from theNYTimes.com:
Carine Roitfeld Resigns From French Vogue
By CATHY HORYN
In a surprise move, Carine Roitfeld said Friday she will step down as editor in chief of French Vogue at the end of January.
“It’s 10 years that I’m editor of the magazine,” Ms. Roitfeld, one of the most influential editors in the fashion business, said in a telephone interview. “I think it’s time to do something different.”
She informed Jonathan Newhouse, the chief executive of Conde Nast International, that she wished to pursue other projects. “I have no problem with Jonathan, and he understood me very well,” Ms. Roitfeld said of her ideas for the magazine, which featured bold photography and expressed a cool, physical, erotic fashion ideal.
Ms. Roitfeld often did the styling for photo shoots. “I had so much freedom to do everything I wanted. I think I did a good job.” But she added, “When everything is good, maybe I think it’s the time to do something else.” She expects to complete issues through March. She said she was not sure what she would do after that. “I have no plan at all,” she said.
On British Vogue’s Web site, Mr. Newhouse said, “It’s impossible to overstate Carine’s powerful contribution to Vogue and to the fields of fashion and magazine publishing. Under her direction Vogue Paris received record levels of circulation and advertising and editorial success.” .
Showing posts with label Cathy Horyn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cathy Horyn. Show all posts
Friday, December 17, 2010
Carine Roitfeld Resigns From French Vogue
from theNYTimes.com:
Carine Roitfeld Resigns From French Vogue
By CATHY HORYN
In a surprise move, Carine Roitfeld said Friday she will step down as editor in chief of French Vogue at the end of January.
“It’s 10 years that I’m editor of the magazine,” Ms. Roitfeld, one of the most influential editors in the fashion business, said in a telephone interview. “I think it’s time to do something different.”
She informed Jonathan Newhouse, the chief executive of Conde Nast International, that she wished to pursue other projects. “I have no problem with Jonathan, and he understood me very well,” Ms. Roitfeld said of her ideas for the magazine, which featured bold photography and expressed a cool, physical, erotic fashion ideal.
Ms. Roitfeld often did the styling for photo shoots. “I had so much freedom to do everything I wanted. I think I did a good job.” But she added, “When everything is good, maybe I think it’s the time to do something else.” She expects to complete issues through March. She said she was not sure what she would do after that. “I have no plan at all,” she said.
On British Vogue’s Web site, Mr. Newhouse said, “It’s impossible to overstate Carine’s powerful contribution to Vogue and to the fields of fashion and magazine publishing. Under her direction Vogue Paris received record levels of circulation and advertising and editorial success.” .
Carine Roitfeld Resigns From French Vogue
By CATHY HORYN
In a surprise move, Carine Roitfeld said Friday she will step down as editor in chief of French Vogue at the end of January.
“It’s 10 years that I’m editor of the magazine,” Ms. Roitfeld, one of the most influential editors in the fashion business, said in a telephone interview. “I think it’s time to do something different.”
She informed Jonathan Newhouse, the chief executive of Conde Nast International, that she wished to pursue other projects. “I have no problem with Jonathan, and he understood me very well,” Ms. Roitfeld said of her ideas for the magazine, which featured bold photography and expressed a cool, physical, erotic fashion ideal.
Ms. Roitfeld often did the styling for photo shoots. “I had so much freedom to do everything I wanted. I think I did a good job.” But she added, “When everything is good, maybe I think it’s the time to do something else.” She expects to complete issues through March. She said she was not sure what she would do after that. “I have no plan at all,” she said.
On British Vogue’s Web site, Mr. Newhouse said, “It’s impossible to overstate Carine’s powerful contribution to Vogue and to the fields of fashion and magazine publishing. Under her direction Vogue Paris received record levels of circulation and advertising and editorial success.” .
Friday, September 3, 2010
"Fashion Week Preview: The Faces" by Cathy Horyn
Fronm the New York Times
Fashion Week Preview: The Faces
By CATHY HORYN
New Faces on the runways for New York Fashion Week. Clockwise from top left: Fei Fei Sun, Daphne Groeneveld, Melodie, Bambi Northwood-Blyth, Iris Egbers and Ilva Heitmann.
Now that we’re practically on a first-name basis with Doutzen, Lakshmi and Anja, it’s time we meet Bambi, Fei Fei and Kat. They are some of the new and almost-like-new faces we’ll be seeing next week at the New York fashion shows.
This is crunch time for casting directors, with meetings over the weekend, as more new models arrive in town and people start making decisions about whom they want on their runways. On Thursday, after I spoke in the morning with the casting director Ashley Brokaw, whose New York clients include Narciso Rodriguez, Proenza Schouler and Rag & Bone, she reported in an e-mail message: “Just saw a girl Jessica Clarke @DNA. VERY excited about her. Classic supermodel material from New Zealand.”
It’s all about the “girls.”
There are many casting directors working between New York and Europe, but among the top ones are Ms. Brokaw, Michelle Lee of the public relations and production firm KCD and Maida Gregori-Boina, whose clients include Calvin Klein and Jil Sander. They agreed on some — but not all — of the new models, and they had some thoughts about what differences to look for this season.
High on Ms. Brokaw’s list are Bambi Northwood-Blyth, Melodie at Wilhelmina, Caroline Brasch Neilsen, Fei Fei Sun and Julia Nobis. She elaborated: “Fei Fei doesn’t look like anyone else. She’s an exceptional beauty. Caroline is the full package. She’s got a great body for the shows, a beautiful face, she’s smart. You can check every box. All these girls have great personality and manners. They’re impressive in person.”
Of Ms. Nobis, who is a bit of a tomboy, she said, “You can picture her leaving a casting and jumping on her skateboard.”
Ms. Brokaw and Ms. Gregori-Boina say that clients want models with sensuality plus personality. “I think people are looking for muses, for more than a face and a body,” Ms. Brokaw said. Recalling a meeting recently with the Proenza designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, she said they told her they wanted to see girls with some life experience; maybe they’ve had a boyfriend or traveled a bit. “Things are steering away from the army casting we’ve seen in recent years.”
Meaning the militias of blank-faced models.
Not that models won’t be skinny, but there is a trend toward pouty lips, thick eyebrows, curves and, with some models, a bit of a pale androgynous look. Indeed, some of the girls recall the casting of early Raf Simons men’s shows. Ms. Gregori-Boina says clients are referring to the casting of Helmut Lang, Prada and Jil Sander shows in the ’90s. Among the new faces that she thinks will have a big season are Daphne Groeneveld, Iris Egbers and Hailey Clauson.
Ms. Lee of KCD suggests we might see two distinct model types this season: pouty Lolita, which certainly covers Lindsey Wixson, Barbara Palvin and Ms. Sun; and a somewhat androgynous girl, with linear proportions and striking features; maybe some freckles. Keep an eye on Chloe Memisevic, Ilva Heitmann and Kat Hessen.
Fashion Week Preview: The Faces
By CATHY HORYN
New Faces on the runways for New York Fashion Week. Clockwise from top left: Fei Fei Sun, Daphne Groeneveld, Melodie, Bambi Northwood-Blyth, Iris Egbers and Ilva Heitmann.
Now that we’re practically on a first-name basis with Doutzen, Lakshmi and Anja, it’s time we meet Bambi, Fei Fei and Kat. They are some of the new and almost-like-new faces we’ll be seeing next week at the New York fashion shows.
This is crunch time for casting directors, with meetings over the weekend, as more new models arrive in town and people start making decisions about whom they want on their runways. On Thursday, after I spoke in the morning with the casting director Ashley Brokaw, whose New York clients include Narciso Rodriguez, Proenza Schouler and Rag & Bone, she reported in an e-mail message: “Just saw a girl Jessica Clarke @DNA. VERY excited about her. Classic supermodel material from New Zealand.”
