Ooh-La-La Fashion Tips for You and Your Home

Culled from Sir John Soane's Museum and the British Museum

From Sir John Soane's Museum (www.soane.org):
Leave the sarcophagus in Egypt.
A centerpiece of the wacky Soane Museum is a sarcophagus, the Sarcophagus of Seti I c.1370BC with fragments of its lid Canopic vase from the tomb of Seti I, in fact. In all of the labels, the museum explains that the now yellow-ish stone sarcophagus was white when it arrived in London, and the inscriptions were bluish-green because of some sort of inserted substance. The inserted substance has degraded and the stone has yellowed because of the London climate.




Paint your house in Turner Yellow and Pompeii Red.
These were real names of the popular colors for wall paints during Sir John Soane's Day.

Rear Drawing Room in Turner Yellow.




Pompeii Red:


Use natural instead of artificial lighting whenever possible.
The Soane Museum is surprisingly bright even though it is lit by natural lighting. It was quite grey outside on the day that I was there, and there was still very sufficient light inside. Sir John Soane's reputation as an architect certainly rests upon something!

Breakfast Room Lantern:



Hang paintings by Turner in your home.

Forum Romanum for Mr Soane's Museum , J.M.W. Turner. The sheer number of paintings inside the museum is incredible, considering its relatively small size--not to mention the numerous sculptures and well, yes, curiosities. If you are ever in London, definitely go, and make sure that they open the multi-layered cabinets of paintings. When you look at some walls, it appears to be a wall of paintings, but no!, the doors actually open to reveal one or two more panels filled with paintings and drawings.

See to it that the portrait painted of you that will become well-known after your death goes well with both Turner Yellow and Pompeii Red.

And here's Sir John Soane himself.



From the British Museum:

Don't wear hummingbird heads on your necklace.
Isn't this gross?



Harry Emmanuel, London, 1865-1870. From the label: "Emmanuel patented his method of attaching the bird feathers to gold mounts in 1865.


Wear fake butterflies instead.

From mid-19th C. Germany.


Don't invite the Centaurs to dinner.



The British Museum owns a good portion of the artwork from the Parthenon. One of my favorite things were the metopes (basically stone panels with scenes sculpted onto them) that portrayed the story of the Centaurs and the Lapiths. From Wikipedia: "The metopes of the southern wall (Plaques No. 1-12 and 21-32) present the Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs, also known as the Centauromachy, in which the mythological Athenian king Theseus took part. The battle between the Centaurs and the Lapiths broke out during the wedding feast of the king of the Lapiths and personal friend of Theseus, Peirithus. According to one version of the myth, the Centaurs, insulted from being excluded from the celebrations attacked the Lapiths while according to another, during the feast drunken Centaurs reacted violently under the influence of wine. The result was a fight between the Centaurs and the Lapiths and an attempt of the former to abduct the Lapith women."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metopes_of_the_Parthenon


Do allow the baby to get a good look at the disassembled remains of the Parthenon so that he'll be well-cultured and know better than to invite any centaurs to dinner when he is a teenager.


I love this picture! Isn't Freddy the cutest? Sarah pointed out that my flippant tip isn't fair, because we shouldn't judge people on the basis of the behavior of their ancestors. Therefore, go ahead, and use your discretion about inviting the centaurs over for dinner. And rest assured that Freddy has such a reasonable and kind mother that he didn't leave the British Museum with any prejudices toward Centaurs. So, Tara, we're having the Centaurs over for dinner first thing once I get there in August.

Wear your drapery in such a way that it flies.

Another sculpture from the Parthenon. I appreciated the label: "A girl moves rapidly away from the centre, her drapery flying ut behind. She may represent Hebe, cup-bearer of Zeus, who was shown on the middle of the pediment."

Wear kangas.

Kangas are beautiful and popular cloths used as versatile garments in East Africa. This is a display of them.


Know whence your diamonds come.


I was a little annoyed with some of the curation of the 19th century European jewelry at the British museum--there was some disingenuous copy about the supposedly mysterious proliferation of diamond jewelry during the first half of the 19th century. Why, where on earth could those diamonds have been coming from, and could it have had anything to do with European capitalist expansionism? Now, I know we've been over this in this very blog before, but let's think again about the violent past of many of the diamonds on today's market. Check out: http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/diamond/index.htm




But most importantly, from Sarah, Freddy, Amanda and the Millennium Bridge:
Sarah and I graduated from Kenyon in 2000, the same year that the Millenium Bridge was inaugurated (obviously!). I think we all--including the Bridge, which, if you recall, wobbled too much when they first opened it--might be older, but not at all worse for the wear!