Earlier this evening I was thinking that one of the nicest aspects of some of the places I've stayed this year -- the Vancouver Club, the Over Seas House in Edinburgh -- is that the rooms have keys. No cards. And so I mused on that passing fashion in jewelry design of discarded hotel keys being incorporated into motifs as huge quantities went on the market after reaching obsolescence in most places (there was a big spike, for instance, when the lot from the Plaza was sold) just as vintage/salvage chic went mainstream. Except when I found some examples, I realized my mistake: there's really nothing more alluring than the idea of hotels and nothing less romantic than the idea of clanging around with a janitor's key ring slung around your neck. It's just so... obvious, which is one of my best-loved expressions for tossing a benign label on to something I find abhorrent. And to me, personally, being obvious is the worst possible thing. It encompasses every quality I loathe in other people: to be uncouth, insensitive, striving, reliant on the approval of others for validation, lacking in judgment and the sort of basic elegance that can be acquired easily enough by learning to be observant and keeping one's mouth shut for a while. And then I thought about it some more, and about the year as a whole in retrospect, and I thought, what's so bad about being obvious? What's wrong with that? Maybe being obvious could lead to all of the best things about 2009.
[How to Marry a Millionaire Silk Briefs, $78 at gildapearl/etsy]
Windowlicker - from the French for window shopping: faire du lèche-vitrine - often appears on Tuesday and Thursdays at 10am EST-ish.
Those briefs are obviously subtle.
Posted by: Marco Romano | December 09, 2008 at 10:16 AM
I'm definitely leaving inspired to look for the obvious :)
Posted by: Beth Hemmila (HINT Jewelry Design) | December 11, 2008 at 07:37 PM