you've got mail

 "The City of Is, the reverse of Par-is, the towers in the water not the air, the drowned roses and flying fish and other paradoxical elementals - you see - I come to know you - I shall feel my way into your thought - as a hand into a glove - to steal your own metaphor and torture it rather cruelly. But if you wish - you may keep your gloves clean and scented and folded away - you may only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink..."

A.S Byatt, Possession

I'm back in Sydney and the last of the postcards are trickling in. I love the fact that I checked the letterbox yesterday morning and there was a postcard from me, stamped London, England and sent off in a flurry from a red postbox more than two weeks ago. Mail is a funny thing, but it's also dying, and it's something that I never want to see go. I am a big fan of postcards. I love to send them and I love to receive them. I am fastidious about them. I would pick up a packet or two at every place we visited - snow-covered castles from Germany, the piazza della Academia in Florence, the Eiffel tower in spring - and I would find time that day to sit down with pen and paper and annotate them for their intended recipient. Sometimes the cards would be filled with little jokes or asides, formulate through years of friendship and things I knew would make them smile. Sometimes it would be just the simplest, quickest of thoughts, rendered necessary by the small amount of space given to you by a postcard. "Miss you", "Wish you were here", and, more often that I intended, "Paris is beautiful" (an endearment all of its own, surely). 

I picked up the most recent issue of Kinfolk while away and have started to work my way through it this rainy first day of Autumn. It's dedicated to ice cream ("maybe the romance is in the fact that it melts - that the days when it is best are the days when its lifespan is shortest" Nikaela Peters writes on page 41) and that is reason enough to get your hands on it. But there's also a lovely article towards the end of the issue about "checking in", the lost art of sending letters. The still life - pencils and postcards and blocks of Mast Brothers chocolate - is exactly the kind of image I love. I want to spend this year checking in more, not just electronically but the old school way, with little notes and handwritten bits and pieces sealed with a kiss and sent through Australia Post. Why do I only buy stamps when I'm on holiday? I want to send more postcards this year, even just from Australia. Talisa and I are back in the same country again and she bestowed upon me the most beautiful birthday package of treats, carried all the way back from New York; Catbird candles and Mast Brothers chocolate. Maybe it's this rainy weather and the three cups of tea I've had this afternoon, but it has me all inspired to write a letter.

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really really really all gone

Part one // two // three // four. A piece of the OG carrot cake from The Rose Bakery in Paris.

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the thing

tommy ton style.com

The ear is the thing. I'll be keeping it simple with BRVTVS's delicate ear cuff, but this is clearly a case of anything is more.

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petersham nurseries

There are some places in the world that instantly make you feel at home. You know, right from that first step, that first sight, that first smell, that you are in the kind of place that could make you happy. Often this feeling accompanies events - your first day at university, your first sight of a new house, occasionally, if you are lucky, when you start a new job - but for me this happens more frequently at restaurants and cafes. I have always felt comfortable surrounded by food, with a mother who cooks better than anyone I know, and family and friends who share my love of celebration and plenty. Good memories for me are inextricably linked to the food that accompanied them. The evening I had after my first holy communion, eating home-made choc-tops and allens snakes with my best friend while watching A Little Princess, the graduation dinner my mum cooked, outdoing herself for the umpteenth time with an ode to french cooking and champagne to match, my first time at The Rose Bakery, an experience in and of itself.

Well, now I can add Petersham Nurseries to that list. I had wanted to go for ages, because of spreads in Harper's BAZAAR UK, features on Park and Cube, and the prominent role it played in the best Burberry campaign ever, of all time. Nestled in the heart of Richmond in West London, it literally abuts the field opposite a family friend's house, a fellow foodie through and through, and we've always wanted to go together. When I finally did get to go, while in London just a few weeks ago, it was a cold and windy winter day, with barely a flower in sight. But it didn't matter. We found a seat in the deserted cafe - carefully selected because of its proximity to the heater - and devoured chicken and mash, tart and salad, cake and tea, cake and tea. This is the kind of place that appeals to that homey, simple pleasures part of everyone. The part that likes flowers - lots and lots of flowers - and hand-carved pottery and chandeliers, the part that likes dirt floors and Hunter wellingtons, candles burning all the time, cake and earl grey tea and honey, roast chicken with fresh herbs, the part that likes dirt and fresh air, children and tricycles, the part that religiously, fervently refreshes Manger hoping for a new post (Look, we've all done it). Some people are more attuned to this part than others. Some people are city people with a dash of country thrown in for good measure - they eat organic, they listen to the occasional Hugh Laurie blues song. But some of us are country people who have learned city behaviour. It's less about ambition and more about happiness. A world without fashion or trends. A world formed around contentedness as it exists in the pure simplicity of pleasures.

Because isn't that the point, that despite everything - the price tags, the artfully dishevelled-ness, the overwhelming perfection of it all - it's still the dream? Because if you could, if you really, really could, if you could cook from scratch every day with organic produce and herbs from your own garden, if you could breathe fresh air and see the stars every night, if you could sleep in and go to bed early, if you could make your own quilts and knit your own beanies and spend all day surrounded by green, if you could get your hands dirty with soil and seeds, with babies and buds, with four under four and chocolate-smeared cheeks and finger-painting, wouldn't you? I know I would.

Petersham Nurseries, Church Lane (off Petersham Road), Richmond
 

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getting old

1 and 3 - style.com // 2 - vogue daily

I love hearing people write rude comments in the Ashley Olsen TFS thread about how she's dressing too old for her age. Those comments are like catnip for me. I love how Ashley Olsen dresses (understatement, I idolise it). I love dressing more than ten years older than my age, I love the idea of aging gracefully, I love the idea of sensible clothes, quietly elegant in their unfussiness and simplicity. That's why I love these street style looks from London and New York - Sarah Harris and Virginia Smith, two of my absolute favourite mag girls, the former for her long grey hair and the latter for that one line in The September Issue, when Anna fixes her with a withering stare in regards to that lovely accessories shoot with Daria Werbowy, "I think it's pretty" - of women who are so supremely comfortable in their skin that they wear their hair naturally grey, they run bare-faced to a fashion show with just a celine pouch for comfort, and they team a cashmere turtleneck with a fur coat and jeans. I love looks that come together with little thought at all - the clothes pulled from the drying rack and slipped into, the shoes grabbed by the laces as you run out the door. In my experience, it is those outfits that look the best. And that confidence and understanding of your personal style can only come with age. 

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Burger Lobster

Just one of the many places I tried in London - but one of the only places I took pictures. The London I experienced was one obsessed with the no-fuss restaurant. There was Meat Liquor, Bubble Dogs and then Burger Lobster, which was just that, Burgers and Lobster. Everything was 20 pounds and everything was served on platters with a bit of grease paper thrown in top. The concept behind it was simple and relatively unpretentious, and, most importantly, the food was delicious. Jane and me polished off our lobster rolls (sandwiched between two halves of a sugary-sweet brioche bun that countered the mayonnaise-y creaminess of lobster like nothing else), chips and garden salad with ease, alongside two cocktails (mai-tai's for Jane and Chai mules for me). Jane was also there for one of the other fantastic meals I had, a valentine's day feast with K. We went to the Duke of Cambridge organic pub and wined ourselves through pate, mackerel and pie, and sacher torte and orange cake for dessert. Company definitely makes a meal, but the food does a good job of helping.

