Fashion Notes, ASvO

My review of Anne Sofie von Otter and Bengt Forsberg is up at SFCV. For this review, I had to give some though to whether to break one of my personal rules for reviewing and talk about what von Otter was wearing. I decided against it, so here's what I was thinking.

Orange is almost never a good fashion choice. It can work if you're dark-skinned; it's not hard to imagine Jessye Norman stunningly beautiful in an earth-tones-and-orange outfit, for example. But ASvO is about as far from dark-skinned as a human can get without being albino.

Orange is an even worse fashion choice when it's the ground color of a paisley whose highlight colors are blue and white.

And when you're a six-foot-tall blonde Swedish goddess, well....let's just say I spent more of the recital looking at the song texts than I ordinarily would have, given von Otter's special blend of beauty and charm. She would have been drop-dead gorgeous in ruby, in deep blue, in black, in white, in forest green, in any number of other colors, but no, instead she performed in a dress that looked like someone's nightmare memory of the 60s. I'm hoping she'll leave the orange paisley in Stockholm next time she goes on tour.