My friend Eddy send me an email this week, with a link to the Christie’s  Online Auctions : The Suzy Menkes Collection. Some spectaculair garments are for sale, specially the very sought after Ossie Clark/Celia Birtwell pieces are rare to be found.

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Suzy Menkes is an iconic fashion journalist who is held in the highest esteem by designers, models, fellow journalists and fashion followers around the globe. Comprising just over 90 lots, the collection features an inspiring array of dresses, coats, skirts, jackets and accessories by a cross spectrum of the most revered names in fashion from Ossie Clark and Emilio Pucci, to Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Lacroix. All the pieces highlight Suzy’s beliefs that colour and pattern make every day joyous and that clothes are like friends: they have to complement your personality, your hopes and desires.

http://www.christies.com/

(photograph by Robert Maxwell)

Feu means fire, and there’s a lot of fight in Limi.

 Born in 1974 by the famous fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto, it was not surprisingly that Limi Yamamoto chose a creative path and took up fashion studies at Bunka Fashion College and is now one of Japan’s most promising fashion designers.

She started work as a pattern maker for the Y’s line of Yohji Yamamoto Inc. in 1996. After working 2 years as a pattern maker for Y’s, she started her very own label named Y’s bis LIMI in year of 1999 and presented her first 2000 autumn/winter collection in Tokyo. In 2002, the brand was renamed as LIMI feu and with a huge success, Limi further expanded her fashion territory to Paris and debuted her 2008 spring/summer collection there obtaining praises immediately.. In 2009, she was awarded the Designer of the Year award by the 51st Fashion Editor’s Club of Japan.

LIMI feu  spring 2013

In one interview, when asked how Limi’s  style differs from the style of her famous dad), the designer replied simply: “by the fact that I’m a woman”. If the question was what they have in common, it would be that they are both Japanese.  Where the designs of Yohji are considered to be more romantic, the clothes of Limi are femininely sensual. Her signature is, first of all, in the volume: the garments are oversized, as if migrated from the men’s wardrobe to women’s as well as the combination of military style and delicate floral prints on the same coat, or those funny high bowlers. At one show several men came out on the runway which had the audience wondering if Limi has launched a men’s collection. “Ah non,” exclaimed one of her French  staff.  “It’s just that in Japan men often borrow LIMI feu from their girlfriends closets so she wanted to play with that”.

LIMI feu catwalk pictures

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A tribute to that infinitely complex and perfected very “Japanese” cut is in order: that black-white-grey palette, only occasionally broken by the bright colour splashes of blue, red or their mosaic combination, and that seemingly simple maximally elongated male snow-white shirt, and the curiosity of the trousers with strap,; and short leather jackets with inevitable motorcycle boots.
Sensuous rock and roll on the verge of anguish, or simply on the verge of.. male and female.

“She made it” declared a beaming Yohji after his daughter’s Paris debut. And papa had every reason to be proud: The collection was a walking advertisement for fashion DNA.

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LIMI feu Prankster

LIMI feu also produces a kid collection called LIMI feu Pranster, which is very popular in Japan.

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                                                  (Coco Chanel by Richard Avedon)

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I must have read it 4 or 5 times now, Chanel: A Woman of her Own by Axel Madsen and like to recommend it as a very good read.

   “I didn’t create fashion, I am fashion.”   

Coco Chanel’s genius for fashion may have been distilled in simplicity, but her life was an extravaganza. A brilliant array of luminaries fell under her spell – Picasso, Churchill, Cocteau; lovers included the Grand Duke Dmitri; the English roué, Boy Capel; a French poet; a German spy and the Duke of Westminster, who offered to leave his wife for her permanently, if she would only bear him an heir. Paradoxically, though she might have been regarded in some lights as a pioneering feminist – sacrificing marriage to a revolutionary career in couture – Chanel was utterly baffled by the idea of women’s politics. Educated women? ‘A woman’s education consists of two lessons: never leave the house without stockings, never go out without a hat.’ Chanel’s rise from penniless orphan to millionaire designer – ‘inventing’ sportswear, the little black dress and No. 5 – makes compelling reading, not least because she was inclined to design her own life as deftly as she did her fashions. Axel Madsen negotiates Chanel’s smoke screens with skill, bringing this tantalizing woman to life in all her alluring complexity.

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PEERS BOOK REVIEWS

Review by Cathleen Myers

It’s not easy to construct a biography of a compulsive liar, especially when your subject is a highly creative liar who told a different set of lies to each biographer and eventually came to believe some of her own fantasies.

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According to Axel Madsen’s well-documented biography, most of the “accepted” story about Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s romantic early life is pure fantasy. She didn’t learn dressmaking from sewing samplers for her strict “aunts” or from “taking courses in design;” but from the nuns at the orphanage where she was raised after her mother’s death and from an ordinary apprenticeship at a provincial dressmaker’s. Her first hat shop was started on money from her first protector, Etienne Balsan, not from her first love the polo-playing Englishman “Boy” Capell. Her father was not a respectable horse trader but an itinerant market fair trader who abandoned her; and she was illegitimate, a disgrace she sought to hide all her life.

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Madsen’s biography is an eminently readable celebration of Chanel’s genius as both a couturier and as a self-made business woman who refused the easy life of a kept woman to start her own business, rise to the top of a male-dominated profession and help transform women’s fashion from the opulent Edwardian style to the practical, natural, “modern” look most of us wear today (to work, at least). The author’s style is lively and novelistic and he does have a good knowledge of the fashion industry, though he gives Coco credit for innovations that were not her own (The “feminization of masculine fashion” had been going on in England before Coco’s birth). But Madsen dishes so well about the deadly world of Haute Couture that his lavishly illustrated book is a must for anyone interested in the history of fashion and costume.

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Historian’s warning: Madsen’s main weakness is a lack of understanding of the class structure of Chanel’s world (as his misuse of British titles makes clear). A true American, Madsen wonders why Coco fought so hard to conceal her “roots.” Since her true rags-to-riches story is so remarkable, why pretend to have risen from the lower middle class? But those of us who understand 19th century social history understand Chanel’s motives. Nor does Madsen seem to understand the social cachet that an English duke carries even today – which explains Chanel’s desire to marry the eccentric Duke of Westminster, her ruthless erasure of her past, and Westminster’s ultimate refusal to marry her. He was desperate for a male heir and, judging from Debrett’s, preferred well-born brides .

Coco Chanel’s life in photographs & quotes

Coco Chanel at the age of 23

. Coco & Etienne Balsan

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Coco Chanel & Boy Capel, 1912

Coco & Adrienne in 1913, in front of Coco’s first boutique in Deauville

Coco & Serge Lifar (The principal dancer of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes during its final years in the late 1920′s)

Coco photographed by Cecil Beaton, 1937

Coco & Salvador Dalí

Coco Chanel at 50 by George Hoyningen-Huene

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“Dress shabbily and they remember the dress; dress impeccably and they remember the woman.”

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Coco working on het beloved jewelry

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“Fashion has become a joke. The designers have forgotten that there are women inside the dresses. Most women dress for men and want to be admired. But they must also be able to move, to get into a car without bursting their seams! Clothes must have a natural shape.”

February 14, 2006 a photograph of a pond taken by Edward Steichen sold for more than $2.9 million, easily setting a world record for the highest amount a photograph has sold for at auction, Sotheby’s said (today this record has been broken a few times). The photograph, titled ”The Pond-Moonlight” and taken in Mamaroneck, Westchester County in 1904.

There are only three prints which were made under Steichen’s supervision, and are a great example of a rare vintage photograph by an artist who had an influence on later 20th-century photographers. Steichen’s early painterly photographs, possibly naive to our image-soaked modern eyes, helped establish photography as an art form.

The Pond-Moonlight 

A few days ago I went to an exhibition with photographs by Edward Steichen and realised I recognized so many of his pictures, but knew nothing of the man himself. Reading about his tumultuous life, I got fascinated with this multi talent.

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Edward Steichen was born in Luxembourg in 1879, migrated with his parents to the United States only two years later, eventually settling in Milwaukee. In his mid-teens be became an apprentice lithographer and took up photography as a hobby. But his first love was painting and it was painting that inspired him to travel to Paris in 1900. Years later Steichen destroyed the canvasses in his possession, instead he learned to achieve Impressionist effects in his photographs, by blurring his lenses with petroleum jelly or manipulating his negatives and prints in the darkroom.

“ If it looked like a painting, it was art”.

(the photographer struggled to gain the recognition as an artist)

Self Portraits

Steichen with his wife Clara Smith   .

Steichen’s pictorialist period ended in 1917, when he joined the United States Army and created an aerial photography unit in northern France to gather intelligence about artillery positions and troop movements behind enemy lines. And after the war, Steichen’s lifelong interest in horticulture resulted in near-abstract images of flowers, plants and insects.

Then he went through a bad and expensive divorce. By 1922, when Steichen was 43, he was undergoing what we now call a midlife crisis. He had serious misgivings about his talent as a painter and told fellow photographer Paul Strand that he was sick and tired of being poor. He needed something to renew his energies and a means of making his alimony and child-support payments.

Flowers

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A crucial change happened in 1923, when Condé Nast offered him a job as chief photographer for Vanity Fair, which meant essentially house portraitist, but regular fashion work for Vogue was also part of the deal, following Baron Adolphe de Meyer, who was fashion photography’s first star. Some of his pears felt like Steichen was selling out to commercialism.

Steichen’s portraits for Vanity Fair brought him new fame. In part because of the status of celebrity subjects as Gloria Swanson and an incredibly handsome Gary Cooper. But on his Vogue assignments Steichen produced pictures as extremely careful and precise  as any painting by Gainsborough or Sargent—even though he needed to fill page after page, month after month.

Gloria SwansonGary Cooper

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Steichen’s corner-to-corner attentiveness, coupled with his painterly training, allowed him to make fashion pictures that ranged in style from classic 19th-century illustrations to Art Nouveau and Art Deco. “He was designing with his camera and after starting out as a [soft-focus] pictorialist, he brought sharp focus to bear and had a tremendous effect on the field.”

Typical of his work is a 1933 picture of a model wearing a patterned dress by a designer named Cheney. Steichen poses her in front of a two-tone background covered with calligraphic curves that echo the dress, then adds a white hat, scarf and gloves, a bentwood chair and tulips—all of which make a composition reminiscent of a Matisse painting. But he also used movie conventions to make even studio photographs—which are by definition artificial—appear to be life at its most enviable. If two women and a man sat at a well-appointed dinner table, Steichen made sure that part of another table, set with equal lavishness, appeared behind them, turning the studio into a fine restaurant in which the black dresses and tuxedo found their proper context.  Matchsticks and matchboxes study for fabric Piano of Steichen’s own design, one of his favorite props .

Astonishing is a pattern of matchsticks and matchboxes he photographed as a study for a fabric (silk) design. And his work as a designer appears in his Condé Nast work in the form of a piano of his own design he favored as a prop.

In 1937 he ended his contract with Condé Nast and devoted his time to raising Delphiniums (common name “larkspur“). He  became an accomplished gardener in France. During WWII he put on the uniform of a Navy officer and never returned to photographing clothes, though he kept taking pictures untill his death in 1973 at the age of 93.

Portraits

Marlene Dietrich Louise BrooksMary HeberdenCarlotta MontereyAnna May WongAnna May WongGreta Garbo

Pola Negri

Katharine Hepburn

Lillian Gish

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Edward Steichen was recognized in his lifetime as one of the great photographers of the 20th century. 

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Fashion

Steichen had the instinct of a communicator who was supremely confident in his eye as an artist. And if he was criticized for using art to sell clothes and magazines, he saw no reason to apologize. ”I don’t know any form of art that isn’t or hasn’t been commercial,” Steichen said in old age. After all, he added with no small immodesty, Michelangelo also liked to be paid well for his work.

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(information for this post comes from the Smithsonian magazine, article by Owen Edwards)

Matador César Rincón after a bullfight in Seville. This must be the sexiest picture ever taken of a bullfighter!

The photograph is made by Peter Müller, who was born in Peru. He studied art and architecture at Zurich university before working as assistant to photographer Bert Stern and chief camera operator under director Eddie Vorkapich. After many years living in Spain, working on major advertising campaigns and for various magazines including Vogue, he decided to look more closely at the crafts and lifestyle of southern Spain.

Two books by Peter Müller have been published, featuring photographs of Spanish bullfighter costumes.

Oro Plata: Embroidered Costumes of the Bullfight

Costumes of light

According to Spanish tradition, the bullfighter should never wear his costume outside the bullring. Published for the first time, the greatest stars of the Corrida, resplendent in their elaborately embroidered costumes, are brought to readers in a series of stunning studio portraits. Matadors dressed in gold and banderilleros wearing silver re-enact the dramatic gestures and intricate choreography of their profession, displaying the most artistic, appealing aspects of the bullfight as seen today in Spain, France and South America. Oro Plata and Costumes of light are the perfect showcase for both the colorful history and tradition of these costumes, and for the living legends of the men who wear them.

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Bullfighter’s costume influence on fashion

Ann Demeulemeester ’matador’ jacket

Jeremy Scott designed  these sweaters for Adidas Originals

Jeremy Scott in his matador inspired Adidas Originals jacket 

Matador inspired jacket

Moschino 2012

Sarah Jessica Parker in Matador look

And last but not least, the king of dress-up, John Galliano as a Matador

Biography

After ending the collaboration with the house of Dior, Roger Vivier opens a new boutique at 24 rue François Premier, across from maison Dior. He consults with aeronautical engineers on the design of his swooping ”comma” heel, that became another one of the most copied styles in footwear history.

Comma heel

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Roger Vivier’s collaboration with Yves Saint Laurent

He also creates shoes for top designers and couturiers, like Emanuel Ungaro, André Coureges, Cristobal Balenciaga and features risqué crocodile thigh-high boots for Yves Saint Laurent, who is now designing under his own name.

Another shoe debuts in Yves Saint Laurent’s “Mondrian” collection in 1965. The design has a square heel and a pilgrim-buckle placed on the extreme tip of the shoe, unlike the seveteenthe-century version where it was positioned on the top of the foot. 

In 1966 Roger Vivier designs transparent-plastic shoes and boots for Yves Saint Laurent.

Crocodile thigh-high boot

Pilgrim buckle shoe

 Transparent-plastic boot

Belle de Jour

In 1967, French siren Catherine Deneuve pairs her Yves Saint Laurent wardrobe with Rogier Vivier pilgrim shoes in the movie Belle de Jour by  Luis Buñuel . The movie becomes a cult hit right away and the pilgrim shoe becomes a runaway bestseller, two hundred thousand pairs are sold in one year and is the best sold modelfor Roger Vivier ever…..

‘There’s nothing like a movie that celebrates the Madonna-whore conundrum to get hearts racing and tongues wagging. Throw in English subtitles and Catherine Deneuve in various states of undress, and you have a winning cinematic equation. But while the guys were salivating over Deneuve’s sexy siren scenes, the women were likely captivated by her classic Roger Vivier pumps. Although Vivier had already established himself as a footwear master by the time Belle de Jour came out. The elegant Pilgrim pumps paired with the sleek Yves Saint Laurent wardrobe, and juxtaposed against Deneuve’s character’s sordid double life, elevated the shoes to instant cult status. But trust us when we say you can’t go wrong in a black mid-heel variety. Look what it did for Deneuve’s sex appeal.’

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In 1968 Roger ads scarves and gloves to his collection and a year later Monsieur Vivier men’s department opens in the Vivier boutique, which offers made-to-measure shoes.

Among Roger Vivier’s biggest fans were Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor , who enshrined his exquisite creations in a custom closet; and the cinema femme fatale Marlene Dietrich, who haunted his boutique almost daily and was rewarded with custom black satin pumps held up by glittering rhinestone balls. Vogue’s editor, Diana Vreeland, insisted her maid polish the soles of her Viviers with rhinoceros horn. Included in her vast collection were a dozen each of his pilgrims and rock-star vinyl boots. Vreeland was among the many who regarded Vivier’s work as true art; in her 1977 Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute exhibit, “Vanity Fair,” she contrasted examples of his craftsmanship with that of 18th-century artisans.

Diane Vreeland wearing Roger Vivier boots

Wallis Simpson closet with Roger Vivier shoes

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In 1994 the 86-year-old Roger Vivier signs a new licensing agreement with Rautureau Apple Shoes, which in turn allows him to open a  shop in Paris the following year. The Rautureau venture gives Vivier the backing to continue doing what he loves the most—designing shoes. Yet three years later, in October 1998, Vivier dies in Toulouse, France. He is remembered by many, including fellow shoe designer. “People try to copy him, but it’s impossible to find that mix of technical skill and design.” Kenneth Jay Lane, who has worked with the master , declares,

“He was the world’s greatest artist of shoe design.”

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Random collection of Roger Vivier heels, shoes and boots

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Roger Vivier book by Rizzoli

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A gorgeous tribute to the legendary shoe and accessories designs of Roger Vivier.  Master designer Roger Vivier elevated both the form and decoration of ladies’ shoes during his sixty-year career. His innate Parisian style embodied a sense of perfection and craftsmanship, and his work was coveted by style icons from Elsa Schiaparelli to Jackie Onassis. Described by Yves St. Laurent as bringing to his work a “level of charm, delicacy, refinement and poetry unsurpassed,” he created the first stiletto heel for a ready-to-wear shoe line with the house of Dior in 1955. His shoes are legendary, and the tradition of his innovative spirit continues with the revival of the house by current designer Bruno Frisoni, who has updated Vivier’s concepts, bringing his own touch to signature shapes and embellishments (including the buckle pump made famous by Catherine Deneuve in Belle du Jour). This lavish volume celebrates the history of the venerated house and charts the current evolution of the fantastic haute-couture designs that keep Roger Vivier at the top of every well-dressed woman’s list. With gorgeous new photography of the house’s collection of vintage shoes, beautifully rendered sketches, and details of the amazing accessories coming out of Roger Vivier today, this book is as chic as the shoes that fill its pages.

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Exhibition

Virgule, etc… in the Footsteps of Roger Vivier

A RETROSPECTIVE paying tribute to the life and work of Roger Vivier is coming to Paris. The exhibition will be staged at the Palais de Tokyo in October, to coincide with Paris Fashion Week, and was curated by Olivier Saillard – director of the Musée Galliera. 

The showcase is titled Virgule, etc… Dans Les Pas De Roger Vivier (Comma, etc… In The Footsteps of Roger Vivier), so named after the designer’s famous comma-shaped heels. The exhibition will take the form of “a pastiche of a museum dedicated to shoes”, explains a press release, featuring about 140 footwear designs.

The retrospective will pay tribute to the brand’s eponymous founder, who died in 1998, as well as tracking the more recent history of the footwear label. Roger Vivier was revived in 2000 by Diego Della Valle, chairman of Tod’s SpA, and Bruno Frisoni joined as creative director in 2002.

The exhibition will run from October 2 to November 18.

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My friend Eddy de Clercq is and has always been a very stylish man. During his teens he regularly went on a ferry-boat to London to buy the newest and hippest clothes. His shopping trips started at Biba, the most fashionable & exciting department store ever and to Seditionairies, the boutique  by Vivienne Westwood & Malcolm McLaren at World’s End, where he bought the infamous t-shirt with the drawing of two half-naked cowboys by Tom of Finland.  

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In Paris he strolled the streets wearing a black suit with pagoda shoulders designed by Yves Saint Laurent, who had recently opened his store ‘Rive Gauche’. Prêt-à-porter as still a new concept then and Yves was the first haute couture designer to embrace the London street style, as one of the first Parisian fashion designers  promoting young fashion at affordable prices in specially designed stores. 

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One of Eddy’s style icons, maybe even thé style icon, is Brian Jones, founding member of The Rolling Stones.

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When he was 14, he asked the barber to cut his hair just like Brian Jones. Little did he know that Brian never had a serious haircut in his life, he just grew his blonde tresses into a helmet type of hairstyle that covered his forehead and floppy ears completely. When Eddy’s father came into the barbershop and saw his son’s new haircut, he freaked out and ordered the barber to cut it again, but this time into a very short crewcut, American style. 

Tears gushed and Eddy was so upset with the result that he ran away from home, only to return after a few months with a genuine Brian Jones hairdo.

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Biography 

Lewis Brian Hopkin Jones was born February 28, 1942 in Cheltenham, UK. Young Brian was an excellent student at school and his father hoped his son would follow in his academic footsteps and go to university, but Brian decided against university and started a series of random jobs. He had only one passion: music.

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After being introduced to the music of Charlie Parker, Brian persuaded his parents to buy him a saxophone. Having mastered that instrument, he received an acoustic guitar. At nineteen, he went to a concert of the Chris Barber Band at Cheltenham Town Hall. The set they played  included a blues segment and it stimulated Brian to practice the blues on a slide guitar.

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At twenty Brian hitch-hiked to London where he would go to the Ealing Blues Club. It was there one night Mick Jagger and Keith Richards heard Brian play slide guitar and were impressed with his version of Elmore James’s “Dust My Broom”. Soon after Brian, Ian Stewart, Mick and Keith formed a band. On the 12th July 1962 they played their first gig at the Marquee Club, billed as The Rollin’ Stones.

Brian came up with the name the “Rollin’ Stones” (later with the ‘g’) while on the phone with the venue owner.

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Brian’s musicianship had an inevitable influence on the singles that pushed The Rolling Stones into the pop charts. But he was also one of the ultimate 60′s pop stars, with a creative and cutting edge fashion sense and an iconic hairdo to match.

Though they were sharply dressed, Brian always stood out

The Rolling Stones looked like a clean-cut “boy band”.

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In the early days The Rolling Stones looked like a clean-cut “boy band”. Though they were sharply dressed, Brian always stood out (when they weren’t all dressed exactly the same) and he always played the coolest, quirky guitars. The short time he was in the band, Brian Jones transformed from a young lad keeping it sharp to a man living the full on rock and roll decadence.

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A fashion Icon, sharply dressed and always clean cut, Jones wore meticulously fitted velvet jackets. Always more than often, donned in shirts, some striped, others plain, or patterned and often worn with cravats. Style of an eccentric. Brian was the embodiment of unconventional, his famous blonde bowl haircut, hazel eyes and the aesthetic representation. Decorum and grace were all there. Brian had a tremendous lot of clothes and spent an awful amount of time preparing himself for late-night appearances into the clubs.

Brian Jones & Anita Pallenberg

Brian was featured alongside Anita Pallenberg, in an issue of ‘œMen in Vogue’, in 1966.

Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg were a couple from 1965 untill she started dating Keith Richards in 1967. Anita suggested he always tried to look like Francois Hardy. He certainly took a good swing at it, almost hitting the look of darling Hardy, on the very fine nail. Jones’ biographer Geoffrey Giuliano writes about him and Pallenberg: “Together they forged a revolutionary androgynous look, keeping their clothes together, mixing and matching not only fabrics and patterns, but cultures and even centuries. Jones would parade the streets of London wearing a Victorian lace shirt, floppy turn-of-the-century hat, Edwardian velvet frock coat, multi-coloured suede boots, accessorised scarves hanging from his neck, waist and legs along with lots of antique Berber jewellery.”

