Reflections on a Lifetime of  Collecting the Most Beautiful Clothes

How do you put a price on a lifetime's collection of the most beautiful clothes made in the western world?  I've learnt you can--I recently donated over 500 ensembles collected from the late 80s until last year to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.  It gave me great pleasure to do so as it assures that my fashion story will be told.  I am posting 11 photographs.  Seven of the ensembles are now at the de Young.  The clothes were professionally appraised, which required me to look at each garment and recall why I bought it, where I wore it, which then of course required me to go back into all the different times of my life--as a young mother and wife of a famous philosopher living on the Stanford University campus, to an Internet editor, hitting all the international fashion shows, to a serious haute couture buyer and finally, with the realisation that I had amassed an important collection, a chronicler of that collection (the book Electric Fashion with photographs by Frederic Aranda).  Over three decades of memories, to be exact.  The de Young will mount an exhibition in 2020 called "San Francisco Elegance" which is long overdue.  If my donation has helped, then I am happy, because San Francisco is a truly elegant city.  For those of you who wonder why I bought so many clothes, you are not true collectors.  True collectors understand--it is an obsession to find the perfect piece to refine the story you are telling through your collection.  For those of you who who wonder why I gave them away, I will tell you this:  I was caring for them as though they were my children.  Nadia came from Sacramento each month to assure they were all in good shape, that the temperature in the storage room was correct, the humidifier was working and that no insects existed. The clothes lived on elevated racks on padded hangers under gauze and muslin.  One day I realised these children had to leave the nest and go to their next life--a more academic one to be sure--but under the care of the de Young's Curator in Charge, Jill D'Alessandro, I can be sure their new lives will be as good as their first lives with me.
For the record, photographs 1,3,4,5,6,8 and 10 are by Frederic Aranda.  7 and 9 are by Drew Altizer.  The last photograph is a candid shot, taken in a limo in Washington DC with my late husband Patrick Suppes and my daughter Lexi who is now a psychologist at NYU.  In this picture we were being driven to the White House, where Pat was to be given the National Medal of Science.  It's been a wonderful life in fashion, and now I'm delighted to share my collection with the people of San Francisco and the world.

Rodarte

Rodarte

Ungaro

Christian Lacroix

Commes de Garcons

Alexander McQueen

Rodarte

Christian Dior

Rodarte

Blackgama, Hermes, Yves Saint Laurent and Chanel

Stalking and Stocking
Little Missy has been reflective this spring.  I began living at Stanford University forty years ago.  Yes, I was a child, of course! Now, I'm being stalked by paparazzi (until they realise I'm no one famous, as in this top image as I'm leaving my hotel for the 2018 Met Gala).  It's almost as much fun as having lived at Stanford for half my life!  (Just joking!  It's fun in a DIFFERENT way.  I get to say I was stalked going to the Met Gala.  Which is kind of fun.  AND I get to say I lived at Stanford for all those years.  Which is kind of fun, also)!  Kind of.

Stalking to end up in the Getty Images Stock List!

A little boy on a tricycle on 280 in 1968!  Yes we were doing that stuff back then!

Wow, here is a Before and After!  The Bride at Stanford and then magically into a time machine almost forty years later!  Do I look cynical now, or just world weary?  Look at yourselves in the mirror for that answer!

OMG here is my favourite coat from 1985, before the Internet! I wore it to pick up my daughter at kindergarten and the other mothers hated me!  LOL!  I was always the daring fashion innovator!

 OMG here is the Valley just as the Internet took off.  I was now the mother of two beautiful children, a daughter Lexi and a son Michael!

Here I am basically now, this picture shot by Frederic Aranda in Death Valley. It's taken me forty years but now I can truly say it:

It's my way or the highway!

That's a major 70's expression, but then I'm a major 70's kind of girl!
Love from Little Missy

Mid Century Elegance

Mid Century Elegance:  it's a subject in which I consider myself an expert, having grown up in it and around it in a town less than 20 miles south of San Francisco. Here I am with my mother Jane Johnson circa 1965.

