"THERE were velvet dresses ... and lace dresses, and embroidered ones, and hats ... and muffs, and boxes of tiny gloves and handkerchiefs and silk stockings ...". In A Little Princess, the protagonist Sarah Crew has a perfect wardrobe, looked after by her French maid Mariette: "petticoats with lace frills on them -- frills and frills". Today, I visited my friend Sadaf in her boutique Pearls and Shells, and felt a little like Sarah myself!
In the 19th century, women were advised to be modest and circumspect, and luxurious fashion was viewed with suspicion by some moralists. Not so in A Little Princess! Lace, muslin and lace trimmings are happiness, while austere and worn out clothes are misery. Sarah remains strong and dignified, whether in richness or in poverty. Yet, fashion is an index to the from rich-to-poor-and-back-to-rich plot. In the final scene, Sarah appears again happy and glittering, like a princess!
Sadaf's boutique is lovely and full of amazing clothes --lace, embroidery, ethnic, jeans-- as well as accessories, some imported and some handmade. My friend was kind enough to let me try on these spectacular clothes and we took pictures! It was tremendous fun. I felt like a top model!
Personally, I bought an amazing lipstick kisses blouse, which I will wear and show in the blog in a later post!
Have a good Monday evening xxx
SINCE I read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I imagine myself a little like Helen Graham whenever I go out to draw! Here I am today with my Moleskin red artist's journal!
Helen Graham is Anne Bronte's revolutionary heroine, who leaves an abusive husband and starts her own studio. She goes out into the country to paint, and earns her own living!
Though Helen is not my favorite heroine from literature, I do think of her whenever, like Helen, like today, I sit with my pencils and artist's journal to draw landscape.
Today was a beautiful, warm day. It's the day of a grand fair in my hometown, but I never go, because I suffer from nausea and claustrophobia and get ill when I am in a crowd.
While everyone drove to the beach for the fair, I drove to the countryside to draw! I did a simple sketch of the wheat fields with the hills in the distance.
Then I went back to town (carefully avoiding the beach front) and bought a frappe (iced coffee Greek and Cyprus style).
Lipstick for the day was the Pink Lolita herself, the Princess of Lipsticks. Nothing beats pink, and nothing beats the Pink Lolita!
You can see everything in my journal, pictured below.
This was one, beautiful day, the first of June and the first of summer. Hoping for more beautiful days to come! xxx
ROSE gardens, poetry and hymns -- welcome to The Lipstick Papers Weekend Review and the book A History of the Fragrant Rose!
This is a lovely little book by Allen Paterson, an experienced horticulturalist, who trained at the Cambridge University Botanic Garden, and is now the director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Ontario, Canada.
The book features numerous colored illustrations, and contains chapters on the history of the rose, rose gardens, the rose in botany and medicine, and the rose in poetry. The chapters on history begin from antiquity to end in modern times!
According to legend, the rose springs from the blood of the Goddess Aphrodite. While running to meet her lover Adonis, Aphrodite stumbles on a thorn: her blood runs down to earth to produce the beautiful flower!
The rose is sacred both to Aphrodite and to the Virgin Mary, the rose and Queen of Heaven!
If you want to hear a beautiful 1970s (psychedelic) Greek song about a white rose, copy paste this link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36NAcFRORpA
Άσπρο μου Ρόδο, means My own white rose in Greek, and the performer is the fabled Greek singer Marinella!
TODAY, the coolest thing happened when I went to the opening of a friend's boutique! I had lately been thinking how much I wanted a white, knit summer jacket, and found it exactly!!! You can't get better than this!
The boutique in question is Riva boutique in my hometown, an old and beloved place, which has moved to a larger and brighter location! Here is myself with the owner, Ms Rena Katsi.
The launch of the new store featured an amazing collection of summer wear, from jeans to maxi knit dresses, pretty blouses, bags and all sorts of accessories! Lace is everywhere too, and I was impressed. Everything is in pastel, romantic style, with clothes for every occasion.
Lipstick for today was my electric pink from Estee Lauder!
Nothing beats lipstick and nothing beats pink. One of the most annoying scenes in literature is, for me, the moment when Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Bronte's Villette expresses dislike for a pink dress. Eventually, Lucy agrees to wear the pink silk since she can combine it with a black lace mantilla. Looking at herself in the mirror, she is surprised at how well everything seems to suit her. No surprise here for me! You can't go wrong with pink.
I had a lovely time at the opening and I wish them all the best with the new store!
A GIRLS' NIGHT is great for fortune-telling, as my last night's outing with girl friends proves! One of my friends is an expert in various types of fortune telling and read my coffee cup!
Reading fortune from coffee or tea leaves is called tasseography or tasseomancy. Here in Cyprus, it is a long and favorite tradition: we are in the intersection of East, Oriental and West, so our culture and tradition is kaleidoscopic and varied!
Of course, our preferred method of tasseography has to do with coffee: tea is not popular here. In fact, I didn't know that you could read the fortune from tea leaves until I started studying English literature! I found it in a novel, though I am not sure I remember which ;-)
To read the coffee cup, you drink the coffee first, then put the cup upside down in the plate. You wait for about 15 minutes for the coffee dregs to run down, and you read the patterns inside the cup! Coffee reading goes back to the medieval period, and is full of complex symbolism. My friend's reading was mainly good news, and I have high hopes that it will be accurate! This is because her references to the recent past were spot-on, though it was something she did not know about.
We also talked about beauty and beauty advice, and I got that tip, which apparently comes down from the very old and very wise tradition of Smyrna. (Smyrna is a famous Greek city, now in modern Turkey, which had a long tradition of healers, botanists, soothsayers, sorcerers and beauty experts). If you want to be wrinkle-free, you should apply to your face aloe vera mixed in blender with cognac! Do this every day and you will have no wrinkles whatsoever.
