I really love haute couture. My paternal grandmother taught me to sew, a bit, when I was a wee thing. I used to make buttonholes for her, because her thumbs were arthritic and the buttonhole attachment on her Singer sewing machine was a fiddly thing that she couldn’t work all that well any more. At one point I was putting buttonholes in many of her neighbors’ homemade garments, at twenty-five cents a hole, which enabled me to keep myself well supplied with firecrackers one summer when I visited with her for a month or so.

From there I graduated to making my own Mardi Gras costumes, and I’m sure that’s where my love of haute couture grew from. Just take a look at the couture the model in the photo is wearing. It’s pretty darn haute, if I say so myself, and could as easily be part of a Mardi Gras costume as something anyone would wear under normal circumstances. More easily.

I was delighted, when I was working at SAS and Al Gore invented the World Wide Web, to discover that there was a company that put photographs of every dress modeled on every runway of New York, London, Paris, and Milan’s fashion weeks online. It was called firstview.com. During fashion weeks I was in heaven paging through shot after shot, collection after collection. I had no idea when anyone would actually wear clothes like these, but they were fascinating.  Then, around the time I started working at the American Cancer Society, firstview went behind a paywall and I was devastated. I kept up my interest, but had to be satisfied with occasional news supplements that showed the highlights of one or two shows.

My interest in high fashion is one of those things that the people I work with don’t understand. Actually, I can’t say they don’t understand it so much as they just don’t believe it. One day there was a big group discussion at the office about the hats worn at Kate Middleton’s royal wedding, and I walked in just as our graphic designer pulled up an image of one of the hats in question. “Cool,” I said, “who’s that with the Philip Treacy hat?” And everyone just stopped talking and stared at me.

(This is great! I was wracking my brain to remember the exact name of the firstview website, and put in a placeholder in the text so I could finish my post. And as I was typing Philip Treacy’s name up above I suddenly remembered firstview.com, and opened it up, and at some point they have stopped having a paywall! I have 15 years of fashion shows to catch up on. This does not bode well for days 21 through 100, but man am I grateful for this! Later, everybody!)