everyday i watch you paint the town so pretty

Not just one of my favorite Marianne looks, but one of my favorite looks of all time. I love the combination of the patterned frock with simple knee-high boots. If I could dress like this everyday, I most definitely would. 

Title: from "Streetwalker" (Michael Jackson)

The Marianne Chronicles: The Demeanor

Marianne Faithfull is intensely intelligent, fiercely witty, and the kind of alluring free spirit that attracts countless hoards of people. Alain Delon, her Motorcycle costar, once said, "She is a happening all to herself. She is the type of girl men fought dragons for in mythology, the type that duels have been fought over." Not only is that the best thing that anyone has said about anyone ever, it's also really damn true. Nowadays she is a world-weary chanteuse, one who has lived through everything and is still here to sing about her adventures, but back in the sixties, she was a dreamer. She saw no end to what she hoped to accomplish and who she hoped to be. In Faithfull, she detailed how "between the ages of 17 and 19 I shed any number of old lives and grew new ones overnight without any of them seeming quite real to me; I discarded them as cavalierly as a child who moves from one game to another. Pursued in interest, any one of these might have led to a reasonably happy life. But then again, I wasn't interested in happiness. I was looking for the Holy Grail." I feel like that speaks to a lot of us young dollies out there who are looking for our own 'Holy Grail' (preferably one that includes Mick Jagger!)
Marianne was fiercely independent and never apologized for her behavior - she followed her heart no matter what. Whether that meant leaving John Dunbar for Mick, or doing some pretty drastic things to shake off her convent girl persona, Marianne was never satisfied following convention.

The Marianne Chronicles

What can be said about Marianne Faithfull? A lot, actually. She’s been known as Miss X, the girl on a motorcycle, the goddess of proto-goth punk, a convent girl, the angel with big tits (to charmingly quote Andrew Loog Oldham), the girl in the fur rug, homeless junkie in Ossie Clark, a vamp with a whiskey-soaked voice to match, the daughter of an Austro-Hungarian baroness, descendent of Leopold Baron von Sacher Masoch. She's been known by many names and many labels. She's been written about and then written off more times than half of Hollywood. 

I've been working for a while on a follow-up to the Pattie Chronicles centered around Marianne, and I feel confident enough to begin sharing some of what I've gathered about the enigmatic Miss Faithfull. Hopefully it won't disappoint. 

"I’ve always known who I was. Whether I could achieve to express that to everyone else was another matter. I am who I am. I’m confident enough now to show myself. Perhaps it took this long – I’ve thought of it before – it’s as if I’ve been staying undercover. You know, how animals keep to the trees and bushes, if they might get killed. I often think that’s what I was doing until very recently." - MF