My good friend Jill bought me a fantastic book to read before the summer. I took this on my holiday and thoroughly enjoyed it. 'Some Girls, Some Hats and Hitler' is a true story written by and about milliner Trudi Kanter.
It's a tale of a young and beautiful hat designer trying to keep her business afloat in Vienna whilst struggling against the beginnings of Hitler's oppressive regime, as Jewish people are humiliated and stripped of their dignity and finances. Her descriptions of fashion, trips to Paris and her designs are juxtaposed with the horrors of war. Trudi's collections reflected the new reality: she decided she would use more veiling to hide the sadness in women's eyes. She used her talents and position to attempt the escape of her family to start a new life in London.
Been away from my blog for a while- just busy busy sewing for the spring wedding and race season and when I'm not sewing I have been wrenching cloth samples from the jaws of my new dog Rosie.
I have been watching the brilliant progress of team GB from the comfort of my sofa but I braved the crowds in London this week to get to the outstanding new exhibition Metamorphosis at the National Gallery.
This is a unique collaboration between the National Gallery and The Royal Ballet combining the work of three contemporary artists, costumes and sets for three ballets all based on works by the Venetian artist Titian.
Chris Ofili, Conrad Shawcross and Mark Wallinger together with a group of choreographers, composers and poets have come together to create a response to three of the master's most famous works- Diana and Callisto, Diana and Actaeon and The Death of Actaeon, which were themselves based on Ovid's poem Metamorphosis. Each artists' work can be seen along side the paintings.
Chris Ofili response to Titian's work is perhaps the most traditional. He has created a series of large and colourful paintings, which concentrate on the master's curvaceous figures and echo the overtly sexual nature of the paintings, which comes through in Ofili's colour and shapes but he subverts the classicism of the originals by giving them distinctively Trinidadian backdrops.
Conrad Shawcross is a sculptor and produced a robot to represent Diana. In a glass case the robot can be seen moving seductively towards an antler it has carved.
The final piece by the conceptual artist Mark Wallinger was definitely the most unusual and uncomfortable. 'Diana is about watching and being caught in the act...' Wallinger explains, and he has created a locked room with tiny peepholes for you to view her if you dare. It's brilliant!
The exhibition also has a few costumes from the ballets and a wonderful series of films documenting the rehearsals for the performances.
I really enjoyed this show; I only wish I had seen the three ballets based on Titian's extraordinary and beautiful masterpieces.
"A hat is a flag, a shield, a bit of armour, and the badge of femininity. A hat is the difference between wearing clothes and wearing a costume; it's the difference between being dressed and being dressed up; it's the difference between looking adequate and looking your best. A hat is to be stylish in, to glow under, to flirt beneath, to make all others feel jealous over, and to make all men feel masculine about. A piece of magic is a hat". M. Sliter
"The hat is not for the street: it will never be democratized. But there are certain houses that one cannot enter without a hat. And one must always wear a hat when lunching with people whom one does not know well. One appears to one's best advantage." Coco Chanel
"When I am an old woman I shall wear purple, With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me. And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves, And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter." Jenny Joseph
"The hat I was married in, will it do? White, broad, fake flowers in a tiny array. It's old-fashioned, as stylish as a bedbug, but it suits to die in something nostalgic." Anne Sexton
