I found these magazine pages saved in my archives from the now-defunct Blogspot account Vintage Fashion Magazines (I warn you, don't visit it -- it's very NSFW now!), and just loved how incredible a layout it is: the fabulous Darling herself, Julie Christie, in the most literal and amazing namesake dresses I've ever seen. The multi-colored dresses are cited as being designed by "Tuffin & Foale" (designers more commonly referred to in the order of Foale and Tuffin, because alphabetical order is nice), a design team out of Swinging London that epitomized the Mod style of the mid-1960s. I get a kick out of the fact that the dresses are listed as being available at Paraphernalia, the New York City boutique that was home to Betsey Johnson back in the day (she was their in-house designer). (Is it strange that it still is a bit unreal to me that stores once featured the designs of Betsey, Foale & Tuffin, Mary Quant and the like were all once featured in the same store? In case the years of me blogging about it haven't made it clear, I really wished I lived in the sixties. Mostly for the shopping opportunities.)
What I love about this clipping is that it is a great example of the fantastically poetic and rather whimsical way that most fashion magazine writers wrote back in the day. I love how fascinated those journalists seemed with the girls they wrote about, as if everything their subjects did was utterly beguiling. They simply couldn't believe the size of a dolly girl's eyes or her short hemlines or her laid-back hippie nature. It was all too much for them to take. I want to be described in those terms! Of Julie, they write: "With her thick pale hair worn just as it pleases her to wear it, her easy vitality, and her level-eyed spill-the-beans candour, Julie Christie is the Breakaways' Breakaway -- the girl who spells it all out: CONTEMPORARY. The way it is today. (Tomorrow: Fahrenheit 451 and Far from the Madding Crowd; in both movies she plays "an anti-status-quo girl ... a bit out of context with her time ... slightly ahead." The way it is.) Here, the darling of Darling and Zhivago wears a knit spelled JULIE -- an undershirt dress, all action and colour; her kind of gear." Which is just about the most amazing thing you can say about someone. What would I have to do today to be considered capital-letters contemporary?

Title: from "She's a Rainbow" (The Rolling Stones)