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

Nancy Sinatra & Me

Chapter Three of Super Vixens' Dymaxion Lounge went up today, about a pool party at the Playboy Mansion circa 1996. Here's an excerpt:

I make my way back to the pool. I need a loo, and find one in a pool cabana that looks like a seventies wine bar, the kind of place that was always called The Hobbit. There's a dimmer switch next to the commode, and a bowl of bobby pins next to the sink. On the way out I bump into a woman in a tuxedo. She has a cigar in one hand and a sushi roll in the other.

I spot Mel Torme.

At the bar, I try to get a drink, but instead I end up in a pitch meeting with a loathsome, tubby creature who claims to be a movie producer. «It's a John Wayne, Tom Cruise kind of thing!» he exclaims. «A musical kickboxing thing!» As I turn to leave, he slips me his business card. «I went to college with Stallone,» he whispers.

I lose him, because the fifty-four-year-old Nancy Sinatra is about to make her comeback by performing «These Boots Are Made for Walking» on a cramped little stage...

Read the rest of the chapter here. I may have to tease my hair today, in tribute to Nancy.

Posh Spice is no style icon

But then we knew that. If we didn't, Simon Mills (trendmeister journalist and husband of former model Yasmin Mills) would have certainly set us straight with his scathing review of Victoria Beckham's new book, That Extra Half an Inch: Hair, Heels and Everything in Between:

On the pages about jeans, for instance, she just blethers on inconclusively and uninsightfully about all the denims she’s ever bought, covering all cuts and labels, before deciding that dark blue, boot cut, skinny ones are what suits her best. Well, thanks but we already knew that, didn’t we? ...Her mother, clearly cut from the same introspective cloth as her daughter, passed on two vital style tips to her daughter. “Never wear horizontal stripes.” and, ready for this?, “don’t eat beetroot because it stains and I never have to this day.” What insight!

...I’m sorry but I just don’t buy the idea of Victoria Beckham as this pared down, less-is-more style goddess going that “extra inch” for her admirers. I much preferred her as the trashy footballer’s wife with her default-setting glamourflage of hair extensions, Cuprinol skin tone, flared jeans and Gina heels. There was an endearingly tacky honesty about her back then.

It is hard to disagree with Mills, especially when Victoria says things like this:

I’m doing something I’m actually very good at. I can confidently sit in a room with Donatella Versace or anyone in the fashion business and be respected as I know what I’m talking about.

Except I've yet to see any evidence - not least in how Posh dresses and styles herself - that she does.

Bergdorf Blogs

  Opulence a la Bergdorf Goodman 
  Originally uploaded by Adriana Lukas.

My friend Adriana Lukas (previously seen here and here) is working in New York at the moment, and took this picture of a glorious Bergdorf Goodman window display. THIS is beauty.

The title to this post is an alliteration I couldn't resist, a reference to the Plum Sykes book Bergdorf Blondes, which I read on my recent holiday to Cairo. I'm sure it would not have held my attention anywhere but poolside, unless I was doing a study in women more shallow than me (a population I did not previously believe to be large in number. Bergdorf Blondes proved me wrong.). Plum hails from a little village called Ide Hill, near where I used to live in Sevenoaks, Kent (Plum was educated in Sevenoaks, which is the closest town to Ide Hill). It is about as far removed from the Upper East Side as one can get, but much more picturesque. Then again, there are no shop front windows like this in Ide Hill...

Miller Harris' Citron Citron

There continue to be signs that I may someday grow up to be an adult.  For instance, it isn't at all unusual for me to find that something I once looked down my nose at has in fact been above my head (a trick of the ego, all done with mirrors).  Like Jeffrey Eugenides, I didn't appreciate Henry James' Portrait of a Lady the first time I read it, in my teens, but in my 30s found its bitter, twisted heart and saw the shimmers on the surface, too.

The same thing happened the other day when I absently dabbed on some of Miller Harris' Citron Citron.  I've had the bottle for years, and always keep it out as it's one of the prettiest I own, but I remember distinctly rolling my eyes at what I considered yet another citrus scent for sissy girls who can't handle perfume for real women.  At the time I was heavy into the orientals, and no fragrance without dark, narcotic weightiness seemed worth my attention.  Sophomoric?  You betcha.  Like a college student who has discovered Sartre and Genet for the first time....

