Photograph by Aurie Singletary of Clique Creative

It’s a bit of an understatement to say that adjusting to life after the pandemic—or as I like to call it, the Great Pause—was challenging.

For some, the healing balm came in the form of a hashtag, #blackfaeday. In May 2021, I called for Black fantasy enthusiasts all over social media to don fantasy garb and celebrate themselves for a day of positivity and merriment.

Since then, Black Fae Day has been celebrated globally, online and in person, on the second Saturday of May each year.

Black Fae Day is all about connecting through playful experiences—and as it turns out, playing is good for you! I recently spoke about this subject with Dr. Niah W. Dickson Singletary, a.k.a. Phoenix Luxe. A self-proclaimed TheraFairy who cosplays, she has written on the mental and psychological benefits of creativity and play for Black adults. She shared her unique perspective as a fantasy nerd and mental health therapist.

“Organizations and holidays like Black Fae Day,” Luxe told me, “teach the world what Black people have always known: Radical joy and play are healing. Fantasy is limitless and allows for expression that doesn’t focus on revisiting trauma of our everyday lives.”

When I asked her what advice she’d give people who feel alienated and without community—and who want to experience more joy through play—she responded, “For every interest, there are people ready to welcome you … people that can show you all the ways joy is real … Sometimes it starts with something as simple as frolicking in a park among kin.”

And that we do. Black Fae Day is an intergenerational affair that inspires lasting smiles to heal weary hearts. Whole families participate, from grandparents to the youngest infant. Children cavort in miniature wings, capes, and face paint. Their parents wear festive costumes as well. Humble gatherings in homes and parks are the most magical and popular ways to celebrate, but if you’re ambitious like me, you might quite literally have a ball.

Since the inaugural jubilee, I’ve had the pleasure of hosting two Fairytale Galas and a global Faemily Reunion. People from all backgrounds and walks of life have collaborated to make each celebration more jovial than the last. Connections as deep and rich as mycelium forests have been created through the power of kindness and imagination. And yes: I too credit the unstoppable power of the playfulness in all of us. It’s an intimate and ancient feeling that can be experienced only by inviting others in.

This spring, I encourage every reader to slay feelings of bashfulness and invite someone new into your play circle. The overture can be as simple as sharing a welcoming smile or sending out an invitation for second breakfast. Remember that your playfulness is liberating—not only for yourself but for the people around you. Joy is the bridge that connects all hearts and minds.

When you’re ready to roll down hills and Swag Surf in castles, I’ll be waiting. To see what’s happening in your neck of the woods or to participate in this Black Fae Day, please follow the official Instagram @blackfaedayofficial for updates. Like last year’s, the next Faemily Reunion will include several event and community organizers from around the world.

Phoenix Luxe Recommends

To hear more about the incredible research mentioned here, reach out to Dr. Singletary via her Instagram handle: @blerdylove. Also, aside from Black Fae Day, Luxe loves communities like Carefree Black Girl (@carefreeblackgirlinc)

and Black Joy x Reckon (@blackjoyreckon). For further reading, she recommends Dr. Jearold Winston Holland’s Black Recreation: A Historical Perspective; Why Wakanda Matters: What Black Panther Reveals About Psychology, Identity, and Communication, edited by Dr. Sheena C. Howard; and Dr. Samuel T. Gladding’s Creative Arts in Counseling.

Jasmine La Fleur is a proud library worker and self proclaimed LiFAERian in Jacksonville, Florida. When she isn’t frolicking with local fairies she enjoys reviewing books on the Nymphs of Lore Podcast.

Follow Clique Creative on Instagram @clique_creative_atl.

Photographer: STEVE PARKE @steve.parke
Model: TEE PIMENTEL @teepimentel
Wardrobe: JILL ANDREWS GOWNS @jagowns
Muah: NIKKI VERDECCHIA @nikki.verdecchia
Backdrop Paintings: NICHOLE LEAVY ART @nicholeleavyart Jewelry: PARRISH RELICS @parrish_relics
Photographer’s Assistant: BRITT OLSEN-ECKER @brittolsenecker

This time-traveling cover story shoot was conjured by a Baltimore team that’s worked together several times before for Enchanted Living. Of course, when you’re featuring a saint and a goddess, you need a unique pantheon of artists.

