Word Association

I was going to make a post about Chanukah today, but then I found this picture in New York of Cher at Studio 54 and got really distracted. Her outfit is slightly confusing but it appears to be the tightest jeans ever and an open button down which reveals piles of slinky bling. Don't even get me started on the suspenders! Her cascading waves of hair! Her hat! Do you like how she's all, "Oh, we're going to the most famous club ever? Let me just put on my jeans and my insane gold necklace."


I check our site-counter obsessively (hello, German readers! Thank you for searching Christine McVie and finding us here), and in the last week or so, an inordinate number of people have arrived at Listopad via Google searches for Bobby Trendy, the late Anna Nicole Smith's interior decorator. This prompted me to re-read Simon Doonan's 2002 New York Observer column in which Trendy asks if Diana Vreeland is "a new type of strep throat," which in turn prompted me to look up photos of Diana Vreeland. I found this one at Wessel + O'Connor Fine Art; it was taken by Andy Warhol. This is how I want to be remembered - as a pair of penetrating eyes punctuated by knotty, gesticulating hands, painted nails, and big jewelry.


"We're stormy, and that which is ours breaks loose from us without our fearing any debilitation," wrote Helene Cixous in "The Laugh of the Medusa," which was published in L'Arc in 1968. "Our glances, our smiles are spent; laughs exude from all our mouths; our blood flows and we extend ourselves without ever reaching an end; we never hold back our thoughts, our signs, our writing; and we're not afraid of lacking." Olivier Roller took this photo of her in 2004. I can't wait to be old and have crazy short hair and do whatever the fuck I want with my makeup.

Wintage Vintour

After reading about the rumors of Carine Roitfeld taking over at American Vogue, I decide to do a little Google Image-searching for Anna Wintour, the pale, mute specterdonna of this frighteningly lavish magazine. Turns out I missed last month's Fashionologie post marking her 59th birthday.

My stars! I thought I'd seen it all until I saw these photos.


If you told me that you'd just seen a gorgeous sequined rainbow-ombre dress, I would have laughed, but not in a nice way. This dress should have been a train wreck, but it's somehow fucking amazing. It probably has something to do with the way she's looking at the camera, like, "So?" (December 1990)


This makes me think of the Rahzel song "All I Know." Look at that statement necklace! This woman is truly a bad motherfucker. (November 1991)


This is evocative of Susie's Tadashi bodysuit - which I love! Anna, why don't you dress like this anymore? And look at how successfully you are not wearing fur. (December 1991)

But are you ready for the piece de resistance? Close your eyes.



Gaaahhh!!! I found this pic on RDuJour (via Cat Party) but have no inkling of its origin. (Bonus: Cat Party has some vintage pics of Carine Roitfeld and Emmanuelle Alt, too!)

Get To It

(Tyler Mallory.)

Y'all, this is going to be a weekend-heavy edition of Get To It because there is like, an orgy of stuff going on. (Get your mind out of the gutter, folks. There is no actual orgy.)

Thursday is the first day of the DC Shorts Film Festival. Our attention span, having been destroyed by too much Internet, is excited. (We recommend LOL titles like The Art of Stalking and Back to the Fuschia.) In addition, Baltimortals Thank You play DC9. (Go to Etete before the show. You will thank me!)

Just try and decide what to do on Saturday. I dare you! You could watch the opening performance of the Washington National Opera's 53rd season broadcast live and for free at Nationals Park, or you could go to the Kennedy Center's Open House Arts Festival, a swirling gyre of amazing performances that marks the hallowed center's 37th birthday. (A performance by Chuck Brown closes the festivites. Do not sleep.) All of this is possible provided you're not too exhausted from going to the opening of Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power at the Corcoran.

Sunday is Adams Morgan Day Festival! Imagine the madness of Adams Morgan on a Friday night. Now multiply that by families, food stands, and craft vendors! Can you stand it?!?! No, seriously, it's pretty fun.

Sunday Bread

WWD reports that Michelle's dress is by Thakoon.

Hot.

Doris

liebemarlene vintage posted some beautiful early-40s snapshots (from the stern, lush Charles Cushman collection) of some seriously alabaster bathing beauties on Lake Michigan.

Here is an excerpt from a excellent essay on Cushman by Indiana University professor Eric Sandweiss. (Please explore the site. The breadth and depth of Cushman's work -- well, read what the professional has to say.)

For thirty years, Charles Cushman documented a dying landscape in living color.

Packing his car with camera, lenses, and film, his tripod, his notebooks and—often as not—his first wife, Jean (who was not, to judge from the expression on her face in Cushman's occasional carside portraits, always a happy traveling companion), this extraordinary amateur photographer pursued a life on the road, and in the streets, of mid-twentieth-century America. Whatever its effect upon his marriage, Cushman's peripatetic compulsion did result in a remarkable gift to future historians, photography lovers, and students of Americana. For here, framed through the lens of his Contax IIA camera, saturated in almost embarrassingly vivid colors, springs to life a world that we had long since resigned ourselves to viewing only in shades of gray. The America that we thought we knew, whether through the self-conscious artistic starkness of the images of Berenice Abbott and Walker Evans or through the polished middle-brow poses of Look and Life, is revealed as being but the shadow of a world no less full and tangible than our own. In Cushman's work the past becomes, for an instant, impossibly present.

My favorite photo: