Subway's "Tuscan" melt
My husband called me yesterday from Italy, where he is on a business trip, which is hard to bear. I’m dragging in the groceries in their various unsightly eco-bags from the car trunk and he is sitting down to a Negroni in an ancient piazza, watching the beautifully dressed people walk by. Continue reading…
Even Madonna is into fast fashion at H&M
Because of the subprime mortgage crisis, spending less has become the name of the game, but does that mean that everything else we buy has to be subprime too? Continue reading…
Romantics can easily be disappointed, as my 15-year-old son and I discovered last week on a road trip through America’s stalled heartland.
Holding it out as a carrot through exams, we had planned our mother/son getaway through western Pennsylvania and Maryland down to Washington, D.C., referencing travel and gourmet magazine clippings on pretty towns and the best road-stop diners. For inspiration en route, a girlfriend had kindly loaded an iPod with audio books, and my son crafted an appropriately American folk-inspired playlist.
Our first stop, Pittsburgh, was a gem – a once-mighty steel town grand with elegant edifices to American industry. We ate giant workers’ sandwiches stuffed with fries and coleslaw at the famed Primanti Brothers, walked the steel bridges and marvelled at the still-functioning Heinz 57 factory, which was a dead ringer for Willy Wonka’s.
But the road itself – famously elegized as a path to self-enlightenment by the likes of Thoreau, Whitman and Kerouac – was a big disappointment. Continue reading…
In the great Canadian tradition of the summer cottage, there are the owners, whose family retreat is a place of memory and tradition cherished by generations. And then there are the renters, who begin their vacation like intrepid 16th-century explorers searching for clues as to how, exactly, the indigenous population manages to wash dishes in this sink set-up and where they might keep something resembling a toilet plunger.
For many reasons, chief among them a restless desire to travel rather than always return to the same place, we fall into the latter category. Continue reading…
Andy Warhol called it his “pencil and paper.”
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders described it as “lush” and “forgiving.”
Andre 3000 advised us in his 2003 hit Hey Ya to “shake it, shake it” like, well, itself. Back when I was styling shoots for magazines, we aspiring downtown Mapplethorpes used it at work and then afterward at parties. Continue reading…
Better sanitise those dirty hands!
Globe & Mail, 19 September 2009
Did you catch the latest? According to a recent study by social scientists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, the behaviours of our nearest and dearest might be contagious. At least, that’s been the media’s take.
“Are Your Friends Making You Fat?” asked last week’s New York Times Magazine, in scarily chubby letters on its cover – nothing being more terrifying than the notion that there’s something lurking out there that might blimp you up a jeans size. That’s not to mention the lightning bolt it must be for the skinny tall girls who for years, have made sure to surround themselves with short, plump girlfriends as a living, eating (hence flattering) backdrop. Continue reading…
Karl Lagerfeld, as rake thin as a MacBook Air
I have glimpsed the future, and boy does it look like it’s just back from a spa vacation–one where they put you on a strict regime of colonics and an 800 calorie vegan diet. Back in the days of the Duchess of Windsor, it was said that you could never be too rich or too thin. But now, it seems being so severely rake-like that you have the side profile of a manila envelope is “money” itself. Continue reading…
The recent death of Yves St Laurent opens up an interesting question. If, as the fashion media has unanimously proclaimed post-mortem, YSL was the last designer who could truly be called a great artist, could it be said that creative genius in fashion has breathed its last too? Continue reading…
The people who like to tell me at parties that they never read the Style section are always the same people who tell me that the one section of the newspaper they never miss is the report on business. Style, they scoff, with its shallow focus on trends and appearances, is “just a re-named women’s section”. Whereas to these same three-button types, business is all serious, nuts-and-bolts “news you can use”— in their view, it’s the boy’s section.
