Today is my last day in the office before heading to New York for a few days to visit my sister (she's studying fashion design at Parsons and ready to collapse from final projects and studio nights until 5 am, the poor thing!). Then I”m going to my aunt and uncle”s home in Virginia for Christmas en famille. I”m no gift expert you know, I”ve bought hardly one thing for anyone yet, but I believe most online shopping is guaranteed to arrive if you order by December 20, so as we stare down the last 48 hours, here is an excuse to look at some pretty things online. (And who knows maybe someone will be helped by this.)
My friend Amy gave me a feather headband from Love Lulu Mae for my birthday. This summer I wore it to my cousin Jeanne”s going away party, a picnic on the Seine, and also with an Alexander McQueen dress to Petite's wedding reception. It”s totally exquisite, and designed in Chicago I might add!
This has been written about in a lot of places but I think a voucher for artwork from 20×200 is an excellent gift idea. And Claire just turned me on to these dignified and adorable animal prints.
Departement Feminin has free shipping through the 20th! Aren”t these Zanotti shoes the pink of perfection?
This perfume guide book is as good as everyone said, and is on my Christmas wish list. Flipping through it in a store recently, I was struck by something they wrote about a favorite perfume of mine, Quelques Fleurs by Houbigant, that it was “easy” more or less (it was very much like the Merlot rant in Sideways). I”m not going to stop wearing Quelques Fleurs, au contraire, but their pluck got me excited in the way a fun and bitchy older friend might excite a ninth grader who is new in school.
The new Boucheron perfume, B, is a woody floral enclosed in one of the prettiest bottles I”ve ever seen (with a cabochon emerald green stone on top). It smells perfectly lovely if you like sandalwood, which I do, and this perfume makes little use of synthetics which is nice. (Full disclosure: Boucheron offered to send me a bottle to sample, and I declined as I don”t generally write about “stuff you can buy” here, but when I smelled the sample strip in Vanity Fair I liked it, and I love the bottle. So I changed my mind.)
At Walgreens on Michigan Avenue in Chicago they are selling commemorative Obama buttons. I don”t know if this is a nationwide thing or not, but what a great stocking stuffer! Your kids will someday be clearing out your garage, possibly when you move to a retirement home and they”ll be wondering why you have so much crap you never threw away, until they see this wonderful, perfect, plastic thing, which will make them smile.
Finally, it”s hard to single out a book from all the wonderful ones I”ve read this year, but I”ll go ahead and tell you about the juicy, impossible to put down story that I just finished: Katie Rophie”s Uncommon Arrangements, a biographical examination of some unconventional romantic lives, mostly among the Bloomsbury set.
By: Elisabeth Fourmont Source
