Jack & Hill: A Beauty Blog - make-up, cosmetics, perfume, and the substance of style

Beauties: Rachida Dati

The fact that French Justice Minister Rachida Dati gave birth five days before this picture, at the age of forty-three, is extraordinary and remarkable, but not a great moral achievement for herself or all womankind, as this kind of news story typically tends to imply. What I am impressed by is this woman's sheer and utter Frenchness: is this the most impressive example ever seen of a black skirt and jacket with plain earrings? She seems to wear the jacket every day, too, knowing her style and sticking to it, admirably.

The smile speaks volumes of course, and is unusually glam for a politician, or even Carla Bruni. Presumably having walked from the delivery room to the Palais de l'Élysée while maintaining secret knowledge of the baby's father (especially if it was President Sarkozy) must make one feel quite powerful, but that gorgeous velvet jacket- with the turtleneck- and the Mediterranean-style hoops! More mature, sexy and self-assured than in the pregnancy photo, she has something of the ultra-glamorous Simone De Beauvoir slash Princess Diana in the black minidress wronged woman (as in "wronged? me? ha!") about her. Wonderful.

Beauties: Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama reminds me a great deal of Hillary Clinton. She's a lawyer, she's a working mother, and when she married, she wasn't the one thought to be making a good match.... Maybe someday Michelle Obama will be our first woman president.

Beauties: Eleanor Roosevelt

I did two things this weekend: voted by mail, and attended an AAUW event in honor of Eleanor Roosevelt's 124th birthday, which was October 11th. I had three partisan races on my ballot, and voted for a Democrat, a Libertarian and a Republican. I have never voted Republican in a national race, but I tend to like fiscally conservative candidates at the local level, where they are in charge of budgets, not constitutions. Michelle Obama got my vote for first lady.

Speaking of first ladies, Eleanor Roosevelt is one of the most magnificent humans to have lived on our planet. In 1933, she began holding female-only press conferences, in the knowledge that this would force all the major newspapers to hire women to cover the White House. In 1939, she broke with the DAR over their refusal to let Marian Anderson sing at Constitution Hall. In my book, she was the greatest visionary social leader since the revolution. Here are a few quotes to give a sense of just how sharp she really was:

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.

A woman is like a tea bag- you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people.

Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both.

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

“I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.”

Beauties: Sarah Palin

I don't "get" Obama, even though I may well vote for him. I'm not even talking about the politics, just the phenomenon of the personality cult. I see others digging him so soulfully, and I find their belief credible, but he holds no magnetism for me. I don't hate but also don't get Elizabeth Taylor either, the Beatles or Star Wars (give me Marilyn, the Beach Boys and Battlestar Gallactica).

But I get Sarah Palin. I will, I am sure, come to like her either less or more as I learn more about her, but based on what I have read about her record, and on her performance at the RNC, I now think of her as a fine example of her type: she's a natural, so comfortable in a position of leadership as to be quite organically fearless. Setting aside the specifics of her positions, or her party's positions, some of which I agree with and some of which I don't, even setting aside the words and phrases that she did or didn't write in her speech, I saw in her demeanor what I took for the rarest brand of fearlessness, the kind that comes of complete immersion in a calling, from being in that flow state that I myself have only felt a few times here and there (in my case while writing a novel or editing a newspaper). She was in her element, and it was a thing to see.

There are different forms of fearlessness. Psychopaths are fearless, and you want to avoid putting those in office. Stupid people can be fearless when they don't know any better, and stubborn people sometimes seem to have Novocaine in their veins. Then there's the kind of fearlessness that is acquired through repetitive risk taking, met with repetitive success. That's the kind I saw in Palin last night, and that I read in her record as a reformer who isn't afraid to be hated.

Brazen naturalness

Alice Bachini-Smith, a longtime friend of Jack & Hill, joins us as a guest blogger today. Welcome, Alice!

One of the many things I hate about the internet is blogs with a picture of a big grinning ninny in a corporate suit on the top. Glistening helmet-hair and blinding Hollywood Grand-Canyon grins really are outdated now. The only people who should look like newsreaders in 2008 are newsreaders, and possibly not even them. So when you need a portrait for your résumé or profile, please do not pay someone to photoshop away your entire personality- the idea of a potrait is, and always has been, to look impressive, cool and nice. Not lobotomised.

I am a huge fan of the Brazen Careerist blog by Penelope Trunk. The way Penelope puts opposites together and gets away with it while still running a business is dazzling, and makes me wish I'd watched her beach volleyball skills in action, back in the day. Divorce and entrepreneurism, sex and investors, farming and fear- in Penelope's hands, all these things are related. She could probably divine career advice from your grandmother's freshly-knitted dishcloth if she wanted to. The woman has chutzpah!

So I was thrilled to see some new lovely, real and gorgeous Penelope pictures on her blog, ones which do true justice to the personality of the writing. And it's no surprise to learn that the Yahoo company and photoshopping were both involved with the traditional, more dentally-oriented one we are more used to seeing, on the header.

Here we have the old Penelope on the left and the new Penelope on the right. One is terrifyingly pale, and the other is either nonchalantly bored by the tedious elegance of the whole media hoo-hah or thinking about sex. And I think we all know which looks most utterly fabulous.

