Sunday, September 10, 2006

fashionistas

Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth I of England made popular the ruffled fan-shaped collar, which served well to frame The Royal Face. This fashion statement was just one of many influences brought on by her reign.

A number of large, fanned collars were worn by Helen Mirren in her portrayal of Elizabeth I for HBO. I greatly admire Helen Mirren’s acting, see her as an ageless beauty, was eager to view her performance in a period piece, and so looked forward to the miniseries "Elizabeth". My erratic life/work schedule doesn’t often allow for the luxury of watching any television miniseries in proper sequence. Thankfully, HBO habitually airs their shows repeatedly (sometimes too many times!) and so I managed to see snippets enough of all the episodes to successfully piece the basic story together. Even seen this way, I enjoyed it. Learned a lot about Elizabeth I. Well acted. The costuming was gorgeous. The extraordinary size of Elizabeth’s collars did render her larger-than-life to all others in court. As did her charisma, of course.

His Royal Highness Trooper P.-S. I - likewise sports a Moderne version of the collar to frame his Beauteous Beagle Face. Note how regal he looks sitting on his throne!

Trooper the Beagle is wearing what is referred to as an Elizabethan Collar (E-collar) to protect and prevent him from scratching or licking fresh scars from recent surgeries. The opacity of his plastic collar took him a bit of getting used to, and in hindsight, perhaps it would have been made easier had he some newer version of the collar.

Beagles are originally an English breed of dog. Perhaps that's one reason E-Collars look so handsome on them - it's a natural extension of their wardrobe (use your imagination!).

New World beagles, take note!

OK, so here's what happened: I got hold of this cutie photo of one of my favourite doggy friends, wanted to blog about it, noted the obvious connection with Elizabethan collars, remembered how much I enjoyed HBO's 'Elizabeth'...then made this feeble attempt to connect the two. Educational + silly fun cutie. And that's how blog topics sometimes come to be...

2 comments:

Lauren said...

I was wondering what inspired this post as I started to read it, and then I scrolled down and saw the cute/sad picture of Trooper wearing his lampshade! (I mean, his "Elizabethan collar".) Too funny.

Anonymous said...

Poor Beagle!
Our puppy had to wear one…we called it "the lampshade". He ate by lowering his nose to the floor...the lampshade would hit with a klunk! We felt so sorry for him, but we couldn't help laughing ‘til our sides hurt! Poor puppy.