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1 month ago | 
airmail.news | Laura Jacobs
“She had survived the Great Depression and World War II, slighted for her gender and interned for her race,” writes Marilyn Chase in the prologue of Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa (2020).
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Jan 3, 2025 | 
wsj.com | Laura Jacobs
New YorkThere’s very little text in the exhibition “Barbie: A Cultural Icon,” at the Museum of Arts and Design. Born on March 9, 1959—when she had her debut at the New York Toy Fair—Mattel’s “Teenage Fashion Model” doll has figured in the cultural conversation ever since. And what a figure! Back in 1994, when she turned 35, there were books, articles and academic studies aplenty that took on the semiotics of bosomy Barbie.
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Nov 18, 2024 | 
wsj.com | Laura Jacobs
A collection is a passion, a family of objects that excites the eye and stirs the heart. It’s also a question: Why this family, and is the sum more important than the parts? Fashion as we know it consists of “collections,” those biannual searches for the self that call up forms and forces. And what of those who collect fashion? An Eye for Couture: A Collectors Exploration of 20th Century Fashion Prestel 290 pages We may earn a commission when you buy products through the links on our site.
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Nov 11, 2024 | 
wsj.com | Laura Jacobs
New YorkFashion exhibitions present the best and the most. They’re about aesthetics and semiotics. They hunt for metaphors and moments. Though bought and worn by real women, the designs are elevated, the work of professionals who have their own ideas about form and function. “Real Clothes, Real Lives,” at the New York Historical, offers a different kind of real.
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Oct 11, 2024 | 
wsj.com | Laura Jacobs
“What’s this bird, this falcon, that everybody’s all steamed up about?” asks Humphrey Bogart as the private eye Sam Spade. The answer comes from Sydney Greenstreet, who plays Kasper Gutman, a criminal on a quest. “In 1539,” he says, “crusading knights persuaded Emperor Charles V to give them the Island of Malta. He made but one condition, that they pay him each year the tribute of a falcon in acknowledgment that Malta was still under Spain.” So far, so good.
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Sep 13, 2024 | 
wsj.com | Laura Jacobs
BostonThe Louvre’s marble statue of the Greek goddess Nike, a signature holding that dates to 190 B.C., is known as the “Winged Victory of Samothrace.” Nine feet tall, her gown windblown, her wings lofting with air, Nike is positioned in solitary grandeur at the top of the museum’s Daru staircase. €18.99 €4/Month Includes unlimited access to The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and MarketWatch. €9.99 €2 per month Includes unlimited access to WSJ's unrivaled journalism.
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Aug 9, 2024 | 
wsj.com | Laura Jacobs
PhiladelphiaIn “Sleeping Beauties,” an exhibition currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a Fortuny “Delphos” gown is laid out behind glass, its days of gleaming life over and done. The springy vertical micropleating of the silk, so like the fluting on a classical column, or the bark of an ancient tree, or the rivulets running off a rusalka—so redolent of antiquity and myth—was the result of a secret patented process invented in 1909 by Henriette and Mariano Fortuny.
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Aug 9, 2024 | 
wsj.com | Laura Jacobs
In the Arthurian fantasy film “Excalibur” (1981), there’s a scene I’ve never forgotten. Merlin finds the enchantress Morgana asleep, still dewy after decades, and wonders if she’s used up all her magic to keep herself so young. When Morgana awakens, Merlin flatters her into demonstrating her power. She chants, and when the mist clears she’s a husk.
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Jun 26, 2024 | 
wsj.com | Laura Jacobs
Salem, Mass. “By its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe,” says Ishmael, in Chapter 42 of Herman Melville’s masterpiece. “It” is whiteness—the color of Moby-Dick, an albino sperm whale that bedevils Captain Ahab, who lost his leg to the creature and lives for one thing only: revenge. “Moby-Dick; or, The Whale,” published in 1851, has been called “a beast of a book.” Certainly its length and breadth embody the immensity of the title character.
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Apr 26, 2024 | 
wsj.com | Laura Jacobs
Silk is a fiber composed of proteins, a secretion unique to certain creatures of the forests, fields and one sea. It gleams of the Earth’s magical abundance. In Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” during the little play in which Thisbe finds her lover, Pyramus, fatally stabbed, she calls to the mythic sisters who loomed his fate in their tapestry. “Come, come to me / With hands as pale as milk.
