L’homme Parisien, post-Modern witches and the dazzling eclectic

We’re with ‘Vogue’ on Hedi Slimane’s  SL show for Paris Fashion Week.

Saying that he’s ‘master of the theatre,’ Jessica Bumpus saw rock chicks with immaculate styling and a rock edge aesthetic honed at Dior Homme, with Seventies billowy chiffon.  Liking oversized hats, with every look,  multiple neck bows, tuxedo jackets,  super skinny trousers with their ‘rock credentials.’ 

Cathy Horyn, banned from the shows, was tentative in her report, for the New York Times.  Viewed from streamed images,  her words lack the tones of a disappointed critic.  I think she really liked it, but isn’t saying! You wouldn’t either, if you weren’t invited, would you?

Business of Fashion loves the idea that Slimane has gone for “commercially lucrative” pieces but hopes the label won’t be too distracted away from its original YSL roots towards a sort of ‘All Saints Laurent!’

Reminding us of Yves Saint Laurent’s controversial 1971 Nazi-inspired show, seen as “a tour de force of bad taste” at the time, BoF thought Slimane’s collection might be a deliberate attempt by the ‘complicated designer to provoke negative reactions’.

For BoF, Suleman Anaya also asks the question about where YSL might be heading under Slimane’s baton. Is it another top luxury brand removing itself from the kind of high-concept fashion that receives ‘lavish editorial praise but performs middlingly in stores?’  Or is it going for ‘money in the bank for retailers.’

Isn’t this what everyone hopes will happen to all Fashion?  Slimane’s tactics can’t be  bad if YSL is also seen as a lifestyle brand for musicians and those who want to hang out with them.   To me Anaya is totally on the button as he winds up with the assertion “It’s tough, but it’s luxury, down to those heavily embellished (and surely expensive) leather boots.”

How is Slimane doing it?  It’s probably the seven years with Dior, designing menswear, which gives him the gift to capture traces from the extraordinary creative and vulnerable masters who preceded him.  It’s also  his schooling in Art History and  Tailoring.  His visit to the offices of Le Monde,  when he thought he wanted to be  a journalist is telling.   For  the creative spirit,I think, it’s all about wanting to communicate thoughts and feelings. It’s what makes Fashion’s heart beat.

 

Mary Quant’s late husband, the debonair lothario, Alexander Plunket Green, supporting his wife’s exceptional talent, told me that sharp, tailored, clothes, rather than peasant looks, are what’s needed to underpin optimism during an economic downturn. 

Slimane, as  a French  Fashion national/natural, is doing it all.  Re-interpreting Yves from beyond ‘peasant,’ through Punk, away from ‘grunge’ through to a democratised high street, to thrill Beats, Hippies, New Wave and Digital Natives.  Keeping us all wanting to join the parade. So why is the Fashion jury still out on Slimane?  The renaming to ‘Saint Laurent’ seems neat and his eclecticism,  dazzling.

 

As  an original Fashion victim, I want to look as much like the post-Modern witches on  Slimane’s Paris Week catwalk, as the cyber princesses in their fluorescent trenches at Christopher Bailey’s  S/S 2013 London show!

http://www.businessoffashion.com/2012/10/a-wake-up-call-for-ysls-pr-team.html

Manchester, Paris and Montauk

The singer and the song

HAVING appeared in Paris, the night before, Rufus Wainwright told an enraptured Manchester audience  that Jean Paul Gaultier had let him ‘borrow’ the slinky black leather ensemble he was wearing for the show.

Making an entrance in sparkly ostrich feather cape over tails, he told us he would be giving us three opportunities to marvel at Gaultier’s work.   Removing the fabulous feathers after his first two songs,  then the coat and later a short bolero to reveal clinging body-hugging dungarees.   Sitting with some difficulty at the grand piano he described the designs as not too practical for playing musical instruments, adding that was probably why Madonna could  wear as much JPG as she liked!

