Perhaps I've mentioned the Cranbrook to you; Dale and I stumbled upon it last summer and it has seemed like a magical oasis of art and gardens ever since. Tucked into an expansive green space in the middle of the city and accessed by a hilly winding road, it's one of my favourite places in Detroit. It's a beautiful space but what I love about it is that I'm never sure what I'm going to see there. Take yesterday, for example. We wandered into an exhibit called "When Philip Met Isabella" which is about the relationship between Philip Treacy (a hatmaker) and his friend/muse Isabella Blow. I had no idea how stunning this exhibit would be nor how fascinated I'd become by these two people, the hats and all of the ephemera created around them and these quirky beautiful hats. If you go to the above link and scroll down, you can see examples of the hats and some of the photos. One of the things that intrigued me was how Treacy was able to take a line from a vintage hat or a familiar hat motif or millinery material and reinvent it into something surprising and new yet still within the tradition of hats. See, for example, the pheasant feather hat. I was really fascinated too by Treacy's Boat hat which was inspired by Treacy reading a book by Olivier Bernier called Pleasure and Privilege: Life in France, Naples and America 1770-1795. He learned that after the defeat of the British Fleet in 1784, fashionable ladies in the French court incorporated representations of d'Estaing's ship in their coiffeurs. 'The Ship" (1995) is an incredibly detailed and meticulously constructed reconstruction of a ship made with traditional millinery materials like black satin, feather bones, feathers and netting. Apparently, not all of yesterday's patrons were as enthused by Treacy's work as we were. As I was copying down the details about The Ship, a girl of about 8 peered into the case and exclaimed with disdain:"No one would wear a hat like that in broad daylight!" Her friend shrugged and off they went. The equally beautiful David Beckham hat met with their disapproval as well. Oh well. I'm still going to order the book; if you live near me, I'm sure I'll foist it upon you. And, who knows, I may even foist it upon you if you don't live near me. Here's another link about him.
PS: I'm trying to coordinate my Flickr site and blog a bit better. You'll find photos from This Weekend in the set called, you guessed it, This Weekend. I'm also assembling the baseball pictures together too. Can you tell I took cataloguing?
No comments:
Post a Comment