Birthday Wishes

First I just have to share something I saw on the T today which just pefectly encapsulates Mother's Day--there was a guy standing on the platform with a bouquet in one hand and a laundry bag in the other. I love you mom.

So Tuesday is my birthday, and just in case anyone is wondering what to get me, here is a helpful hint or two:

Tord Boontje by Tord Boontje
My favorite contemporary designer. Period. Oh, how much I want this book. I'm pretty sure it will be Uncle Sam's gift to me thanks to the check I just received from him for overpaying him last year. I keep thinking that I'll have to start buying Table Stories pieces one by one so when I'm 50 I can have a lovely dinner party with my beautiful dinnerware.

Poiret by Harold Koda & Andrew Bolton
We just got our copies in here, and it is just a gorgeous book. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful design and photography of some of the most beautiful, beautiful, beautiful clothing ever created. I hope the essays and captions are of equal strength.

I am not surprised at the quality of Poiret; as a rule Yale University Press is the best when it comes to publishing books on fashion and costume (partially this is the result of publishing catalogs from the Met's Costume Institute, pretty much the only public collection of costume and fashion that is regularly exhibited and published). If you want pure theory you want Berg, of course, and if you want purty pictures than you have a number of publishers to consider, but Yale is best when it comes to combining the intellectual and visual aspects of clothing.

Perhaps this is the moment to interject that clothing/costume/fashion/ whatever you want to call it is something in which I take particular interest. Remember my previously-mentioned over-education? Well, in addition to my master's in library science (thanks, Simmons!), I'm one thesis shy of a master's degree in material culture and decorative art from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture where my focus was on clothing and textiles. Maybe if you're really lucky I'll tell you what my thesis was about! Maybe I'll finish it one day. Probably the same day I finish that collection of Tord Boontje tableware.

[On a side note, thanks to an idiot who didn't know what s/he had, I have my little paws on a used copy of Installationview by Ryan McGinness, a favorite artist of mine. ]