La Belle Époque

Added 1680530926 by Rebecca Tun.

When I learned that the theme for Saturday's life drawing class was Gustav Klimt, I headed straight to Pinterest and began to make plans. "Bring some fabrics" is what I was told but I couldn't resist going all out. The Gilded Age drew me in.

Lying awake the night before I went through the motions of the daunting hairstyle I'd planned. I wondered whether I'd be able to pull it off at all. But when it came to it, I found the styling process much less stressful than I usually do when attempting something elaborate.

When I contemplated why that was, I learned something about why I find the Art Nouveau aesthetic so seductive. I didn't feel at all as though I was trying to 'fix' my face and hair, as I so often do. None of it was about correcting my problem-this or problem-that. I swept shimmering golds across my eyelids and let the gold dust fall below my eyes without wiping it up. I dabbed silly rosettes onto my cheeks like a girl playing with makeup for the first time. Before I knew it I'd bypassed the stage where there was any point concealing my skin under a layer of foundation. Highlighter, fun amounts of glistening golden gilding, was the obvious next step. It was a celebratory process of decoration, working with and not against my natural appearance. No wonder they call it La Belle Époque. It was an age when fashion celebrated the beauty within.

As for my hair, a clever updo enlisting a legion of hairpins would often be enough to reduce me to tears. But with backcoming being the basis of the style and the curls being a bundled heap where flyaways only made the look more 'romantic', I wasn't beset by the usual immediate onset of anxiety about the inevitable decline of the hairdo. Isn't it so much nicer when something is designed to improve with entropy?

I came away with an important lesson - that playful styling isn't synonymous with unsophisticated styling. Imprecision can be elegant, and the security it brings is such a joy. I'm saying yes please to more feel-good styling in my future.

To see some of the artists' fabulous work, check out Ide Hill's Instagram page: https://instagram.com/idehill.lifedrawing