text:
“To Die For” : A Study on the Disturbing Culture of Death in the Fashion World

Vatic Note:   This article shows just how far down we have come with the increase in Satanism within our society and culture.   If we do not have a counter influence pretty doggone quick, I would not want to see what our world will come to and I would be old enough to avoid seeing it in my lifetime.

How did we get here???  I see young people with skulls on their clothing and tatooed on their bodies.  My goodness, what happened to good taste and beauty? This is going way beyond rebellion as a statement, its bordering on a "way of life".   Can you imagine?  Death as a way of life!!!

This article points the blame to the people who have promoted this, and also tells us what is going on behind it all.  I think there is slightly more to it than just the obvious that the author of this article points to below..  In fact, I believe the powers that be want us in a death culture to make us better killers and desensitized to what we are told to do, or at least our soldiers in war.

Vigilant Citizen, January 25, 2016

“To Die For” : A Study on the Disturbing Culture of Death in the Fashion World

By on Latest News
An article submitted to the peer reviewed Scan Journal of Macquarie University takes a deeper look at the culture of death prevalent in the fashion world and studies “corpse chick” – the disturbing trend of posing models as glamorous corpses.
If you’ve been reading the Symbolic Pics of the Month series on this site, you are probably aware of the culture of death prevalent in the fashion world where death, violence and dehumanization are glamorized in photoshoots. This trend has been going on for years and is so disturbing that it caused outrage at numerous occasions.

The prevalence of death culture in fashion is so noticeable that it became the subject of an article in the peer-reviewed Scan Magazine of Macquarie University, a journal that analyzes media, arts an culture.
Here is the article in its integrity, complete with references. It is a perfect in-depth complement to the material that has been exposed on Vigilant Citizen for years.

To Die For: Skull Style and Corpse Chic in Fashion Design, Imagery, and Branding

By Jacque Lynn Foltyn

Is fashion something to die for? If one examines the content of fashion magazines, websites, videos, blogs, and fashion itself, the answer is a resounding “yes”. Death is a fashion star, used to sell clothing, accessories, brands, celebrity, magazines, style-based television programming and websites, and cross-media collaborative efforts.

From Alexander McQueen and Ralph Lauren to Target and H&M, skulls, crossbones, and skeleton motifs have taken over fashion. Death is the darling of not only the fashion set but also of the masses – and their dogs, who wear skull bedecked cardigans and collars and lounge on skeleton embossed beds. In mainstream fashion and lifestyle magazines, models, actors, stylists, and socialites not only model skull style, they model ‘death’ itself, in gruesome pantomimes of murder, suicide, and eco-disaster.

These “corpse chic” (Foltyn, 2008b, 2009) narratives are ‘ripped from the headlines’, but are also inspired by literature, music, cinema, and true-crime television genres; they are the basis for photos shoots for the reality TV program America’s Top Model. In the twenty-first century, and in more ways than one, fashion, to paraphrase Karl Lagerfeld, is not only “ephemeral” and “unfair”; it is “dangerous” (2006).
This article explores the fashioning of death as a mainstream advertising strategy, branding ploy, artistic expression and style trend, and examines its continuity with other representations of death, past and present. Since fashion is about 1. consumption and conformity (Veblen 1902; Simmel 1957); 2. reflects the preoccupations of contemporary culture; 3. can be linked to specific historical and political contexts (Kaiser 1990); and 4. speaks to the characteristics of modern culture itself (Blumer 1969; Baudrillard 1998; Evans 2003), it is argued here that skull style and corpse chic reveal current attitudes about not just contemporary society but about celebrity, beauty, fashion, and death.

In turn, this article considers the following questions: Why is death a fashion star? Why are the fashion-obsessed, death-obsessed? Why are beautiful models and actors posing as cadavers? What does the popularity of skull style and corpse chic say about who we are? What does this trend of viewing and wearing death as a fashion statement say about our relation to the Grim Reaper? Finally, how can we reconcile living in a culture in which death is, on the one hand, denied (Becker 1973) and hidden away (Walter 1991), while on the other is a constant grisly presence in our information culture and entertainment society – even something that we wear?
To answer these questions, this article first considers examples, influences, and precursors of skull style and corpse chic, collected through historical research and qualitative methodologies (observation, interviews, content analysis, and visual sociology); and then moves on to a discussion of the larger socio-cultural significance of this deathly fashion trend.

Designing Death: Skull Style

In February 2010, Le Bel Age Boutique, a fashion store in San Diego, had an unusual window display: bone models (see Figure 1). “I call them ‘couture skeletons'”, said Valerie Lee Ferrari, the store’s proprietor. Ferrari explained that while her initial motivation in creating the plastic skeletons had been to celebrate Halloween, she had been influenced by the gothic movement and wanted to create a mannequin with “an edge”.

Noting that the fan base for the couture skeletons had become so large that she was now manufacturing and selling them, Ferrari remarked: “I display them as a kind of “puppet theatre. They take on a life of their own. People ‘get’ them or not”. She drolly added, “Death as a style influence is very much in the air” (Interview February 3, 2010).

Figure 1: Couture skeletons, San Diego
Figure 1: Couture skeletons, San Diego

The year-round popularity of Ferrari’s couture skeletons is a sign of the contemporary importance of death as a design motif and creative feature of fashion media and marketing. The human skeleton has arrived in the mainstream world of fashion and is no longer a rare artistic expression.

This was not the case in November 1995, when The New Yorker published Richard Avedon’s ‘In Memory of the Late Mr. and Mrs. Comfort’ (see Figure 2). A ghoulish, strangely beautiful marriage of fashion, art, commerce, and death, Avedon’s ‘ode’ featured supermodel Nadja Auermann and a male skeleton partner, dressed in designer fashions, and in a cinema-style narrative. It had scenes of courtship and of the couple copulating, arguing, sitting on toilets, and playing with a cadaver baby.

Figure 2: Richard Avedon, The New Yorker
Figure 2: Richard Avedon, The New Yorker

Now, Avedon’s use of skeletons as fashion models has worked its way not only into a San Diego boutique but a Spring/Summer advertising campaign for Alexander McQueen’s ‘Eyes’ (sunglasses), inspired by artist Damien Hirst (see Figure 3). In the June 2010 issue of W magazine, readers were confronted with a grinning human skull, with silver metal-coated teeth, wearing sunglasses, against a backdrop of pink, red, and white flowers.

03 mcQueen eyes
Figure 3: Alexander McQueen, ‘Eyes’

‘Fashion-y’ skull style is one of the most prominent emblems in contemporary fashion, and so commonplace as to have lost any shock value. The phrase ‘in fashion’ summarises an important but downplayed aspect of social life: the pull towards others (connection) and the push toward the new (Hemphill and Suk 2009).

As a sign of both consumption as well as conformity, babies, children, and pets wear skull style, as well as ‘wholesome’ starlets like Jessica Alba. It is a design aesthetic for jewellery, clothing, accessories, baby slings and diaper bags, and is sold at high end and low end retail venues. Even Ralph Lauren, whose preppy ‘to-the-manor-born’ aesthetic seems far removed from death, has embraced the skull as a fashion muse.

In 2010, Lauren sold skull-decorated pyjamas, slippers, bedding, wallets, ties, puppy collars and cardigans, and barware festooned with skeletons. Stylish jewellery is now fashioned from human bones, both real and simulated. While human bones, ashes, and hair have been worn as trophies, religious relics, objects of mourning, and memento mori (both historically and cross-culturally), today bone jewellery sits within the sphere of modern consumer society (Barratt 2005).
In the contemporary world of style, death is worn as a prop in the performance of fashion. Following Erving Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical sociology and Judith Butler’s (1990) ‘performative’ arguments about the construction of identity, Valerie Steele, editor of Fashion Theory, commonly frames fashion as a staged performance.

The presentation of self can be viewed as a series of theatrical acts, with the realisation of these presentations consisting of a front stage, where the actual act is presented for the audience, and a backstage, where the act is prepared, complete with a script, rehearsals, cosmetics, masks, and costumes. From whence did this wearing of death as part of the performance of the contemporary self emerge?
Keith Richards was wearing skull style decades before dogs and babies. The most irascible Rolling Stone, the iconic Richards is one of many rock stars who have shaped death as a fashion statement (see Figure 3). Richards, whose ironically named memoir Life (2010) reveals brushes with death through drug use, accident, and a debauched ‘devil-may-care’ lifestyle, has been wearing a widely imitated skull ring, created for him by David Courts and Bill Hackett, since 1978.