To re-create these two Renaissance-era paintings, we first needed some … painting, so we called upon artist Nichole Leavy to create custom backdrops, like the ones she so gorgeously crafted for our Nautical and Medieval issues. Her Primavera grove (pictured in its full glory at bottom left) is a stylized version of Botticelli’s original, she says, since the original is so rich and detailed. “I took certain liberties and simplified,” she says, “omitting the figures, of course, and ‘opening up’ the middle foliage. I also changed the original orange trees (a symbol of the Medici Family) into peach trees to be cheeky.” Her Saint Catherine backdrop was much smaller, as she needed to paint it quickly, but it worked perfectly, as you can see.

Both goddess and saint had to have amazing dresses, so we went to wedding- gown designer Jill Andrews, who made pieces for our Celestial and Decadence cover shoots. For Venus’s complicated radiance, she layered white silk chiffon over metallic gold lamé, then hemmed the edges of the chemise using a technique that makes “the perfect ruffle you see in old paintings.” She re-created the ornamental bra from a piece she found online and then hand-covered it with beaded trim. “It was fun to interpret and source all the various details,” Andrews says. She made our saint’s dress from an extremely fine iridescent silk, binding the neck with black velvet and using black cotton bobbinet (a sort of netting) over a bright chartreuse-green charmeuse to get just the right shading on the sleeves. The overdress is a luscious silk and rayon velvet lined with saffron silk taffeta to get the perfect era-appropriate drape.

Of course, we also needed someone who could embody both a goddess and a saint, and we were thrilled to finally put Tee Pimentel on our cover. You’ve seen Tee many times in these pages already, and you might also know her as the magical wing maker behind Creatures Who Craft. Have you ever seen a model move more fluidly from goddess to saint and back again? “It was almost like I was swaying in a dance with friends,” she says, when describing posing as Venus. She does admit to having had a little more trouble with Saint Catherine. “The model in the original painting was really leaning into that wheel at an odd angle,” she says, reflecting on the lack of torture devices in the Enchanted Living shoot, which we do try to make general policy.

Tee arrived at the shoot with jewelry from Parrish Relics, whose treasures we’ve also featured numerous times. Our

goddess and our ladies on pages 18 and 19 are wearing artist Jen Parrish-Hill’s handmade floriated amulet and clover earrings (bottom center), inspired by the Miracle Windows of the Trinity Chapel in Canterbury Cathedral. Our saint is wearing her trois fleurs sacrées amulet and earrings (bottom right), inspired by the mille-fleurs tapestries of medieval Europe. How gorgeous are they?

And then Nikki Verdecchia—who has contributed to more shoots for this magazine than we can count—once again worked her hair and makeup magic, keeping Tee’s hair and skin soft and natural, with a glowy lip … for that delicate luminescence worthy of goddess and saint. Because we shine as both, don’t we?

And, finally, photographer extraordinaire Steve Parke, who’s now up to his sixteenth cover for us, worked to replicate the feel of the original paintings by using static lighting rather than strobe lights, which tend to throw a more even light source everywhere in the space. “This allowed me to move the light sources wherever I wanted and achieve a softer, more painterly quality to the images,” he says. Britt Olson-Ecker of local band The Outcalls was also there to assist; everyone knows that it never hurts to have a goddess of music on hand, no matter your endeavor.

Photographer: STEVE PARKE @steve.parke
Model: TEE PIMENTEL @teepimentel
Wardrobe: JILL ANDREWS GOWNS @jagowns
Muah: NIKKI VERDECCHIA @nikki.verdecchia
Backdrop Paintings: NICHOLE LEAVY ART @nicholeleavyart
Jewelry: PARRISH RELICS @parrish_relics
Photographer’s Assistant: BRITT OLSEN-ECKER @brittolsenecker

We’re gazing into our scrying stones at a new year, eaking open a fresh tarot pack, planning a bright 25 of luscious flavors and fragrances, colors and charms. We’ve always been artists, but this year we’re itching to try something new: bake ourselves some jewelry, write a poem full of predictions and wishes, pick up a brush and paint a self- portrait—treat ourselves as the raw materials for new lives.

Welcome to your own personal Renaissance. Are you ready to be refreshed?

