It happens in your life like your Bat Mitzvah or your First Communion, sooner or later you cross your path with the Fitzgeralds and it’s never the same.
I was 17 and on my first rebellious stage when I first saw the movie with Robert Redford and subsequently read the book. Although my rebellion manifested in such a demure fashion that [I believe it] mostly remained confined within the parnthesys of my own ears, I had an epiphany: in one of my previous lives I had been Daisy.
Glamour, Paris, pearls, short bobbed hair, women smoking cigarettes, long days never ending before the sun rises, champagne and yachts.
Coco Chanel, the iconic rebellious of the decade, wearing trousers and cardigans made of men’s underwear fabrics, the dropped waistline and just a lot of pearls.
Blouses and bold wallpaper prints, beads, sheerness, silks, sleeveless evening gowns.
The New York Jazz Age of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, les Folies Bergere and Greta Garbo. Paris and the Ritz Bar, Le Lido and its underground marble pool.
The novel is about living in the realm of possibilities, on the fine line of fragile and magnificent illusions. I read this about the book:
… Fitzgerald’s characters, each as fabulous as Babe Ruth, [are] rendered with the fragmentary touches of a Cézanne watercolour.” The comparison is perfect: Fitzgerald uses bright shocks of colour and vivid juxtapositions to create impressions, not facts. Gatsby’s greatness is measured by the intensity of his dreams, which provide him a “satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality”…
No matter what the critics are saying, what Miuccia with director Bez Luhrmann and costume designer Catherine Martin wanted to do was to make Daisy the ‘most beautiful and rich woman on earth’.
Could that be why I really think I was Daisy in one of my previous lives?
P.S. I haven’t watched the 3D movie and I am posting pictures of the one I am familiar with.
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