Aware of his public image as a raging outlaw, ‘Prince of Darkness’, and seemingly indestructible dodger of death, Richards confesses that he has felt obligated to live up to this “necromantic” image. He writes: “I can’t untie the threads of how much I played up to the part that was written for me. I wear the skull ring” (2010: 364). Noting the “people love that image,” Richards believes they identify with the “raging Keith Richards” – so his typically middle aged, middle-class fans send him skulls “by the truckload” (2010: 365).
The bony remains of human beings have complex histories not only as memento mori in religious iconography but also as logos for street gangs, motorcycle clubs, and other outcast (often criminal) groups. The cult-like followers of The Grateful Dead call themselves Deadheads, and the punk and gothic movements have embraced the skull as a symbol.

Such deathly images remain confrontational style statements when worn by members of subcultures to suggest, symbolise, or signal ‘outlaw’ status such as Richards’s, and alienation from, disaffection with, and rebellion against conventional culture. Among fashion’s many social functions is the expression of uniqueness and social deviation for cultural outsiders searching for ways to differentiate themselves from so-called ‘normal’ society (Simmel 1957).

Fashion reflects symbolic meanings and social ideals (Barthes 1983) and designers search for new looks not only among elites (Veblen 1902) but on the street, and among members of subcultures, and marginalised and decadent individuals who are determined to make themselves appear distinctive (Simmel 1957). Fashion designers, editors, and photographers frequently respond positively to rule breakers, the counterintuitive, and the ‘out of the ordinary’ – and often think of themselves as such: what could be more confrontational and indeed provocative than the ‘wearing’ and staging of death?
Skulls and skeletons have rich cultural histories and symbolic meanings that provide them with other sources of deathly allure. Associated with Halloween, they were worn by the living in autumnal religious rituals (the Celtic Samhain and the Christian All Hallows Day) to disguise the self and scare away ghouls on days when they were thought to roam the earth (Rogers 2002).

Death heads figure in military insignia and are worn by warriors as memento mori, to protect them from death, and to proclaim their status as violent, frightening dealers of death. The Death Head was a symbol of one branch of the Nazi SS. Hussar military uniforms, with their horizontal gold braids, gold chain loops, and decorative frogging that stretch across the chest, evoke the skeleton, and have been a prominent feature of the rock military style (Langkjaer 2010) and surface as popular style statements.

The bony remains of human beings are props in pirate, vampire, and CSI themed films, television shows and video games, and figure in the tie-in merchandise worn by fans of these genres, such as the Pirates of the Caribbean skull and cross-bone T-shirts.
It’s not surprising that skulls and skeletons were objects of fascination for Alexander McQueen, a designer known to be interested in the more macabre aspects of popular culture and with outsider subcultures. McQueen’s designs nod to pirates, witches, warriors, and predators and their prey; and he staged catwalk extravaganzas oriented around Jack the Ripper and the 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, about a deadly dance marathon. Arguably the designer most associated with skull style and runway props, McQueen wove skulls into clothing and scarves; fastened death head charms to ankle boots; exhibited an aluminium rib cage corset cast from an actual human skeleton; and had runway models carry giant skulls and bones, drag skeletons from their feet, and wear masks that made them look like death heads.

There are McQueen skull cuffs, bracelets, bangles, charms, earrings, rings, and tongue jewellery. The commercial value of the death head is such that Winged Death, one of McQueen’s most famous iterations of the skull, has become the subject of a trademark infringement suit filed by the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club (Alexander 2010). The fact that McQueen hung himself in February 2010 speaks to the performative role of death in his life, while those who knew McQueen well enough to write personal obituaries have noted not only a depressed state but also his obsession with death.

On February 1, McQueen’s Twitter messages showed both a troubled state of mind as well as a revealing statement about his creative process: “From heaven to hell and back again, life is a funny thing. beauty [sic]can come from the most strangest of places even the most disgusting places” [sic](Collins 2010). McQueen’s ‘genius’ and theatre of the macabre made him a favourite among fashion journalists and helped move skull style from the periphery to the centre of fashion.
There are periods when fashion embraces melancholy subjects (Lipovetsky 1993). In the 1990s, McQueen was one of many young conceptual, deconstructionist, ‘post-fashion’ designers (Vinken 2005: 35) whose work was “at the edge commercially,” focused on dark themes, and valued fashion primarily for its symbolic possibilities (Evans 2003: 5; Steele and Park 2009).

Fashion can provide a window and commentary on social change (Veblen 1902; Simmel 1957; Crane 2000), and experimental designers such as McQueen, Martin Margiela, Hussein Chalayan, and Viktor & Rolf infused their designs with macabre imagery in response to social, economic, ecological, technological, and political changes that have created alienation, the distressed body, war, terror, violence, forced migration and a fear of instability, change, and death (Evan 2003).

Some of those who wear skull style are no doubt responding to the tenor of our times, while others identify with the outsider, ‘dodger-of-death’ symbolism of Keith Richards. Others wear it as a memento mori, while others like Carlos wear the style more ‘lightly’, to project a slightly edgy look. Then there are those who seem impervious to the cultural meanings of the imagery; for them skull style has been drained of its symbolism and is worn simply for it trendiness, a response to the unthinking consumerism that Adorno (2002) argued modern capitalism engenders.

Regardless of the reasons for wearing skull style, slavishly following trends is a prominent feature of affluent consumer societies (Baudrillard 1998, Lipovetsky 1993), and designers, editors, and marketers have now recognised consumer attraction to death.

Death by Fashion: Corpse Chic

In the mainstream fashion performance of death, ‘corpse chic’ represents a different kind of dead body narrative, in which supermodels and celebrities pose as cadavers. Corpse chic styles death with the flesh of the living rather than the bones of a skeleton and glamorises the freshly or decomposing ‘dead’ body, transforming the alluring living body into an alluring ‘dead’ one.

Such imagery draws attention to its creators’ artistry, of course, and to the fashion site where the image is featured, but its goal is to sell the fashions modelled by the ‘corpse’. The assumption that a ‘dead’ body can now be an engaging fashion model is a perceptive one, as the viewer’s attention is grabbed at a time when actual and simulated death images have become a pervasive part of modern entertainment.

There is interplay with the real death shown in the news, the simulated deaths of popular culture, and the contrived images of death currently seen in fashion, a theme that will be developed in more detail shortly.

For thousands of years death has been performed in theatre and dance, as cultural reflection and expression. It then appeared in photography, film, television, videogames and, more recently, fashion. Corpse chic imagery is commonly appropriated from amorous death scenes from literature, mythology, and art. Shakespeare’s suicides are a source of inspiration, for example, the Romeo & Juliet themed ‘Love of a Life Time’, by Annie Leibovitz for Vogue (December 2008). Here, the doomed lovers lie ‘dead,’ arms entwined – modelling McQueen.
Figure 5: Annie Leibovitz, Vogue 2008
Figure 5: Annie Leibovitz, Vogue 2008

In the 2010 Pirelli Calendar, Terry Richardson’s photograph of model Lily Cole as a modern-day Ophelia (from Hamlet) also pays homage to Shakespeare.

Figure 6: Lily Cole as Ophelia
Figure 6: Lily Cole as Ophelia

However it is the victim of violent crime, rather than the romantic suicide, that is most common in the performance of corpse chic. This model has typically suffered a heinous ‘death’ at the hands of a murderer, serial killer, sexual sadist, paedophile, animal, or even demented toy (Foltyn 2009). Consider the themes and images of four corpse chic pictorials published in W magazine between 2007 and 2009.
‘Honeymoon Hotel’, from July 2009, stars the nude or semi-nude actor Bruce Willis and his wife Emma, performing torture, dying, and death in a macabre sado-masochistic themed pantomime, photographed by Steven Klein and styled by Camilla Nickerson. Willis appears with spouse model Keiko and designers (including Michael Kors) in a series of images that involves masks, whips, metal fingernails, death heads, and an emergency vehicle.
Bruce and Emma Willis in W Magazine.
Bruce and Emma Willis in W Magazine.