The cycles of birth, growth, decay, and rebirth are what define time itself: seasons of the year, transitions of history. So let’s go back about five and a half centuries and say it’s 1475. You’ve lived through a bleak time, what with the Black Plague (1347, then again and again) and the so-called Holy Wars that finally ended (more or less) in 1453, when Constantinople passed from the Byzantine Empire to the Ottoman Empire. Lately you’ve noticed that the world is more interested in business than in religion, which means that you’re mixing more with other cultures in a step toward globalization. People are paying more attention to people. And then you look around a bit more and rediscover the ancient Greeks and Romans: their intricate stories, their passionate gods, their love of the body in art.

Suddenly you know there is no more exciting time to be alive— and to be refashioning yourself into the person you want to be.

For this issue, we re-created the Renaissance with a dazzling dual cover shoot embodying two of the era’s most amazing icons: the Roman goddess Venus and the early Christian martyr Saint Catherine of Alexandria. We pulled these archetypes out of two famous paintings, dressed our model in lush Renaissance attire, stood her in front of exquisite hand-painted backdrops, and asked goddess and saint to speak to us through the centuries. Art and beauty might be eternal, but they must also step out of the frame once in a while, reveal their layers, and remind us who they are.

At first glance, these women could not seem more different. Botticelli’s Primavera (painted in the late 1470s or early 1480s) shows an exuberant festival, with pagan gods welcoming springtime—perfect for the theme of rebirth. Then Raphael’s Saint Catherine of Alexandria (circa 1507) presents a quiet conversation between saint and heavens, a callback to medieval themes of martyrdom and submission. And yet both of them are quintessentially the Renaissance.

What draws goddess and saint together is not who they were but how the artists presented them, the reverence that Botticelli and Raphael shared for the human … sidling all the way over into outright joy. Our talented team of artists felt it too. They utterly reveled in designing and sewing the costumes, painting the scenery, posing, photographing as much of the process as possible, and finding the modern superwomen within the timeless icons.

Indeed, is there any better way to spend a day—or an era?

Goddess of Mysteries

That stately but ethereal figure on our outside cover cannot be anyone other than Venus, goddess of love and beauty. She is an ancient goddess reborn (yes, Botticelli painted that Venus too), a somewhat serious spirit presiding over others’ pleasure: She is one of the ideals to which we aspire. She is also the mother of Cupid, who flies blindfolded over her head, aiming his arrow willy-nilly into a crowd—because you never know when love (or inspiration, or the dawn of a new age) might strike you.

Dating phases of creativity is always dicey, but we’ll go ahead and break the Italian Renaissance down into four major periods: the early gearing-up (1300–1450), the Renaissance generally speaking (1450–1500), the High Renaissance (1500–1520), and a long, lingering, late era (1520–1625) infused with Mannerism, spilling over into the drama of the Baroque. We’ve covered a bit of it all in these pages, from early angels to Queen Elizabeth, and of course, the flourishing art scene.

Botticelli was born around 1445 and belonged to that second phase. He was from a family of goldsmiths (formerly leather tanners), and he lived all his life in one neighborhood in Florence, with some forays to Rome. When he reinvented himself as a painter, he became known for otherworldly, fine- featured, slightly pensive-looking Madonnas. And then came Primavera, and it changed everything.

This huge painting (about 6 ⅔ by 10 ⅓ feet) is a nest of mysteries. We don’t even know what Botticelli might have called it—art historian Giorgio Vasari gave it the name we know, some seventy years after it was made. What we do know is that Primavera was the first large-scale painting of classical gods and goddesses undertaken since the classical era. Here we see Mercury, the Three Graces, Venus, Flora, the wind Zephyrus, and the nymph Chloris. People had heard of these entities but hadn’t seen them portrayed on such a scale. Botticelli’s masterwork is everything that Renaissance humanism and art were about—an expansion of beliefs and references, with a realistic sense of dimension in the space through which painted bodies appeared to move, and love at the center of it all (or just slightly off-center, anyway).

Now take away the party, the friends—just leave Cupid, because he’s part of who Venus is—and the ancient goddess manifests new qualities. Draped in bright colors over a pale gown, with the hint of gold armor over her heart, she is regal, commanding—a strong beauty. She can hold her own in solitude.

Botticelli’s Venus meets our gaze, her head tilted to the side. Flirting a little? Not if we look at her closely. She seems thoughtful, perhaps assessing us. Are we worthy of love?

Her hand lifts in greeting, or maybe she’s just about to make a pronouncement.

We might not have all the answers, but do we really need a reason to celebrate Venus? Shouldn’t life be all about love and abundance anyway?

Goddess of Transformation

To love, and to love beauty, means you have a curious mind and an adventurous streak—you want to experience the world as you find yourself in it. So our modern Venus, embodied by model Tee Pimentel, is not quite so judgy as Botticelli’s. She asks, What is love, anyway? How do you define what’s beautiful in your life? She has a sense of humor; having exchanged Botticelli’s blue-gray gown for one in diaphanous white, she crosses her arms, just on the point of laughing good-heartedly in our faces. But laughter is just one side of her. She’s also dreamy, passionate, serious, inhabiting each mood fully—a truly human goddess. She urges us to embrace all our emotions. And isn’t it just about time?

Our clothes have always signaled who we are to the world, and as our Venus decides to change hers, we discover new mysteries. The layers peel away. Designer Jill Andrews has added luxe elements such as the cloth-of-gold (a modern silk lamé) that glimmers beneath the filmy white overdress. That gold emerges as Venus’s sleeves, showing she’s precious through and through.

But our girl chooses not to stay Venus forever. When she steps into the Tuscan landscape of our second cover—both backgrounds painted marvelously by Nichole Leavy—she slips into a gown of iridescent blue silk chiffon with split sleeves, studded by 150-year-old gold buttons. Perhaps she is one of the

Muses: Clio for history; Polyhymnia for sacred poetry, song, and dance; Thalia for comedy and celebration. Or a new Muse for a modern age that embraces the past …

Why, incidentally, is there no Muse for painting? Some people say it’s because art must be governed by the goddess of beauty. Or maybe all of us are the Muses. Because even a so-called ordinary girl can change the world.

Breaking the Wheel

Take, for example, Raphael’s Saint Catherine of Alexandria, painted with the spiked wheel of her martyrdom, face turned to the heavens in ecstatic conversation. She too has been a guiding spirit for the Renaissance and beyond: intense, intelligent, sure of her convictions and her rightful place. Not afraid to suffer for her beliefs.

Born around 287, Catherine was a princess and a bookworm (girl after our heart) who converted to Christianity at age fourteen. She set about converting other Romans until the emperor Maxentius considered her a problem when she was about eighteen. He sent pagan philosophers to teach her a lesson and bring her back to the official state religion—and she out-debated them, even convinced some of them to adopt the new faith. Naturally, Maxentius threw her in prison. She held firm. He proposed marriage; she refused. But when he condemned her to death, she accepted with grace.

The method of execution was to have been that spiky wheel on which she leans in Raphael’s picture. It was a cruel sentence, with the executioner using the wheel to break victims’ bones and then leaving them to die. But when the wheel came out, Catherine touched it—and it shattered under her hand. So Maxentius ordered the executioner to cut off her head … and instead of blood, her wound ran with milk.

Saint Catherine has endured for more than 1,700 years as a model of intelligence and resolve. In 1428, her voice urged sixteen- year-old Joan of Arc to take charge of the French army; this princess also knew how to be a warrior.

Joan’s heroism was still within living memory when Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (even his name is a work of art) painted this picture around 1507. His Catherine embodied strength of character and grace, her body twisting away from the wheel that was meant to be her end and up to the heavens in which she trusts. And he painted her in ecstasy, plugged into the divine.

Our modern saint takes Raphael’s version a step further. She’s already shattered the wheel and kicked the pieces away; it doesn’t belong anywhere near her. When we first encounter her, on our inside cover, she meets our eyes immediately—chin up, proud and defiant, with a smile in the corners of her mouth. That’s right, she says, I’m still here. Page a little further into the feature and you’ll see that in her most Raphaelesque pose—eyes toward the sky—she has actually left the painting behind to plant her feet on the modern studio floor and channel the divine into this complicated world.

She shows up several times, too, in the work of Artemisia Gentileschi, who herself withstood torture to tell her own truth (see “When Women Painted the Renaissance” on page 28), and in paintings by Caravaggio, Titian, Vanessa Bell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and others.

Catherine is a princess in the very best sense: a brilliant intellectual, a persuasive debater, with a magical-miraculous scorn for anyone who tries to tell her who to be. She doesn’t need a weapon to fight a war; she has her mind and her will, a complexity that might surprise even our Venus. A secret smile between poses hints at even more mysteries to uncover, perhaps a challenge for us …

Will you be a goddess or a saint?

We answer her just as we’d answer our Venus: Why choose? Be one, be both, be anything. This is your Renaissance.

