009 Nostalgia is only good when you're selling something

On Industry, The Garden of Earthly Delights, Milan Fashion Week and entering my sculptural jewellery life phase.

Yasmin on Industry, the saddest girl in the world to have a boat named after her! Picture: HBO

Nobody on the TV show Industry is sentimental. That’s the kind of thing that in this world loses you money! Here you cut your losses, and your people too if you need to.

Nostalgia is only good when you’re selling something, says the absolutely craven Pierpoint investment bank CEO to Eric, who does have it in him, after-all. 

Industry costume designer Laura Smith and the show’s two creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay (former bankers and total fashion guys) were on the Fashion People podcast this week. One of my favourite parts of the interview is the extreme attention to detail, everything is deliberate. You can tell a crusty blue blood by the way he knots his tie, or newbie by the flash of his shoes. Definitely his watch is a tell - and the kind of watch he upgrades to when he gets his first bonus. Sidenote: you have to read the Dimepiece interview on the watches in the show.

But Jones also talked about how she conceptualises the clothes, and one of her starting points - especially for the pivotal boat scenes with Yasmin and Harper - is Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, painted somewhere between 1490 and 1510.

It’s, frankly, radical that this was painted at that time. It could have been painted in any era. Every time you look you see something different.

When I interviewed the haute couture designer Iris van Herpen in Brisbane earlier this year, we spoke about the painting then too and she brought it up on her phone and we looked at it. It’s a source of inspiration to her, which makes sense when you think about how her work straddles a line between truly cutting edge technology and science and a sense of other worldliness and also centuries old couture techniques. 

A look from van Herpen’s ‘Hybrid’ couture show in Paris last month. Picture: Franck Bohbot

I went back to my recording and found what she said about the painting as I didn’t use it in my piece,

“He's one of the artists that I grew up with because I live in the same area, but his work is actually 400 years old and it can still look futuristic today,” she says.

“So you are seeing heaven on one side. You are seeing a present world at that time, and then you're seeing hell. But when you look, you have to see the details. When you look at the architecture and even the materiality, it's like silicon. It's like positives of the future, even today. And I think that speaks about the power of imagination, right? It can transcend centuries. I think it's the most precious thing we have in the world.”

So when you think about this painting, the kind of thing commissioned by titans of the universe back then - the kind who might wear a Richard Mille watch now as they hock people’s super funds - it’s timeless.

The things we crave - like power - are timeless. Heaven comes with some hell. The future is always around us but also you can’t escape the past. Not really. No matter how much you try to lose yourself.

A really nice thing

My new obsession is La Maison, a show about a French haute couture house that becomes embroiled in a very of our times scandal. I interviewed the costume designer (costume designers are some of my favourite people to interview!) and I specifically wanted to know about the wardrobe of Perle Foster. Perle is the muse of the house, and also the under-appreciated right-hand person of a troubled genius - a thankless job! She has also, crucially, reinvented herself. 

Unflappable, chic Perle! Picture: Apple+

In the show, as the show’s costume designer Carine Sarfati told me, she wears a lot of Alaia, Comme de Garçons, Junya Watanabe, Dries Van Noten, Lemaire.

“We drew inspiration from iconic artists’ muses as well as fashion icons such as Farida Khelfa (muse of Azzedine Alaïa).”

But the thing I really zeroed in on was her Elsa Peretti for Tiffany bone cuff. She tends to wear it stacked with a leather bracelet in such a way that I feel I am ready to enter my sculptural jewellery phase of life! 

To be this chic!

Peretti designed the cuff in the early ‘70s, breaking form with conventions on jewellery at the time by using silver. She got Halston to put Liza Minelli in it, and apparently overheard him telling her “You can’t afford gold, and men have to give you diamonds, so you’re going to wear silver.”

“My god, I thought,” said Minnelli of her first thought about wearing silver. “All I could think of was Albuquerque. But then Elsa brought out all these things—the bone bracelet I remember best. Everything was so sensual, so sexy. I just loved it.”

Obviously you can buy the diamonds yourself, but I do think this cuff is the kind of thing a woman of certain self-possession would buy herself. It is sensual.

The women who have worn it, including Sophia Loren and Catherine Deneuve (and Perle Foster) are proof of this. 

As Peretti once said,

“Style is to be simple.” 

I tried one on on the weekend! When I asked the lovely assistant said I probably couldn’t stack it with my watch (I know some people find watch stacking horrific!) because it should sit on the bone … but I think I’d still try it.

Looking forwards, looking back

I wrapped up Milan Fashion Week here, and I loved thinking about Milan’s two modes - classic and playful. I remain obsessed with Mrs Prada's personal style, and cannot stop thinking about the way she pushed up her grey knit jumper with diamond bracelets as sleeve garters! The woman is a true original, and as I have on record, this is my favourite kind.

whatmiuccia

A post shared by @whatmiuccia

(This is one of my favourite Instagram accounts).

I did read with interest last night this from the Business of Fashion questioning whether Milan Fashion Week, with its mining of the archives, represented
“the end of fashion history, doomed to endlessly recycling the past?”

(No, not really is the answer).

It made me think of how Karl Lagerfeld loathed the past. Most people who’ve reinvented themselves do. He never looked back.

“I throw everything away! The most important piece of furniture in a house is the garbage can! I keep no archives of my own, no sketches, no photos, no clothes – nothing! I am supposed to do, I’m not supposed to remember!” – he told John Colaptino at the New Yorker in 2017, two years before his death.

But none of us will let him go!

Yet without nostalgia - remember, only useful when you want to sell something - how does heritage retain its specialness? Luxury needs the burnish of it! The best thing about fashion though is that it reinvents itself, even when - maybe especially when - it’s always steeped in what’s come before. Anyway, I’m obsessed with these suits inspired by Yves Saint Laurent’s own personal style. I want to wear one to go short on an ESG/SRI! 

Books

I have been too busy to read much lately, which is very deregulating!

I am still reading The Paris Novel, and to be honest, it’s not the best. but I am enjoying it anyway. Mostly because of the descriptions of Paris, but especially because of the descriptions of food (Ruth Reichl is a chef and food writer and her writing about food is so lush I can practically taste it!). I love books that describe food in great detail - a chief reason I like Haruki Murakami novels is the way he will describe someone eating a simple supper of a beer and noodles. 

I also have my hot little hands on Sally Rooney’s new novel! This was an interesting line in her New York Times interview, “There is a huge cultural fixation with novelty and growth. Everything has to grow all the time. Get bigger, sell more and be different — novelty, reinvention. I don’t find that very interesting.”

I also bought a new biography of Pamela Churchill Harriman. I have already read one about her! She was on the periphery of Truman Capote’s Swans, but they mostly hated her because she kept stealing their husbands! I love glamorous, scandalous woman and she was said to be incredibly charming. A quality that can be sorely lacking, don’t you think?

Because I haven’t read much this week I’m adding in that this year I am the last person to discover Claire Keegan, and her books are perfect. In fact I might read another this week as they are so economical with words you could finish one on your lunch break.

Annie xx