In ‘Pinup’, from March 2008, one image features top model Lara Stone lying on a clear plastic coated bed, legs parted wide, eyes staring upwards vacantly. She is dressed in a pink Bottega Veneta tulle bustier and a Roberto Cavalli pink rooster vest: a fetishist’s fantasy.

Set in a seedy motel, and photographed by Mert & Marcus, Stone’s body is foreshortened so that the viewer looks up her dress. The editorial copy of this shoot describes the models as “girls gone wild…in some rather compromising positions”, but there is no mention that the two models have been styled to appear dead.

"Pin Up", W Magazine, 2008
“Pin Up”, W Magazine, 2008

Perhaps the most disturbing tableaux from W is ‘Into the Woods’, from August 2007; this was also photographed by Mert & Marcus, and styled by Alex White. Dressed in various furs, Dutch supermodel Doutzen Kroes poses with stuffed toy animals that caress and menace her; in some images, she appears a cadaver-white, thumb-sucking child, who has been ravished by either the soft plush toys or an out-of-view paedophile. There is an implicit connection here to a sexual subculture called the ‘furries’, in which people dress up in animal costumes to have sex (Foltyn 2009).

 'Into the Woods', 2007
‘Into the Woods’, 2007

Corpse chic imagery such as these moves beyond the sensual to more dubious territory, a subdivision of dead body imagery I call “corpse porn” (Foltyn 2008b). Corpse porn highlights the simulated dead body’s sexuality in ways that go beyond the erotic; its themes are the vulnerability, debasement, decomposition, and sexuality of the un-mourned corpse, which it transforms in theatrical ways to titillate viewers with glimpse of sexual fetishes and perverse sexual subcultures.
On the other hand, serious social issues are occasionally addressed by corpse chic. Inspired by the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, in August 2010 Italian Vogue staged model Kristin McMenamy as an oil soaked feathered sea creature, washed ashore, surviving (dressed in Ralph Lauren Collection), dying (spitting out oil) or dead, dressed in torn black nets. The story – ‘Water and Oil’ – was covered across the media, in ‘hard’ news, fashion websites, and the blogosphere.

As the magazine’s editor Franca Sozzani explained: “in the face of this dramatic, catastrophic stalling, the images of Steven Meisel make up a precious reportage that delivers an artistic impact. Unforgettable images, created purposely to unnerve the viewer, capture the reality of the situation.”

"Water Oil", Vogue Italia, 2011
“Water Oil”, Vogue Italia, 2010

For the September 2010 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, celebrity stylist (and now celebrity) Rachel Zoe appears in a campy performance of corpse chic. The tongue-in-cheek, Hitchcock-style piece ‘Rachel Zoe: I Die’ has Zoe ‘killed’ by some of her favourite designers.

She is buried alive in clothes by Michael Kors; Marc Jacobs shocks her with a hairdryer; and shoe designer Brian Atwood nails her with a stiletto. The layout is unusual for its frivolity and ironic, exaggerated sensibility, hallmarks of the camp performance (Sontag 1964). As a commentary on Zoe, it mocks her favourite expression (‘I die’), but also points to the increasing banality of corpse chic imagery.

"I Die", Harper's Bazaar, 2010
“I Die”, Harper’s Bazaar, 2010

Campy or serious, corpse chic imagery is a subcategory of a long tradition of the beautiful dead body in art. Sculptors, painters, photographers, filmmakers, video gamers, webmasters, and pornographers have used their imaginative minds to create ‘dead sexy’ looks to instruct, entertain, excite, scandalise and horrify (Foltyn 1996).

Representations of dead beauties are an enduring theme in western art and pop culture, from the eroticised ‘dead’ bodies of Greco-Roman warriors to the crucified Christ; the surrealist images of Dada, Magritte, Bunuel, and Visconti; the photographs of Man Ray, Edward Westin, and Weegee; and the vampires of the Twilight trilogy. Today’s corpse chic imagery is indebted to the avant-garde and subversive fashion photographer Guy Bourdin, whose images of gorgeous ‘dead’ women (between the 1960s and 1980s) were embraced by clients known for their edgy aesthetics (Drake 2006) (See images athttp://www.guybourdin.org/under the Vogue caption).

Corpse chic is indebted to film noir, b-grade movies, and television dramas, current affairs, and reality programming that focuses on violent crime and forensics (Foltyn 2009); as well as to contemporary art photographers such as Izimar Kaori and Melanie Pullen, whose installations merge high fashion, crime, and death. Pullen’s models, for instance, wear high fashion and are arranged in positions based on actual NYPD and LAPD crime scene files, photojournalism, cinema, and television.
As the ‘supermodel’ sex that is most sexualised and most associated with beauty and fashion, it was inevitable that most corpse chic would star women. In the history of art, young beautiful females have often been paired with skulls and mirrors to warn of the perils of vanity and the brevity of life, and have been associated with disease, death, and decay (Dijkstra 1983). Simone de Beauvoir (1974) and Mary Douglas (1966) claim that existential conditions have caused human beings to place woman closer to not only sex, birth, and dirt, but to beauty and death.

Images of dead female beauties are a staple of contemporary visual culture (Britto et al 1997; Hughes 2006); indeed, the beautiful female murder victim has been a regular feature of newspapers since the early twentieth century (Cohen 1997). Today, the violent death or murder of any pretty (usually white) female can make an instant celebrity of a previously unknown individual (Foltyn 2005). Forensic science has supplied new ways to explore her demise in modern media culture (Foltyn 2008b).

Mad Men, Desperate Housewives, and The Sopranos have all inspired fashion layouts in the era of media convergence, so why not CSI? It is a complex feat to grab the attention of sophisticated consumers who ‘buy’ fashion as an expression of self and who are bombarded with all matter of advertising messages, and ‘dead’ women remain successful ‘hooks.’ Fashion editors and advertisers ply consumers’ psyches with seductively unsettling death imagery and by linking objects not typically seen together, for example, a cadaver and a handbag.
Cultural critics have explored the connection between woman, beauty, and death. Bronfen (1992) argues that beauty, like death, has a quality of stillness. A photo of a supermodel can be viewed as a work of art, is statue-like, and be regarded as a still life (nature morte), that is, dead.

In The Mechanical Bride, Marshall McLuhan wrote of modern capitalism’s assembly-line production of the ‘lifeless’ beauty: the showgirl, Hollywood glamour queen, and woman as cultural commodity and spectacle (McLuhan 2002). Symbolising the modern loss of individuality, conceptual designers such as Margiela, Chalayan, and McQueen have experimented with the idea of the female model as a doll-like generic commodity, and presented catwalk models as dummies, automatons, cyborgs, androids, and dead – to negate fashion’s emphasis on idealised bodies (Evans 2003).

The word ‘model’ is a synonym for mock-up, replica, reproduction, and pattern: a simulacrum rather than ‘the real thing.’ In his essay on the uncanny, Freud (1955) argued that people develop lifeless doubles for positive, if delusional reasons, as a defence against annihilation and death. In the fashion world, the generic runway model is evocative of memento mori and can be viewed as a dead woman walking.
Since representations of death can be alluring and revolting, evoking a perplexing mix of fear, disgust, and desire (Freud 1952; Lacan 1992), it figures that those in the fashion world would fasten onto this provocative mix. Death, like beauty, attracts and repulses us, inspiring cultural awe, but also ambivalence, anger, and anxiety, so much so that beautiful victims have been offered as sacrifices in various cultural contexts (Foltyn 1996).

When supermodels and film stars pose as chic corpses for today’s fashion media (such as Gwyneth Paltrow in W, August 2007; Kate Hudson in WSeptember, 2008), we can visualise what they might look like dead (Foltyn 2009). Is there a collective fantasy to see icons of beauty dead? An MGM executive thought so, noting that studio heads repeatedly cast Greta Garbo as a victim because the public liked to see her die (Paris 2005).

Understanding this fascination with bringing the beautiful down to size through death, Lady Gaga, one of the most daring cross-media and fashion influences in contemporary pop culture, told Vanity Fair that she staged her own death in the Paparazzi video as a way of taking “something not fashion at all and [making]it fashion.”
I had this incredible fascination with how people love watching celebrities fall apart, or when celebrities die; I wanted to know, what did they look like when they died? Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana, JonBenet Ramsey…I think about all these dead girls, these blonde, dead icons….So then I thought, ‘Well maybe if I show what I look like when I die, people won’t wonder. Maybe that’s what I want people to think I’ll look like when I die (Robinson 2010: 330).