Why, oh why, after a show full of talent did it devolve into a camp fiasco for a well-rehearsed encore? Well known Jewish singer, song writer, Adam Cohen and Wainwright dressed in short white togas with shiny blonde wigs looked uncomfortable and cold, even with oiled legs!  Backing singers Cristal Warren and Stella Blackman, accomplished soloists in their own right, were dressed as pantomime cut-outs, certainly undermining their contributions to the musicality of the show.  Maybe I’m not sure that ‘glad to be gay’ shouldn’t be tempered with patrolling by the style police. The image of Wainwright, above,  at the piano with the show’s stunning and subtle lighting plots is the one I’ll take home with me.

Audrey Hepburn and the Big Bang Theory

WITH crowned kings and queens and actresses wearing tiaras, no-one’s too sure about jewels as status symbols anymore. But as Sheldon’s girlfriend discovers her, diamond-studded, apology gift, the worlds of fantasy and reality collide.  See video below.

There’s more than just a tiara linking Audrey Hepburn, outside Tiffany’s in that hit 1961 movie, and Mayim Bialik as Amy Farrah Fowler in my favourite sit com, The Big Bang Theory. I can hardly write this blog for wanting to view the Youtube videos below. That’s not part of the connection, although it may be.

Audrey Hepburn frees modern woman to be more herself, than she has ever been before, as she steps out between New York skyscrapers from a yellow cab in the early hours of the day. Gazing into Tiffany’s window, ‘nothing really bad could happen to you there,’ holding her portable coffee, taking a bite from a do-nut, wearing tiara and pearls, we are convinced that anything is possible at any time.

When Amy is offended by Sheldon’s dismissal of her scientific journal article and he is persuaded, by Penny, to give her a gift, he chooses a tiara. For him this will be far more confusing than understanding String Theory! Yet without the Hepburn film moments, from the 1950s and 1960s, none of us would be able to get the ironies in the situation, either.

Before Hepburn in Roman Holiday, when Princess Ann realised she could lead a more ordinary life, even if for only one day, and in B@T’s when Holly Golightly throws off mid American domesticity for the glamour of New York, we did not know we could question status.  From then on we could play with symbols, such as tiaras, to create our own individual personas through Fashion.  We now, no longer, have to be either feminine or Feminist.  We can be both!

Privileged paradise and cyber space trenches!

AS Fashion students, VFX directors, journalists set foot on acres of soft cream plush, outside the perpendicular-tech pavilion, at Christopher Bailey’s, 2013 S/S, Burberry Prorsum show we are in a privileged paradise.

The  drama begins. Dark-suited security staff check credentials.  The tension mounts as each tiny, taupe, picnic stool is taken up and millionaires rub shoulders with the recently employed.  In a hushed dusk conversations continue.  Suddenly, pounding techno music rebounding and reverberating, throbbing through carpet, platforms and seating.

As the first model steps out on the runway, blinds, along each side of the vast venue, are slowly lowered to let in the blazing natural light.   On view outside, Kensington Gardens’ ancient trees in late splendour, predict another summer yet to come.

Sweet models express the Burberry look represented in see-through acrylic, shoulder length, capes – the new epaulettes.  Shorts, it seems, are essentials for next summer for Westwood and Bailey.   Each separate, particular, Prorsum design makes subtle reference to the Burberry archive, interpreted through recently developed colours and fabrics .

Every piece, translated through designer’s eyes, references the  status Burberry imparts in official details.  At first the capes are Burberry enough, but in homage, and  a return to the actual Trench, for the finale, Christopher Bailey delights us.  Seventeen glowing pink, purple, aqua, green, gold coats  are totally referential and especially irreverent.  Cyber princesses at the beginning of the 21st century will look beyond science-fiction in these dreams of delight.  We’ll all want one!

http://uk.burberry.com/store/shows/#/ss13-womenswear/show

http://www.hud.ac.uk/research/researchnews/fashionintheageoftheimage.php

Stars in Dior, from screen to the streets

TWO other men, easily as  interesting as William the Conquerer, came from La Manche, Normandy.