Feature Image:
Photography by Marketa Novak
Model: Nela Boudová

I imagine a mature woman with long, flowing hair with some noticeable strands of gray. She’s bedecked in a many-layered gown of autumn colors and wears a crown of leaves, some fully turned, some still showing bits of green. At her feet a bountiful harvest shares space with a bevy of woodland animals, the hibernators looking just a little sleepy. In her lap she holds a jolly jack-o’-lantern from which a spiral of pumpkin-scented smoke curls. When she’s being more casual she exchanges the jack-o’-lantern for a large, steaming mug of pumpkin-spice latte.
—Megan Mays

To me, an autumn queen would be someone who embodies all the fruitfulness of the season, the abundance of the harvest, and the bright raiment adorned by the deciduous trees. She would understand the cycles of the seasons, embrace change, and not fear death, for she’d know that the ephemeral nature of life is what gives it such value. An autumn queen is whom I wish to channel as I reach and surpass my middle years, reminding me not to fear getting older but to embrace every season of my life.
—Kimberly Bea

I see a mountain path covered in fallen aspen leaves, a foot deep in yellows and golds, crunchy with that fresh deep mountain scent only aspens have. A bright yellow canopy of leaves casts shadows and creates a mysterious otherworldly glow as crows gather high in the trees and boulders. The cooler winds usher others into houses but calls to the woman who walks in the mountains on autumn nights.
—Candice Rose

A woman at ease and contemplative. The time for rushing is over; now it’s time for rest. She slowly meanders through the forest, singing the trees to sleep.
—@_elle_on_earth

I think of the crisp leaves crunching under our feet as we make our way through a leaf-strewn path. The birdsong high in the branches and the scurrying of the squirrels with acorns in their cheeks. The smell in the air of damp leaves and smoke from the fire. We’re dressed in our autumnal skirts, knit sweaters, and wellie boots, plodding along. We’ve donned our homemade brown wicker crowns adorned with the last orange, yellow, and red marigolds, and our noses tickle in their scent. Our excitement builds the closer we get to our bonfire and picnic, where we’ll make merry with friends and strangers alike.
—Deb R.

Everything about my queen is hues of autumn foliage and fall fruits: golds and tawnies, wheat and dark ale, ochre, umber, maple red or violet-black, grapes, orange pumpkins, and ghost-pale gourds, dried vines, and the deep evergreens that will scent the air and crackle in fires through the cold months ahead. She tints herself as she wishes moment to moment, from her crown of fallen leaves and rose hips to her dappled eyes to her warm gowns of velvet and rustling silk taffeta. She’s bejeweled with glossy berries and shining nutshells. Her scepter is a fallen branch.
—@saralindacloud

“Autumn queen” reminds me of dark fairy tales, powerful elven queens, and Mother Nature’s magical side—giving so many gifts of beauty yet revealing the allure of darkness at the same time!
—@jewelrynomen

I picture an auburn-haired enchantress draped in fallen leaves yet in reality a woman surrounded by her harvest— home-canned goods, squashes, dried food, pies, and the food storage she’s prepared for the winter months.
—@faerienicole

Golds, reds, and oranges. Harvest crown, flower embroidery on her dress. A woven basket with bread, scones, and cake.
—@adifferentmojo

Okay: It’s 2012. Ingrid Michaelson’s “Just the Way I Am” is playing on the radio. Crocheted slouchy beanies are in everyone’s closet, and twee is the fashion moment. I’m outside in the crisp fall air, leaves falling around me and littering the streets in hues of gold, pumpkin orange, and faded chocolate. I have colored tights on under my shorts and a Peter Pan–collared shirt. Life is perfect through my thick-framed plastic glasses that I took the lenses out of.
—@jonnyblacktypes

I think of all of us in this household—my daughter-in-law and me and, we suspect, soon her older daughter, who is a hedge witch in training for sure—who look forward to autumn all year long and then celebrate and revel in it commensurately!
—Jennifer Elizabeth Brunton

I imagine long skirts dragging along the crispy leaves in the forest. An autumn queen would surely be out enjoying the trails!
—Nicole Platania

Leafy crown. Tea party under the trees. Dancing fairies in autumn colors!
—@candy_morningstar

We think that Jasmine Tucker, a.k.a. founder of Black Fae Day @blackfaedayofficial, perfectly captures the joy and beauty of an Autumn Queen in this capture by Carlos Williams Jr. Black Fae Day is dedicated to promoting the representation of Black people in high fantasy across various media and has been celebrated on the second Saturday of May each year since 2021.