What Gaga doesn’t mention though are the sexualised corpses of these dead beauties, a facet of contemporary dead beauty imagery that is staged for public amusement and aesthetic enjoyment, and covered as an infotainment phenomenon (Foltyn 2008b). Gorer (1955) argued that historically death and sex exchange positions as forbidden subjects.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, we became accustomed to viewing overtly sexualised images of beautiful people in various pop cultural venues, including fashion. But as images of the sexual body became part of the public conversation, the corpse body remained socially acceptable only in more limited forums. In societies oversaturated with sex, death has become “the new sex” (Foltyn 2005: 29-30), the corpse and its simulated versions is the new fetishised body to be voyeuristically explored.

The novelty of corpse chic is that it combines both culturally forbidden bodies, violating long held taboos about both death and sex. Just as with the popular CSI television franchise, where the sexualised ‘cadavers’ of young beauties are part of the visual formula, corpse chic representations amplify opportunities for voyeuristic exploration of the gorgeous dead body.

Refashioning Death

Skull style and corpse chic mine an evocative place where endings, beginnings, sex, beauty, death, fashion, and consumption meet. Fashion imagery and fashion itself – with its ‘birth’ and ‘death’ cycles, trends, and nostalgia – is by its very logic associated with dying and death. In his work about passages, Walter Benjamin observed that “fashion was never anything but the parody of the gaily decked-out corpse” (quoted in Bruno 2002: 147).

For Benjamin, fashion plays a role in the human struggle against decay, by offering “sex appeal to the inorganic” (Bruno 2002: 147). Objects such as clothes, accessories, and mannequins, in Benjamin’s view, lure the living to “the realm of dead things.” In the nineteenth century, Marx was critical of the vagaries of fashion, blaming it for unpredictable garment and textile markets that impoverished common workers and created exploitative, dangerous work conditions that could kill them (Ross 1997), a critique that remains valid for some workers in today’s globalised fashion industrial complex.

The very language of fashion culture is connected with death, beyond the “I die” of Rachel Zoe. Models are ‘shot’ by photographers and are featured in ‘shoots.’ People who dress fashionably are said to be ‘dressed to kill’ or to have ‘killed a look’, while particular items of fashion are ‘to die for’.
Beauty, one of fashion’s most important aesthetics, is also aligned with death. Freud (1957) claimed that beauty and death share a “hidden identity” and that beauty’s ephemeral nature augurs the transience of life, foreshadows bereavement, articulates a human attraction to death, and can be viewed as an aesthetic substitution for it.

For Freud , “the goal of all life is death” (1952: 652). Similarly, Lacan maintained that a function of beauty is to present death as a “dazzling’ sight” (1992: 62), attracting us to our own demises. “For”, as poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes, “beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror we can just barely endure, and we admire it so because it calmly disdains to destroy us” (1992).
While death as a theme was once at the periphery of the style world, explored by avant garde photographers and by experimental fashion designers who staged and designed it to call attention to socio-political problems, it is now at its center. In Fashion at the Edge (2003), Caroline Evans posits that imagery of “death, decay and dereliction” from the 1990s stands for mutability “[rather]than for mortality” and is more about the “change, instability, and uncertainty” that came with “rapid technological and social transition than with death itself” (2003: 10-11). While Evans’ analysis is useful and extremely well-documented, it is now 2010 and more than ever, death as a fashion aesthetic is about death itself.
Since fashion designs and imagery are consumed, and fashion is about what’s ‘hot’ and registers the pulse of contemporary culture, the fact that deathly styles and images are mainstream style trends tells us something important about what is happening now. That is, a resurfacing of an interest in death itself. It is no accident that this ‘to die for’ trend coincides with the larger cultural fascination with forensic images of the corpse, both real and contrived, and interest in information about the dead bodies of celebrities and victims of war, terror, disasters, and corpse abuse scandals, all of which are beamed directly into our houses.

While some find this trend appalling, others respond positively to this macabre imagery. The debate about the effects of violence and death as themes of popular culture is probably as old as the images that have been produced. Research has found that the violence seen on television evokes a variety of responses from viewers, from fear, acceptance, antisocial behaviour, the craving for more violent imagery, and desensitisation (Cantor 2000). Whether telling ‘an important story’ or commercially exploiting lurid public appetites for such imagery, representations of human remains have become major infotainment commodities and US exports (Foltyn 2008a).

Information about the processes of dying, death, decomposition, and bereavement make bestseller lists and have also brought dying, death, and the corpse to the fore (for example, Mary Roach’s Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers 2003; Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking 2005) (Foltyn 2008a, 2008b). So strong is the desire to see ‘real’ death that a plethora of websites devoted to dubiously acquired images of the dead and autopsied bodies of the famous have sprung up (such as eBaum’s World Famous Corpse gallery, at http://www.ebaumsworld.com/pictures/view/80709927/).
Death, as the boutique owner Valerie Ferrari observed, is “very much in the air”. Perhaps fashion imagery and styles are tapping into what Lacan (1992) called the collective fascination with death, allowing it to resurface from a historical graveyard where it had been buried as incompatible with the optimistic mood of modern capitalism (Aries 1974; Gorer 1955). Since fashion reflects the social zeitgeist, the emergence of a death-oriented style tells us something about our changing attitudes towards dying and death in postmodern societies where our relation to death is disjointed and is being redefined.

Perhaps deathly fashion imagery is another example of how death, to paraphrase McIlwaine (2005) ‘has gone pop’: fashion’s skull style and corpse chic imagery helps bring death ‘out of the closet’, and reverses the historical changes that, over the past century, made it something to hide and disguise (Foltyn 1996).
The refashioning of fashion to include skull style and corpse chic reveals the underbelly of a culture progressively preoccupied with death, and with a paradoxical orientation toward the Grim Reaper. On the one hand, we entertain ourselves with death, peruse its imagery in fashion venues, and wear its symbols. On the other hand, we live in a period when death has receded from everyday life, is viewed as the ‘failure of a cure’ in affluent modern societies where it’s expected that one will live to be old (Aries 1974).

Longevity is greater, infant and maternal mortality is lower, and people tend to die ‘invisibly’ in hospitals or hospices rather than at home. Many people have never see an actual corpsein person, including those of their deceased loved ones, preferring to celebrate their lives in memorial services, with no cadaver, casket, or urn present. Ours is an era in which many of have seen portents of our future skeletonised remains, through x-ray scans that reveal the interior of our bodies (Sawday 1995), and yet we are unclear about what happens to our ‘self,’ post-mortem, a source of very real fear in modern secular societies.

While we are increasingly members of what Bogard (2008) called “the empire of the living dead”, where biomedical, genomic, and cloning technologies have made the divisions between the living and the dead more fluid, the fact is that modern medicine has not defeated death. Perhaps we look at images of death and wear its symbols as futile attempts to confront, ward off, and master death. Or perhaps our psyches crave acknowledgement of the reality of death, even as our society does not sufficiently acknowledge that each of us will die.

In corpse chic, the ‘most beautiful’ among us – supermodels and celebrities – ‘die’, that is, model death for the rest of us, and serve notice that death is indeed the great leveller. Perhaps the ‘stillness’ of death (Bronfen 1992), seen in corpse chic and worn in skull style, is something that members of our frenetic time-poor culture seek. A multiplicity of explanations is necessary to understand the emergence in mass culture of these deathly fashion trends, as subcategories of the larger cultural intoxication with death, and to explain why we are attracted to, revolted by, and ambivalent toward it.

Even the world of fashion registers this ambivalence. How else can we explain why death remains fashionable in the world of style, even as it claims its deeply mourned icons, muses, and stars through disease (Yves Saint Laurent, Herb Ritts, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Audrey Hepburn); old age (Francesco Scavullo, Irving Penn); or violence (Gianni Versace, Alexander McQueen, Princess Diana, John F. Kennedy, Jr., Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and Isabella Blow)?
Do skull style and corpse chic matter in the larger scheme of human life? Well, yes. To a degree, everyone is a consumer of fashion, one of the most imaginative, productive industries in the global economy; in the US alone, apparel and accessories are responsible for several hundred billions of dollars per annum in sales, more than those for films, books, and music, combined (Hemphill and Suk 2009).