It’s all about the “girls.”
There are many casting directors working between New York and Europe, but among the top ones are Ms. Brokaw, Michelle Lee of the public relations and production firm KCD and Maida Gregori-Boina, whose clients include Calvin Klein and Jil Sander. They agreed on some — but not all — of the new models, and they had some thoughts about what differences to look for this season.
High on Ms. Brokaw’s list are Bambi Northwood-Blyth, Melodie at Wilhelmina, Caroline Brasch Neilsen, Fei Fei Sun and Julia Nobis. She elaborated: “Fei Fei doesn’t look like anyone else. She’s an exceptional beauty. Caroline is the full package. She’s got a great body for the shows, a beautiful face, she’s smart. You can check every box. All these girls have great personality and manners. They’re impressive in person.”
Of Ms. Nobis, who is a bit of a tomboy, she said, “You can picture her leaving a casting and jumping on her skateboard.”
Ms. Brokaw and Ms. Gregori-Boina say that clients want models with sensuality plus personality. “I think people are looking for muses, for more than a face and a body,” Ms. Brokaw said. Recalling a meeting recently with the Proenza designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, she said they told her they wanted to see girls with some life experience; maybe they’ve had a boyfriend or traveled a bit. “Things are steering away from the army casting we’ve seen in recent years.”
Meaning the militias of blank-faced models.
Not that models won’t be skinny, but there is a trend toward pouty lips, thick eyebrows, curves and, with some models, a bit of a pale androgynous look. Indeed, some of the girls recall the casting of early Raf Simons men’s shows. Ms. Gregori-Boina says clients are referring to the casting of Helmut Lang, Prada and Jil Sander shows in the ’90s. Among the new faces that she thinks will have a big season are Daphne Groeneveld, Iris Egbers and Hailey Clauson.
Ms. Lee of KCD suggests we might see two distinct model types this season: pouty Lolita, which certainly covers Lindsey Wixson, Barbara Palvin and Ms. Sun; and a somewhat androgynous girl, with linear proportions and striking features; maybe some freckles. Keep an eye on Chloe Memisevic, Ilva Heitmann and Kat Hessen.
"Fashion Week Preview: The Faces" by Cathy Horyn
Fronm the New York Times
Fashion Week Preview: The Faces
By CATHY HORYN
New Faces on the runways for New York Fashion Week. Clockwise from top left: Fei Fei Sun, Daphne Groeneveld, Melodie, Bambi Northwood-Blyth, Iris Egbers and Ilva Heitmann.
Now that we’re practically on a first-name basis with Doutzen, Lakshmi and Anja, it’s time we meet Bambi, Fei Fei and Kat. They are some of the new and almost-like-new faces we’ll be seeing next week at the New York fashion shows.
This is crunch time for casting directors, with meetings over the weekend, as more new models arrive in town and people start making decisions about whom they want on their runways. On Thursday, after I spoke in the morning with the casting director Ashley Brokaw, whose New York clients include Narciso Rodriguez, Proenza Schouler and Rag & Bone, she reported in an e-mail message: “Just saw a girl Jessica Clarke @DNA. VERY excited about her. Classic supermodel material from New Zealand.”
It’s all about the “girls.”
There are many casting directors working between New York and Europe, but among the top ones are Ms. Brokaw, Michelle Lee of the public relations and production firm KCD and Maida Gregori-Boina, whose clients include Calvin Klein and Jil Sander. They agreed on some — but not all — of the new models, and they had some thoughts about what differences to look for this season.
High on Ms. Brokaw’s list are Bambi Northwood-Blyth, Melodie at Wilhelmina, Caroline Brasch Neilsen, Fei Fei Sun and Julia Nobis. She elaborated: “Fei Fei doesn’t look like anyone else. She’s an exceptional beauty. Caroline is the full package. She’s got a great body for the shows, a beautiful face, she’s smart. You can check every box. All these girls have great personality and manners. They’re impressive in person.”
Of Ms. Nobis, who is a bit of a tomboy, she said, “You can picture her leaving a casting and jumping on her skateboard.”
Ms. Brokaw and Ms. Gregori-Boina say that clients want models with sensuality plus personality. “I think people are looking for muses, for more than a face and a body,” Ms. Brokaw said. Recalling a meeting recently with the Proenza designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, she said they told her they wanted to see girls with some life experience; maybe they’ve had a boyfriend or traveled a bit. “Things are steering away from the army casting we’ve seen in recent years.”
Meaning the militias of blank-faced models.
Not that models won’t be skinny, but there is a trend toward pouty lips, thick eyebrows, curves and, with some models, a bit of a pale androgynous look. Indeed, some of the girls recall the casting of early Raf Simons men’s shows. Ms. Gregori-Boina says clients are referring to the casting of Helmut Lang, Prada and Jil Sander shows in the ’90s. Among the new faces that she thinks will have a big season are Daphne Groeneveld, Iris Egbers and Hailey Clauson.
Ms. Lee of KCD suggests we might see two distinct model types this season: pouty Lolita, which certainly covers Lindsey Wixson, Barbara Palvin and Ms. Sun; and a somewhat androgynous girl, with linear proportions and striking features; maybe some freckles. Keep an eye on Chloe Memisevic, Ilva Heitmann and Kat Hessen.
Fashion Week Preview: The Faces
By CATHY HORYN
New Faces on the runways for New York Fashion Week. Clockwise from top left: Fei Fei Sun, Daphne Groeneveld, Melodie, Bambi Northwood-Blyth, Iris Egbers and Ilva Heitmann.
Now that we’re practically on a first-name basis with Doutzen, Lakshmi and Anja, it’s time we meet Bambi, Fei Fei and Kat. They are some of the new and almost-like-new faces we’ll be seeing next week at the New York fashion shows.
This is crunch time for casting directors, with meetings over the weekend, as more new models arrive in town and people start making decisions about whom they want on their runways. On Thursday, after I spoke in the morning with the casting director Ashley Brokaw, whose New York clients include Narciso Rodriguez, Proenza Schouler and Rag & Bone, she reported in an e-mail message: “Just saw a girl Jessica Clarke @DNA. VERY excited about her. Classic supermodel material from New Zealand.”
It’s all about the “girls.”
There are many casting directors working between New York and Europe, but among the top ones are Ms. Brokaw, Michelle Lee of the public relations and production firm KCD and Maida Gregori-Boina, whose clients include Calvin Klein and Jil Sander. They agreed on some — but not all — of the new models, and they had some thoughts about what differences to look for this season.
High on Ms. Brokaw’s list are Bambi Northwood-Blyth, Melodie at Wilhelmina, Caroline Brasch Neilsen, Fei Fei Sun and Julia Nobis. She elaborated: “Fei Fei doesn’t look like anyone else. She’s an exceptional beauty. Caroline is the full package. She’s got a great body for the shows, a beautiful face, she’s smart. You can check every box. All these girls have great personality and manners. They’re impressive in person.”
Of Ms. Nobis, who is a bit of a tomboy, she said, “You can picture her leaving a casting and jumping on her skateboard.”
Ms. Brokaw and Ms. Gregori-Boina say that clients want models with sensuality plus personality. “I think people are looking for muses, for more than a face and a body,” Ms. Brokaw said. Recalling a meeting recently with the Proenza designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, she said they told her they wanted to see girls with some life experience; maybe they’ve had a boyfriend or traveled a bit. “Things are steering away from the army casting we’ve seen in recent years.”
