"Was Queen Elizabeth hot?/Confirm. She was very stylish in the ’60s."

"She had a fabulous figure, fabulous waist and big bosoms, and she looked good in her clothes."

That's André Leon Talley, doing a "Confirm or Deny" interview with Maureen Dowd. I'm putting this up for Meade because just yesterday we had a discussion about whether it's ignorant or jauntily jocose to put "bosom" in the plural (when speaking of only one person) and because the interview — the whole thing — is very amusing.

The OED takes my side on "bosoms": "In recent use, a woman's breasts. colloq." with quotes going back to 1959:

1959   C. MacInnes Absolute Beginners* 68   Snaps of the Dean sell like hot ice-cream among vintage women with too many bosoms and time on their hands.
1961   L. Hughes Ask your Mama 72   Sojourner..Bared her bosoms, bared in public To prove she was a woman.
1965   I. Fleming Man with Golden Gun v. 70   She gave him a quick glimpse of fine bosoms as she bent to the door of the icebox.
1978   C. Beaton Parting Years 2   Can you really imagine that is the way the arm comes out of the socket? Look at their bosoms—they're nowhere near where they should be. Have you ever seen a naked woman?
1986   Observer 2 Mar. 60/1   She was larger than lifesize: enormous buttocks and stomach, with two medium-sized watermelons for bosoms.

Those are some fine quotes! I love "medium-sized watermelons." Meade is outside shoveling snow, and here I am consulting the Oxford English Dictionary to win a debate from yesterday. It's not really a debate. I agree that "bosom" embraces the entire chestal area. "Bosoms," like "chestal area," is silly, and that is the point. By comparison, "breast" has always referred to the entire area OR to one of "the two soft protuberances situated on the thorax in females, in which the milk is secreted for the nourishment of their young; the mamma" (as the OED delightfully puts it). And by "always" I mean both meanings predate modern English.

Maureen Dowd got 2 articles out of her encounter with André Leon Talley. The other one is "Monsieur Vogue Is Leaving Trumpland." It's kind of sad. I don't remember noticing André Leon Talley, but he's an important fashion person. There had to be a reason to see him as being in Trumpland for it to be possible for him to be leaving Trumpland.

In fact, he'd traveled with Melania and helped her pick out her wedding gown. He'd "called Melania charming and private, 'soignée and polished' with 'impeccable' manners." He'd said that Melania was “a wonderful person to be with,” and that she “will be one of the great stars in the administration,” and even "I hope there will be a great, great Trump presidency.”

He got slammed by — well, Dowd doesn't say who:

It didn’t take long for the guillotine to fall. One friend emailed him, “Oh my God, you have gone to the Evil Empire!!!!!”

We're supposed to just somehow know that the fashion world demands that Trump be hated.

Did Talley contact Dowd and request some reputation-saving publicity? The next paragraph is:

He agonized about the “tragedy of ruptured friendships” to me in an email, saying about Melania: “She’s a nice person. I do not endorse Trumpism on any level. So why can’t one be positive and want her to shine? I mean, it’s good she cares about napkins, crystal, dinner plates with gilded edges to the point of over the top, and abundant flower arrangements. In the end, why pick on her when they should be picking on her husband’s billionaire cabinet and his seeming readiness to turn the country back towards oppression, anti-Semitism, anti-culturalism, etc.”

It sounds as though he wanted to play a part in the fashion and design side of the new presidency, but he couldn't bear the risk.

As we sit in the hotel lobby, he muses: “I’m not a big person in the world. I’m maybe a big figure in the fashion world. I mean, sort of iconic. But I don’t want to get phone calls in the middle of the night, telling me I’ve gone over to Trumpland and I’m going to Darth Vader because I said nice things about Melania....."

He's afraid of bullies.
______________________
*

The phrase "the Color Line."

The NYT has an opinion piece titled "Cousins, Across the Color Line," about present-day Americans of different races who trace their ancestry to the same white person, for example, those who see themselves as descendants of Thomas Jefferson.

At one point, Gayle [who is black and considers herself a descendant of Jefferson] asked me [a white woman who also considers herself a Jefferson descendant] if I was looking for absolution for what my family did, and we both agreed the word was imperfect. I think instead we are both looking for some present-tense reconciliation. We acknowledge our desire to feel connected to our shared history, and appreciate the fact that we can sit together, looking at the mystery of the past and trying to articulate what it means....

There is something radical in knowing Gayle....

The author, Tess Taylor, doesn't use the term "color line" in her text, though she does mention  reaching "across racial lines." The word "line" is also used in the essay to refer to ancestral lines, but put that to the side. I want to examine the inference, in the headline, that if a black and a white person today are connecting, they are crossing something called "the color line."