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Live as well as you dare…..
I happened upon the Letter from Sydney Smith to Lady Georgianna Morpeth, 1820, and it so aptly advises what to do in the melancholoy times that come to all of us. My favorite…
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Isn’t She Lovely?
I love the month of October; it is heralded in by my birthday and it begins the happy run up to the holidays. As my custom, I watch the DVD of Mona Lisa…
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Dream Job
I had a dream of a job once. And I worked a full fall season there and so it is only natural that when August gives its page over to September, and my…
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Joan
My mother has always been a petite little thing. And she’s always loved clothes. Somehow she manages to find the perfect well-made garment among all the masses of cheaply made clothes at our…
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Lipstick Love
I strolled through a grove of dress material and found myself at a counter piled with jars of face creams and lipsticks…I caught sight of my own face, colourless and worried-looking, the eyes…
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Fashion in Literature
I am possessed by the beauty of the past. And while a vintage novel’s domestic details—like a cut crystal bowl brimming with oranges in a Christmas tableau—stirs my heart, the rousing happens moreso…
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Jane
I thank my 10th grade Gothic Literature teacher, Miss Otis, everytime I watch Masterpiece Theater’s adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre. If it were not for Miss Otis, I might have missed…
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Single Note
Victorian beauties didn’t have the dazzling array of perfumes to choose from we modern women enjoy. Their fragrances were mostly single note toilet waters and colognes – lavender, violet, tuberose – nothing like…
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There’s a Kind of Hush…
For me, Herman’s Hermits 1967 hit song seems to be heralding in spring, the year’s softest season. And it is only natural that the fashion song I sing takes me back to 1967…
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Someone I Love
Someone I love has been very ill. But she’s going to be alright. She has my spirit, my eyes, and now my illness. I’ve handled mine well and I will teach her to…
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Candybox
I collect vintage woman’s magazines, particularly, those from the 1930’s – 40’s. They have some darling photographs that recall great fashion eras when women dressed to kill every single day, often on shoestring…
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Christmas Beauty
What makes a Christmas Beauty? That’s what my 1942 Woman’s Home Companion asks me each year. A favorite Christmas Beauty has always been Anne Hilton, played by the lovely Claudette Colbert, in the…