Sergei Bondarchuk's War and Peace

According to the FT, there is a nostalgia craze in Russia for imperial tsarist history. Putin has commissioned a new set of textbooks taking a revisionist and slightly simplistic look at the Tsars - some people think in order to shape a new national identity built around strong leadership but NOT wrapped up in Communism.

What better way to celebrate a slightly sinister bit of propaganda than some screenshots from a truly masterful bit of propaganda?



Sergei Bondarchuk's War and Peace is a Russian epic. As Roger Ebert said: "By now the statistics regarding "War and Peace" are well known, but forgive me if I recite them with a certain relish anyway: the film was five years in the making at a cost of $100,000,000, with a cast of 120,000, all clothed in authentic uniforms, and the Red Army was mobilized to recreate Napoleon's battles exactly (it is claimed) as they happened."

Apparently, the embarrassment of riches thrown at the production was because the film equivalent of an arms race was going on after the 1959 American-Italian of War and Peace was released. It was decided that the Russian version must top it; at any price.

This scene (one that I watched quite a lot as a little girl) is Natasha's first ball, where no one will dance with her untl Pierre sends his friend Andrei over. So romantic!*

*This scene is great but the book is so much more - read it if you haven't!

Pink and fluffy

Pink fluff has never been so hot! The Paris Texas angora dress has launched a thousand pink coats, 60s suits and fluffy jumpers.



 (Paris Texas is great, but put me in one of these things and it would be more Ed Wood.)
 

I can't really handle the itchiness of angora sweaters, so I've been making do with a big mohair scarf I bought in a charity shop a few years ago. I'm building up a collection of these with the help of Etsy. There are some rather nice ones to be had for not much £££.

 

From Russia With Love - Title sequence

My boyfriend recently got the Bond Blu-Ray boxset as a gift and we have been working our way through the films in order. I think I am a bit 'Bonded-out'. There is only so many times you wanna see Sean Connery punch a woman in one evening - but I wanted to the share the amazing projected title sequence created by adman Robert Brownjohn on a budget of £850.



The projection! The font! The girls!

 
Brownjohn, who abhorred storyboards and scripts, pitched the concept to Saltzman and Broccoli by removing his own shirt and standing in front of a slide projector. “It’ll be just like this,” he said, “except we’ll use a pretty girl!”

 Read more about it here.

A-Dixon

I made a lightening raid on Selfridges last week to spend an old gift voucher on Christmas gifts from the food hall.  Because, of course, nothing says "I<3U" like a £5 pot of artisan jam.

On my way out of the food hall, I got totally lost, just like the nefarious store designer intended. I adamantly refused to buy anything extra but did find myself in the interiors section. The Tom Dixon concession looked good enough to move into. When I become a millionaire International Woman/ female version of Tyler Brule, I am going to have a lot of those copper lampshades.




Tom Dixon started his design career off welding motorbike frames and started out by cutting his suit to fit his cloth:

Working in the early 1980s could have been a dispiriting experience if I had known any better, but I was blissfully unaware and tried a variety of means of getting (my work) to market, driven mainly by necessity or naive optimism. If I knew as much as I do now, I almost certainly would not have bothered. I explored a variety of affordable techniques for self-production and usually designed to fit a new machine tool I had bought, a new stock of cheap available raw material, or to fit a local subcontractor’s skills. Source

Tom Dixon is a man who can appreciate copper piping and road safety flouro orange and can turn them into exquisite consumer products.He champions affordable design and British manufacturing. He also takes inspiration from all manner of unexpected places. He lives the George Lois saying, "Creativity is not created, it is there for us to find. It is an act of discovery."



My dad, who does a deeply practical and unglamorous job in the plastics industry, ended up working with him a couple of years ago when he decided to fill Trafalgar Square with expanded polystyrene chairs that the good people of London could take home with them.



One day when I have more space, I'll make like Door Sixteen and fill unoccupied spaces with his off-cut furniture.

Celia Birtwell's life in style

Celia Birtwell is the textile designer whose floral prints on gossamer chiffons, silks and satins, tailored and cut into romantic dresses and shirts by her late ex-husband, Ossie Clark, defined the ethereal look of the late 1960s and 1970s. Talitha Getty, Marianne Faithfull, Pattie Boyd and Bianca Jagger all wore them. Even Brian Jones and Keith Richards couldn't resist the odd blouse. - Kate Finnegan

In their heyday, Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell were a classic 70s fashion partnership/marriage, a bit like the team behind Biba, Barbara Hulanicki and Stephen Fitz-Simon (my post on Biba is here). They were friends who did work experience at Christian Dior together and had a black poodle called Beulah after a line in a Mae West movie ("Beulah, peel me a grape").  Partly thanks to his short life and his amazing diaries, Ossie seems to have gone down in history as the tragic genius in the partnership - bisexual, drug abusing, bitter, eventually murdered by a male lover, etc. Although incredibly stable in comparison, Celia Birtwell is also very interesting. She is a close friend of David Hockney and a very funny lady :

"She does a great impression of Hockney ('uuh nuuh, luvvie…'), who just this morning has sent her one of his iPad paintings. She wipes make-up smudges off her iPhone as she shows me a wonderful depiction of the artist's view from his bed at home in Yorkshire to the house across the street. 'He sends them to quite a few people,' she says. 'I get so many I'm a bit nonchalant about them now. You run out of things to say - oh, it's amazing, oh, it's fab - so you don't say anything. Although I did tell him I liked his curtains last week.'"

Celia also had great curly fringe action in her day (which you know I like) and created the loveliest felt tip pen designs, all done from the face downwards; if she didn't like the face of the model she had drawn, she wouldn't continue.

 Here are some great photos of Celia and her work from her biography.

Blues

An outfit from before the winter came.

Leather jacket - New Look via Ebay, Skirt - American Apparel, Shirt - Banana Republic, Shoes - Jones, Bag - And Other Stories

Tapas at Jose, Bermondsey Street

Jose is a delightful tapas bar on Bermondsey Street, run by the street's resident Spanish chef, Jose Pizarro - who has another restaurant, Pizarro here as well.

Jose is the kind of place you should go after a holiday in Spain, to reminisce and wash the blues away with sherry and jamon iberico.  You can sit at the (beautiful, marble) bar and the Spanish waitresses will put up with you practicing your dodgy espagnol after a few glasses of wine.

Interestingly, Jose is a refurbished sandwich shop that I used to frequent a few years ago when the street wasn't quite as fashionable as it is now.  Sadly, it closed down after its lovely owner was murdered there by an ex-employee. It is great the place is having such a successful second life.

Find out what some more accomplished food reviewers thought of Jose here and here.

Decorating

Some new things in the flat:

Things I saw, did and ate this week

Flowers and a dog driving a car... at Columbia Road Flower Market


Jones' Dairy at Columbia Road Flower Market


Great views off Kingsland Road in Dalston


An old City barber shop and the garden at the Geffrye Museum of the home


Love Shake; a little ole' place where you can buy pancakes and coffee for £3.50