Word: parisian
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...constantly blasts into the dining area-making it a good place to take guests to whom one has nothing to say. Last month Warner extended the yellow brick road to Central Park. There he has opened a $2.5 million gustatorial pleasuredome that may in time rival its long-running Parisian counterpart, the Grande Cascade in the Bois de Bou logne. It is called the Tavern on the Green, but it bears as much resemblance to the 42-year-old landmark of that name as La Belle Sole de la Manche Meunière does to cheeseburgers (both delicacies will...
...Alphonse Mucha was a sculptor too, and nothing in this show epitomizes the art nouveau vision (or fantasy) of woman better than a bust he designed around 1899 for a Parisian jeweler. This astonishing object, whose form shifts like water in the twining reflections of silver flesh and gold hair, is perversely liturgical-a parody (done, one should recall, for a public whose cultural background was still Catholic) of medieval head reliquaries. The image, however, is not a saint or a magdalen but that sibylline bitch of the fin-de-siècle imagination, the Fatal Woman, La Belle Dame...
...reminds one how fused by the current of high artificiality the aesthetic and sexual fancies of the time were apt to be. Every Parisian male wanted to possess Cléo de Mérode, Liane de Pougy and their thespian sisters-the "great horizontals." But they were also votive objets de culte, focuses of sexual snobbery. In a like way, the most rarefied work of the art nouveau craftsmen was not accessible to a wide public. As the style spread through the decorative arts-furniture making, inlay, bookbinding, jewelry, glass-too much labor and fine material were devoured...
Subsidized Superelegance. The vast expense of haute couture-the latest Y.S.L. collection costs at least $500,000-makes the whole notion of super-elegance for a dwindling few seem anachronistic. Nonetheless, the number of Parisian high-fashion houses still in business remains constant at 25, and the couture industry's sales increased 15% (to $1.4 billion) last year. One reason is that couture, in a Y.S.L. executive's words, is "the locomotive" for a clothing company's lucrative ready-to-wear business. Additionally, the publicity that high fashion generates for Y.S.L.-or Pierre Cardin or Dior-helps...
...that festive day in 1770 when the Dauphin Louis Auguste, now King Louis XVI, married Archduchess Marie Antoinette, all ladies of fashion gained a new bellwether-but they also lost one. During the wedding celebrations, Monsieur Legros de Rumigny, the Parisian cook turned coiffeur nonpareil, was accidentally smothered to death in a brawling crowd. The famed 38 styles described in Legros's L'Art de la Coëffure des Dames Françoises had become de rigueur for all the best heads in Europe. But with the tastemaker gone, faddism has flourished-so much so that European...