jak and jil
Whatever happened to the fashion eccentric? Fashion Editors are so generic now, they stand around in their denim cut offs, their balmain strong shoulders and their $600 tee shirts, feigning nonchalance and attempting to get hipness to ooze from their pores. They're interchangeable - beautiful and well dressed, undoubtedly - but interchangeable nonetheless. Don't you remember the days when Isabella Blow used to swan around London, arriving to the Vogue offices under Anna Wintour at 11 AM and getting the job done by 12, all whilst wearing a giant ship on her head, or something of such sort.
Even Daphne Guinness, Blow's great friend and once a reach character in fashion, has turned hip. She runs around with Olivier Zahm (shudder) in the ugliest shoes known to man and bears all for purple magazine. I don't know... it's just not the daphne that i fell in love with. The one who enthused about the artistry and fantasia of haute couture and who nurtured Alexander McQueen's fragile genius. Now the fashion editors strap on the highest heels they can find, the shortest dress they can find (or the tightest pants) and some sort of statement jacket. Then part their hair in the middle and then wait around to be photographed by the hoards of street style photogs just waiting to fawn all over their 'achingly hip' looks.
I know this sounds anti-fashion eds when actually i think they are uniformly well dressed. The problem for me is that, on the most part (taylor tomasi, giovanna battaglia and yasmin sewell excepted), i can't distinguish one editor from the other.
All this existential fashion soul-searching comes from the fact that i am having a few issues with my style. I feel that i always wear the same thing over and over again, that my style is predictable and that if you took away 3 or 4 things from my wardrobe i would have nothing to wear. Whenever i feel like this i try and go away with a bag of things i never wear to force me to expand my horizons, but since work has prevented that kind of therapy i instead have taken to perusing the web for inspiration. I used to think i dressed a lot like Alexa Chung, but as i survey my closet i really don't, not at all. I admire her style greatly, but since it's not legs-a-go-go here at my house the only thing we really share in common is eurasian heritage and nars lipstick.
People always ask me who my style icon is, and i used to spurt forth Alexa like a broken record. Although i still love her (and always will), i feel that i need a real icon who is relevant to my wardrobe, my sensibility and my style. Having more than one icon is, of course, fine. Alexa's prep and (more than a bit of) yasmin's ability to mix sharp tailoring with australian effervescence will forever inspire me. But recently i've been craving a bit more.
It was a happy accident that i stumbled across Catherine Baba's thread on the fashion spot, and i can safely say i haven't looked back since. Her inner elegance and poise, redolent of some bygone era where bright young things held absinthe parties while swathed in furs, , is even more striking than her clothes. She is a character, often called the most stylish woman in Paris, who eschews all the trends and all that hipster fuckery to wear clothes that are arrestingly beautiful. Vintage kimonos, turbans, more costume jewelry than a seniors bridge night and the odd smattering of current designer fare makes for a style that is just magnificent to behold.
The funny thing is that I used to dress a lot like her. Not now, now i prefer something that is a bit more simple, less theatrical. But deep down there is the girl who once wore an entire outfit to a country races source from the 1930s - from cloche to mary janes. I just looooove her elegance and old hollywood worldliness. She looks like Jean Harlow with Katherine Hepburn eyes. And i love the fact that, like Blow, you remember her. She doesn't melt faceless into the crowd of fashion editors in their thigh highs and messy hair.
There is a great interview with her and Diane Pernet where Pernet asks her, sarcastically, whether her fur coat was quite necessary in the balmy heat of Paris in April.
'But darling, it's freeeeeezing, no?' she replied.
I may not revere her and wish to copy her every move, but seeing these pictures have made me dig out my old vintage fur collared coat that saw me through 2 teenage winters when i was trying to be an evenlyn waugh-esque bright young thing with strands of onyx beads and a happy go lucky attitude. What i've learned is that your icon should not be someone that you wish to copy head to toe, but rather someone that you respect and admire. I admire her elegance, her theatricality and grace, just as how i admire alexa's gazelle-like stature and rock credibility and yasmin's inane ability to compose outfits that are so 'her'. You can't quantify her style, really, it's that mixture of suggestive drapery, clever tailoring and classic lines.
Catherine Baba is exactly like that, and so much more. She's the kind of woman that someone who has grown up reading Waugh and Mitford and Forster can only dream of. The kind of woman who has a lace fan stashed in her bag and sips her bourbon whiskey out of tea cups.
The kind of woman who i thought couldn't exist in a fashion world that worships Wang and Balmain at the expense of Galliano and Gaultier. But it's kind of comforting to think that even though we are prostrate at the altar of fast, commodified fashion and all our high priestesses dress themselves in the same erin wasson-style threads, women like Catherine Baba can still thrive. I hope that no matter where fashion goes in this next decade (and it's sure to be an exhilarating ride) there'll still be fashion editors like her. Ones who don't care if studs, khaki and everything shredded are in, they'll still wear their ripped crinolines... with a pair of new season boots underneath.
Here's to the eccentric!
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