olourful (and often clashing) prints.She was a one-woman womens evening dresses , three-ring circus of style.RelatedTwo new biographies look at fashion eccentric Isabella Blow's life and legacyYoung starlets have a retinue of stylists and yay-sayers who ensure they appear tasteful and on-trend, and nothing could be more banal than either (or both) of those fates.The rest of us may cluck, but even we fearfully wait for a sanctioned holiday like Halloween, when such exuberant flights of fancy become downright mainstream, or for the permissible occasion of a thematic fancy-dress party.I prefer the eccentrics, even if I don t dress like one.They put together their toilette, often with wild abandon, to please none but themselves.These peacocks are sometimes ridiculous, often memorable, always inspiring.With age comes a certain fashion fearlessness.Style writer Ari Seth Cohen eschews the typical gamine twentysomethings that populate most street-style blogs and instead respects his sartorial elders in Advanced Style.Like Piaggi, his new blog-turned-book favours women who have the childlike sense of play that we lose when we grow up.sedate is not in their vocabulary.for the past 20, a wavy Smurf-blue tinted quiff emerged from one of her hundreds of Stephen Jones hats and snaked over a quizzically cocked eyebrow.Generally, she clutched a brightly hued walking stick.These items, and her theatrical makeup punctuated by a crimson moue, clashed artfully with zebra trousers, harlequin dresses, spats, oxfords, trilby hats and berets.You d naturally expect such a dresser to be a creative thinker, and she was, as a veteran editor and fashion writer since the 1970s, chiefly for Vogue Italia, where she had a lavish double-page column spread called D.Doppie Pagine di Anna Piaggi.teenage Rookie magazine founder Tavi Gevinson is an eccentric-in-waiting who infuses her look with whimsy, for example.Or take my Grade 10 biology teacher.Give the classroom context of her outfits, Ms.but only just (I blame the threat of Bunsen burners as potential hazard to hats and feather boas).In my northern mining hometown womens fashion evening dresses , pop.she stood out as an an inveterate and inventive thrift and fashion shopper, and I spent the entire semester chronicling her meticulously co-ordinated outfits, marvelling at how she never wore the same outfit twice.Her approach to dressing captured my imagination more than the internal workings of any dissected frog ever would.I attended my high school reunion this past weekend and was relieved to find that my nostalgia had not conjured Ms.Jenkin and her parade of outfits out of thin air.Presiding over a retrospective fashion show, she paid special care to her outfit, just as she had daily 20 years ago: an ornate black vintage dress and large matching New Look-era saucer hat with coq feathers that quivered with every tilt of her head.Her style captured my imagination all those years ago, and I m still grateful for it.The mythology of Route 66John Steinbeck had a talent for seeing the poetry in the commonplace, so naturally he was the American bard who founded the legend of Route 66 as the great American highway, a legend that has outlived not only Steinbeck but even Route 66 itself.arriving in Los Angeles.It was replaced by bigger highways decades ago and decommissioned in the 1980s, but nostalgists insist it never died and never should.For many it symbolizes the spirit of American history.Their enthusiasm breathes life into an affectionate but not uncritical tribute, A Route 66 Companion (University of Texas Press), edited by David King Dunaway of the University of New Mexico.That novel became the chief literary ornament of the Depression and John Ford’s 1940 film version, with Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, carved the sorrows of the wretched Okies even deeper into the public imagination.Steinbeck eulogized Route 66 as the mother road, the route of a people in flight.RelatedRobert Fulford: Gore Vidal: The no.anti-American AmericanRobert Fulford: A Habsburg Empire state of mindAmericans have always had an enviable way of wrapping place names in glamour.In 1885 Walt Whitman grew lyrical about towns called Fairplay, Tombstone, Whiskey Flat and Squitch Gulch.t, in a poem called American Names celebrated Harrisburg, Spartanburg, Painted Post, Nantucket Light and of course Wounded Knee (he also gave a friendly nod to our own dear Medicine Hat).If Steinbeck created the Route 66 myth, Bobby Troup, a pianist, actor and sometime songwriter, greatly enlarged it.In 1946, Troup wrote a piece that’s listed in the catalogues as (Get Your Kicks on) Route 66 though it often appears as just Route 66.A kind of musical travelogue evening dresses for weddings , it’s lasted six decades.At first Nat Cole seemed to own it, having made it a hit, but over the years Chuck Berry, The Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, Diana Krall and many others have recorded it.I heard it at a tender age, 14, and fell in love with it and its subject.Get your kicks on Route 66.It listed places totally unknown to me but endowed them with magic.Somehow, Route 66 became the highway of my dreams.I could recite Kingman, Barstow and the rest.I never did travel the route, but decades later, when I finally visited that region, the place names welcomed me like old friends.Flying toward the Grand Canyon in a small plane, I asked the pilot to point out Kingman.Today Kingman, Ariz.and has a Route 66 Museum located in an old powerhouse on Andy Devine Avenue, named for the raspy-voiced Kingman boy who ended up acting in 400 movies, several directed by John Ford.Troup’s song made the road so famous that Route 66 became a television series and lasted from 1960 to 1964.rootless loner from the wrong side of town.itself now a cherished, carefully preserved cultural treasure.Over the years artists have done their best to enhance the cultural status of Route 66.in 1974, Stanley Marsh 3, heir to an oil fortune, hired a San Francisco collective, the Art Farm, to build an appropriate public monument.They acquired 10 old Cadillacs and h.