Fashion is not only a business; it is a feature of popular culture. Fashion’s thematic content is important for understanding larger trends in mass society and who we are. The fashion world has merged with a globalised death culture and made skulls, skeletons, and simulated corpses chic. But as we naively wear or gaze upon these often beautiful spectacles of death, we may forget that one day death will come for us too, and its arrival won’t be a style statement.

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Dengue fever vaccine shows promise after clinical trials

Dengue fever vaccine shows promise after clinical trials

Sep 01, 2011

MADISON, WIS. — A new vaccine to protect against dengue fever has proven safe and effective in preclinical studies involving nonhuman primates, scientists recently reported in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

In 2006, InViragen, based in Fort Collins, Colo., received a multi-million dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to help develop a dengue fever vaccine. The four-year grant funded a collaborative effort led by Dan Stinchcomb, InViragen's chief executive officer, and involved scientists at the Division of Vector-Borne Infectious Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison's (UW-Madison) veterinary school.

Dr. Jorge Osorio, assistant professor in the Department of Pathobiological Sciences at UW-Madison's veterinary school is the lead author on the paper and is also InViragen's chief scientific officer.

The Wisconsin National Primate Research Center's Animal Services Division helped acquire the cynomolgus macaques used for the study and performed much of the technical work, according to Division Associate Director Saverio Capuano.

The InViragen vaccine combination proved safe, induced neutralizing antibodies to all four dengue serotypes, and protected the monkeys against dengue infection, according to the authors.

The four dengue viruses, spread by mosquitoes, cause an estimated 0.5 to 2 million cases of life-threatening dengue hemorrhagic fever every year, UW-Madison reports.

"Recent dengue fever outbreaks in India, Pakistan and Cuba have emphasized the need for this vaccine," Stinchcomb says. A dengue outbreak in Florida highlights the continuing global spread of the disease. Dengue fever is already a major public-health problem in Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, the Caribbean, Mexico, Central and South America and parts of Africa.

If successful in human clinical trials, InViragen's dengue vaccine may be used to protect children and adults in these endemic countries and to protect travelers to those regions, the university says.


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Neuromuscular diseases - challenging diagnostic opportunities

Neuromuscular diseases - challenging diagnostic opportunities

Figure 1: Muscle. Dog. Red O stain. Lipid storage myopathy. (Courtesy of Dr. G. D. Shelton.)
Veterinarians have become increasingly aware of muscle and peripheral nerve disorders in the past decade.

Some diagnoses require physical and neurological examinations, blood and urine analyses, electrodiagnostic tests, radiographic studies, and advanced imaging modalities. However, many neuromuscular diseases have normal or nonspecific serum creatinine kinase and/or EMG changes.

The general practitioner may participate in the diagnosis of many neuromuscular cases. Diagnostic reliability is also dependent on the service of specialized laboratories using current techniques for serological tests, endocrinological assays, and the evaluation of muscle and peripheral nerve biopsies.

PolymyopathyPolymyopathy in dogs is generally associated with intermittent weakness and reluctance to move.

Figure 2: Dog. Normal muscle. (Courtesy of Dr. G. D. Shelton.)
Muscle atrophy is inconsistent. Pain may be noted on physical examination by palpating various muscle groups. Exercise-associated weakness seen sometimes with polymyopathy may also be present with disorders of the neuromuscular junctions (e.g., myasthenia gravis, myasthenic syndrome, tick paralysis, or botulism). The constellation of muscular and neurological signs represents a real challenge to the clinician. Complementary tests are necessary to evaluate the cause of neuromuscular diseases.

In a recent report (GD Shelton. Proceeding of the 20th ACVIM Forum, 325-327), the author describes the practical approach to the diagnosis and treatment of neuromuscular disorders. Some very useful tests that can be performed in general practices for polymyopathy are the pre- and post-exercise plasma lactates, pyruvates, muscle and nerve biopsies.

In healthy individuals, cellular metabolic energy is generated mainly via the aerobic pathway. In conditions of relative or absolute cellular hypoxia, glycolysis (which does not require oxygen) allows energy production to continue. Glycolysis produces pyruvate and lactate. Defects of muscle oxidative metabolism may result in elevated concentrations of these compounds in tissues and blood. Determination of their plasma levels offers a unique means to evaluate the muscle condition. These assays can be performed by Dr. Diane Shelton's laboratory. Her Web site ( has submission forms and more detailed information.

Muscle and peripheral nerve biopsies should be considered with elevated plasma lactate and/or pyruvate levels and with clinical signs supporting polymyopathy (Shelton's Web site also has detailed information, submission forms, and information on how to handle muscle and nerve biopsies). These must be fresh samples with specific preparation.

MyopathiesIn a recent edition of The Veterinary Clinics of North America, Small Animal Practice (SR Platt, GD Shelton, M. Podell, PA Cuddon. Neuromuscular Diseases, January 2002), the authors note that a large variety of acquired myopathies and peripheral neuropathies may be treated adequately.

A significant number of dogs with metabolic myopathies, such as lipid storage myopathy, respond favorably to the long-term administration of L-carnitine (50 mg/kg orally twice daily), coenzyme (1 mg/kg daily), and riboflavin (50 to 100 mg daily) (GD Shelton. Canine Lipid Storage Myopathies. In Kirk's Current Veterinary Therapy XII, Small Animal Practice, 1161-1163, 1995)*.

Figure 1 shows canine lipid storage myopathy, Figure 2 shows normal muscle. Remission of clinical signs is often observed once hormonal disorders (e.g., hypothyroidism, hyperadrenocorticism), inflammatory conditions (e.g. immune-mediated disease, parasitic infestation, tick-transmitted disease), or metabolic myopathies are treated.

*Nutritional supplements are not currently regulated by the government and may not always contain what is indicated on the label (The Wall Street Journal). It is best to encourage the client to use supplements from reputable veterinary or human manufacturers.


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Italy Is No Greece: Unicredit CEO

Monday, 30 May 2011 | 1:30 AM ET

Italy is in a totally different position from Greece, Federico Ghizzoni, chief executive of Unicredit, told CNBC. He added that it is too late to think about reprofiling in Greece, it should have been done a year ago.


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Eat, Drink and Be Thrifty

This video infographic examines how much people spend on food and dining, based on aggregated, anonymous data from Mint users. It’s rather interesting and you might be surprised by a thing or two.

About is dedicated to bringing you quality motion graphics and video infographics daily.

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The League

Gene Wang
Fantasy Guru

Gene Wang

A sports staff writer at The Washington Post

Cowboys: Viva La Vida

Everyone loves an underdog, and during the Super Bowl era, that means just about every team other than the Dallas Cowboys. The Cowboys have won five Super Bowls, made eight appearances in our country's biggest game and have the most playoff wins of any team in league history.

Dallas haters point to the arrogance stemming from that virtually unmatched level of success as to why so many football fans love seeing the Cowboys lose.

In Philadelphia, New York and Washington, you'd probably find as many fans who relish a Dallas loss just as much if not more than a victory by their team. That's probably the case in most NFL cities other than Dallas-Fort Worth and its surroundings.

Ill will toward America's Team starts with the players. As much as Roger Staubach, Troy Aikman, Daryl Johnston and Emmitt Smith exemplified ideals the NFL seeks to promote, many other Dallas greats were known as much for their off-field indiscretions as their fine play on it.

Only in Dallas would a player be known as Hollywood. But Thomas Henderson isn't alone when it comes to player hubris. Michael Irvin was nicknamed The Playmaker, not just for making clutch receptions in the most important games but for letting you know when he did. And of course there was Prime Time. Deion Sanders may be the greatest cover cornerback in NFL history, but he's probably one of the league's most reviled players too.

Then there were the coaches. Many mistook Tom Landry's stoicism for arrogance, and former Redskins coach George Allen fueled the rivalry by using that as motivation. The Redskins embraced the persona of the lunch-pail Over-the-Hill Gang and the Hogs, while the Cowboys were automatons, void of emotion or compassion.

Jimmy Johnson was brash from the moment he took over for Landry. Remember he was the coach who called a Fort Worth radio station in 1994 to guarantee a victory over San Francisco in the the NFC championship game. Dallas won, 38-21, en route to their fourth Super Bowl title.

Then came Barry Switzer, who won three national championships at Oklahoma and gained many critics for what some perceived as an outlaw program. The Cowboys were a traveling rock band under Switzer, and their escapades are well documented. Drugs and women were in heavy supply then, but Dallas still won despite those distractions.

