...And the livin' is easy.  My goal for the final week of my leave is to be as carefree as an illustration by our dear M. Gruau.

When it's proved to be one of those weeks (and I won't deny this is one, O Best Beloveds), sometimes all it takes at least to start to feel that little bit better is to spend a while looking at the alluring work of M. René Gruau.

Known more for his ultra-chic ladies, resplendent in New Look Dior, Gruau (born, you know, the Count Ricciardelli delle Caminate) is almost equally adept at turning out very fetching gentlemen.  His swooping, calligraphic lines, so free and yet so precise, are somehow particularly attuned to bringing life to a very specific kind of urban type, cosmopolitan and good humored; his men all seem to be variations on the type that dear Mr. Ethan Mordden has immortalized in his own persona: The Cocktail Dandy.

Here we see an especially example, looking very dapper in his Ben-Day jacket and cap, his discreetly arched brow promising at the very least an amusing afternoon out - ending perhaps in a quick drink at one of those quiet little bars over on the East Side, on the edges of Covent Garden, or in the shadow of the Opéra Comique.  After that... who knows?

And after a trying week, isn't that an awfully attractive prospect?  Much pleasanter, you know, than reality just about now.  But that, I think, is point of disappearing, now and again, into le monde de Gruau...

Born 105 years ago today (although she would probably have told you it was 96), Fleur Cowles was one of those remarkable 20th century women - tough, ambitious, elegant, canny and depending on your perspective either fearless or foolhardy - who broke the barriers between what were then the separate spheres of men and women.  An editor, author, painter, doyenne, fabulist, and survivor, she made her way in both Business and Society through a carefully chosen and delicately navigated path of working hard and marrying well.

She's most remembered today for her greatest failure, commercially, and her greatest success, artistically: the ill-fated monthly magazine Flair, a hyper-ambitious attempt to combine the worlds of journalism, art, fashion, and literature in one extravagantly glamourous package.  Launched in 1950, it lost her millions, but it gathered for her a cachet that lasted the rest of her long life (she left for Fabulon only four years ago).

Flair, however wonderful,* is far from her only legacy; she also wrote an authorized biography of Salvador Dalí, a piercingly unimpressed take on the lives of Juan and Eva Peron, and a pair of relentlessly auto-hagiographic memoirs, as well as other books that she also illustrated.  She promoted the careers of artists as diverse as Katherine Anne Porter and marvelous illustrator René Gruau (whose portrait of her appears above), both of whom graced the pages of Flair, and she counted as friends everyone from Cary Grant to the Queen Mother.  If she was an unfailing social climber (and one not eager for the world to know that she entered it as Florence Friedman, daughter of a feckless novelty salesman), few have ever climbed so elegantly; her contemporaries were more than willing to forgive her occasional tiresomeness (and someone born Florence who calls herself Fleur was likely more than a little tiresome from time to time, don't you think?) in return for the enthusiasm and joy she brought with her.  We should all live so well, for so long...

* And it really was - among the things, alas, lost many years ago when I had an unfortunate fire were three of its only twelve issues, picked up for a song at a suburban Philadelphia flea market once upon a time.  If you've got a spare $300 or so, you can pick up her anthology, The Best of Flair, over at Amazon, or ten original editions at eBay.  As Mrs. Vreeland might have asked - why don't you?

Daily, for the moment, I walk a few blocks through a faceless commercial district just outside DC, subjecting myself to another day's indoctrination in things bureaucratic.

En route, I pass a sad little dress shop, the kind that's clearly just holding on until it, too, turns into a McCosiQuiznoChipotleBucks, of which there apparently can't be enough in any neighborhood through which pass commuters.

On the far wall, wrinkled, stained, and just off-center, is a fading framed poster, one that calls up a world infintely distant from the dowdy frocks on offer:


It is, of course, a work by the late, great René Gruau, an artist who is just a fashion illustrator only in the way that Ella Fitzgerald was just a girl singer.

That said, he was of course an extraordinary fashion illustrator, one whose bold, graphic style did much to cement in the popular imagination the High Fashion worlds of Dior, Balmain, and other mid-century greats:

Much of his work, though, balances delicately between illustration and abstraction, fueled by his tremendous gift for fast, swooping lines that evoke anything from an eyelash to a jetliner to, as here, a LoieFulleresque skirt:

His best works not only show a product - a line of Van Cleef & Arpel baubles, for example - but make it clear that owning it would transform the wearer:

His women are impossibly glamourous, elegant - languourous houris who combine a nineteenth century hauteur with a very modern élan.

When called on, however, he had a fetching way with The Opposite Sex as well...

He was that rare specimen, someone whose birthname was actually a great deal more interesting than his professional one: Count Renato Zavagli Ricciardelli delle Camminate.

Something in his exotic Franco-Italian heritage clearly rubbed on his sensibility.

He was for decades as much associated with American magazines like Flair and Harper's Bazaar as French couture, which perhaps accounts for something insouciant and approachable in even his most chic creations.

And the man himself? In the measured words of one obituary, in the veddy British Guardian, "His private life remained discreetly private."