(I don't know about the dosage here, so if you are going to try this do it with extreme caution. If I try it myself I will let you know. I don't have a blender, fresh aloe or cognac, so it is currently in my "to do" list).
Girls' nights out are productive, relaxing and tremendously fun. As you can see, they are also essential in continuing the female tradition of herbalism and beauty expertise! xxx
TONIGHT I went to a poetry evening, with poetry from my friend Yiota Dimitriou, and reading and song by the actress Elena Hadjiafxenti!
Though I was friends with Yiota, I did not know her poetry, and I have to say I loved it!!! The poems are pretty, sensitive, personal and contain a variety of images, allusions and experiences -- train journeys, maps, gardening, The Little Prince. Most of all, I think, the poems are original and true: true to emotion and true to themselves. For my beloved Romantics, truth was the condition for good poetry.
Also, the presentation by Elena was original and atmospheric, almost oneiric. I loved her choice of costume -- the flowing, white evening dress with the lace gloves tied very well with our Mediterranean evening garden and moon! It was all so beautiful!
Poetry, summer and friends are, I believe, an unbeatable combination. Have a good night, wherever you are, always with beauty and a book! xxx
TODAY I visited the new place for a well-known and old boutique in my hometown, and here I am! I remember this boutique since I was a teenager, and I wish them all the best for the new location!
Opening a new shop is always hopeful and adventurous in real life, as in fiction -- I am thinking, for example, of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, where Miss Matty has to open a shop late in life, for survival reasons. In A Woman of Substance, Emma Harte starts a lucrative business career from a small pastry shop in Leeds; in real life, Helena Rubinstein's story begins in a small shop in an obscure Australian town. Though Anastasia Steele only works at Clayton's, she's not the owner, she and Christian Grey have an amazing scene in the store!!!!!!!!!
Opening a store or restaurant is thus always a key event, even in those dreadful Maeve Binchy romances. Some of you may cry, "but Maeve Binchy is one of the best-known romance writers"! I know, yet I dislike her fiction, which most of the time is quite improbable -- think of The Glass Lake. We all have to be meek, plain and plainly dressed. The sexy blonde woman is always empty (Tara Road, Circle of Friends). You know how much this makes me angry. To say that blonde, glamorous and sexy women are empty is as misogynistic as to say that plain brunettes cannot be sexy. In my fiction, I always aim to break stereotypes -- one of the ways I do it is by making the protagonist always blonde, sexy, clever and feisty!
I think the one novel I like from Maeve Binchy is Evening Class, but again that book contains the motif of the beautiful blonde who makes mistakes and does not find happiness.
To get back to my hometown boutique. They have an official opening for the new store this weekend: I can't wait! I will check it out and write all about it in The Lipstick Papers! xxx
GETTING ready to go out and listening to marital advice from George Clooney is the best! I can't tell you how George's marriage will turn out, though I wish him all the best -- what I can tell you is how great he sounds about it!
I loved it when he said that he is proud to be married to such a beautiful and clever woman as Amal Alamoudhin, that he admires her for all she has achieved and that, as he put it, "I am proud to be around". Generally, "proud" is the epithet that run through his discourse.
As we feminists never tire of saying, it is a strong and admirable man who can be married to a woman he perceives as somehow "superior". A woman's strength is not off-putting, though of course not all women can be strong. And the same goes for men too.
To finish the piece with fashion and lipstick, please note my lipstick ring! Lipstick is not only the Queen of cosmetics, it also makes a lovely accessory!
Have a beautiful Saturday night and be well, xxx
HERE is the make-up apparatus for the early 20th century, according to The Saturday Review: lipstick, rouge, powder in various colors, kohl and eyebrow pencil. And here is myself deep in make-up study!
The term make-up was popularized by Max Factor, but I have found it in periodicals as early as 1886. In All the Year Round, Charles Dickens reports that "the whole tribe of cosmetics" is called "make-up" in "theatrical parlance".
The "tribe of cosmetics" was totally distrusted by 19th century conventional minds, and even fashion and beauty columns would not recommend it as late as 1893 (as I saw today in an April 1893 edition of the Bow Bells Magazine).
I am currently working with 19th century periodicals in order to write an article on Victorian beauty discourse from the periodical press. Thanks to the Internet and digitization, we no longer have to travel to Britain to read Victorian magazines!
I will keep you posted on my findings in future posts. Meanwhile, have a good evening, and be well! xxx
IT was such a beautiful day today! Summer's here, and I feel good! In summer, I come out of hibernation and feel wonderful. I relish the heat and I relish the moment I throw off sweaters and cardigans to put on the T-shirts and summer tops.
First stop was the hairdresser, and here I am:
In literature, one of my favorite hairdressing scenes comes from Charlotte Bronte's Villette. Lucy Snowe, the novel's odd and unsympathetic protagonist, cannot believe how much prettier she looks after having her hair done. This is on the occasion of the principal's fete at their school. Madame Beck, the said principal, treats her students and staff with hairdressing, a great dinner and a ball on the day of her fete. Lucy is impressed at how a bit of pampering can change her appearance. Throughout the book, Lucy believes she is plain and even ugly, though it is probably her own sense of inferiority which makes her think so!
My next stop was the bookstore, where you can see me leafing through Jane Eyre, an all-time favorite! Jane does not share Lucy's sense of inferiority about her appearance. Jane knows that she is not a beauty, but she likes to dress well and look nice.
Then I went to the seashore with friends, and generally had a swell time.
It was a long day, where I saw old friends, talked a lot and exchanged news. A day as long as life. I once wrote a poem about this, how some days seem to enclose all of our lives.
And I think that it is days like these which make life beautiful. :-)
