Sweet little kicky retro Friday video reminding us that summer will return. And then we can all just jump about on lawns with pastel coloured trinkets, macarons and best friends.
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Posts tagged as:
fashion
Beautiful drapey silk things from Wilfred: Le Fou. The clothes are available from Aritzia stores in the US and Canada. Completely gorgeous site for Aritzia too, and as all their wintery and autumnal things come in, it’s almost enough to make you wish it was cooling down here as well.
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1. Italian Easy: a fabulous cookbook filled with easy to handle pasta- and other recipes. 2. This “La Cruse” skirt is framed loveliness. Yellow and grey stripes with a little white T tucked in is planned summer wear. 3. Rent a Crowd: Wall art from Elly Nelly. 4. Eplica font from My Fonts. 5. Royal treatment of jelly using these moulds from Bompas & Parr. 6. Travel bag from Jack Spade: Tarpaulin Dry Dopp Kit $95.
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I have a little slip dress. It’s black with a pearly trim detail at the top, and the straps are barely there. Nor is the dress really, and I have to either be wearing too much underwear, that won’t show any lines, or virtually none at all, that won’t show any lines. But I have to think about who I might see when I wear it, what gusts of winds might come my way, and whether it’s appropriate to be wearing such a tiny piece of cloth in public. It’s Fleur Wood. So really I can wear it whenever the hell I like because frankly it’s darling. And in fact I’m going to get it out now, it goes well with my new book. I wish my life went with my new book.
Oh well, I might just spend the weekend eating coconut ice and sitting under a bare naked tree adorned with bouquets of bright balloons. If I want. No, Food Fashion Friends is not real life. It is not real life at all. It is not even the fashion industry’s real world, reality just isn’t this pretty. But oh so pretty this fabricated world is, and I might spend much of my reality delving in to it, pouring over pages where models eat sugar and cream-turned-into-cakes. It would take several days to prepare such an extravagant diabetes-ridden feast as presented here. But this is not reality. And Fleur Wood knows this. She’s telling us to just pose, and see that this beautiful, original and make believe world – or elements of it – can be recreated in our real lives. I like it. I like the offering of fantasy and the imaginary. It’s the rabbit hole and the fashion world, but with pictures of cakes and with recipes. This is the grown-up-girl’s latest release Barbie House, but better.
Fleur Wood, and she’s an Australian fashion designer don’t you know, has included style guides for perfect dinner parties. She shows us how to go all out, with cottonwool-made clouds hanging above a table and silver stars painted on to the walls, for example, or how to tone it down while keeping it fabulous. There is the extreme fantasy in the book, and there is extreme elegance.
My father made a very amusing comment about the book, while acknowledging it was incredible: “You shouldn’t have to agent orange a tree and cover it with balloons in order to have a picnic.” Having said that, Fleur Wood also offers simple ways make remarkable things – I love her idea of Ricotta Panna Cotta with Espresso Caramel, or a heart-shaped Salmon Mousse with Croutons.
Recipes include Crab Burgers; Aioli; Peach and Ginger Punch; Lemon Thyme Mushrooms, Ham Croquettes; Baked Eggs; tiny individual Marble Cakes and Iced Chocolate Cookies. Fleur Wood sets Menus for certain occasions, such as the aforementioned High Tea. Citrus Tea; Coconut Ice (yes really!), Prosecco with Watermelon Sorbet; Lobster Sandwiches. I love it all. I love the romance and the attitude and the idea of cutting pate sandwiches into the shape of butterflies. This world is dreamy, and I’m going to borrow it as my own.
Food Fashion Friends, by Fleur Wood, is published by Penguin ($59.95).
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Local Sydney artist Ears, or Daniel O’Toole, has been in the Inner West street scene for a while. He has carved out a style in which beautiful curling eyes have adorned many street walls, and his art has also cropped up in Paddington and the East. But this incredibly talented “graff” artist has now turned to more studio-based pursuits, doing painting we can actually buy instead of wander past.