This is what we all aspired to prior to the mid sixties:  Norman Parkinson's breathtaking 1950 portrait of Jean Patchett for Vogue Magazine.

And then when Flower Power came, we were still OK with it because it was so beautiful.

And then I was lucky enough to hear Angela Davis lecture at UCLA.

And lucky enough to march with Cesar Chavez.

And watch this guy doing his mime act all over San Francisco.  It was Robin Williams!

This beautiful actress, Brenda Aoki, was the cousin of my late dear friend Joanne Aoki.

I could go on and on, but driving home a point too long is not Little Missy style.  Just remember this: Mid Century Elegance belongs to all of us.  And I was lucky enough to be brought up in the Bay Area where that meant something!

Happy Sunday!

Love Little Missy

Why Givenchy's Orange Coat for Breakfast at Tiffany's is My Favourite Audrey Fashion Moment

You know the coat---she wore it OVER her famous little black dress to "select" jewelry at Tiffany's in the immortal fashion movie Breakfast at Tiffany's.

She was really having fun with leading man George Pepppard

Givenchy gave Audrey Hepburn real power with her orange coat.  In the more famous look, the "little black dress (now LBD)", a bit of salacious shade is thrown onto the screen as party girl Audrey jumps out of bed, miraculously throws on the perfect LBD (which is somehow next to her bed), and slips into the perfect black heels-- which are miraculously under her bed.  We somehow have managed to forget that Audrey was a call girl in this hallowed fashion film!  But in Givenchy's orange coat, she is protected, secure and truly joyous.

This will never take away from the magnificence of this image.  However, Audrey's screen power came when she donned the orange coat.

Tiffany's took her seriously, too!

So here is Little Missy's Advice:  it comes from a San Francisco girl who owns a lot of coats because it's COLD in this town!  Wear a great coat whenever you can. This orange coat has been copied more times than nearly any other garment.  Its staying power is for real. Wear a great coat, ladies, and so will be yours!

Love Little Missy

Little Missy's Fashion Tips

Every age has its charms.  How many times have you heard that one? Well, Little Missy has entered that age where I don't give a hoot what anyone thinks about my style.  I am very sad for these younger women who desperately put photos of themselves online, or even worse--selfies--on a daily basis.  I think they are really simply trying to discover who they are. At any rate they seem to have no clue.  The Kardashians...maybe this family started this bizarre trend which is now a multi-billion dollar business.  Little wonder our country is in the mess it's in. 

We value reality stars over beauty and art.

We value reality stars over truth.

Last night I attended a bittersweet goodbye party for Alan Morrell, the General Manager of Neiman Marcus in San Francisco.  He's leaving to manage an even bigger Neiman's outside of Dallas proper.  It was dipping into the 30's Fahrenheit, which is very cold for San Francisco at any time.

Now to my fashion tips.  What to wear to a cocktail party when you really want to honor the honouree by looking your best and it's freezing?  You don't want to walk into the ultra glamorous Rotunda Restaurant in a heavy coat.  You know Drew Altizer (our local society photographer) will have someone very good there photographing everyone in attendance.   I chose a two piece blue sequined Rodarte ensemble, very Hollywood glamorous, which I paired with a lighter blue Mongolian Azzedine Alaia shrug.  For jewelry I only had to dip into my mother's cache which she left to me. I carried a blue velvet Dries van Noten envelope bag large enough to hold an umbrella and I wore black suede Emma Hope kitten heels with crystal star bursts at the toe. It goes without saying that your hair, makeup and nails should look good without looking overdone. Regular grooming appointments help.  It's that simple. If you commit to a regular program, you won't be freaking out on the day of your event.

A lot of people loved the above described ensemble, which I devised out of necessity (it was freezing). But I say to my readers, just enjoy yourself.  Don't wait until you're my age to stop caring what other people think (spoiler alert: I have never given a damn what anyone thought  I wore as long as I loved it).

