design related saturday shopping

labels
While we did have an instance of general "blah", today pretty much all came together with nary a hitch.

I rolled myself out of bed later than I'd intended this morning, so I only really had a chance to change my bedding and generally straighten things up rather than get things, mostly the kitchen, appropriately shipshape.

And because the weather is unable to pick a season I ended up having to wear a jacket, which is slightly ridiculous for the beginning of November.

As I mentioned last week my superpower to judge when Ma is downstairs is clearly on the fritz, and I had to stand around on the corner like an idiot until she arrived.

Then we switched cars as usual and I drove to the supermarket.

Other than us spending more than the usual amount on groceries there wasn't really anything spectacular about our supermarket adventures... it did appear that a bus full of pensioners had pulled up at some point... when we were headed to the checkouts there were suddenly little old ladies everyfuckingwhere.

But that was it really. And then it was back here for ritual unpackery.

After perusing and rejecting every bedside lamp I've seen for the past several weeks, I finally saw one I liked online this week, so I wanted to go and grab it before it disappeared or I overthought it too much. It would possibly have been an easier excursion if Beacon Lighting actually had stock out on the floor. Also if we hadn't happened to be in there when everyone else in the known universe was in there buying $500 worth of lighting.

I did get the lamp though, and it suits my sense of the absurd.

Since we were literally just down the road, we also detoured over to the framers and picked up my John McConnell artworks... I'm thinking the appropriate place to hang them is in the bedroom, although I'll need to shuffle some other things around first.

And we didn't really have very much else in the planning file... Ma ended up just doing a big driving loop past Ikea, past Harbour Town and back up Anzac Highway to the city.

fashion icons
From there we headed to the Art Gallery to check out the Fashion Icons: Masterpieces from the collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris exhibition.

We could have just headed straight to the exhibition space, but instead we had a bit of a wander through the rest of the gallery first. It's been a while since we've done that and they've made some very appealing changes to the spaces along the left side of the gallery... mirrored walls, dark painted walls and instead of trying to cram the labels for everything on the wall alongside the artworks, they've come up with these big laminated sheets you can take from a spot on the wall that feature a picture of the works and all the details.

I would imagine that the only issue with that is that you can't just make rearrangements on the spur of the moment or swap things out without a lot of additional work.

But it does make the gallery walls feel more approachable and more like artwork you'd have on the wall at home than feeling sterile and cold. Granted I'm not sure you'd want to have the back ends of two horses that have been sewn together and hung from a metal pole in your house, but you know what I mean.

Because we took the elevator down to the exhibition area (since Ma isn't great with the gallery stairs) we ended up going into the exhibition backwards.

It ended up being a bonus, for me anyway, since the exhibition is organised by decade from the 50's (late 40's really) through to the 2000's and I much prefer the 50's stuff to a lot of the later stuff.

Some of it is frankly ridiculous, some of it isn't ever going to look as good on the little skinny flat-chested mannequins they're using as it would on actual women in motion, and there is a serious under-representation of men's fashion... but there are some really gorgeous pieces.

Also, I kind of would have liked some additional tidbits like "so-and-so wore this dress in this movie or on the cover of that magazine or to this very important event" type of thing... but clearly that's not the point of the exhibition, so with one exception where the outfit is actually designed for a movie (and is THE most ridiculous outfit in the whole exhibition, being made entirely of giant rolls of metal), they don't do that.

After we'd finished looking at everything we wandered through the rest of the gallery and then headed across to the Mall to get some lunch before calling it a day.

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