Fleurs de Villes takes cues from ‘Downton Abbey' at South Coast Plaza
It's the fifth consecutive visit for the touring special exhibit featuring fresh floral installations. This year's theme takes cues from the show's fictional Crawley family, with mannequins in dressed in Edwardian fashions surrounded by high society props like a Tiffany lamp and a Rolls Royce.
Fleurs de Villes co-founder Karen Marshall said she and her business partner, Tina Barkley, started their floral display business in Vancouver, Canada in 2016 but didn't go full-time with it until 2019.
'And one of our first locations in the United States was here at South Coast Plaza,' Marshall said.
On view through Sunday and presented in partnership with Focus Features and Carnival Films, the Downton Abbey theme coincides with the theatrical release of the third film in the series, 'Downton Abbey: A Grand Finale' on Sept. 12.
'This spectacular floral exhibit is created in collaboration with some of Southern California's most talented floral designers,' Michelle Dalton Tyree, director of public relations for South Coast Plaza said at the preview reception. 'It brings to life all of the beloved Downton Abbey characters in the form of your favorite blooms.'
The exhibit also ushers in the 35th annual Southern California Spring Garden Show, a four-day garden event hosting more than 40 garden vendors and sellers of unique plants in the Crate & Barrel and Macy's Home Store Wings of South Coast Plaza, also through Sunday. Visitors will find four more Fleurs de Villes mannequins on display in that area of the shopping mecca.
In addition to the garden vendors and Fleurs de Villes, the show features outdoor living space vignettes, plus other home and garden displays. Carol Younger, senior horticulturist at Sherman Library & Gardens, leads guided tours of South Coast Plaza's core palm tree collection.
Marshall and Barkley thanked the participating florists present at the opening for their talent and hard work: Los Angeles Floral Couture, Kat's Floral Design, CJ Matsumoto and Sons, OC Florista, Florals by Mitzi, Sarah C. Brown Designs, NPD Events, Orla Floral Studio, Maravilla Floral Designs, Ivory Florist, Lilac Studios, Backstage-A-Fare Events, Paul Fenner Floral Design, Kissed by Tulips and Flower Bunny.
'The love of flowers is universal,' said Barkley. 'It doesn't matter what language you speak, how much money is in your bank, everyone loves flowers and these displays really speak to everyone.'
A floral installation inspired by Lady Mary Crawley of 'Downton Abbey' by Sarah C. Brown Designs features a slip-like beaded dress crafted from silver dollar eucalyptus. The character is donned in the modern silhouette, her short bob hairstyle accented with a gold headband, an example of the evolution of fashion that came with the arrival of the 1920s flapper era.
The wedding dress inspired Lady Edith Crawley's wedding gown by CJ Matsumoto and Sons uses 4,000 skeleton leaves for the lace veil and pumpkin seeds sewn on the hem serving as the beaded embellishment.
'We were definitely going for a very realistic look and also a lot of drama, as you can tell by the wedding veil and the train,' said David Navarro, creative director at CJ Matsumoto and Sons. 'That actually was the beginning process of the whole look; the veil itself took about two weeks.'
The detailed work of Navarro and his team didn't go unnoticed. CJ Matsumoto and Sons won the title for Most Creative and Florist Favorite from display judges. Other recognized florists included NPD Florals for Most Realistic and Florals by Mitzi for Best in Show.
This was Navarro's fifth time participating in Fleurs de Villes and he said his team has learned to choose hearty flowers that can stand up to being on display for five days indoors. A majority of the building happens in the CJ Matsumoto and Sons shop it's transferred to South Coast Plaza, where Navarro and the other florists work late into the night to finalize their creation.
While the exhibit is on display this week, visitors have the chance to vote for the fan favorite, an honor Navarro hopes CJ Matsumoto and Sons will earn.
'I just want people to know there is lot of hard work that we put into this,' Navarro said, surveying his team's craftsmanship. 'It looks like it paid off.'
'Fleurs de Villes Downton Abbey' is on view throughout South Coast Plaza Level 1, Jewel Court and Crate & Barrel/Macy's Home Store wings through Sunday, April 27.
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National Geographic
14 hours ago
- National Geographic
The original sirens in mythology weren't the seductresses we know today
Sirens torment Ulysses with their enchanting song in Herbert James Draper's 1909 painting titled 'Ulysses and the Sirens.' Draper portrays the Sirens as sexualized mermaids, consistent with other Edwardian era depictions of the creatures. © Ferens Art Gallery / Bridgeman Images For thousands of years sirens have lured sailors, haunted coastlines—and shapeshifted through myth and media. Here's how they evolved to the seductive mermaids of our modern imagination. The Greek hero Odysseus famously faces many travails as he attempts to return home following the Trojan War, from giant cannibals to enigmatic enchantresses. But one challenge stands out as perhaps the most evocative, dangerous, and enduring of them all: the sirens, with their hypnotic and mesmerizing song, who call to passing sailors. To stop is certain death. They're powerful and mysterious figures and even now, of all the creatures from Greek myths, audiences simply can't get enough of them. Sirens have been a fixture of the Western imagination since the time of Homer and the composition of The Odyssey in the 8th century B.C. They appear in the works of ancient Roman writers like Pliny the Elder and Ovid, and one even appears in Dante's Divine Comedy. They fascinated painters of the 19th century and now lend their name to television shows and the "siren-core" fashion aesthetic touted by social media creators. (Dante's 'Inferno' is a journey to hell and back.) But these mythological creatures have shifted forms dramatically over the centuries, transforming with the times to reflect society's complicated and ever-changing relationship with desire. In modern popular culture, sirens are alluring creatures of the sea, most commonly women, often sporting shimmering mermaid tails. But their ancient Greek roots weren't fishlike at all; instead, they were bird-bodied creatures associated with death. Here's how sirens have evolved over time, and why their song stays so loud in popular culture. A attic terracotta status from Greece 300 BCE shows Sirens in their original, bird-woman form. Photograph by Peter Horree, Alamy Stock Photo This artwork titled 'A Siren and a Centaur' shows how classical mythology and artistic imagination have blended together to reshape Sirens iconography. The piece portrays a bird-like siren (left) and centaur (right) in an imaginative and dynamic scene. Photograph by ART Collection, Alamy Stock Photo Homer's Odyssey is the sirens' earliest appearance. Thought to have been composed sometime in the 8th century B.C., the poem follows the winding path of the hero Odysseus as he returns home to Ithaca and his long-suffering wife from the Trojan War. Along the way, he faces Greek gods, marvels, and monsters, including the sirens. The sorceress Circe warns him about the creatures, telling him that they 'bewitch all passersby. 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For example, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts holds a funerary plaque from the 7th century B.C. depicting a mourning scene, in which two women flank a funeral couch that holds a corpse. Crouched underneath is a siren. Some sources, including Euripides' 5th century B.C. play Helen and Ovid's 8th century A.D. poem Metamorphoses, associate the sirens with Persephone, the goddess of spring carried off by Hades, god of the underworld, to become his queen. Some stories say they were given wings to seek Persephone. According to Beaulieu, som e sources, including the Argonautica , show sirens as the daughters of one of the Muses. 'Except that in a way, they're the Muses of death, instead of the Muses of life, because they lure people to death with this singing,' says Beaulieu. This mural from the 14th century shows a Siren playing music. During this period, the enchantresses were depicted as both bird-women and mermaids. Photograph by Heritage Image Partnership Ltd, Alamy Stock Photo How the iconography of sirens has evolved Sirens retained their bird bodies into the time of the Roman Empire and well beyond; Pliny the Elder includes them in the 'Fabulous Birds' section of his Natural History, written around A.D. 77, claiming they lull men to sleep with their song and then tear them to pieces. (Though he's a skeptic that they exist.) But over the course of the Middle Ages, the siren transformed. More and more they began exhibiting fishtails, not bird bodies. The two types coexisted from the 12th through 14th centuries at least, Beaulieu explains, but eventually the mermaid-like creature emerged as dominant. That shift is probably thanks in part to the strong Greek and Roman tradition of unrelated sea gods like Triton, as well as the sirens' association with water. But it's also thanks in no small part to the influence of Celtic folklore traditions. 'The blending is a super interesting syncretism of cultures,' says Beaulieu, pointing to 14th century tradition about St. Brendan the Navigator, an early Irish Christian whose journeys parallel those of Odysseus. Naturally, he encounters a siren on his odyssey—only this one is wholly recognizable to modern audiences as a mermaid. How Christianity has shaped Greek mythology As the physical appearance of the sirens began to shift, so did their symbolic meaning. The sirens of ancient Greece were considered beautiful—but they tempted Odysseus with songs of glory, not simply sex. Ancient Greeks were more concerned with power dynamics, so a man having sex with a subordinate woman wasn't a problem. 'You get into trouble when you have a goddess having sex with a mortal, for instance,' explains Beaulieu. "That's part of what would have given the sirens their menace." But medieval Christianity saw sex and sirens differently. They became symbols of temptation itself, a way to talk about the lures of worldly pleasures and the deceptive, corrupting pull of sin. Hence the appearance of a siren in Dante's 14th century Divine Comedy. The very same creature who tempted Odysseus comes to Dante in a dream and identifies herself as 'the pleasing siren, who in midsea leads mariners astray.' In the end, his guide and companion through the underworld (the epic poet Virgil) grabs her, tears her clothing, and exposes the 'stench' of her belly showing the medieval siren is sexually alluring but repulsive. Those medieval temptresses are unmistakably the roots of modern sirens, with their dangerously attractive songs. The association between sirens, mermaids, and temptation only grew tighter in the 19th century, when painters returned again and again to creamy-skinned, bare-breasted sirens with lavish hair. There is no better example than John William Waterhouse's turn-of-the-century painting The Siren, where a lovely young woman gazes down at a stricken, shipwrecked young sailor who looks both terrified and enthralled. The sirens of modern-day popular culture Millennia later, the sirens continue to resonate. They're even inspiration for a fashion aesthetic: sirencore, a beachy and romantic look with just a little hint of menace. Modern creatives, meanwhile, are still turning to the sirens as a source of inspiration and a rich symbol for exploring power, gender, and knowledge. Netflix's new release Sirens, which adapts Molly Smith Metzler's 2011 play Elemeno Pea and stars Julianne Moore, explicitly grapples with the mythological figure. Director Nicole Kassell told The Hollywood Reporter, 'I love the idea of analyzing the idea of what a siren is, and who says what a siren is—the sailor. It's very fun to get to go back and consider it from a female lens.' Black sirens navigate the challenges of modern-day sexism and racism in Bethany C. Morrow's 2020 A Song Below Water; a Puerto Rican immigrant falls in love with a merman on turn-of-the-century Coney Island in Venessa Vida Kelley's 2025 When The Tides Held The Moon. For many writers, sirens are an opportunity to turn old tales and stereotypes on their head, using characters who've long been reviled and distrusted for their controversial power. The Sirens by Emilia Hart is one such modern-day retelling, which weaves between the modern day, and the 19th century transportation of Irish women convicts to Australia. 'I thought this mythological creature was the perfect way to give my female characters some power back into this historical narrative,' she explains. 'I wanted to make this general comment on how we think about women and how we have this idea of women as being temptresses, and we demonize them and we overly sexualize them, as a way of trying to explain or perhaps diminish their power,' she says. In the hands of modern-day writers, the sea can become a place of transformation, freedom, and potential. And sirens can be restored to a place of power and wisdom—and, yes, a bit of danger too.
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