Text and photography by Steve Parke

A Queen in the Forest: Capturing the Magic of My 87-Year-Old Mother

I’ve photographed countless people in my decadeslong career—including the artist Prince, over many years as his art director at Paisley Park, and numerous models for Faerie Magazine, now Enchanted Living, as photographer and photo editor. (I believe at this point I’m up to sixteen covers!) But when I learned the theme for this issue, I proposed doing what might be my most epic photo shoot yet: one with my very own mother, Joyce Parke, eighty-seven years old and a queen if there ever was one, straight down to her mismatched earrings.

Many moons ago she and my dad plucked up a red-haired baby that needed a family (yes, I’m adopted!), and she was the best mother she could have possibly been to me, always treating me as no less than her firstborn. She has a gigantic heart and is accepting of everyone she meets; in fact, she’ll usually send new friends a handwritten card through the mail if she spends more than two hours with them. She’ll tell them about the weather, the latest murder mystery she’s watching, and how sadistic her new weight trainer at the gym was (or wasn’t) that day. My mother’s letters are famous.

Embracing the Magic: A Deep-Forest, Witchy Queen Photoshoot

Here was a way to give something back to her.

I wanted the opportunity to show her in a queenly light, which is the way she should be shown, of course, but as a deep-forest, witchy kind of queen, because that’s her style. Just take a look at her ability to fit more tchotchkes in one square inch than any law of physics should allow, or watch her side-eye when she says something hilarious and you’re not sure if you heard her correctly. (You did.)

My wife, Kim, and I came up with her outfit, centered on the glorious red velvet cloak she’s wearing, and I did her makeup myself, having watched her do it throughout my childhood. I set my sights on the fairground at the Maryland Renaissance Festival, a place I’ve loved and worked at since my teenage years. And then my mother posed flawlessly for a couple of hours, remarking on how exhausting modelling seems as a potential profession. I don’t think she has any idea how many people a third of her age get just as tired under the same circumstances.

I think she has a big career ahead of her. Don’t you?

Find Steve Parke’s portfolio, prints, and publications at steveparke.com.

We’re thrilled to share the cover of our upcoming Autumn Queen issue, which will ship in September and which features a true queen, Vlasta Gerhardová, mother of Slovakian photographer Michaela Ďurišová, whose gorgeous portraits we’ve featured numerous times on social media as well as in these pages. How stunning is she?

This issue is full of autumnal delights and faerie queens and the night forest and bats and moths and bioluminescence and candlelight and black velvet cakes and we think it’s really rather epic and dazzling and cannot wait to show you more of it.

For now here’s just a peek:

If you’d like to pre-order the issue, you can do so at https://enchantedlivingmag.com/products/enchanted-living-issue-68-autumn-2024-print

If you’d like to subscribe, you can do so at https://enchantedlivingmag.com/collections/subscribe

And if you’d like to gift a subscription to a friend, you can do so here: https://enchantedlivingmag.com/collections/gift-subscriptions

From the early 1820s until 1829, young Manx artist Amelia Jane Murray (1800–1896) rather obsessively painted fairies—smartly dressed and not overly active tiny creatures, that is, who reclined on feathers and stems and leaves as if they were chaise longues. Her fairies rode upon bats, bees, moths, and dragonflies; relaxed atop shells, on the backs of seabirds, and inside curving, flowering leaves that skimmed through the water; and occasionally swung in hammocks made of cobwebs strung among the blooms. They might perch on a snail on a rosebud, holding a leaf like a parasol. Like miniature Snow Whites (the Disney version), they are friends to all living creatures … except every living creature is their chauffeur—because these miniature fashionistas do not like to walk or use their wings, ever. Why should they?

Murray herself was from a privileged background. Her family once held sovereign rights to the Isle of Man, where she grew up, and her uncle was governor there. We imagine she may have preferred to hang out with spiders and snails and owls. Or not. No one knows much at all about Murray’s inner life, except that she created this exuberant art in her twenties. She stopped in 1829, when she married a man twenty-nine years her senior and moved to Fife, Scotland, to live with him and his six children.

Amelia, now Lady Oswald of Dunniker, ended up having two children of her own and long outliving her husband. She never (as far as we know) painted fairies again. But who can say what she might have left sealed in an attic, being guarded by an eclipse of moths, covered in cobwebs?

