D'NA collects: Barbie by Assouline

The spirit of Barbie is best evoked in her 1959 debut: she is in Bette Davis’ smirk in All About Eve, Coco Chanel’s string of pearls, Marlin Monroe’s mole, and Marchesa Luisa Casati’s enormous eyes, which she famously drew attention to by dropping belladonna in and lining with the world’s first fake eyelashes fashioned out of mink. There is a worldliness to her expression, which she pairs expertly with gold earrings and a chic monochrome striped bathing suit. Which makes it so surprising this doll was introduced to the world as a teenage fashion model.

This weighty tome produced by Assouline and written by Yelda Zonis McDonugh, was created in celebration of the 50 year anniversary of the world’s famous doll in 2009. We are offered the opportunity to look a little deeper into its history of the brand and uncovers some home truths about its origins. For instance, the American Barbie doll had a precursor as the German Lilli doll, almost identical to its 1959 counterpart in every way: in its style (blonde hair, high ponytail) and its enviable anatomical proportions. However, the key difference was that the Lilli doll was not made for children: it was created as a novelty item to celebrate the eponymous pin-up from a comic strip in Hamburg newspaper Bild-Zeitung. Ruth Handler would come across the doll by chance in 1956 on a family trip to Switzerland, and take note how her 15 year-old daughter was entranced by the fashionable shape of the doll and the removable outfits. She took home three Lilli dolls to the States, sensing a gap for a more mature doll in a market flooded with babies and toddlers. On her return, in what will forever be a fascinating and polarizing branding move, Ruth Handler, co-founder of Mattel, decided to market the adult doll as a teenager. Perhaps it was endemic of the cultural climate in the 1950s that was just discovering the creative and commercial possibilities of American youth culture, where female role models in popular culture had once been stratified as either June Cleaver or Lucille Ball. Rebel Without a Cause had come out only a year before in 1955, and Mattel had been built on their forward-thinking business acumen: husband and wife Eliot and Ruth Handler had expanded their picture-framing business in 1945 by making doll furniture out of surplus slats and panels. By 1962, they would be one of the first big name brands advertising on TV, with a spending budget of $5,700,000, (they chose an advertising spot on the Mickey Mouse Club, with the catchy handle “You can tell its Mattel, its swell.”) Mattel was able to purchase rights to the Lilli doll by 1964, halting its production in the same year. Ruth made her choice and she had chosen well, and with her lucrative decision to market a more mature doll to young girls, ironically that doll would develop into a totemic figure synonymous with a cultural obsession for youth.

With that in mind, what is interesting about this book, is that it something of a departure. It debunks the myth of representing Barbie as a trendy ingénue constantly on the lower rungs of the career ladder and returns her to her original siren status as a woman of a certain age. We see Barbie re-imagined as a dark-haired Sophia Loren glamazon; Barbie photographed by Patrick Demarchelier in couture. It is a stark break from the idea of ‘Barbie’ as it currently exists in our lexicon, often used as a pejorative noun to describe someone who is deemed artificial in their tastes, as lacking imagination by pursuing uniform cosmetic standards (and perhaps even going as far as undergoing surgery to achieve them). But how much value is there in stating that the fact Barbie represents artifice is a bad thing? The idea of achieving a ‘fake’ look itself, striving at something so seemingly perfect it has to be unreal, itself requires degrees of self-awareness and artistic license. To know just what to emphasize and what to conceal, the spiritual nip and tuck that will make the difference, is what drives any self-transformation. After all, what is Barbie but a woman who constantly re-invented herself while maintaining a lionized sense of self? Apropos of the 50s culture that birthed her, she is all about the very forgivable narcissism of self-refinement. Which is why at 56 years old, there is still a place for her in popular culture: Moschino successfully channeled the 80s ‘Malibu’ iteration of the muse in their 2015 Spring Summer collection, sending models down the runway in baby blue eyeshadow and pastel sunglasses. The “Barbie” font emblazoned in pink across tank tops and sweaters was surely a moot point, when her legacy in popular culture has always been about the cult of femininity as both an aesthetic and a choice. On the runway it was translated as part-Clueless, part Madonna circa Lucky Star, and the younger generations who bought them will understand it in the playfulness of the make-over: changing your hair; changing your outfit; changing your mind. But for those who still believe Barbie as a brand representing little girls and the colour pink, make no mistake: she is the original grande dame.

