The Lost Art of Being a Dame celebrates dames of yesteryear and explores cultivating the dame within today.
A compendium of vintage femorabilia, the blog is meant to inspire, inform, and serve as a practical guide to living life with guts and glamour, style and substance, grace and gumption, wit and the right underwear. Equal parts movies, mojo and motivation, The Lost Art of Being a Dame looks to vintage pop culture, real and reel world biographies, and the ageless crème de la crème in fashion and self-help to guide women on how best to use their entire female arsenal.
I’ve always been fascinated by things having to do with identity, self-expression, character and, as Oprah puts it, “living one’s best life.” As a young girl and then an adolescent, I was hungry for information on how to become a woman, and I looked for answers and inspiration from the old black-and-white movies I saw on TV after I got home from school. Now, as a woman entering middle age, I continue to sometimes struggle with how to negotiate the female space in a way that’s comfortable, potent, and fun.
I got the idea for The Lost Art of Being a Dame because in this era teeming with ditzy ingénues, feckless fembots, and humorless overachievers, I realized there really is indeed “nothing like a dame.” It occurred to me that the independent and easy-going, tough and feminine, soft of heart and sharp of tongue femmes found in classic movies make good role models for today’s 21st century foxes.
For me, the word dame embodies a host of great co-existing qualities that are too often portrayed as paradoxical. As seen in archetypal dames like Barbara Stanwyck and Myrna Loy, there’s a powerful synergy and liberating complexity in women who are both gutsy and glamorous, witty and wise, sexy and self-reliant, playful and powerful.
I believe women (and quite a few men) can find the key to living life with fun, ferocity and fabulousness can be found in the simple question: What would a dame do?
I’m not an expert on, nor am I promoting, some brand of female perfectionism. I don’t have all the answers, but I’m fascinated and excited by the questions.
Please come join me and the legions of other cool women like yourself in our quest for eternal dame-nation as we discover the fabulous, fierce and fun art of being a dame!
