More specifically concerning: fashion
in a style to endure
1 June 2014, around 11.42.
In the world of literature and art, Goldsmith and Johnson had gone; Cowper was not yet much known; the most prominent poets were Hayley and Darwin; the most distinguished prose-writer, Gibbon. […] Miss Burney, afterwards Madame D’Arblay, surprised the reading world with her entertaining, but somewhat vulgar novels; and Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Charlotte Smith, and […]
Crambe repetita (34)
15 January 2015, around 5.17.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Four Figures: Beau Brummell’ from The Second Common Reader.
Montaigne 1.36
18 September 2015, around 10.02.
Men in various clothes, ca. 1782, from the Wellcome Collection anachronism Now, all things being exactly furnished else-whence with all necessaries to maintaine this being, it is not to be imagined that we alone should be produced in a defective and indigent estate, yea, and in such a one as cannot be maintained without forrain […]
Montaigne 1.43
6 November 2015, around 10.25.
anachronism The linking of sumptuary laws and fear of change, and the need for those in power, for those with influence, to teach ‘people’ how best to live. And albeit most men were apparreled alike, yet were there other sufficient apparant distinctions of mens qualities. How soone doe plaine chamoy-jerkins and greasie canvase doublets creepe […]
rudimentary
8 January 2021, around 5.47.
The other day I happened see something about a fashion photographer’s memoirs and was bored and the ebook was available from the library, so I succumbed to the temptation of my phone and looked. It had the expected condescending, self-assured tone, with a rhythm to its prose like the jolting trot of a school-horse (willful, […]
21.i.2021
21 January 2021, around 8.19.
‘The periwig constitutes a chapter by itself not only in the history of dress but in the history of civilization.’ —Huizinga, Homo Ludens
fits and starts
1 March 2021, around 8.35.
This a juxtaposition of three quotations about clothes, from Boswell, Hamann, and Thomas Carlyle.
the nerve
25 August 2023, around 12.28.
All our criticism consists of reproaching others with not having the qualities that we believe ourselves to have. —Jules Renard (Journals, trans. Louise Bogan & Elizabeth Roget, July 1895) It also consists of reproaching others with having those qualities that we would like to have, but don’t.