By Hadeel Eltayeb

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D'NA collects: Oscar Niemeyer

Our story starts in 1936 in Brazil, where the Education minister Gustavo Capanema seeks to establish himself and the new progressive administration with a modernist skyscraper, of a scale the world had not seen before. Plans were drawn up for a building that would physically house Rio’s ministry of health and education, and symbolically cement the ideals of the nation. Capanema was looking to send a message that Brazil was not just moving in harmony with the modern world but also capable of leading it. He compiled what to him must have been a sterling team of five emerging Brazilian architects, headed by the promising Lucio Costa. Costa had even insisted on hiring the internationally acclaimed Le Corbusier as a consultant. Oscar Niemeyer, however, had not been one of those five brilliant men. He was only 29 years old and he had convinced Costa to allow him onto the project only through a combination of sheer gall and the fact he had promised to work for no payment. And yet when Le Corbusier flew in on a Graf Zeppelin to meet the team, Niemeyer was among the party to meet him. When Le Corbusier produced two sketches which failed to encapsulate the vision Capanema held for the new Brazil, it was Niemeyer who took over. The building that we now know as Capanema Palace opened in 1943 to international acclaim, making Nimeyer barely 36 years old when he was unveiled to the world as an architectural icon.

This incredible 168-page monograph by Matthieu Salvaing allows us to borrow from the late Niemeyer’s vision, rather than turning the eye inward onto the man himself. Although there are some autobiographical passages where he writes beautifully of his artistic process (including the confession that his designs are always sketched with an accompanying written composition), Niemeyer is never more poetic than when his designs speak for him. Then, as many of his most celebrated structural masterpieces are reproduced to a dazzling gigantic scale, we are able to look deep into the sensous structures of his design and pick him out clearly. For instance, if we look at his early work such as the 1943 Capanema Palace, we notice the nod to Corbusian principles such as pilotis, open plans and long horizontal sliding windows, enhanced with brise-soleil. But even then his departure into what would become his signature style is burgeoning: the high-rise building with its row of curved volumes, giving a wave effect. Niemayar would become infamous for exhausting his engineers and pushing the aesthetic possibilities of re-inforced concrete to construct his beloved curves. As he said himself:

"I am not attracted to straight angles or to the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man. I am attracted to free-flowing sensual curves. The curves that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuousness of its rivers, in the waves of the ocean, and on the body of the beloved woman.”

He found inspiration from natural life and in that way, confounded the world’s concept of an urban landscape by daring to soften it, dulating the pulse of the city into an elegant liquid form. This was the case at the 1939 New York World fair, where Nimeyer and Lucio Costa worked together again to head up the design for the Brazilian Pavilion. It was an avant-garde display, where Costa saw their vision as embodying grace in structure, light and spatially fluid in contrast to the mainstream contemporary architects at the fair. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia gave Costa and Niemeyer the highest award and in exchange, the keys to New York City. Soon enough, world leaders and esteemed patrons were asking Niemayar to sculpt his dreams, and then he would offer them the keys. A sequence of events would set this into motion: in 1940 he first met Juscelino Kubitschek, then Mayor of Belo Horizonte, who wanted him to design a new suburb north of Pampulha. This would be the Pampulha architectural complex which would put him on the map, featuring the internationally acclaimed St. Francis of Assisi church. In sixteen years, when Kubitschek was now the President of Brazil, Niemayer was given a carte-blanche to design Brasilia’s civic buildings: what we would become the residence of the president, the Alvorida Palace, with its moat and modest gatehouse. The National Congress of Brazil, the Palacio de Pantalto, the Cathedral of Brasilia. The dream of Brasilia was realized in 41 months, and in as much time, Niemayar had truly taken up residence with the heroes of Modernism: Miles van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, and of course, Le Corbusier.

Buildings such as the Nietóri Art Museum and the Oscar Niemeyer museum itself show that there is something to the late icon’s maxim that form should follow beauty rather than function: coming upon them even today, they are a surprise. They jolt you out of your everyday existence and into wonder. Where did this come from? How is it sturdy when it looks so light it could sweep the floor? In fact, with both the art museums in Brazil, a common observation is that their beauty supersedes their function, as more people stand in line to see these works of architecture than those who venture inside to see the works of art. It is a testament to his legacy of genius that we still have so many questions. How did he do it?

