Thumbelina

Dark lips and a severe brow are simple touches that add a delicate quality to a powdered face. Quite Coco Rosie in style, sometimes looking the fairy you feel inside brings a little mystery and magic to the outside world. Living out of the pages of Vogue would indeed be dreamlike and fantastic, though perhaps not practical. Sometimes even the artworks that appear on the ramps are simply beyond the occasions that a relatively mundane life presents us with...but the odd ethereal touch can never go to waste. Playing with metallic colours, silks and lace, layering, emulating rosebud shapes with lily-shaped skirts and petalled shirts, and studding the ears with sparkly costume jewellery large enough to entice magpies from their nests.

When I received it as a gift from my beautiful artist mother, this ring immediately reminded me of Thumbelina, one of my favourite Disney movies when I was young. It is made up of gold petals with a small amethyst in the centre, like a poppy plucked from one of those magical dreams I never want to end. When I was little I remember longing to be like Thumbelina bobbing along a treacherous river on an oak leaf, pursued by a lusty frog and numerous amorous beetles. I find it funny that even at such a young age beauty and desire were known concepts to me. They filled my dreams and were the driving force of my fantasy games and Christmas lists.

Now that I am grown, fantasy has been watered down with harsh reality—the sobering-up process started with a notorious freckled bully at junior school informing me that neither Father Christmas nor the Tooth Fairy existed, and continues on today with the news that one’s heart can indeed be broken, and that one’s birthday is just another day in the year. But before we become too cynical, there are some bezaubernde experiences in life that do bring back the fantasy to life: the hypnotizing clang of singing bowls in a Buddhist temple, or a piece of fresh sushi that melts in the mouth; a beautiful dress that fits like a glove; seeing a loved one’s face through a glass pane at the airport after a passage of time. Style is one of the ways that the unimaginable can become imaginable. —E