Burger and Lobster, 36 Dean St, London

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that girl in the hat

jak and jil

All throughout Paris and London I toyed with getting a hat. I perused the windows at Lock and Co, I stalked the display area for Maison Michele at le Bon Marche. The idea was fermented in Milan, after seeing scores of women running through the Galleria wearing their purchases from Borsalino. After that it just grew - the Italians wear hats well - until by the time I got to Paris all I could think about was snapping up an expensive felt topper of my own. I thought I had put this whole hat thing to rest. Remember the year before last when every second post was about hats and how I was obsessed with finding the right one? Well I found one, and I wore it, but I soon came to the realisation that I might not be a hat person. As I tried to explain to my friend in Paris, it all seems fine and dandy to buy a hat in Europe, and wear it with belted tweed coats and cashmere scarves wrapped tight, but then you get back to Sydney, and instead of being that girl in the hat, you're just that girl in the hat. I'm not convinced that I'm ready for the scrutiny that comes with wearing a hat. But I just can't quite get this image out of my head; of hair tucked up, and oversized turtleneck sweaters, and a stiff felt hat on top of it all.

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the one

the sartorialist

Every fashion week I latch onto one image that, for me, sums up my current fashion mood and inspiration. Normally this moment arrives in paris - of course, of course - but I think that maybe this year New York has pipped it to the post. There is a lot of talk going on in the blogosphere - and in real life, as bloggers are want to talk about their industry as much as fashion journalists are - about the place of street style in today's world. Much has been said. Much of it has merit, and much of it smarts so much of generational discord and a slight sense of desperation. Whenever these debates crop up - and they crop up remarkably frequently, with more and more vitriole as the seasons roll past and the number of street style photographers and their willing subjects outside the tents at Lincoln Center or The Tuileries or Somerset House or any of the multitude of off-site shows grows exponentially - I am reminded by an article by Clay Shirky about the death of the newspaper. We read it in third year media studies and one idea from it has always resonated with me, has always been something that springs immediately to mind whenever the old guard of print media whip out their pistols at dawn against the new;

"Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world increasingly resembled the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors... That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen." When you're living in a revolution you can't see the revolution happening, and even if you can, you don't know where it will end or what it will take with it. We just don't know. Suzy Menkes doesn't know, Leandra Medine doesn't know, and I certainly don't know.

So what does it all mean? Does it mean that Suzy wasn't right when she said that there are too many attention-seekers crowding the fashion weeks, yearning for a moment of fame in the lens of a street style photographer? Does it mean that Leandra wasn't right when she said that we are all to blame for our loss of editorial integrity? I think that it means that ultimately Clay Shirky was right. That if we are building a guttenberg press - and I don't think anyone would deny, this far down the track, with this many street style photographers and the nature of this industry, that that is indeed what we are and have always been doing here - then none of us know what the hell is going on and what the hell is going to happen. Could you have asked someone in the middle of the dot com bubble where the internet was going to go and would he have been able to answer coherently? You can ask me where street style and blogging is going to lead and I wouldn't be able to string two sentences together other than this: I have no idea. And this; just look at this picture. Because, like I have always thought, if we only get one moment like this the whole season, then it would all be worth it. All of it.

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back to the start

garance dore

First knuckle rings got a little crazy there for a while. It was like the arm party gravitated south, and everyone had super stacks going on with a million rings elbowing each other out of the way (sometimes right off your finger and onto the subway platform, sniff beloved Jordan Askill heart) for attention. I was guilty of it. We all were. But then the zeitgeist caught up and we moved on - to ear cuffs and anklets and ankle cuffs and earlets (that's next, folks) - because that's what fashion folk do, and that's what we did. But now, it's come full circle. Gone are the days of a million delicate things piled up on your hands. I'm welcoming back with eager, open palms (and fingers) just one or two first knuckle rings, doubled-up maybe, but not necessarily, just like it was at the start.

