Peek-a-boo

I've been doing my washing today, haven't got a stitch on except my shoes.
I'm all in the rude under this dress...

I only tell you 'cause you are bound to have noticed.

Imperial Chinese court summer robe of embroidered gauze

You...uh...you can't see through this dress can you? 

I have been worried for fear of embarrassing you...

Oh, Mr. Sloane! Don't betray your trust...

Kath in the film version of Joe Orton's Entertaining  Mr. Sloane

Now playing:  Siouxsie and the Banshees - Peek-A-Boo

Inspired

Alexander Rodchenko

Prototype 576 table light, 1971 

Made by Arteluce, 1971

Based on an idea of Germano Celant. Lights in the style of the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s, particularly after works by Alexander Rodchenko. Having acquired consent from the artist's widow, lights 576 and 577 were realised in very limited editions in the early 1970s.

One has to take several different shots of a subject,  from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again - Alexander Rodchenko

Now playing: Arthur-Vincent Lourié - Synthesis for piano op. 16

Does she still exist?

Who?

The woman who could carry a rattan Kelly.

Now playing: Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong - Summertime 

Wicked...

But,  couldn't help wondering whether the sale will be at Christie's or at Sotheby's?
And, would it be the scrum all the previous single collectors' sales have been in the past...
In the words of Noxeema Jackson, Miss Thing's got some stuff.
Undoubtedly, for the time being at least, nothing more than a baroque worry. 

Iris Apfel’s Exuberant Apartment

Architectural Digest, June 2011

Now playing: Salt 'n' Pepa - I Am The Body Beautiful

at Home

Lord and Lady Rendlesham

Their country house decorated by David Mlinaric in the late 1970s.

 

from Mlinaric on Decorating

David Mlinaric, The end of the Sixties - 
 

Everybody was to some extent camera shy. Nobody really wanted to go over the top in being conspicuous. The magazines that were interested in exposing this new thing, like Vogue or Queen were fairly uncritical to begin with, not like nowadays where everybody wants to score points off somebody else. The current celebrity thing has a lot to do with making a lot of money and we didn't have that aspiration. You could go out to lunch for seven and sixpence, and if you got fifty pounds for a photo shoot in a German magazine … you would just go out to lunch. We never thought it was the target, to make a lot of money. 

Now playing:  Big Country - In A Big Country

The curious Mr. McBean

Angus McBean
Self portrait as Neptune, 1939

"My mother and I completely redecorated our first £600 house. there was a variety of paints and styles, but there was one room which I had papered completely with a gold metal paper stuck on canvas, rather disgusting. and there was an awful lot of black paint everywhere. I had read somewhere that if you poured the top off gloss paint you got matt paint. So I did, and so it was, but alas it never really dried. When it was all done, my mother took against the house and so we advertised it for sale as ‘an artistically decorated house’. this term, applied to a house in South Wales, had never been heard before, it was something completely new. Newport was dazzled. people used to come and look round and say ‘Yes, it is artistic’– and so it was. We sold it at an £800 profit, with the money we bought a much better house, and my mother was bitten by the bug of buying and doing up houses in which I would do most of the painting and decorating.” - from Angus McBean: Facemaker by Adrian Woodhouse

Angus McBean photographed for Harpers & Queen, 1986
Flemings Hall, Suffolk

For more images of and insight into Flemings Hall see Smouldering brick and Mick Jagger by The Blue Remembered Hills.

Now playing: The Smiths - Asleep

Blast from the past

Madge Garland (1898-1990)

photograph by Cecil Beaton

The Australian-born Garland was fashion director at British Vogue under its second editor-in-chief Dorothy Todd. Todd was not only her editor but also her mentor and her lover. Their time at Vogue was brief, 1922-1926. In this short period Garland and Todd forged friendships with some of the more significant members of the Bloomsbury set such as Virginia Woolf and Rebecca West. A reflection of Todd's desire to transform Vogue into a magazine more about literary content than about stays and . . . petticoats.

Todd was sacked by Conde Nast in 1926 for what was perceived to be an all too bohemian bent. Todd's career never recovered. Garland, on the other hand, went on to become a leading fashion journalist and textile expert. In 1947 she was appointed to London's Royal College of Art as the first Professor of Fashion Design. 

In the latter part of her career Garland wrote numerous books on art, the history of fashion and gardening. 

Changing Face of Beauty: 4000 years of beautiful women

Now playing: Kate Bush - This Woman's Work