Joseff of Hollywood.

For my pseudo-internship at the Harn Museum (I'm a MUSE. I feel that I should prance around in a toga and affect poses with masks while intoning the verse of the Muse of Tragedy. Or Comedy. Or hysteria) I have to "research the evolution of design elements," which is certainly vague. I began by browsing the Design and Architecture page on MOMA's site but quickly tired of this.
Then I moved to jewelry.
When my mother joined me for my second of two weeks in Paris in 2004 (post study-in-Rome) one of the first things we did was go to the Clingancourt flea market. My mother collects antiques, particularly antique costume jewelry. She loves big confusing flea markets. Such things amuse me...until I get overwhelmed and then I have a tendency to wander around and get lost. Neither of us expected that she would find a treasure chest:
A woman with crazy red hair who sold rare Joseff of Hollywood pieces.
I'd never heard of Joseff of Hollywood. But the jewelry. Was. Beautiful.
And, more importantly, beautiful people wore it: Joan Crawford and Bette Davis and Greta Garbo and oh the shining stars! Madame Redhead had befriended Joseff's widow who had slowly bequeathed her bits of the collection. And now Madame Redhead was selling the collection to discerning buyers.
Needless to say my mother was one such buyer.
So when I was researching "design elements" for my internship I really just spent an hour or so browsing various Joseff's of Hollywood pages.
This probably won't be useful for my internship but it was far more entertaining than perusing MoMA's design catalogues.

In what is, perhaps, far more importantly news (certainly important enough to make the picture of the NYTimes homepage this moment) is the reconciliation of Barbie and Ken. I guess Ken's sudden turn to Buddhism and Nora Jones gets Barbie's plastic panties wet.
My heart flutters.