Word: orientate
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...train stops in the stillness of time. Passengers in this single car of the Orient Express luxuriate forever in a reverie of richness. The burnished wood of the dining car, the deep upholstery of the seats, the soft, shaded lighting make the figures stand out in relief, their clothing a testament to social identity and design legacy. In this ravishing tableau, the train is merely the transportation, the setting. It is the clothing that offers a round-trip, first-class ticket for a giddy voyage into the past...
...intention of the new Museum of Fashion Arts, inaugurated this week in Paris by French President Francois Mitterrand, to make sure that the sun always shines brightly on the world of fashion. Tableaux like the Orient Express--part of the museum's premier exhibition, "Moments of Fashion," a display of costumes spanning the past three centuries--may have a sentimental cast, but they also have a dramatic vibrancy. The new museum, which is contiguous to the Union of Decorative Arts and part of the Louvre, thus becomes one of the world's foremost facilities for the study of clothing...
Historian George Stewart once amused himself by imagining the course of U.S. history if America had been discovered not on its Atlantic side by Christopher Columbus but on its Pacific side by a 15th century Chinese explorer named Ko Lum Bo. As hardy immigrants from the Orient began to establish colonies in the sweeping new continent, Stewart wrote in mock retrospect, they naturally ! adhered as closely as possible to the customs of their native land. Accordingly, "vast areas of the country were terraced and irrigated as rice paddies. The colonists continued to use their comfortable flowing garments, and pagodas dotted...
...quest for authenticity, Schwab is uncompromising in his attack on shallow Oriental exoticism. He reveals his anti-aesthetic bias against the French Romantics, toward whom his brilliant criticism is considerably less kind. He denounces their tendency toward "formal creation." The chapter, "An Extended Orient: Exoticism" criticizes at length the borrowing of imagery by the French as sheer indulgence. Gautier's Avatar is dismissed as the work of an exploitive dilettante with a "strikingly apparent gift for painting generalized pictures." Similarly, Hugo's Orientales is dismissed as "meager picturesque Orient imposed upon Montparnasse landscape...
...Oriental Renaissance transforms the search for origins into a quest for spiritual identity. Long used to regarding the Orient, the Outsider, as barbarian, western civilization is forced to reexamine its conceptions of barbaric and civilized. Sewab perceives the moment of confrontation, however, not as one of threat, but rather reconciliation, "transforming exile into a companion...