A perfect storm, Grace Jones & Azzedine Alaïa

Happy 70th Birthday to the best frock rocker ever, Grace Jones 🎉🎈🎊

Grace Jones, Los Angeles, 1991 Photographer: Greg Gorman. Dress by Azzedine Alaïa

The Met Gala celebrates Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination

Well, it is May, and along with the wonderful celebration of motherhood...It is also the time when Fashion and Art collide at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for what is fondly known as the Met Gala.  This year sees a particularly nuanced "collision" as Anna Winter,  Editor of Vogue harnesses the rich and beautiful aesthetic of the Catholic Church in "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination". It truly is Donnatella's time to shine...Vatican collaboration considered!

It's good time to be a frock lover, let me tell you! I wonder if there is a confessional for tragic like me who love to see the workmanship and lush materials paraded on the red carpet. I don't have much interest in celebrities, but I do appreciate an elegant carriage of an opulent and well designed frock! Some of my favourites below...

This is a time to see the glories of the craft of fashion design and the skill of the couturiers les petites mains, or little hands which has been honed over centuries. This is the thrill of fashion for me...this magnificent moment passes so quickly.

Atelier Versace...The boots are a bit humble, but they were very on trend for the night.

John Galliano gave Rhianna a frock to die for, perhaps others might consider it more costume than gown?

Moschino in the game, celebration of the Madonna.

Atelier Versace

Versace...chain mail forever!

It really was a night for Atelier Versace, the gowns were incredible, but then again, this is Donnatella Versace in her element.

The Labour of Frocks

Today I was at Queensland Art Gallery and mooched upon this amazing painting of women doing laundering. As I read more, it is a modern work referencing an earlier work from 1912 by Vida Lahey, Monday Morning. Interestingly, the image date coincides with a march by unionists and their supporters called Black Friday. It began with a tram strike in Brisbane as a result of tram workers being dismisses for wearing union badges, and ended in the police brutally dispersing the crowd at what is now King George Square.

Women's Work (1912) 2017 painted by Helen Johnson Australian, Vic b.1979

How hard it must have been to keep all those layers of clothing clean, and dust free in the streets of a quickly growing city. It would truly have been a days work! Let alone the difficulty of manouevering such heavy and clumsy skirts while getting on or off trams must have been so very challenging.

Women's work could not be more apt a title don't you think? It might make one quite tired, which is why the next painting seemed so relevant 😴.