♥ very early in my life it was too late.

"i'm wearing a dress of real silk, but it's threadbare, almost transparent. it used to belong to my mother. one day she decided the color was too light for her and she gave it to me. it's a sleeveless dress with a very low neck. it's the sepia color real silk takes on with wear. it's a dress i remember. i think it suits me. i'm wearing a leather belt with it, perhaps a belt belonging to one of my brothers. i can't remember the shoes i used to wear in those days, only certain dresses... this particular day i must be wearing the famous pair of gold lamé high heels. i can't see any others i could have been wearing, so i'm wearing them. bargains, final reductions brought for me by my mother. i'm wearing these gold lamé shoes to school. going to school in evening shoes decorated with little diamanté flowers. i insist on wearing them. i don't like myself in any others and to this day i still like myself int hem. these high heels are the first in my life, they're beautiful, they've eclipses all shoes that went before, the flat canvas ones, for playing and running about, made of white canvas. ... it's not the shoes, though, that make the girl look so strangely, so weirdly dressed. no, it's the fact that she's wearing a man's felt-brimmed hat, a brownish-pink fedora with a black ribbon." (p. 11)

leave it to me to focus on the only fashiony part of this book & subsequent film adaptation of marguerite duras' semi-autobiographical tale of a young french girl's steamy affair with a chinese man in french indochina, the lover. while i usually don't like films that are derived directly from books, i found this one to be a thoughtful representation of an impoverished young lady's relationship with a wealthy, older chinaman, that also provides

an excellent visual accompaniment to the outfit described by duras above.

one of my favorite parts of this outfit is the man's fedora, which duras claims to be completely out of place in saigon "no woman, no girl wore a man's fedora in the colony then. no native woman, either. " (p.12) my head is sort of large for a hat, but i totally love the idea of wearing a man's hat, it's so inconspicuous.

source.

source.

and just like the cover of the book, the young girl is seen throughout the film wearing a darker stain on her lolita-esque lips. here are some of my favorite lip colors:

clinique almost lipstick in black honey.

benefit's benetint.

and while the blush color of the silk slip dress that she wears does not necessarily look well on everyone, i have found that it is becoming a pretty popular this season:

madewell.

shopbop.

and just last year, marco zanini presented a colorful spring/summer 2010 for rochas, which explored the look of the french women in the colonies: many of which look like they could have stepped right out of the lover.