Of course, Penelope's new pics are a highly professional job. But in these digital days, you don't need a 4-hour studion session to come up with a good portrait. Good light, an outfit you love and a friend with an eye for photography can achieve more than the professionals you can't afford. This is something that is really worth spending a bit of time on, especially if, like me, nearly all the pictures you have of yourself were taken by a cross-eyed husband.

Beauties: Christina Hendricks

When you see Christina Hendricks in contemporary dress, it's almost jarring how out of place her voluptuous body and dainty, porcelain face appear to be--it's as if the real world can't quite contain her. She is built to be an idealized period piece, whether as a 60's bombshell in Mad Men, pictured here, or a futuristic conwoman in Firefly. Whew, not since Lynda Carter dressed up as Wonder Woman have we seen a wasp waist like this.

NB: Sadly, I think the undergarments required to make the vavoom happen in quite this way are deadly uncomfortable, and I despair of ever recreating this look, but it does make me wonder: why don't doctors offer women torpedo-shaped implants in addition to the humdrum, melon-shaped kind, just for the sake of variety?

Beauties: Lesley Ann Warren

I have had a huge girl crush on Lesley Ann Warren ever since she sashayed though the delectable 80s cult classic Choose Me, which is up there with Some Like It Hot as one of the all time great sex comedies. So I am delighted to see that she's now on TV every week in the new USA Network show In Plain Sight, which you can catch on Hulu. I'm happy to report that she is as achingly kittenish at 62 as ever, well cast as gritty Mary McCormack's ditzy sexpot mom. Sure she's had some botox she didn't need, but she still oozes sex like no other actress half her age.

McCormack isn't half-bad either, and she gets one of my favorite TV lines in recent memory, when her tough cop character wrinkles her nose and says, "What's the deal with babies? I don't get it."

Beauties: Tafv Sampson

My niece, Tafv Sampson, is graduating from high school today. This is her, on the right, returning from a wild road trip to California with her friend Robin and the band Justice. You can read all about the adventure here and here (Tafv's mom happens to be Jack & Hill contributor Nancy Rommelmann).

I also love these pics of Tafv modeling for the avant garde fashion cooperative Seaplane.

Tafv is stylish without being trendy, she makes her own fashion and art (I have bought both clothes and photographs from her), and the most devastatingly glamorous thing about her, I'd say, is how casually sane she is. In my day, artist/adventuresses were brilliant and impulsive, but also troubled and a mess. We didn't get to where she is until we were about thirty.

Happy graduation, Tafv, from Aunt Hillary and Aunt Jackie!

Beauties: Kiki Smith

I am going to be waiting outside the Gap when it opens on the 15th, to make sure I get one of the limited edition t-shirts designed by the art world goddess Kiki Smith. The Gap, in partnership with the Whitney Museum, is producing shirts by thirteen artists, including such sirens as Smith, Marilyn Minter, Hanna Liden, Barbara Krueger and Sarah Sze, and such sirons (which I hereby declare to be the masculine form of siren) as Chuck Close and Jeff Koons.

Last year Target issued a limited edition of artist-designed bath towels and I happily snapped up one by Cindy Sherman. I am all for mass-produced art, and I'm glad to see this from the Gap, which has been struggling of late to find its mojo.

Pic of the t-shirt after the jump!

Beauties: Kingi Carpenter, the Betsey Johnson of Toronto

Kingi Carpenter, owner of Peach Berserk in Toronto, is her own best advertisement; wearing a baby blue ruched top of her own design, with babydoll pink lipstick, her arms covered in ink from silkscreening fabrics, she is the very picture of the midwestern farm girl who made good as a fashion designer in the big city. This is what Dorothy would have looked like at 45, had she decided not to click her heels together and go home, but to stay in the big, bright Emerald City with her fabulous new friends and make a life for herself.

I have always thought of Toronto as a mecca of street style and alternative fashion, and was excited to visit Queen Street West, a neighborhood of shops, bars and restaurants which has grown up around the Ontario College of Art and Design. The first shop I stumbled into was Peach Berserk, where I instantly felt that old hungry-eyed yearning that only comes when you walk into certain temple-like stores. The shotgun shop is crammed to bursting with colorful garments in hand-silkscreened jersey, silk and taffeta that reminded me strongly of Betsey Johnson in the late 70s/early 80s, and when I mentioned this to Kingi she smiled and said, "I made a trip to New York in the early 80s, and when I walked into the Betsey Johnson store I said, 'This is what I want to do with my life.'"

I was surprised, when I began fingering the various garments, at how substantial the fabrics were and how impeccable the finish work was--something you don't see often in clothes with this much edge. Kingi and her lovely assistants print and sew in an open workshop in the back of the store, and will custom make any garment in any fabric. It's also hard to find clothes this youthful and fun that also fit a womanly body, and these are deftly cut to flatter the body.

Kingi is a great lifestyle example for my generation of artsy women who came of age in the 70s and now want to figure out how to approach middle age without succumbing to that dull urban classiness that seems to be the general prescription for how to look good after 40. There are a couple more pics after the jump!