By Hadeel Eltayeb

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D'NA collects: Swans—Legends of the Jet Set Society (Assouline)

A gentleman leaves the Deauville summer house of a good friend at 4 in the morning. He returns later that evening, only to find his friend had been riding, played a spot of tennis, flown to England to watch one of his horses run, flown back and returned with a few girls to play a game of bridge. This man was Prince Aly Khan, and his friend Jean Fayard: welcome to the world of the Jet Set, where names matter less than titles do if you are on the inside. According to former Sotheby’s director, John Bowes-Lyons, this was a small group of a few hundred people “who saw each other, dined with each other, and stayed with each other, entirely, all the time.” Nicholas Faulkes introduces us to a dazzling cultural landscape of excess so vast, he does his best to convince us juicy vignettes such as this are barely skimming the surface.

Swans: Legends of the Jet Society’ examines this world with a droll sense of humour, exploring key players in cultivating the scene, such as Stavros Niachros and Aristotle Onassis, Gianni Agnelli, Prince Alfonso von Hoenlohe-Langenberg. It seems fitting that this era of self-aggrandizement would be born out from the period of insecurity that came between the two world wars, where the race to beat German fighter planes led to the technological advances in jet-propelled aircrafts. It was not until 1949 that the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) offered the world’s first commercial jet flight from London to Tripoli and back, at a record of 2,980 miles in six hours and 38 minutes. Next came the first Trans-Atlantic flight from London, England to Idlewild, New York a few years on in 1952. By 1958, Pan-American World Airways had caught up with the launch of the Boeing 777, offering round-trip flights from New York to Paris. These would become the popular destinations that would trump a London still in the throes of post-war rations and economic depression well into the fifties. In a world where people still lived in the city where they were born, spoke with their own language and ate their own food, the cultural shift was seismic. That same year in January, the Harper’s Bazaar cover hails 1958 the “Year of the Jet Set”, featuring an editorial which required staff stopping over in the greatest cities of the world and taking note of the fashion. Diana Vreeland recalled:

“The most haunting impression of all the trip was the this sense of a world not only contracted in space but in time. Everywhere. The eye commutes- from past to future and back again- with bewildering speed.”

Mining the history of this past, where Foulkes excels is in the cinematic images he recreates: there are vivid descriptions of parties, palatial estates, and panoramic vistas that would not seem out of place in an Evelyn Waugh novel. Stavros Niachros and friends insisting on entering their estate grounds by jumping out of a their helicopter and into the pool, fully clothed; Baron Henri Thyssen and Nina Dyer eloping to Paris to live in a hotel suite for a year with a hoarde of dogs and a panther; Grace Kelly agreeing to a publicity trip to Monaco between shoots of To Catch a Thief, not yet a fashionable summer destination. These are the kinds of hyper slices of high society life which appeal to the archetypes we know today: dappled sunlight on a clear sea and deeply tanned athletic couples sailing in white, surely what Madison Avenue executives dreamt of at night when conceiving campaigns for Ralph Lauren, Lacoste , or Lily Pullitzer. In fact, the effect of the anecdotal story-telling is so seductive that the line between fact and fantasy begins to blur, and it becomes exciting to consider how many fictional constructs that are part of popular culture which could have emerged from the very social milieus Foulkes describes. For example, Ian Fleming’s world of James Bond and Thunderball is populated by well-dressed tastemakers in exotic climes who could easily emulate real life cads Baby Pignatari and Porfirio Rubirosa. Elsa Maxwell claimed to have invented Côte D’Azur as a summer destination, where it was virtually unheard of until Cole Porter and his wife summered at the Château de la Garope in 1921. It would be remiss not to imagine the stories pruned for the plots of F. Scott Fitzgerald, where among the summer murders and the spoils of moral ruin, you may be surprised to find among the guests at the Château that year were the couple Sara and Gerald Murphy, the real-life protagonists of Tender Is the Night. Or as it happens, amongst the sheer volume of scandalous revelations, you may not be surprised at all. In any case, infamy is the name of the game. The very title of the book ‘Swans’ refers to Truman Capote’s meditation on style icons such as Jackie Onassis, Slim Keith or Marella Agnelli, which emerges as an argument on the cultivation of taste as beauty. He posits that a young woman in her twenties is worthy of attention, but worthy of his admiration are these women of a certain age who enhance their natural gifts with the patience of ‘an artist whose sole creation is her perishable self’. What is interesting is Capote’s observation places the style aficionado as the artisan of their own legacy, where, if we consider Diana Vreeland’s remark that the pace of jet-setting contracted both space and time, and allowed the eye to travel, then it makes sense this heightened awareness of the world should translate into a heightened awareness of oneself. This after all was the dawn of the age of the papparazzo (coined in Fellini film La Dolce Vita in 1960) when legendary gossip columinists such as Elsa Maxwell and Igor “Ghighi” Cassini curried favour within high society by writing about them, showing the Jet Set were already turning that sharp eye inward on themselves.

