Our aprés tennis sweater reminded me of the Chanel Collection from the year I visited Paris, primarily red white and blue, was it Spring 2016? This sweater arrived just as we were notified that Karl Lagerfeld had passed. Naturally named To Karl With Love. I was reading about Coco to Lillian, and she came up in conversation with my aunts and then in a business meeting. Here's what I've read: she fought hard to make her parfum just a certain way, with just a certain chemist, with just a certain, incredibly rare flower, and it was expensive. It was also her money maker. I'm not sure exactly why this is important at this time, but as you know, when I get this many hits, I have to share. When she came to the US to see clothing on racks in department stores she shuttered, a far and dismal distance from couture cutting and fitting for an individual woman. I'm so curious what she would have thought of Lagerfeld and yet it doesn't matter. Her fashion house, which had a tumultuous story through and around WW2, has a life of its own. Her story is one of great sadness, abandonment, independence, creativity, talent, functionality, and vigor. Wins and Losses, like all of us. I wonder what his was. I've read he kept ipods in every room so he could always have his music available to him. "Embrace the present and invent the future" is quoted on his site, I would bet the two of them had this mantra in common.
I'm a bit of a risk taker, why not, I'm scared most of the time anyway, ha ha, but I like most of us, want some reassurance, and I'm learning more and more that the assurance is in "everything is possible" and "things work out well for me" as core beliefs. The power of perspective, finding the good, and allowing it to be true, along with all the feelings. I wonder how Coco felt as she fought for that perfume, I wonder how much she questioned herself, those around her, etc, and what is it that drove her/ drives us regardless. Something subtle inside, an instinct, a feeling, an idea, so vulnerable without proof and only you to champion it. Maybe it comes to fruition, maybe it doesn't, maybe it sets something in motion that then manifests in someone else's life. Maybe its a game changer in yours. I guess I'm just swimming around in curiosity today, inspired by a sweater, that I hope you love, a designer that fascinates me, and a woman I admire.
xoxo, Cecelia