high brow

Maybe it's because I've just re-read The Great Gatsby for like the 28th time, or hearing that Carey Mulligan is cast as Daisy in Baz Luhrmann's remake, but I've been thinking about eye brows a lot lately.

Hear me out, please. If you look at any given film from any decade, you could believe that, for example, in the 1930s, all women had thin lines for eyebrows, and small chins and tiny lips with cupid bows. I don't know if the standard of beauty being large puffy lips will increase, or deflate, in the next decade (and I love what Kate, of Style is Always Fashionable, said, that this generation of young woman tend to be more happy, or less critical, of their own faces - but instead tend to focus their insecurities on their bodies - that makes sense: there is probably more of an 'anything goes' variety of choice for facial features than any other time). But I do know that if you look at any film made in the 1980s, what defines that decade is without doubt, dark, thick, scraggly brows. While I don't know the official reason, my guess can be summed up in two words: Brook Shields.

I can even remember magazines instructing girls how to achieve the look: use vaseline and a toothbrush, and brush UP: use mascara, if necessary. Do not tweeze!

Whichever era a film is set in, it seems the period in which it is filmed somehow blends in with the period it's meant to take place in. Thus Mia Farrow's Daisy became so iconically 1960s. And just as I'm really psyched to see Carey and Leo try to fill Mia and Robert Redford's shoes, I'm curious how the 2011 sensibility - in costume, as well as hair and make-up - will be interpreted in this version of Long Island in the 1920s. (I shot this, btw, as part of my 'Arcadia' not real women series).

Whenever we return to the land of my childhood - that same area that Fitzgerald dubbed East and West Egg - I can sense, not just Gatsby and Daisy, but Scott and Zelda, too.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.