So here are Little Missy's Fashion Tips in list form:

1. Always try to look your best

2. Always maintain a high standard of grooming

3. Dress for comfort, meaning lower heeled shoes for ladies if you know there will be walking, and for warmth if you know you will be outdoors a lot and it's cold.

4. Smile and make an effort to enjoy yourself or this advice of mine will be for nought.

Now, if it's a Gala or a Red Carpet event, much of my advice is out the window.

1. Never hide your Red Carpet gown with a coat even it it's 20 below Fahrenheit.

2. Wear the highest heel you can manage if you're a woman and suck it up in black tie if you're a man.

3. Forget enjoying yourself.  You'll be through it in a few hours and if you did a good enough job, there will be some photos to prove it.

Well, I didn't claim this was the cure to cancer or the way to world peace.  Little Missy gave you the secrets of what she knows best--putting a fashion perspective into perspective.

Fashionably Yours,

With Love, 

Little Missy

Little Missy Is Five Years Old!
March 2013-February 2018

And like most five year olds, I want a party if I can't go to Disneyland!  Yes, Little Missy took both her daughter and then her son to Disneyland when they turned five.  That's how I got out of having to go to Great America, which is located less than ten miles from my home!

I celebrated my fifth birthday as Little Missy with this beautiful Rodarte dress.

I think of all the things that have happened in the past five years!  My granddaughter Isold was born. My children's father passed away.  My mother and father passed away.  Frederic Aranda and I published Electric Fashion. We then began a new project. Births and deaths and re-births!  It's what life is all about!

A photograph from Electric Fashion

Lexi and Isold at our V&A launch party for Electric Fashion

And we're planning a Rodarte exhibition at the National Museum for Women in Arts November 2018!  First DC museum fashion exhibition in history!

So remember, when life seems to get you down, put on your tiara or your cowboy hat or whatever and get out there!  Get up, dress up and show up!

It's been a five year roller coaster ride my dear readers and I'm still here and so are you.  I love you all!  Let's keep loving each other!

XXXXXOOOOO

Little Missy

WARREN  BUFFET READS 500 PAGES A DAY
Letter from Paris

Little Missy cannot say the same thing.  But if Warren can manage 500 pages, then I think the rest of us can as well. In my youth, about a million years ago I labored under the delusion that you either read or you wrote and I chose to write. Even Bertrand Russell said (and I paraphrase) "you either read or you write".  Just today in the International edition of the New York Times, in an interview with Philip Roth, one if the most prolific writers of his generation,  Philip said he had retired from writing and has shifted to reading.
It's a cozy, rainy night in Paris.  I just got in today, and I'm tucked away in my room thinking about the last three hit books I've read.  They are as different as all get out. Leonardo da Vinci by the great biographer Walter Isaacson was almost as compulsive a read as his Steve Jobs biography.  And indeed Isaacson made constant references to his Steve book in his da Vinci bio.  Like there is a similarity?  Much as I have loved Steve for decades, I think not!  If you want to know what colour Leonardo was obsessed with in his clothes choices, Walter knows!  Walter's also good at explaining all the things Leonardo figured out, and what commissions he either completed or not, as well as  personal studies he abandoned or pursued with sustained intensity. Michaelangelo is portrayed as a gauche and filthy angry genius who refused the older, more genteel Leonardo's advice.  I was  inspired to read it after having a peek at Salvator Mundi, the last Leonardo painting to go on auction.

Tina Brown's The Vanity Fair Diaries was a bitch for me to read.  Tina is exactly my age and at the thirty was given the limping Vanity Fair magazine to edit and turn into a huge success, which she did.  Si Newhouse, her boss, apparently had a thing for English girls with fathers in the publishing business.  Tina breezily recounts all those boring dinners with the likes of Henry Kissinger, Ben Bradlee, Warren Beatty and so on.  And if you are looking for a loyal best friend, don't pick Tina.  Her best friend, in whose house Tina was married, wrote a book and Tina thought nothing of having Christopher Buckley do a hatchet job on it. Tina still doesn't understand why her friend stopped speaking to her.  Tina is just too disingenuous for words!

