Category Archive: Grande Dames
Leona Dare, a Mega-muse
Leona Dare (1855-1922), one of Encyclopedia of the Exquisite‘s brightest stars, is someone you should know. She was a circus queen in the late 19th century, thrilling audiences across Europe and around the world by going up in a hot-air…
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…
The Highest Notes
What I’ve always hoped to find in Milan, during many, many fashion weeks here, are traces of the glamorous Maria Callas, who took to the grand La Scala stage in the mid-1950s, and took the city by storm. Sometimes, seeing…
Let them eat….
It’s now thought that if Marie Antoinette made her most famously un-p.c. statement at all, she said, “Let them eat brioche!” and not, as legend has it, ‘cake.’ (Rousseau offered the disambiguation.) Let me eat brioche! The eggy puffed cake…
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