Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Let us not then speak ill of our generation...let us not speak well of it either

Dear World,


Let us not look to Hollywood adaptations
of our favourite books for our daily dress.

Recently, I spied an obtuse-looking lad photograped in mismatched tweeds announcing that his 'style' was borrowed from Brideshead Revisited—the film. Oh, goody, I thought, please, please let me be encircled by yet another lather of unlettered dullards. Do let's be ensorcelled by the surly onscreen charm of Sebastian Flyte. Let us dress in waistcoats, starched yolks, Oxford brogues. But let us not read one page of the original work, although do let us carry about said work in an oiled-leather satchel.

Let us look too to that ridiculous moving picture of the love-letters of Dylan Thomas, The Edge of Love. Let us all admire Sienna Miller's moue but not the dipsomaniac's sullen art. Let us now wear tea dresses and scratchy cardigans. Let us buy beautiful fifties cotton sun-dresses and take the scissors to their knee-length hems.

And let's look onwards to Kubric’s apple-cheeked Lolita--a favourite of the girl-blogger. A proliferation of girls snapped in heart-shaped specs and slick mouths are popping up everywhere. Let us look to emulating sexually precocious twelve-year-old girls and to Chuppa-chups, and to malt and French fries.

And if we must read, let us look to all fictional floozies. I am made rather uneasy, indeed, (as is Ms Susan Faludi) by a staggering number of women exhibiting an eager return to the feminine—the domestic—the feeble. Local fashion bloggers have been piping in unison that Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby is a ‘literary crush’ of theirs. Insubstantial, flimsy, cotton-wool Daisy. Daisy: a figurehead for all the vapidity and callousness of the roaring twenties. Do let's look to Daisy and take her remark, "[...] a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool." as sterling instruction.

MV

4 comments:

  1. whoever you are, i love you

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  2. I am choking on my Devonshire tea as I read. Such a shame my perfect white summer frock which makes me feel like Daisy is now ruined by my splutter. Such a shame.

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  3. Pam, you flatterer, you.

    Patrizia, if you truly are Daisy, soiling one dress shouldn't matter as you would most certainly have a superfluity of white dresses.

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  4. A 'beautiful little fool' is an apt description for the handful of local fashion bloggers I've just endured in the last hour.

    Do keep it up.

    Josephine

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