It may be true that, as Tennyson wrote: “In the spring, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.”
For women, though, the season for romance is autumn. That’s when we fall in love with fashion, swooning for cashmere and tweed, dreaming over velvet and fur, longing for great tailoring and elegant silhouettes.
Luckily for fashion lovers, fall 2005 offers more romantic intrigue than a Victorian novel in three volumes.
Recent seasons have been flirty and fun, but now it’s as if fashion’s debutante ball has ended and the ingenue has emerged as a woman, all sleek and soignee and sophisticated.
Texture, colour, silhouette and accessories are all more beautiful and more flattering than they have been in recent seasons. These are clothes women will want to wear, and not just now, but for years to come.
What brings this season alive in a way the dour minimalism of the ’90s and the aggressive power dressing of the ’80s couldn’t is the way designers have drawn on three richly romantic themes.
Related Travel Information
Beijing May 7 -- It has been some time now since people in this country talked about the decline of tradition and custom as something that worries them. Some have even appealed to the government for help to honour our national heritage.
One appeal, which was heard from the debate in the National People's Congress earlier this year, is for the inclusion of more traditional festivals into the official holiday system. This appeal, I think, will gain more widespread support with time.
Currently, in the Chinese mainland, people take days off only
Paris - First came singles bars, dating services, and click-and-date websites. Then young urban professionals searching for a little tenderness turned to speed dating.
Now a pair of French cooking schools are blazing another, somewhat less frenetic, trail in the quest for modern romance: "cook-dating."
"I came up with the idea" - and coined the term - "when I noticed how much the students in my classes had in common," said Frederic Chesneau, who runs a small cooking school in the Marais district of central Paris. www.cookdating.com
There were a lot of thirty-something professionals with stressful jobs, similar interests and very little time
As we drift into a gray autumn - our San Diego sunshine fading, our mayoral race stripped of suspense - here's one bit of cold comfort:
At least Toronto is having fun.
You may not have heard about the juicy bone fate has thrown to our northern brethren. Say what you will about Buffalo and Toronto making up one big metropolitan corridor, there's still a news blackout between us.
So I'll fill you in: A romance was discovered between two senior Toronto bureaucrats - Pam Coburn, a 45-year-old divorced mother of two, and Joseph Carnevale, a 33-year-old married guy with
Call it female intuition. My wife, Norene, picked up on the decided romantic ambiance that pervaded the dining area when we visited Suffield's Tosca restaurant recently. "Oh yes, you had the most romantic table in the restaurant," says Robin Gath, the general manager of this little gem, which features authentic Italian cuisine, an impressive list of imported and domestic wines, and ambiance aplenty. "The restaurant breeds romance. I've been here three months and we have had three couples get engaged while dining during that time."
True to Gath's description of Tosca's as an "old-fashioned, full-service restaurant," our visit was highlighted by
Her brother has gone bonkers. He’s pouring all the booze down the drain and announcing he’s turning the pub into a worship center for Jesus people. Mona and Phil inherited the pub from their parents, and live upstairs; Phil (Paddy Considine) has come to Jesus belatedly, after a spell in prison. Mona (Natalie Press) gets on her moped, which has no engine but nevertheless functions as a symbol of escape, and wheels it into the country outside their small Yorkshire town. That’s the day she meets Tamsin.
The title of “My Summer of Love” gives away two games at once: