Allow me to prefice this blog entry with the necessary holiday cheer of MERRY CHRISTMAS! I finally joined the smartphone market with the gift of a samsung galaxy (ha iphonites! eat your heart out, you haven't managed to brainwash me just yet..). Goodbye productivity, hello
angry birds and other pointless apps.
Basically, I was thinking about my love of fashion/ photography/ ketchup on pancakes (the latter being irrelevant to this blog entry but just thought I'd slide that one in there), and it made me think of my mum (again, not the pancakes bit. lol). Perhaps she was an early inspiration into a world I would one day covet to be a part of. I love the retro look of these old photographs. Something about the over-perfection of digital cameras has a habit of erasing the character of certain images.When my mum moved to Holland from Brazil with her first husband, she became a model, modelling in places like Paris, Germany, and Poland. I remember as a child in Holland playing between racks of clothes that she was working with, or stumbling upon designer sketches of clothes. At 4/5 years of age I was more into eating sand than shopping per se, but come to think of it I vaguely remember how cool those illustrations were. All shoulder pads and power dressing captured in strokes of ink (yup, you guessed it, eighties...). In my childhood I couldn't care less about these pictures, but it would be interesting to find them again and appreciate them with a more mature, fashion-focused eye.
She would tell me all these hilarious modelling stories about how the girls would play pranks on each other. Mind you, she worked as an in house model for one fashion house, and they tended to use the same girls over and over again. Even to this day, she counts some of her modelling 'coworkers' as her best friends, so the tricks they played on each other were more tongue-in-cheek versus backstabbing bitchiness. Things like removing the elastic bands of trousers right before they went on the runway so that they would fall right off (can you imagine that happening at Gucci or something today? Fashion suicide!)
She would tell me about fabulous parties in Paris, where she would be allowed to stay at some designer friends' place and host a get-together. I can't even imagine what it was like to plan parties pre-facebook/ texting/ smartphones. Suffice to say, she can now speak about 7 different languages, not perfectly, but enough to get by. Apparently she was once in a charity fashion show that Princess Diana was watching. Bananas.
How Diana Ross is this picture? Below, my parents Diomar and Sam, circa eighties. Circa BIG HAIR. I seriously don't know anyone else, in any other decade, that could pull off a pink jumpsuit with green boots!
I remember looking at these old photos early in my adolescence, smugly laughing at how old fashioned they were as I stood there in my (hideous!) 90s uniform of baggy jeans , spaghetti straps and kohl rimmed eyes (curse you All Saints for making me think that look was cool!). But looking at them now, as the eighties have come into fashion time and time again, the outfits in these images look classic, but still relevant and fresh. Erm, perhaps not the pink jumpsuit with the green boots combo though, don't think I can pull that one off.. But fashion inspiration no less.
xx
