This week’s Wednesday wonder is brought to you by Sarah Waldron of The Licentiate. What’s she on about? Why I love . . . bookshelves.
This might be a bit counterproductive, being a blogger and all, but I really love a good bookshelf. It’s the opposite of a blog; it’s permanent, it doesn’t yield to your constant urges for new information, its contents need extra time to properly drink in images and indulge in a bit of careful reflection (insofar as you can carefully reflect about fashion).
This is my bookshelf. The top row is dedication to fashion books and magazines – some rare, some mass-produced. Some are amazing (if you only buy one book, buy Fashion Today, the huge orange and white tome on the far left), some not so good (National Folk Dress of Europe, anyone?).
Reading a book is an experience far removed from reading a blog; sometimes it’s a purely tactile experience. The feeling of cracking the spine of a brand new book or carefully flicking the corners of a dense, card-like page, rough or smooth, with a thumb is far more satisfying than clicking a mouse or fiddling with a phone’s touchscreen.
The bookshelf is the hub of the apartment. Apart from books, it plays house to a nail varnish collection, jewellery, candles, dvds, Xbox controllers, photos, ticket stubs, miscellaneous wires, batteries, a neglected pack of tarot cards, sunglasses, perfume a very lonely bottle of TCP and an old Valentine’s Day card. The very stuff that life is made of.
It stands to good reason that the things I love the most about my bookshelf are the books. A book is a portal to a new space for inspiration. Here are some of the books and pages that inspire me the most.
Clockwise from bottom left. A page from Frida Kahlo’s diary, a piece on Ewa Rudling from seminal style book Cheap Chic Update by Caterine Milinaire, a page from Coco Chanel: The Legend and The Life by Justine Picardie, one of Anni Piaggi’s famous double spreads for Vogue Italia, from Anna Piaggi’s Fashion Algebra, colour-me-in shoes from Nina Chakrabarti’s My Wonderful World of Fashion, pictures in i-D 1980-1990, a Vivienne Westwood spread in the S/S ‘09 issue of LOVE and some more childish action in Great Fashion Designs of the Sixties: Paper Dolls in full colour.
