the.com/silhouette
a portrait that brags about your shape while keeping every secret you've got
means a dark outline or shape of someone or something shown filled in with solid color, usually black, against a lighter background.
from Named after Étienne de Silhouette, a French finance minister in the mid-18th century whose name became a byword for things done cheaply. The cut-paper profile portrait was the budget alternative to a painted one, so 'à la silhouette' came to mean done on the cheap — and the word stuck to the shadow-portrait itself, leaving the minister forever attached to the poor man's likeness.
- named after
- Étienne de Silhouette, a notoriously stingy French finance minister
- cheap dig
- the name mocked his penny-pinching as art on the cheap
- pre-camera
- the budget portrait before photography existed
- brain trick
- we read identity from outline alone, no detail needed
- scissors art
- once cut freehand from black paper in seconds
alfred hitchcock's profile — director's distinctive side profile used as his personal logo and appeared in every episode of his tv show from 1955-1965
statue of liberty — colossus figure backlit against new york harbor sky, recognized globally as symbol since 1886