Dali in the Land of Mescal

"The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb"  Andre Breton  

In the book "Traveler's Tales, Mexico",  we are told that Andre Breton, the founder of French Surrealism, said of Mexico "There is no need for our art movement in this country. Surrealism is a way of life here."    A variation of this quote is attributed to Salvador Dali, "I won't be in a country that is more surreal than my paintings".  Whoever said it, we can all agree;  Mexico defies reason.

 

 

 Andre Breton with Marxist Leon Trotsky and Muralist Diego Rivera in Mexico
 

Mexico is an irrational country, composed of disparate and unexpected elements, visions and sounds that clash and then resonate, that make us uneasy, that exhilarate, that make us wish we had been born here but grateful at least to live and die here.  It is  a man drinking down the moth larva floating in his mescal while his toddler, perched lovingly on his knee, snacks on sugar candy coffins.  It is boisterous laughter at a funeral. 

                                                          En Suenos.  In dreams.


The divide between reality and dreams in Mexico has only widened since the late '30's when Breton returned to France.  Mexico had taught him all she could but now there is so much more in Wonderland to trick the eye and send the mind reeling. 

Carolyn in Mexico

Brisa's Grandmother

            

 


Brisa is in her late teens, tall,  beautiful with Indio hair and skin, and classic Castilian features.  She works with her grandmother who is a juice vendor in an open-air market in central Mexico.  Brisa is physical perfection.  The only things separating her from the glossy pages of Vogue are make-up, a modeling contract and her grandmother.

Real Mexican markets, far away from tourist spots, can be fascinating, garish, beautiful and repulsive.  We had gone to this particular mercado to buy long stemmed roses, eucalyptus and purple statice from the flower stalls and at these prices we could fill our home in Mexico.  We could also buy pirated movies, house paint, live chickens or just chicken feet, saddles, rebuilt cell phones, or day of the dead toys but on this particular day, amid the smells of garbage and aftershave, the sounds of cumbia and crying babies, in this chaos, we spotted Brisa.  She was exquisitely out of place, scooping fallen honey bees out of the watermelon juice that she and her grandmother were selling.

Silver Nina, the website, would need jewelry models.  Brisa would be the first.  Her grandmother thought not. 

We explained ourselves; we offered references and remuneration; we invited the grandmother to come for the photo sessions.  But no.   In the end we left them our business cards and asked them to contact us, should they reconsider.  They won't.  Grandmothers in Mexico have the last word. 

~Carolyn in Mexico.

Long weekends

Like every single person I know, I do not wait well, but after the forms are filled, after the package is in transit, after all the phone messages have been left and every deadline is still far enough out that it's inappropriate to start calling people to ask, "Are we there yet?", one simply must wait.   As if on cue, a four day weekend has arrived where we plan to do very little other than relax, and put meat to fire as we sip refreshing adult beverages with those we love.   Here is hoping you enjoy your time off as much as you enjoy going back to the tasks you love and that you don't ever have to wait for anything.  Ever.

~Tracy in Newport Beach

The first silver

It feels like the long-awaited adoption of an already beloved child has finally gone through, and doesn't she take your breath away.

p.s.  "She's" on instagram /silverninanow
~Tracy in Newport Beach

Violante Ulrich

Violante Ulrich (right) with Shayna Weeden at an exhibition of Romero Betsabeé's work. Photo: Gilberto Covarrubias

I once met a slender young woman with long dark hair and pale skin who lived a privileged but purposeful life on a ranch outside Taxco, Mexico.   Her home was an inheritance from her father, Alberto Ulrich, an Italian engineer, who had purchased the ranch from his friend William Spratling along with furnishings and creative works.  Though it all belongs to Violante and her sister now, it is still called Spratling Ranch.  

The property was not really a ranch as we know them in Texas, but rather an estate, what might have been a former hacienda or the remnant of larger land holdings and wealth.  Restoration and preservation filled much of Violante's purposeful life; that and managing the grounds of the estate, part neatly cultivated gardens, part jungle pushing up against cream colored adobe walls and over terracotta tile roofs.  A long lane from the iron gate winds under an archway, past hand stacked stone fences, aviaries and a swimming pool off  the main house where she lives in dark cool rooms and works at making silver jewelry.

Spratling Ranch was not a museum, not a place where strangers could ever hope for an invitation but on a buying trip to Taxco almost a decade ago, we met someone who knew Violante and who was comfortable dropping by unannounced.  He offered to take us to meet her and after a 30 minute drive out of town, we were at the ranch .......where he drove his car over a freshly washed Persian rug drying on the pavement near the front portico of her house.  I know that she has forgotten the few who have made the pilgrimage to her front door over the years and she has forgotten me, thank goodness, but she isn't likely to forget the day tire marks appeared on her oriental rug.  We were horrified.  She was gracious. 

I was in Taxco last summer and learned that Spratling Ranch has opened part of the estate as a bed and breakfast.  What better way is there to hold onto her legacy than to share it?

~Carolyn in Mexico

Well, I did say I want to live closer to the equator..

The weather has been ridiculous.

Our normal temperature for this time of year hovers around 70F. It's topped 100F all week, and errands wait for "no hay días calurosos".  The silver is here!!

Fortunately, the shops between point A (my car) and point B (fedex) are beautiful if not immune to the freakishly hot weather and I have all the makings of agua fresca in the fridge.

In the meantime, enjoy your Friday and some refreshing color brought to you by the slightly mad and ever cool genius herself, aka Betsey Johnson.  Check back Monday for an introduction to another woman you want to have lunch with in the person of Violante Ulrich.  Even her name is fabulous.

~Tracy in Newport Beach

Silver:The Other White Metal

Once you fall in love with silver (capital J) Jewelry, it tends to break your heart when you realize what you've missed all these years. I'm genuinely horrified that I once thought sterling silver jewelry was what one settled for when one could not afford the "good stuff". I have, as they say, seen the light.  Silver is the precious metal so within reach that it is really the only choice for fine jewelry to be worn every day in any life on any woman.  Over the next weeks years worth of Wednesdays, we're going to show you exactly that.
To wit, here's a sneak peak of the master silversmith, Antonio Pineda, in your post post modern life:

[1] Victoria Beckham silk and wool-blend dress via My Theresa [2] Antonio Pineda (1919-2009)  obsidian and silver bracelet [3] Leuchtturm 1917 lined notebook in orange available via Writer's Bloc [4]Stipula Tuscany Dreams Peposo fountain pen via Writer's Bloc[5]Casadei black patent pump via Shoe Scribe.

~Tracy in Newport Beach

The women of Silver Nina

     The jewelry we're creating is for all women who love beautiful things regardless of her specific style, but there are pieces that have a particularly powerful feel about them.  All our silver is crafted by dedicated and passionate people hunched over jewelry benches in Mexico pounding and polishing bits of that country's story into their life's work, but because these pieces are as unique as the artists and the country that created them, they are a gift offering to women equally unique.These are the pieces for women who favor their own gracious light over conformity, women who excel in games thought best played by a "heartier" gender, women who stand and dare, women who believe in and champion their own causes, and women who are the heroines of artfully lived lives. These are the pieces for women like my mother and my grandmother and like my brave and brilliant daughters.

And these pieces are for women like you.

Tracy in Newport Beach

Mission Statement:

We will tell women the story of Mexican silver jewelry, the exuberance and devotion felt by the perfectionists who made it and the elegant women who have bought, worn, cherished and handed it down to their daughters and granddaughters for a century.  Our mission is to bring the romance and mystery of this silver to every woman who loves fine jewelry and to make her a part of the story whatever her style
~Carolyn in Mexico

And we'll do it in a studio off the bougainvillea draped courtyard of a Mexican hacienda with all the windows and most of the doors thrown open so we can hear this* and the sound of water splashing into the fountain from every room.
Someone will be squeezing limes...
~Tracy in Newport Beach

*There's not much video, but you're too busy to watch anyway.  Just listen. And think "Mexico."

Details and the design.

Store credit resulting from what I swear will be my final attempt to find black mary janes with a moderate heel and a perfectly designed button detail was a good excuse to buy a pair of sunglasses that I would never otherwise buy.  I lose sunglasses too easily to cavalierly invest in the good ones. In fact, my last pair is sitting in a silver studio in Taxco, Mexico where Silver Nina's design team spent long hours with the talleres who are crafting pieces of metallic perfection to grace the digits, wrists and collar bones of the people we adorn.

The anticipation of these pieces softens the sting of the $20.00 loss considerably and the new glasses came with a lovely embossed thank you note as well as a business lesson.  Details matter. Details make the consumer feel good about spending their hard won shekels on your beautiful products and in the words of Charles Eames,

 "The details are not the details. They make the design."

Tracy in Newport Beach

Mildly Savage, Wildly Chic

This jewelry looks a bit paleolithic, don't you think?   A little savage?  It's from Talento via Fashion Rogue.  I see silver, copper, maybe some brass and bronze.  Total style and just raw enough. 

Copper and brass pieces are fun to buy and so affordable they're practically free.  Silver, on the other hand, is an investment; so give some thought to it because silver transitions beautifully from savage to formal and it lasts forever.  Which is convenient because you will love it just that long.

Hammered, oxidized and free-form metals, wear them as cuffs and bangles up one side and down the other. 

Dance around the firelight.

Carolyn in Mexico

Ordinary Love

 

I promised my mother one blog post a week because that's the only way I would actually blog. I’ll break a promise to myself in less time than it takes a two year old to meltdown in the checkout line at Whole Foods on a food holiday weekend when The Word "no" has been uttered, but I try really hard not to break the promises I make to my mother. Unfortunately I have no deep, meaningful or lovely thing to wax poetic about and that has created a lot of pressure in my brain.

Evidently this is something I have needed to create quite often in my life. By way of example, my first career choice: Oracle database administrator and linux sysadm. If you don’t know what that is, you may now have a seat with all the other sensible people. Point is, I made a rather major career decision because I once saw a movie with Harrison Ford in it where a small(time/town) girl gets the corner office and the Harrison Ford. As I’ve said, 17. Boy. Crazy. Sadly, I am not corner office material and I can promise you, those views do not come with the Harrison Ford. I’m more hacienda courtyard material. This bit of honest self examination puts me in the midst a work week afternoon where Henry Belafonte is singing Jump The Line while I design jewelry instead of completing the enrollment process for a computer class. I would detail so as to impress and enlighten you, but then we'd all have to leave the sensible table. And now that I’ve met my self imposed deadline and typed enough words to satisfy the visual space for a post, I can go back to the very ordinary love of pencil to paper and stone to silver. I told you there were a few things you needed to see. This video is one of them.

I also told you not to tell your friends.

Tracy in Newport Beach

Something About Mexico

I’m Tracy. David and Leslie, are my siblings and Carolyn is our mother.  She is the woman who, in her sixties, announced to my very patient father that they were leaving their life in Houston's "Texas chic" Museum district neighborhood in order to move to Mexico where she was going to sell silver so gorgeous that said museums had been moved to acquire the stuff.  The fact that my parents have gotten cooler as they've gotten older makes me re-think what seventy looks like.   Kind of like Mexico made me rethink what home looks like despite the fact that I now have a very comfortable life of my own in Newport Beach, California.  If you know anything about Southern California, you have a pretty good picture of the extent to which my comfortable life is truly comfortable and if you don’t, take my word for it. Life. Comfortable. But something changed three days ago. 

I returned home from my first trip to Mexico’s interior and I find that I’m pining deeply for what I’m honest enough to say is a less comfortable life.  I feel like I did when I fell in love for the first time with an exotic boy from Appalachia during a summer adventure with friends. (and for the record, because my mother will read this, I was 17, utterly clueless and I was boy crazy.)   My husband probably feels like my mother did at the end of that summer when I wasn't as happy to see her at the airport as she would have liked.   I'm only being mildly dramatic when I say I feel bereft.

See, there’s something that Mexico does to you that borders on the transformative, and I am very much inclined to keep its secrets to myself because I don’t want you to know them..  If you do, you’ll move to Mexico and tell all your friends, which will in all likelihood turn places like San Miguel de Allende and Dolores Hidalgo into gated communities, a thing for which I’d have a hard time forgiving you.

  The internist I saw for all the years I lived in Austin, Texas once told me that geography wasn't a factor of happiness.  Meanwhile, three days later, I left the sparse shade and triple digit temperatures of Texas for Newport Beach’s cool Pacific breezes.     Let me tell you, geography is a factor in happiness, and Mexico makes me happy, a truth that would have made me spray the mouthful of Mailly Grand Cru I just drank all over my laptop in fits of hilarity just a month ago.  I got over the summer of 17 boy.  I can already tell you I won’t ever get over Mexico. Mexico and its people woke up a very big sun in my bones.

 That’s what I’m going to tell you about.   Come with me.  I’ve got to show you a few things you really need to see. Just don't tell your friends.

Tracy in Newport Beach

Totally Turq

If you have untreated turquoise, you have something rare.  And you paid a fortune for it.  If it's untreated, it's totally turq, pure as the day it was born and and worth every dollar you dropped on it.  It is not dyed, stabilized, heat treated or powdered and reconstituted.  All these are entirely respectable things to do to turquoise, in my opinion.  Except maybe powdering and reconstituting.  That's going too far.