Meaning the militias of blank-faced models.
Not that models won’t be skinny, but there is a trend toward pouty lips, thick eyebrows, curves and, with some models, a bit of a pale androgynous look. Indeed, some of the girls recall the casting of early Raf Simons men’s shows. Ms. Gregori-Boina says clients are referring to the casting of Helmut Lang, Prada and Jil Sander shows in the ’90s. Among the new faces that she thinks will have a big season are Daphne Groeneveld, Iris Egbers and Hailey Clauson.
Ms. Lee of KCD suggests we might see two distinct model types this season: pouty Lolita, which certainly covers Lindsey Wixson, Barbara Palvin and Ms. Sun; and a somewhat androgynous girl, with linear proportions and striking features; maybe some freckles. Keep an eye on Chloe Memisevic, Ilva Heitmann and Kat Hessen.
Monday, May 10, 2010
032c preview: Natasa Vojnovic, ph: Danko Steiner
As seen on the New York Times:
photo of the magazine by Patricia Wall, original photo by Danko Steiner
Celebrating the New World, Bravely
By CATHY HORYN
Scarlett Johansson is a very good actress, but since we don’t need any more articles about the brand kitten’s style, let’s enjoy a big gulp of the contemporary culture provided by 032c, the Berlin-based magazine that is published twice a year. The latest issue, the 19th, is just out.
I adore 032c. Many of us are feeling a little discouraged by the bombardment of stuff on the Web that doesn’t inform or surprise, and 032c is an antidote for that. It sort of destroys the notion that printed journals don’t have the quickness or relevance of blogs. No, they just have to be serious about what they do.
The magazine is operated by Joerg Koch, its editor, and Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain, its managing editor, and many of the big fashion brands — Dior, Prada, Tom Ford, YSL — advertise there.
The lineup for the current issue includes a look at the impact of a 1960 article about Cy Twombly, with photos by Horst, that ran in American Vogue and that was rediscovered in 2003 by the interiors magazine Nest. As Mr. Koch wrote, it’s a “story on the story on the story.” Despite Vogue’s solid name and Horst’s gorgeous images of Mr. Twombly’s house in Rome, the original article, “Roman Classic Surprise,” may have compromised the artist’s career. At that time artists were not supposed to be part of a chichi world. The 032c piece is an unusual way to consider views from the past in the context of current assumptions.
There is also a group of articles and photographs about the American writer William T. Vollmann — or, I should say, a rare published dialogue with him (based on a correspondence by mail) and extracts from his books. The standard of the choices of ideas and images, which include a fair amount from the fashion front, always feel a bit higher at 032c. Anyway, I plan to dig in this weekend between the mowing and mulching in the garden.
Of the new issue, Mr. Koch wrote: “In a time such as ours, when all forms of cultural expression seem to occur simultaneously — as if ‘contemporary’ were essentially just a byline for the past, present and future combined — stories like these become rough blueprints for the new creative aesthetic proposed within the pages of 032c.”
photo of the magazine by Patricia Wall, original photo by Danko Steiner
Celebrating the New World, Bravely
By CATHY HORYN
Scarlett Johansson is a very good actress, but since we don’t need any more articles about the brand kitten’s style, let’s enjoy a big gulp of the contemporary culture provided by 032c, the Berlin-based magazine that is published twice a year. The latest issue, the 19th, is just out.
I adore 032c. Many of us are feeling a little discouraged by the bombardment of stuff on the Web that doesn’t inform or surprise, and 032c is an antidote for that. It sort of destroys the notion that printed journals don’t have the quickness or relevance of blogs. No, they just have to be serious about what they do.
The magazine is operated by Joerg Koch, its editor, and Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain, its managing editor, and many of the big fashion brands — Dior, Prada, Tom Ford, YSL — advertise there.
The lineup for the current issue includes a look at the impact of a 1960 article about Cy Twombly, with photos by Horst, that ran in American Vogue and that was rediscovered in 2003 by the interiors magazine Nest. As Mr. Koch wrote, it’s a “story on the story on the story.” Despite Vogue’s solid name and Horst’s gorgeous images of Mr. Twombly’s house in Rome, the original article, “Roman Classic Surprise,” may have compromised the artist’s career. At that time artists were not supposed to be part of a chichi world. The 032c piece is an unusual way to consider views from the past in the context of current assumptions.
There is also a group of articles and photographs about the American writer William T. Vollmann — or, I should say, a rare published dialogue with him (based on a correspondence by mail) and extracts from his books. The standard of the choices of ideas and images, which include a fair amount from the fashion front, always feel a bit higher at 032c. Anyway, I plan to dig in this weekend between the mowing and mulching in the garden.
Of the new issue, Mr. Koch wrote: “In a time such as ours, when all forms of cultural expression seem to occur simultaneously — as if ‘contemporary’ were essentially just a byline for the past, present and future combined — stories like these become rough blueprints for the new creative aesthetic proposed within the pages of 032c.”
Monday, February 15, 2010
Cathy Horyn has something to say
Natasha Poly at Joseph Altuzarra fall 2010 show:
from today's New York Times:
February 14, 2010
Three Nominees for Who’s ‘Next’
By CATHY HORYN
Joseph Altuzarra is a Swarthmore-educated Paris-bred son of an American mother and a French father. Prabal Gurung grew up in Katmandu and trained at Bill Blass. At 25, Alexander Wang is the hitmaker of contemporary urban fashion, his $25-million business already surpassing that of many established designers.
If fashion didn’t routinely select a new group of designers to acclaim, it wouldn’t be fashion. There must always be someone waiting in the wings, the “next” one. These three designers now appear to be the leading candidates.
It is clear that Mr. Wang has managed to give his collections the properties of high fashion — top models; coveted accessories; a cool, insolent sensibility — while making affordable clothes that many women, not just skinny hipsters, can wear. His show again achieved the illusion of being something more than a contemporary-priced collection. With their matted hair and vacant gazes, the models, led by Natalia Vodianova, looked possessed by zombies, but you can bet that people will wonder when they can get their hands on the elephant-belled thigh-high tights that Mr. Wang showed with his miniskirts and platform boots. Like an old-fashioned merchant, Mr. Wang knows how to get value out of a single item.
The collection drew heavily on deconstructed tailoring: pinstripe blazers and vests lopped off at the midriff, blended with a furry layer or a broken lace top and a pair of boy trousers with part of the waistband snipped away. If it sounds a little tricky, with many extra parts, it was. Traditional garments of power and formality were the sources for swallowtail minidresses and camel wool clergy capes, and the general gloominess. Still, the collection was an ambitious step up for Mr. Wang, and despite the moving parts, it looked polished.
Mr. Gurung has a knack for the languid, jazzy tailoring of a Blass or a Saint Laurent, his spiritual mentors, and that feeling was captured in a fresh way in his first show last February. He also demonstrated in the next season that he could do chic dresses in double-silk satin with pleats and peplums.
So he didn’t need to repeat himself this time. While most of the day clothes were fairly solid — two-tone coats and suits in cashmere with curvilinear lines, boxy metallic tweed blazers — the ruffled evening looks didn’t seem new and indeed looked a bit tortured. A lanky jacket, shown with pants, that combined fox, mink and broadtail captured the lighter, offhand attitude that Mr. Gurung first conveyed, and to which he should return.
What gives Mr. Altuzarra an edge over virtually all the new young designers in New York is that he has a masterfully light hand with couture materials. His admiration for Tom Ford’s ability to give familiar shapes an extra kick of design and urgency was evident in this collection, his fourth. And the sexy fierceness of the mostly black clothes was incredibly appealing.
