Reasons To Be Cheerful: 1.2,3…

Reason 1: I am very excited about the new magazine/book by Carine Roitfeld ‘CR Book’.

I love her foreword which relays both a vision for her new venture and an appreciation of fashion’s fertile possibilities, plus the sheer joy of motherhood, familial love and abundance.  At the Crillon last July, upon an introduction she sweetly pronounced me ‘the chic girl’ and I was swooning for hours!  New talent combined with visionary leading luminaries, reborn; how exciting: I am sure it will be wondrous.

http://crfashionbook.com

It was listening to the song Quicksand which transformed my career.  After working as an assistant, it took nerves and bravado to launch out as a fledgling stylist on my own.  My lovely former boss, Anna Cockburn in a ‘phone chat/mentoring conversation, did ponder why it took me so long, but I found it scary and when you want something it always feels utterly daunting, like the chance not to reach the stars is incomprehensibly devastating.  After a few tests and even some commissions, I knew I hadn’t quite found my ‘voice’: I dressed more colourfully than the work I was producing.  One day, I chanced upon a secondhand beaten up LP copy of Hunky Dory and listening through the crackles came to ‘Quicksand’.  In a synaesthesian epiphany this was it: the poetic humility soaring with revelations quite casually relayed was my moment of understanding how brave, how open and how resolved I could be…

“I’m not a prophet
or a stone age man
Just a mortal
with the potential of a superman
I’m living on
I’m tethered to the logic
of Homo Sapien
Can’t take my eyes
from the great salvation
Of bullshit faith
If I don’t explain what you ought to know
You can tell me all about it
On, the next Bardo
I’m sinking in the quicksand
of my thought
And I ain’t got the power anymore “

This patchwork springboard of colours, dreams, textures and harmonics burst my heart wide open with the playful possibilities and the hope to dare.

News of the upcoming exhibition at my favourite of museums, The V&A fills my heart with love today…

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/david-bowie-is/

Famous for her idiomatic quips, Diana Vreeland was someone I would have loved to have met, let alone worked with.  I am sure her breadth of vision, her encyclopaedic all-encompassing openness to the opportunity for style to inform content would have been the best fashion education ever.  Social merging with art; fashion taking surreal steps into quixotic visual revolutions; how I wish she had been my editor, even if only for a sitting.

The documentary ‘The Eye Has To Travel’ which ties in with the book of the same name is due at The Curzon later this month.

http://www.curzoncinemas.com/events/details/1367/premierediana-vreeland-the-eye-has-to-travel-qa-lisa-vreeland/