- ebay rabbit hole 1: Czech/Austrian glass brooches and clip-on earrings in the shape of fruit (any fruit, I’m not picky). This is - what a cliché - a holdover from when I was 18 and owned a single piece of jewellery, a pendant that looked like a little bunch of purple glass grapes complete with two perfectly shaped little green glass leaves on a black suede cord. Predictably, I loved and lost it and have been mildly obsessed with perfectly-shaped and coloured glass fruit bijoux ever since.
It wasn’t till last year that the Great Rabbit Hole of ebay led me to stumble upon the closest thing to it I’d seen in twenty years - Austrian glass fruit brooches and clip-on earrings, especially the frosted ones that appear to date to the 80s? early 90s? going by the look of the brochure pictured in one listing. Promising stuff. The berry brooch and earring set in the first pic are now mine, sadly the frosted cherries and pears brooches from two other listings were beyond my budget but - well.
- random fashion thought/ebay rabbit hole 2 : I’m surprised that, in all the ballet flat revival that’s been ongoing for the last year AND all the ‘quiet luxury’ stuff that’s thankfully piping down now, Ferragamo has apparently been sleeping on its iconic Vara and Varina bow flats? a.k.a. the best grandma shoes ever. I’ve lost count of how many Vogue and Whowhatwear pieces I’ve seen going on and on about Ballet Flat mk. 2020s, and bow flats too, with 0 mentions of possibly the most iconic (and in my biased opinion, best quality and most versatile, long live the 8.5 C width) ones. Shouldn’t complain since it lets me score secondhand pairs for affordable-to-me prices. But seriously, why are they sleeping on it? Miu Miu those things up! You could do it ten years ago, why not now? A waste.
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- happy 80th birthday (belated, it was on the 3rd) to Yohji Yamamoto, a genius like no other who’s been in the game for a long, long time and starting to feel it going by all of his 2023 interviews (this one for W magazine by Kristen Bateman and this more recent one for Harper’s Bazaar by Steff Yotka). Long may he continue to move us.
(I still can’t figure out how to resize images, booo - they were all from ebay listings except the last, which is from Harper’s Bazaar)