But now I find that the Miller Harris citrus scent has layers of aromatics and woods, including basil, cedarwood and cardamom, rolling like smooth bass notes beneath the sparkly lemon-orange surface (which also hides a dash of bitter lime).  It's not the least bit "pretty," nor even "womanly."  It is, however, extremely ladylike in that vaguely threatening, complex Jamesian sense of the word--every bit like something Isabel Archer would wear.

Rupert Everett in Hollywoodland

Thanks to Kate Coe at Fishbowl for pointing me to Evening Standard's series of installments of Rupert Everett's book, Red Carpets and Banana Skins, about his adventures with Hollywood divas.  Breathtaking, brain-swallowing passages of beautiful writing, like this about Julia Roberts:

Like Madonna — of whom, much more tomorrow — Julia smelt vaguely of sweat, which I thought was very sexy. There is a male quality to the female superstar. There has to be. If a girl is going to survive in Hollywood, she must develop special ‘people skills’.

Flocks of executive seagulls will try to take her and drop her onto the rocks. She must learn to f*** them before they f*** her if she is to survive, so she becomes a kind of she-man, a beautiful woman with invisible balls. After sex with a man, she fights the desire to eat him.

For him, and all the hims like him, the smell of her sweat is a strange and powerful reminder, attractive and terrifying, of who is wearing the trousers. It marks him out as her territory.

The best writing about women, by a man, that I've read since J.G. Ballard's memoir, The Kindness of Women.

Beauties: Adrienne Barbeau

Not bad for a 61 year-old former scream queen, and the original inventor of the breast.  I have several long drives coming up, and I plan to spend at least one of them listening to her memoir, There Are Worse Things I Could Do.  I hear she actually wrote it.

More summer reading

Yesterday I drove into LA and back, which gave me just enough time to listen to the three hour abridged version of Katherine Graham's memiors.  What's most interesting about the book to me is the contrast between the two CEOs portrayed:  Graham's husband Phil, who was thrust into his publisher role at the remarkably early age of 31, and Katherine, who took over the job after his death.  Phil:  manic depressive, driven, prodigal, daring.  Katherine:  late-blooming, deliberate, lucid, brave.

Both styles have a lot to recommend them, and both were remarkable leaders.

What's the difference between bravery and daring, you ask?  Daring was making acquisitions like Newsweek, pushing the company to grow from $3.50 a share to $300 a share.  That was Phil's style.  Bravery is knowing you're taking a risk, and deciding it's worth it, or that it's the right risk to take at the right time.  As when Katherine gave Washinton Post editor Bill Bradley the go-ahead to publish the Pentagon Papers despite enormous pressures--the decision was hers alone. 

As different as the two of them were, they each seem to have been the right leader at the right time.  Many years ago the Economist published a brilliant article that facetiously (but only just) posited the obsolescence of men. It took a historical view, saying that men and their testosterone were good for nation-building and conquering, while estrogen-driven women were good for running adaptive economies (which is what a household is).  Now, if taken in the broadest cultural metaphorical terms, doesn't this help us look at our assumptions about how things ought to be done?  I.e., that feminine management styles may be better suited to operating businesses, while masculine styles may be better suited to starting or growing them?  (Note: either a man or woman can be masculine or feminine in personal style, of course, it's just a broad metaphor.)

It seems clear to me that any debate about which style is "better" misses the point--that's like thinking you need to choose between listening and talking, when it takes both to form a dialogue. 

The Flower and Willow World

I, along with 4 million other people, read Arthur Golden's romantic Obi-ripper, Memoirs of a Geisha, with relish.  But I stayed up until 2 am last night finishing Geisha, A Life by Mineko Iwasaki, the woman whose confidences Golden may or may not have betrayed in cribbing for his potboiler.

Mineko, who was Kyoto's top Geisha in the late 60s and early 70s, wasn't happy with Golden's fictionalized portrayal of her.  "Geisha are not prostitutes. They are performance artists, improvised one woman shows," she told the Far East Economic Review in 2000. So she wrote her own book.  To me, hers is far more fascinating, because she shows herself as a spoiled brat, hardened business woman, romantic idiot and above all, true artist--and because she paints a clear picture of the "Flower and Willow World's" financial, political, social and moral economy.

Mineko is absolutely correct in her analogy to performance art.  Imagine Martha Stewart's entertaining skills, Arnold Schwarzenegger's physical prowess and control, and then throw Martha Graham and Mark Rothko in, and you have an idea of the level of maniacal accomplishment geisha can achieve.  (Although Mineko also describes a drunken lout of a Geisha who had to be carried home by her hair almost every night, but was "put up with" because she was an absolute genius as a drummer.)

But Geisha were also rather high up the economic ladder.  Mineko worked seven days a week for seven years, earning, she estimated, $500K a year, and this was thirty years ago.  She was the top performer, so presumably the drum playing Calamity Jin didn't do quite as well, but you get the idea. 

Mineko portrays Kyoto's Maiko and Geiko (they aren't called Geisha in Kyoto) as dynamic, independent business women who are free to form romantic attachments with or without marriage, and to bear or adopt children as they please.  An assertion that would appear to be borne out by the fact that her husband, a painter, took her last name when they married.  Mineko was the head of an important business/household, and her name--which she in turn took from her Geisha adoptive mother, was the one that mattered most.   

But it's the portrayal of the art of beauty that's most stunning here.  Physical, personal beauty and fine art are conflated in this culture.  The geisha wear and perform the culture's highest art forms, and by doing so in an intimate, dinner party setting, they draw their audience into participation.  What a way to make an art community thrive.

Mineko was a master dancer, and of necessity an art patron: during her career, she commissioned 300 kimono at $5K to $7K apiece--and hair ornaments, fans, etc.  "All of the kimono worn by Maiko and geiko are one of a kind," she writes.  "Many of them are given names, like paintings, and are treasured as such."  She recounts one incident in which she was entertaining Prince Charles and he impulsively decided to do her the honor of signing his autograph to her fan.  Mineko was furious that he should deface a work of art, and let him know it in the most deliciously subtle and withering terms--and threw the fan promptly in the trash. Geisha, contrary to popular misconceptions, are not meek, even with princes.

Cherries in the Snow

That is, as any makeup junkie worth her salt knows, the name of one of Revlon's most famous, best-selling lipsticks. It's also what I thought of as soon as I spotted this gorgeous wedding dress while walking around the neighbourhood where my hotel is, in Zaragoza, Spain this afternoon. This being Spain, the shop was shut, so I couldn't go inside and get a better photo of this beauty. Instead, I tried to think of one woman I know who could carry off this look. Not many names spring to mind.

In my mind's eye, I can see it on someone with alabaster skin and dark, nearly jet-black hair. Her makeup would be minimal: only the hint of blush, maybe some black liquid liner on the upper lids, mascara, and - of course - Cherries in the Snow or some other deep, true, blue-based red on her lips.

I keep trying to imagine which celebrity female could pull this off, and not even Angelina Jolie seems quite right. If she were less fragile-looking, I'd say Renee Zellweger might do it justice. Monica Bellucci isn't pale enough. Winona Ryder would be good, if she weren't Winona Ryder. At the moment, only Nigella Lawson strikes me as approaching suitable for this.

Cherries in the Snow is also the name of a new novel by Emma Forrest - which I spotted on the shelves while stocking up on reading material for my flight this morning. It's about an English expat working at a cosmetics firm in New York, coming up with clever, grunge-y names for colours. Here I thought I was the only one who'd ever imagined doing that for a living...

Makeovers at the Beauty Counter of Happiness

Author and illustrator Ilene Beckerman's books are droll, childlike and sophisticated. Her masterpiece, Love, Loss and What I Wore, is like a Salinger novel told in pictures.  Beckerman's latest, Makeovers at the Beauty Counter of Happiness is slighter, but has its charms.  In a series of casual musings inspired by the recepit of an invitation to a 50-year grade school reunion, she fusses and frets over losing weight, writes mash notes to Marilyn Monroe and Ava Gardner, and generally behaves like an eleven year-old in a sixty year-old's body--not quite what Sinatra meant by Young at Heart.

Here's a gem:

Once I dreamed I was in a fancy mall.  It was probably the Short Hills Mall in New Jersey.  The stores were all boutiques selling designer body parts.

I charged a pair of Manolo Blahnik feet, a Chanel chin, and a perfectly matched set of boobs designed by Vera Wang exclusively for me.  On my way out, I picked up a Versace midriff on sale.  For the first time in my life, I was finally perfect.