The word "natural" means different things to different people, but when a purist calls a piece of  turquoise "natural" he is saying that, other than cutting or polishing, absolutely nothing has been done to this turquoise.   Less literal folks might say, OK a few things have been done to it, but not much.

Paying a fortune doesn't guarantee you're getting pure turq, but if you pay too little it's almost certain you aren't.   So always get  written certification when you're buying the really good stuff. By that I mean turquoise that is truly natural and only 2% of all turquoise on the market is. 

Wedding Jewelry

The average couple spends around $5800 on the bride's wedding rings. Will she ever get even close to getting that kind of jewelry again?   Well of course she will because he will adore her till he dies, but first he will live to buy her expensive things.  Still, $5800 for her wedding rings is a good start.

After the trip to the jewelers for her rings, she is off to pick out the pieces she will wear on her wedding day and to buy silver jewelry for her bridesmaids as gifts.

The Silver Standard

In April 2011 the price of silver reached an all time high of  $49.76 a troy ounce.  It bounces along, far behind gold, on the world market at a rate of about 1:58

Say you want to melt down your 100 gram silver bracelet.  At todays price of $21.31 an ounce you would have about $75. worth of silver.  The same bracelet in gold would get you $4350....today one gram of gold costs 58 times what one gram of silver costs.

Silver, gold and platinum sell on the commodities market just like soybeans, crude oil and feeder cattle.  These are investments and while most investors don't take possession of their commodities, I do.  And you can, too.

Owning and wearing silver jewelry, and gold jewelry too if you can afford it,  may not be as financially efficient as buying bullion....although it might be....still, it is a fabulously stylish way to invest.

Precious metals...platinum, gold and silver... may be the last hedge against everything that goes bump in the markets and you may as well look gorgeous while being an exquisitely shrewd investor.

Fantasy Jewelry

It doesn't happen often but sometimes nothing but a tiara will do. 

Night jewelry.

Street Jewelry

Office Jewelry, Corner Office

Hello upper management.  Your jewelry says, I'm your next CEO, I'm dead serious, and by the way, although  I didn't get here on my looks, I'm absolutely gorgeous and I know how to accessorize.

      Photos and descriptions.

You can afford the best jewelry and you buy it.  It's the highest quality.  It's restrained and understated.  You rule.

Office Jewelry, Casual Friday

Today is fun jewelry day. We're not wild but we're still highly spirited.  We are, after all, classy.  Here's the line up for edgy Fridays. 

Photos and descriptions


Disclaimer:  I am not a licensed dress code practitioner.  Always refer to your company manual before getting dressed for work. I'm just covering my gorgeous behind here.

Taxco Time

We spent some Houston traffic, customs and airport time yesterday, crept along in the runway queue, then there was the flight time.  Now the big airport in Mexico City was coming at us and the plane sits itself down on ancient Aztec turf.. 

The bus ride to Taxco from Mexico City is horrible (see previous things-I-fear-that-never-happen post, regarding buses and cars somersaulting and bouncing their way to oblivion).  Now Taxco is coming at us.  Yet another safe landing. 

It's taken nine hours to get here from Houston.  I would have spent nine days to get here, to this mountain side and to the silver.

Now we start Taxco time.  Let's just all slow down. 

Cat Burglars and Finders/Keepers

Someone, somewhere is wearing my 150 gram sterling silver, Maguey bracelet with the Spratling hallmark, a piece of art if ever there was one.  That someone isn't me. It's only jewelry, but I cherished it. 

I lost a Spratling bracelet some years ago and I hope that whoever found it loves it as I did.  It fell off my wrist and I imagine someone, joyful and appreciative picking it up from the restaurant floor, slipping it on her own wrist and knowing pure pleasure.

I bought that chunky, but oh so sweet masterpiece at the old Spratling ranch, a short drive out of Taxco de Alarcon.  It was a perfectly executed piece of jewelry.  Perfectly.  It was made by Don Thomas, brilliant old Maestro with trembling hands. I loved it for years.  And it's gone.

Over at www.stolenswissdiamond.com  I may get some sympathy.  They are offering a $1,000,000 reward for a flawless heart shaped 17.48 carat diamond.  You don't leave a piece like that on the sink of a public restroom so I assume there was a cat burglar and a cracked safe somewhere in the mix. Major heist.

But it's only jewelry.

