Style and Fashion

Julia Sneden writes and rhymes about bathing suit shopping: It's an annual chore for most people, this business of buying a bathing suit. For me, it comes around every six months or so. With older women and men doing water aerobics and swimming laps, wouldn't you think the bathing suit manufacturers would twig to the idea that there’s a huge market out here? We buy suits more often than teenagers do, because we're harder on them more »

In the eighteenth century, promenading among the shops along the rue St. Honoré became a fashionable leisure activity for men and women alike. This street was home to Paris's marchands merciers, a class of merchants who dealt in all manner of luxury goods, including textiles for furnishing and clothing. The mercers' exclusive right to finishing work — arranging for the addition of embroidery, buttons, braids, and sequins through a network of specialized workers — allowed their customers to choose the exact colors and patterns they wanted at the point of sale. more »

The exhibition presents the many devices and materials that women and men have used to shape their silhouettes from the seventeenth century to today, including panniers, corsets, crinolines, bustles, stomach belts, girdles, and push-up brassieres. The exhibition will also look at how lacing, hinges, straps, springs, and stretch fabrics have been used to alter natural body forms. In men's fashion, the exhibition explores how padded jackets provoked arched torsos; how calf enhancers, stomach belts, and codpieces were worn; and how variations on these enhancements continued into the nineteenth century and beyond. more »

Tam Gray writes: Usually, after a professional makeup session, I'd run back home or to the ladies room to remove a large portion of what had been applied. Shockingly, Maia didn't even take my elbow and try to steer me to those products that would be 'for me only' at a 'special price,' perhaps expecting that I would splurge on a specific brand of cosmetics. I went back to the office feeling quite pleased with the way I looked: fresher and rested. "There are many reasonably priced products made for different skin types that will give the older woman a clean, healthy appearance and a natural, radiant look."   more »