Barbi Does Miami

mostly from my oxymoronic years between Miami and Milford

Category Archives: to be a fashion designer


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Fashion’s Night Out Miami

photo by Iona Gordon

I finally  dressed up and went out, Miami style.

After being absorbed by getting the kids back into school mode like meeting teachers, signing into after-school programs, seemingly endless driving to and from new friends and  special classes, dealing with Iona’s bi-polar morning-bus driver who is on a pick-up schedule that stretches somewhere between 6.30am and 8am (yes some kids wait 90 minutes at their bus stop),  it has taken me three weeks to get back into being Barbi who does Miami.

If it wasn’t for Fashion’s Night Out, the one-night celebration started by Anna Wintour to make shopping super glamorous and revive the fashion economy, I would still be the anti-social Mommy taxi service.

But, for once thanks to Ms. Wintour, I glammed up and went to Bal Harbour Shops, here in Miami Beach. Husband is back up north, so I took Iona. Iona cleaned up very nicely, adding about three years to her 14 years, and was a hotter date than husband…(sorry Al)

Iona with Celine Model

Fashion’s Night Out in New York could leave one, no, would leave me, completely paranoid, as in the desperate feeling that the best party was most definatley NOT the one I was attending, but had to be one of the other three hundred that were being tweeted at me from far flung corners of the city, like the Vogue show at Lincoln Center or Barneys, Isaac Mizrahi or Ralph Lauren uptown or Alexander Wang in Soho, Scoop in Nolita, Balenciaga in Chelsea… and I would have ended up of the verge of a fashion-stress induced break down. I mean just looking at the schedule of FNO New York events left me aching with I-should-been-there-ness.

Bal Harbour Shops, on the contrary, is a contained tropical retail village and everyone  who is anyone in designer retail is there. From Marc Jacobs, Prada, Pucci and YSL to Gucci, Saks and Neiman’s. They all have gorgeous stores in what must be one of the most pleasant shopping experiences anywhere and Miami fashionistas of all ages partied under the giant Royal Palms by the ponds and waterfalls, walking in and out of stores that offered  free champagne, DJ’s, celebrity chefs, photo-ops and fashion shows. Only Chloe seemed to miss the point and had a hyper PR guy with a clip board culling guests at the door. If you weren’t on the list you weren’t exactly welcome, but no-one cared, and by 9pm the fashion’s-night-out penny had dropped, the doors were flung open and the pr guy was last seen posing for the paparazzi…

so they shopped…

and they drank  champagne…

They danced…

They posed.

They played bocce ball…

It was not New York.

It was so not New York. It was Miami. Glamorous, tanned and toned, wealthy and bling and sexy and showy and nipped and tucked and implanted and perfectly groomed and South American and Russian and Israeli and Middle Eastern. And, in contrast to New York, where everyone is wondering who can afford all the exquisite designer clothes shown on the runways, it appears that almost everyone here can buy just about anything that the designer stores in Bal Harbour have to offer.

My five favorite moments:

1. Stanley Whitman, the 92-year old founder of Bal Harbour Shops, watching the crowd and the bocce court and enjoying his unique retail creation…

2. The attention that was showered on Iona,  whomever wrote Snow White  had no idea how lovely it is to be the proud mother of a budding beauty.

3. The vast mix of (under yet overdressed) ages and nationalities, all happily partying together under the warm night sky.

4. Wearing high heels again.

5. Marc Jacob’s exquisite fall collection, which made me remember and re-appreciate great design, fabric and craftsmanship…


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betwixt and between…

barbi?

Barbi is back in Miami

Only I’m not quite back to being Barbi, and I wonder, was Barbi a character I created for living in Miami last year? Do I want to be Barbi forever? Do I want to do Miami forever?

Am I lost between Milford and Miami and me and Barbi?

me

I am lost between Milford and Miami and me and Barbi.

So, since I’m not Barbi, its kind of hard to blog  Miami style.

I’ll start with the kids, to keep the focus off me.

Iona is at DASH with lots of homework, fun homework like do ten art works using soy sauce, soap and candle wax and there are lots of cute boys so she’s tired but inspired.