 Now I'm reading What We Cannot Know by Marcus du Sautoy.  Marcus is Professor of Mathematics at Oxford (Tina's alma mater in fact) and in 2008 was appointed as the Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science.  This means he has the gift of explaining all kinds of scientific knowledge in a way that even I can get it!  I'm loving the history of logic through the history of gambling with dice. I already feel more intelligent!  Warren Buffet is on to something!  I am going to try to read at least 250 pages a day and see where I go from there! If any of you have any good book ideas, send them along!
Love from Paris
Little Missy

Influencer or Influenza--What is Worse?

Here I am at my chic morning haunt, drinking my cappuccino and showing you my partially eaten pastry and my new Azzedine bag!  I forgot to bring my copy of Le Monde, but you get the idea...I'm CHIC!

Here I am with my all important out of season peonies, trying to figure out what jewelry to wear!

About last night...that's what we Influencers always say! Mine was about Rodarte!

I have the new Rodarte bag and you don't!

Here I am with my new candle and of course my peonies!

Next week we'll talk about taking SELFIES!

Little Missy Goes to the Movies

A Thanksgiving Tradition--Catching up on the movies you have been wanting to see!

Victoria and Abdul
Like many of Little Missy's readers, I am usually dazzled by anything to do with the British Royals, even when their most gifted filmmakers are attempting to humanise them, one might even say knock them off their pedestals.  Watching the brilliant actor Judi Dench, made up to look like an obese and ageing Queen Victoria gives one a start, especially as we must endure her slurping through her formal dinners, burping when she's not snoring.  When two young Indians arrive to present the queen with a special Indian coin, we are cheering the tall, good looking one on to wake her up.  Apparently, she hasn't lost all of her lively impulses, or else it's the chicken curry he has made especially for her, but all at once, the Indian called Abdul becomes her favourite--and the queen goes on an Indian fanaticism that lasts the rest of her life.  The story of Victoria's obsession with Abdul--he was with her nearly every day, teaching her Urdu and Hindustani, chatting about her family problems as well as the issues of the state--was little known until 2003, when Shrabani Basu was touring Victoria's Isle of Wight summer home and noticed several paintings and busts of an Indian made up to look like an aristocrat, not a servant.  Voila:  Stephen Frear's drama starring the aforementioned Judi Dench and Ali Fazal.  This movie is well acted and beautifully shot, and Little Missy gives it a pass because it brings to light a story we didn't know about Queen Victoria.  And because of that, it sheds new light on the age of repression we call "The Victorian Era". Nothing is as easy as a label. By now we must all know that.

Last Flag Flying
Leave it to filmmaker Richard Linklater (Little Missy reviewed his "Boyhood" a few years ago) to tackle a difficult and sensitive topic. The film takes place in 2003, just after the beginning of the Iraq war. Larry "Doc" Shepard, played by Steve Carell has lost his wife to breast cancer a few months earlier and now his son, a Marine, in Iraq. Steve, who served in Vietnam until an incident got him thrown into the brig for two years and thrown out of the Navy with a Bad Conduct Discharge, is truly the epitome of down and out. He seeks out his old Vietnam buddy Sal, played by Bryan Cranston, who is now running a seedy bar in Virginia for help.  Although the two haven't seen one another since the war, Bryan drops everything when Steve asks him if he will come with him to claim his son's body and bury him. The Marines have stipulated he be buried at Arlington, which already is giving Steve bad feelings.  The two pick up one more old Vietnam friend for this journey, Richard Mueller, played by Laurence Fishburne, now a Baptist minister. We learn that Steve doesn't want his son buried at Arlington, but next to his mother in New Hampshire. When the three friends arrive at Dover to claim Steve's son, they meet the son's best friend, Charlie Washington, played brilliantly by J. Quinton Johnson.  Quinton tells Steve what really happened to his son, which makes Steve go ballistic.  He insists on bringing his son home to New Hampshire, Arlington be damned, and the Marines insist Quinton accompanies the group to insure the son has a proper and dignified burial wearing his dress uniform.  My favourite part of the movie is when the three old warriors start reminiscing about Saigon, booze and prostitutes, and Quinton shuts them down by suggesting that prostitution isn't something he or his friends are into.  Hmmmm, a Millennial Moment???  Happily for this sad movie, the ending is upbeat.  The three inadvertently have done exactly what the son would have wanted them to do.  Full disclosure:  I would not have picked this movie, my boyfriend did--but I am glad I saw it.

