What an amazing apartment. I don’t know if I could really live in it, but it sure as hell is glamorous. I wonder if it feels claustrophobic?

The designer says: “The client was Cindy Gallop, international woman of mystery, who didn’t exactly have much time, as the chairwoman of advertising giant BBH, to lay out her new apartment in the converted locker rooms of the first YMCA in the U.S. But she did have time to inspire us… her brief was simple: “at night, I want to feel like I’m in a Shanghai nightclub…” and so our proposal was equally simple: “What if you lived inside a black-lacquered Chinese box?” To our amazement, she was game so we knew our next idea would pass as well, no walls whatsoever, just a network of curtains which could be used to make rooms on-the-fly. Of course, there was the matter of the 300 pairs of heels that Ms. Gallop cherishes as art and so they were treated as such, displayed in the own light boxes, all along the width of the apartment. This project was conceptual in nature at first but yielded results beyond our wildest dreams in terms of comfort of living and luxury.”

Check out more photos and a video here.

Photograph by Loomis Dean in Paris, 1957.

From Wikipedia: “Paul Poiret (20 April 1879  – 30 April 1944) was a French fashion designer. His contributions to twentieth-century fashion have been likened to Picasso’s contributions to twentieth-century art. Though perhaps best known for freeing women from corsets and for his startling inventions including hobble skirts, “harem” pantaloons, and “lampshade” tunics, Poiret’s major contribution to fashion was his development of an approach to dressmaking centered on draping, a radical departure from the tailoring and pattern-making of the past. The structural simplicity of his clothing represented a “pivotal moment in the emergence of modernism” generally, and “effectively established the paradigm of modern fashion, irrevocably changing the direction of costume history.”

Via

Australian label, Secret Squirrel Clothing.

I just posted about Irene and Vernon Castle on my jazz dance blog, and couldn’t help but post a few photos of Irene Castle here also. She was a fashion visionary and trend setter in the 1910s. She wore cutting edge designs, and – as a dancer’s convenience – shortened her skirts and even bobbed her hair in 1915, long before it became de rigueur.

If you aren’t familiar with Irene and Vernon Castle, here’s a compilation I put together, with footage of the Castles, as well as clips from Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers’ tribute to them, the 1940s film, The Vernon & Irene Castle Story.