Jean Zimmerman

Category: Fashion

  • The Spirit of Electricity

    I finally saw “The Spirit of Electricity,” the costume worn by Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt II at an outrageous fancy dress party she gave with her railroad tycoon husband that was one of the highlights of the Gilded Age in New York City. Textiles perish, and you don’t often get to see the famous gowns of…

  • Making Book

    Frank Stella’s splashy, enormous constructions line the walls of the lobby where my book publisher has its offices. Three collages, to be precise, of mixed media on a base of etched magnesium. Standing in front of one, you have to crane your neck to see the top of the piece. Standing there, I try to…

  • Thank You for Reading

    I am thankful. This is a post about this blog. At Thanksgiving, in a lot of families, a blessing is performed before the turkey comes on in its golden, crispy glory. The blessing consists of going around the table with every guest sharing some thing they are especially grateful for. On the occasions I’ve taken…

  • Portrait of a Lady Descending a Staircase

    Visiting the exhibit of Gilded Age Portraits at the New-York Historical Society, I simply had to let myself go into a cloud of chiffon, of gleaming satins, of deep-pile velvet. And, on the masculine side, really good wool. I fortified myself beforehand, consuming a dish of pappardelle with duck ragu and chocolate shavings, the kind…

  • Another Fine Dress You’ve Got Me Into

    I always wondered by what means people got up their getups for fancy dress balls during the Gilded Age. A fancy dress ball didn’t mean, as it sounds, elegant gowns for the ladies and stiff black tails for the gents. They were actually masquerades, opportunities for the well-heeled to escape their own trials and tribulations –…

  • The Things We Carry

    What heirloom would you bring? I’m reading about refugees and the things that they carry (remembering the Tim O’Brien tale The Things They Carried, about the impedimenta Vietnam soldiers take with them into battle.) BBC News Magazine profiles refugees during the Nazi menace of the 1940s, asking that question. Isabelle Rozenbaumas’s mother escaped  Nazi-overrun Lithuania, barely,…

  • The Myths of Time

    I love that building, said my friend John, a publisher with a reliably elegant sense of taste. It was designed by Louis Kahn. The Yale Center for British Art, in New Haven, Connecticut, is housed in a sleek shell of matte steel on Chapel Street, the bustling main drag of the town. It was the architect’s last…

  • Forever Twenty-One

    Icy New York City, hot colors, textures, tastes – drinking it all in with a 21-year-old, on break from scholarly endeavors, who needs a pair of boots. Not those boots. Who needs a cookie. The crumbliest, crunchiest, richest cookie in Manhattan, from Levain bakery on West 74th Street. Chocolate, a zillion calories. Would make a…

  • Natasha and Pierre on Broadway

    Well, yes, only in New York, sure. An electro-pop opera in a night club. In a tent. On a parking lot. In Times Square. On line outside Kazino supper club, on a Wednesday night, we wait in the cold. There are many sweet and stylish young couples. Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812…

  • Victorian Waltz and Tea

    Writing a novel in which Gilded Age debutantes dance with their swains in the gaslit ballrooms of fashionable New York made me want to get some nineteenth century dance moves under my belt. Or, rather, under my crinolines. So I brought my best Tigger kicks in to Manhattan for an afternoon of 1-2-3, 1-2-3. Susan…

  • What a Wonderful House

    The walls can talk in Satchmo’s house. Literally. Standing in Louis Armstrong’s den in his longtime residence in Corona, New York, we heard his perfect rumbling tones describing his inspiration for What a Wonderful World – the children of his neighborhood in Queens. The docent had pressed a button. The effect was magic. We were visiting…

  • The Golden Notebook in Golden Fall

    Tomorrow will be a perfect day to take in the leaves upstate as they color up. If so much natural beauty wears thin and if you happen to be near Woodstock, New York, consider coming to The Golden Notebook for my 2:00 talk on The Orphanmaster. Signing copies, too. I know there are excellent lattes…

  • A Victorian Evening

    There were not enough chairs. Victorian Society guests who came in late had to huddle by the door rather than join the hundred or so in the room. I was only a little distracted by all those wide eyes in the audience, drinking in the images on the screen behind me, so entranced were they…

  • Sargent and the Newlywed Stokeses

    John Singer Sargent painted Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes in 1897, during the couple’s honeymoon – a classic portrait and an icon of the time. The three of them spent weeks in his studio, with Sargent occasionally taking breaks to pound out tunes on his grand piano. The great painter was at the…

  • Crystal Palace Visions

    One thing on the island of Manhattan that I’ve always wished I could have seen is the Crystal Palace, built to house the World’s Fair of 1853, “The Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations.” Walt Whitman called the glass and iron complex “Earth’s modern wonder.” On 42nd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, where…