015 Squalid overboogie

On how to be a redoubtable women, the Le Bal des Débutantes, Yves Saint Laurent's Proust obsession and a beautiful book.

Image: courtesy of Saint Laurent

Like many overlooked women in their time, Eve Babitz was right about many things. Including that it is much better to describe the feeling of being entirely burnt out this time of year as squalid overboogie. You’ve gone to the third venue, and it’s never a good idea! In my next life phase I’m going to really know this.

Of course, like every self-respecting bookish elder millennial who has written at least one essay in the style of Joan Didion, I inhaled Didion & Babitz, Lili Anolik’s new book.

I’ve got a piece coming out on it soon but something I really took from it - other than style is something you can work at - is that it takes a lot of courage to live an unconventional life. And it can come at great cost.

I was reminded of this when I saw the Sydney Theatre Company’s utterly brilliant Sunday this week. Based on the life of Sunday and John Reed, who built an artist’s utopia in Heidelberg in Melbourne (it’s a beautiful museum and garden that you can visit now). Sunday was a woman who was game and brave and determined to live on her own terms in a world that then, and now, doesn’t tend to like this. I haven’t seen a play in a long time that moved me like this. It was profound.

Nikki Shiels was mesmerising in Sunday! Also very chic trousers and blousy shirts - v redoubtable way to dress.

Also I really liked a line Sunday says to her son at the very beginning when she tells him off for swearing and he says but you swear! And she says something like, ‘a woman saying bloody means she’s redoubtable, a man saying bloody is just common.’ A redoubtable woman! Yes.

Another redoubtable woman I came across this week is Ophélie Renouard, the French PR executive who founded Le Bal des Débutantes, i.e. the gloriously anachronistic debutants ball that showcases the creme de la creme of debs and their cavaliers (usually obscure minor Euro royals). Obviously I’m obsessed with it.

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As Rachel Tashjian, another redoubtable woman, wrote in The Washington Post of the spectacle,

“Le Bal captures the strange inanity of debutante balls — to whom are these women … coming out? — but it also reveals their deluded splendour. Whereas the traditional deb ball solidifies a social stratus enforced since the debutante’s birth, at le Bal, heirs to defunct monarchies and children of billionaires mingle with the finest spawn of Hollywood and other forms of corporatised culture.”

The good thing about this ball, I guess, is that it shows that money is the great equaliser!? You can buy your way in and this ball allows you to (finally!) show off your spoils.

Renouard, I’m gathering from the Proustian Q&A she did with Airmail, is the kind of woman who knows exactly what she’s doing. Part of being redoubtable is being definitive. It’s a power move!

Her enemies? “Vulgarity, dishonesty and disloyalty.”

Her kiss off? “See you soon” (lol!)

Her insult: “Not worth it” (this is of course perfect, it’s better to be talked about than not at all!)

Speaking of Proust, I’m obsessed with Saint Laurent’s new short films based on Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, John Waters, Chloë Sevigny, Addison Rae and more). Why aren’t we talking about this more!

It took me into a google rabbit hole of Yves Saint Laurent’s obsession with Proust - though apparently he never finished the book! This is where I confess I too am someone who likes the idea of being someone who reads Proust but am also yet to finish it. I’m in search of lost time! Maybe over the Christmas break.

I came across an article by yet another redoubtable woman, the New Yorker’s Judith Thurman, one of the ultimate fashion writers, on Saint Laurent’s retirement and his final show. This is a line from his press conference,

“I have grappled with anguish and I have been through sheer hell . . . I have known those fair-weather friends we call tranquillisers and drugs. I have known the prison of depression and the confinement of a hospital. But one day I was able to come through all of that, dazzled yet sober. It was Marcel Proust who taught me that ‘the magnificent and pitiful family of the hypersensitive are the salt of the earth.’ “

Image: courtesy of Saint Laurent

(Apparently Gwyneth Paltrow - mother of this year’s star deb at the Bal, Apple - was turned away from the door, though Lauren Bacall, Bianca Jagger, Paloma Picasso, Nan Kempner, Diane von Furstenberg, Betty Catroux and Catherine Deneuve were in attendance, I mean!).

Later in the piece Thurman writes that Proust taught Saint Laurent well, that “art, elegance, snobbery, nostalgia, and vice distilled with supreme purity make an eau-de-vie that goes straight to the head.”

I loved too her observation that no other designer had been so “gallant” toward women, or “resistant to the temptation of modern fashion to make clothes as difficult, ironic, contemptuous, or ugly as modern art. Saint Laurent takes it upon himself to anticipate every potential humiliation in the bulge of a seam, the pucker of a pleat, the mockery of a bow. His cutting and drapery are a lover’s discourse with the female body.”

I.e clothes for a redoubtable woman!

Image: courtesy of Saint Laurent

Finally, I think to be redoubtable you can’t have regrets. How else would you have character? I loved this interview with the artist Maira Kalma about her new book that examines the idea of remorse, a different thing, through figures such as Tolstoy and his wife and Chekhov.

This is how Kalma differentiates the two:

“And I say regret is, ‘I’m sorry I ruined the roast, I’m sorry I didn’t come to your birthday party.’ Regret is OK,” she said. “Remorse is, ‘I’m sorry I ruined your life.’ Remorse is deep sorrow and guilt. There is more history. There’s more, ‘What did I do to somebody?’”

I loved this bit too where she talks about observing people sitting next to her in the lunch kiosk at the MOMA:

“The last time I went there, the two people next to me ordered a million desserts,” she said. “I said, ‘Are you having some kind of dessert tasting?’ And they said, ‘No, we just ordered all the desserts.’ And I thought these people know how to live.”

BOOKS

(Speaking of knowing how to live! I read this beautiful book in the most glorious place!)

I was reunited with Olive Kitteridge in Elizabeth Strout’s beautiful new book Tell Me Everything. Oh I loved it! I dog-eared so many pages, one of my many bad qualities. It’s about how people are just people. They are mean and petty and make mistakes and are kind and good and accepting because they’re people.

“People suffer. They live, they have hope, they even have love, and they still suffer. Everyone does. Those who think they’ve not suffered are lying to themselves.”

“It’s just life, Mrs Hassellbeck, that’s all it is. Life.”

We’d all have more grace if we remembered that!

Love,

Annie