For the first funeral I went to, I wore apricot. I thought about black but that seemed so somber. I never really understood why a funeral, or even death for that matter, couldn’t be more of a tributory celebration. So I wore an apricot Chanel suit, because she would have liked that. Black is seductive [...]

DEATH NOW Our perceptions of death have continued to shift and evolve yet still revolve around a type of instinctive fear of the end of life. Sometimes we re-direct our attention to life affirmation in order to conceal a latent anxiety regarding its cessation.  Michel Foucault has remarked how this emphasis on life—as a method [...]

DEATH AND THIS DESIGNER What does death look like? Goya’s corpse hauling itself out of the grave in Nada? Or like bloodied and gutted bodies hanging from trees like crows crowding onto a morbidly stiff and gnarled branch, pointing into the darkness in Jacques Callot’s war etchings? The proliferation of skulls, taxidermy, vintage war paraphernalia [...]

GLAMOUR AND GOULASH DAHHLINK Zsa Zsa. Eva. And lesser known Magda. They dripped in diamonds, were forever swathed in fur and between them, racked up a staggering 20 husbands (and one shared one between them-does that bring the number to 19?). Because you can never have too many diamonds or husbands. Frankly I think one [...]

ERZSEBET BATHORY: THE COUNTESS WHO BATHED IN BLOOD Erzsebet (Elizabeth ) Bathory was born in 1560 to Baron George Bathory and Baroness Anna Bathory. The Bathory  family was one of the most powerful Protestant families in Hungary, and included warlords, politicians and clerics within its ranks. Elizabeth’s ancestor Stephan Bathory had fought alongside Vlad Dracula in [...]