passion is in fashion

I received the *best* Christmas surprise ever!!!  A signed (with real pen!) portrait of Michelle Obama.  I think that’s a Kors sheath and a medium Cartier Tank Francaise.  What lovely simple style!  Even lilies are my favorite flowers.  ^^

Thanks f for arranging for this!  It is priceless and I will treasure forever!

Hello world!  It will not be long until I scoot off to the land of plenty, *again*!  Much to clear out of the way before I am free, however.  Here I am chilling at my desk in anticipation of my *midnight* phone conference with the US.  (So conveniently scheduled!)  Tomorrow have much to accomplish at work.  Fingers crossed a grande latte will get me through all of it with unparalleled efficiency! 

Have mostly been staying put in HK since I got back from the US at the beginning of the month, except for one particularly traumatic trip to Dongguan!  I thought Guangzhou was bad, that is until I set foot on the cultural wasteland that is Dongguan!!!  Due to fall in exports most of the factories there have shut down or laid off substantial amount of people.  The subsequent high unemployment lead to even higher crime rate than before.  I hear the local economy is recovering, but even then I would not be enthused to visit.

For next year, my January and February schedules are packed!  Will be visiting Shanghai, Beijing, Jakarta, Singapore, and KL!  Hope my ambitious schedule pans out.    HK is curiously humid and freezing in Jan/Feb anyway, so might as well get out of here!  No idea what I’ll be doing for Chinese New Year, however.  Can’t even think that far ahead!  Haha.

One fun thing to look forward to tomorrow night (last night in HK in 2009!  *tear*) is revisiting Cafe Gray – my new favorite place!  The view is pretty amazing and it is decorate by Andre Fu in my favorite neutral palette!  (Haha if you ever read this blog you will know my mild obsession with minimal modernist natural neutral tones for interiors.)  Our friend is the sous chef there and he takes really really good care of us!  The seafood risotto and some kind of cooked beef something is unbelievably delicious!   Can’t wait. 

Cafe Gray

As we all know heather gray jersey is very important for Spring Summer 10 and Alexander Wang’s football uniform-inspired collection was nothing short of revolutionary.  What to do with a guy who thinks sweatpants are not okay, even for lounging around the house!?  The lovely editor of NY Mag’s The Cut gives incisive advice:

Also, this guy sounds like a total phony. You know if he were at home with swine flu he would not be curled up in front of Oprah wearing his Brooks Brothers slacks and his Tucker Blair turquoise polo. Okay, maybe he doesn’t wear sweats in this situation, but he probably wears something worse — like a lobster-print thermal onesie from Tucker Blair. If he lies to you about wearing lounging garments, think of what else he could be lying about. One day you might wake up to a text message from him on December 24 that’s all, “Sorry, I can’t come to Christmas at your parents’ house because I forgot this is the weekend of my Fire Island Nudist Club retreat in St. Barts.”

Amy Odell in The Cut

The baby panther from Cartier Les Must campaign.  I would totally name him Mr. Snuggles!

UPDATE – as f kindly pointed out, this little guy is a leopard.  The all black one is panther!  Cute all the same. 

Image from Cartier.com

Really, is there anything as enjoyable as reading a really good blog?  (Yes!  Perhaps petting a puppy while smelling flowers while reading a blog!)   Just imagine, this form of communication didn’t exist until a few years ago.

I remember one day I was listening to my eleventh grade English teacher discuss the literary masterpiece of The Great Gatsby.  There was one thing which completely revolutionized writing at the time, which was…. the movies!  In The Great Gatsby you’ll find Fitzgerald cutting from one scene to the other, much like a movie does.  According to Mr. G, it has never been done in fiction before.  (Really?  What if a writer was just really really ADD?)

Blogs are awesome because they again revolutionized the premise of writing.  It could be of a unifying theme, or it could be entirely incoherent: a bunch of ramblings bearing no relation to each other other than that they are dreamt up by the same person.  Ah, technology makes us *that* much more tolerant of randomness.

And like any brilliant idea, blogs are polarizing.  Famously, Anna Wintour and judge Alex Kozinski alike have been known to publicly hate on blogs.  As Kozinski so concisely puts it: “I hate them, hateful things… just think it’s so self-indulgent, you know. ‘Oh, I’m so proud of what I’m saying, I think the world instantly wants to know what I’m thinking today.’ People wake up thinking, . . . . ‘I wonder what great thoughts have come into his mind this morning that I can feel myself edified by.’” (via Above the Law.)  And Anna apparently hates the word blog so much, the Vogue staff were instructed to find an alternative name for it.  (Blogue, perhaps?)

Lastly, as I have previously recounted here, blogs are simply a reflection and product of the generation. The blogs I love the most are those who seem to have somewhat of a central theme, but manages to frequently deviate, all the while peppered with whimsical and witty commentary.  A bit like my favorite people, really.

Enough on theorizing, onto one of my favorite blogs, which is from Jane Aldridge of Sea of Shoes fame.  Although I don’t quite agree with her shoe choices (prefer classic stiletto heels myself!), I find her mother-daughter partnership and frequent puppy appearances super adorable.  This is her mood inspirations blog, which is full of enigmatic and provocative images.

They don’t call them lovers in high school, Leeland

Just saw this.  It was absolutely precious (sometimes even a little *too* precious.)  How adorable was Zooey Deschanel in this one?  The bangs… flats… and retro woven sundresses (very Bottega SS collection!) Perfect inspiration for dressing library-chic.

And, do you think the IKEA sequence was product placement?

Was walking up the stairs today when I lost my right shoe.  It just slid right off.  During the winter all I wear is opaque black tights (and avoid pants at all costs).  They do tend to make your patent leather pointy toe stilettos a little more slippery though!