A number of designers this season are showing jackets that combine two or three different materials — fur and wool, say. In their straightforward collection, rich in texture, Alexa Adams and Flora Gill of the label Ohne Titel mixed suede with what appeared to be knitted fur, or black leather and a softer ribbed fabric.
But the motive in this collection and others seems to be to lend novelty to an otherwise basic garment. Nothing new or interesting is being proposed. And in some cases the contrasting textures come together in a lumpy way.
The difference with Mr. Altuzarra’s clothes — belted, close-to-the-body suits in black boiled wool with shoulders or fronts of glossy black goat hair — is that the choices feel more considered. He’s not just making a collage. Also, the workmanship on rather tough-looking materials, like leather and the glazed wool of a dress with laced vents, is consistently delicate.
Mr. Altuzarra used Frankenstein stitching on many of the pieces, in part to suggest the feeling of things coming apart, but the stitches are fine and random in length. As much as the big showy gestures, like the goat hair or the raised storm collars or the wool coats shaped by rows of buckled straps, the sutures play their part in an excellent collection.
The news at Preen, which is designed by Justin Thornton and Thea Bregazzi, was a bold, dark floral print used for blouses and dresses with articulated bra cups. There were a lot of familiar plays on transparency (dresses cut with random holes, sheer yokes). What looked fresh was a straight-line charcoal pantsuit over that blue-gray print.
Regina Feoktistova at Alexander Wang fall 2010 show:
from today's New York Times:
February 14, 2010
Three Nominees for Who’s ‘Next’
By CATHY HORYN
Joseph Altuzarra is a Swarthmore-educated Paris-bred son of an American mother and a French father. Prabal Gurung grew up in Katmandu and trained at Bill Blass. At 25, Alexander Wang is the hitmaker of contemporary urban fashion, his $25-million business already surpassing that of many established designers.
If fashion didn’t routinely select a new group of designers to acclaim, it wouldn’t be fashion. There must always be someone waiting in the wings, the “next” one. These three designers now appear to be the leading candidates.
It is clear that Mr. Wang has managed to give his collections the properties of high fashion — top models; coveted accessories; a cool, insolent sensibility — while making affordable clothes that many women, not just skinny hipsters, can wear. His show again achieved the illusion of being something more than a contemporary-priced collection. With their matted hair and vacant gazes, the models, led by Natalia Vodianova, looked possessed by zombies, but you can bet that people will wonder when they can get their hands on the elephant-belled thigh-high tights that Mr. Wang showed with his miniskirts and platform boots. Like an old-fashioned merchant, Mr. Wang knows how to get value out of a single item.
The collection drew heavily on deconstructed tailoring: pinstripe blazers and vests lopped off at the midriff, blended with a furry layer or a broken lace top and a pair of boy trousers with part of the waistband snipped away. If it sounds a little tricky, with many extra parts, it was. Traditional garments of power and formality were the sources for swallowtail minidresses and camel wool clergy capes, and the general gloominess. Still, the collection was an ambitious step up for Mr. Wang, and despite the moving parts, it looked polished.
Mr. Gurung has a knack for the languid, jazzy tailoring of a Blass or a Saint Laurent, his spiritual mentors, and that feeling was captured in a fresh way in his first show last February. He also demonstrated in the next season that he could do chic dresses in double-silk satin with pleats and peplums.
So he didn’t need to repeat himself this time. While most of the day clothes were fairly solid — two-tone coats and suits in cashmere with curvilinear lines, boxy metallic tweed blazers — the ruffled evening looks didn’t seem new and indeed looked a bit tortured. A lanky jacket, shown with pants, that combined fox, mink and broadtail captured the lighter, offhand attitude that Mr. Gurung first conveyed, and to which he should return.
What gives Mr. Altuzarra an edge over virtually all the new young designers in New York is that he has a masterfully light hand with couture materials. His admiration for Tom Ford’s ability to give familiar shapes an extra kick of design and urgency was evident in this collection, his fourth. And the sexy fierceness of the mostly black clothes was incredibly appealing.
A number of designers this season are showing jackets that combine two or three different materials — fur and wool, say. In their straightforward collection, rich in texture, Alexa Adams and Flora Gill of the label Ohne Titel mixed suede with what appeared to be knitted fur, or black leather and a softer ribbed fabric.
But the motive in this collection and others seems to be to lend novelty to an otherwise basic garment. Nothing new or interesting is being proposed. And in some cases the contrasting textures come together in a lumpy way.
The difference with Mr. Altuzarra’s clothes — belted, close-to-the-body suits in black boiled wool with shoulders or fronts of glossy black goat hair — is that the choices feel more considered. He’s not just making a collage. Also, the workmanship on rather tough-looking materials, like leather and the glazed wool of a dress with laced vents, is consistently delicate.
Mr. Altuzarra used Frankenstein stitching on many of the pieces, in part to suggest the feeling of things coming apart, but the stitches are fine and random in length. As much as the big showy gestures, like the goat hair or the raised storm collars or the wool coats shaped by rows of buckled straps, the sutures play their part in an excellent collection.
The news at Preen, which is designed by Justin Thornton and Thea Bregazzi, was a bold, dark floral print used for blouses and dresses with articulated bra cups. There were a lot of familiar plays on transparency (dresses cut with random holes, sheer yokes). What looked fresh was a straight-line charcoal pantsuit over that blue-gray print.
Regina Feoktistova at Alexander Wang fall 2010 show:
Friday, September 11, 2009
High Fashion Faces a Redefining Moment
From the New York Times today:
Joseph Altuzarra, a young designer in New York, specializes in ruched georgette dresses, priced around $2,000, which are made in France. Recently, he asked his factory there if it might simplify the ruching process to lower costs. The factory refused.
“They said they would be ashamed to produce a garment that way,” Mr. Altuzarra recalled.
Then he took a sample to a New York City factory to see if it might produce garments for him. “They looked at the sample and passed it around the factory and 15 minutes later said, ‘We can’t do it,’ ” Mr. Altuzarra said. “It was technically impossible for them to do it.”
Joseph Altuzarra, a young designer in New York, specializes in ruched georgette dresses, priced around $2,000, which are made in France. Recently, he asked his factory there if it might simplify the ruching process to lower costs. The factory refused.
“They said they would be ashamed to produce a garment that way,” Mr. Altuzarra recalled.
Then he took a sample to a New York City factory to see if it might produce garments for him. “They looked at the sample and passed it around the factory and 15 minutes later said, ‘We can’t do it,’ ” Mr. Altuzarra said. “It was technically impossible for them to do it.”
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Richard Avedon opening tonight at the International Center of Photography
Tonight I will be attending the opening of the Richard Avedon exhibition at the International Center of Photography.
Veruschka with Richard Avedon, dress by Kimberly, New York, January 1967
From the ICP:
Richard Avedon (1923–2004) revolutionized fashion photography starting in the post-World War II era and redefined the role of the fashion photographer. Anticipating many of the cultural cross-fertilizations that have occurred between high art, commercial art, fashion, advertising, and pop culture in the last twenty years, he created spirited, imaginative photographs that showed fashion and the modern woman in a new light. He shook up the chilly, static formulas of the fashion photograph and by 1950 was the most imitated American editorial photographer. Injecting a forthright, American energy into a business that had been dominated by Europeans, Avedon's stylistic innovations continue to influence photographers around the world.
