Therefore, the young woman who escaped the greyness of New Jersey built her own codes of beauty and femininity, which Robert Mapplethorpe’s portrait on the extraordinary sleeve of Patti Smith’s Horses captures so well.

I'm not sure that Holly Golightly, to whom the wonderful and unique Audrey Hepburn lent her elegant, radiant and spicy beauty and her auburn chignon mixed with gold, is finally more "beautiful" than the Patti Smith from Horses in her late twenties, with her fine-boned extreme slimness encompassed in this supple body tapered like a steel beam, that was hers by then. A beauty based on a translucent complexion, gray-gold-blue eyes glowing like fire and her loose, free and wild black mane that no comb ever seemed to be able to tame.

Only the appearance changes, as beautiful in one case as in the other, but on radically different aesthetic reading grids. The background, the essence remain the same : the fragility of the uprooting, the refusal of the codes and rules, the pursuit of love, and the everyday nagging, burning, obsessive vital question: how am I going to get myself some dough!

Free Money? Come on, you wandering drifters, you just have to break windows, and all the pearls and diamonds that you always longed for are there, awaiting in self-service, shimmering like a river in the moonlight.

 

 

Every night before I go to sleep
Find a ticket, win a lottery
Scoop the pearls up from the sea
Cash them in and buy you
all the things you need

Free Money
Patti Smith – Horses (1975)

Two drifters, off to see the world
There's such a lot of world to see
We're after the same rainbow's end
Waitin' 'round the bend
My huckleberry friend, Moon river and me

Moon River
Henry Mancini & Johnny Mercer
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)