Hemingway has long been out of fashion, with everything from his terse sentence structure to his obsession with masculinity mocked, but suddenly he’s everywhere you turn: In Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris; in the bestselling novel The Paris Wife (about first wife Hadley), which is currently mandatory reading for every book club; and in the upcoming HBO production Hemingway & Gellhorn, starring Nicole Kidman as his third wife, the writer and war correspondent Martha Gellhorn.
There are also lengthy articles about Hemingway in two glossy magazines this month. Town & Country speculates that the woman who helped inspire the "rich bitch" in the short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” was socialite Helen Hay Whitney, while Vanity Fair features never-before-seen letters from Hemingway’s Cuban estate, the Finca Vigia.
As for parasols, I’ve noticed they are a trend here in Philadelphia -- perhaps because I work so close to the University of Pennsylvania campus, with its large number of Asian students, some of whom brought the custom with them from Japan and other countries. But no less a credible fashion source than the Sartorialist—whose readership is slightly higher than mine--also spotlighted parasols recently, and the numerous comments on the post echoed my observations regarding seeing women carrying them here in the States, not just in Asia. The other day in my neighborhood of Fairmount I spied a tall blonde walking with her parents in broad daylight, an ordinary black umbrella held aloft against the bright sun. I asked if she would consider carrying a parasol instead, and she said she would if it were affordable enough. With that in mind, a couple of similarly-minded friends and I are concocting a scheme to import and sell our own designs.
(Now, if we could only figure out a way to get our mitts on some of Hemingway's lost letters, and maybe a silk parasol or two left behind at the Finca Vigia by one of the wives, and sell those...)
2 comments:
"The Dark Side of Parasols."
An odd thing about the parasol: it may be argued that they are a once racist device brought back by, at best, modern medicine, or at worst, (and still better than the original purpose) the fear of aging.
We now know that sun exposure is unhealthy, and we know very well it is the primary cause of premature aging. I speculate this drives their revival in America.
But the reason they persisted in many cultures, e.g. Asian cultures, and in paticular Japanese culture, was not age or health but the association of skin tone with social status.
The dark side of the parasol is its use by cultures attuned to ethnic elitism: Japanese women originally carried them not to be healthy or youthful, but to simply be "whiter" than the lower and darker skinned classes/ethnic groups.
Something to think about when you market your product.
The Unstructured Man
Interesting point. I ran this by a few people and they all agreed that parasols now are indeed about sun protection. They also fit the trend toward nostaglia for the past. Parasols are of course terribly feminine (definitely something to think about for marketing purposes).
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