This exhibition will be the most comprehensive exploration to date of Avedon's fashion photography during his long career at Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, The New Yorker, and beyond. Working closely with The Richard Avedon Foundation, ICP curator Carol Squiers and guest curator Vince Aletti will present new scholarship on the evolution and extraordinary, ongoing impact of his work. The exhibition will feature more than 200 works by Richard Avedon, spanning his entire career, and will include vintage prints, contact sheets, magazine layouts, and archival material.
Several Women models were fortunate enough to work with Richard Avedon, including Veruschka, Kylie Bax, Christina Kruse and Karen Elson.
Veruschka, dress by Kimberly,New York, January 1967
Veruschka, Photo: Richard Avedon
Kylie Bax
Kylie Bax
Kylie Bax
Kylie Bax
Christina Kruse
Christina Kruse
Karen Elson
Karen Elson
Despite the hullabaloo she caused, which the writer Thomas Whiteside described in a profile that year in The New Yorker, Twiggy’s career was actually brief. It is Avedon’s pictures that make us think of her as the definitive ’60s child.
His gift was not merely for the alive moment — the model, her chin up, leaping cleanly over a puddle. Rather, it was for knowing which of the myriad of gestures produced the truest sense of the moment. Whiteside found Avedon’s process utterly unique, explaining he “exercised meticulous control over his model, almost as though he were working from a blueprint.”
That blueprint is, broadly, the subject of a retrospective at the International Center of Photography, from May 15 to Sept. 6.
From his earliest, sun-splashed pictures in 1944 to portraits in 2000 that convey his fashion fatigue, the I.C.P. exhibition is the largest survey of Avedon’s fashion work since the Metropolitan Museum show in 1978.
In both appearance and personality, Avedon cut the ideal figure of a fashion photographer, and five years after his death, at age 81, he remains that. His photographic style has been widely imitated, not least by Steven Meisel. Generations of models have sprung across mid-tone seamless backdrops, or sat pensively in cafes, or pretended to be in love or quite alone — all because of Avedon. And yet if his images retain their special power, if the experiences and emotions they present seem lived and not merely imitated, it may be because he is the more complete photographer.
A twice-married man, whose energy and trim, compact looks seemed to embody the word “flair,” Avedon often harbored doubts about his next project, yet recovered quickly. His great passion, outside of picture-making and his family, was the theater. A friend, the writer Adam Gopnik, reckoned that Avedon saw Mandy Patinkin’s one-man show 35 times in the space of a summer. “He lived for performance,” Mr. Gopnik said.
It’s probable that as a teenager in New York in the early ’40s — Avedon dropped out of DeWitt Clinton High School and enlisted in the merchant marine, where he learned basic photography — he saw not so much the fashion in the streets as the cosmopolitan gestures that animated it. Movement entered his pictures for Harper’s Bazaar soon after he arrived there. Storytelling followed, especially once he began shooting the Paris collections and invented street scenes for models like Dovima and Dorian Leigh, or his first wife, Doe Avedon.
Already on the masthead at Bazaar was Martin Munkacsi, the Hungarian-born photographer whose action shots impressed Henri Cartier-Bresson, among others. In later years, when he discussed his beginnings, Avedon often made Munkacsi out to be a more distant figure than he was, according to the exhibition’s curators, Carol Squiers and Vince Aletti.
Then again, Avedon always maintained that in every picture he was photographing himself. When Ms. Squiers asked the photographer Lillian Bassman, who spent summers with Avedon and their families on Fire Island, why he had his models running — or laughing — she replied: “Did you ever meet Dick? He was always jumping around.”
Outdoor shots and innovative photography were part of the terrain at Bazaar in the ’40s and ’50s. The cultural life in New York similarly enriched the work of other photographers, notably Irving Penn, who was at Vogue and who would be Avedon’s friend and rival for the next 40 years. So what made Avedon different?
HE was keenly aware that beauty had an element of tragedy — it faded, for one thing, or it came at a terrible loss of self. Growing up, Avedon heard his mother say to his sister Louise, who would eventually die, at 42, in a mental institution, “You’re so beautiful you don’t have to open your mouth.” This notion that beauty can be intoxicating but, equally, impoverishing to the soul, Ms. Squiers said, tinged Avedon’s early pictures with a feeling of compassion.
And it may never have completely left him. A photograph he made in 1998 of a robotic-looking model wearing a mouth plug seemed to circle back to his sister. Such pictures, made when he was a staff photographer at The New Yorker, suggested Avedon’s long view of fashion, but also a distinct side of his personality. “There was a real sadness about him,” said Norma Stevens, who joined his studio in 1976 and today runs the Richard Avedon Foundation. “He loved working, and he would be up for that. But it was like a performance. After that there would be a drop.”
Drawn to theatrical performers, Avedon took numerous portraits when he was at Bazaar, and, like Penn, derived a lot of artistic satisfaction from them. Yet into the ’60s, influenced by the Civil Rights movement and the poets of the counterculture, the portraits acquired a hardness that made critics question Avedon’s right to be more than a fashion photographer. An eviscerating review in 1964 by Robert Brustein of “Nothing Personal,” the book Avedon did with James Baldwin, left him unable to do serious projects for the next five years.
The crisis also affected his fashion work. “You can see he’s been knocked off his game in a lot of those pictures,” Ms. Squiers said. In 1965, Avedon left Bazaar and followed his close ally, Diana Vreeland, to Vogue. As at Bazaar, Vreeland gave him free rein and, more important, said Mr. Aletti, the curator, protected him from the interference of Vogue’s art director, Alexander Liberman.
Surprisingly, Avedon’s pictures in the ’60s of models like Twiggy and Penelope Tree were seen by some critics as anti-fashion. Avedon — the ’50s golden boy, the inspiration for Fred Astaire’s suave character in the movie “Funny Face” — was now savaging beauty and elegance. Not only was he fleeing from the confines of fashion magazines, he was also seeking revenge.
COMMENTS of this sort make you wonder how much the critics knew about fashion. If anything, Avedon’s stripped-down aesthetic and motion are representative of the era’s frenetic energy.
Mr. Gopnik, who first met Avedon in 1985 when the photographer was completing his series of portraits called “In the American West,” believes the attacks were motivated by jealousy and envy. People resented the famous, good-looking man who took such delight in his work and, at the same time, kept exploring new areas. “I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that,” Mr. Gopnik said.
Avedon’s photography has always amounted to a plea for beauty — to see it mysterious, to see it raw but ultimately to see it whole. To view his portraits in the ’50s and ’60s is to see the flip side of the decades’ stylish obsessions. And whether the faces were beautiful or ravaged, famous or not, the portraits relentlessly informed the fashion images, and vice versa.
Certainly by the ’90s, with notions like Prada’s ugly beauty, the categories of beauty had dissolved. For Avedon, though, the lines had faded long before, if they were ever that clear. Perhaps the famous “Avedon blur” expressed the futility, even the tragedy, of permanent beliefs.
“I certainly think — I know — that the apparent line between his fashion photography and his portraits was false, that he saw it as continuous work,” Mr. Gopnik said, adding that Avedon was amused at how people could look at the empty face of a model and find it more beautiful than the worn face of a coal miner. “It was not an affectation on his part,” he said. The I.C.P. exhibition, picking up where the 1978 Metropolitan show left off and allowing the first complete view of Avedon’s fashion photography, strips away the last shadows on his art.
Veruschka with Richard Avedon, dress by Kimberly, New York, January 1967
From the ICP:
Richard Avedon (1923–2004) revolutionized fashion photography starting in the post-World War II era and redefined the role of the fashion photographer. Anticipating many of the cultural cross-fertilizations that have occurred between high art, commercial art, fashion, advertising, and pop culture in the last twenty years, he created spirited, imaginative photographs that showed fashion and the modern woman in a new light. He shook up the chilly, static formulas of the fashion photograph and by 1950 was the most imitated American editorial photographer. Injecting a forthright, American energy into a business that had been dominated by Europeans, Avedon's stylistic innovations continue to influence photographers around the world.
This exhibition will be the most comprehensive exploration to date of Avedon's fashion photography during his long career at Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, The New Yorker, and beyond. Working closely with The Richard Avedon Foundation, ICP curator Carol Squiers and guest curator Vince Aletti will present new scholarship on the evolution and extraordinary, ongoing impact of his work. The exhibition will feature more than 200 works by Richard Avedon, spanning his entire career, and will include vintage prints, contact sheets, magazine layouts, and archival material.
Several Women models were fortunate enough to work with Richard Avedon, including Veruschka, Kylie Bax, Christina Kruse and Karen Elson.
Veruschka, dress by Kimberly,New York, January 1967
Veruschka, Photo: Richard Avedon
Kylie Bax
Kylie Bax
Kylie Bax
Kylie Bax
Christina Kruse
Christina Kruse
Karen Elson
Karen Elson
Karen Elson
How Avedon Blurred His Own Image
By CATHY HORYN
Published: May 13, 2009
ON a morning in April 1967, Twiggy, the doe-eyed British modeling sensation, sat on a stool before Richard Avedon in his studio on East 58th Street. She had on a plain black dress and black fishnets, and it was her first session with the fashion photographer. She was 17.
By CATHY HORYN
Published: May 13, 2009
ON a morning in April 1967, Twiggy, the doe-eyed British modeling sensation, sat on a stool before Richard Avedon in his studio on East 58th Street. She had on a plain black dress and black fishnets, and it was her first session with the fashion photographer. She was 17.
As Avedon stood behind a Rolleiflex camera mounted on a tripod, the Kinks blared from a phonograph nearby. Since he began photographing beautiful women in the mid-1940s — first for Harper’s Bazaar, then Vogue — Avedon made it a practice to ask his models what music and food they preferred. This more than contributed to the relaxed atmosphere of the studio. “They all wanted to please him,” said Polly Mellen, the Vogue editor on that shoot.
Bending over the Rolleiflex, Avedon said, “All right, now, very straight,” and Twiggy sat up straight and turned her gaze to the camera.
Despite the hullabaloo she caused, which the writer Thomas Whiteside described in a profile that year in The New Yorker, Twiggy’s career was actually brief. It is Avedon’s pictures that make us think of her as the definitive ’60s child.
His gift was not merely for the alive moment — the model, her chin up, leaping cleanly over a puddle. Rather, it was for knowing which of the myriad of gestures produced the truest sense of the moment. Whiteside found Avedon’s process utterly unique, explaining he “exercised meticulous control over his model, almost as though he were working from a blueprint.”
That blueprint is, broadly, the subject of a retrospective at the International Center of Photography, from May 15 to Sept. 6.
From his earliest, sun-splashed pictures in 1944 to portraits in 2000 that convey his fashion fatigue, the I.C.P. exhibition is the largest survey of Avedon’s fashion work since the Metropolitan Museum show in 1978.
In both appearance and personality, Avedon cut the ideal figure of a fashion photographer, and five years after his death, at age 81, he remains that. His photographic style has been widely imitated, not least by Steven Meisel. Generations of models have sprung across mid-tone seamless backdrops, or sat pensively in cafes, or pretended to be in love or quite alone — all because of Avedon. And yet if his images retain their special power, if the experiences and emotions they present seem lived and not merely imitated, it may be because he is the more complete photographer.
A twice-married man, whose energy and trim, compact looks seemed to embody the word “flair,” Avedon often harbored doubts about his next project, yet recovered quickly. His great passion, outside of picture-making and his family, was the theater. A friend, the writer Adam Gopnik, reckoned that Avedon saw Mandy Patinkin’s one-man show 35 times in the space of a summer. “He lived for performance,” Mr. Gopnik said.
It’s probable that as a teenager in New York in the early ’40s — Avedon dropped out of DeWitt Clinton High School and enlisted in the merchant marine, where he learned basic photography — he saw not so much the fashion in the streets as the cosmopolitan gestures that animated it. Movement entered his pictures for Harper’s Bazaar soon after he arrived there. Storytelling followed, especially once he began shooting the Paris collections and invented street scenes for models like Dovima and Dorian Leigh, or his first wife, Doe Avedon.
Already on the masthead at Bazaar was Martin Munkacsi, the Hungarian-born photographer whose action shots impressed Henri Cartier-Bresson, among others. In later years, when he discussed his beginnings, Avedon often made Munkacsi out to be a more distant figure than he was, according to the exhibition’s curators, Carol Squiers and Vince Aletti.
Then again, Avedon always maintained that in every picture he was photographing himself. When Ms. Squiers asked the photographer Lillian Bassman, who spent summers with Avedon and their families on Fire Island, why he had his models running — or laughing — she replied: “Did you ever meet Dick? He was always jumping around.”
Outdoor shots and innovative photography were part of the terrain at Bazaar in the ’40s and ’50s. The cultural life in New York similarly enriched the work of other photographers, notably Irving Penn, who was at Vogue and who would be Avedon’s friend and rival for the next 40 years. So what made Avedon different?
HE was keenly aware that beauty had an element of tragedy — it faded, for one thing, or it came at a terrible loss of self. Growing up, Avedon heard his mother say to his sister Louise, who would eventually die, at 42, in a mental institution, “You’re so beautiful you don’t have to open your mouth.” This notion that beauty can be intoxicating but, equally, impoverishing to the soul, Ms. Squiers said, tinged Avedon’s early pictures with a feeling of compassion.
And it may never have completely left him. A photograph he made in 1998 of a robotic-looking model wearing a mouth plug seemed to circle back to his sister. Such pictures, made when he was a staff photographer at The New Yorker, suggested Avedon’s long view of fashion, but also a distinct side of his personality. “There was a real sadness about him,” said Norma Stevens, who joined his studio in 1976 and today runs the Richard Avedon Foundation. “He loved working, and he would be up for that. But it was like a performance. After that there would be a drop.”
Drawn to theatrical performers, Avedon took numerous portraits when he was at Bazaar, and, like Penn, derived a lot of artistic satisfaction from them. Yet into the ’60s, influenced by the Civil Rights movement and the poets of the counterculture, the portraits acquired a hardness that made critics question Avedon’s right to be more than a fashion photographer. An eviscerating review in 1964 by Robert Brustein of “Nothing Personal,” the book Avedon did with James Baldwin, left him unable to do serious projects for the next five years.
The crisis also affected his fashion work. “You can see he’s been knocked off his game in a lot of those pictures,” Ms. Squiers said. In 1965, Avedon left Bazaar and followed his close ally, Diana Vreeland, to Vogue. As at Bazaar, Vreeland gave him free rein and, more important, said Mr. Aletti, the curator, protected him from the interference of Vogue’s art director, Alexander Liberman.
Surprisingly, Avedon’s pictures in the ’60s of models like Twiggy and Penelope Tree were seen by some critics as anti-fashion. Avedon — the ’50s golden boy, the inspiration for Fred Astaire’s suave character in the movie “Funny Face” — was now savaging beauty and elegance. Not only was he fleeing from the confines of fashion magazines, he was also seeking revenge.
COMMENTS of this sort make you wonder how much the critics knew about fashion. If anything, Avedon’s stripped-down aesthetic and motion are representative of the era’s frenetic energy.