Marianne Faithfull remembers: One of the best things about visiting Anita and Brian was watching them get ready to go out. What a scene! They were both dauntless shoppers and excessively vain. Hours and hours were spent putting on clothes and taking them off again. Heaps of scarves, hats, shirts and boots flew out of drawers and trunks. Unending trying on of outfits, primping and sashaying. They were beautiful, they were the spitting image of each other and not an ounce of modesty existed between two of them. I would sit mesmerised for hours, watching them preening in the mirror, trying on each other’s clothes. All roles and gender would evaporate in these narcissistic performances, where Anita would turn Brian into the Sun King, Francoise Hardy or the mirror image of herself   (Quote from Faithfull  by Marianne Faithfull & David Dalton. http://www.amazon.com/Faithfull-An-Autobiography-Marianne/dp/0815410468)

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That blonde bowl haircut that’s so indicative of  Brian started to grow out as the suits and striped jumpers were replaced with velvet jackets and shirts with cravats. The jeans got tighter, the boots got bigger.

Beyond the music, trend setting hair style, loves, loathes and lusts, Jones was burdened, like many of his fellow artists, with the abuse of substances such as drugs and alcohol. Brian’s demise was a tragic one, like most of the 27 club ( Music artists who all died at 27 : Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim  Morrison, Kurt Cobain… and recently Amy Winehouse). 

Brian saw his influence over the Stones’ direction slide as their repertoire comprised fewer of the blues covers that he preferred; more Jagger/Richards originals developed, and Andrew Loog Oldham increased his own managerial control, displacing Jones from yet another role. Bill Wyman stated:  ”There were two Brian’s… one was introverted, shy, sensitive, deep-thinking… the other was a preening peacock, gregarious, artistic, desperately needing assurance from his peers… he pushed every friendship to the limit and way beyond”.
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Brian pulled out of (or actually was forced out) The Rolling Stones in 1969, prior to a planned North American tour. He was unable to join, due to a criminal record for possession of cannabis, but he was also physically no longer able to play instruments. Brian Jones died on the 3rd July 1969, at the age of 27, after he was discovered motionless at the bottom of his swimming pool at Cotchford Farm.

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Book

Brian Jones  The last Decadent

“This is the book that every Brian Jones fan has been waiting for, the most sensitive and honest portrait of Brian yet. Finally justice is done.”

The Official Brian Jones Fanclub

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http://www.amazon.com/Brian-Jones-The-Last-Decadent/dp/1871592712 .

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Movie

Stoned

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‘The life of Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones was as wild as it was short, filled with gorgeous groupies, unimaginable decadence, and groundbreaking music.  By age 26, he had achieved enormous fame and fortune; a year later he would be dead.  The story of rocks forgotten father, Stoned unravels the mystery surrounding his death while re-living the sex, drugs, and rock and roll that made the sixties swing.’ .

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Eddy de Clercq music blog: http://soulsafari.wordpress.com/

information for this post:

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Jones

http://www.rollingstones.com   

http://dandyinaspic.blogspot.nl/2011/09/brian-jones-1960s-peacock-style-icon.html

I have been fascinated by traditional costume for as long as I can remember. Not only the Dutch traditional costume, but from countries all over the globe. Whenever I travel, I always try to find something of the regional clothing. It can be shoes, a handbag, jewelry, a hat or an element of the clothing, for men or women.

Vaguely I remember cycling to my grandmother on Sundays, together with my mom. Grandma was dressed in traditional clothing every day and it made her look very impressive. Together with my grandfather, she lived in the village they were born and had grown up in and there a lot of the older people were still wearing the lace caps, embroidered vests and I don’t know how many skirt piled over each other. Strangely enough I don’t remember much of my grandfathers clothes, but I think it was traditional too.

Through the years, many designers have been inspired by traditional clothing.Cristóbal Balenciaga was influenced by the Spanish folk tradition, being from Spain himself, but other designers were also influenced by clothes from all different countries. John Galliano and Alexander McQueen produced several collections inspired by China, Mongolia, Japan, Russia, etc. And in 2007, Viktor & Rolf created a collection on Dutch folk costume: tapestries, checks, and pure white buttoned-up blouses,  their fall 2007 collection.

Dutch Traditional Costume from different districts

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Viktor & Rolf fall 2007 ready-to-wear collection

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most pictures in this post come from:  http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20665/20665-h/20665-h.htm  and  www.style.com

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Kurt Cobain

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March 04, 2013     Paris, Saint Laurent a/w 2013 by Hedi Slimane

By Tim Blanks     (edited version)

California grunge was the inspiration for Hedi Slimane’s second women’s collection for Saint Laurent.

With a little adjustment, that’s a pretty fair description of what Slimane has been trying to do with Saint Laurent. The legacy today was grunge, not YSL; the longing was his own ardent attachment to a scene that was a continent and an ocean away from a kid in Paris at the beginning of the nineties. Slimane is not the only designer motivated by a powerful impulse to reimagine youthful yearnings. Anna Sui and Marc Jacobs (for Perry Ellis, s/s ’93 collection) immediately spring to mind as masterful mediums of pop-cultural watersheds like The Factory or the Beats. And of course, it was Jacobs who famously lost a job over his original recasting of grunge in a high-fashion context.

But there was no job on the line, no sense of present danger, with Slimane’s collection today. And with regards to that adjustment, there was no expert skirting of nostalgia. Almost nothing looked new. Which didn’t trouble Alexandra Richards, Alison Mosshart, and Sky Ferreira in the least. Such dream clients were all thrilled by what they’d seen. “That’s the way I dress anyway,” was their party line on the baby dolls, the schoolgirl slips, the vintage florals, the random mash-ups of sloppy cardigans, plaid shirts, and sparkly dresses accessorized with ironic strings of pearls and black bows, fishnets and biker boots. All well and good, and money in the bank for retailers etc., etc., but anyone expecting the frisson of the future that Slimane once provided would have to feel let down yet again. At the odd moments when he allowed it to happen—as in a cutaway jacket over a plaid shirt over slashed black leather cuissardes—there was a glimpse of the kind of rigorous sensibility that hybridized passion and fashion into an irresistible force at Dior Homme.

But wouldn’t it be radical if Slimane was actually saying that there is nothing new under the fashion sun, that all that ultimately exists is the energy and inspiration you derive from those elements of the past that you value and love. The same kind of fanboy ardor makes, say, Shibuya 109 in Tokyo or Trash and Vaudeville in New York such wonderful retro romps. This collection will undoubtedly send orgasmic tremors through such places.

Hedi Slimane’s Saint Laurent a/w 2013

Grunge music is inspired by Alternative rock, hardcore punk, heavy metal, punk rock, hard rock and indie rock, Grunge fashion is a combination of the same, but it’s also boyfriends and girlfriends wearing each others clothes. And the ultimate icons of Grunge are Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love in the late 80ties and early 90ties.

Grunge

“Grunge is nothing more than the way we dress when we have no money,” designer Jean Paul Gaultier told Vogue in 1993, the year fashion co-opted the look. It had grown out of the raw, messy scene surrounding the raw, messy sound—produced by a bedraggled pack of flannel-clad Pacific Northwest dropouts—that was suddenly the talk of the fashion establishment.

Grunge’s Goodwill aesthetic was, as Gaultier observed, largely born of necessity; it was functional, too (flannels for warmth, boots to keep out the wet). In 1989, Everett True, reporting in Melody Maker about an upcoming band call Nirvana, had drawn readers’ attention to the authenticity of an emerging music genre: “Basically, this is the real thing. You’re talking about four guys in their early twenties from rural Washington who wanna rock, who, if they weren’t doing this, would be working in a supermarket or a lumberyard, or fixing cars.” The grunge-grunge style (as opposed to fashion-grunge) was slept in, picked up off the floor, swapped, scrounged from the ragbag. It was a sartorial representation of nihilism that had been evolving among members of the college-rock and hardcore underground for more a decade but was only just beginning to meet the commercial mainstream via MTV.

“Punk was antifashion,” James Truman, then editor in chief of Details, said. “It made a statement. Grunge is about not making a statement, which is why it’s crazy for it to become a fashion statement.” Truman’s quote appeared in The New York Times in November 1992, the month that Grunge was served up to Seventh Avenue by a trio of young downtown designers: Marc Jacobs at Perry Ellis, Anna Sui, and Christian Francis Roth. (At Roth, models were accessorized with laminated backstage Nirvana passes strung on ball chain.) The shows’ immediate impact was one of those tempests in a teapot that are rehashed with relish in the fashion annals.

Critics were then, and remain, divided over the new up-from-the-street look. The English actress Sophie Dahl, then an impressionable pro-Grunge teenager, would later reminisce in Vogue: “The word itself was antisocial, the premise antidotal to what had gone before. The style was perfect for that awkward stage of adolescence, layers that one could shrug off and hide behind, an armor of sorts.” In contrast, the fashion critic Suzy Menkes distributed “Grunge Is Ghastly” buttons among her colleagues.

Jacobs, the prime mover of the trend, described his infamous grunge collection, which eventually cost him his job at Perry Ellis, to the Times as a “hippied romantic version of punk.” Visually, the look dovetailed neatly with the neogypsy chic coming out of Europe and modeled by Madonna on the October 1992 cover of Vogue. Yet grunge was, on a deeper level, more about garages in Granite Falls than ganja on the beach in Goa. And unlike the bondage pants and shellacked mohawks of punk, it wasn’t just low-maintenance, it was no-maintenance. The faux-real grunge aesthetic was a difficult fit for fashion, which is—by the very nature of the beast—marketed with aspirational images and biased toward fantasy.

“Your rendition of grunge fashion was completely off,” one disgruntled reader complained in a letter to Vogue. “If the whole idea is to dress down, why picture models in $400 dresses? No one who can honestly relate to the music labeled grunge is going to pay $1,400 for a cashmere sweater (especially when they can buy a perfectly comfortable flannel shirt for 50 cents at the local thrift store).

It irked retailers in the extreme and, materially speaking, didn’t amount to much. Jacobs’s famous collection was never even produced. Still, the movement was a game changer. It challenged the status-oriented status quo, and introduced a layered, rumpled new silhouette. “All fashion is loosening up, in an apparent rejection of the hard-edged styles and attitudes of the ’80s,” observed a reporter for Knight Ridder Newspapers in the seminal year of 1992. “Grunge is the realization of that backlash at its most extreme. And ugliest.” (Vogue, too, would later lump the “clunky downtrodden look” among the “worsts” of the 1990s.) And while grunge disdained—or just didn’t think about—the hierarchies of fashion, it also played loosey-goosey with gender. Though a male-dominated scene, it embraced androgyny. “In the wake of an overload of macho,” the journalist Charles Gandee wrote in Vogue the following year, “and with the rise of the gamine, a new breed of young actors, models, and musicians is reshaping our idea of what’s attractive in a man.”

Fashion images, both in advertisements and in editorial pages, began to attempt to represent what was “real.” The photographer Juergen Teller talked about this sea change in the March 1994 issue of Vogue: “We’re not this generation of finding a girl with tons of jewelry attractive—nobody has to have some bloody nose job and breast implants,” he said. “We live in very hard times, and that’s why the people in my pictures maybe look a bit fucked-up or, you know, maybe tired. Because life is tiring.”

Grunge & Glory

Vogue US December 1992 Steven Meisel (this story was based on the grunge collection Marc Jacobs presented for Perry Ellis)

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La fièvre Grunge

by Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott for Vogue Paris September 2013

(shortened version)

information : www.style.com  and  http://www.vogue.com/voguepedia/Grunge

I found this beautiful Christian Dior dress suit about 15 years ago in a second-hand shop (that’s how vintage shops were called at the time). The place belonged to an ex-girlfriend of my neighbour and he advised me to walk in there once in a while, because between all the regular second-hand stock, sometimes real treasures could be found. That’s how I came to know of the shop, which was situated in a neighbourhood you would normally never look for extraordinary second-hand finds.

I got to now the owner, who one day tipped me, a wardrobe of an old lady would arrive and probably it contained some great finds. Being a collector of vintage clothes, shoes and handbags,  I got really excited with the prospect.

That day I walked in and immediately spotted the Christian Dior dress suit, which was hanging behind the counter. I didn’t want to seem to eager, so I walked around the shop, looking for other beautiful things, but nothing could beat the Dior suit. I went to the owner and informed about the price of the suit, but of course she already had noticed I my excitement ( I am the worst actor in the world) about the suit and had upgraded the price to a number she had never asked for a garment in her shop before. But I had fallen in love with the suit, which was made out from  black bouclé fabric and didn’t even try to negotiate about the price.

That is how I got to own the suit and for all these years I have taken good care of it. Because Christian Dior was the first one to number his garments, I knew I could find out more about the sui;, the year it was made (somewhere in the 1940ties?) and maybe even if it was made to order for a certain person. I didn’t do anything about this, till about a month ago. I emailed to Dior Paris about the suit and I was advised to photograph it from every side and send these pictures, together with a letter with all possible information about it, to Dior Heritage.

This week I got an email from Dior Heritage, to thank me for the photographs  and if I was willing to consider selling the suit to Dior. I haven’t thought about selling it before, but the idea of the suit returning to Dior after all these years seems very appealing to me, even romantic……

I have been able to study the suit and I want to share the pictures, so others can also see how it was made.

The label in the back of the jacket. The number in the label is quiet faded:  30442

Top front of the jacket with close look on the finishing work of the collar.

The jacket has a ’fake’ bow belt, which closes with a hook-and-eye underneath the bow

The jacket open showing the full front of the dress, with beads and sequences on the top

Close-up beads and sequences work

Top front of the dress

 Back of the dress, which shows the dress looks like a two-piece, but it is one piece!

The dress inside-out. the lining of the top is made from silk fabric

The dress has two zippers in the back; one trough the silk lining+skirt and one in the beaded top which can open completely from top to bottom and has an extra hook-and-eye to keep it perfectly closed.

The bottom of the inside out dress, with extra wide seams (in case it has be be made bigger)

The label inside the dress

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I was a success in my job as a cover girl,” she writes, “and I owe that success more to an expressive face than to my good looks.”

Bettina

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Biography

Simone Micheline Bodin (born in France, 1925), known professionally as Bettina or Bettina Graziani, was a French fashion model of the 1940s and 1950. Simone spends her childhood in Lavel, France. Her first job is tinting drawings for an architect, while she’s  dreaming of becoming a fashion designer. She moves to Paris and presents her drawings to couturier Jacques Costet at his atelier at 4 Rue de la Paix. Costet isn’t interested in her drawings, but takes Simone on as a model. “My round country-girl’s cheeks and healthy appearance made me look quite unlike all the other mannequins,” she will later write.

Simone meets Gilbert “Beno” Graziani, a genial man-about-town (who will later become a well-known Paris Match photographer). Together they move to the Cote d’Azur to run a bar in Juan-les-Pins to make ends meet. Back in Paris, Simone marries Graziani in a borrowed Jacques Fath dress.

In 1947 Jacques Fath hires Simone to model for him and transforms her “from a long-legged redhead with freckles to a supremely elegant, streamlined girl”. He renames her Bettina (because there is another model named Simone in his troupe) and she is photographed in Fath finery by Erwin Blumenfeld for Vogue. A year later Bettina makes her runway debut for Jacques Fath for spring.

Photograph by Irving Penn.Published in Vogue, September 1, 1950.

Jacques Fath directs her to shed her chignon in favor of a boyish “Greek shepherd” cut in 1949, which will spark a revolution in women’s hairstyles.. The same year Bettina makes her first trip to America, to work with Vogue’s Irving Penn. She gets offered a contract by 20th Century Fox, which she turns down. She is also invited by Christian Dior to join his fashion house, but  chooses instead to work for Jacques Fath.

Bettina divorces from Beno Graziani in 1950 and later befriends Peter Viertel, screenwriter of The African Queen.

After Jacques Fath’s tragic early death, Bettina goes to work for “handsome giant” Hubert de Givenchy, as a muse and press agent in 1952. Bettina organizes and models Givenchy’s first collection, which includes an embroidered and frilled, Byronesque “Bettina” blouse, which becomes a fashion icon in the early 1950s and inspired the bottle for the best-selling Givenchy parfum ”Amarige.”. In his early seasons, Givenchy channels Bettina’s personal style, sending her out barefoot in cotton separates, revolutionizing the couture at that time. Together they travel to New York for the “April in Paris” benefit at the Waldorf-Astoria. Designer and muse do a television interview with newsman Edward R. Murrow.

Bettina in parfume ad for Canasta by Jaques Fath

Bettina blouse by Givenchy

The Alliance with Givenchy ends after two years and Bettina is now a freelance model. She  moves for a time to Hollywood with her boyfriend. Peter Viertel.  Approached by a Hungarian manufacturer, Monsieur Hein, to create a line of sweaters called Bettina.

In 1955 Bettina meets Prince Aly Khan, a playboy who briefly was the United Nations ambassador from Pakistan. She gives up modeling to be his constant companion. This, she’ll later write, requires a change of style. “When I looked in the mirror I sometimes found it hard to recognize myself. Where was Bettina, the leading mannequin, ever in the forefront of fashion? The Bettina I saw had hair as long as Mélisande’s, and extremely decorous dresses that were sometimes even longer than fashion dictated. But I accepted what I saw in the mirror with perfectly good grace, since I knew that this was how Aly liked me to look.”

Bettina & Prince Aly Khan

“No. 1 topic among the marriage-makers of the International Smart Set these days is the romance of Prince Aly Khan, ex-husband of Rita Hayworth, and the beauteous ‘Bettina,’ . . . ex–cover girl.” Bettina receives two dozen roses from the prince daily, the press reports

In 1960 disaster strikes when Aly Khan is killed in a car accident, which Bettina survives, though she’ll suffer a miscarriage. She inherits Khan’s Chantilly château, Green Lodge (which she’ll later sell to Khan’s son, Karim).

In 1967 Bettina, “the green-eyed railway worker’s daughter” goes back to modeling at the age of 42. And all because she’s bored. Bettina works for Coco Chanel, but she has a problem, for as the couturier says of her, “She needs to lose a little weight. I have told her to follow my example and don’t eat at weekends.”  After presenting Chanel’s collection in July, Bettina says, “It was fun to do it once. I never will again.”

Coco Chanel & Bettina

Bettina becomes director of haute couture at Emanuel Ungaro in 1976. “I needed to go to work for the money,” she later says.

In 2010 Frédéric Mitterrand presents Bettina with France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres award, saying, “You are, in a word, the embodiment of the modern woman.”

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Portrets

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Interview Magazine

Interview by Colleen Nika,   publised: 18 December, 2008  

During the postwar creative boom of early 50s France, three fashion designers revolutionized couture: Christian Dior, Pierre Balmain, and Jacques Fath. Supermodel Simone Micheline Bodin Graziani, pet named “Bettina”, rubbed shoulders with all of them, and played muse to the youngest of them, Jacques Fath. With her red hair and fresh face, Bettina personified the innovation, wit, and accessibility of Fath’s brand. Fath died in 1954, but his bold silhouettes, dramatic necklines, and unorthodox flourishes—”flying saucer buttons,” popularized by Hollywood starlets and Bettina’s editorials—continue to influence designers like Viktor & Rolf, John Galliano, and Giambattista Valli. Bettina famously lent her name to an iconic blouse by Hubert de Givenchy, from his first collection, but she considers her formative Fath years the highlight of her career. .  

Jacques Fath in studio with Bettina. Photo Louis Dahl-Wolfe

Colleen Nika: History has come to associate you with Givenchy, but before your worked with him, you were a muse to Jacques Fath. How did he jumpstart your career?

Bettina: I started working with Fath when I was very young, back in 1947. I had modeled before then, but on a much smaller scale. And I worked with Fath longer than any other designer in my career—four years. From the draping process through our presentations and campaigns, he used me for all of his new collections. He liked that I was “different”: I was very young, very genuine. I wore no makeup and I had red hair. At the time, Fath was interested in conveying an American spirit and a brand new attitude. He wanted to communicate a modern image to the media; it was very important to him. So, I became the face of Fath. 

CN: What do you consider most memorable during your years as Fath’s muse?

B: Fath would throw costume balls in the countryside, at the Château de Corbeville. All the best buyers, stars, writers, even other designers like Balenciaga and Balmain would come. Sometimes we would throw 20s– and 30s–themed partiesm, or cowboy-themed parties. Imagination was everything. And we had a great time at Fath’s studio, especially during draping sessions. Givenchy, who worked there when he was very young, says it was a beautiful experience and that he learned so much during that time. Guy Laroche got his start there, too. This was just after the French liberation; we all lived for the creative moment.

Bettina in Jacques Fath, 1950

Bettina in Givenchy winter dress, 1955

CN: After your Fath years, what path did your modeling career take?

B: I worked for Givenchy for two years. I also did a lot of magazine work. I was everywhere: in Vogue, of course, but also in Elle, which was a very new magazine at that time. In those days, the models would have their name credited in the magazines, so I had a lot of publicity. I stopped modeling in the late 50s, but later, I did some work for Valentino and I was a US press agent for Emanuel Ungaro.

CN: What are your thoughts on the contemporary modeling profession?

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B: The models are different now—they are so young, and they all look the same. Of course, I was young when I started, too, but there was so much less competition, less big names. But then, the entire business was different. The presentations were much smaller; collections were shown to select clients in salons, like a trunk show. You could reach out and touch the clothes. It was approachable. Back then, there was no ready-to-wear, only couture. Of course, because the runway events are so costly now, the industry is returning to smaller presentations. But the model’s role has definitely changed.

CN: Speaking of the present, how are you keeping busy these days? Are you still actively involved in fashion? What designers interest you?

B: Well, I travel a lot; I recently was in Malta and the Riviera. But I live in Paris, so I am still very engaged with fashion. I go the shows every season. My favorite designers? Azzedine Alaia and Yohji Yamomoto. But especially Alaia; he is the ultimate innovator. Actually, I am wearing couture Alaia now—he made this for me two years ago. [stands up to show sculptural black sheath]. And I still am very busy; I have many projects. People call me all time—they want to interview me: they ask me about the Parisian fashion scene of the 50s; they want my pictures and commentary. And I love talking about fashion history, so I am happy to do it.

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Jacqueline Bouvier, photographed by Horst P. Horst on the 
announcement of her marriage to John F. Kennedy, 1953
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Introduction

The 1960′s were considered to be a time for change, and that is  exactly what first lady Jacqueline Kennedy did for White House fashion. Jackie Kennedy became a fashion icon during her few years as first lady  and her influence on women’s attire continued throughout her life.  Everyone fell in love with Jackie’s grace and style largely because of  her wonderful fashion choices.

Jackie Kennedy loved wearing bright colors such as pink, yellow, red  and ivory. Her own personal fashion icon was Audrey Hepburn and  throughout her life, Jackie’s style would always feature the flavor of  Hepburn’s old Hollywood glamor. As a result, Jackie chose Hubert de  Givenchy as her go-to designer since Givenchy created looks for Audrey  Hepburn in ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s.’ Jackie Kennedy’s daywear generally consisted of simple sleeveless  dresses, Chanel jackets and A-line skirts by Dior, paired with her  signature pillbox hat, pumps, long white gloves and usually pearls or  brooches. 

For days around the White House or in the office, Jackie  opted for a high-waist trousers paired with a blouse, turtleneck or  cashmere sweater.  Jackie always completed her daywear with her black,  oversized sunglasses – a trend that is still in style. 

 For eveningwear, Jackie’s style was generally a sleeveless look in a  single color with a founded or bateau neckline as well as long sheath  dresses that showed off her slim figure.  Jackie also loved backless or  off-the shoulder gowns, which made her look like Hollywood royalty. Her  shoes and accessories would always match her evening apparel perfectly. A pair of white gloves was another signature accessory of Jackie  Kennedy’s. 

She also knew the meaning of the word ‘occasion.’  When  traveling to foreign countries, Jackie always dressed accordingly to  complement the customs of her host nation. For example, when visiting  India, her style was more conservative than what she would wear to an  American event. It’s this quality that helped foster Jackie’s classic  and classy sense of style and drew infatuation from people all over the  world.

Amazing experience

Where to start a post about Jackie Bouvier, Kennedy, Onassis, who was and still is a style icon? I did go to the exhibition ‘Jackie Kennedy, the White House Years’ in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2001 and it was one of the best I’ve ever seen (except ofcourse the exhibition of Alexander McQueen at the same museum). To see these clothes, you know so well from all pictures and tv broadcasts, from nearby was an amazing experience.

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Exhibition

The reason for the exhibition was to mark the 40th anniversary of her emergence as America’s First Lady and to explore her enduring global influence on style. Some 80 original costumes and accessories had come from the collection of the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston, to which the former First Lady donated these landmark pieces after she left the White House. The collection included elements from her formal White House wardrobe – what Mrs. Kennedy herself called her “state clothes” – as well as pieces worn during her husband’s 1960 presidential campaign. Hamish Bowles, European editor-at-large of Vogue, served as creative consultant. “Jacqueline Kennedy is one of history’s great style icons. Her profound influence on the way an entire generation wanted to look, dress, and behave cannot be overestimated.” Hamish Bowles  Hollywood’s preeminent designer, Edith Head, called her ‘the greatest single influence [on fashion] in history’ 

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Advice to Jackie

Jackie studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and she returned with a smart, sophisticated Parisian wardrobe, containing pieces of Givenchy, Balenciaga and Chanel. When John F.’s career climbed the ladder, Jackie was issued a discreet ultimatum: For political expediency : Cut the Paris cord. She began consulting with Diana Vreeland, the fashion oracle, on a selection of American designers. In December, the Hollywood costumer Oleg Cassini, a French-born American of aristocratic Russian and Italian descent, was made official designer of her White House wardrobe. An old family friend, Cassini would create for his star client a polished wardrobe of both original designs and Paris copies—for which Jackie often supplied sketches, pages torn from magazines, and fabric swatches.

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Another advice came from Manhattan hairdresser Kenneth: loose the short, wavy “Italian Cut” hairdo, grow your hair and stretch it out on rollers. (In the coming years, Kenneth will be responsible for Jackie’s famous trend-setting bouffant)

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Famous outfits

Inauguration Day

On the Inauguration Day, January 20, 1961, Jackie dressed in Cassini’s trim greige coat, worn with Halston’s news-making pillbox hat and a little sable circlet and muff. It set the tone for the new first lady’s wardrobe.

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Inaugural Bal

For the 1961 celebration,Jackie Kennedy collaborated on a design with Bergdorf Goodman’s Ethel Frankau and Emeric Partos. “What you see with the inaugural gown is the triumph of her own personal style,” the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Valerie Steele has said. “To use fashion as a way of representing her husband’s presidency—to look modern, elegant, simple and American.”  An Ivory column with silver embellished bodice, veiled with a sheer overblouse and a matching cape to add a royal touch.

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Inaugural Gala

Jacqueline Kennedy’s Inaugural Gala Gown. Ivory silk satin evening gown, by Oleg Cassini, American, 1961. Worn by Jacqueline Kennedy to the Inaugural Gala, National Guard Armory, Washington, D.C., January 19, 1961 the evening before President Kennedy’s inauguration. The cockade at the waist pointed to Jacqueline Kennedy’s pride in her French Bouvier ancestry and her profound love of history.

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Television broadcast

Jackie Kennedy wears a red wool day dress by Christian Dior for a televised tour of the White House on Valentine’s Day in 1962

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Nobel Prize winners diner

A Grecian draped Celadon column in silk jersey, draped to form a pleated skirt and a gathered bust line. Designed by Oleg Cassini.

This dress was worn by the First Lady to the dinner honoring the Nobel Prize winners of the Western Hemisphere at the White House in Washington, 1962.

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Opening of the Mona Lisa exhibit

Pink silk chiffon strapless evening dress. This sari inspired evening dress is delicately beaded with porcelain and rhinestones. Jackie had noticed a photograph of Audrey Hepburn wearing the original yellow version of the dress in the May 11, 1962 issue of Life magazine, designed by Hubert de Givenchy.  She supplied Cassini with a sketch from which he created this version after a spring-summer 1962

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Visiting the Pope

A full-length long-sleeved black dress in black Alaskine with a taffeta petticoat. This dress was worn by Jacqueline Kennedy during her audience with Pope John XXIII, Vatican, Rome, March 11, 1962. Protocol requires that women wear a mantilla or hat and dressed in black.

This dress is one of my  favorites worn by the First Lady, because of the  fabulous simplicity.

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Fatal day

Jacqueline Kennedy wore a double-breasted, strawberry pink and navy trim collared Chanel wool suit on November 22, 1963, when her husband, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Accompanying the suit was a trademark pillbox hat in matching pink. The suit has become an emblem for her husband’s assassination and one of the iconic items of fashion of the 1960s. It has been variously described as “a famous pink suit which will forever be embedded in America’s historical conscience“, as “one of those indelible images Americans had stored: Jackie in the blood-stained pink Chanel suit”, as “the most legendary garment in American history“, and as “emblematic of the ending of innocence“. Jacqueline Kennedy was a fashion icon, and this outfit is arguably the most referenced and revisited of all of her items of clothing and her trademark.
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Catalogue-Book Exhibition

A beautiful illustrated, very inspirational, must-have book.

http://www.amazon.com/Jacqueline-Kennedy-Selections-Library-Museum/dp/0821227459

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“I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.

-John F. Kennedy-

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Twiggy & Justin de Villeneuve

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For a while now I’ve been curious about ‘what happened to Justin de Villeneuve, after he and Twiggy split up as a couple and professionally’, so it was time to find out more about him. And I’m happy I did, because it’s the story of a chameleon and a one of a kind, who reinvented himself more often than Madonna did……, being a boxer, a colourful villain, a hairdresser, interior decorator, manager, photographer and poet, but best known for launching Twiggy’s modeling career and making her a superstar.

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Short Biography

Born Nigel Jonathan Davies in East End London, 1939. But Nigel didn’t seem a great name for a boy with ambitions, so he starts calling himself Nagels. Everyone, he says, with their fingers in dodgy pies, knew Nagels. He was one of the most persuasive mouths around, learning his craft by encouraging punters into strip clubs in Soho. From there he turned a few folding ones as the plant in the audience who volunteers to fight the boxer in the fairground ring and soon he was buying and selling this and that. Once he got his hands on a job lot of wine.

“It was an insurance job, Jewish lightning struck the warehouse,” he remembers. “The wine tasted like paint-stripper, but I just stuck fancy labels on it, and sold the lot to Vidal Sassoon for his wedding. He invited me along, I was very nervous, positioned myself by the door to do a runner. But they were such gullibles, his guests, they got conned by the labels, everyone loved it. Vidal was so impressed, he made me his assistant.”

It was then, as number two to the fanciest snipper in town, that the young fast-lip decided that a false name was required to complete the con. This time he renamed himself Christian St Forget. But not for long. “I’d heard the name Justin and I liked it. Then someone said I should choose a French second name, but I didn’t know any. So they said, ‘Well just take the name of a town.’ So I said, ‘What, like Harlow New Town?’ And that was it: Villeneuve.” And so, suitably titled, the young hairdresser soon found himself blagging his way into the affections of all sorts of handsome women who came in to have their hair done. One was a skinny 15-year-old called Lesley Hornby.

She attracts the attentions of de Villeneuve, ten years her senior, while working as a Saturday girl in the local hairdressing salon. “I started going out with Lesley in 1965″. She wanted to become a model and Justin changes her name to Twiggy. Together they arranged meetings with fashion editors, but they all said she looked too young. He sets about promoting her look with great success. Eventually she got her break, within six months of meeting, Twiggy was on the front cover of every magazine. She is declared ‘the face of 1966′ by the Daily Express. Twiggy is photographed by Vogue, flown to New York, and becomes a recognisable fashion icon throughout the world.

“A lot of tap dancing went on,” he says. “I didn’t know what I was doing, I had a lot of front, but I had a lot of taste as well. I’d only let her do the good stuff. We exploded, we were like the biggest names. It was Mick and Keith, John and Paul, and Justin and Twigs. At one point I got through 23 cars in 12 months, Ferraris the lot. I had a domestic staff, five of them: cook, butler, chauffeur. Ridiculous, but I don’t regret a minute of it.”

It occurred in the early Seventies, when the pair had been an item for eight years, during preparation for the follow-up to the film The Boy Friend (“You remember, lovely film, really made Twigs”). De Villeneuve blames it all on a contractual problem. A script had been arranged, a producer engaged, Fred Astaire was going to star alongside Twiggy and a semi-famous actor was lined up to play the love interest. But then the snag struck: the money couldn’t be agreed on, and he dropped out. So an actor called Michael Whitney was recruited in his place. And, whoops.

“Halfway through the filming she rings and tells me she’s in love with Michael Whitney and I’ve got the old elbow. Devastated I was,” De Villeneuve remembers. “But the thing was, it need never have happened. Michael Whitney never needed to be there. It was contractual problems, you see, with the first geezer. Contractual problems which I could’ve sorted, but the agents wouldn’t let me. If only I’d been allowed to sit down with the bloke, then, well: crash, bang, wallop, two kippers and a bon-bon, how’s your father, done and dusted.” A colourful way of recalling his life has Justin de Villeneuve.

De Villeneuve takes fifty percent of her earnings as a model, and from the dress line set up in her name and the franchises for dolls and accessories. During the early relationship, Twiggy is naïve in business whilst de Villeneuve becomes increasingly extravagant – he takes delivery of a new Italian car every six weeks; Tommy Nutter suits are ordered ten at a time.

As Twiggy starts to become more aware of her earnings, De Villeneuve has difficulty demonstrating his relevance to their existing business relationship. He antagonizes professional photographers by taking up photography and then demanding grandiose fees; he generates a similar response in the film world and is deemed incapable of standing back and accepting his role should simply be that of an effective agent.

Iconic photographs of Twiggy in Biba by Justin de Villeneuve

Twiggy in Dudu make-up advertisement for Biba by Justin de Villeneuve

“By 1973, we were no longer a couple, but I remained her manager. David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane had just come out, and we loved the line: ‘Twig the wonder kid.’ We met Bowie a few times socially, and he mentioned that he wanted to be the first man on the cover of Vogue. I called them to suggest this, with Twiggy, of course, and after a bit of a hoo-ha, they agreed. T

o be honest, I wasn’t a professional photographer. I had watched Bert Stern, a hero of mine, do a cover with Twigs. I was fascinated by the set up: he would disappear into an office while the assistants set everything up. Then, when it was ready, he would return, utter those immortal words, “Strike a pose”, click the picture and go. I thought: “Justin, you can do that.” That’s the moment I became a photographer. 

Twiggy for Vogue by Justin de Villeneuve


Twiggy, 1971. Picture by Justin de Villeneuve
Twiggy for Italian Vogue by Justin de Villeneuve

Bowie was working on Pin Ups in Paris, so we flew there to do the shoot. When Twigs and Bowie were together and lit up, I looked through the viewfinder and realised that David was pure white, whereas Twiggy was tanned from a holiday in Bermuda. There was a moment of panic because I knew it would look bizarre; but the makeup artist suggested drawing masks on them, and this worked out even better. 

I remember distinctly that I’d got it with the first shot. It was too good to be true. When I showed Bowie the test Polaroids, he asked if he could use it for the Pin Ups record sleeve. I said: “I don’t think so, since this is for Vogue. How many albums do you think you will sell?” “A million,” he replied. “This is your next album cover!” I said. When I got back to London and told Vogue, they never spoke to me again. Several weeks later, Twigs and I were driving along Sunset Boulevard and we passed a 60ft billboard of the picture. I knew I had made the right decision.”

Photo of twiggy & David Bowie, commissioned by Vogue, but ends up as album cover for 'Pin Ups'

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In 1973, Twiggy severs her ties with de Villeneuve. And with that out went his main source of income. For a few years, De Villeneuve traded on the old name, doing a bit of interior decorating here (“Some poor sap in the City gave me a grand for doing out their restaurant; I hadn’t a clue”), a bit of pop management there (two of his clients were Tim Hardin and – we all make mistakes – Clifford T Ward). But it was not enough to sustain the domestics. 

“I was used to picking up the phone and making it work,” he says. “All of a sudden you’ve got receptionists saying, ‘How do you spell that name?’ “

Then, in the middle of a very barren run in the Eighties, came a crushing revelation. “I realised that I was only any good at that sort of thing when I was with Twigs,” he says. “It became an enormous handicap, my name. You could feel people assuming everything I did must be a load of old bollocks. People seemed to take enormous pleasure in my fall.”  Moreover, by then, Twiggy wasn’t around to help him make a few quid. All this self-assessment, though, had a positive outcome. De Villeneuve decided to write about the good times in book form (An Affectionate Punch, published in 1986).

http://www.amazon.co.uk/An-Affectionate-Punch-Justin-Villeneuve/dp/0283993464

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1975 Justin weds American Model Jan Ward. Together they have to baby girls, who now have made a name for themselves in fashion styling, Poppy de Villeneuve and illustration, Daisy de Villeneuve. 

Jan (Ward) & Justin de Villeneuve

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Another marvelous scheme

Justin worked as a studio producer for a while, after his split from Twiggy. You can find an entertaining story about this when you click on the next link!!!

http://www.studiowner.com/essays/essay.asp?books=0&pagnum=123

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2007 Justin married Sue Timney, president of the British Institute of Interior Design, at Chelsea Town Hall, they live in Kent 

Justin de Villeneuve & Sue Timney

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Now retired, Justin’s influence on Twiggy’s career was again highlighted when Bonhams auctioned the iconic photograph by Barry Lategan from her first modelling shoot in 1966. It had been arranged by de Villeneuve. The picture, which fetched £5,600, propelled Twiggy to international stardom.

Exhibition in 2011

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FACES OF THE SIXTIES: Justin de Villeneuve With a portfolio full of celebrated fashion shots and iconic portrait sittings with a number superstars of his era and glossy magazine publications, the new exhibition in Proud Chelsea is a marvellous look back at a prolific career. Featuring Twiggy, Pattie Boyd, Marsha Hunt and David Bowie, this exhibition showcases an exclusive collection of de Villeneuve’s rare and unseen photographs. Not only his famous sitters, but de Villeneuve himself is one of the most intriguing characters in British fashion history.

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A beauty shot of Twiggy for Biba’s new range of cosmetics, 1970

American singer and novelist Marsha Hunt at the time of her appearance in the stage musical ‘Hair’, 1968

Twiggy wearing a fur-trimmed dress knitted by herself, over a white blouse, 1972

Twiggy & Patti Boyd for Italian Vogue, 1970

Twiggy & Patti Boyd for Italian Vogue, 1970

Twiggy wearing a peasant-style dress in a promotional shot for Ken Russell’s ‘The Boy Friend’

Twiggy wearing an Ossie Clark fox fur coat from 1970

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Book

http://www.amazon.com/Twiggy-Justin-Thomas-Whiteside/dp/B0006BUYPO

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Justin de Villleneuve, 2006
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Information for this post:  Interview by Jim White, 1995

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/no-more-mr-twiggy-1603492.html

In 1988, I got invited to a party thrown by the model agency that represented Linda Spierings, a well-known model who is friends  with Azzedine Alaïa. I still had my own boutique for which I’d designed a collection enriched with embroidery of Arabic writing that season. To be sure nothing offending would appear in embroidery on the clothes, I’d copied words of a Marlboro advertisement (these were the days before internet…..).

The collection was a success and the night of the party I was wearing one of the embroidered jackets. Azzedine was dancing with Linda, when we bumped into each other at the dance floor. He looked at my jacket and got a huge smile on his face…. I didn’t dare to ask him what I had embroidered on the jacket, but because of his smile, I knew it was ok.

Azzedine & Linda Spierings

Embroidered jacket, 1988. Ph. Carel Fonteyne

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He dares to speak his mind

Azzedine Alaïa has earned an unusual degree of autonomy within the fashion industry. He shows when he wants and when he is ready — not when there’s a fashion week on the schedule. He does the same with his seasonal deliveries. He doesn’t advertise, and doesn’t seem to care one way or the other about editorial mentions, either. For this congenial contrarianism, Alaïa has earned the admiration of many an influential fashion critic.

 So here’s his unvarnished take on Anna Wintour: “She runs the business (Vogue US) very well, but not the fashion part. When I see how she is dressed, I don’t believe in her tastes one second. I can say it loudly! She hasn’t photographed my work in years even if I am a best seller in the U.S. and I have 140 square meters at Barneys. American women love me; I don’t need her support at all. Anna Wintour doesn’t deal with pictures; she is just doing PR and business, and she scares everybody. But when she sees me, she is the scared one. [Laughs.] Other people think like me, but don’t say it because they are afraid that Vogue won’t photograph them. Anyway, who will remember Anna Wintour in the history of fashion? No one. Take Diana Vreeland, she is remembered because she was so chic. What she did with the magazine was great.”

Anna Wintour & Karl Lagerfeld

In 2009, Wintour presided over an exhibition at the Met that celebrated “The Model As Muse,” and Alaïa, who is well-known for his enduring friendships with (particularly) the 90s supermodels, was excluded. (Naomi Campbell refused to attend the Met Ball in protest.) At the time, Alaïa said of Wintour, “she behaves like a dictator and everyone is terrified of her…but I’m not scared of her or anyone.”

 Alaïa also isn’t such a big fan of Karl Lagerfeld. In the same new interview, he says: “I don’t like his fashion, his spirit, his attitude. It’s too much caricature. Karl Lagerfeld never touched a pair of scissors in his life. That doesn’t mean that he’s not great, but he’s part of another system. He has capacity. One day he does photography, the next he does advertisements for Coca-Cola. I would rather die than see my face in a car advertisement. We don’t do the same work.”

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Short biography

Born June 7, 1939  in Tunisia, Azzedine Alaïa’s family were wheat farmers. His glamorous twin sister inspired in him an early love for couture and it was whilst assisting the famous midwife Madame Pinot, a close friend of the family, that Alaïa learnt about fashion. Madame Pinot enrolled him at the École des Beaux-Arts to study sculpture where he discovered what was to be his lifelong inspiration, the beauty and symmetry of the human form.

In 1957 the young Alaïa moved to France and began work at Dior as a tailleur but due to ill feeling centered on the Algerian war his tenure was limited to 5 days. He soon met Madame Simone Zehrfuss and Louise de Vilmorin who introduced him to the cream of Parisian society and were pivotal in him gaining his illustrious list of private clients. Alaïa worked under the patronage of the Comtesse de Blégiers, producing gowns exclusively for her for 5 years. He then moved to Guy Laroche to learn tailoring and after this he worked alongside his friend Thierry Mugler.

Azzedine & Naomi Campbell

In the late 1970s Alaïa settled in his famously small apartment on the Rue de Bellechasse. From here he ran his tiny atelier as a secret word of mouth concern, dressing the world’s jet set from Marie-Hélène de Rothschild to Greta Garbo, who used to come incognito for her fittings.

He produced his first ready-to-wear collection in 1980 and moved to larger premises on rue du Parc-Royal in the Marais district. When interior designer Andrée Putman was walking down Madison Avenue with one of the first Alaïa leather coats, she was stopped by a Bergdorf Goodman buyer who asked her what she was wearing, which began a turn of events that lead to his designs being sold in New York and in Beverly Hills.

In the 1980s when most of the fashion world was embracing sharp shouldered power dressing and baggy androgyny Alaïa introduced the world to the ‘body’ and to his own skin-tight mini skirts and dresses. Truly a showcase for the perfect human form, his ‘bodycon’ look sat alongside the more masculine power suits of the decade. Alaïa was voted Best Designer of the Year and Best collection of the Year at the Oscars de la Mode by the French Ministry of Culture in 1984 in a memorable event where Jamaican singer Grace Jones carried him in her arms on stage.

Grace Jones

Azzedine & Grace Jones

As Suzy Menkes said in 1991 ”If there were any justice in this (fashion) world, Azzedine Alaïa would be a worldwide household name, instead of a cult hero. It is 10 years since the small, shy, Tunisian-born designer launched the body-conscious stretch looks that have defined the way an entire generation dresses and become the fashion revolution of the last decade”.

During the mid 1990s, following the death of his sister, Alaïa virtually disappeared from the fashion scene but continued to cater for private clients and his RTW collections enjoyed continuing commercial success. He presented his collections in the heart of the Marais where he had brought together his workshop, showroom and Azzedine Alaïa shop. His return to the limelight in 2000 saw a departure from his super sexy 80s heyday and his new look was described as “much more sober, almost Amish in comparison”.

Catherine Lardeur, the former editor and chief of French Marie Claire in the 1980s, who also helped to launch Jean-Paul Gaultier’s career, stated in an interview to Crowd Magazine that ” Fashion is dead. Designers nowadays do not create anything, they only make clothes so people and the press would talk about them. The real money for designers lie within perfumes and handbags. It is all about image. Alaïa remains the king. He is smart enough to not only care about having people talk about him. He only holds fashion shows when he has something to show, on his own time frame. Even when Prada owned him (2000-2007), he remained free and did what he wanted to do.”

Azzedine Alaïa & Tina Turner 

Alaïa’s lack of interest in self promotion is legendary. He never learnt English and even at the height of his fame he was known to show his collection up to three weeks late, long after the international fashion pack had moved on from Paris. Without a thought for producing show stopping outfits or the next ‘it’ bag he is revered for his independence and discreet luxury.

A tireless craftsman Alaïa is famous for his extensive research into new materials and new ways of cutting and shaping them. He cuts many patterns himself and often finishes garments by hand. Alaïa drapes directly onto the body, ensuring the perfect fit. It has been said that once a girl has worn an Alaïa anything else seemed simply ‘too big’. There is always a fit model present in his atelier, available 24 hours a day, a role once filled by a young Naomi Campbell.

Owing much to Madame Vionnet, the great tailleur of the 1920s famed for her introduction of bias cut dresses, Alaïa uses the same lingerie inspired sewing techniques along with seaming and stitching usually reserved for corsetry. Combined with malleable elastic fabrics this allows for maximum body control and sex appeal in his clothes. He avoids vulgarity by utilizing a range of muted colours and expert tailoring, lace is backed with skin coloured fabric to give the illusion of exposure. Alaïa’s garments are created using old tailoring techniques yet he has always taken full advantage of developments in fabric construction embracing modern fabrics such as lycra, jersey and viscose.

Azzedine Alaïa was named Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur by the French government in 2008.

Azzedine working on his famous crocodile dress

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In 2011 Alaïa was asked to become the head of Dior after John Galliano’s departure. He expressed himself to be flattered but not interested in the role.

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Exhibition autumn 2013

Photos by Peter Lindbergh featuring Lindsey Wixson, 2013

Palais Galliera, Museum of Fashion in Paris, Autumn 2013

Designed for the reopening of the Galliera Museum, the exhibition provides the first retrospective in Paris dedicated to couturier Azzedine Alaïa.  After studying at the School of Fine Arts in Tunis, Alaïa arrived in Paris during the 1950s and quickly became a noble artisan himself, perfecting Parisian elegance. He mastered his craft by remaining close to his clients, whom he seduced with custom-made garments in the great tradition of Chic. In the 60s and 70s, he developed wardrobes for famous personalities such as Louise de Vilmorin, Arletty and Greta Garbo.

He followed a creative method that allowed him to free himself from dictates and rules, confirming his talent as a visionary. He was recognised by the media in the 1980s as his work stood out as particularly noteworthy during that decade. A true plastic surgeon who only used his scissors on chiffon and leather, Alaïa sculpted a new body. By inventing novel morphologies for clothes through the simple play of seams, Alaïa became the couturier of a timeless body of work. His influence on contemporary fashion and all generations of creators and couturiers is fundamental.

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Books

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 A beautiful catalogue of the Groninger Museum, Azzedine Alaïa Exhibition 2012

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http://webshop.groningermuseum.nl/p/13/azzedine-ala%C3%AFa-groninger-museum-webshop-catalogus

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II

Very rare hardcover ‘Alaia’ book featuring breathtaking images taken by Azzedine Alaia published by Steidl dating to November of 1998. Limited edition. 240 pages.

http://www.amazon.ca/Ala%C3%AFa-Azzedine/dp/3882435364

http://www.1stdibs.com/fashion/books/fashion-books/alaia-azzedine-alaia-steidl-nov-1998-limited-edition/id-v_91791/

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III

http://www.amazon.com/Alaia-Universe-Fashion-Francois-Baudot/dp/0789300893

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Info for this post: WWD, A Magazine, Wikipedia

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A friend asked me recently if I had noticed all these boys and men wearing beards lately. I laughed, because this trend isn’t just lately, it’s been going on for a few years already. But not many people know how and with whom it started…?

In 1996, Patrick Petitjean was already well known as a model, he’d done some great editorial jobs. I met him during a job for a Dutch magazine called Man. I told him I would in Paris during the next menswear shows-week and promised to give him a call. We met again backstage at the Claude Montana show and later we went to the Hugo Boss show, he was booked for. I never saw him again after that day, but I remember him as a really nice guy, with amazing blue eyes!

Early editorial picture of Patrick Petitjean 

Polaroid of Patrick Petitjean, ph. Patrick Demarchelier
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Soon he appeared on billboards for Missoni, Louis Vuitton, Calvin Klein and Hugo Boss, and became one of the most photographed male models during the late 90ties. 

Missoni Campaign, 1996

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After a few years of lots of editorials and campaigns it became quiet around Patrick Petitjean, but in 2008 he appeared in a campaign again, this time for Prada, photographed by Steven Meisel.

Prada campaign, photographed by Steven Meisel
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Then Patrick did something that bombarded his career to the  absolute top and changed men’s fashion: he grow his beard… Magazine editors and photographers recognized immediately it was thé new look for men. He first appeared  with his new look in 10 Men magazine, 2008.

Ph. by Marcelo Krasilcic for 10 Men magazine

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Growing his beard wasn’t all Patrick did, he also grew his hair. This Jesus-look has inspired  photographer Mario Sorrenti and stylist Emanuelle Alt  to make “On the Road” for Vogue Hommes International, september 2009.

Vogue Hommes International, september 2009
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But the absolute break-through for the bearded look came with the fall/winter,2009 H&M campaign, photographed by Andreas Sjodin.

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That’s how the beard became a fashion item again and lost its hippy / 70ties image.

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Other great photographs of  a bearded Patrick Petitjean

And in 2012 without a beard

Ph. Jean- Baptiste Mondino

Ph. Jean- Baptiste Mondino

Mongolia, 1921. Ph. published in National Geographic/Fashion
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In this post I’d like to share photographs I find very inspiring, like the story by Martina Hoogland Ivanow (photography) and Desiree Heiss (styling and 1/2 of the Bless duo)  for  Another Man, issue 1 autumn/winter 2005. 

Actually, the complete debut issue is a great source of inspiration. If you’re interested, dubble click on the link underneath the cover photo with Joaquin Phoenix, and scroll through the pages….

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Another Man, issue 1  autumn/winter 2005

Martina Hoogland Ivanow (photography) and Desiree Heiss (styling).

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National Geographic   FASHION

by Cathy Newman

This book is also inspiring to me. It contains archival and contemporary photographs focussed on fashion while documenting the people and cultures who wear them.

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http://forums.thefashionspot.com/f78/another-man-debut-issue-32640-3.html

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http://www.amazon.com/Fashion-Cathy-Newman/dp/0792233751

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Short Biography

Among the 80s and 90s top models, the Dutch model Marpessa plays a particular role, thanks to her extrovert personality and her unusual beauty If it is true that the name of a person holds part of his destiny, then to be called Marpessa, like the nymph disputed between the god Apollo and the warrior Idas, or like the Afro-American actress turned by Marcel Camus into the carioca Eurydice of the Black Orpheus, means having an aura of beauty that is almost mythic. This is the case of Marpessa Hennink, which entered the Olympus of the top models between the middle 80s and the early 90s. She was born in Amsterdam from Dutch parents, and her father had origins from Suriname; at 16 years old she decided to begin her career as a model. Her strong will and her daredevil personality, that mirrored her unique way of walking, don’t let her give up when Eileen Ford, pioneer of the model management that passed by the Dutch city for some castings, rejects her.

Before there was Cindy and Christy and Naomi – and for a while, during – there was Marpessa. An olive-eyed, gravel-voiced Amsterdammer whose mixed-race lineage left her feeling an outsider among her strapping, fair classmates but also made her endlessly versatile for fashion shoots, and one of the great catwalk prowlers. “Modelling made me so much happier about myself. Before that, I was like a black sheep and then all of a sudden in Milan it was ‘Ooh bella’.” For a time, she was ubiquitous.

Then, in 1993, she bowed out. “Grunge killed it for me,” she says, waving her cigarette as if to brush away a pesky fly. “I wanted to be in fashion to be beautiful and elegant, not to walk around looking like a junkie.

“ You can feel her agent’s anguish even now – walking away just as the big money began to cascade down the model chain. “Don’t worry, I made plenty,” she cackles.

I get the impression she made plenty more “in retirement” in Ibiza, where she had her daughter Ariel, now 10, and established an idyllic-sounding life of haute hippiedom and lucrative property development.

Doing up homes for affluent would-be bohos is sweet revenge for a model who for 12 years never had time to unpack, let alone hang a picture. Her life seems to have been a constant process of balancing and amendments. “My mum was quite a hippie and into sewing things and studying homoeopathy – and this was Holland in the Seventies, we weren’t exactly at the vanguard of fashion. So when I got to Paris I really went for it, clothes-wise.

“ She reckons she was the first model to dress the part off duty. Not that they were ever really off. By the late Eighties the supermodel culture was fomenting nicely; theirs was the fame that only requires a first name. She and Linda (Evangelista) were fashion-obsessed, trotting around in their Alaïa leggings and Chanel jackets. “We wanted to look as good off the catwalk as we did on. Before us models didn’t dress nicely at all,” she reports disapprovingly. “It’s not supporting the business is it? I won’t mention names but some, especially the American girls, wore the ugliest cotton knickers even to their fittings.

“ Marpessa, for the record, wore La Perla and Hermès. “I invented the It bag,” she laughs. She almost had an Hermès bag named after her – there was a collaboration in the offing but Ibiza got in the way.

She is an intriguing contradiction of laid-back and fastidious. But so is her parentage: her mother, the world’s “strictest hippie”, her father, a tailor “who used to go mad if he saw me up a ladder paint-stripping a wall in a Chanel jacket”.

Which would have been quite likely. She has around 17, at least two couture. She had “a particular relationship with Karl” when she was modelling. She doesn’t mean anything romantic, unless you count the creative connection that flourished between the big models of the Eighties and Nineties and the designers. She was in at the beginning, when Versace escalated the fee wars by paying models $50,000 to do one show and Dolce & Gabbana paid the models in clothes. “Models had much more input then than now,” she says. “The designers would listen to what we had to say during the fittings and sometimes they’d change the clothes because of it.” And sometimes they wouldn’t. “Then you’d have to wear something hideous on the catwalk and just pretend it was fabulous.

“ Apart from her hair, which she says she can never get right herself, she’s abnormally low-maintenance – no exercise, no special beauty tips, apart from total sunblock 364 days a year and one intriguing exercise she shows me to lift your boobs (smile downwards, flex your cheeks upwards, ladies, and feel the burn). She’s a compelling argument for not messing around with injectibles. In Ibiza she floated around in sun dresses (by her friend Yvonne Sporre who also decamped to the island) and lots of antique gold jewellery.

She’s wonderful at making things look effortless and as if they don’t matter very much – it’s the Chanel jacket-up-a-ladder philosophy. Secretly I think she worked quite hard in Ibiza, buying and selling real estate, as she calls it, engaging in the odd spot of modelling (she’s been in Vogue more this year than at any other time in her career) and ensuring friends like Valentino and Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana had a good time whenever they came to visit.

And then, last year, when Dolce & Gabbana launched its Alta Moda (haute couture) line, it offered her a job in Milan. When I ask her title she looks at me pityingly. “We don’t have titles.” If they did, hers would be something like “Person Who Takes Care Of Clients And Makes Wearing Alta Moda Look Easy”. Because amazingly, wearing lace dresses worth tens of thousands of pounds without looking like a museum piece can be quite tricky. So can those clients, even though she diplomatically insists they’re a breeze. Perhaps they’re simply in awe.

(By Lisa Armstrong | 06 August 2013)

http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/news-features/TMG10224775/Lessons-from-the-Stylish-Marpessa-Hennink.html

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Collaboration with Ferdinando Scianna and Dolce & Gabbana

The long collaboration with Magnum photographer Ferdinando Scianna, with whom she shot the first D&G catalogues and campaigns and various editorial spreads, resulted in the publication of the book Marpessa, in 1993.

The first time Ferdinando Scianna has seen the top-model Marpessa, it was in photography, a small photography issued from the collection fall-winter 87, showed by the two italian designers Dolce & Gabbana. They asked him to work for them. Scianna knew nothing about fashion. It was his first experience. Like Scianna, Domenico Dolce was born in Sicilia. And for this collection, the clothes were inspired by Sicilia. As a photographer, Scianna was looking for the virtue of his earlier books on Sicilia to shoot Marpessa. The book surpasses the classic definition of fashion photographs. It’s simply like an sensual italian movie in black & white, as a long time ago…

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Young Dolce & Gabbana waiting in a car during the photo shoot on Sicilia

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http://www.amazon.co.uk/Marpessa-R%C3%A9cit-Ferdinando-Scianna/dp/2859491503

(all pictures above by Ferdinando Scianna)

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DOLCE AND GABBANA ALTA MODA

April 27, 2013

When school pictures were taken, Apollonia Van Ravenstein always had to stand in the back, because of her height. At 15, the owner of a pantyhose factory , situated in her hometown Geldrop (Netherlands), asked her to pose for his new collection.  Apollonia sent him to meet her parents for approval. She was paid fl 75,- ( € 34,-) for the session, while her pocket-money was only € 11,- a month.

It was her brother Theo who convinced her to take the next step. He owned a hair salon in Berlin, Germany, and  was interested in fashion magazines. Theo told his sister, he believed she could become a professional model, made an appointment at the model agency of Corine Rottshäfer and accompanied Apollonia to Amsterdam. She was wearing a light-blue suit her mum had made for her. The other women at the agency were wearing fur coats, their hair up in a bun and too much make-up.

Within a month Apollonia was called ‘the face of 1970′ by the most important newspaper. She travelled to Milan, did a cover for Vogue, went to Paris and not long after took off to New York. The beginning of her model career was overwhelming. ‘You earn lots of money, you’re placed on a pedestal, but your inner grow suffers from these circumstances. The beginning of the 70ties was one big party, with lots of drugs and alcohol. I saw people in the fashion world who came to grief.’

Apollonia became well-known in the 70ties and 80ties. She modelled for Norman Parkinson, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn . Her pictures were in various magazines such as Vogue Magazine and Ambiance (1978 ). In 1972 she went to the United States and received an exclusive contract with American Vogue. Besides the modelling world, she was also active in the art and music scene. She met with Andy Warhol , who signed her, was one of Mick Jagger’s girlfriends and modelled for Playboy Magazine  in June 1978.

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Apollonia by Andy Warhol

Recently, september 11, 2013, these polaroids of Apollonia by Andy Warhol were auctioned.

ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987) 
 Apollonia Von Ravenstein 
 four unique polaroid prints 
 each: 4¼ x 3 3/8 in. (10.8 x 8.6 cm.) 
 Executed in 1982.
Apollonia photographed by Andy Warhol
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Apollonia van Ravenstein. Circa 1978-1979.
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Apollonia on the cover of Andy Warhol's Interview, June 1973

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She played a small role in the music video for Golden Earrings Quiet Eyes by Anton Corbijn in 1986.
Since the late 90s Apollonia van Ravenstein sails the seas, as hostess and interpreter on board luxury cruise ships of the Holland America Line . She is married to Captain Edward Zaane.

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Irving Penn

US Vogue November 1, 1972 , Pale, Liquid…with Pearl at Night

Photo Irving Penn
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Albert Watson’s Twelve

Albert Watson’s Twelve was private edition of twelve 12″ x 10″ silver gelatin prints, with an additional print (the heels) tipped onto the box cover, that was produced for his major clients. Only 12 of these sets were made. 1978

Norman Parkinson

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Vogue Covers

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Avenue (Dutch) May 1972

Apollonia van Ravenstein photographed by Barry McKinley

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Various pictures of Apollonia

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Model  by Michael Gross

The definitive story of the international modeling business—and its evil twin, legalized flesh peddling—Model is a tale of beautiful women empowered and subjugated; a tale of vast sums of money, rape, both symbolic and of the flesh, sex and drugs, obsession and tragic death ; and of the most unholy combination in commerce: stunning young women and rich, lascivious men.  Overview of modeling industry and several supermodels. Models Persons Health Fitness Beauty Grooming Business Cindy Linda Christy Naomi Magazine Covers Tv Ads Supermodels Francine Counihan Jean Patchett Suzy Parker Celia Hammond Veruschka Lauren Hutton Apollonia Ravenstein Louise Despointes Gunilla Linblad Shelley Smith Janice Dickinson Mike Reinhardt Christie Brinkley Bitten Knudsen Tara Shannon Christine Bolster Veronica Webb.

Investigative journalist Michael Gross takes us into the private studios and hidden villas where models play and are preyed upon, and tears down modeling’s carefully constructed façade of glamour to reveal the untold truths of an ugly trade.

Model by Michael Gross. Published in 1995. 

http://www.amazon.com/Model-Ugly-Business-Beautiful-Women/dp/0062067907/ref=la_B001IQZ8ZM_1_6/184-0980824-6474223?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1386063564&sr=1-6

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The Froggies - Apollonia Von Ravenstein – 1985

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Johan Asherton’s hommage for Dutch actress/ model Apollonia van Ravenstein.

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Charles James - Photo Cecil Beaton, 1929

Biography

Often cited as the greatest American couturier, Charles James was actually born (1906) and raised in England , but began his career as a hatmaker supported by friends of his mother in Chicago, where he sculpted his creations directly on the heads of his clients. Before he was educated at Harrow, a British public school, where he met the fellow fashion enthusiast and fashion photographer Cecil Beaton, whose images later defined his work. Charles was described by a friend, Sir Francis Rose, as temperamental, artistic, and blessed even in childhood with the ability to escape the mundane chores of life-like a trapeze artist.

In 1928 Charles heads for Long Island with just 70 cents and an assortment of hats to his name, after he left Chicago in a swirl of financial confusion. He sets up a studio in a carriage house once rented by Noël Coward in Southampton. Socialite Diana Vreeland is a client; she will later recall Charles  at the time running “up and down the Southampton Beach in beautiful robes showing his millinery on his head.

Charles James at work

Charles James and Mrs Randolph Hearst

His training as a milliner would shape his approach to clothing design. Much as a hatmaker uses a block, Charles viewed the female form as an armature on which to build his highly sculptural pieces. Never afraid to try new materials, spiraled a zipper around the torso in 1929, thus designing his famous taxi dress. To give strength and shape to the luxurious fabrics he favored, Charles often underpinned them with a framework of millinery wire and buckram for bombast. Though his dresses weighed up to eighteen pounds, his technical prowess ensured that the wearer moved as gracefully as a ballerina. Witness the garment that Charles considered his “thesis” in dressmaking: the Four Leaf Clover ball gown, which, viewed from the top, indeed resembled the lucky charm. To create the unique quatrefoil silhouette, James engineered a complex undercarriage of multiple petticoats, over which floated a skirt of cream duchesse-satin, its four structured “petals” emphasized by a wide undulating band of black velours de Lyon. 

Four Leaf Clover ball gown

Because of various financial escapades that skirted the limits of legality, James found himself in 1939 no longer welcome in England. The next year he opened Charles James, Incorporated, at 64 East Fifty-seventh Street, New York City. Virtually ignoring wartime rationing, he began designing collections for Elizabeth Arden and redesigning her couture collection in 1944; their relationship was severed in 1945 because of financial problems .

His impressive acts of achievement in construction earned Charles a reputation as fashion’s premier architect, known for his sumptuous eveningwear as well as his ingeniously seamed coats. “Mathematical tailoring combined with the flow of drapery is his forte,” Vogue noted in 1944. Even the venerable Cristobal Balenciaga, himself a master of cut and cloth, was unsparing in his praise of Charles James, calling him “the world’s best and only dressmaker.” Christian Dior described his designs simply as “poetry.”

Charles James cloaks by Cecil Beaton for Vogue, 1936

In 1948, Cecil Beaton photographed one of Vogue’s most memorable images, eight models in the eighteenth-century drawing-room of French & Company, a Manhattan antiques dealer. Their hair chicly coiffed, necks craned like swans, the young beauties in the composition were swathed in sculpturesque ball gowns of silk and satin, taffeta and velvet. Together, they created a harmonious palette—icy blues and grays, punctuated by surprising combinations of celadon and lemon, rust-orange and petal-pink. Posed against the Louis Seize–wall-panels, each figure emerged as a singularly exquisite study in color and texture. Indeed, if not for Beaton’s masterful lighting—soft shadows trace the curve of collarbone and shoulder-blade, the drape and billow of skirts—the women themselves could have been the rare objets on display.

The designer of this lavish fashion tableau was Charles James, “master of color comparatives, of the cut and fold of exceptional cloths”, as Vogue wrote.

Cecil Beaton for Vogue. Dresses by Charles James

Between the late forties and mid-fifties—around the time the Beaton photo ran—Charles was at the height of his powers. He finally achieved success and recognition, won two Coty awards in 1950 and 1954 for “great mystery of color and artistry of draping”. His pieces were already sought after by collectors and museums, as well as by those wealthy patrons willing to pay his exorbitant fees—not to mention, gamble on the actual delivery of a commissioned design. “Charles James felt there was not enough money in the world to buy his garments,” one client bluntly remarked. His desire to receive out-sized financial rewards for his designs, coupled with perfectionism and his insistence on total control, eventually destroyed him.

Charles James was, in short, an egomaniac. He considering himself an artist rather than a dressmaker, and was so strongly attached to his creations that he felt they ultimately belonged to him. He would borrow back a dress from one client, only to lend it to another; or, worse, loan it out for an advertising campaign for feminine products. At minimum eccentricity, the darkly handsome designer—who was said to have been an excellent model for his own work—might don a finished gown and dance all night in his apartment above the Chelsea Hotel before handing it over . . . if he handed it over at all. he did not let go of his creations easily. He made his clients pay, sometimes twice for the same gown, and sometimes for a garment he had also promised another client. He was notorious for not having garments delivered on time.

Among his most ardent (and patient) devotees were Babe Paley, Mona von Bismarck, the Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers—who steadfastly supported him throughout his career—and, deliciously, the burlesque performer Gypsy Rose Lee, for whom he created elegant designs for her strip-tease. Fellow couturiers Elsa Schiaparelli (who had to pay) and Coco Chanel (who didn’t) also put in orders.

Antonio Lopez illustrations of Charles James's designs

A perfectionist to the extreme, Charles James was capable of spending thousands of dollars developing the ideal sleeve or a staggering twelve years on a single frock. He would “far rather work and rework a beautiful dress ordered for a certain party than have that dress appear at that party,”  Diana Vreeland once observed. Such obsessive tendencies, combined with his taking investors on a wildly careening roller-coaster ride in his business dealings—in short, promising unicorns and rainbows and delivering absolutely zip—would ultimately prevent the designer from achieving the kind of success his genius deserved.

By 1958 Charles was a beaten man, unwelcome on Seventh Avenue, and mentally, physically, and financially drained. In 1964 he moved into New York’s bohemian hotel, the Chelsea. Here he worked with the illustrator Antonio Lopez to document his career. Old clients joined with his protégé Halston in 1969 in a bravely attempted salute to his career.  Charles attempted to document the creations of a lifetime, whether they were in public or private holdings. Above all, during those final years of his life, Charles James was fanatical about securing his proper place in the history of twentieth-century fashion.

He dies in 1978 of pneumonia in the Chelsea Hotel, alone and penniless.

Charles James at work

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Exhibition in the Metropolitan

          Charles James: Beyond Fashion

The inaugural exhibition of the newly renovated Costume Institute will examine the career of the legendary twentieth-century Anglo-American couturier Charles James (1906–1978). Charles James: Beyond Fashion will explore James’s design process, focusing on his use of sculptural, scientific, and mathematical approaches to construct revolutionary ball gowns and innovative tailoring that continue to influence designers today. Approximately one hundred of James’s most notable designs will be presented in two locations—The New Costume Institute as well as special exhibition galleries on the Museum’s first floor.

Petal evening dress

La Sirene Evening Dress, 1938