Amalya Shandelman

Leave it to the Italians to take something ridiculously crude and utilitarian, and turn it into high fashion. (We cannot be sure it was them in this case; but who else?)

In ancient times, bags made of sackcloth were used for two related purposes:
For carrying grain home from the market.
For toting your most prized possessions, so that all the nosey passersby would think you were just carrying grain home from the market.
But those days are long gone. It's now a thing of beauty.

Your woman is your grain of truth -- the secret of your economic success in a highly competitive marketplace. She's also your most prized possession, so protect her from prying eyes. The fabric of simple ambiguity will serve you well for that.

And all you men out there who can't seem to catch the woman of your dreams, take heart. This one is in the bag!

When modes and mores change decade by decade as they do, two centuries can seem like a veritable eternity. While the stately elegance of the nineteenth century is by now mostly just the stuff of musty museum displays, some of us still refuse to forget the likes of the great German painter and lithographer Franz Xaver Winterhalter, and the royalty whom his portraits immortalized. That those grand traditions of elegance live on, infusing their subjects with anti-anachronistic, thoroughly contemporary vitality, can be seen in this striking image by Houston portrait photographer Amalya Shandelman.