Finally there's Jerry Jones, the owner who turned around the franchise when it had fallen into disrepair in the late 1980s. He's been accused of meddling in football operations, namely hiring and firing coaches with impunity and trading draft picks with little regard for the consequences. Now he's built the largest stadium in the league.

The old saying is: "Everything's bigger in Texas." That's true of the Cowboys on just about every level. That includes the outsized personality of the players, coaches and owner to the size of the stadium to the inflated egos of the Dallas fan base.

The sense of entitlement surrounding the Cowboys makes them easy to hate. Last season with a roster full of Pro Bowl players, they failed to make the playoffs. The Cowboys went into many games as if they expected the opponent to wilt simply because of the star on the side of the Dallas helmets.

The era of opponents fearing the Cowboys, who have not won a playoff game since 1996, is long over. Dallas instead has become the butt of jokes for organizational mismanagement, poor coaching and underachieving players. These days it's just as easy to pity the Cowboys as it is to hate them.

By Gene Wang  |  November 20, 2009; 11:51 AM ET  | Category:  Dallas Cowboys , Gene Wang Save & Share:  Send E-mail   Facebook   Twitter   Digg   Yahoo Buzz   StumbleUpon   Technorati
Previous: America's Team... of arrogance | Next: Nearly the worst

Please email us to report offensive comments.

Nice writing. But not even much of the cowboy fanbase really cares about the cowboys. These are the vacuous bandwagoners of the fanbase who are comprised of folks who aren't from dallas and contain no sense of where they are from and no sense of the pathetic nature of self-aggrandizement that dallas represents in American culture. Are you from dallas?

Posted by: BIGHITTER | November 20, 2009 5:29 PM

I don't quite understand all this "hate" talk. I enjoy football, but I don't hate anybody or team. As a matter of fact I was bred, born, raised, and aged in Texas, but my favorite team is the New York Giants. Cowboys are a distant second.

Posted by: dondi17 | November 20, 2009 8:00 PM

Interesting that you mention Thomas "Hollywood" Henderson, a player with great ability and no self control. He only played in Dallas four years before Tom Landry, not the NFL, not the commish, but the coach, got rid of him for being a disruptive influence (coke). Within a couple of years he was out of the game and after a couple more he was in jail. And yet you say "Only in Dallas would a player be known as Hollywood."

Contrast this with the career of local hero Dexter Manley (banned for life after four failed drug tests, two years in jail) who is considered one of the "70 greatest Redskins", or Bal'mer hero Ray Lewis (charged with murder, ultimately copped to obstruction) who will probably end up in the HOF some day. Times have changed and the bar has been lowered.

Posted by: kguy1 | November 23, 2009 4:37 PM

News Update: Dallas beat the Redskins.... Again.

Posted by: oldno7 | November 23, 2009 9:56 PM

Hollywood Henderson had more ability & no less control than most of the players in the league today. The truth is that he had a coach that had 0 tolerance for showboating, & 0 understanding for drug addiction. The league( union)and Pete Rozelle actually tried to have hin re-instated by the Cowboys, but Thomas had ripped the phone cord out of the wall and no one could reach him for 5 days. He missed the deadline.

He's the only NFL linebacker that has ever returned punts and kick-offs for touchdowns.You probably weren't even born yet, but you're passing judgement.

Thomas was a teammate and is still a friend.Today, he helps people for a living. What do you do ?

Posted by: keithponder21 | December 1, 2009 5:48 PM

BTW, he was out of the league only because of a broken neck that he sustained with the Dolphins in a pre-season game against Kansas City, while tackling the late great Joe Delaney. Shula loved him. He put him in the middle (linebacker) and told him to just "go find the ball".

Posted by: keithponder21 | December 1, 2009 5:53 PM

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Villains Wikia

Adam Newman

36,303pages on
this wiki

Adam Newman is a fictional character from the American CBS soap opera The Young and the Restless. Introduced as a baby in 1995, he was later removed from the show for plot purposes, then rapidly aged upon his reintroduction in 2008. First played as an adult by Chris Engen, he was replaced after just a year in the role in 2009 by most recent portrayer Michael Muhney, who played the role until Muhney was fired from the show in December 2013, with his last on-screen appearance on January 30, 2014. The role is currently being played by Justin Hartley.

Adam is kind, caring, selfless, intelligent, calculating, confident, (his confidence is not to the point of being overconfident) however, there is a limit of how kind and caring he can be; towards people he dislikes for good reason. Adam can sometimes be short tempered and impulsive, but he always tries his best to control his temper, and he never intentionally makes a scene in public. Adam does not like to hurt good/innocent people, and he always tries his best to avoid it, however, he does have his moments when he does get pushed too far. His devotion and loyalty to the people he loves, mainly Chelsea and Connor, are never questioned, however he is not loyal to the Newman family, mainly Victor, because of what kind of people they are, and because they have treated him like garbage, for no apparent reason, he despises all members of the Newman family (except Noah, Reed and Faith) for good reason, mostly due to their unwillingness to accept him as part of the family.

He admits he makes mistakes and learns from them as well, but he rarely admits he made mistakes out loud towards people he dislikes for good reason, he never underestimates his opponents, he has a conscience, guilt, morals, and remorse for his actions, and always tries to do the right thing, he always does something out of the kindness of his heart. Adam has compassion and sympathy towards good/innocent people. He is a very forgiving person (far more than his father) however he also knows there are some things that just can't be forgiven.

After Adam (apparently dying in a car explosion) returned as Gabriel Bingham. He was reluctant to impersonate Gabriel, as he had saved his life (actually dying in the explosion) but he had no choice, mainly because Sage Warner blackmailed him into being Gabriel, otherwise she would tell the police that he is alive, as he was previously wanted for running over Delia Abbott and leaving her to die, (however, in truth, he did not realize he had hit Delia, until a few days after the accident). He did not confess as he could not prove he was innocent. He managed to blackmail Victor into making him CEO of Newman-Abbott, partly as revenge for blackmailing him into letting Victor see his grandson and mainly because Victor used the death of an innocent child to try to control him.

He reconnected with Chelsea and got her to fall in love with him again, (unaware that Gabriel was actually Adam), and got the be in his son's life again. He (secretly) became unhappy, as he realized that everything he had accomplished was based on a lie, as he achieved it as Gabriel, not as Adam.

However, when he made the mistake by mocking a photograph of his father, when he said he is Adam, Chelsea, overheard what he said, and demanded to know what he meant by that, realizing he had no choice, he confessed the truth to Chelsea and was willing to confess to everyone else, as well and face the consequences of his actions. Chelsea stopped him, partly because it would just hurt them all over again and mainly because it would hurt Connor; as he would lose his father all over again.

Adam is later revealed to be the mastermind behind the Paragon Project intended to bring Victor down and had been secretly collaborating with Ian Ward, a cult leader from Nikki Newman's past who despises Victor just as much as Adam does (this project was also why Victor had Jack held captive and brought Marco out of prison). However, similar to the situation between Victor and Marco, Ian becomes more rebellious and refuses to continue being under Adam's thumb.

Dark Personality

There is also a dark side to Adam's personality, something that he developed after his father tried to ruined his life, when it comes to the Newmans, the Abbotts, (except Traci and Colleen) their acquaintances (except Katherine Chancellor), and people he dislikes for good reason.

Unlike the rest of his paternal family, Adam is never arrogant, selfish, self-righteous, power-hungry, amoral/immoral sociopathic, hypocritical, delusional and a bully, although he can be cruel, sadistic, ruthless, manipulative and vengeful, but it is never directed at good/innocent people, also his vengeful nature is never to the point of being obsessive.

Hope Adams

Hope was Adam's mother.

Cliff Wilson

Cliff was Adam's adoptive father/step-father.

Riley Newman

Riley was Adam's unborn son and first child.

Connor Newman

Connor is Adam's son second and second child.

Sharon Newman

Sharon is Adam's ex-wife and good friend.

Chelsea Lawson

Chelsea is Adam's estranged wife and friend.

Friends and Allies

Jack Abbott

Jack is Adam's best friend and ex-enemy.

Sage Warner

Sage is Adam's friend.

Victor Newman

Victor is Adam's father and enemy.

Victoria Newman

Victoria is Adam's paternal half-sister.

