The Eye has to travel, Documentary, 2012

I have been confined to my home for a bad back - which has the great advantage, that I can really do nothing else than watch telly, read and sleep. Actually I sleep and think a lot. Yesterday I finally watched a DVD which has been waiting for my attention already quite a while. I think the film was just showed very shortly here in Belgian cinemas, but it is a must for every style conscious person, who happens to be interested in beauty and art and fashion.

The film is quite short, a little bit over an hour, and is a documentary about the "empress of fashion", Diana Vreeland - the women who was for decades editor in chief for American Harper's Bazaar and then American Vogue. It was her who made those magazines into some form or art, not only talking about fashion, but about society and fashion, about stars, new technologies and everything a wide awake woman was and should be interested in.

For her style was something which came with self-education and curiousness for life, not only throwing money at interior designers and fashion popes. The most interesting bits are of course the moments when we hear her speak in an interview she gave already in her 80ies in 1983.  What glamour, personality and what a sharp mind. I was really flabbergasted and got a rush of regret, not to have lived in times like that - for  me the 60ies are perhaps not the ideal adult time zone to have lived in, but the 2 decades before would have been worth inventing a time machine right now on the spot.
All she says has to do with all we live, still today. Off course she is the master of exaggeration - not all is to be taken literally, which sometimes people don't get. "The eye has to travel" - indeed, imagination is something of a wild animal which has to be tamed and then used for bring more fun, more conscience of beauty and more longing in our lives.  Exaggeration for her was the instrument to highlight those  of years gone and years to come. If you note her clothes in the interview, they are always the most simple cuts and colours - nothing loud there. The background is full of colour and fun and wisdom. Today, much of what she did as an editor would not be possible, simply out of economical reasons: who will ship 500 orchids to the Arctic for a single photo shoot?

I watched the film with my daughter, who is in her teens and not particularly - yet - interested in fashion - but she got the essence of the film: Beauty matters and the live we want to live is the life we have to create our selves. In times of internet-shopping and floods of information, cheap heaps of cheap clothes, the art is to source for the things which MEAN something to YOU. Dare it, be somebody,  be yourself, the best self you can be, not just a weak copy of a some magazine's make over story. Dare to be somebody of your own. That is her message, in a nutshell.
If you can get your hands on a copy, watch it.

Interior Decoration

In a next life, I will decorate houses in the dozen. Not just clippings out of magazines and a house in my mind, but the real thing - in the country, in town, at the beach, on a mountain and one in France, too. Preferably an old winemaking chateau. Or better an old and desperate country house in England, or Bavaria?

Interior Decoration is something which never bores me, never. I just feel elated when I get hold of a good interiors decoration magazin, can snuggle up the sofa and have a good read. After this I am refreshed and would like to start right away - but alas, there are nor will be all those houses to provide for all those pleasures. One cannot have it all: the dreams and then the reality..
So I go on doing it in my mind and until now have not been bored with this neither. The advantage: It involves no costs ( unless in the foreseen future we have to pay to have a right to think for ourselves?) and all is possible - you have always to see the bright side of life.
I have changed houses many times in my life, but almost ever I have lived in nice places. (A dear friend told me once, that I would owe him a new addressbook, if we would keep up the speed of moving - his M-Page was full in a mo!) Not big houses or appartements sometimes, but nice. In my childhood I had the privilege to grow up in a big house with much space and a huge garden. There were not enough rooms for each of us, but it did us no harm to share. I had also the privilege to see and take in many old country houses, some of them now altered unrecognizably, some still intact - with the oldfashioned courtousy and Gastfreundschaft which is a rare relict of olden golden days.

When I started to study, I was lucky as well: in Munich I lived always in a nice neighbourhood, in Nymphenburg, in Schwabing, then more or less on the Maximiliansstrasse and at last in the upcoming quarter of the Johannisplatz. I have always felt well in my flats, as small as they were - and I enjoyed to live in a WG  ( Wohngemeinschaft - shared flat) - even if this meant that the chap living with Lilli and me never cleaned the bathroom, considering this to be a girls job. It also meant, that my expensive face cream was shared as was the milk I bought. But the company was great and the fun we had together is unforgettable. The start of a wonderful and still ongoing friendship.
All my rooms and interiors seem to look the same - I have very early developped a style of my own, being more "mine" as the years advance and I see the world. Or at least I hope.

Entree of House Wittgenstein in Vienna

Recently I get more and more interested in modern art and architecture - most of it is still a mystery to me, but I could imagine to live in a very modern and streamlined house - but only with my own furniture and my own way of arranging it. It could look very interesting indeed. The idea is not mine - alas. I picked it up most certainly in the fotographs of the interiors of the villa Ludwig Wittgenstein built for his sister at the beginning of the 20th century in Vienna. One of the most refined interiors I have ever seen - timeless, elegant and without any dust and historic ballast. Shame, that the house nowadays is only to be visited in its empty shell - almost impossible to imagine the interiors as they were meant to be as such. ( for  more information about this marvelous house, please have a look in wikipedia and also on www.wien.info/sights) . The pictures of this post are all found in Google.