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Paris reigned the fashion world, also in New York untill Claire McCardell came along. Before Seventh Avenue was mass producing copies of French creations, Claire originated The American Look and paved the way for designers as Halston, Calvin Klein and Donna Karan.
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Claire McCardell , born in 1905, grew up as a tomboy, probably due to being a girl only having three brothers, who nicknamed her “Kick”. She dreamed of being an illustrator and in 1925 she persuaded her father to let her transfer to the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (later Parsons).
In 1927, Claire went to Paris, “what was then the source of all fashion” and continued her studies at the Parsons branch school at the Place des Vosges. While in Paris, Claire worked part-time tracing fashion sketches and learned, in her own words, “the way clothes worked, the way they felt, where they fastened.” Together with her classmates she would often comb Parisian flea markets, looking for cast-off couture clothing, which they would then take home and unstitch to see exactly how the garments were created. especially the samples from the French couturier Madeleine Vionnet, whose influence was evident in Claire’s work; though she did not work in the couture tradition, she was able to create ready-to-wear clothing by simplifying Vionnet’s cut. Claire incorporated the bias cut into her designs, both for aesthetic as well as functional effects.
After graduating Claire takes a series of jobs -painting rosebuds on lampshades and modeling for B. Altman- before she gets a job at a knitwear company. She is fired eight months later, after the owner tells her, “Stop designing for yourself and start designing for the customers.” Instead she finds a job with designer Robert Turk.
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When Robert Turk shuts down his business, Claire follows him to Townley Frocks. Shortly after the move to Townley and just a month before the spring showing in 1931, Robert Turk tragically drowned while swimming, forcing Claire to finish the collection. She recalled how she dealt with the opportunistic crisis: “I did what everybody else did in those days – copied Paris. The collection wasn’t great, but it sold.” This success encouraged Claire to experiment.
In 1934, Claire launches her first innovation: the interchangeable separates, for which the public took some time to get used to. “It is my experience that a good, new idea must be repeated over and over to catch on,” she’ll later say. “You have to sneak up with it, at least in mass-produced clothes.” Three years later she designs her first bathing suits for Townley..
Department store Lord & Taylor becomes one of the first retailers to promote homegrown design during the Depression years of the thirties, it was almost a decade, according to The New York Times, before “people started talking about the ‘American look’ in fashion. It was fresh, spirited, young. It was made for healthy, long-legged girls who were going places and wanted clothes they could move in.”
For fall 1938, Claire shows dirndls (skirt with attached apron), which fall flat, and the Monastic dress—which takes off after Best & Co. buys the look and markets it as the Nada frock. Time will later report, “Until then, American women had little choice of styles between a cotton house dress and an afternoon dress. The Monastic dress gave American fashion a new flexibility that it has never lost.” Despite being an unqualified and much copied hit, the Monastic will eventually—when Claire insists on repeating its silhouette in subsequent seasons—cripple Townley financially. The company closes later in the year.
Monastic dress
Claire joins Hattie Carnegie designing “Workshop Originals”, but the company thought her designs were “too simple for the rich tastes of the Carnegie carriage trade”. In January 1940, four months before the German occupation,she attends her last Paris fashion show. Soon after, she will leave Hattie Carnegie and work briefly for lower-cost manufacturer Win-Sum, before rejoining the reopened Townley—the surprise outcome of a chance meeting on an elevator with her former employer and his new partner Adolph Klein. She will stay with Townly till her death.
Claire introduces the Kitchen Dinner dress—just the thing, a reviewer says, “for the girl who wants quickly to whip up a meal for her beau or her husband and to serve it to him looking smart. Adolf Klein adds Claire McCardell’s name to Townley labels. Valerie Steele, chief curator of the Historic Costume Collection at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City noted that in Claire McCardell’s time, “You had the name of the store or manufacturer. The designer was someone kept in the back room. …But she wanted the credit. It wasn’t an ego trip. It was just acknowledgment of her work.”
Her name is becoming a brand; she is one of the very first American designers to earn this kind of personal recognition. Unable to get proper shoes for her presentations due to wartime restrictions, she uses Capezio ballet slippers, starting a craze for dance flats.
The War Production Board issues Regulation L85, which sets restrictions on womenswear. Claire comes up with another innovation because of the fabric shortish: Salvage Sally line of patchworked clothes and she introduces the denim Pop-over,a wrap-around housedress which Vogue will later describe as a major invention “born of necessity.” Some 75,000 of these $6.95 dresses ((its low price was because it was classified as a ‘utility garment’ and Claire’s manufacturer, Adolf Klein, of Townley, was able to make a special deal with labor) ) are sold within the year. Some form of a wraparound dress around $25 or $30 was always in Claire’s collection thereafter, and she liked denim so much she made coats and suits of it for townwear completed with the workman’s double topstitching as a form of decoration. … Claire could take five dollars worth of common cotton calico and make a dress a smart woman could wear anywhere. The modern woman could both be chic and do the cooking. The Popover is lauded at the Coty American Fashion Critics’ Awards.
Pop-over dress
At the age of 37, Claire took a break from her professional career to focus on her personal life, marrying Texas architect Irving Drought Harris, who had two children from a previous marriage. She helped raise them, but her growing career and her husband’s disapproval put a strain on the family relationship. Claire’s brother Bob said about the marriage: “Irving never approved of her career. He would have been very happy if she gave that up.” But she had made a name for herself and she was intent on having her career. It was her first love.
When Claire wins her first Coty Award, Norman Norell, who received the inaugural prize the year before, will say that she should have had that first: “Don’t forget, Claire invented all those marvelous things strictly within the limits of mass production. . . .
New York Times reporter Virginia Pope writes that Claire “is frequently spoken of as the most American of designer, for she seems to have a special aptitude for understanding and interpreting the life of the American woman.”
Lord & Taylor uses the phrase The American Look for the first time in 1945. In response to MoMA’s query “Are clothes modern?” Vogue publishes an Erwin Blumenfeld portrait of Claire wearing her “future dress,” which is “made entirely of two huge triangles that tie at the neck, back, and front.”
Future dress
After World War II, Claire continued to branch out in the fashion industry, working as a volunteer critic at the Parsons School of Design, as well as joining an advisory panel for Time, designing a new magazine that would become Sports Illustrated. Her most lasting impression, however, would continue to be in design.
In September 1948, Claire McCardell receives the Neiman Marcus Fashion Award.
“The typical McCardell girl looked comfortable in her clothes because she was comfortable,” wrote Sally Kirkland, a fashion editor at Vogue in the forties. “She always had deep side pockets, even in evening dresses, which encouraged a sort of nonchalant Astaire-like stance.”
Of her summer line for 1951, The New York Times says, “The designs were made of distinctive fabrics as always. The clothes were functional and styled basically, following the lines of the fabrics rather than molding anything to the body. Miss McCardell believes in belting gathers in at the waist rather than cutting the fabric to fit.”
In 1952 Claire becomes a partner in Townley.
Info: VoguePedia & http://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc3500/sc3520/013500/013581/html/13581bio.html
a lot of pictures found: http://www.metmuseum.org/
Claire McCardell was the founder of American ready-to-wear fashion, and in doing so defined what has become known as The American Look. She created casual but sophisticated clothes with a functional design, which reflected the lifestyles of American women. McCardell’s design philosophy was that clothes should be practical, comfortable, and feminine.
Claire addressed the subject of the great New York–Paris divide: “The basic difference,” she said, “is that we American women always look as if our feet were on the ground and European women mince.” She wasn’t speaking entirely metaphorically, either: She had popularized the ballet slipper as streetwear, when faced with leather shortages during the war; moreover, she built into her clothes “the McCardell slouch,” which she taught her models.
In 1955 Time Magazine published an article in which Claire McCardell’s designs were advertised “dresses that are as at home in the front seat of a station wagon as in the back seat of a Rolls, as comfortable in the vestibule of a motel as in the lobby of the Waldorf, as fitting for work in the office as for cocktails and dinner with the boss.”
“Claire started the feeling for Americana,” Vogue’s Babs Simpson told Time. “I’ve always designed things I needed myself. It just turns out that other people need them, too,” Claire quoted.
Her clothes were functional and simple with clean lines. They were considered subtly sexy with functional decorations. She utilized details from men’s work clothing, such as large pockets, denim fabric, blue-jean topstitching, metal rivets and trouser pleats. The idea of separates, in coordinating colors and creating endless configurations was revolutionary, because of its practicality and economic.
Before Claire, noboddy dared to use jersey, rayon, calico, seersucker, gingham, and cotton voiles for evening wear. She loved easy and accessible fasteners in her clothing, from zippers, to toggles, to rope. Her Madras cotton halter-style full-length hostess gowns were shown for evening.
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Her design trademarks were double top-stitching, brass hardware replacing buttons with decorative hooks, spagetti ties, large patch pockets, and Empire waists. Claire also brought denim to the fashion forefront as a dress fabric, as well as mattress ticking, and wool fleece. Manmade fibers, too, were a source of innovation. She also loved leotards, hoods, pedal pushers, and dirndl skirts. Surprising color combinations were trademarks of Claire’s work.
