September 30, 2023
September 20, 2023
A Wedding Classic Revisited
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| from GETTY IMAGES |
“On May 19, 2018, the royal nuptials of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex made history and broke traditions, with the bride Meghan Markle’s wedding dress almost serving as an allegory,” Fawnia Soo Hoo wrote in her recent article, “Meghan Markle’s Wedding Dress Nods to Hollywood and American Royalty,” for Vanity Fair.
I love that this “allegorical” wedding, this extraordinary couple, and Meghan’s sensitive and intuitive creativity is being revisited in such a beautiful article. Fawnia chats with the gown’s designer, Clare Waight Keller, about its inspiration and her collaboration with the bride, noting other memorable wedding gowns....
“There was
that sense of playfulness and modernity and doing things in a different way,”
Waight Keller says. “And I really feel that—for the dress, particularly—that
sense of it could be something that really represented her, her spirit, her
modernity, and the freshness....”
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| from GETTY IMAGES |
Also revisit the article I wrote a few days after that memorable wedding in 2018 and posted here: “A Day of Gracious Gestures and Love Power”....
The radiant bride, in designer-sculpted shimmering white silk....
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| from GETTY IMAGES |
Meghan’s friend Vicky Tsai, after attending the wedding ceremony,
confirmed: “It felt like a moment where the world paused and celebrated love.”
August 26, 2023
Women's Equality Day
The first Woman's Rights Convention
July 1848, Seneca Falls, New York
Between August 18 (when the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1920) and August 26 (when it was signed into law, giving women the vote...a date now known as “Women’s Equality Day”), I posted a five-part essay titled “Second-Class Citizen” on MEDIUM…sharing a little this ‘n that of women’s history.
July 31, 2023
The Princess, The Feminist & The Grown-Up Bride
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| Royal Wedding, 31 July 1981, Lady Diana Spencer and Charles, Prince of Wales |
In my book, The
End of the Fairy-Tale Bride: For Better or Worse, How Princess Diana Rescued
the Great White Wedding, I looked at the social and historical influences
of the wedding of Lady Diana Spencer and Charles, Prince of Wales, in 1981. The
event was a cultural phenomenon. For the first time in history, nearly a
billion people came together at the same moment to witness the same marvel, televised
in ‘living color’—could such a spectacle not help but shake up our global
psyche? We gathered around our clunky television sets as if anticipating some
long-ago promise fulfilled.
With its reassuring sense of order and thrilling dose of pageantry—courtly rituals and symbolic pomp, ceremonial uniforms and polished splendor—this royal wedding was like a soothing balm for a society reeling from the rebellious upheavals of the 1960s and ‘70s. The wedding came at the beginning of a decade that saw Reaganomics, Thatcherism, pseudo-Christian politics, and a “greed is good” mentality attempt to put a lid on those earlier outspoken youthful voices, female voices, Black voices railing against a tone-deaf, out-of-touch, vengeful society. These latest patriarchal forces may have quieted those voices of dissent, but the revolutionary spirit remained, laying groundwork for the next uprising of heart energy.
Weddings, especially royal ones, can indeed be profound bringers of change. Although Charles’ and Diana’s wedding played its part in gilding the last two decades of the twentieth century with a superficial gloss, it had a more enduring role, something of the heart—evident even before the glittering wedding dust had settled. The regal ceremony stirred the wonder of some deeply feminine ethos around the world with its fairy-tale longings and a beautiful, lit-from-within bride…a heart-centered young woman (a future revolutionary) becoming a real princess of a legendary kingdom at a time when a new wave of feminism was rising—which seemed to punctuate its own irony with a mythological purpose. (Was an ancient archetype for a new age rising as well?)
[Continue reading this book-in-progress excerpt on MEDIUM...posted with a rare photo from my former shop.]
July 19, 2023
Was It the Death of the Heart?
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| Diana, Princess of Wales, commemorative statue in the Sunken Garden at Kensington Palace in London |
“When the royal family enfolded Diana, they thought they had got a
rather dim girl from the landowning Norfolk aristocracy—not exactly the stuff
of revolution. They could not have known that she would be transformed into an
international superstar who would make their lives hell.” This from an article,
“Diana’s Britain,” by the editors at Newsweek magazine published the
week after the princess’ funeral. Some feminists of the time were also fooled
by “the mouse that roared.” British journalist Beatrix Campbell wondered how
more conservative Britain could become when this pretty, inexperienced girl
from old landed gentry married into the stale confines of royalty. Calling her
wedding gown “a shroud,” she feared Diana would disappear within a dusty
patriarchal construct. But Campbell and others began to see it differently.
June 13, 2023
One Woman's Story {Ruby Ross Wood}
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| “Ruby Ross Wood exemplies the growth of the American business woman—a self-made success before she could vote and a pioneer in establishing interior design as a career in what is now a multi-million dollar business annually.” |
“The Road to Good Taste: The Design Life of Ruby Ross Wood” is a new exhibition at the Atlanta History Center. It presents the life and work of one of America's most influential interior designers. From her early days as a journalist to opening her own firm, Ruby Ross Wood's work was always characterized by eclectic combinations of furniture, bold color choices, and impeccable taste."
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| Ruby Ross Wood, c1939 |
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