Category Archive:
Balloon Boy
Encyclopedia of the Exquisite covers the first parachute (an umbrella contraption launched in Montpellier, France in 1783) and the first hot-air balloon, the ornate aerostatic machine which took off from Versailles as King Louis XVI watched below. Now a Brooklyn…
Silken Petals
If I lived nearer to the Paris flea market I’d start collecting antique silk flowers, of the sort that used to bedeck the world’s prettiest hats. It’s said that in 1775 Marie Antoinette was presented with a silk rosebud that…
The Woman of 50 Faces
I’m still thinking about John Galliano‘s muse. This season he dedicated his spring collection, which was shown in Paris last week, to Maria Lani, a Polish émigrée who in the late 1920s enthralled Paris’s painters and sculptors from Mogdiliani to Matisse…
Four Pretty Bows
I was wondering this morning about all the different forms of the word ‘bow.’ To bow as a verb, as in ‘to bend the body,’ comes from the proto-Germanic root bugon, as does the archer’s bow, in that it forms…
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