Daily Office: Thursday
¶ Matins: Just my luck. Coming across an unattributed line of Latin in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherworld, I google it and discover that, not to my surprise, it comes from Virgil’s Georgics:O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint,
agricolas.
It’s a typical bit of aristocratic sentimentality: how happy the peasants would be if they only knew how lucky they are to be peasants. Yes, well. It took a moment to track down the source, though, because the first return at Google took me to a discussion of Tacitus’s Dialogue on Oratory. It was only by checking out the next couple of links that I discovered Amerloque: A Long-Term American Expatriate Resident in France Shares His Views.
¶ Sext: I tip my hat to Guy Trebay, who says a number of things that I’ve been thinking about the Thom Browne look.
Oremus…
§ Matins. The linked entry dated from 2006: hmm. The most recent entry, which I jumped to at once, dates from April 2008, but it reports a recovery from a “very, very serious” malady, and the prior entry goes back to December. Uh-oh. If I’ve discovered this obviously literate blog at the end of its run, I’ll have a fit.
§ Sext. He doesn’t even pretend to be objective, Mr Trebay, about the cut of Mr Browne’s suits: “… Thom Browne has come to represent sartorial arrested development, the proponent of a kind of masculinity that suggests one is never sexier than when being carded…”
To me, it’s a question of morphology, body-type, rather than age. Women seem to have made this discovery a few years ago. It’s the end of Fashion with a capital F because it’s a rejection of the idea of an ideal body type. There are simply too many affluent people in the world at the moment for most of them to be unhappily incongruent with the silhouette of the moment.