Her art passed through four generations of descendants before it was published for the first time in 1986, in a small, unassuming volume called A Regency Lady’s Faery Bower, alongside a short history of her family, snippets of poetry from Shakespeare and the like, and eternal questions such as this one: “Why, it is pertinent to ask, should a young lady in her twenties be so drawn to this unusual subject?”

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Sylvie Facon would like to see you in the library. That is, she would like to see you wearing the library, namely in the form of one of her fantastic couturier gowns.

Made from actual antiquarian books that she takes apart and manipulates, Facon’s creations are at once both avant-garde and romantic, innovative and steeped in history. She collects materials from the odd corners of library and bookstore, where she says you’ll find “passion fully expressed, a mastery of subjects”—though the tomes themselves have probably languished unopened for years. Or think of them this way: waiting. It is their destiny to be rediscovered and repurposed, cleverly fashioned into marvels to make their wearers and beholders gasp.

By now you’re already imagining yourself slipping into a one-of-a-kind Facon. Pull the heavy bindings and spines up around your spine. Settle the gathered pages around your waist and get help lacing yourself into that corset. You have entered the fever dream of a writer, bookseller, couturier, reader, lover. With every step, your gown sways like a bell; your pages rustle; the edges of your bodice part to reveal precious handwritten lines. You can truly call yourself an open book when an ancient tome’s pages unfurl from your hips.

Already known for unique bridal wear and floral gowns, Facon—a resident of Arras, France—was inspired to create her first book dress when she encountered steampunk. The movement’s philosophy about using old materials to make something unexpected and new gave her exciting visions of new uses for book covers and bindings.

In an interview that took place over email, Facon said, “What I love most in old books is what I call ‘the colors of time’s passing’: the aged leathers, the color of their pages, what’s unique and precious. The fact that they have been witnesses to lives, generations, big events—that they’ve survived all of that to arrive at me.”

By making books into dresses, she “can put them into conversation with other precious materials that enhance their beauty.” So to their sturdy leather and foxed pages she adds tulle, rattan, and lace to create garments both spectacular and personal: showy statement pieces that feel as intimate as a whisper.

“I work from an impulse toward harmony and gentleness,” she says, “thus very few contrasts.” When she looks for materials, she has an eye out for “sketches, drawings, and paintings with a lot of finesse. Elegant typography. An impression of profusion.”  The colors are in half-tint, slightly faded, never “garish.”

She has completed nine out of a projected ten chapters, each one a different dress. What drives the series is “above all a desire to say things in my own way, to tell stories.” Her authorship is emphasized in a technique that partially erases it, as she makes sure none of the sewing work shows. Only the final creation should be seen, she says: “We move from one kind of material to another in an almost invisible way.”

The effect does not come easily. A dress needs curves to fit a woman’s body, but the old leather bindings and spines are not supple. Facon has a “little secret” for protecting their integrity while she works with them—and an artist must guard her secrets closely—but she says she does not use steam or any chemical products to alter the physical books. She simply works with them gently, coaxing them into the shapes she requires. Call her the book whisperer.

Inspiration comes also from a friend’s bookstore in the center of Arras. The ground floor may look like a typical bookshop, but, she says, “the mezzanine level takes us to the past. Thousands of old books are packed tight on shelves that sag under their weight”—old books that are no longer for sale and that “have no great value, but in my eyes are very aesthetic.”

Her own personal library is curated for the visual and the magical. She loves illustrated editions about fairies, elves, dragons, and other enchanted creatures, and the work of French artists Sandrine Gestin and Didier Graffet. “Their world is also mine,” she says.

That world is ever expanding into entire universes of possibility. One idea sparks another as Facon builds couture out of fantasy. One of the challenges she faces while creating the book dresses is precisely “to stay in the realm of original haute couture, not costume.” She explains that a costume is a way of transforming oneself to embody a character or era; a costumer puts her creativity at the service of the client’s vision. Original haute couture requires precise technical savoir faire and flawless handmade execution—most important, it represents an artistic vision that soars above the materials to express ideas of the art, artist, and time themselves.

In one of Facon’s creations, you don’t just wear the story; you are the story.

Visit Sylvie Facon online at sylviefacon-creatrice.fr/en/home.
Find Susann Cokal online at susanncokal.com.