Bedizen, a verb, means to dress up in fine and showy attire. It also means to decorate something in a gaudy, vulgar or tasteless manner.
It is a great source of fun for me to watch the stars as they walk the red carpet for the award shows bedizened in fabric and jewels. Many entertainers have gained great notoriety based on how outrageous they dress, such as Madonna, Elton John, Cher, Lady Gaga and many more. Who is your favorite?
How we decorate our homes or ourselves is a matter of taste. Something that seems gaudy to one, might be gorgeous to someone else. Ultimately how we decorate ourselves and the things in our lives allows us to express ourselves in a unique and creative manner. A great freedom.
"At 18, he attended a party "frizzled, powdered and curled, in radiant pink satin, with waistcoat bedizened with gems of pink paste and a mosaic of colored foils and a hat blazing with 5,000 metallic beads,” according to Michael Battersberry in "Fashion, The Mirror of History."
-- Donna Larcen, "Details Details: Everything Old Is New Again", St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 19, 1994“Prithee, young one, who art thou, and what has ailed thy mother to bedizen thee in this strange fashion?” The Scarlett Letter by Nathan Hawthorne
Here are a couple of my favorites from the red carpet:
Some history of Bedizen..........
ReplyDeleteDid you know?
"Bedizen" doesn't have the flashy history you might expect -- its roots lie in the rather quiet art of spinning thread. In times past, the spinning process began with the placement of fibers (such as flax) on an implement called a "distaff"; the fibers were then drawn out from the distaff and twisted into thread. "Bedizen" descends from the verb "disen," which meant "to dress a distaff with flax" and which came to English by way of Middle Dutch. The spelling of "disen" eventually became "dizen," and its meaning expanded to cover the "dressing up" of things other than distaffs. In the mid-17th century, English speakers began using "bedizen" with the same meaning.