One, the sensational Christian Dior whose New Look,  (1947) promoted by the American journalist Carmel Snow,  began a democratization of style which fascinates Vivienne Westwood to this day.  The other, is Roland Barthes, the mid 20th C writer, transforming the way we think about popular products, like Hollywood, cars, margarine, wrestling, strippers and especially Fashion…

I knew Granville was Dior’s birthplace and that his home is a museum, but didn’t  know that this summer, 2012, celebrates the many Dior connections with the movies.  On show, inside the house, La Rhumbe, seen above left, in pink, are Dior creations from 1947 to now.  From the Robert Altman film Pret a Porter, to Jude Law in  Dior Homme, from Fahrenheit; Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, Ingrid Bergman, Natasja Kinski, Ava Gardner, Zizi Jean-Maire to Rachel McAdams, in Woody Allen’s, Midnight in Paris, all are costumed by the House of Dior.

Dior did not go back to Granville, once he was forced, by the 1929 Wall Street crash, and subsequent worldwide depression, to seek his fortune in Paris.  I did go back.  How could we not re-visit the  gardens, perfumed with a cornucopia of blossoms, overlooking a spectacular coast?  Then to discover that high on another hill, over the town, there were stories of Collette’s relationship, with the master couturier,  in a museum space devoted to  collections of Richard Ancreon, another of CD’s amis. Malcolm McLaren really got it right when he said Dior knew everyone.

It would be fun to think that Dior  and Barthes met one day in, say, a cafe on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, when they were both around to sample the joys, and  talk of the pleasures, in that most especially aesthetic of  cities.

Above right is the illustration Anton Storey created for FASHION MEDIA PROMOTION  the new black magic to encapsulate the ideas he and I have about Barthes.

http://www.hud.ac.uk/research/researchnews/fashionintheageoftheimage.php

Audrey Hepburn and the discreet charms of the LBD

Ever-lasting Elegance: Our fascination with Audrey Hepburn

AT this year’s Paris’ Haute Couture show, July 2012, Hubert de Givenchy re-styled his Little Black Dress. The original, made famous by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1961, was iconic in its simplicity and made the LBD the wardrobe staple of today. So, what is it with our lasting obsession with Audrey Hepburn?

She represents simple elegance, ultimate femininity and natural beauty. She is an actress as well known for her style as her films, wearing classic pieces made by top Fashion designers especially for her. What’s not to love? But has anyone come close since?

Apparently not.  In 2011 she was voted by British women as the most beautiful woman of all time. Personally, I think it’s her wonderful expressive smile and her compassion. She won us all over as the Princess Ann in Roman Holiday appealing to everyone’s inner princess. She made the character of Holly Golightly into a new fairy tale figure.  How many of us have that picture of her with the cigarette holder,  smiling mysteriously, on our walls? Editors and stylists love her as well as fans? Her look is truly exceptional; recognised in an instant.

Indeed, on July 22^nd  the Sunday Times travel supplement mocked up the image of Hepburn in sunglasses and a hat. That ‘Audrey sells,’ is  a given.  It’s an inner beauty which shines through and yet she’s more known for her commercial potential!  She’s helped liberate women’s sense of identity by being feminine, stylish, yet strong and distinctive.  Let’s hope her sons gave permission to the Murdoch vehicle to use her photograph to copy.  If so, then the newspaper group will need to send a donation to UNICEF!

Picture Ref: Audrey Hepburn and Breakfast at Givenchy’s: Fashion Media Promotion: the new black magic p. 92 : Wiley Blackwell

http://www.hud.ac.uk/research/researchnews/fashionintheageoftheimage.php
 

Vain hopes, vague waves – August is a wicked month

We love the glossies. They exist to distract us with their glamour.  It’s as if  Benetton’s, revolutionary 80s, advertising never happened for August 2012′s, UK editions, Vanity Fair and Vogue.

Subtle, conventional, uncontroversial, Louis Vuitton promotions feature liveried guard, luxury coach interior,  stern faced models in sculptural hats, vertiginous platforms, fine denier hosiery, polished leather gloves, and bejewelled, cupcake buttons, in Vogue.  The luggage company’s aspirational offering, for Vanity Fair, shows Muhammad Ali with boxing gloved, be-jeaned, glorious tiny grandson and unzipped LV holdall in luxuriant,  pooled garden.

Editorial in VF involves itself in matters of the moment.  Annie Leibovitz’s photos of Nobel Peace Prize winners create startling juxtapositions of Mikhail Gorbachev with the 14th Dalai Lama, Professors Jody Williams and Mohammad Yunus, Dr. Shirin Ebadi,  Lech Walesa, F.W. de Klerk with Jimmy Carter, 39th president of the United States.