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pretty

'In Glorious Mono' - starring Rosie Tapner, shot by Alasdair McLellan and styled by Francesca Burns - Vogue UK March 2013

I've always liked my models on the pretty side. Not Lindsey Wixon pretty, crazy doll pretty. Just, classic English rose pretty. Lily Donaldson pretty, Constance Jablonski pretty, vanilla and smiley, Christy Turlington pretty, with her perfect teeth and her symmetrical face. I've also always loved Sienna Miller - no matter what anyone says (I actually titled a blog post on sienna miller with that). I think what I love about Sienna is her prettyness, her brightness and buoyancy and ebullience, her sheer bloody-minded happiness even in the face of every adversity, her very 'pretty' way of including everyone, even interviewers, in the rosey, perfect sphere of experience that is the territory of the very pretty. ("She is phenomenally pretty; far too pretty for my living room," Jo Ellison mused of her in Vogue UK last year). This editorial from Vogue UK's March issue has given me another model to crush over. 17 year-old Rosie Tapner, fine-boned and fresh, tall and tanned and young and lovely, surely Sienna's slightly edgier doppelganger, the kind of girl born to do Chloe campaigns and wear Valentino rockstud kitten heels. Photogenic, which isn't something you always say about models. I can't wait to see more of her this season.

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never full

nyanzi report

I can't quite remember the first time I wanted the Louis Vuitton neverfull but I do remember the first time that I shared this desire with someone. A friend at work - a fashionista through and through, she has a Celine bag and loves Isabel Marant sneakers like it's nobody's business, and I don't have many friends I can say that about - I thought she would fuel my obsession even further. Instead, she wrinkled her nose and said words to the effect that the bag was tacky. I was dismayed. I had been obsessing over it for a while now, and once you start obsessing over something you see it everywhere. It seemed like every customer at work for a month had been toting that bag, ever woman in line at Thomas Dux had her groceries flung in there so casually, ever mother at the school I coach debating at was carrying her blackberry and planner in one. I wanted it, in the biggest size, maybe even with a monogram HRY and a navy blue stripe down the middle (why not?). Tacky? Maybe just a little. It's hard to separate Louis Vuitton now from the this and the that. But I've always thought of Louis Vuitton as the glamorous purveyor of travel trunks, of French classicism and things that you keep forever and pass on to your daughters. I spent weeks convincing this friend of mine that, paired with bretons and tapered trousers, with loafers and big sweaters, with pea coats and fine jewellery, this bag would be the ultimate in chic everyday living - the kind of thing you could just throw everything in and head to the beach in a cloud of Byredo Gypsy Water. This was a grown up's bag. Well, V, what do you think? I know that Francesca Burns and me don't exactly have the same style, but you can't deny, this bag has class with a capital C.

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paris photo diary

"What truly makes Paris beautiful is the intermingling of the monumental and the personal, the abstract and the footsore particular, it and you. A city of vast and impersonal set piece architecture, it is also a city of small and intricate, improvised experience... We love Paris not out of nostalgia but because we love the look of light on things, as opposed to the look of light from things, the world reduced to images radiating from screens. Paris was the site of the most beautiful commonplace civilisation there has ever been: cafes, brasseries, parks, lemons on trays, dappled light on bourgeois boulevards, department stores with skylights and windows like doors everywhere you look. If it is not so much wounded - all civilisations are that, since history wounds us all - as chastened and overloud in its own defense, it nonetheless goes on. The persistence of this civilisation in the sideshow of postmodern culture is my subject, and the life it continues to have my consolation. I see the moon these days from Paris because I once saw Paris from the moon." 

Adam Gopnik, "A Family in France" from Paris to the Moon
 

Waking up to a classic Parisian view // Walking through the entrance to the Village St Paul // Majestic Notre Dame Cathedral // Nanashi also make good cake // That bloody tower // my favourite; the booksellers by the Seine // Locks on the Pont Neuf // Basilica of Sacre Coeur // Three delicious photographs from the Inez & Vinoodh exhibition at the Gagosian // A carousel and a by-gone era in the Tuileries // That vaulted ceiling of Notre Dame // What a view, baby, what a view.

