There’s a hilly village in Dorset, Britishland which was used in a TV commercial for Hovis bread many years ago. Here’s a view of the same hill taken during one of the “Beast From The East” winter storms recently:
My first question is: what the hell would possess anyone to build a village on so steep an incline?
My second question: I wonder what the incidence of thrombosis is in this village, compared to the national average?
Before I was born — hell, before my father was born — women dressed in the fashion of the day without regard to what it actually looked like. (Yeah, not much has changed.) Here’s one example, from the Roaring Twenties:
Of course, while that was what women wore in public, in private was a whole ‘nother story, as they say. Here, for your delectation, is a series of pictures of some of the Ziegfeld Girls of the era — most of whom were physically tiny, by the way — dressed (or rather, partly-dressed) in some private fashions.
This all came about when I was looking for some reference pics for a novel I’m working on — I needed to describe how a female character dressed back in the day, and suddenly, as so often happens on Teh Intarwebz, I ended up looking at these.
I’ll get back to the research any day, now…
Dramatis personae, from the top:
Adrienne Ames
Jean Ackerman
Olive Brady
Madge Bellamy
Lillian Bond
It’s all Phil Collins’s fault.
Perhaps I should explain myself.
Phil has a daughter named Lily who is a fashion model, and an extraordinarily beautiful girl she is, too:
However, she is distinguishable from most other girls by her signature feature, those thick, glossy eyebrows. And if there’s one thing we know about the fashion business, it’s that they slavishly copy anything that could be called “trendy” or “in” or whatever term they use to justify lemming behavior.
Yesterday I was riding on London’s Tube system, and across from me were sitting two girls of exquisite beauty — had they not been fuller-figured than the norm [2,000-word rant on the Anorexia Look deleted], I would have thought they were models. (I’d like to show a pic, but nowadays if you take an unsolicited photo of a woman, the next thing that happens will be you finding yourself spreadeagled on the ground while protesting to an unsympathetic audience of the fuzz that you’re not a stalker.)
However, both said beautiful Tube girls were (in my mind anyway) disfigured by having painted their eyebrows thicker — grotesquely so, like this:
…and in so doing, they’d transformed themselves into caricatures of Greek peasant women.
And forgive me, but the Greek peasant woman look doesn’t go well with blonde hair.
I would suggest that younger women take a pass on this particular trend, no matter how many fashion mags suggest that the simian look is the latest hot thing. What looks natural on Lily Collins looks freakish on everybody else — because no matter how good you think you look, all we see is that you’ve done a Groucho on your eyebrows (and hence the title of this post):
Of course, nobody’s going to listen to me. I just hope Phil Collins is satisfied.
“OMG, so I went to this like, artist’s place ’cause he said he was, like, looking for a model and he was offering like, serious cash. So I get there and he says I have to pose like, nude OMG, but he says he saw my nude pic on the Internet because that bastard ex-bf of mine, like, took those nudies of me with his iPhone? and this artist is all like, it’s Art, not just a boob pic, you know? And he offers me like, double the money and I’ve got these student loans? so I think WTF and I strip off. He starts painting me, and then he’s, like, all OMG you’re so beautiful and he starts looking at me LIKE THAT and I’m just about to get up and leave when he, like starts kissing me and I’m like ewww ewww ewww because he’s like, older than my Dad, you know? I was so grossed out, it was like, sexual harassment? but he gave me $500 for the session so I guess it’s like, okay?”
“OMG that’s exactly what happened to me? only I didn’t go nude and the artist was like kinda sexy, like Brad Pitt kinda, so I didn’t mind too much? Just promise me you won’t like, tell my bf, kay?”
It occurs to me that of late I may have been giving women a hard time on this here website, and I’ve also been discussing various examples of female pulchritude in my usual drooling Male Bastard fashion, so my Lady Readers may be getting a little ticked off.
Here then, in the interests of balance, is something for said Lady Readers:
I have no idea who he is (British, to judge from the label — “What label?” I hear you ask), so go ahead and just look at him like a sex object.
I owe you all one.
Comments, on this post, are restricted to the Ladies.
