Last time I came to visit her, my mother gave me a first edition of Harper's Bazaar: 100 Years of the American Female: The Sumptuous, The Expensive, The Precious, The Moneyed, The Luxe, The Tasteful, The Opulent and The Amusing Woman From Bazaar, a suitably weighty tome created in the '60s for the magazine's centennial.
I'm sure I will come back to it again and again, as it includes selections of the best of the magazine's photography, literature, fashion, essays, interviews, observations and criticism collected over a century.
I couldn't haul it back to New York with me at the time, and so it was a thrill to come across it this morning as I was looking for something to read. My selection for contemplation today is from an essay entitled, "Individuality in Dress: The Secret of the Well-Dressed Woman," by Paul Poiret:
I cannot help feeling a vague contempt for those who ask at the beginning of the season, "What is to be the favorite color?" Choose the color that suits you, madame, and if some one tells you that red is to be worn, dare to wear violet and consider only what is suitable to you, because there is only one single rule for the well-dressed woman, and the old Romans expressed it in one word - decorum - which means, "that which is suitable." That which is suitable! ...
... Choose whatever is most in harmony for your character, for a dress can be the expression of a state of mind if you but try to make it. There are dresses that sing of joy of life, dresses that weep, dresses that threaten. There are gay dresses, mysterious dresses, pleasing dresses, and tearful dresses.
It's such a gloriously strident essay, and - even though he could never have predicted the rise of such fashionable disasters as Sex and the City and The Meatpacking District - Poiret's words ring just as true today.
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