016 Aesthetic emotion
The case for! Polly Mellen forever and my top ten books of the year.
Portrait of @pollyallenmellen by @stevenmeiselofficial for @vogueitalia (Polly Mellen forever)
You have to feel bad for ‘aesthetic.’ It used to stand for something! I was thinking about this when I read a tiny collection of Virginia Woolf essays on art on our way back from Fiji this week (I heartily recommend slim novellas for an easily won sense of accomplishment). In it she defends the notion of “aesthetic emotion”. It was in the context of the colours of Cezanne’s paintings, but the idea is that everybody has access to aesthetic emotion. You don’t need to know what you’re experiencing, just to experience it. To feel something! Anyway language doesn’t always explain what you’re feeling, it can be slippery like that.
This is how I want to approach 2025. To go to art galleries and see what I respond to. We just bought a house (a house!) and I want to gradually choose things I’m drawn to and not think about our house as having any ‘aesthetic’ other than things we love and that mean something to us. I feel like I want to paint a wall green and have a striped armchair, I don’t know why, I just do!
Picture: Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf in a Deckchair (1912), Oil on board, Mimi and Peter Haas. (Apparently Leonard Woolf, Virginia’s husband, said this portrait was “more like Virginia in its way than anything else of her” and this is exactly how I hope to spend the rest of the summer break).
This is how I want to get dressed too. Or actually, I’m going to be channeling the late Polly Mellen, the iconic fashion editor - creator of what is still the world’s most expensive fashion shoot (a 26 page spread lensed by Richard Avedon with Veruschka in Japan!) who died this year.
Polly was a true original. She lived to be 100! Like true originals (she was the protégé of another such one, Diana Vreeland) she had her own idiosyncratic way of speaking. She made declarations.
One editor described her mode and manners as speaking as “fashion iambic pentameter.”
“like a Vogue caption, often in triplets. Say anything three times and it sounds important. Somehow she sounded like she was addressing the human condition.”
Honestly, I think she probably was!
She was also, obviously, one of what seems an increasingly rare breed of person who dressed for herself and didn’t need to wear the ‘right’ things, or worse dress to fit in.
As she told The New York Times of her school years at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington (alma mater of Jacqueline Bouvier), “I’d wear my sweaters backward or tie my shoes with red laces. Looking like everybody else bored me. I should have paid more attention to my studies. Instead of college, I went to the College Shop at Lord & Taylor.”
Polly, and oh my god you have to see her Connecticut garden, famously cried when she really loved a fashion show. The designers would ask backstage if she had.
This is one newspaper headline about her: “Oh, my. Nobody hyperventilates over fashion like Polly Mellen!”
Here are two things I love: grand dames who make declarations and fans. Here’s to a 2025 of showing what we love, and effusively so.
BOOKS
I’ve been thinking about my top ten books of 2024. As usual, there’s scarcely a book by a MAN in sight (exceptions always for Alan Hollinghurst). This year I tried to expand beyond my favourite genre of complicated, spiky women figuring out how to be. Though these still feature prominently. Something I’m going to keep on with in 2025 is to read more non-fiction and classic books I haven’t read, or read when I was younger and missed the point of them. I love going back to books with more life under me, more understanding of how people are and why they do the things they do.
So, below, my top ten reads of the year (in no particular order).
A novel, of sorts, or maybe more a series of observations from three people who live in the same apartment in Paris in different periods of time eking out what and why we desire, what kind of love lasts, what makes a home, how to find peace with yourself. Illuminating.
I’ve been on a spy jag of late, who hasn’t (Black Doves on Netflix was perfect, even if the voice of Paddington as a gun for hire was unnerving!). This upended the trope and unpicked people’s weaknesses and it was unnerving and delicious.
I adore Plum Sykes! It’s like she is constantly wearing a wire in her interactions with society (and those aspiring) and she’s perfect on what people wear and how they decorate their homes when they’re either thinking too much, or not at all, about what their ‘aesthetic’ says about them.
This knocked me out!
The Custom of the Country, Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton also basically wore a wire (or would have had they been invented in her time) in her interactions with the upper crust society she belonged to. Nobody captures their manners and whims and fears better and this book about ambitious Undine Spragg is an apt-for-today warning about how happiness doesn’t come by acquiring things. Or at least, it has a cost beyond fiscally!
Our Evenings, Alan Hollinghurst
Not my favourite Hollinghurst (The Line of Beauty is), but as elegant and languid and devastating as I could hope for. The ending wounded me.
Consider Yourself Kissed, Jessica Stanley
This one isn’t out until April but you must, must buy (pre-order!) my brilliant friend Jessica Stanley’s perfect book. Any woman in their ‘30s, and especially mothers, will feel recognised in still trying to hold onto your precious dreams that you barely even whisper out loud.
Tell Me Everything, Elizabeth Strout
Oh, Elizabeth. Nobody understands people’s peculiarities and what makes a community and what makes a person like her.
The Friday Afternoon Club, Griffin Dunne
Everything I could hope for in a celebrity memoir - truly juicy, Harrison Ford when he was still a carpenter, almost too much airing of dirty laundry, Joan Didion. Perfect!
That thing I said about novellas? You can read an entire Claire Keegan in your lunch break and feel profoundly moved, like socked to your stomach and your most secret self. Not a word is wasted.
Wishing you a peaceful, emotionally aesthetic 2025. Thank you for reading my newsletter, I can’t believe how many smart and lovely people write to me to say that you do.
Love,
Annie xx