Inevitably, the launch of the jumbo jet and the reality of air travel we know it today would kill of this clandestine culture in the early seventies. Yet if there is one key difference that separated those societies which Foulkes refers to as the Gilded Age and the Jet Set era and engineered for one its early demise, it is the lack of self-awareness between those Europeans still rooted in old world aristocracy and the more progressive guard of New World capitalists. There is a captivating passage about The Windsors, an old name for an old era, who still sailed their ship The Queen Mary twice a year for their vacations. As he tells it, despite their visiting the ‘right’ destinations in France, they spoke no French, so they did not host the most interesting people. The capital Paris still had its standing as the height of fine art, fine food and couture, but travel had begun to broaden the horizons of the social elite. Their lack of interest in keeping up with changing fashions and reverence for tradition were seen as démodé, when picking up new tastes while abroad was becoming like learning a new tongue. It was a new language of expression and in this sense, the relics of the Fricks, Carnergies, Vanderbilts, Gettys, Rockefellers with their Old Masters paintings had become too remote. Those in the know spoke in short-hand: they still shopped in Paris, but they also went to ski in St. Moritz, eat at Maxim’s and invest in Gaugins, Cezannes or Van Gogh pieces for their homes. Reading ‘Swans’ in 2015, this is a comforting reminder our global culture is not so remote from that of the Jet Set: our cultural short-hand may be different, but the past is no longer a foreign country.

By Hadeel Eltayeb

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Hôtel Du Cap Eden-Roc (Assouline)

There is a passage in A Tale of Two Cities, published in 1859, where Charles Darnay is described as looking into the mirror at his reflection while the character is in inner turmoil. It is the kind of set up for scenes we have seen many times in films, but this was the first time this kind of cinematic potential for self-reflection was explored in literature. This is 40 years before Freud would publish The Interpretation of Dreams, and introduce the idea of the self to the general public. It was no wonder, when by the end of the 19th century, the age of industrialization had made commonplace the presence of clocks, train schedules, shift work that would take over modern life, and man was aware of time as an authority that rules over their lives. To think of the Hôtel Du Cap Eden-Roc, it was almost as if the original founder realized this sacrifice to the modern age and rejected it, engineering a kind of surrealist utopia that resisted the passing of time. Hippolyte de Villemessant, who had also founded the French right-wing newspaper Le Figaro, built the hotel’s original site in 1870, intending the place to be an escape from writer’s block. Today in the 21st century, it has remained a retreat for film stars and the unofficial home of the Cannes film festival, with the legend on the hotel garden plaque that reads: Ce qui sera, c'est ce qui fut. "What will be, is what was."

In ‘Hôtel Du Cap Eden-Roc, Cap D'Antibes (Assouline)’, author Francois Simon establishes the bygone era of ‘what was’ by effectively taking us back to a time when the ‘vacation’ was a new concept, and the very nature of traveling was that journeys took so long, you really ought to stay a while. Yet through more than a century of history, you would be surprised how much of the hotel site has remained loyal to its origins. The original building, which started with the rose-coloured Napoleon III château in the early 1900s, has now been painted a cool white, surrounded by a 22 acre park of pine trees and tropical gardens. It now houses 117 suites, 33 cabanas and 2 private villas, but the only landmark changes made in the 20th century seem to have been the addition of two fountains, and the installation of the Eden Roc Pavillion built in 1914. This is no accident, as we find that legacy of the hotel is well-kept through meticulous effort by its keepers (and it will have many keepers in its lifetime). In the 45 million euro restoration which began in 2007 and completed in 2011, the objective of co-owner Maja von Malaisé Oetker was that only regulars of the Hotel Du Cap should notice the changes being made. Such is the spirit of the hotel, there is more evidence of its mark on each set of successive inheritors to the hotel and not the other way around.

