a blind flaneur

One consequence of succumbing to the flu and avoiding the office this week has been letting my febrile mind go wherever it wanted. I’ve wandered from Wall Street to the House of Dior, and unexpectedly, I returned like a prodigal son to the poetry of my misspent youth. What was it Delacroix said? “To […]

Is this Colette, Balenciaga’s favorite model from the 1950s? [Photo source: Fashion Spot/Vogue]
In Couture Clash (Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2008), Benjamin Schwartz reviews four recent books that document the golden age of couture in postwar Paris. He crafts a narrative of contrasts between Christian Dior and Cristobal Balenciaga:
Dior, a charming if exceedingly plain-looking dilettante, came to […]

Christian Dior created a media sensation by changing hemlines season after season in the 1950s.. [Photo by Roger Wood; source Britannica/Hulton Archive/Getty Images]
Christian Dior exhilarated Paris and its most important industry in February 1947 when he presented his inaugural couture collection. Benjamin Schwartz sets the scene in Couture Clash (Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2008): “In […]

Odilean kindly asked for a sample of my poetry in lieu of Princess Caroline’s lost poem. Here is one from the same period. It was published in 1977 in a Paris-based little magazine called The Atlantic Review (not to be confused with the prestigious monthly of the same name) whose editors had some […]

When she posted this photo of Charlotte Casiraghi, accompanied somewhere out of the frame by designer Karl Lagerfeld, Stylophile noted dryly, “It must be nice being a princess.” Maybe, I thought, but there is the tawdry business of kissing all those frogs along the way. It was the red dress, not the name, that caught […]

My taste turns to the street more than the red carpet, but I couldn’t resist Marion Cotillard’s gown at the Academy Awards. It’s Jean-Paul Gaultier’s mermaid look from Paris Fashion Week, sweeping piscine curves with a shimmer of sexy scales and fantail finish. Unlike Coco Rocha’s runway rendition in Paris, Marion needed no crutches to […]

Indy rock bands were the first to experiment with free downloads as a marketing strategy. Now a classical virtuoso is giving it a try. According to NPR, “Britain’s top concert violinist released her latest album, The Naked Violin, free on the Internet in an effort to draw more people to classical music, she says. Tasmin […]

Passage des Panoramas, Paris. [Photo by deneux_jacques]
Thanks to deneux_jacques for sharing this image in the Creative Commons. See his superb photo set, Ah, Paris!
Imaging Paris documents places in the city and the images that inhabit them. “Just as every tried-and-true experience also includes its opposite, so here the perfected art of the flaneur includes a […]

[Photo by Bill Cunningham/NYT]
Count me among the true believers in Burton Malkiel”s A Random Walk Down Wall Street. That’s a flaneur’s approach to capitalism if ever there were one. I don’t lose sleep at night worrying about leading economic indicators. I’m hunkered down with the bears right now. As the economy sinks deeper into recession, […]

Congratulations go to Marion Cotillard, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Édith Piaf in La Vie En Rose. Here is Cotillard’s interpretation of Piaf’s great swan song, “Non, je ne regrette rien.” An earlier edition of Café Mouffe features Piaf and song lyrics.
Café Mouffe opens every Friday at […]