Speaking of Worth....

As I was on my way to the lecture at the Bruce Museum I got a good hour of reading in on the train: Love in the Time of Cholera is the current pick. I absolutely loved the movie, but am just now getting around to the book.

In a nice dovetail, the main female character, Fermina Daza, has strong opinions about fashion. On her enviably long honeymoon in Europe somewhere between the late 1880s and late 1890s, she had the opportunity to buy from the best:

"Fermina Daza, always resistant to the demands of fashion, brought back six trunks of clothing from different periods, for the great labels did not convince her. She had been in the Tuileries in the middle of winter for the launching of the collection by Worth, the indisputable tyrant of haute couture, and the only thing she got was a case of bronchitis that kept her in bed for five days. Laferrière seemed less pretentious and voracious to her, but her wise decision was to buy her fill of what she liked best in the secondhand shops."

Sound like anyone we know?

What is significant about this passage, too, is Worth's dominance in fashion at the time this book is set and that Márquez picked up on it so many years later. Márquez mentions clothing often and with a subtlety a reader won't often find in a book written almost a century after the story takes place, as in that case the author has no anecdotal knowledge of fashion, what was in, what was dowdy, and how costume played out in the real world.

Although I think One Hundred Years of Solitude is next on the list, I think I will seek out some Edith Wharton after that... she is widely considered to have excellent costume observations.

Report on the Bruce lecture soon!