Icing on the cake

Shops and their signature colours. Lovely. Harrod's green. Selfridge's yellow. Liberty purple. Fortnum & Mason's eau de nil.

I’m not sure when Fortnum and Mason adopted their tasteful, delicate blue-green choice. It’s a colour that shimmered on walls and shot through the weave of ladies striped gowns in the Georgian period. As Fortnum has been trading, in some form or another, since then, it is nice to think of it having been their signature colour for a long time.

But it is more likely that the colour became theirs in the 1930s, when it was revived and took on an iconic status. Everything from Vitrolite bathrooms to crushed velvet, bias cut evening jackets, came in eau de nil. Back then, the words ‘eau de nil’ were all that was tasteful.

Fortnum's have recently revived the colour. They have rebranded and reboxed everything from biscuits and cup cakes to tea in it. The façade of the shop too proclaims its allegiance; looking somewhat like a grand cake on the busy, dirty length of Piccadilly. And Fortnum’s have liberally applied the colour to their new shops-within a-shop in Japan, which repeat the décor of the London store.

The wee hound pictured here is from a Fortnum and Mason marketing leaflet of the 1930s. And although he was available in ‘orange plush’, the eau de nil of the Fortnum lettering is the thing.

About a pearl

I am having a bit of a Pearl Binder moment. Fantastic name. There is not a lot of information about her out there. A short, tantalising entry in Wikipedia opens up more questions than it answers. But there is nothing like poking about on the internet to find out more. I love to follow bizarre, occasionally rewarding links. You get a snapshot of who else is interested and often find another book to buy…

Binder was an interesting figure. She wrote and illustrated many books and was particularly obsessed with dress and folk arts, indeed all things decorative. She was well entrenched in the London commercial art circles. I love these mid-century artist / ethnographer types - Barbara Jones was another – as they had a beautiful, strangely naive yet socialist vision of Britain to espouse. They were part of the pre and post-war movement interested in design education in its widest sense and what, as they saw it, modern society lacked in terms of cultural and historical references for re-building its national visual identity. Between them they wrote and illustrated books on beautiful clothing, architectural history, follies, indigenous craft skills, furniture, interesting shops (yay!) and so on.

I love the fact that Binder’s illustrations re-interpret historical items, re-drawing them with artistic licence and, probably, inaccuracy. And I love her drawings, although she was not a great artist. At heart a curator, Binder was a cultural kleptomaniac. Piling up reference upon reference to things she found cool and then fitting them into the stories she wanted to tell. She lived in east London and obviously had a bit of a thing for London traditions, particularly the Pearly Kings and Queens (and who wouldn’t with her name?) whom she eventually wrote a book on in the 1970s. This illustration, though, is an early indication of her obsession, from a 1959 children’s ‘Look Book’ on clothes.

Summer's catch

Among lots of other tasty exhibits in the V&A Surrealism exhibition there is the iconic lobster dress of 1937, designed by Elsa Schiaparelli. The combination of the vivid and painterly red lobster with the white silk organza of the dress is as indelicate and startling as ever. It a combination far from appropriate in an evening dress today, never mind 70 years ago. Pictured on Wallis Simpson in the pages of Vogue early that year, the dress became as notorious as the model.

And, just as it would today, the dress was scaled down and produced in a ‘high street’ version, exploiting its notoriety and marketability. The picture here, from Vogue July 1937, shows the ready-to-wear version: a crisp white linen beach dress with a big hat ‘that is no more than a lobster-basket.’

How well it reads as a summer dress in this illustration. How cleverly Schiaparelli has taken the motif, repeated it across the fabric and lessened the offence of the lobster.

Attention to detail is what Schiaparelli brought to all her ready-to-wear collections from her couture collections - a patch of embroidery, unusual buttons, complicated seams or zips - small asides, always witty.

Schiaparelli was one of the first women designers to licence out her name, allowing it to be associated with mass produced items; from hats to stockings, perfumes to tartans. These all carried her logo, a sweeping black signature and often came packaged in the shocking pink colour she had claimed for her own. Selling on a little of the magic to the masses.