Described as a ‘wayward teenager,’ the Yale alumna and the much missed, Marie Colvin, famously quoted as saying, ‘I never drink when I’m covering a war,’ is celebrated in  over 14 gripping pages, by Marie Brenner, as the world of Rachel Weisz’s scary fiction is contrasted with this real life drama of love and war.

In the revelatory economics of ‘Microsoft’s lost decade’ we discover that Google has ‘almost the same amount of cash on its books as Microsoft’ and that Steve Jobs blames Bill Gates for not putting enough emphasis on brilliant products, tending to ignore the humanities and liberal arts.  Well duh!

Latest trends in marketing are emerging through the rich West’s involvement with fabulous food provenance, sensed through the actual taste bit from the aesthetic list.  Stunning Art makes my mouth water and never more so than when devouring Fashion ads.   Gucci’s deep, dark oils across Vogue‘s double pages with spotlit glitter, glamour, glitz on belts, bags, rings and statement jewels are beguiling as Belgian chocolates.

Wondrous evocations of the Chanel legend drift across pages, one of pure white space. In a shade, dreamed from the sky at midnight, textured fine wool, with deeper contrast trim and sleeves appear on a porcelain and spun-ebony model. More genius styling from teams behind Bottega Veneta, Dolce & Gabbana, DKNY, Prada, Armani, Burberry Prosum make up selling-copy as divine post-modern theatre.

Although it hardly matters, with all this other scrumptiousness, editorial remains a delightful, image-rich feast, too.  In this August Vogue there’s nothing more serious than the sobering thought, from editrice, Alexandra Shulman, ‘everyone loves a good diktat!’  So let’s just say, ‘Keep taking the tablets.’

http://www.hud.ac.uk/staff/fashionintheageoftheimage.php

Magic, Miniskirts and Modish Queens: an exploration of fashion over the royal Jubilee

  From a Press Release

“In 1952, when the lovely young Queen Elizabeth came to the throne bringing with her a revival in Tudor-style bodices and modest high collars, Marilyn Monroe was shocking the world by appearing in a calendar in just a bikini top and a pair of Levi’s.

Fashion Media Promotion: the new black magic  looks at how fashion, as an industry, has adapted itself over the last 60 years to always command an important role in the global marketplace. It explores how, through communication methods such as advertising, digital and print media and cinema, fashion has waved its magic wand and entranced the whole world.

Revelling in the nostalgia of some classic fashion firsts since the Queen came on the throne, Fashion Media Promotion explores, with some humour, the impact of quintessentially British designers such as Mary Quant, Paul Smith and Vivienne Westwood on both British culture and fashions abroad.

This insightful book will appeal, one trusts, to fashion students and lovers, film buffs and writers as it searches every corner of the fashion world’s monopoly, from the inspiration of Hollywood classics such as Gone with the Wind to a critique of Roland Barthes’ promotional work.

The book, published by Wiley-Blackwell, includes 60 original full colour illustrations. Images of Audrey Hepburn’s glamour, Mary Quant’s Mini-skirts to Kate Moss’s androgynous appeal really bring to life how fashion has evolved over the decades.

 “I have always been fascinated by how fashion links the generations and this has never been more the case than over the last 60 years. To keep us talking about it, fashion always has to find new ways to shock and thrill people, yet it also draws on past trends. Today a granddaughter might envy the clothes her grandmother used to wear in the 1950s.”

http://www.hud.ac.uk/research/researchnews/fashionintheageoftheimage.php

Fanfare, freedom and fun

Since watching Roman Holiday* I can’t help feeling it must have had an influence on Queen Elizabeth II.  Everyone watched popular movies in the 1950s.  I’m sure the Palace had masses of screenings for Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. Or maybe they slipped out, incognito, to the Odeon,  Leicester Square.

Roman Holiday deals with celebrity and public image.  Through the eyes of the young, fictional, Princess Ann we see the difficulties and restrictions of being a head of state; always in the public eye. In the opening scenes Hepburn’s character is compared to the British royals of the time; to the British Queen’s younger sister Princess Margaret, who was something of a dissenter; preferring unpredictable commonplace experiences rather than the strictures of public service. The film’s opening scenes include montaged, actual, footage of state visits in Europe and a voice-over tells  how they improved trade relations.

In 1980 when Princess Margaret visited a Haberdashers’ School in Cheshire, during a tour of the Science rooms, she told me, as a journalist, how her children would rush up and down carpeted areas to create static electricity before coming over to give her a slightly electrifying kiss. This liking for simple everyday experience was felt as an emotional need by the princess in Roman Holiday.  As a reverse Cinderella story audiences are able to empathise with the heroine’s longings even though her life was far removed from theirs.

After Roman Holiday Audrey Hepburn was seen as the movie actress to be cast in parts dealing with transformation through Fashion.  She was not perceived as a Hollywood starlet plugged into the general 50s dynamic.  She carried her own romantic mystique a more elaborate, European, mythology with her.  Although she was seen as a Hollywood product, a Paramount Studio property, she only ever owned homes in Europe. Far from socialising with the movie glitterati she used her influence to fight for children’s rights.  At 16 years of age she danced, in secret, to raise money for the Dutch resistance to the Nazis.  Remembering the subterfuge and fear of the time, she said, ‘the best audience I ever had made not a single sound at the end of my performance’. Princess Elizabeth drove army vehicles as part of the war effort in England and married Prince Philip a serving naval officer. Their lives were lived in similar times and contexts.

The admiration audiences felt in the movie for Princess Ann, when she gave up the fun and the freedoms of being with the charming American journalist, Gregory Peck, to return to her European regal duties is the same respect many  feel for the current Queen of England.  She would  probably much rather be an aristocratic horse breeder than the person having weekly political meetings with twelve different Prime Ministers, even if one  was Tony Blair!

*  
http://www.hud.ac.uk/staff/fashionintheageoftheimage.php

Glass coaches, diamond tiaras and blue jeans

Fashion’s power probably reached its zenith when Kate Middleton married the heir to the British dynastic throne of the United Kingdom in April 2011.  Prince William had fallen in love with her, it is said, as she paraded down the catwalk at a charity Fashion show in their shared university town of St. Andrew’s, near Edinburgh, in Scotland.  The signs of the harem had transmitted themselves to the virile young royal.

There is a Cinderella quality to this story and clothes played their part towards this happy ending.  Not that Kate Middleton had set many fires, or brushed many hearths, but she now  rides in glass coaches and wears diamond tiaras.

Her days at boarding school mixing with the Home Counties crowd, and Sloane Rangers set, put her on the right track. She’s an interesting mix of American preppy and English Burberry.  Her love of the outdoors means she is not tempted to wear frilly fussy looks.

Her parents are friends with the people who run Jigsaw and Kate did a short stint as an accessories buyer with them.  There’s  an image of William  and Kate, in jeans, to make the point  that Fashion is for everyone in ‘the new black magic’*.

Some of the changes leading to the daughter of airline officers marrying an heir to a European throne have come through Fashion’s revolutions. They began when everyone wore versions of Christian Dior’s haute couture looks in the 40s and 50s.  Then, Audrey Hepburn’s transformations in  films  Roman Holiday and  Sabrina, from princess to pauper and back again, blurred edges.  The films made European and American women see the power of clothes to alter status.

In the 1960s Mary Quant made fun clothes for dukes’, doctors’ or dockers’ daughters.  Miuccui Prada dresses new generations  of  upwardly mobile professional women just as Coco Chanel did in the 40s and  50s.

Kate Middleton  may live to regret showing off her underwear in a daring see-through creation during the  2002 charity Fashion show at St Andrews university.  This was said to be the moment Prince William, paying £200 for the ticket, became besotted with her.  But the sparkly Audrey Hepburn little black dress she chose when she and the prince were on a break will be recalled with much more affection I imagine.

I don’t think she could  have got it more right with the classic silk jersey wrap dress by the London based ‘go-to’ designer Issa she wore for the engagement announcement nor when she appeared in Sarah Burton’s angelic, composed, First Communion lace outside Westminster Abbey.  Will she ever wear jeans in public, again, one wonders?

http://www.hud.ac.uk/research/researchnews/fashionintheageoftheimage.php