Mr. Gopnik, who first met Avedon in 1985 when the photographer was completing his series of portraits called “In the American West,” believes the attacks were motivated by jealousy and envy. People resented the famous, good-looking man who took such delight in his work and, at the same time, kept exploring new areas. “I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that,” Mr. Gopnik said.
Avedon’s photography has always amounted to a plea for beauty — to see it mysterious, to see it raw but ultimately to see it whole. To view his portraits in the ’50s and ’60s is to see the flip side of the decades’ stylish obsessions. And whether the faces were beautiful or ravaged, famous or not, the portraits relentlessly informed the fashion images, and vice versa.
Certainly by the ’90s, with notions like Prada’s ugly beauty, the categories of beauty had dissolved. For Avedon, though, the lines had faded long before, if they were ever that clear. Perhaps the famous “Avedon blur” expressed the futility, even the tragedy, of permanent beliefs.
“I certainly think — I know — that the apparent line between his fashion photography and his portraits was false, that he saw it as continuous work,” Mr. Gopnik said, adding that Avedon was amused at how people could look at the empty face of a model and find it more beautiful than the worn face of a coal miner. “It was not an affectation on his part,” he said. The I.C.P. exhibition, picking up where the 1978 Metropolitan show left off and allowing the first complete view of Avedon’s fashion photography, strips away the last shadows on his art.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Balenciaga Fall 2009 Show
Balenciaga Fall 2009 Show
Time: March 5, 2009 at 10:00 am
Location: Hotel de Crillon, 10, place de la Concorde 75008 Paris - France
Designer: Nicolas Ghesquiere
Casting Director: Ashley Brokaw
Kasia Struss
Olga Sherer
Natasha Poly
March 5, 2009, 6:17 am — Updated: 6:41 am -->
Balenciaga: Paris Under the Skin
By Cathy Horyn
It sort of adds up: the whispering tingle of Serge Gainsbourg on the soundtrack, the smart-looking shoulders, the mix of Persian blue and kelly green, the draped satin dress in a blend of colors. Today’s Balenciaga show was all about Yves.
Even the setting, in a salon room at the Crillon Hotel, seemed a nod to Yves Saint Laurent, who used to present his haute couture collections at a nearby hotel. And yet, considering how many designers have been influenced by Saint Laurent, this was a very good show on its own merits, an interpretation by a pro who understands the connections between one designer and another, between one generation and the next. Nicolas Ghesquiere has always looked to the women around him; his early collections at Balenciaga captured a style he saw on the street, and Saint Laurent himself was similarly influenced.
A virtue of this collection — certainly from the perspective of sales — is that the overall look is softer and more frankly feminine than Ghesquiere’s recent collections. The main event is the draped skirt or (even better) the draped trousers in dark satin; they ripple softly over the hips and taper down the leg. One pair was shown with a tailored jacket in black wool with black satin draped on the lower half. Another black blazer, showed with a black lace bandeau top, came out with dark gray striped pants. In a sense, Ghesquiere made his mark with trousers, and it’s great to see him again make a statement with them.
The other news was the draped coat dress, in black wool but predominantly in spotty, splashy prints, which Ghesquiere said after the show were inspired by the Balenciaga archive. Suede heels came in a blend of colors, typically with a swag of satin at one side.
One wonders if Ghesquiere has long harbored an itch to interpret Saint Laurent. He bided his time, and chose his motifs carefully. Still, this is a modern Balenciaga collection through and through.
Time: March 5, 2009 at 10:00 am
Location: Hotel de Crillon, 10, place de la Concorde 75008 Paris - France
Designer: Nicolas Ghesquiere
Casting Director: Ashley Brokaw
Kasia Struss
Olga Sherer
Natasha Poly
March 5, 2009, 6:17 am — Updated: 6:41 am -->
Balenciaga: Paris Under the Skin
By Cathy Horyn
It sort of adds up: the whispering tingle of Serge Gainsbourg on the soundtrack, the smart-looking shoulders, the mix of Persian blue and kelly green, the draped satin dress in a blend of colors. Today’s Balenciaga show was all about Yves.
Even the setting, in a salon room at the Crillon Hotel, seemed a nod to Yves Saint Laurent, who used to present his haute couture collections at a nearby hotel. And yet, considering how many designers have been influenced by Saint Laurent, this was a very good show on its own merits, an interpretation by a pro who understands the connections between one designer and another, between one generation and the next. Nicolas Ghesquiere has always looked to the women around him; his early collections at Balenciaga captured a style he saw on the street, and Saint Laurent himself was similarly influenced.
A virtue of this collection — certainly from the perspective of sales — is that the overall look is softer and more frankly feminine than Ghesquiere’s recent collections. The main event is the draped skirt or (even better) the draped trousers in dark satin; they ripple softly over the hips and taper down the leg. One pair was shown with a tailored jacket in black wool with black satin draped on the lower half. Another black blazer, showed with a black lace bandeau top, came out with dark gray striped pants. In a sense, Ghesquiere made his mark with trousers, and it’s great to see him again make a statement with them.
The other news was the draped coat dress, in black wool but predominantly in spotty, splashy prints, which Ghesquiere said after the show were inspired by the Balenciaga archive. Suede heels came in a blend of colors, typically with a swag of satin at one side.
One wonders if Ghesquiere has long harbored an itch to interpret Saint Laurent. He bided his time, and chose his motifs carefully. Still, this is a modern Balenciaga collection through and through.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Michelle Obama wears Isabel Toledo for the Inauguration of Barack Obama
From the New York Times:
About the Dress
By Cathy Horyn
Isabel Toledo, the Cuban-born designer of Mrs. Obama’s inaugural outfit, did not know positively until this morning if the new first lady would wear the lemongrass-yellow coat and matching dress she specially designed for her. “We’re all up here watching the T.V.,” said the designer in a telephone interview from her New York studio. “It’s great. We’re so happy.”
Ms. Toledo, who has been making clothes in New York for 25 years, said the coat and dress were made of Swiss wool lace, backed with netting for warmth and lined in French silk. “I wanted to pick a very optimistic color, that had sunshine,” she said. “I wanted her to feel charmed, and in that way would charm everybody.” Ms. Toledo sounded overwhelmed. “This is so wonderful,” she said.
About thirteen people in her studio worked on the outfit over the Christmas holidays. “Chinese ladies, Polish ladies, Spanish ladies—I have a picture of everyone working on her clothes,” Ms. Toledo, who is 48, said. She added, “We’re all grateful for this opportunity, and we don’t even have a PR person!”
Like the other designers who have made inaugural clothes for Mrs. Obama, Ms. Toledo worked with Ikram Goldman, the owner of a boutique in Chicago called Ikram, where Mrs. Obama has previously bought clothes. Ikram also sells clothes by Narciso Rodriguez and Maria Cornejo, other favorites of Michelle Obama.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Bill Blass to Close
Verushka, wearing Bill Blass, photographed by Richard Avedon, January 1967
By Eric Wilson
Nearly a decade after Bill Blass retired from Seventh Avenue, the company that bears his name is closing, with many of its remaining staff expected to leave this week. According to current and former designers who have carried on the collection in recent years, the company will close its showroom at 550 Seventh Avenue and eliminate about 30 remaining jobs there as early as Friday.
Craig Hoffman, the president of Bill Blass, declined to comment on Wednesday.
Michael Vollbracht, who designed the line from 2003 to 2007, said that several of his former colleagues had informed him of the company’s plans to close, given the economic climate. The label was put up for sale earlier this year by its parent company, NexCen Brands Inc., which announced in May that it was facing a severe cash squeeze. Bill Blass has since canceled its spring collection, and its latest designer, Peter Som, left the company in October and has not been replaced.
