Wednesday, January 02, 2008

For a minute there, Elle Decor made me feel cool

I can only find the photos online but this month's Elle Decor devotes a whole 7 pages of words and pictures to Dallas. We are evidently a "forward-looking city," "the queen of the Southwest."

The highlight for me is the Collage mention and then this sentence: "Tucked inside [the Dallas Museum of Art] is a mini-museum made up of five rooms reproduced from Coco Chanel's South of France villa, jammed with antiques and Impressionist paintings collected by a later owner of the house, Wendy Reves...." There's something funny about Mrs Reves, despite all her best efforts and headbands, being relegated to secondary status behind Chanel.

4 comments:

Ad Broad, oldest working writer in advertising said...

Wow. When I'm, um, of a certain age I hope someone reminds me to never, ever go out of the house wearing gold hippie-headbands and bug-eye shades.

Irene Done said...

Ha! I was really hoping I could find a photo of Mrs Reves wearing a feather boa -- she wore those even more often then the headbands.

Anonymous said...

Wendy Reves is still living, in the south of France, at Villa La Pausa. She must be more than 90 now. I met her when the Dallas Museum of Art installation was installed, went to dinner with her several times, and was crazy about her. So wonderfully dotty and chic and Auntie Mame. At our first meeting, she wore one of her late husband's Savile Row pin-striped suits topped with black feather boa and one of those headbands. And high heels. Amazing.

Irene Done said...

Argentine -- that's a very sweet and lively memory and I'm grateful you shared it here.

I'm sorry to say Wendy Reves has passed away. The Dallas Morning News story is here. Among other things, it reminded me that her donation to Dallas is still astounding -- "works by Edouard Manet, Paul Cezanne, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec."