Fifty Shades of Fashion

One of my favorite pictures is The Travelling Companions by Augustus Egg (1862). That the two girls in the painting are identical is immediately obvious.

I read the painting as a metaphor for living -- here we are, ourself and ourself, alone in the compartment of life. Our destination is unknown, but we are comfortable and calm, as indeed we should be.

The color grey in Victorian fashion is sometimes seen as the color of simplicity and even puritanism. However, there are more positive readings, which present grey women's clothes in the 19th century as a symbol of "correct" femininity, "correct" meaning (in those days) marriageable, orderly and attractive. 

There is support for this in literature -- beautiful Dorothea Brooke wears grey in George Eliot's Middlemarch; Jane Eyre tells us that, though she is plain, she likes to look nice, and often wears her silk grey dress with lace and a brooch. Plain Lucy Snowe wears grey in Villette, but so does sexy and exuberant Ginevra Fanshawe. Because of their similar dress the two girls are mistaken for each other from afar.

This year, the color grey looks more glamorous than ever in the luminous creations of Valentin Yudeshkin. Grey never looked so brilliant before!

As for Rachel Zoe, she makes grey appear a shade of white in her spring collection for 2014.

Sean O'Pry, number one male model (and my ideal for male beauty) is as beautiful as ever in this lovely color.








I suppose all shades of grey have a beauty of their own...