Helmut Newton, Kiss from “The Bordighera Details”, 1982

Love how much a departure this is from both their styles.

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Helmut Newton, Monte Carlo, 1994

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New shitkickers by Elisanero. To aid my surviving any impending apocalypse. Awesome.

Unrelated: a small child I know recently asked, “Are you a witch? You only wear scary black clothing.”

Love these shoes. I can’t find them online, but you can find other (equally badass) shoes by the brand at Oak, LuisaViaRoma and Saks.

Family resemblances are uncanny things. It’s magical seeing a friend’s nose or gestural tic mirrored in their mother or sister. My mother and I always laugh about this, because while, taken feature by feature, we bear absolutely NO resemblance to each other, people always insist that there’s no doubt that we are related. Apparently, we give the same sort of impression? Yeah. Doesn’t make sense to me either.

Anyway, me me me aside, photographer Frauke Theilking has taken this idea and exploded it, finding mother-daughter and father-son pairs and photographing them stripped of any encumbrances in the form of garments or the like. The results are fascinating, highlighting the strange echoes and gaps that you find between the generations.

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Old Milanese ladies are a wonderful study in doing things “just so,” as captured perfectly by this old photo I stumbled across on the Sartorialist. Nobody wears furs and sensible skirts the way they do. And I particularly love this one’s cane and daring pop of yellow at the neckline. They’re also masters of looking perfectly dignified and aloof, managing to pour just the right amount of disdain into their glance– when they condescend to look your way– to communicate to you that you are an inferior species and have lots to learn from them. I hope to grow up to be like a little old Italian lady someday. Compact, bitchy and fabulously dressed. That’s the way to do it.

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I took an intensive haute couture sewing  and patternmaking class last fall, taught by a tiny old seamstress we called Signora. We sat at workstations in serried rows for hours at a time while she paced about the room, examining our work and holding forth on the subject du jour. It was fantastic. Very rigorous, but just what I wanted.

As the Resident Foreigners, my friend Astrid and I were given many lectures on why traditional Italian tailoring enjoys the reputation it has (and let me tell you, there is WORK that goes in to properly tailoring something!) A constant refrain from Signora was “Rifiniture!” The finishing touches. She showed us the extra steps that made a hand-made garment into a work of fine craftsmanship. It’s all about the little thoughts that make a garment truly special.

That’s why I’m particularly drawn to vintage tailoring, such as with the suit above. The perfect seam on the waist and the buttons at the back are beautiful touches, showing that the garment was thoughtfully constructed. I’m working on building a skeleton wardrobe right now, of perfect base pieces, and it is these careful details that I’m looking out for, such as a well-made hem or something to make the piece more beautiful and unique. I think I might be done with fast fashion, except for pops of trendiness. Quality and thoughtfulness are becoming more and more important to me. How do you feel about this?

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I don’t know about you, but early January always has me heading straight for the astrology sites to read page after breathless page about the Year Ahead. I try to be a skeptic the rest of the time, but the new year is a good time to be credulous no? And they’re saying some utterly fantastic things about Sagittarius in 2012, so I’m all for anything that says good things will happen.

In that vein, I was utterly delighted to come across Ekaterina Koroleva’s Zodiac Signs  paintings on Behance. I like the things being done with watercolours these days, and here we have another fine example.

Sagittarius is my personal favourite, because it’s badass and backs are sexy. Then again, I’m biased. See the rest of the signs here.