In 1899, Madame and Antoine Sella first bought the property with aims to revive its status. The first guests of Antoine Sella’s Hôtel Du Cap had been two English women who only paid 12 francs per day. The rest of their party had not arrived and Sella had prepared for 40 guests, requesting 5 horses and a bus to accommodate them. From a business perspective, it seemed to be destined for failure. But fail it do not, as the fashionable classes of aristocrats came to appreciate its discreet location and old world charm, famously eschewing all the trappings of modern furnishing and plumbing. It was resistant to fashion: it became a summer destination only after a young American couple rented the hotel for the season, when before that it had been one of the few properties in the region open all winter and closed during the warmer months. It was in 1903, when Antoine Sella was showing Lord Onslow around the property, that Onslow remarked the place could benefit from central heating, private baths and lifts. Sella politely conceded that improvements could be made, and stated financial instability as the true culprit behind some of the hotel’s more rustic charms. Onslow brought out his cheque book and at that moment, wrote down a generous sum and he left in a town car stating he would return to sort out the mortgage at a later date. It would not be the first time wealthy patrons would be seduced into assisting the legacy of the great hotel. When Antoine’s son André Sella finally sold the place in 1970, it was then purchased by Rudolf August and Maja Oetker. They had made the sale without a single visit, merely spotting the mansion from afar on their own travels and taking a shine to it. They had acquired the property for their Oetker collection, which at that time already included Brenner’s Park in Baden-Baden, the Bristol in Paris, the Chateau Saint-Martin in Venice and the Park Hotel in Vietnam. But it was clear that the Oetkers had a certain reverence for its status going in. the Hôtel Du Cap-Eden-Roc (HDCER) would never become relegated to a trophy boutique luxury hotel.

This book serves as an archive of guests past and present, and captures beautifully, the quality of a place equally constructed from memories and from dreams. There is a quote from the hotel’s General Manager, the late André Sella, which is so simple and astute as an observation of human behavior. Recalling the caliber of their guests, Stávros Spýros Niárchos; Monsieur Hennessey (of the cognacs); Eddie Constantine; the Duke and Duchess of Windsor; the Maharaja of Patiala, Sella remarked: "When on vacation, the rich like to pay Maharajah prices to live like boy scouts." This compulsion towards child-like abandon comes through in the tales of the Hollywood A-list who cross the Promenade de la Croisette during the Cannes Festival, seemingly on their worst behavior once they have beat a hasty retreat from papparazzi, publicity and the shackles of contemporary celebrity culture into the four walls of the HDCER. But there are more tempered examples of a desire to escape: Monica Belluci receiving special permission to sleep in the cabanas facing the sea; Tom Hanks’ heart-breakingly succinct praise in their famed guestbook- ‘Peace and Coffee’! No matter the cultural weight of the past guests who sojourned in their suites, from George Bernard Shaw, Marc Chagall to Pablo Picasso, they are all leveled by in their existential quest to detach from their public persona, so much so that they spirit themselves away to the furthest resort of the tip of the Ivory Coast.

In this sense, you get the feeling the spirit of the hotel is built on eternal nostalgia for another time or place. It is haunted by the romance of the original founder, if we accept D.H. Lawrence’s definition of romantic as ‘being homesick for somewhere else’. If cities such as London, Paris, New York are the most filmed, then we recognize their aesthetic as modern: tapping feet, roving eyes, clocks. Places like French Riviera will always be the most written about, like Rome, they are almost mythical, never pinned down to a fixed image and seem more true to our imagination. We may never see the Cap D’Antibes for ourselves, but we already understand that it represents a dream of a paradise, even if it is not our own.

By Hadeel Eltayeb

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