Francisco Garcia, Revolutionary

Last night the Alhondiga opened it's scarred, creaking doors to me.  And the hundred or so really well dressed jewelry aficionados who were gathered with me on it's front steps. The Alhondiga  is the embattled fortress built in 1796 in Guanajuato that that now houses the Museo Regional de Guanajuato Alhondiga de Granaditas.  But never mind all that. 

History can be scary, and anyway, we weren't there to remember ancient battles, but to check out the design revolution sparked by metalsmith and design zealot, Francisco Garcia.

We were there for the launching of Garcia's exquisitely unique jewelry, his latest collection of necklaces, earrings, bracelets and rings.  We were there for his champagne and his prosciutto, his classical music soundtrack and the trips back through his exhibition, to see again and again those stellar pieces of his.

Silver Nina will post photos of his incendiary masterpieces soon, bronze breast plates, copper and silver medallions, some burnished to a soft fire, others more like bombs bursting in air.
 Carolyn in Mexico

Higher Than a Kite

A margarita now.  Or, just hand me the tequila bottle because I'm about to throw myself out of this car and crawl the rest of the way to Taxco. 

And that's not just the mountain fever talking.  Although.  At 9500 feet, we passed the altitude sickness threshold waay back, 3000 feet back down the mountain.   Back when the dizziness, the palpitations and nosebleed first began.  And flatulence. Yes, it's true.

It's not the mountain fever talking but the fear.  In fact, the fear is screaming it's bloody head off  because these roads don't have shoulders, not one.  What they do have are sheer cliffs.   They have canyons, bottomless, car eating emptiness.  A tire's width away.

Does Mexico have open container laws?  A little 90 proof to get the kinks out of hairpin twists and U-turn curves?  Blind ones?

If I live to see Taxco, I'll run, not crawl, to the silver shops and get sloshed...get stinking drunk on silver.  There now.  That's what silver jewelry is for.

Mexico is for Families

In the song Scenes from an Italian Restaurant, the "old days", are idealized, you know the kind of days our grandparents reminisced about.

Last week, I was in San Miguel de Allende at Mama Mias.  Its an Italian Restaurant.  I looked around, and saw the old world charm.  Architecture and families being together.  We see them both as quaint relics.  You know... of how it USED to be:

Very family oriented and that's Mexico for you.  I always thought that once you move forward in life you really can't go back to the way it was. Almost like, if you go back it's more than a step backwards, it's regression.  Sounds bad doesn't it?

But after 2 years here in Mexico, I have to wonder... is that so bad?

The family unit has changed, and so have the concepts surrounding what happens at dinner time, but is this better than what we find in the States?  For the most part it is, because................

this is the American way, him in his study, the wife in her study, and the kids downstairs watching tv.

Don't we all just want to be happy?  ~  David, making these the good old days. In Mexico.

Greenwich Village, 1940's

As you are reading this, thousands of solitary silversmiths are plying their art at studio work benches everywhere, sculpting wearable art one soul-rending piece at a time.  It's always been that way and the machine age changed nothing for the hands that coax metal into exquisite compliance.

The '40's remain the most prolific years for designers and metal smiths producing modernist, counter culture jewelry, mostly silver.

It was in fact an international movement back then, from New York to Taxco to Copenhagen and beyond. After Japan was devastated by WWII, some of the first signs of new hope were Japanese designers who ventured out into modernist directions in jewelry making.

These photographs tell a little about the Greenwich Village studios, the men and the jewelry.  Sam Kramer and Art Smith.  I wish I'd been there 70 years ago, on Ginsberg's and Bob Dylan's turf, buying up jewelry I can only see in museums today.

Invitation to a Party

This reminder just in from Elle, "Clothes without accessories is like a party without cake.",  a little play on Julia Child's "A party without cake is just a meeting".....aaanyway, we get the point.  Accessorize, we must.

If we would rather be a party than a meeting, then we're gonna have to put on some jewelry.  Keep in mind, this metaphor, simile, whatever,  isn't about where you are, but about how you feel.  Outwardly,  jewelry gives you presence, substance.  But jewelry can make you feel beautiful and confidant inside.  That's a party.

Slip on a wisp of a chain with a pendant for the run to Whole Foods, the drive-through at the bank.  It's not just about the checker or the teller, it's about you, how it makes you feel.  Party on.  ~   Carolyn in Mexico

San Miguel, Little Hive of Industry

You might know San Miguel de Allende.  Conde Nast knows it.  Travel and Leisure Magazine knows it well.  It is a photo shoot mecca, the haunt of photographers, professionals who pay the rent through the lens of a camera.  Creative staff at Gentlemen's Quarterly, Elle and Vogue search it's streets for the perfect composition and then pray the light lasts.  What cool jobs they have.  They get paid for this?


