until eventually breaking into film. Her work with the avant-garde, cowboy directors of seventies cinema left her, inevitably, a cult icon of an ephemeral, dreamy, style. While she didn’t make much of herself as a singer, hints of that folk life would always cling to her, and she never stopped evoking something of the breed, always seemingly a little wistful, ready to sing a lovely, and kind of dark, melancholic song. Some of the things we adore so much today- lacey slips, soft curls, delicate cotton dresses- owe something to Spacek’s whispery ingenues.
A young Spacek in Terence Malick’s Badlands. Is that a ruffled-bib and a peter-pan collar? DO WANT!
Another darling cotton dress, adorned in tea roses, for her sweet and bad outlaw teenager in Badlands.
Looking lovely in lavender…
Channeling Loretta Lynn.