All the brokers and bankers and traders fortunate enough to be in this boy’s club pride themselves on playing a man’s game because it involves risk and numbers. Even for the few women on the team, the talk verges on locker-room, the macho walk all about how big their hedge fund is. It is widely, if tacitly accepted that the manly business world, with its MBAs and projections and spreadsheets, works on practical, rational scientific principles rather than anything squishy—or, god forbid, intuitive or feminine. So I couldn’t resist a giggle on Martin Luther King Day, when widespread panic over the wildly fluctuating world stock markets made these swaggering dudes their bitch. Continue reading…
It’s early Saturday morning, and instead of lounging in bed with a stack of newspapers, I’m in a meeting room with a bunch of strangers with sticker dots on our foreheads. The stickers come in blue, yellow, red and green – but since there are no mirrors, we don’t know which colour we’ve been given. And yet, when we’re told that the room has been divided into different coloured corners and asked to go to where we think we belong, I for some reason make a beeline for the green corner.
Awaiting me is a group of mostly middle-aged professional types clad in casual wear and looking as serious as people who have dots on their heads can. When I approach, they look right at me and, almost in unison, shake their heads. My dot is not green after all. Continue reading…
As the late French actress Simone Signoret wittily titled her memoirs, “nostalgia isn’t what it used to be”. What we yearn for seems to be more of a variable than a constant.
Nowhere is this more true than in Germany’s Ruhr valley, where the abandoned mine shafts and slag heaps in the heart of what was once Germany’s industrial engine now draw tourists keen to explore what might possibly be the least likely spot for a dream vacation: the Industrial Heritage route. Continue reading…
Ever since the phenomenon known as Tiger Woods burst onto the scene, and then of course, President Obama (I still get a thrill writing that), I have been wondering when the global fusion of humanity that these two highly evolved orchids represent will start making an impact on the culture. And then, watching the Oscars sweep of Slumdog Millionaire – a pop cultural hybrid, if you will, of Western fairy tale and Bollywood surrealism – I realized that it already has.
It has been long established that hybrid plants grow bigger and faster than their parents. Darwin first identified the scientific principle known as heterosis in 1876; now virtually all corn grown here is a hybrid of different strains. What is fascinating to observe is how we too are increasingly becoming hybrids, along with the things that surround us. Continue reading…
Why is the Queen carrying her own purse and umbrella?
(First published, 2007)
Have you seen the video of President Bush’s watch being lifted? Shot by Italian journalists covering Bush’s “historic” visit this week to the notoriously impoverished nation of Albania—one of the small “coalition of the willing”—it appears to show the US President’s $50 Timex being expertly removed from his left wrist as he surfs the crowd shaking hands. Although the White House quickly dismissed the story, claiming that the President actually removed his own watch before launching into the melee (why, because maybe somebody would steal it?), what is clear is that it’s time for the President to make some new friends.
Like the old joke says, he’s certainly going to need a new watch, but lucky for “Booshie”– as the Albanians like to call him—his now missing accessory was standard- issue Timex with a Stars ‘n Stripes face, rather than 24k Rolex. Aside from the rather obvious question of what exactly Bush’s phalanx of secret-service guys were up to when this little assault on the President did, or didn’t happen, however, is the bigger question of why Bush needs to wear a watch at all. Presumably the Leader of the Free World doesn’t have to worry much about whether he’s running late for a meeting or the last bus home. Not to mention all the eager flunkies around him 24/7 who would only be too happy to give the outgoing President the time of day.
My own pet theory is that the reason that the President wears a watch is the same reason that the Queen always carries a handbag. Continue reading…
I have a beef with the way the words fashion and style tend to be used interchangeably. When I tell people I write about style, for instance, they immediately assume I write about fashion. It is true that the two can meet: those who approach fashion as an art form, for instance, can be described as stylishly dressed. But to observe the latest fashion trends is hardly the same thing as having style. Continue reading…
This year, on my birthday, I resolved to do something radical (it happens to fall on the vernal equinox, so I tend to celebrate it as if it were New Year’s). No, it wasn’t a “big” or important birthday, just another cheery turnstile on the road to senility, decrepitude and death. And no, I didn’t jump out of a plane, climb a distant mountain peak at dawn or book an appointment to have my eyes, tits or ass tucked, and/or drained and lifted. And I most certainly did not hold a fashionable “rebranding” party for myself, where, apparently, one invites all their friends over, serves them cocktails and hors d’oeuvres and then has to listen their “constructive” advice as to how and what one should really work on in order to become more marketable or more appealing to the outside world.
What I decided was not to do any of those things. And by not doing them, not get any older. Let me explain. Continue reading…
Copyright © 2010 Karen von Hahn. All rights reserved.