On the right, Louise Brooks, the darkest sylph of silent sensuality. It isn't merely her beauty that makes modern film buffs still pine, nor is it the bob — "that radical, chirpy cut, which carried with it the dizzying innuendo of casual intimacy." It's the way her entire personality permutes through her body: the screw of her features when she is perplexed, the delighted smile, the strange tantrums, the soft curling of impishness upon the purse of her mouth. It's one of the reasons why it's hard to understand her beauty merely from pictures: Louise Brooks is a siren only in motion.
On the left, Sophie Dahl (incidentally, granddaughter of Roald Dahl), dressing up as Louise Brooks advertising a watch by Boucheron Paris. The copy? "A Watch for an eternity dreamed of by Louise Brooks." I have no idea what that means, but as lovely as Sophie Dahl is, she simply looks nothing like Louise. She looks too sultry: part of Louise's appeal was how her fresh faced and innocent beauty (too clean to be seductive in itself) juxtaposed with the exquisite carnality of the movement of her body. And the epochal bob is all wrong. A bob should be fluid, as if a bottle of ink so violet it's black has been poured over the scalp. This feathered bob is a travesty. And Louise Brooks should never be approximated in color: the juxtaposition of darkness against her pale, silver skin is all the allure.
It makes me sad. Sophie Dahl is undeniably ravishing, but she is a farce as Brooks.