(caption and Gentlemen's Quarterly photo)

(caption and Vogue photo)



She's on the clock.  Model waiting for camera set up.

                                                        Drop some pesos in the cup.

                                                         Jardin shoe shine.  Tips are good.

                                                                        Restoration

                             Basket vendor.  Buy more than one.  He's trying to make a living.

                                 

Wait staff doing double duty.

San Miguel works.  ~   Carolyn in Mexico

The A List and the Other A List

Leslie  knows her way around on-trend jewelry, all those box closures and parures, but she's not into heavy weight jewelry while I very much am, oh so much.

She's lighter and more restrained.....not sure I care for restraint.  Can I buy silver by the pound?  One of  the necklaces soon to be on the SilverNina website came from a silversmith Leslie likes.  I love the design but I begged her to send him back to his bench to double the size.  As diva as you can get. 

She sent in her orders for the Taxco trip....I'm so excited...we going to Taxco!!...  and her designs are deliciously sized for office, street, and little dinner parties.

Her designs flutter and soar, but the way this works is that I order my share of pieces and they are all a bit heavy on the heavy.  My list, silver drama.  Her list, everything else, but just stack her stuff.  Same thing.  ~  Carolyn in Mexico.

Taxco, We're Comin' for Ya

We are going to Taxco in two weeks.  They've got silver there and we're buying it. 

We're loading up on silver jewelry,  the most radiant stuff that ever wrapped itself around an arm or a neck and we won't stop buying till they cut up our credit cards.  We'll be sending it all to you, Texas, to be on the collections menu of  the website, Silver Nina.  Watch for it, coming soon to a computer near you.

We aren't just  launching a website, we're unleashing it.  It will be wildly successful and demand will run all over supply.  And we'll be off to buy more and more luscious bracelets, necklaces, rings and things.  Hope Taxco can keep up.

We know all this because that's what it says in our business plan, word for word.  ~  Carolyn in Mexico

The Maestros

A silversmith who works with us at Silver Nina will be fine tuning her  skills by going back to school next week.

This intimate school draws devotees from advanced level silver workers and starry eyed beginners. The instructor has roots in old Taxco's era of silver makers.  Those perfectionists.  Sublime creators.

Classes are held in Guanajuato in central Mexico and are kept to a six student minimum. Americans come to learn, Mexicans are there to teach them.

A few arroyos away in San Miguel de Allende, the instructors are mostly Americans and Canadians.  You go to San Miguel de Allende, you are going to learn something, not necessarily silver smithing alone.  Learn to paint, join a quilting group, take singing lessons, guitar lessons, sculpting, weaving, paper-making, Mexican cooking, French cooking, Italian cooking. Is there anyone in this town that isn't teaching?

San Miguel, knit a sweater, throw a pot.  Create.  ~  Carolyn in Mexico

Karl Lagerfeld Looking Texas Good

Karl Lagerfeld, the wildly off-beat, mildly likeable, endlessly stylish trustee of the Coco Chanel legacy, was in Texas recently wearing a Stetson cowboy hat and posing like a dude. Not the "hey dude, cool hat" kind of dude, but the "LA cowboy" kind of dude.   Still. he played along, smiled at the camera and was a good sport about it all.


The thing I like about Lagerfeld is his jewelry.  Everything he ever put on a catwalk is just fabulous and accessorized to perfection. I'm saying, his serious jewelry collections are sublime. Only Oscar de la Renta does it better.  Beyond Lagerfeld's designer pieces is the iconic jewelry he wears himself, his cuffs, rings, tie sticks, and chains.  Man in Black with jewelry.


He has a mouth and has set-off a lot of folks.  The whole House of Windsor was miffed when he said that Pippa would do the world a favor if it never had to look at her ugly face.  Yes he DID.  He said that. 

Short men don't much like Lagerfeld either.  Not since that day he revealed to an oblivious world that short men aren't only ugly; they're ugly AND angry.

And there was that pieing by PETA that missed Lagerfeld and hit Calvin Kline (in a tiff over fur issues).

He's careful not to make enemies in Texas though.  We sit the fence on PETA, but  insult our women and our short, ugly, angry men and we do more than throw pies.  Mister Lagerfeld behaves himself in Texas.