Fashion's Fabulous Females: Focus on Diana Vreeland

          'The only real elegance is in the mind; if you've got that, the rest really comes from it.'



Columnist for Harper's Bazaar, Editor-in Chief of Vogue, standard setter for costume exhibitions, personal advisor to Jacqueline Kennedy: confident, opinionated, beyond chic. Vreeland lived and breathed fashion and advocated constant reinvention of one's self.

'Don't look back. Just go ahead. Give ideas away. Under every idea there's a new idea waiting to be born.'

In honour of Ms. Vreeland's famous Harper's Bazaar article series in the 1930's, (containing such gems as 'Why don't you turn your child into an Infanta for a fancy dress party?') here are few simpler 'Why Don't You's'  that might make your day a bit brighter, enjoy!

Why Don't You...

 - Spend a day with your inner artiste, take some time to be creative: draw, write, dream...

 - Talk a walk, even better with a furry companion...

 - Make new friends: donate some time to your local pensioners home or hospital...

 - Treat yourself to a full day of pampering: whatever  means 'treat' to you...

 - Read a classic novel, they are classics for a reason! Try a Balzac, Dickens, or Bronte, a Woolf, a        Hemingway or Fitzgerald, an Austen or Eliot, the list is endless...

 - Go old school Try a day with fresh food, gathered the way grandma would have done it, before the days of superstores; visit your local butcher, baker, grocer, cheesemaker. Sit down to dinner, turn off the telly. Converse...

 - Sing - out loud. Dance - like a child. Live every day like it is your last...

I Can't Help It, I Love...Men in Makeup

The male of our species has been adorning himself long before the seemingly anomolous phenonmenon that is the Metrosexual came along in the early Nineties.  We need only look to the cosmetic predilictions of the ancient civilisations of Egypt (kohl and malachite), Persia (henna), Greece and Rome (white lead and chalk foundation), the Celtic warriors donning of blue-green woad for protection and intimidation of the enemy, Native American Indian warpaint...and so on.  There is no question that men in makeup was acceptable and popular.  In fact, it wasn't until Victorian times that the current attitudes of 'women only' in the cosmetics department became the norm, and that was a reaction to a society's fear of too much sex and pleasure...hmmm