Kiki and Leila? They’re fine too. Oblivious to the drama that goes on at their school.  That screwed-up underfunded, overpopulated public elementary school. And Miami Beach has many entitled super-moms running around (I admit to being guilty myself), who are all confused about wanting and trying to get “the best for their child” in this – classes too big, teachers too stressed, Gifted/not Gifted principals too scared, no budget for nothing, job insecurity, not good enough UNIVERSE. We’re all in it and we all feel lost in it, like there is no there, there, no truth, no path, no mentor or inspiration, its just a get-through-it-in-one-piece processing plant. BUT. The girls like their teacher, She’s funny, they say. Funny is good! They come home and do their homework, so they want to please her….

But me, I’m betwixt and between…

Husband was here for five days. We had a big meeting with a potential client (fingers crossed). Then he stayed for our early anniversary. We first met on September 2nd 1990 and got married on September 4th eight years later. Twenty years! But thats another blog, the love blog, the relationship blog. The pink lava lamp blog. Still I don’t mind telling you that being betwixt and between on your anniversary is very romantic. I can recommend the uncertainty, as if nothing can be taken for granted. There is no need for fancy hotel rooms with scattered rose petals, or a million candles around the tub, or a ring studded with meaningful diamonds. I take the flutter of betwixt anytime over all that. And the shiver of between…

But  he’s gone back for work in NYC. And my car broke down. It rains and its grey like Holland. So I rearranged the furniture. The designer couches and rugs and Arad chairs of our Tiesto bachelor pad are all muddled up.  We now have a TV corner, how bourgeois, and can, for the first time in a year change the channels lying down instead of  walking around the corner of the hidden designer shelving system. Much better. Its cozier  but also more photogenic  in a World of Interiors kinda way.

But I wonder, where do I start picking up on me? Am I working or caretaking? Am I facilitating or building an awesome third career?  Am I a writer, a fashion designer, a book designer, an environmentalist, a mother, a wife, a bill payer, check chasing, budget balancer (yes I’m definitely that ) ? Am I at home or am I lost in Miami?

Where is home?

Milford is home, because that’s where my heart is the fullest.

favorite spot, over the stream...

But the rest of my family disagrees. The girls think its boring and husband thinks its HillBilly… (my husband is so not HillBilly but I have an inner HB)

This kind of family division causes betwixt.

I be twixt. I be twixt in a who the fuck am I? where the fuck am I? kinda way.

Oddly I don’t seem to mind it. I may even like it. Its nothing like being bored or the feeling that I should be somehwhere else because I’m already somewhere else.

Maybe I don’t quite mind it because – did I tell you this already? – I got an order for 900 t shirts to be embellished with Plastic is Forever from Barneys!

Barneys New York!

Loomstate Tee with Plastic is Forever

For Spring 2011!

Thats a lot of beach plastic. Thats a lot of harvesting and cleaning beaches and I will post my progress on my Its a Man Made World blog.

So that is one person I WILL be: a beach-plastic comber, during September, October, November, I shall be crouched over the coral-pink sand of the Bahamas filling my bags with plastic garbage…

I look forward to it. Its just when I add all the other stuff I also have to do to that order. Thats when I start to be twixt. Like can I do it all? Be it all? Be here and there and there as well.

But maybe we all feel like that all the time now? Like what we do is never enough and at the same time too much. Too much choice of stuff like options for anti-aging, to name an example, so many ways, creams and pills and remedies that I may need but will never get around to trying.  Or all those causes, like at the check-out of Publix for helping poor hungry kids and at Walgreens for helping Haiti, and on FB posting pink ribbons for breast cancer, and an Inbox full of ways to help out in the Gulf, and then there are those PTA meetings I should attend. I want to do them all, end up doing none and then I feel guilty.

And what’s with making money all of a sudden? Someone has turned off the middle-class money faucet, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Obama.

Then I worry about Obama.

I can’t watch TV because I get too upset. About what those mad hatter tea-partiers are doing and getting away with. The bile they stir into their BP logo tea cups. The general ignorance of who funds and fuels (oil) their fire of hatred. And why? When I get on that train of thought I get so betwixt that between is not even an issue.

But I wonder, Milford versus Miami aside, do we all feel this way?  Like where the hell are we headed and how do we turn this around?

Are we lost because so much of our lives are no longer familiar?

