Ann Romney has been coming under fire for wearing a $990 Reed Krakoff t-shirt on the air recently. Never mind that Reed Krakoff sounds like a rejected Hunger Games character. This is a Serious National Issue.Of course, this comment is directed at the "99%" who cannot afford $990 silk shirts. In the usual fascistic and dogmatic manner of liberals, everyone has to wear the $9 t-shirt that caters to the lowest common denominator. And all those who can afford to buy $990 t-shirts have to hand out their money to those who somehow got behind in buying designer shirts, and wear the $9 t-shirt uniform in solidarity. Never mind those 1% (i.e. the Romneys) who bought their shirts with their hard-earned money.
My biggest objection to the shirt is that it looked like a disembodied fish-bird was squinting at you off Ann Romney’s right shoulder.
That is a nightmarish vision with which I would as soon not contend. That someone would pay this amount of money so that a disgruntled yellow creature could give TV audiences the stink-eye is the sort of thing that makes even the staunchest Reaganian rethink his stance on trickle-down economics.
Never mind that the t-shirt (or silk shirt, as what it really is) has a print of John James Aududon's Gyrfalcon, which is an illustration of a large falcon native to North America.
Audubon's book of illustrations, Birds of America, was an ambitious project of,
435 hand-colored, life-size prints of 497 [North American] bird species, made from engraved copper plates...[which] contains just over 700 North American bird species.The books also features the gyrfalcon.
So how "un-American" can Ann Romney be, with her instinctive ability to wear a shirt featuring an American illustrator's American bird, while accompanying her husband on a campaign interview at CBS This Morning a few days ago? Michelle Obama also likes to wear large prints, yet I have never found any of hers to have cultrual significance other than to promote "designers of color."
That said, Reed Krakoff, the designer who created Ann Romney's shirt, took the liberty of adding extra colors to the print on Ann Romeny's shirt, since Audubon's bird is mostly white, black and with touches of color, as are the colors of the actual bird. Krakoff's website says:
The bird painting was inspired by John James Audubon' s iconic painting of gyrfalcons, recolored and manipulated to a larger-than-life scale for a bold and modern effect.
Detail of Reed Krakoff's gyrfalcon
Still, good design is a reinterpretation of what is out there to fit the item on which it is displayed (a piece of clothing, a furniture), and I'm sure Audubon would have found it an honor to be part of American political history.
Gyrfalcon
By John James Audubon (1785-1851)
From: The Birds of America; from original
drawings by John James Audubon
Publication date 1827 - 1838
About the gyrfalcon:
The Gyrfalcon is dispersed throughout much of the Northern Hemisphere, with populations in Northern America, Greenland, and Northern Europe. Its plumage varies with location, with birds being coloured from all-white to dark brown.
The bird's common name comes from French gerfaucon; in medieval Latin it is gyrofalco. The first part of the word may come from Old High German gîr (cf. modern German Geier) for "vulture", referring to its size compared to other falcons; or from the Latin gȳrus for "circle" or "curved path"—from the species' circling as it searches for prey, distinct from the hunting of other falcons in its range. The male Gyrfalcon is called a gyrkin in falconry. The scientific name is composed of the Latin term for a falcon, Falco, and for a countryside-dweller, rusticolus. (More here