Nicholas Newman

Nicholas is Adam's paternal half-brother.

Abby Carlton Newman

Abby is Adam's paternal half-sister.

Heather Stevens

Heather is Adam's ex-fiancée and enemy.

Ashley Abbott

Ashley is Adam's ex-friend and enemy.

Billy Abbott

Billy is Adam's enemy.

Paul Williams

Paul is Adam's enemy.

Michael Baldwin

Michael is Adam's enemy.

Neil Winters

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Wednesday, 17 December 2008

ho, ho, ho, the festive spirit kicks in.............

Good evening everybody, is the festive spirit upon you yet? It's well and truly arrived in this house. The tree is up, decorated to within an inch of it's life, the stairs are swathed in fairy lights and garlands, the candles are lit, as is the fire, Nigella's on the telly expanding our waistlines just by watching, the advent calendars have only 5 doors left to open and I've still a humongous pile of presents to wrap and Christmas cards to send.

So this will be a post of many pictures and very few words, apologies to all. However, I must mention the button maker since so many of you have asked where it came from. So I will let you in on my little secret because I'm kind like that. I bought it at Dunelm Mill for the princely sum of less than £2, the buttons themselves are about £2ish as well. I've also seen them at "The Range" - see, I go to all the best places don't I!! Of course whilst I was out and about scouting round the cheapo shops I felt it would be churlish of me not to throw another one in my basket along with a pack of buttons, so I have one to give away to one of you lucky ladies (or men). Just do the usual, leave me any comment before Christmas Day, doesn't have to be funny or anything, a simple hello is enough, and this little gadget will be winging it's way to the lucky winner. As Miss Sew'n'Sew will vouch I am the slowest parcel posting lady so I will not promise it before Christmas Day but it'll brighten up those post Christmas blues and give you something to do on those long dark nights.

So, are you ready, pictures galore to follow...........

...............let's start at the front door with my trusty old wreath. As tempted as I was with the truly delicious eucalyptus "White Company" one I was a goody two shoes and let it go. There is a limit as to how many a person can have and at the last count I had nine! have a nose through the window, go on tell me you do it too! I just love dusk at this time of year, it provides the ultimate nosing opportunity, curtains still open and lamps on. Does that make me sound weird, back me up here ladies!

.................the fire's roaring so come on in out of the cold.

....................Christmas tree by night (bloody hard to photograph it was too!)
..............................and by day.

.................we have our own little carol singers,

.................vintage baubles,

............................little sparkly snowmen,

The baby blanket will not be finished in time, surprise, surprise. It is coming along a treat, the Rowan yarn is a dream to crochet with, the colours are sublime. I've (sort of) followed a brilliant tutorial for granny squares with built in flowers kindly given by Rosehip, and I'm thrilled with the results. Give me another 6 months and we may have something resembling a blanket.

The only thing left to say is have a lovely, peaceful, joyous Christmas, and see you in the New year!

Curlew Country said...

Merry Christmas Julia, your house is looking so inviting and very festive. Glad to hear I'm not the only one who hasn't tackled the wrapping yet!

I got the paperchains from an ebay shop, very cheap and they arrived quickly.

Have a great festive season - enjoy yourselves.

Clairey said...

Your house is look gorgeous Julia. I've done a mountain of wrapping and have tonnes more to do.

I too love looking in people's windows and I always chuckle when people gawp in my window!

Have a lovely Christmas

Claire x

LittleGem said...

Your home looks gorgeous Julia! I am a lurker on your blog (sorry) but I do love to read it.
Merry Christmas X Gemma X

Miss sew n sew said...

Oooh goody I can hardly wait for Mr Postie! Your house looks like Christams heaven! So cosy and no your not weird I look through peoples windows too, I thought about doing the through the window shot too it's lovely!
The paint colour on my front door is Pidgeon Green by Farrow and Ball I love it too.
Have a wonderful Christmas!

Frances said...

You have definitely got the Christmas spirit alive in your home day and night!

Something about all those tiny white lights and the scent of evergreen creates such magic.

david mcmahon said...

You have wonderful judgement when it comes to photo composition.

No, make that impeccable judgement.

Ali said...

Don't feel alone Julia - I am an avid window peeker too. If I loved near you I'd have my nose to the glass drooling at all that gorgeousness in real life.

And is Nigella's secret festive trick to slap an entire packet of butter in everything? Seems to be.

jessica daisy said...

Beautiful decs Julia, Your house is looking gorgeous!
Those little granny squares are soo cute, can't wait to see the end result!

Have a lovely Christmas!
I love the glass doors and the Granny Squares.
Oh, of course I peek through windows, but rarely to see such a comfortable home as yours, I must say!

Anonymous said...

Beautifully homely with a dash of class - what a wonderful place to retreat to on those dark, damp British days. Over here in Australia we will be sweltering our way through another un-festive Xmas celebration - boy do we miss the mother country at times like these!
Thanks for sharing,
(ex-pat,now in Perth Western Oz)

Lesley (Notesfrommydays) said...

oh my goodness that is a gorgeous tree!!! i keep seeing everyone else's tree and needing to re-do mine!!! the house looks very christmassy from outside as well :-)
and I will back you and confess to having volunteered to pop to the shop in an evening around xmas as I know lights will be on in houses and i can peek in!!! actually i do that all year round not just christmas.......... !!!
have a fantastic christmas and new year :-D
Lesley x

Deb said...

So much to comment on!

your house looks very stylish from the front (not that it doesn't inside too) but I love the front!

Love the tree too. I love being able to nosey into people's houses before they've closed the curtains so you're not alone!

Have a great Christmas.

Deb (at beingordinary)

Helen said...

I did press my nose against the window and then I tried the door, it opened and I came in. Lovely pictures of your cosy home. Its one of my favourite winter things to do - looking through peoples windows when the lights are on and the curtains still open. Sadly where we live now it isn't possible but where we lived before this it was wonderful, such lovely homely, cosy interiors some people had. But others ...! Say no more.

serendipitylovesnewyork said...

Well I've been window peeking since I was a little girl, lovely to go for a walk in the evening and go house looks beautiful, made me feel christmassy especially after spying all those wrapped pressies under the tree. Hope you have a fantastic Christmas in the Vintage Heaven household........claire xx

Jenny said...

I love the branches in a jug, very simple and pretty. I may have to borrow that idea!

claire said...

Try not to hate me when I tell you I've done all the wrapping (all 4 kids and the extended folk too!!) I have no food though so hope there is enough choccies to go around!!
Your house looks amazing - all those little touches - just gorgeous. X
Happy Christmas

sharie said...

How festive your home looks! I'm always sneaking peeks into peoples windows (obviously I don't go right up to the window that would make me a peeping Tom-belina)
Just nosy in as I'm walking past.
I like looking at eveyones christmas treess ;-)

Josie said...

I'm nosey too! and your house looks lovely, very cosy, I've just finished wrapping 3 pressies, cards sent last week, tree up.
Merry Christmas
Josie x

periwinkle said...

your house looks so warm and cosy.. merry christmas to you and your family
lisa x

bekimarie said...

You are most definately not the only one to nose through peoples windows. I always think if they didn't want us to look, they would close the curtains.
Your tree looks gorgeous by the way.
Must get back to wrapping my pressies, still so many left to do.
Take care
Beki xxx

bekimarie said...

Have a fantastic christmas xxx

Summer by the sea said...

Hi Julia, love the pics, and no - you're not wierd - my neighbours never shut their curtains and their house looks lovely, so I'm always trying to have a sneaky nosy - I have never been invited in unfortunately, but annoyingly, my hubby has, I quizzed him when he came back whether it was as nice inside as it looked from the road, but you know what men are like - he could give me no details whatsoever - men!
Have a happy christmas and a lovely New Year too - Look forward to reading more from you in 2009 - Natalie x

Jacoline (Lien) said...

Merry Christmas, your house (home) is looking great! have a great time!!

Things Hand Made said...

Merry christams to you too! We will come and sing loudly outside you window and see how the christmas spirit(s) are doing!

MelMel said...

Why have i not read this post...?

I just adore you home, so sweet and cosy n festive....xx

Kathy said...