Maybe familiar is out and betwixt is in…

Iona's eye by Iona


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The BlackBerry Diet – a novel by Barbara de Vries

“Youth is something very new.

Twenty years ago no one mentioned it.”

– Coco Chanel.

The BlackBerry Diet


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writing and plastic…

photo: iona gordon

There’s definitely too much to read.

Oh for the predicament of writers, as per Facebook, where 99.9 % of my friends seem to be professional authors. Writers get a bum rap. We all agree. Publishers are dying while writers are multiplying. Nobody gets paid. No one who’s not somewhat famous gets published into a real hardcover book. And surely there are more words on the internet than have been written in the history of mankind.

Still.

I like to write. Its like giving those voices in my head a clothes line where they can flap about in the sun rather than be cooped up in my dark and dank head all day long. I never have writer’s block, unless you call what the fuck is the point of being a writer a block. Like those voices, even if I give them plenty of sun and air, still want better. They want to be heard, they want to be read, they want to be seen, they want to make an impact, they have big ego’s, and they always want more more more.

Writing is lonely, but blogging is not entirely. Lonely. Well, at least I get to see my daily stats (the chart that shows how many people have been on my blog). My daily stats are my ego mood meter. When it goes up my voices are pleased, but when it goes down they are pissed. My agent is lucky that I have stats. If I didn’t have stats, which tell me two hundred people read my latest blog within the first hour, I’d be on the phone with my agent all the time. Love me, love me, tell me you love me. Tell me I’m good. Tell me that my last novel is funny, will be published, will make me famous. Oh shut up already. Go work with the homeless. Go save the oceans. Those are my other voices. My who the fuck do you think you are? voices. Do you have those? I think they’re Dutch. The Dutch are not supposed to desire much. I’m Dutch. But I left Holland. I think I left because occasionally I take myself seriously. I have ambition, a really dirty word in Holland when I grew up, in the sixties, those I’m gonna be a social worker and save humanity sixties. That’s why, apart from writing, I also need to save the world from plastic pollution.

Yes.

I collect old plastic trash from the beach, bring it home to my garage, where I forge jewelry from this trash. I sell the jewelry and I’m just adding bikinis with ocean trash plastic embellishment to the collection, just so the plastic can get back to the beach and lie in the sand, only now on the sexy tan bottom of some Miami babe who paid (a lot) for the trash that she left behind a year ago.

That’s just the kind of thing I like. It makes me laugh and gives me something to write about, because even though I do take my creative ambition seriously, it makes me feel like I actually do not take myself quite so seriously.

Thus the conflict inside my head, my murky voices, my modus operandus, my reasons for writing.

the collection at Las Tias, the Miami store


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children – not a weakness, not even in fashion

kids in the rain

us in the rain

anna wintour says her kids are her weakness. after watching her in The September Issue i  see why.  weakness to Anna is the urge to be warm, encouraging, open, funny and sensitive, emotions which, as the center of the fashion world, Anna does not broadcast.  but around her daughter, who says fashion is entertaining but silly,  anna shows (big gold) buttoned up affection that sizzles with loneliness and when her daughter  says no mom i wont  be your successor (anna thinks vogue  her royal court). i will be a lawyer. anna hears,  she will abandon me. and i’ll be alone with my weakness. i dont care about anna perse, but i care about her power as icon of fashion. i just wish she wasn’t such a bitch cartoon. after all she is a mother, an ex wife, an influential leader and boss. but in her windowless world wintour is not a role model for  modern women.

i evolved in fashion a decade after she did, london in the eighties and new york in the nineties.  and i remember it as inspired.  wild,  inclusive, free, and magnanimous.  but  fashion  is no longer the arena where creative women can express themselves. its the industry  where we can get lost in the insecurity of everything that we are/have not.

anna wintour is at fashion’s core, and at the core of anna wintour is the belief that her children are her weakness.

SO

YO ANNA. children are a strength. all the emotions our children make us feel, compassionate, vulnerable, angry, protective, love, fear, are our strength. not just as mothers. but as women who are bosses, leaders, wives and friends. it is where we, women, easily connect with each other. its where we feel comfortable in the strength of our numbers. its where we  have each other’s back. it’s where we stand apart. it’s where we rule. even in fashion.