Getting Carded
Handing out business cards is the easiest way to give people your numbers, even in social situations. But some truly fashionable girls feel the need to take a more personal approach. Tiny Edwardian-style calling cards, decorated with a name, a number or two (home? cell?), and sometimes a tiny decorative flourish, are being pressed into the city’s chic-est palms. Papivore offers calling cards in many sizes, but the preferred shape is small and square (117 Perry Street; 212-627-6055). Nancy Sharon Collins, Stationer, having been besieged with requests for calling cards lately, suggests cards with no number at all (to order, call 212-431-5959). “That way,” Collins explains, “you can write whatever number you want.” Perfect for gracefully diverting pesky suitors.
Full Fashion Jacket
It may have finally happened. The reign of a certain kind of jean jacket – old-Levi’s-style, but naturally made by Earl instead – has come to an end, just in time for these schizophrenic months when a cover-up is always a wise idea. In its place? The shrunken blazer. The season’s best have tufted shoulders and fitted bodies, look more collegiate than cowboy, and are tossed over everything from sheer dresses to dirty denim. Marc by Marc Jacobs has done the style in a number of twills: khaki, light blue, rust, or denim (about $250, at Barneys New York and Bergdorf Goodman), and Mayle’s Valentina jacket (pictured) is covered in tiny stars and stripes ($340 at Mayle, 252 Elizabeth Street; 212-625-0406). Now, if only something would come along to replace those ubiquitous black platform slides . . .
Pec-Neck Sweaters
In the beginning, there was cleavage. Standard, heaving, bosom cleavage. It was such a hit that others followed – toe cleavage, for example, even (thanks to Alexander McQueen’s low-low-cut pants) bum cleavage. Now the hottest cleavage is showing up somewhere else entirely: on men. Prada and Gucci, along with all of their imitators, have taken the man’s V-neck and dropped it navelward. This low neckline is known as a Johnny collar, and worn right (that is, without some opaque T-shirt underneath), it cuts across the chest in a neat angle that affords a perfect view of the outline of well-developed pecs and the tidy shadows they cast across the chest. Can man-Wonderbras be far behind?
Smart Set
Pamela Clarke Keogh
“She never embarrassed us,” says Pamela Clarke Keogh, author of the new book Jackie Style, about her subject. “She never spilled her guts to Barbara Walters.” If Keogh’s feeling a bit wistful, she’s not alone. With the Costume Institute’s Jackie retrospective opening this week, the whole city is engaged in a collective yearning for the glamorous icon. Keogh’s book looks at Jackie’s style from her baby-fat equestrian days right through her life as an Upper East Side editor, neatly chronicling all the Capri pants, head scarves, and shift dresses in between. The book is Keogh’s second – the first, Audrey Style, dealt with that other gorgeous gamine – and both tomes sprung from Keogh’s desire to teach history through stories of women and style. “What I really like about Jackie,” Keogh says, “was that Camelot was her creation. The Kennedys were very adept at seizing power, but Jackie understood that you have to make people believe in a dream. Fashion is what we remember, but that was really the merest bit of it.”