Style File: Anaïs Nin

 

 

I may as well start out saying I love Anaïs Nin. There are a lot of critics (read: haters) out there who trash talk her for narcissism or fabrication, but those aspects are some of the best parts of her writing. She's dramatic and mysterious, sometimes indecisive and insecure, often manic and sexually confident. She's had many faces and disguises - she can never be quite pinned down, but her writing reveals her struggles with the creation and abstraction of her personality and femininity in a time of normalized sexism I can only imagine as a nightmare. Her writing is smattered with lies and delusions she is constantly clawing through to see clearly. Though she hung around the Paris pre WW2 arts scene, and bankrolled more than one male artist who never appreciated her talent (can't write about Anaïs without mentioning Henry Miller [eyeroll]), she was always somewhat of an outsider, for incalculable reasons of gender or politics or what have you.
Her later life is just as interesting as her youth, when she was unapologetically polygamous, having moved to California and married a husband 16 years her junior while still married to her first husband, and hiding the truth from both parties. She was also in experimental films of Kenneth Anger and Maya Deran. Despite long struggles to get published, mixed up with her personal anxieties about privacy threatened in revealing the full truth in her diaries, Anaïs' tale doesn't end with punishment for her transgressions of social norms.  Her diaries are great. The cherry on top is she's a pisces, like me.

Now, to get her look:
Pencil in eyebrows real skinny, pin up the hair with a big flower or hat on top, wear something long and preferably velvet or with fur trim; dark painted nails, red lips and a mischievous smirk

(drawn as a gibson girl)

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