The Florida Project
If I had to say what movie had the most impact on me this year, I would have to say it was Sean Baker's "The Florida Project". The setting is a three-story poverty motel on the outskirts to Disney World.  It's even called The Magic Castle, but this is as close to Disney World the kids who live here are going to get. It stars Willem Dafoe as motel manager and it should get him an Academy Award. He is uncompromising but kind and humane to the down and out parents who are trying to make their rents each week.  He also looks out for the small kids while their parents are working, asleep or inebriated.  A six year old girl called Moonee, played brilliantly by Brooklyn Kimberly Prince, lives with her early twenty something mom, played by Bria Vinaite.  For Brooklyn, summer means endless stretches of time to invent games to antagonise neighbours, roam throughout the neighbourhood inventing fantasy scenarios, and never giving up or giving in.  In essence, this movie is about the resiliency of children, despite what may be going on at home. In fact, I've never seen a movie that quite captured the indefatigable bounce back kids can have in the worst of situations. I don't want to say much more, except do whatever you can to see this movie!

Woodshock
Last but not least, Little Missy is happy to say that Woodshock is available as a DVD.  Kate and Laura Mulleavy's breathtaking movie starring the luminous Kirsten Dunst is a must see.  It tells a story 100 per cent from a woman's viewpoint, something I don't think has ever happened in Hollywood. Like the movie "Days of Heaven", which was released in 1978 and is now considered one of the most important American movie, there is little dialogue and much gorgeous cinematography.  Allow yourself to be immersed in the redwoods while Kirsten takes her dark night of the soul journey. Stunning and unforgettable.

Happy Thanksgiving, dear readers!
Much love
Little Missy

Coco Chanel's Out of Date Advice

Throw It Away Now

Yes it's true!  She's dated.

"I don't care what you think about me. I don't think about you at all".

Advice to hand down to a daughter or a granddaughter?  I hope not!

"Dress like you're going to meet your worst enemy today".

Perhaps Mademoiselle may have written that when she was holed up at the Ritz in Paris with Nazi officers?

"A woman with good shoes is never ugly". 

Forgive Little Missy but What in the Hell does That mean?

"A girl should be only two things: who she is and what she wants".

God forbid she would ever think of anyone else!

"A girl should be two things: classy and fabulous".

For those of you old enough to remember, Helen Gurley Brown, the legendary editor of Cosmopolitan Magazine essentially had some of the most famous writers of the day re-writing this drivel, including Norah Ephron.  Gone with the wind!  It's too ridiculous to contemplate.

"A woman who doesn't wear perfume has no future".

I guess it worked for selling Chanel No. 5 but who's buying into that myth now?

And last but not least because I think my beloved readers are getting the idea:

"If you're mad, add some lipstick and attack".

Utter rubbish!

Coco, your days of "chic advice" are over.  Little Missy never quoted you to her daughter and can't imagine doing so now.  My granddaughter would simply look perplexed, and ask why the lady (Coco) was so angry and why she wanted to play those games with lipstick and shoes.  This isn't 1910.  Little Missy says please stop quoting Chanel, stop the memes and the Pinterest boards about her "pearls of wisdom". Collect the costume pearls she created -- they actually have value and are skyrocketing every day.  Lay to rest the things she had to say and do to get where she got. It's a brave new world, women! 

#MeToo