The beauty of her clothes lay in the cut which then produced a clean, functional garment. Her clothes accentuated the female form without artificial understructures and padding. Rather than use shoulder pads, McCardell used the cut of the sleeve to enhance the shoulder. Relying on the bias cut, she created fitted bodices and swimsuits which flattered the wearer. Full circle skirts, neatly belted or sashed at the waist without crinolines underneath, a mandatory accessory for the New Look, created the illusion of the wasp waist. The clothes often had adjustable components, such as drawstring necklines and waists, to accommodate many different body types…
Unfortunately, Claire’s life and work were cut short by a diagnosis of terminal colon cancer in 1957. Many believed that she was just then reaching the height of her career, and yet, despite the prognosis, the designer worked feverishly to complete her final collection. With the help of long-time friend and classmate at Parsons, Mildred Orrick, Claire completed her final collection from her hospital bed, getting up to alter the sketches when they were not to her liking. One of her brothers, Adrian, recalled how, “In spite of her impending death, anything coming out in her name she wanted to make sure was hers.” On the day of the show, Claire checked herself out of the hospital to personally introduce the collection. Many fashion followers realized this would be her final showing and crowded New York City’s Pierre Hotel for the show, giving her a standing ovation at the conclusion.
On March 22, 1958, at the age of 52, Claire McCardell passed away.
Claire contributed many “firsts” to the world of American fashion. Her revolutionary 1938 Monastic dress was certainly one such revolutionary innovation, as was her use of blue-jean stitching and trouser pleats and pockets in women’s clothing. Like the Monastic dress, the “popover” in 1942, a “wrap-around coverall in denim,” sold more than 75,000 copies in the first season alone and Claire included variations of the popover in every succeeding collection. She also modernized the dirndl skirt, a traditional German full skirt gathered at the waist, in 1938 and although it was not popular at first, variations of the dirndl skirt remain a popular clothing staple even today. She was also the first to incorporate the “riveted look” using “work-clothes grippers for fasteners and ornamentation. As one of the most innovative bathing-suits designers around, she introduced diaper and bloomer silhouette.s
Claire gave American women a look that set them apart from the traditional Parisian influences and helped make the everyday, such as homemaker chores, fashionable and stylish. At the same time, her designs encouraged American women to wear clothes that flattered their individual bodies and were comfortable, not restrictive ((Claire was the sworn enemy of shoulder pads), therefore ushering in a new approach to American fashion and women’s clothing.
She also started a craze for dance flats (especially Capezio) to be worn on the streets and even under evening dresses!
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1987, exhibition in FIT-Fashion Institute of Technology-Museum: Curator: Richard Martin.
Due to this exhibition, the three designers work earned them a special award in 1987 from the Council of Fashion Designers of America
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Women-Madeleine-McCardell-Kawakubo/dp/B0044PP6O2
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1998, exhibition opens at F.I.T. “In McCardell’s honest clothes,” publicist Eleanor Lambert writes, “you see the women of the Plains in a completely modern idiom.”
Book description:
The revolutionary fashion designer credited with originating “The American Look,” Claire McCardell designed for the emerging active lifestyle of women in the 1940s and ’50s. She was the originator of mix-and-match separates, open-backed sundresses, and feminine denim fashion; she started the trend for ballet flats as a wartime leather-rationing measure. Spaghetti straps, brass hooks and eyes as fasteners, rivets, menswear details and fabrics: they were all started by McCardell. Her Monastic and Pop-over dresses achieved cult status, and her fashions were taken up by working women, the suburban set, and high society alike.
First published in 1956, What Shall I Wear? is a distillation of McCardell’s democratic fashion philosophy and a chattily vivacious guide to looking effortlessly stylish. Mostly eschewing Paris, although she studied there and was influenced by Vionnet and Madame Gres, McCardell preferred an unadorned aesthetic; modern and minimalist, elegant and relaxed, even for evening, with wool jersey and tweed among her favorite fabrics.
What Shall I Wear? provides a glimpse into the sources of McCardell’s inspiration–travel, sports, the American leisure lifestyle, and her own closet–and how she transformed them into fashion, all the while approaching design from her chosen vantage point of usefulness. A retro treat for designers and everyone who loves fashion–vintage and contemporary–and teeming with charming illustrations and still-solid advice for finding your own best look, creatively shopping on a budget, and building a real wardrobe that is chic and individual, What Shall I Wear? is a tribute to the American spirit in fashion.
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/what-shall-i-wear-claire-mccardell/1118070664?ean=9781585679706
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Info: VoguePedia, http://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc3500/sc3520/013500/013581/html/13581bio.html & The fashion encyclopedia
a lot of pictures found: http://www.metmuseum.org
Which photograph can open my story about Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn……? I mean, the’re so many amazing pictures of the woman widely credited as the first supermodel. I know, many are named or self-proclaimed “first supermodel”, but for me and many others Lisa is the one!
I chose a photograph of Lisa and the love of her life, Irving Penn.
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Born Lisa Birgitta Bernstone (May 17, 1911), Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn spends her childhood in Uddevalla, Sweden. As a young girl she takes up painting, sculpting and dancing. At 17, her parents want her to take cooking lessons, but Lisa is determined to pursue dancing. Three years later, she moves to Berlin to take classes with choreographer MaryWigman, a pioneer of Expressionist dance (Mary Wigman was a pioneer of modern dance in the spirit of Martha Graham). After finishing Wigman’s, she returns to Stockholm to open her own dance school.
In 1933, Lisa takes a train to Paris, after she is asked by renowned Swedish choreographer Astrid Malmbörg to join her in Paris for an international competition. She falls in love with the city and decides to stay. Lisa meets fellow dancer Fernand Fonssagrives with whom she marries in 1935. Together they give private dance lessons in their apartment .
In the elevator of their apartment building, Lisa catches the eye of fashion photographer Willy Maywald, who asks her to model hats for him (Willy Maywald, a fashion photographer for the houses of Dior, Fath, Griffe, and Jacques Heim. He also worked for Harper’s Bazaar). Fernand takes the prints to French Vogue, where a test shoot is promptly set up with Horst P. Horst. Lisa arrives terrified, in a homemade brown wool suit and long, wild hair. “I had never seen a fashion magazine,” she will later recall. “I didn’t know what fashion was . . ., had no idea of what to do with myself.” The next day, she visits the Louvre to study paintings of people posing in various forms of dress.
Lisa begins modeling for Vogue and for her husband, who has taken up the camera following a back injury. In between the collections, the two roam Europe, photographing and selling nudes, sports, and nature shots to magazines all over.
Lisa Fonssagrives becomes the first recognisable model in Vogue.
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In this cover of Vogue magazine, Lisa poses in a blue and white bathing suit while sitting in a ‘V’ position, to spell out the word ‘Vogue. The first, black & white picture is a study for the final one (third picture).
Horst P. Horst photographed this for the June 1, 1940, issue.
Following a Swedish vacation, the Fonssagriveses are en route to New York when war is declared in Europe. They decide to emigrate to America. Fernand begins photographing for Town & Country; Lisa connects with exiled European photographers including Horst P. Horst and Erwin Blumenfeld. She also enlists with the John Robert Powers modeling agency, doing both editorial and commercial work.
Daughter Mia Fonssagrives is born in 1941. When Lisa returns to modeling, she reduces her workload to 20 hours a week. For a long time she won’t be photographed for Vogue.
Irving Penn’s image of “12 Beauties: The Most Photographed Models in America” runs in Vogue in May 1947; it marks Lisa’s first appearance in the magazine since 1941 and it’s the first time she works with Irving Penn (who placed Lisa at the center of the composition, a delicate ice-carved swan). Recalling this glimpse of his future wife, Irving later says, “I loved her when I first set eyes on her.” The attraction is mutual.
Lisa becomes the first model ever to grace the cover of Time in 1949. The “Billion-Dollar Baby” is the “highest-paid, highest-praised high-fashion model in the business, considered by many of her colleagues the greatest fashion model of all time.”
In Vogue April 1950, one of Irving’s most memorable portraits of Lisa is published, wearing a harlequin dress and portrait hat. A few months later she models the Paris couture for Irving in a top-floor, north-lit studio on Paris’s Rue de Vaugirard. These pictures will be published in Vogue following September.
After the couture shoot, the couple travels to London. By now Lisa’s marriage to Fernand Fonssagrives is over and she weds Irving Penn at the Chelsea Register Office.
In 1952, a son is born, Tom Penn and Lisa effectively retires from modeling, taking on the occasional job for old pals in the field. She also ends her own photography career, which started in 1947, taking pictures for Ladies’ Home Journal. Her apartment darkroom is changed into a nursery.
.“Making a beautiful picture is making art, isn’t it?” With a photographer’s eye, observing the way light hit the dress she was wearing as well as its drape. Then, with a discipline and dramatic flair learned from years of dance, she would stand in front of the camera and as she once put it, “concentrate my energy until I could sense it radiate into the lens.” She called it “still dancing.”
“There were no strobe lights in those days, but very hot spots, often live thousand watts on either side of you and the exposures were long. You could feel the sweat trickling down your face and the assistant would come over and hand you a towel. In fact I remember one time in New York in the ’50s when I was modeling fur coats in the summer. And there were no air conditioned studios then. It was so hot that I just fainted. And they propped me right back up and I went straight back to work.”
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info for this story: Wikipedia, VoguePedia & an intervieuw with David Seidner in Bomb magazine .
Next week: Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn (Part two)
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In 1952, Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, the celebrated (first) supermodel effectively retires from modeling after her son, Tom Penn, is born. She begins designing clothes by the mid-’50s. At first just an occasional dress for one of her husband’s (Irving Penn) advertising campaigns, but then people begin to special order evening gowns and suddenly she finds herself designing a line of at-home clothes for Lord and Taylor. Eventually she designs sportswear for them too. This lasts a good six years. When Lisa and Irving have to move, because the Central Park West building will be torn down, she stops designing, not being allowed to have a business in the new apartment. It is time for something else.
In their Long Island house, Lisa spends more and more time in her sculpture studio and enrolls in the Art Students League to sharpen her drawing skills. Finally Lisa and Irving move to Long Island definitely.
She begins exhibiting her sculptures and paintings in group shows in 1968 and later has many solo shows. She will be represented by the Marlborough Gallery in Manhattan.
“I was a sculptor all my life,” Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn once said, “I was a form in space.”
Lisa dies February 4, 1992 in New York of pneumonia , survived by her second husband, Irving Penn and her two children: her daughter Mia Fonssagrives-Solow, a costume designer who is married to real estate developer Sheldon Solow, and her son, Tom Penn, a designer.
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Ph. Irving Penn
http://www.amazon.com/Lisa-Fonssagrives-Decades-Classic-Photography/dp/0865659788/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1408631601&sr=8-1&keywords=lisa+fonssagrives+three+decades+of+classic+fashion+photography
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The complete set of images that Irving Penn donated to the Swedish museum in memory of his Swedish-born wife. A gorgeous production with exquisite printing.
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info: Wikipedia, VoguePedia and interview with David Seidner
From her humble beginnings in Kentucky, a girl named Edmona Strader transformed herself into Mona Schlesinger Bush Williams Bismarck-Schönhausen de Martini, the queen of international society and fashion icon, who became the world’s most photographed non-professional mannequin. She possessed charm, liveliness and a sense of humor. Her ladder up the social ranks was a familiar one: She arose quickly by marrying a series of older, wealthier men.
Mona was one of the most remarkable American women of her century.
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Margaret Edmona “Mona” Travis Strader was born in Louisville, 1897. She was beautiful even as a child and developed into a stunning woman. At 20, she married Henry J. Schlesinger, who was 18 years older. Her wedding gift from the groom was “a magnificent rope of pearls.” Together they had a son, Robert H. Schlesinger, whom she left in the custody of his father in exchange for half a million dollars, when they divorced in 1920. One year later, Mona married banker and athlete James Irving Bush, fourteen years her senior and reputedly “the handsomest man in America.” This would be her second unhappy marriage and after four years, in 1925, they divorced.
Mona returned to New York, where in 1926, she opened a dress shop with a close friend, Laura Merriam Curtis. Laura was engaged to Harrison Williams, but three days after the announcement of the engagement, Laura abandoned Harrison and remarried her former husband, James Freeman Curtis. Mona, who first met Harrison at her second wedding, got reintroduced to the richest man in America with an estimated fortune of $680 million ($8,000 million in today dollars).
On July 2, 1926, Mona married Harrison, who was a widower 24 years her senior. For their honeymoon they went on a cruise around the world on Harrisons Warrior, a steam yacht with ten staterooms and a crew of 45, at the time, the largest, most expensive pleasure boat in the world. The couple stopped in Ceylon, India, Iraq, and China.
When they returned, Mona and her husband divided their time between residences in New York, Palm Beach, Paris and Capri. Their social circle included statesmen and politicians such as American Presidents Roosevelt and Eisenhower; royalty – the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Princess Grace of Monaco; and an impressive number of writers and artists, including Greta Garbo, Cristòbal Balienciaga, Hubert de Givenchy, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Paul Newman and Enrich Maria Remarque.
Even after losing a lot of assets in the stock market crash of 1929, Harrisons wealth and position afforded Mona a lavish lifestyle, which included buying and wearing the most beautiful couture. Her favorite couturier was Cristóbal Balenciaga, with whom she developed a close friendship in the 30 years she was a client and patron. To complement her radiant complexion, Mona prefered to wear colors like beige, gray or smoked blue and for evening, pastels.
It was said that Givenchy dressed the rich; Balenciaga the very rich – and Mona was married to the richest man in the world.
In time she became known as one of the most glamorous and beautiful women in New York. In 1933, Mona was the first American to be elected one of the ten best dressed women in the world by the Parisian couturiers, including Chanel, Molyneux, Vionnet, Lelong, and Lanvin.
The next year she again topped the list of world’s best dressed women. Newspapers estimated she did spend $50,000 a year on clothing, accessories, and furs. “Mrs. Harrison Williams was among the few exceptionally beautiful women who marked the 1930s,” friend Cecil Beaton wrote. He photographed and wrote about her for the February 1 issue of Vogue, 1939.
After a railroad accident destroyed many of her clothes, she ordered 150 dresses from Balenciaga in one sitting. In 1940, Mrs. Harrison Williams tops the new International Best Dressed List, now picked by American fashion designers. Three years later Salvador Dalí painted her portrait.
Mona’s first happy marriage that ended in 1953, when Harrison Williams died at the age of 80 at the couple’s Long Island estate.
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Balenciaga, 1955
next week: Mona von Bismarck cries three days when Balenciaga retired
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info: Wikipedia, VoguePedia, Style.com, The Independent & the Mona von Bismarck foundation
Countess Mona Bismarck (February 5, 1897 – July 10, 1983) was an American socialite and fashion icon. She married five times and was celebrated by Cecil Beaton and Salvador Dalí, satirized by Truman Capote in Answered Prayers, and memorialized in Cole Porter’s Red, Hot and Blue! In 1933, she was voted “the best-dressed woman in the world” by Coco Chanel and other top designers, and she developed a close friendship with Cristóbal Balenciaga in her 30 years as a client and patron.
.In January 1955 Mona married her “secretary” Albrecht Edzard Heinrich Karl, Graf von Bismarck-Schönhausen (1903-1970), an “interior decorator” of an aristocratic sort and the son of Herbert von Bismarck and grandson of the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. First the civil marriage in New Jersey and a year later the religious marriage in Rome. Mona became Countess von Bismarck.
Countess von Bismarck outdid heiress Barbara Hutton when she bought new 88 outfits, following this with a total of 140 items over the next two years.
Ever energetic, for her own enjoyment, Mona read, swam, did needlework, wrote a book, and cultivated prize tulips. She kept dogs, her favorite being Mickey, a lap mutt.
Eddie von Bismarck died in 1966. Mona now resident in Capri and cut herself off from most of her friends.
Mona’s old friend Cecil Beaton visited her at Capri and was shocked to find that all traces of her famous beauty had left her. “She is now suddenly a wreck. Her hair, once white and crisp and a foil to her aquamarine eyes, is now a little dried frizz, and she has painted a grotesque mask on the remains of what was once such a noble-hewn face, the lips enlarged like a clown, the eyebrows penciled with thick black grease paint, the flesh down to the pale lashes coated with turquoise… Oh, my heart broke for her.”
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On one occasion Monsieur de Givenchy was reported to have made the following comments about his favorite client Countess Mona von Bismarck, ” She was splendid as could be seen in the portrait that Dali had painted of her, and had seduced five husbands. She was mad about pearls and brought them in kilos during cruises in the China Sea and the ports of Japan. She had two lifts of different speeds installed in her apartment in Ave de New York; the faster one was for the domestics so that they could reach the landing before her to open the door.”
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A quote by Diana Vreeland
Edith Sitwell (1887 – 1964) was born in a very wealthy, aristocratic family. She got two younger brothers (also authors), Osbert and Sacheverell, who, like Edith, had a hard time growing up with their eccentric, unloving parents.
When still a teenager, Edith’s father made her undertake a “cure” for her supposed spinal deformation, involving locking her into an iron frame.
At 23, she began publishing poetry and three years later she moved to a shabby flat in London, which she shared with her governess, Helen Rootham. In 1932 together they moved to Paris to live with Helen’s younger sister. Helen Rootham died six years later of spinal cancer. This was a tragedy for Edith, for she had never lived alone before.
Although she spent her life unmarried, Edith was passionately in love with the homosexual Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew. This love was Edith’s most important, yet most unfulfilling, relationship of her long life. For her the spark was definitely there and it did not matter that she was almost eleven years Pavlik’s senior, initially the relationship was one of great intimacy.
In the beginning, Pavlik was captivated by Edith’s extraordinary presence and later painted her portrait several times. Sadly, he only offered “Sitvouka” friendship and with no other choice, Edith accepted. Pavel’s interest in her seemed purely intellectual and quite possibly financial, the thought of Edith laying her hands on him in an intimate way appalled him.
Pavel started to design her clothes and her signature look was born. Edith always tried to be somewhere near Pavel, who once said to her: “Nobody has ever understood you better, or come closer to you than I have and nobody ever will!”
Edith went to New York after the war, where the friendship almost ended as the result of a wild scene that Pavel made in a New York restaurant. Apparently, “white-faced with anger,” he denounced Edith for being “self-obsessed” and for letting herself be corrupted by the “vulgar social figures that surrounded her.” Pavel further accused her of betraying the poet in her, the part he cherished, and “crudest of all, he coldly told her that everything that had ever been between them now was over.”
Crushed, Edith sailed for home the next day and spent the entire Atlantic crossing in bed.
Although, it was possible for her to eventually forgive him the friendship barely survived. It was a disaster of failed nerves and disappointed expectations on the sides of both.
During the WWII Edith had retired to Renishaw with her brother Osbert and his lover David Horner. She wrote under the light of oil lamps as the house had no electricity. She was lucky that during her lifetime she was surrounded by people who appreciated her and her two brothers as central to the artistic life of the times.
Edith Sitwell provoked many critics in conservative Great Britain because of her dramatic work, but also because of her unusual appearance. She resembled Queen Elizabeth I (they also shared the same birthday) dressed in exotic costumes, brocade and velvet gowns, adorned with gold turbans and huge colourful rings that reflected what she claimed: ‘good taste is the worst vice ever invented.’
She was created Dame of the British Empire in 1954. Three years later Edith got ill and ended up in a wheelchair. She passed away in 1964.
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Edith Sitwell first met Cecil Beaton on 7 December 1926 at the home of Allannah Hooper. It was a fateful meeting because the photographs that Beaton made of Sitwell later in 1926, then in 1927 and 1931, brought them both much fame.
The portraits that he took in 1926 and 1927 were all prefabricated set-ups prepared in dimly lit interiors.
In 1962, wearing her black ostrich feather turban faced with sheer organza, she welcomed Beaton into her apartment at Greenhill in Hampstead. She had commissioned portraits from him to mark her 75th birthday. She knew that they would be published internationally and would create an instant sensation. They did and you can see why. She is performing her eccentric fame for the camera and is much more beautiful at 75 than she was at 25.
Her style was an essential part of her character. But she had also had teasing sense of humour. Early on, Cecil Beaton noted ‘the twinkle in her eye’.
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Horst photographed Edith in 1948 for Vogue in New York. Here-along with her aquamarines-Edith wears two massive brooches. Horst says “Edith Sitwell wore extravagant clothes and Jewels; usually the clothes did not fit at all they just hung. She did it exactly her own way and got away with it.” “She was considered an Improbable and anachronistic fashion icon frequently photographed bristling with gigantic aquamarine rings– at least two to a finger, and plastered with vast brooches of semi-precious stones”
‘This gold collar was made for me by an American woman called Millicent Rogers. She was one of my greatest friends, though I only met her once. She sent it to me and the British Museum kept it four days and thought it was pre-Columban, undoubtedly from the tomb of an Inca-though they couldn’t make out how the gold could be stiffened in a way that wasn’t in existence in those days. But I have to be careful of the clanking when I am reciting and don’t often wear it for that.’
‘I feel undressed without my rings. These aquamarines I love, but I’ve got a beautiful topaz like a sunflower–and when I’ve worn these too much I feel it’s being neglected….I’ve got red and green and black amber bracelets, and a ring I call tiger into grape. Its yellow, veined with blue and red, but when it snows it turns blue.’
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People were expecting the two women to dislike each other. Instead of giving the waiting photographers a good scandal, Edith and Marilyn hit it off immediately. Edith described Marilyn in her autobiographyTaken Care Of:
In repose her face was at moments strangely, prophetically tragic, like the face of a beautiful ghost – a little spring-ghost, an innocent fertility daemon, the vegetation spirit that was Ophelia.
Marilyn was an autodidact but her intellectual curiosity and love of books were not considered consistent with her sex symbol image. Marilyn and Edith sat together chatting happily about Austrian philosopher, esoteric spiritual writer, and founder of anthroposophy Rudolf Steiner, whose books Marilyn had recently been reading.
info:
wikipedia
http://theesotericcuriosa.blogspot.nl/2010/02/unrequited-love-broken-heart-edith.html
http://aucklandartgallery.blogspot.nl/2010/08/1962-portraits-of-dame-edith-sitwell-by.html
Since the book The Beautiful Fall and the movie Yves Saint Laurent there’s been an increasing interest in Jacques de Bascher, the man who fuelled the rivalry between former friends Karl Lagerfeld & Yves Saint Laurent by having a love affair with both of them and the reason Karl Lagerfeld suffered from a broken heart for years. Now the movie Saint Laurent has been released (24 September, 2014), I find even more people searching for information on Jacques de Bascher on my blog, so I decided to try to find out more about this mysterious dandy.
It wasn’t an easy task, because not a lot to be found about him, but ……
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Behind every great designer there is often a nudging muse; an aristocratic aesthete who embodies not only the designer’s ideals but who also simultaneously pushes him towards greatness. This symbiotic relationship is at the heart of many a fairytale story; note Alexander McQueen and Isabella Blow, Yves Saint Laurent and Lou Lou de la Falaise. Jacques de Bascher represents this figure for arguably the most influential and important designer (bar perhaps Yves Saint Laurent) of the last half a century – Kaiser Karl, Karl Lagerfeld of Chanel, Fendi, and world domination.
Jacques was not born into actual French aristocracy, but into an affluent family who had borrowed the title to accompany their wealth. But he certainly dressed the part. For Lagerfeld, Jacques represented the dandy prince of the castle who he had always wanted to be. He came to Paris seeking fame and popularity, and found it first as Lagerfeld’s lover and companion, with a brief interlude as Yves Saint Laurent’s obsession. With his penchant for exquisite suits, and turn of the century details, Jacques made quite a stir in Paris society in the eighties until his untimely death from AIDS in 1989. Even David Hockney immortalized him in one of his famous pencil sketches, which now retail for $60 upwards. A true gentleman icon of the last century and something of a modern-day Dorian Gray, Jacques de Bascher was truly a tragic figure worthy of being remembered. Oakazine.com
In the early 70s, however, Karl Lagerfeld became enamored of Jacques de Bascher, a debauched young nobleman new to the Parisian scene, and began bankrolling his extravagant lifestyle. Bascher intrigued Saint Laurent, too, who saw in him a way to rebel against Pierre Bergé’s tight control and to “exorcise certain of his demons,” Drake (Alicia Drake, the writer of The Beautial Fall) writes. In 1973, Saint Laurent and Bascher began an affair — infuriating Lagerfeld and Bergé, and precipitating the fateful rupture between the two camps.
For Drake, Bascher personified the “gilt-edged decadence” that defined his intimates’ milieu. Drawing on the link he himself made between “decadence” and “falling” (a link that apparently inspired her book’s title, The Beautiful Fall), she writes: “For Jacques, it was always beauty that justified the fall. Beauty made even the idea of self-destruction … a possibility.” By self-destruction, the author means not only drug addiction but AIDS, from which Bascher died at 38. But despite Drake’s presentation of him as a doomed artiste, his demise comes more as an anticlimax than as a tragedy of genius lost. Having “never carved a statue or painted a picture” or designed an article of clothing, Bascher left behind only a legacy of hatred between two men far more talented than he. The New York Times
People familiar with Paris fashion folklore readily recognize Pierre Bergé is talking about Saint Laurent’s liaison in the 1970s to the late Parisian dandy, Jacques de Bascher, who also carried on with Saint Laurent’s bitter rival, designer Karl Lagerfeld.
Bergé makes no effort to disguise his distaste for Bascher. “I had to address that period,” said Bergé. “These letters to Yves couldn’t have been written without saying one, that I love him, and two that there were very difficult moments during our relationship.” thedailybeast .com
Insofar as being a muse can be called a function, he functioned as a muse to Karl Lagerfeld. He (Jacques de Bascher) follows a certain dandyish template that I like — let’s call it the charming satanist– and, according to Agenda Inc. the “notorious Moratoire Noir party organized by Jacques de Bascher which introduced the fashion world – for the first time – to the darker edges of the Parisian suburbs and Mapplethorpian quantities of leather.”
I did find his pretensions to French aristocracy to be, well, pretensions to French aristocracy.
Like most people in the book, he’s fairly disagreeable but what he lacks in character is mitigated by what he lacked in good intentions. (One can forgive anything except meaning well.) Pictures do him less justice than words, which, in this case, is a good thing. thegrumpyowl.com
He (Karl Lagerfeld) doesn’t talk about his sexual orientation and maintains that he never had sexual congress with the man he calls the love of his life, the Parisian “It” dandy Jacques de Bascher, who called Lagerfeld “Mein Kaiser” and died of aids in 1989. When Lagerfeld says he “hated the nineties, for some reasons,” it is code for many miserable years suffering with a broken heart, partially expressed by naming his Hellenic-inspired villa in Hamburg “Jako,” an amalgam of their names, and briefly selling a perfume of the same appellation. In fact, De Bascher was the reason Lagerfeld gained weight to begin with. He writes in The Karl Lagerfeld Diet that directly before De Bascher’s death, “I started to lose interest in my appearance, because I knew what was going to happen. I lost interest in myself and trivial matters. I felt old-fashioned in my proper made-to-measure Italian clothes. I started to buy my clothes from Matsuda, Comme des Garçons, and Yohji Yamamoto. I went from small to medium, medium to large, then to extra-large.” New York Magazine
Ultimately Pierre Bergé would move out, unable to cope with Yves’s utter self-absorption. As the years went on they both had other interests, other passions, other lovers (most notably Lagerfeld protégé Jacques de Bascher, whose affair with Yves added another dimension to the bitter Lagerfeld/Saint Laurent rivalry). The Guardian
This book ( The Beautifal Fall) is about the fashion designers Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld in their heydays in Paris in the 1970s. The city then was awash with wild, glittering young things who spent their nights dancing and schmoozing and stripping off and spraying each other with champagne. There were wild parties with weird installations and vast amounts of drugs. Lagerfeld’s companion Jacques de Bascher de Beaumarchais (yes, the name is fake) loved to titillate his guests. On his parquet sitting-room floor you might find a gynaecologist’s chair, or a posse of firemen, or a Harley Davidson with the wing mirrors pointing upwards and, on each mirror, a pile of cocaine with a straw and a razorblade… The Telegraph.uk
Marianne Faithfull is one of the Sixties’ greatest fashion icons and the original rock chic.
Once every so often along comes a genuine style icon – someone with such originality and flare that they capture the attention of millions. A lot of younger girls (and boys) think Kate Moss invented the boho style, but it’s the wardrobe of Marianne Faithfull that originated this style. Marianne Faithfull’s life and wardrobe have made her a cultural phenomenon.
Marianne Evelyn Gabriel Faithfull, daughter of Eva, the Baroness Erisso, and Major Glynn Faithfull, a WWII British spy, was born on 29 December, 1946 in London. She was a bright, fashionable and lively teenager, who plunged in the London social scene. In 1964, barely 16, she began to take on gigs as a folk music performer in coffee houses.
Her career really began when she attended a Rolling Stones launch party and was discovered by Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham. Her first major release, As Tears Go By, was, in fact, written by Andrew Loog Oldham, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. More hit records followed, including Summer Nights and This Little Bird.
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Marianne seemed to have it all, an instant career and she married John Dunbar on 6 May, 1965, with whom she got son Nicholas on 10 November the same year. But turmoil was on its way. Marianne fell in love with Mick Jagger and left her husband. Years later she told journalists: ‘My first move was to get a Rolling Stone as a boyfriend. I slept with three and decided the lead singer was the best bet.’
The start of her affair with Mick Jagger was also the start of Marianne’s use of drugs. The glamorous couple became a notorious component of the London Swinging scene.
Marianne was found wearing only a fur rug by police executing a drug search at Keith Richards’ house in West Wittering, Sussex. In an interview 27 years later for Details, she discussed her wilder days and admitted that the drug bust fur rug incident was devastating to her personal life: ‘It destroyed me. To be a male drug addict and to act like that is always enhancing and glamorising. A woman in that situation becomes a slut and a bad mother’.
In 1968, now addicted to cocaine, she miscarried a daughter before ending her relationship with Jagger and losing custody of her son in 1970 – an incident which caused her mother to attempt suicide. Together with her personal life her career spiraled into a failure. She only made a few appearances, including a 1973 performance at NBC with David Bowie, singing Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe”.
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She lived on London’s Soho streets for two years, suffering from heroin addiction and anorexia nervosa. In 1971, producer Mike Leander found her on the streets and made an attempt to revive her career, producing part of her album Rich Kid Blues. The album would take until 1985 for it to be appreciated.
Speaking of this time she’s astonished that she managed to survive: ‘It’s very, very strange to think about it. It was such a degraded moment, to live on a wall and shoot drugs’.
‘It was complete anonymity. I wanted to disappear – and I did. I wanted out. I wanted out of that world. It’s not that I didn’t love Mick, or I didn’t love the people in my life. I did. But I wasn’t cut out for all that. I certainly wasn’t cut out – although it is a great honour – to be a muse. That is a very hard job.’
Her career restored in full force in 1979 with the album Broken English, one of her most praised albums. It was partially influenced by the punk explosion and her marriage to Ben Brierly of the punk band the Vibrators. A severe laryngitis, together with constant cocaine abuse, permanently changed Marianne’s voice, leaving it cracked and deeper in tone. While her new sound was praised as “whisky soaked” by some critics, a journalist of the Sunday Times, wrote that she had “permanently vulgarised her voice”.
Since then, Marianne Faithfull produced many records, appeared in movies and collaborated with famous photographers (pictures published in the Part Two)
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Aside from her successful singing career, she also enjoyed success as an actress. In 1967 she starred in the film I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘is Name, in which she was the first ever to say the F-word in a movie. A year later, she amassed a cult following as the leather-clad motorcyclist in the French film The Girl on a Motorcycle (1968). After minor appearances in film and television in the 1970s, followed by a fourteen year hiatus, she made appearances as “God” in the adored and well received British-comedy series Absolutely Fabulous (1992). And in Sofia Coppola’s, Marie Antoinette (2006). Marianne played the part of Empress Maria Theresa. A year later, she starred in the film Irina Palm (2007), she played the central role of Maggie, a 60-year-old widow who becomes a sex worker to pay for medical treatment for her ill grandson. Her performance in the film was nominated a European Film Award for Best Actress.
Marie Antoinette
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The Girl on a Motorcycle (1968). A must see for all lovers of 1960s cult and retro British cinema.
Absolutely Fabulous
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Book description
Official website Marianne Faithfull: http://www.mariannefaithfull.org.uk
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Info: http://www.dailymail.co.uk, http://www.queensofvintage.com/marianne-faithful-vintage-style-muse/, Wikipedia
Back in 1971, Yves Saint Laurent was foundational in celebrity stylish as he dressed Mick and Bianca Jagger for their wedding in St. Tropez. By doing so, he built on the already solid platform that saw the brand adjoined closely with rock and roll culture in the houses infant years. Decades later, last year to be exact, that connection was restored as the brand launched their Saint Laurent Music Project. A growing portraiture campaign of musicians styling themselves in iconic and permanent pieces of the Saint Laurent collection, continues this year with contributions from Marianne Faithfull.
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“On the phone from Paris, famous fan Marianne Faithfull notes that Bush’s four-octave range should be regarded as a “national treasure.” “My favorite instrument in the whole world is the human female voice, and Kate Bush is one of the reasons why. It is, by far, a Stradivarius,” Faithfull says. “Which is why she rarely deals with the press or isn’t in a rush to record. She’s one of the few who can be above all that.”
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In 2009 Marianne Faithfull launched an extraordinary attack in The Daily Mail on former friend Kate Moss, calling the supermodel a ‘vampire’ who stole her style. The (now) 68-year-old singer said that, although she and Kate were once close, they are no longer on speaking terms.
‘She’s not really my friend. I thought she was, but she’s very clever,’ she said. ‘She wanted to read me like a Braille book. And she did. It’s a vampirical thing.’
Marianne, who famously had a relationship with Mick Jagger in the late 1960s, even accuses the 40-year-old of imitating her choice of men, comparing the Rolling Stone to Kate’s husband Jamie Hince. ‘Now I see pictures of her with a boy who looks like Mick Jagger, and her looking like me. So there was a reason. It’s one of her gigs to do me,’ she told The Times.
Kate and Marianne, apparently drawn to each other by a shared love of fashion and rock stars, were once a regular night-time fixture in Central London and even holidayed together in the Bahamas. At the time the iconic star said that she and Kate, who is almost thirty years her junior, were kindred spirits.
‘She’s very complex – she’s very like me. She’s a Capricorn. I think she’s great,’ she has said. ‘You know, it’s OK. I don’t give a s***. But I was quite offended at the time. We were very fond of each other. And then it suddenly soured,’ she added.
‘She’s very clever, but she isn’t at all educated. We don’t have any [common] references. Except music.”
A year later, Marianne Faithfull apologizes to Kate Moss……
In the Guardian of 16 February 2013, Marianne says she’s keeping her distance: “Except from Kate [Moss] – she’s an exception, because she’s clever and interesting, which is rare. Also, she’s clean now, which is great. It makes things much easier. She’s almost 40, which is a good time to stop. It’s when I stopped.”
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The story was called “High Camp” and was published in W magazine November 1997. Models in this series:- Lucie de la Falaise, Kate Moss, Stella McCartney, Marianne Faithfull. Photographed by Bruce Weber, styled by Giovanna Battaglia
Only the pictures with Marrianne Faithfull:
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‘Sparrows Will Sing’ was written by Roger Waters for Marianne Faithfull and is the first single from Marianne’s 20th album ‘Give My Love To London’.
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Sometimes I have to ‘disappear’ a day and lose myself in another world to get inspired. Yesterday was one of those days and this time I choose the world of Kate Bush. I read a lot about her, watched many of her music video’s and found a BBC documentary I’d like to share.
The first time I saw the Wuthering Heights video in 1978 was a mesmerizing moment. What I didn’t realise then, was the genius of Kate Bush, who wrote the beautiful song The Man With The Child In His Eyes when she was 13 and recorded it at the age of 16! She became famous at 19 and was solely responsable for her music, her way of dancing and her looks……
Kate Bush became one of music’s most influential women. Her tales of dashing heroes & heroines, sung in her trademark voice, marked Kate out as very different from the rest of the pop crowd.
Her appearance was another trademark, the wild auburn hair was bohemian, always curly or crimped, her wide-eyed expression was achieved with black liner around her eyes, piles of mascara and heavy grey and green eyeshadow, also Kate loved red lipstick. It all added to her status as a style icon.
Her background in dance led her to mixing floaty chiffons and silks with spandex leggings and dancewear. The ivory, floaty Cathy-dress she wore in the video for Wuthering Heights was /is a classic piece of loveliness, punk meets the Pre-Raphaelites.
Kate Bush, a true original.
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Watch the documentary and get inspired by this phenomenal icon
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Anita Pallenberg (born 6 April 1944) ) is an Italian-born actress, model, and fashion designer, who is mostly known for being a Muse the Rolling Stones.
.Young Anita became fluent in four languages, studied medicine, picture restoration and graphic design. At 21 she met Brian Jones (an original Rolling Stone) in Munich, where she was working on a modelling assignment. After a relationship of only two years Anita could no longer deal with his drug abuse. She had become Brian’s ‘full-time geisha, flatterer, punchbag – whatever he imagined, including partaker in orgies, which Anita always resolutely refused to do.
‘I decided to kidnap Brian. It sounds ridiculous but they even made a film about it, about kidnapping a pop star ['Privilege'] starring Paul Jones. This was the original story, Brian seemed to be the most sexually flexible. I knew I could talk to him. As a matter of fact when I met him I was his groupie really. I got backstage with a photographer, I told him I just wanted to meet him. I had some Amyl Nitrate and a piece of hash. I asked Brian if he wanted a joint and he said yes, so he asked me back to his hotel and he cried all night. He was so upset about Mick and Keith still, saying they had teamed up on him. I felt so sorry for him. Brian was fantastic, he had everything going for him, but he was just too complicated.’ .
Keith Richards later said he had to rescue Anita from Brian, because they were both on a very destructive course. It happened during a road trip to Morocco. Brian sensed something had happened between Anita and Keith and became violent to his girlfriend again. In the end she and Keith fled from Morocco and set up home in St John’s Wood, North London.
Anita and Keith together had three children: son Marlon Leon Sundeep (born 10 August 1969), daughter Angela (her middle name, which she chose to go by after initially being named and called Dandelion by her parents), born 17 April 1972), and a second son, Tara Jo Jo Gunne (26 March – 6 June 1976), who died in his cot 10 weeks after birth.
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In 1979, a 17-year-old boy, Scott Cantrell, shot himself in the head with a gun owned by Keith, while in Anita’s bed, at the New York house shared by Keith and her. The boy had been employed as a part-time groundskeeper at the estate and was involved in a sexual relationship with Anita. Keith was in Paris recording with the Rolling Stones, but his son was at the house when the teen killed himself. Anita was arrested; however, the death was ruled a suicide in 1980, despite rumours that she and Scott had been playing a game of Russian roulette. The police investigation stated that she was not in the room or on the same floor of the house at the time the fatal shot was fired.
‘That boy of 17 who shot himself in my house really ended it for us [Keith and her]. And although we occasionally saw each other for the sake of the children, it was the end of our personal relationship.’Keith later declared she shared his addiction to heroin and he wanted to clean up, but had to do it without Anita. Therefore he couldn’t stay with her, she would be a huge trigger for him. In 1981, after they had split up, Keith stated that he still loved Anita and saw her as much as he ever did, although he had already met his future wife Patti Hansen.
‘I was too independent for Mick [Jagger]. I wasn’t proper enough for him. He’s a chauvinist. I wouldn’t put up with that. Keith, surprisingly, is not. Though I feel sorry for Patti [Hansen]. I love her and think she is a marvellous woman, but I would not want to be in her shoes now. It’s such a lonely existence, living with a rock ‘n’ roller. No matter how much he loves you, he will always love his music more. I know when Keith is working on his music nothing else matters to him. He can be in a room with fifty people and he won’t nothing anything but his guitar. A woman, to live with a rock star, must find her ways of independence.’
Anita studied fashion design as a mature student at Central Saint Martins in London; she graduated in 1994. After she divided her time between New York City and Europe, and sporadically appeared in public as a party DJ. She also had a clothes collection.
Anita, now 70, has retired and shares a farmhouse in Sussex with son Marlon and acts as caretaker to Keith Richards’s Redlands estate while he is out of the country in tax exile.
Marlon & Anita
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Anita Pallenberg appeared in more than a dozen films over a forty-year span. Most notably, she appeared as The Great Tyrant in Roger Vadim’s cult-classic sci-fi film Barbarella, and as the sleeper wife of Michel Piccoli in the film Dillinger Is Dead, directed by Marco Ferreri. She had a small part in Volker Schlöndorff’s Michael Kohlhaas – der Rebell which was filmed in Slovakia in 1969 and the 1970 avant-garde Performance in which she played the role of Pherber (actually filmed in 1968 but not released for two years). She co-wrote the script to with Donald Cammell, but had no intention of playing in the movie. She ended up replacing the original actress at the last-minute due to a medical emergency.
Anita Pallenberg as the Great Tyrant in Barbarella : ‘Hello Pretty, Pretty…..’
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photography: Sybil Steele / styling: Marisa Sidoti
…Scots-born musician and designer Pam Hogg has dressed the queens of rock and pop as often as she has appeared amongst them. Once a support act for The Pogues and Debbie Harry, she has fronted bands performing a wide range of music; from rockabilly to punk.
Pam had an overnight rise to fame. After her studies of Fine Art and Printed Textiles at the Glasgow School of Art, where she won numerous medals, she went on to study at the Royal College of Art in London, where she gained her Masters of Art degree.
Self taught in making clothes from an early age, she caught the attention of clubland in the late seventies and early eighties which led to a career in fashion. Her creations were immediately embraced by the popular magazines of the time. She was photographed for ID, BLITZ and The Face and soon became a known fashion talent as London was named the innovative fashion capital of the world. Her first collections sold to Harrods, Harvey Nichols and Joseph in London, Bloomingdales, Bendels and Charivari in New York and independent boutiques in Paris, Italy and Tokyo.
Pam’s first catwalk show was with the collective “Hyper Hyper” in 1985. Pam and her collections gained immediate press attention. In 1989, “Warrior Queen”, her sixth and final group show won her the cover of ID magazine. She left Hyper Hyper that same year and relocated to a small self contained shop parallel to Carnaby Street in the heart of Soho. She continued to create, produce and direct her own London Fashion Week Catwalk Shows for a further six seasons. Her clients ranged from Debbie Harry and Siouxsie Sioux to Bijork, Kylie Minogue and Paula Yates.
In 1991, Terry Wogan introduced her onto the show as “one of the most original, inventive, creative designers in Britain” adding, “She has reached what is called Cult Status”.
In 1992 Pam quit fashion and returned to music. Her band Doll opened for Blondie in 1993 and the Raincoats in 1994.
Between 1999 and 2001 her continued love of designing and making clothes resulted in two catwalk collections and her first Fashion Film “Accelerator” starring Anita Pallenberg, Bobby Gillespie, Patti Palladin and Pam herself. She also clinched cameo roles from Daryl Hanna, David Soul and Primal Scream towards the end of 2002, having found a voice in script writing and film directing.
Inspired by Siouxsie Sioux’s Japanese concept, Pam designed the costumes for the Ice Queen of Punk’s 2004 world tour ‘Dreamshow’. In 2006, the Spanish curator Xavier Arakistain invited Pam to exhibit in the travelling art exhibition “Switch on the Power” alongside Yoko Ono, Warhol, Leigh Bowery and Kraftwerk.
Pam also returned to directing fashion movies, which resulted in the videos ‘Opel Eyes’ and ‘Electricman’’. These were viewed by a whole new unexpected audience via youtube and myspace. This direct access and exposure regenerated a new found interest in Pam’s work and pushed her back into the spotlight resulting in media attention from magazines including Vogue and ID.
In 2007, Kylie Minogue appeared in Pam’s black mesh metal studded cat suit in her 2 Hearts Video, Naomi Campbell modelled a Pam Hogg lycra and snakeskin printed leather catsuit in Vogue while Siouxsie Sioux wore numerous distinctive Pam Hogg signature cat suits throughout her 2008 tour and appearance on Later with Joolz Holland. During the show, Pam was interviewed and announced her inevitable return to fashion.
In October 2008, the prestigious Fashion store Browns of South Molton St London, was the first to stock the new Hogg-Couture collection. She was further asked to dress their widows for Halloween, an honour rarely given to one designer. Katie Grand’s new magazine LOVE, launched during London Fashion Week in February 2009 with a fashion feature over several pages styled by Joe McKenna solely featuring Pam’s new collection.
October 2013 Pam Hogg won an award for Creative Excellence by the Scottish Fashion Council.
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Info official website: http://www.pamhogg.com
My friend Eddy (De Clercq) has shared many memories with me about his famous club RoXY in Amsterdam, my favorite hangout for years. Some of the memories involve Leigh Bowery, artist, dancer, designer, creator of nightclub Taboo and professional provocateur.
Curious about this man, his amazing creations and stage performances, I found a documentary called The Legend of Leigh Bowery, which contains footage Eddy told me about, like the act The Birth and the weird wigs Leigh wore as daywear…
Leigh Bowery was an Australian performance artist, club promoter, actor, pop star, model, and fashion designer, based in London. Bowery is considered one of the more influential figures in the 1980s and 1990s London and New York City art and fashion circles influencing a generation of artists and designers. His influence reached through the fashion, club and art worlds to impact, amongst others, Meadham Kirchhoff, Alexander McQueen, Lucian Freud, Vivienne Westwood, Boy George, Antony and the Johnsons, John Galliano, the Scissor Sisters, David LaChapelle, Lady Bunny plus numerous Nu-Rave bands and nightclubs in London and New York City which arguably perpetuated his avant-garde ideas.
From a young age, Leigh Bowery (born 26 March 1961) felt alienated from his conservative surroundings. He first learned about London and the New Romantic scene through British fashion magazines.
Leigh moved to London for good in 1980, after taking a fashion course in high school. He became a known fixture at local clubs, in part for wearing outlandish outfits of his own design.
In London, he soon befriended fellow clubbers Guy Barnes (known as Trojan) and David Walls. The three men moved in together, and Leigh outfitted his friends in his creative designs. The trio became known on the London club scene as the “Three Kings.”
Leigh found some success as a designer, showing several collections at the London Fashion Week show, as well as in New York and Tokyo. He was best known, however, as a club promoter and London nightlife fixture. In 1985, he opened the disco club nightclub Taboo. Originally an underground party, Taboo quickly became London’s answer to Studio 54. Taboo was known for its defiance of sexual convention, and its embrace of what Leigh called “polysexual” identities.
In addition to his club activities, Leigh participated in performance art and was well-connected within the art and theater circles of London. He often performed in face paint, lurex clothing and masks, relishing the opportunity to shock and flout convention whenever possible. He also served as a model, posing nude for some of Lucien Freud’s later portraits.
Leigh Bowery, who had identified as gay for many years, married his friend, Nicola Bateman (something to do with papers he needed), in May 1994. Only a few close friends were aware that Leigh had contracted AIDS before his death from AIDS-related illness, which occurred in London on New Year’s Eve in 1994, seven months after his marriage.
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Leigh Bowery: indisputably an embodiment of the 1980’s club scene in London and a provocative influence for a generation of artists. The creator of Taboo – in more ways than the infamous nightclub – injects an outrageousness that inspired Boy George, Damien Hirst, Rifat Ozbek… the list goes on. The list is topped off with Charles Atlas, the man behind the camera for this amazing documentary
The documentary is also named in the Top Ten Cult Fashion Documentaries of Dazed & Confused magazine…. (http://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/16863/1/top-ten-cult-fashion-documentaries)
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Info: http://www.biography.com/people/leigh-bowery-20943343#early-life
Leigh Bowery was an Australian performance artist, club promoter, actor, pop star, model, and fashion designer, based in London. He is considered one of the more influential figures in the 1980s and 1990s London and New York City art and fashion circles influencing a generation of artists and designers. His influence reached through the fashion, club and art worlds to impact, amongst others, Meadham Kirchhoff, Alexander McQueen, Lucian Freud, Vivienne Westwood, Boy George, Antony and the Johnsons, John Galliano, the Scissor Sisters, David LaChapelle, Lady Bunny plus numerous Nu-Rave bands and nightclubs in London and New York City which arguably perpetuated his avant garde ideas.
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With the Australian artist Leigh Bowery (1961-1994), this catalog devotes itself to one of the most colourful border crossers of the London club, fashion, and art scene of the 1980s and 1990s. Bowery made his sexuality a means of aesthetic expression, and he consciously used his own body in his excessive abundance as an artistic media. His costumes, masquerades, and travesties investigate the concepts of fashion and the body at the boundaries to the most diverse social fields. Bowery employs his own physical bulkiness as the starting point of an extroverted body cult in which the concepts of ugliness and beauty, social standardisation and border crossings intersect. The result was an art figure which influenced in various areas. Bowery thus inspired Lucian Freud to one of his most fascinating nude paintings.He was discovered by the London art dealer Anthony d’Offay in 1988 and this was the start of a cooperation with the Photographer Fergus Greer who would accompany him until his early death in 1994 resulting from an HIV infection.
Editor: Kunstverein Hannover, René Zechlin, Ute Stuffer
Artists: Leigh Bowery
http://www.artbooksheidelberg.com/html/detail/en/leigh-bowery-978-3-86828-033-3.html
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The definitive biography of one of modern art’s most provocative vanguards Leigh Bowery was one of the most controversial and avant-garde performers of his generation. In this fascinating biography, author Sue Tilley, one of Bowery’s closest friends, lays bare the extravagant life of the trendsetting entertainer. From Bowery’s groundbreaking costumes and performance art, to his notoriety in London’s 1980s nightclub culture, to his role as a favored model for painter Lucian Freud, Tilley’s engrossing portrait offers insight into the outrageous world of 1980s modern art and the man who came to embody it. This ebook features a new postscript by Sue Tilley and an illustrated biography including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.
http://www.amazon.com/Leigh-Bowery-Life-Times-Icon/dp/0340693118
Leigh Bowery is back. In just a few years, Leigh Bowery Looks rose to the status of being the definitive and indispensible guide to the unique looks designed and, in these photographs, worn by Bowery. This paperback version shows one of Britain’s most heroically ambitious yet underappreciated designers and performance artists. Bowery remains an inspiration to many contemporary fashion designers, though few are willing to admit it. Leigh Bowery Looks contains 300 photographs of Bowery–an extraordinary body of work that was the outcome of his collaboration with British photographer Fergus Greer between 1988 and 1994, the year of Bowery’s death. Here the range of Bowery’s many looks is most evident, as are the ways in which he has influenced the world of fashion today.
http://www.violetteeditions.com/books/previously_published/Leigh_Bowery_Looks.html
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http://www.violetteeditions.com/books/previously_published/Leigh_Bowery.html
Sandy Powell OBE (born 7 April 1960) is a British costume designer who has been nominated ten times for the Academy Award and won 3 Oscars and she was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire(OBE) in the 2011 New Year Honours for services to the film industry.
Inspired by her Mum, who made clothes for her and her sister. She taught Sandy to sew at an early age, making clothes for dolls and taking more and more of an interest in the fabrics and shapes. Eventually she started to make her own clothes.
She studied at Central Saint Martin’s for a theatre design degree, but costume was where her heart was. During the Summer, after her second year, she saw dance classes with Lindsay Kemp (British choreographer) advertised and went along. The class didn’t go very well but she introduced herself to Kemp, had tea with him, showed him some of her designs and the two became friends. She started to work in the theatre world and decided not to return to Central. Sandy ones remarked that studying can work for some people, but that it wasn’t right for her.
For a year she worked as an assistant to a costume designer who worked for multiple theatre companies, after which she started to get her own commissions. When she began thinking about working in film, she met up with Derk Jarman (British film director and stage designer) who advised her to get some experience before taking the step into movies. The solution? Costume designing work on music videos….
Having gained design experience on the music videos, a year later Derek Jarman asked Sandy to design the costumes for Caravaggio (a film directed by Jarman). He also took her around the set and introduced her to the crew members and explained their roles. The budget was very low so there was a lot of costume making with a team. Every cast and crew member helped out on the film process – on all aspects.
Sandy credits Jarman as being her biggest influence and inspiration (she designed four films for him in total).
The movie Orlando directed by Sally Potter was her next project. The film travelled from the Elizabethan era to modern day and Sandy said that, for a costume designer, was “a dream come true”. Later she mentioned that she may have been still a little stuck in Jarman’s larger than life theatrical world and this seeped into Orlando.
Sandy thinks about a script in terms of whether it’s a film she’d like to see. A film she’d pay money to see. Having read the script, and enjoyed it, then there is a meeting with the director and, if offered the job, research begins. She uses books, including the photography book Gypsies by Josef Koudelka, which was given to her by Jarman and has been used as inspiration for nearly all her films.
After finding reference images, the aim is to meet the actor. Then she will look at fabrics rather than drawing designs. Sandy uses fabric as inspiration for costumes and tries out shapes on the stand (dress form). Then she will make rough sketches that are only intended for her and the maker – not for presentation to the director! The costume will appear through the fittings and invariably the original rough sketch will change. She will create costume illustrations after the costumes have been shot on.
Interview with a Vampire was Sandy’s first studio film after having made numerous low budget films.
Sandy really worked hard on getting the job for Velvet Goldmine, her first film with Todd Haynes. The film was set roughly in 1974, when she had been fourteen. She describes that period as very influential for her and she designed the film from her memory. There was very little money and a number of clothes were borrowed from people, including a fur coat from Roger Daltrey’s wife.
Next came Shakespeare in Love, Sandy’s first Oscar win. (Her first BAFTA win came from Velvet Goldmine. This was in the same year as her win for Shakespeare in Love – she was competing against herself!) Slight mentions were made of Sandy’s determination that none of her costumes (for any film) look brand new. They will always be “distressed” in some way – whether broken down, painted into, or merely looking as though they’ve been worn a few times before. Just to make the costumes look real.
Far From Heaven was the next movie. This was a film that was very concerned with the colour palette. Numerous meetings took place where colours for each scene were discussed in fine detail.
Then we came to Sandy’s first (of six) films with Martin Scorsese, Gangs of New York. There was some acknowledgment of Scorsese’s great appreciation for costume (with a period film he always feels a new costume on set – he knows how it should feel) and his infamous film knowledge that led to Sandy being given an entire film to watch for a stripe on a collar.
Sandy’s second Oscar win was for The Aviator by Scorsese. This was the film that had the biggest lighting complications for the costumes. Scorsese wanted the early 1920s section of the film to be shot using the colour processes accessible at the time. It was important to test what the colours would look like on the screen. There was one occasion where there was a problem regarding the colour. Cate Blanchett’s dress came out on the screen as a sludgy green when it was intended to by mustard yellow. How was this fixed? The colour was changed in post-production for every frame Blanchett was in. It was joked that this was the most expensive dress in film history.
The next year Sandy was nominated again for an Academy Award for Mrs Henderson Presents. But it took five years before she won her third Oscar, this time for The Young Victoria .
Creating the massive amount of costumes needed for this movie (58 changes for Emily Blunt alone) is something Sandy is seemingly unafraid of. After the initial sketches, she and her team shop for fabrics, commission hats and gloves and surge the internet to find the best dealers for period jewelry. “I like doing the jewelry,” she explains. “It’s one of my favorite bits. We do it at the end of the film when we’ve got all the clothes. Victorian jewelry isn’t that difficult to find…and a lot of the dealers were willing to buy it back after we’d used it.”
For The Tempest (2010) and Hugo (2011) Sandy was also nominated for Academy Award.
BAFTA nominations: Orlando, Interview with the Vampire, Wings of the Dove, Shakespeare in Love, End of the Affair, Gangs of New York, The Aviator, Mrs Henderson presents and Hugo.
BAFTA Film Award won: Velvet Goldmine and The Young Victoria
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Photography for LOVE magazine #10
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Gypsies by Josef Koudelka
http://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/gypsies/author/koudelka/sortby/3/ .
Albert (born November 26, 1926) and his brother David (January 10, 1931 – January 3, 1987) Maysles were an American documentary filmmaking team. They have shot over 30 films including Salesman (1968) , the famous Rolling Stones film Gimme Shelter (1970) and Grey Gardens (1976).
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Grey Gardens is an astonishingly intimate documentary, about Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (1895–1977), known as “Big Edie”, and her daughter Edith Bouvier Beale (1917–2002), known as “Little Edie”, who were the aunt and the first cousin, respectively, of former U.S. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The two women lived together at Grey Gardens for decades with limited funds in increasing squalor and isolation.
The house was designed in 1897 by Joseph Greenleaf Thorpe and purchased in 1923 by “Big Edie” and her husband Phelan Beale. After Phelan left his wife, “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” lived there for more than 50 years. The house was called Grey Gardens because of the color of the dunes, the cement garden walls, and the sea mist.
Throughout the fall of 1971 and into 1972, their living conditions—their house was infested by fleas, inhabited by numerous cats and raccoons, deprived of running water, and filled with garbage and decay—were exposed as the result of an article in the National Enquirer and a cover story in New York Magazine after a series of inspections (which the Beales called “raids”) by the Suffolk County Health Department. With the Beale women facing eviction and the razing of their house, in the summer of 1972 Jacqueline Onassis and her sister Lee Radziwill provided the necessary funds to stabilize and repair the dilapidated house so that it would meet village codes.
“Little Edie” is ‘discovered’ as a cult fashion Icon.
In 2010 the film was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
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Stylishly eccentric characters are familiar terrain for the documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles — he is, after all, the man who captured the cult fashion icon Edith Beale dancing through the decrepit rooms of Grey Gardens in a lush fur and silk head scarves. Nearly 40 years later, Maysles has turned his lens to a very different, more uplifting pioneer of individual style. In “Iris” Maysles follows Iris Apfel — interior designer, businesswoman, champion of flamboyant dress. The 93-year-old Apfel’s story is full of color — from her design projects at the White House to her line of bold accessories for the Home Shopping Network and a retrospective at the Met — and Maysles’s exploration of her creative trajectory is up close and deeply personal.
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Inspired by “Little Edie” & Grey Gardens
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Duro Olowu
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Since arriving on the London fashion scene in 2004, Nigerian-born Duro Olowu has impressed the right people with his vibrant mix of African prints, seventies tailoring, and unlikely color combos. A high-waisted patchwork boho dress—known as the “Duro”—put the brand on the fashion map and became a cult item in 2005 after being discovered by American Vogue editor Sally Singer and Julie Gilhart of Barneys.
Duro Olowu was born in Lagos to a Nigerian father and Jamaican mother; he grew up in a multicultural and big family (he’s the fourth of six children), where any art expression was encouraged. As a child, he passionately loved fashion: his first inspirations were fabrics and prints, shapes and volumes of dresses seen on African women. His Jamaican mother was his first style icon. “My mother was an individual. She embraced my father’s Nigerian culture and would always mix things up. She’d wear costume jewellery with a Gucci scarf and a skirt made by a local tailor. When she got dressed it was instinctual, it wasn’t too drawn out. And I think that’s a valuable lesson.”
My mother used to find the tailors who carried sewing machines on their shoulders and get them to make patchwork shirts and furnishings from local fabrics mixed with others she picked up on holidays abroad. She was a big influence on how I see color and print.
In the 80s he followed his parents’ wish: he studied in London and took a degree in Law, then went back to Nigeria; soon after, apart from being a lawyer, he started working in fashion. He returned to Europe, and spent a year in Paris at the beginning of the 90s, working as a freelance illustrator. He tells: “Paris was wonderful but really what it taught me is that fashion needed to be a business as well. It really showed me that the way you presented things and projected things and your vision were super-important for the future.”
The “Duro” dress
When he went to London again, he met his soon-to-be first wife Elaine Golding, a shoe designer; they launched a brand – Olowu Golding – and opened a boutique: “We were working hard but we were doing things we wanted to do.”
After splitting up with his wife, in 2004 he launched another brand with his own name, totally self-financed, and opened a new boutique: the first dress he designed in this period would set his future success.
In 2005 Sally Singer, who was Fashion News/Features director at Vogue at that time, spotted a dress in the Olowu boutique and fell in love with it: wide sleeves and Empire waist, it was made of colourful and printed fabrics in different combinations. “It’s a very joyful dress, effortless, comfortable, and sexy without being in-your-face,” he explains. When buyers from important New York stores eyed this dress on the journalist, a mania started: everybody wanted the dress promptly called “Duro”.
In January 2008 he married Thelma Golden, curator and chief director of Studio Museum of Harlem, in New York: the bride wore a dress designed – of course – by Duro.
Even if he says he doesn’t design for celebrities, many of them love his style: among the others, Michelle Obama, supermodel Iman and Iris Apfel.
He takes care of all the styling in his shows and often works, as a stylist, with the German photographer Juergen Teller.
He fights against the progressive racism in the world of fashion, where very few models on the runways are black: “The fault lies with the designers – their ignorance and their racism. Yes, it’s true that a lot of agencies don’t bother sending non-white models – my casting agent told me that I’m the only one who asks specifically for non-white models – but things will only change if the designers take a stand and ask for them.”
In 2005 he was appointed New Designer of the Year at the British Fashion Awards, just one year after launching his own brand.
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Thelma Golden wearing one of her husbands design
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info: Vogue Italia & Herald Tribune/ Suzy Menkes
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