Jean Zimmerman

Category: Fashion

  • The Flash Mob in My Mind

    To and fro they go, all the busy, self-involved commuters. A long day at work, the usual stresses, rushing home to other responsibilities. Set faces, hurrying through Grand Central Station with barely a glance at the reaches of fluid, majestic marble, the astronomical ceiling, the hundred-year-old intricate architectural features of the main concourse. Then along the…

  • Silk Thread on Cotton

    The Metropolitan Museum on a Saturday afternoon in fall: everything seems very still, but perhaps that’s because I am moving fast, whisked along in a wheelchair to save my aching foot, the cool gallery breeze in my face, going to see a show I’ve been hungering to experience. On the way we pass the spectacle…

  • Nuggets From Afar

    When the fall chill hits and you wrap yourself in a shawl and feel like drifting off to other times and places, these links might inspire you. The Evolution of Love Songs. In case you ever forget the words to Let Me Call You Sweetheart, here rendered by the Peerless Quartet in 1911. Chrysalis is a…

  • In a New Light at the Guggenheim

    I finally went, on the next to last day of the exhibition. The James Turrell installation, that is, called Aten Reign, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. It’s been up since June, and everyone said You’ve got to go, you’ve got to go. Now I understand why. Turrell is a conceptual…

  • Arrr, Matey

    Biker-pirate crazies rumbling through Times Square, tossing eyeballs into the tourist throngs? I admit, that’s a concept. One, once I heard about it, that got me out of my house and into Manhattan. It was the annual Talk Like a Pirate Day, which I first heard existed when we received an amusing card in the…

  • Pop Up Rules of the Game

    I wore my jacket for so many years the buttons started to blow. There was only one thing for it: pay a visit to Tender Buttons, just around the corner from Bloomingdale’s on New York’s Upper East Side. I collect buttons myself, the kind you happen upon at tag sales. None suited my jacket. Tender…

  • Beautiful Typologies

    Though I still don’t quite understand what a typology is, the form fascinates me nonetheless. Diana Zlatonovski makes typologies fascinating. This, for example, is a collection of sunsets she amassed on Flickr, drawn from the work of Penelope Umbrico. A curator of interesting objects and images, Zlatonovski compiles them into organized entities for our admiration/edification. She…

  • Digging

    I made a list. The things I’d do if I were going out and about this weekend. The free-of-leg-cast things. There’s the NYC Unicycle Festival, which kicks off with a 13-mile single-wheeled parade across the Brooklyn Bridge to Coney Island and which includes a bout of unicycle sumo wrestling. Then, the art installlation by Olaf…

  • Blurbs for The Asylum

    Blue Rider Press has come out with a book trailer featuring fashion insider Simon Doonan talking about getting blurbs for his his forthcoming book The Asylum. There is actually a series of very brief videos, including the blurb one but also one about designer Thom Browne and one about Michael Kors and one featuring “career…

  • Knowing How to Swing

    Revisited some of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Liz Taylor and Paul Newman. How gorgeous and weird a production it is, and what a knockout she is in her silken white dress with its deep vee. And, something I’d totally forgotten, what an amazing crutch walker is Newman’s Brick. It’s not a real…

  • Maine Woods Ramblin’

    My world-rambling brother Peter has sent a bulletin from the northern Maine forest, where he is catching his breath in the middle of a book project and, as always, exploring the local history. Peter published Podunk: Ramblin’ to America’s Small Places in a Delapidated Delta 88, which remains the definitive portrait of locales far off…

  • Crushes on Crutches

    At the movies I saw a woman on crutches. A young, pretty woman in a color-block sundress. As I watched, she hopped around the serve-yourself beverage kiosk, assembling her ice, her soda and her straw, putting the whole drink together before her boyfriend politely carried it away for her. I saw her next swinging her…

  • I Am the Walrus

    I’m about a foot shorter and slightly less blubbery, and my tusks have not come in, but my habit of lolling on the couch is pronounced. I could be lying atop a Greenland ice floe. A tooth-walking seahorse (Odonus rosmarus) through and through, cast-footed variety. Basically sedentary. Shellfish savoring. Laughable? Don’t people sort of snicker…

  • A Hut of Candy Floss

    Magical, feel good potions of the day: a tall iced coffee, a small pain smoother, a delicate skein of candy floss. There’s a lot you don’t know about crutches before they come into your life. Like what good yarn-winders they make in a pinch. This silk-angora begs to be knitted into a Barbie evening wrap.…

  • Day 1-In Which I Learn to Hobble

    It was a success, the surgery, though I awoke from the anesthesia blubbering like a baby. It’s normal, said the orthopedic surgeon, come to check on me. A lot of people cry. Then it was hip, hop, on to the wheelchair, on to the crutches, off to my new full-time lair, my living room, my…