He told Side Street Sydney: “Sydney needs a cultural explosion. There are more people behind the desire to make it happen so hopefully when Sydney does have its creative orgasm it will last a long time and will set the wheels in motion for a new direction that embraces the potential of creative people to run businesses and events in Sydney. For this to happen we need help from our councils and government. With this in mind the new liquor licensing laws are a new hope on the horizon for us all. And I feel that for next 5 to 10 years in Sydney is the place to be. For me its exciting to be somewhere that DOESN’T have 100 cool little bars hidden in back streets and lots of galleries that have seen so much ‘street art’ that they are over it. It’s still all new and fun in Sydney, and we get to pave the way now as the first generation to see small bars opening after a long stint of RSL dominance and pokies galore.”
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This cool little surf shop in Narrabeen is so beautifully decked out and leaves even a non-surfy inspired by the wares. The Sugarmill, (www.sugarmillsurf.com) sits on the golden miles of blue surf that is the Northern beaches. On a drive to Avalon on Saturday we wandered in to explore.
The Sugarmill is where local surfers stock up on slightly less mainstream labelled boards and surf-culture clothes. It sells very cool coffee table books and fins, wetsuits and glasses, and hats!
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One thing that would almost send me back to London are the Borough Markets. At that massive under-cover food market, French cheeses are piled up under the industrial-building-height ceilings, and pheasant, rabbit and other game hang from rafters. Pork pies, fresh custard, truffled sausages, crepes made to order.. the place is a veritable produce extravaganza. And really, Sydney’s never quite matched that experience.
But it is gradually doing so, albeit on a smaller scale. For the past year and a half, a definite forerunner in terms of grand location at least, has become the Eveleigh Markets near Darlington and Erskinville, in the Inner West.
And last weekend, as the heavens opened up in Sydney (despite some sunny patches), instead of hiding indoors, adventurous food-driven locals went to Eveleigh Markets and the Carriage Works gallery.
Fresh flowers, bunches of rosemary, salt-bush lamb, freshly baked artisan bread, cupcakes, those old-fashioned ice-cream sandwiches, pigs’ trotters, hot-smoked trout, organic wines, scores of mushroom varieties, for heavens sake it’s positively culinary.
I saw the incredible red ponytail first, and thought how well it went with the brown-paper-wrapped bunch of flowers. Fashion people do that – inspire some sort of colour coordination and just traipse through a food market looking like a dreamy fashion shoot. Rosie (above), the Fashademic blogger also doing a doctorate on style blogs, had bought some smoked trout and eggs, and was going to make an omelette with the two for dinner.
Bird Cow Fish, the Surry Hills-based restaurant led by chef Alex Herbert, for the first time offered three-egg omelettes this past weekend, made to order (more in an upcoming post). But Herbert herself also gets up at 4am on Saturday morning, she told me on the weekend, and starts baking for the market day ahead. Her early-birding means we get the worm at Eveleigh Market in the form of Chocolate Brioche, Banana Bread Star Cakes, Toasted Zucchini and Walnut Bread, various buns (below) and hot porridge served with brown sugar in a cup. Perfect winter wares.
The buildings themselves are enough to make you proud of your local council. Thank heavens some of Sydney’s older buildings are being reinvented for the public’s use. The old Carriage Works are a magical setting for the food market. Humans are dwarfed by the brick, arched buildings, making it all feel rather breezy and happy. Despite the early start, it’s all very happy, and it’s a place that makes you not think twice about pulling up a plastic crate to sit with a friend in the (currently) rare spots of winter sun. Maybe it’s the idea of spending the day cooking pigs trotters and organic greens bought at the markets, or maybe it’s that we’re surrounded by people who would wake up at 4am to bake for our breakfasts, but this is an awesome setting, where happy individuals and families start their weekends. Maybe I needn’t go back to London after all.
All photos by The Kitchen Inc.
Eveleigh Markets: Every Saturday at 245 Wilson Street Eveleigh, corner of Codrington Street
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