It seems too futile to say it, when so many other have come before me, when it's so patently obvious if you take even a brief cursory look at this blog, when it's been said so many times that it seems to have been rendered completely meaningless. I love Paris. I love Paris. I love Paris. I love Paris because of Madeline and Monet, I love Paris because of my mum, I love Paris because of Isabel and Phoebe, I love Paris because it's the only city in the world that I can truly say and believe is beautiful - heartbreakingly beautiful - not just a cool hangout, not just somewhere to eat tacos and drink beers with friends, a place that seems to have emerged, fully formed, breathtakingly spectacular from the first flutter of the eyelashes, on screen and in books and in pictures and in magazines and in my mind, always in my mind, because loving Paris is like walking - upright and resolutely aware - in a permanent dream-state because it's just not possible for everything to be this beautiful and you must be dreaming for it to be like this because if it was real, if it was really truly real, how could you ever, ever think of leaving? Paris, you're the one (I know this now, more than I have ever known it before, I'm just sorry that it took so long). I'll be seeing you.

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the louvre by night

Every time I go to Paris I say I'm not going to the Louvre but I always inevitably end up there. Every time I go to the Louvre I get a map but I always inevitably end up throwing it away and wandering aimlessly, discovering parts of the Museum I must have seen before but have no recollection of. Every time I wander I somehow always inevitably end up on that viewing platform opposite the Winged Victory of Samothrace, my mum's favourite, thinking of how beautiful it is. Every time I end up at the Winged Victory of Samothrace I always inevitably decide that next time I come to Paris I think I just might go to the Louvre, after all.

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photoshoot

Miu Miu S/S 2013 campaign by Inez & Vinoodh

What must they have thought, peering through the keyhole or leafing through the grainy snaps, those imaginary voyeurs of our teenage years? For there must have been some, right? The imaginary voyeur - the neighbour narrators of the Virgin Suicides, the boys who long and lust in sweaty-browed silence - was the one for whom we dressed up and pranced around when our parents weren't there. Early afternoon in the school holidays would find us assembled at a house - any house will do, as long as it's empty of adults, we lived in a teenage world - where we would break out our meagre supplies of lipsmackers and cheap drugstore eyeshadow supplemented by the glamourous things we managed to pilfer from her mother's makeup cabinet. We might have a theme - movies and television shows were popular, Summer and Marissa were favourites, we had the keds and the clean faces after all - or we might not. We wouldn't spend too long on putting it on. We'd turn our straighteners on but we rarely used them. It was never about perfection anyway. 

It was always about taking photos. One of us - the one with the camera - would herald us out into the yard and we would start to pose with the practiced insouciance of fourteen year olds. How ridiculous it seems now, but then also how necessary. What else can you do, aged fourteen, when your babysitting money won't stretch to a movie ticket and your parents are at work? We had seen thirteen and we thought it was thrilling and all, but we weren't about to sneak out to spend hours with a tattooed guy who didn't go to school. We just wanted to take some pictures. Being young is all about taking pictures. You filled your computer with them, snaps at arm's length with your friends before school dances, photos of feet and hands, pictures of you jumping into a swimming pool wearing your best dress. Sure, you can still invite your best friends over to put on makeup and take photos when you're a grown up. But it doesn't have that same earnestness, that same sense of ritual, that same sense of import and significance that every picture has when you're a teenager. Where every afternoon was a mini photoshoot, a chance to show off to your friends - and those imaginary voyeurs - a chance to prove how well you had studied that well-thumbed copy of Teen Vogue, a chance to make another memory, another personal joke to enshrine with stickers and glitter pens in your scrapbook.

Seeing this Miu Miu campaign took me right back to those afternoons. Remembering those days - and days and days - that we spent trying to take a perfect profile picture, the afternoons in my garden crafting "nature photos" (it mostly involved smelling flowers and fake laughing at the camera while rolling around in grass wearing tea dresses), those hilarious afternoon when we found a whole cache of my friend's mum's 1980s uniform of big sweaters and patterned leggings and suddenly we were Andy and Duckie and Blaine , pretty in pink. This campaign has that same sense of yearning to be caught out in costume, of wearing clothes that are too big for you and makeup that you don't understand, of spending whole afternoons with your friends, taking photos and doing your hair and trying so hard to be beautiful.

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