New York missive no 90 - Naming colours, and Astoria Park on a grey morning

One day I was getting on the downtown 1 train at 59th Street when a young Chinese girl asked if I could help her name a colour. She was clutching a large board. It had scraps of different coloured material and paper stuck onto it. Rather desperately, she said “excuse me, but what name do you give this colour?” I paused then offered “ivory".

“Good, ivory," she said, and wrote it on the board. We got on the train. She sat next to me, and for the next few stops we worked through the rest of her colours. Some were easier than others. There was “baby blue”, “mauve“ and "black”. We both got off at 28th Street: she was headed to the Fashion Institute of Technology where presumably her colour-naming would be put to the test.

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The day before JNH’s birthday I took him for an early morning stroll around Astoria Park (pre mum and baby music class). There was a slate sky and the East River was still. A black and white tugboat slid down it pulling a nondescript cargo. The arch of Hell Gate Bridge was reflected in the river to form an open mouth – leading to the winding throat of the Hudson if you were approaching (as I was) from the South, and to the clanging city and out to sea if you were approaching from the North.

It reminded me of a passage I’d just read in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The passage describes the city of “Despina," that can be reached by ship or by camel. When a camel driver approaches, he sees the shape of the city with its skyscrapers, radar antennae, wind-socks flapping and “chimneys belching smoke” as a ship. “…[H]e thinks of it as a vessel that will take him away from the desert, a windjammer about to cast off…”

When the sailor approaches, he “knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a camel from whose pack hang wine-skins and bags of candied fruit, date wine, tobacco leaves, and already he sees himself at the head of a long caravan taking him away from the desert of the sea…”

The book pushes its idea a bit too far. It describes many, many incarnations of cities to drive home the point that cities have the same contents – it’s the angle they are viewed from that changes and changes them, like a kaleidoscope. But it has some gems, like this paragraph that I pounced on and tripled-lined in the margin. It captures what I’m trying to get at with my 30th Ave website:

“Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.

‘But which is the stone that supports the bridge?’ Kublai Khan asks.

‘The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,’ Marco answers, ‘but by the line of the arch that they form.’

Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: ‘Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me’

Polo answers: ‘Without stones there is no arch.'"

New York missive no 58

Woman walking in a very short skirt through West Village with your dog, do you know that your legs don’t look that good from behind? I wonder...maybe so, and you don’t care. That’s cool.

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The yellow dress that Michelle Obama wore to her husband’s inauguration in January is on display at Fashion Institute of Technology, just over the road from my work. So I went to check it out one lunchtime. It’s there along with lots of other outfits by its Cuban designer Isabel Toledo, who, I felt (being as far from a fashion expert as possible hence not really in a position to comment), designs fabulous shapes but often misfires on the material. Michelle’s inauguration suit, for example, is an elegantly dramatic shape and a striking colour but up close the fabric looks a bit like a sofa cover, heavy and floral.

The exhibition is called "Fashion from the Inside Out," because, Toledo says, that’s the way that she sees her work. "I never thought of myself as a designer. I’m a seamstress. I really love the technique of sewing more than anything else. The seamstress is the one who views fashion from the inside! That’s the art form, really – the technique of how it’s done." The dresses on display were technical masterpieces (again - says I, the absolute novice). Ah, and of naming, which appealed to me of course. There were Origami dresses, folded to create sail-like collars and backs, the Double Tier Pagoda dress, Blossom Sleeve Bolero and Balloon dress, a Butterfly Wingspan jacket, a jersey dress called Tequila Sunrise, and the Cage dress, made of little black bars hung over the shoulders. Lots of descriptions and pictures here.

The week after seeing that exhibition, dramatic dresses caught my eye. There was the woman on the corner of Greenwich Ave and West 13th wearing a fluorescent green one, and the woman with pink hair and a whispy orange floaty dress at a Lincoln Centre Out of Doors concert (where I had a brightish blue sundress on). The concert involved 200 electric guitars. It would have been more dramatic had we got there in time to be in the centre of things rather than tucked away under the trees, but was relaxing in a zenny-summer evening way.