Pump Up the Volume

By Clint Zeagler -- February 6, 2007 at 10:22 pm · Filed under Fashion

For spring think antebellum size with 1980’s flare

Head out to the porch and mix up a mint julep, its time for the ladies to chat fashion. Grab a big pair of sunglasses to hold up that super-teased coif, and fire up that old teal Mustang. It’s the proper lady’s modern horse and cart.
Springtime 07 is all about volume and color.

Southern women know just a little about volume, whether it be in hair or a dress, and really every lady loves a big dress. All that extra room becomes luxurious, especially when you don’t need it.

Look to Marc Jacobs and Lanvin for sewn in volume. Pleating causing puckers in all the right places, like crisp springtime clouds in that big blue Texas sky. The architecturally bubbly forms are wonderfully playful, but beware! Usually one thinks that the skinny dress has to fit perfectly, but actually its the poofy dress has to fit flawlessly or it looks like one requires the extra room. Lay off the petit fours to pull off the skinny girl in a big dress look.

If that silver spoon has made for some dewy hips look to other spring trends to keep you in fashion, and on the front porch swinging in style. Color is one way to let the ladies know you have done your monthly Vogue reading. Metallics are still on the scene and colors are even tasting metallic Blues are electric and pure. Yves Klien would have loved Balenciaga’s current spring collection. Golds are gold, coppers are actual copper, pinks and yellows look like they were stripped of any hues that kept them sedated and acceptable. Colors are reflective and intense.

With all that intensity one also needs something classy and sensible, the perfect accessory. Southern women should love the chunkier heals marching into spring. They look just lovely on the runway, but also work perfectly to keep you upright when strolling down the cobblestone streets of the coastal ports, or if need be, across the pasture to tell daddy its time for supper. Keeping ladies walking like ladies, even after a couple of those mint juleps.

So, take off the T-tops, pop in the 8 track, climb into the Mustang and let the wind blow some volume into your hair and your dress. The boy’s sitting on their tractors will turn their heads at the flash of color on that country highway!

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Ansley Whipple’s Sales Department

By Ansley Whipple -- February 1, 2007 at 9:06 pm · Filed under Design

This week the Hot Shopper answers the question; Will this be on sale in the afterlife?

2007 is barely a month old, and you’re already sweating the time you haven’t spent at church this year. But even if your heathen ways threaten your status at the pearly gates, your sense of style need not have such a hellish outlook. Check out these icons for divine inspiration.

Use this cross by Fredrickson Stallard to give yourself a godly cleansing. And then listen as the inspired design offers a cynical commentary on religious notions and social acceptance.
Find it at CITIZEN: (www.citizen-citizen.com)
Could hunger have been the reason the disciples continually miffed Jesus’ teachings? Maybe if they had Holy Toast! bread stamper for their loaves, the Greatest Story Ever Told would have had a much different ending. Get in communion with FRED’s instant toast party at www.worldwidefred.com

This conceptual shelf from the design studio of Mike and Maaike (www.mikeandmaaike.com), is called Juxtaposed, and it gives those who wax philosophical the chance to be inspired by the world’s most influential religious texts from a balanced position. It has designated spots for the Bhagavad-Gita Gita, the Bible, the Qu’ran, the Torah, and others. Made for Blank Blank (www.blankblank.net).

A trip down Atlanta’s famed Buford Highway leaves little room for doubt that the thriving capital of the south is truly an international city. Atlanta t-shirt company Esperanza gives a nod to the ethnic flavors of the street with its Our Lady of Buford Highway tee.
(www.esperanzaclothing.com)

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Screening Party

By Zack Hudson -- February 1, 2007 at 8:04 pm · Filed under Feature Stories

Six movies with southern roots headed to a television
near you

Fade in:
An Atlanta television executive reads an e-mail from a curious viewer who wants to know whatever happened to some of his favorite movies from years past. The executive becomes curious himself, as his company should own the rights to the flicks, but he’s never heard of them. And the mystery begins. Though the premise would likely have been rejected by even “Murder, She Wrote,” scribes, that’s exactly how Turner Classic Movies Senior Programming Manager Dennis Millay began his quest to reclaim six long forgotten RKO Pictures movies from the 1930s and 1940s.

The pictures, which are all feature-length and were distributed in wide-release, have been quietly locked away in film vaults around the world since the 1950s. The titles are “Double Harness” (1933), “One Man’s Journey” (1933), “Rafter Romance” (1933), “Stingaree” (1934), “Living on Love” (1937), and include four movies produced prior to the once powerful Hays Code, which mandated strict social and religious standards over motion picture content. Though still tame by today’s standards, taboo subjects like the word“virgin” and topics like pre-marital sex — which would be virtually unheard of in movies made during the Hays era — are found in the four earlier pictures.

Moviegoers will recognize some very famous names from the cast lists; Ginger Rogers, William Powell, Irene Dunne, and Lionel Barrymore, and Ethel Barrymore play characters. By Millay’s research, the last time one of the movies was broadcast was in 1959 by a local television station in New York. “It was like a little treasure hunt,” Millay told The Deseret News in Salt Lake City, Utah. “When I found them, I was so excited I was bugging everyone to tell them about it.” The Byzantine process Millay went through to uncover prints of the movies and the rights for Turner Classic to air them compels the story. He received a message from savvy viewer who was curious why the titles were never shown on TCM, whose founder, Ted Turner, acquired the RKO library of movies in 1986.

The six movies, which were produced by legendary movie impresario Merian C. Cooper, who brought the 1933 version of “King Kong” to the screen, had been sold to Cooper out of the RKO library as part of a separation package Cooper negotiated when he quit work at the studio in the 50s.

With the dawn of television before him, savvy Cooper had an eye for showing the movies over broadcast airwaves, but eventually lost the rights to the pictures after a series of business deals went sour. Former Cooper business associate and one-time RKO accountant Ernest Scanlon wound up with the rights to the movies, which probated to his unwitting family when he died.

Millay unearthed the rights to movies, which he purchased from the Scanlon family, but finding actual copies of the pictures was more difficult. Millay located copies of most of the pictures at the Brigham Young University film library in Provo, Utah. One movie, “A Man to Remember,” had to be tracked to a film society library in the Netherlands. Once the titles and prints were secured, Millay began the painstaking process of restoring the movies for broadcast.

First, the movies will enjoy a more auspicious reintroduction to film audiences via New York’s Film Forum week in February. The six movies are set to begin airing on TCM in April.

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