Hi Julia, Your house looks gorgeous and if I walked past I would certainly have to look in. I was terrible whilst in London nosing through all the windows whilst walking back - it is amazing how many people donot close curtains/shutters - great for nosy people like me! I wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas and Peaceful New Year and look forward to hopefully meeting up for an applique day in the Spring. Kathyx

Ragged Roses said...

Beautiful beautiful photos Julia, your home looks absolutely gorgeous. Wishing you and your family a wonderful Christmas and a very Happy New Year

prettyshabby said...

I've just been watching Harry Hill taking the mickey out of funny,but in a nice way!
Hope the jobs going ok,the restraint you must have to have working there-that must be hard work in itself,I think I would end up working for free for 6 weeks!
lovely lovely photos.
Happy Christmas Julia and your lovely family (and BEAUTIFUL house) x

Anonymous said...

Happy Christmas! The house looks all gorgeous and in awe of how you've made it so cosy and stylish, mine never looks stylish when I mix things - it looks as though someone's sorting the loft!! :) Still I am 'watching and learning'!!!! :) Loved the peeping through the window...difficult to do over here without finding you have a farm dog attached to your leg...
Have a good one
Kate in Tassiexx

Miss sew n sew said...

Hi Julia
Your parcel arrved yesterday morning thankyou so much I LOVE it all I spent yesterday faffing about placing them all about the house thankyou you made me a very happy girlie!Photo's on my blog if you want a peep!

claire said...

Well i would be nosing through your windows as it all looks so lovely and you might even see my nose pressed up against the windowpane!

i'm a terrible night time noser. Once when walking home from college I took a good peek in some man's living room as I walked past and I heard him shout "Have a good look love!" (I was ever so embarressed)!!!

We live right on the street with no front garden so anyone that passes can take a good look. Alexei is a nosy bugger too and shouts things like "Oh look Mum, they've got a really nice fish tank in there" while I hiss at him to be quiet. Luckily our road is full of really nice people who don't seem to have any secrets from us. lol!

Have a lovely Christmas. i fancy some paperchains to but can't be bothered to put them up.

Vintage Tea said...

Your home looks so cosy.

Have a fabulous Christmas

Victoria xx

Country Cottage Chic said...

Your house looks superb! And yes, I am a "peeker-in-windows" too!

Just popping in to wish you a very Merry Christmas!

Cowboys and Custard said...

It all looks so inviting..fancy doing a house swap!?
Wishing you and your lovely family a super duper Christmas Julia.. and look forward to more invaluable help from the 'tea lady' next year..
With love
Michele xx

Suzie Sews said...

happy happy christmas to you and yours....

Beata said...

That'll be a gorgeous blanket once done -- happy to see that you found my tutorial useful! - I like how you adapted it!

retrorose said...

I love those crocheted squares, esp the colours. The photos are just beautiful. Hope the festive season is fun. Happy new Year

MelMel said...

Happy new year!xx

Carol said...

Lovely pictures Julia, and as for the granny squares...well they are beautiful, you are too clever, I cannot get mine to look as nice.
Happy New Year to you and your family.
Love and hugs,
Carol xxx

carolyn said...

I have a snowman just like that one Julia. Happy New Year.

Country Cottage Chic said...

Just dropping in to wish you & yours a wonderful 2009!

Lesley (Notesfrommydays) said...

Just popped by to wish you and your family a happy new year and best wishes for 2009 :-) hope you had a fab christmas - are you completely over run with new toys from santa?!!!
Lesley x

serendipitylovesnewyork said...

Happy New year to your vintage heaven household! Claire xx

Debbies-English-Treasures said...

jessica daisy said...

Sending you and your family warm wishes for the New Year ahead!

Debbies-English-Treasures said...

Debbie Moss

the homely year said...

Hi, hope you had a wonderful Christmas...your house looks so warm and inviting.
Wishing you a very happy 2009!
Margaret and Noreen

Amy said...

I enjoy your blog.Love to collect vintage Christmas ornaments,only started last year.
Your house is very nice.

Anonymous said...

hi Julia, i love your blog!!! be still my beating heart.. i must say that not a lot excites me these days but your blog, every wonderous little corner or your home that you have shown and shared, from the kid days to the mag pages i love love love it... my little heart skipped a beat and i am now on a mission to cover all the tables in my house with pretty CK oil cloth or similar - if only i could source it here in Australia. your blog has def been added to my favourites and i shall treasure it, and love it and I shall call it "my squishy" blog... hmmmmm lovely lovely. :)


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Simplicity 6263; ©1974; Misses' Short Two-Piece Dress or Top and Pants (Approximate Length of Skirt is 20"): The button trimmed top with square neckline, short set-in sleeves gathered to armholes and contrasting collar and cuffs is worn with a purchased belt. The short skirt and wide-leg pants have back zipper and elastic waistline casing.

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Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery is home to the largest collection of pre-Raphaelite artwork in the world, as well as collections of silver, sculpture, ceramics and ancient and social history galleries. The Gas Hall Gallery houses a constantly changing programme of exhibitions. Entrance is free except for certain exhibitions.

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The superbly titled Lingerie & Combat Boot Bake Sale/Dance Party was hosted by Menomonie's Acoustic Café on Friday March 23. Admission got attendees a free cookie and a chance to purchase other delicious baked goods, not to mention the chance to hang out in your underwear. Proceeds benefited summer art & music programs of Spindle Tree, Inc. a Menomonie NPO for youth and young adults.

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You may have received distorted claims about me. However, you know me better.  If you've read my newsletters or visited VotePaulSeaton.com, you have the facts and the truth. You know that I've been listening, working hard, and bringing people together in Juneau to find an equitable, sustainable solution to Alaska's fiscal crisis.

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30 November 2010, Singapore – ViewSonic today launched the ViewPad 7 and ViewPad 10 – the latest generation of communications tablets incorporating full mobile phone functionality, computer and gaming capabilities. At 1.15cm in thickness, the ViewPad 7 device claims to be the world’s slimmest, multi-touch, all-in-one tablet.

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With their dedicated graphic chipsets, high-quality interface and built-in dual stereo speakers, ViewPad 7 offers the ultimate mobile viewing environment for Youtube videos, blockbuster movies or home-made clips. The device is equipped with dual webcams, 3-megapixel image quality and auto-focus lens, on both sides of the device, allowing flexibility to capture important life moments. The ViewPad 7 can also receive commands through voice recognition. Users can activate voice search to locate email addresses, software, documents and web pages quickly and precisely. For travelers, the built-in GPS/AGPS, Google Maps help you to find the best way to any destination and the nearest points-of-interest.

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As for the ViewPad 10, the 10-inch tablet is powered with Intel 1.66GHz processor, and comes with an integrated memory of 1GB and 16GB SSD HDD storage space. Equipped with dual operating systems (OS), users can opt for the innovative Google Android OS for browsing and simple application or the familiar Windows 7 OS for VPN, Outlook and other high-end requirements. This high-performance but lightweight and stylish model offers the full PC experience when required. Its low battery consumption feature also boosts mobility and efficiency.

ViewPad 7 retails at S$829 and the ViewPad 10 at S$929 (GST inclusive). Both models will be available at leading retail stores in Singapore before Christmas 2010.


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Wallery - Beautiful Body

Wallery - Beautiful Body

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  • Delicate
  • Beauty
  • Realism

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Many people, even philosophers and scholars, consider the human body one of the most perfect living organisms on Earth. Since the times of Leonardo da Vinci, the human body has been analyzed, measured, studied to such an extent that people have arrived to this conclusion. Even today, there are many things about it that haven’t been explained.
This is what brings many people to consider it a real miracle.

Beautiful Body by Wallery will bring this greatest beauty to your desktop. This amazing and beautiful wallpaper will show you only that: parts of the human body. But it will not be just another screensaver or wallpaper showing you pictures of gorgeous women or athletic men displaying their bodies.

The way this wallpaper presents this wonder to us is by means of hand-made drawings of different parts of the body. You will be able to observe the beauty that mot of the time we just take for granted. The drawings are superb. The wallpapers don’t say who the artist is, but he or she managed to convey the perfection of the human body in all its splendor. Even in a small drawing of a hand holding a tiny delicate flower, you will be able to appreciate how well made we are. Call it a miracle, call it evolution, or something else, you will just have to accept that man is something out of this world.

Beautiful Body by Wallery will surely become one of your favorite wallpapers. It will make you remember how perfect God made us. Maybe then you will really think about starting to take care of yourself more.

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