According to executives and designers still at the company, NexCen is still trying to sell the Bill Blass name with the hope that another company will later revive the runway collection.
This week, the company has been selling samples from Mr. Blass’s collections, along with boxes of Manolo Blahnik shoes that were used in runway shows, at discounts of 90 percent, but the broader archives appear to be headed to Indiana University in Bloomington, where a retrospective of Mr. Blass’s work was held shortly after he died in 2002.
“The demise of Bill Blass is not just saddening,” Mr. Vollbracht said.
“It’s another rude awakening to this industry, I think.”
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Balenciaga Spring 2009
Paris: At Balenciaga, Light Play
By Cathy Horyn
A super-thoughtful and technically interesting Balenciaga show this morning from Nicolas Ghesquière: very light, luminous and leaning again toward the futuristic. He opened with beige-pink jersey stretched and gathered over a kind of heart-shaped form on the bodices of mini dresses, followed by a more complex use of second-skin tops and matching tights for under many of the looks. Slim pants and tunic tops — in pink shades of beige and light gray — had quilting, almost like a moto-cross detail but more polished and delicate like couture.
Metallic fabrics that looked like leather were in fact silk, and silver and gold finale dresses — some with fringe and the beige-pink leotard idea — were made of tiny pieces of ribbon. The tights pulled over the shoes, with apparently an opening for the sole. Very interesting effect: it blanked out the shoes, or the talk of shoes. Ghesquière said the show was about absorbing and reflecting light. It was certainly absorbing and, at the same time, difficult to describe. By the way, he had a passage of male models in the show, in stiff dark suits without lapels and flicker of gold at the nearly closed neckline.
BALENCIAGA SS 09: CONSISTENCY OF LINE WITH COMPLEXITY
Submitted by Wayne
A thousand opinions will bubble up around Balenciaga SS09. Whether you found it good or bad it retained all the codes that makes Ghesquiere's Balenciaga such a compelling proposal. At the precise time he could have chosen to feed the machine the familiar, Ghesquiere distorted the familiar into something uncomfortable. Which is great. The cake and the cake eaten too. The collection looked like a past Balenciaga collection thrown up against a fun house mirror, rippling and warping before your very eyes. The torqued fabric, an idea reflected in the extended gloves and the stockings over the shoes...a familiar styling trick yes, (see mid 90's Margiela) ...the shimmering palette the odd conjunction of textures...it was a intelligent way to mirror your expected themes.As for the menswear...I'd get into it, literally because it is so cult. "Not for everybody"...from a brand the scale of Balenciaga can seem like such an unfriendly position to take but you have to admire the honesty of that.
Natasha Poly
Shannan Click
Kasia Struss
Iselin Steiro
Laragh McCann
By Cathy Horyn
A super-thoughtful and technically interesting Balenciaga show this morning from Nicolas Ghesquière: very light, luminous and leaning again toward the futuristic. He opened with beige-pink jersey stretched and gathered over a kind of heart-shaped form on the bodices of mini dresses, followed by a more complex use of second-skin tops and matching tights for under many of the looks. Slim pants and tunic tops — in pink shades of beige and light gray — had quilting, almost like a moto-cross detail but more polished and delicate like couture.
Metallic fabrics that looked like leather were in fact silk, and silver and gold finale dresses — some with fringe and the beige-pink leotard idea — were made of tiny pieces of ribbon. The tights pulled over the shoes, with apparently an opening for the sole. Very interesting effect: it blanked out the shoes, or the talk of shoes. Ghesquière said the show was about absorbing and reflecting light. It was certainly absorbing and, at the same time, difficult to describe. By the way, he had a passage of male models in the show, in stiff dark suits without lapels and flicker of gold at the nearly closed neckline.
BALENCIAGA SS 09: CONSISTENCY OF LINE WITH COMPLEXITY
Submitted by Wayne
A thousand opinions will bubble up around Balenciaga SS09. Whether you found it good or bad it retained all the codes that makes Ghesquiere's Balenciaga such a compelling proposal. At the precise time he could have chosen to feed the machine the familiar, Ghesquiere distorted the familiar into something uncomfortable. Which is great. The cake and the cake eaten too. The collection looked like a past Balenciaga collection thrown up against a fun house mirror, rippling and warping before your very eyes. The torqued fabric, an idea reflected in the extended gloves and the stockings over the shoes...a familiar styling trick yes, (see mid 90's Margiela) ...the shimmering palette the odd conjunction of textures...it was a intelligent way to mirror your expected themes.As for the menswear...I'd get into it, literally because it is so cult. "Not for everybody"...from a brand the scale of Balenciaga can seem like such an unfriendly position to take but you have to admire the honesty of that.
Natasha Poly
Shannan Click
Kasia Struss
Iselin Steiro
Laragh McCann
Monday, September 29, 2008
Rick Owens Spring 2009
Paris: Rock of Ages
By Cathy Horyn
Rick Owens was quite interesting: much more stripped down, nearly all in black and gray, with these flappy, floppy boots ....The key look was a kind of jumpsuit that suggested a tank dress with openings at the side and back. There were also black cotton jackets that were fitted and closed at the front with a knot of fabric.
Mariacarla Boscono
Kasia Struss
Kasia Struss
Mariacarla Boscono
By Cathy Horyn
Rick Owens was quite interesting: much more stripped down, nearly all in black and gray, with these flappy, floppy boots ....The key look was a kind of jumpsuit that suggested a tank dress with openings at the side and back. There were also black cotton jackets that were fitted and closed at the front with a knot of fabric.
Mariacarla Boscono
Kasia Struss
Kasia Struss
Mariacarla Boscono
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Gucci Spring 2009
Fashion Review
By CATHY HORYN
Ms. Giannini provided a lot of good, unpretentious clothes that will probably feel right to shoppers next spring.
The most appealing looks were snug safari jackets in cotton twill with wrap miniskirts, tunics and poncho dresses in olive silk with zips and drawstrings, and a soft boss-looking python jacket worn with tropical-print jeans. The bags were big and easy, a reprise of Gucci’s Jackie bag from ’60s.
Gucci: Outward Bound
By Cathy Horyn
A few words on Frida Giannini’s latest Gucci collection before I fire up the curling iron and go blearily to the Tod’s party, where Gwyneth Paltrow is the guest of honor and there is certain to be mob panic. Giannini has become an expert not so much in expressing an idea as packaging it. Everything is presented in easy-to-digest units—the boyish pantsuit in cotton or linen (with perky fedoras), the swingy mini caftan (now in a tropical print), the sexy safari section (some adorable poncho dresses and mean python jackets washed to a lovely thinness), and the filmy evening dress. There was sort of a travel experience embedded in the show, with some of the pantsuit colors evocative of an airline palette.
And in a way that makes sense: these clothes can travel anywhere, and tourist spending has been a bright spot for American and European design houses.
Natasha Poly
Toni Garrn
Mariacarla Boscono
Yulia Kharlapanova
Shannan Click
Natasha Poly
Kasia Struss
Vlada Roslyakova
Toni Garrn
Shannan Click
Natasha Poly
Mariacarla Boscono
Kasia Struss
Toni Garrn
By CATHY HORYN
Ms. Giannini provided a lot of good, unpretentious clothes that will probably feel right to shoppers next spring.
The most appealing looks were snug safari jackets in cotton twill with wrap miniskirts, tunics and poncho dresses in olive silk with zips and drawstrings, and a soft boss-looking python jacket worn with tropical-print jeans. The bags were big and easy, a reprise of Gucci’s Jackie bag from ’60s.
Gucci: Outward Bound
By Cathy Horyn
A few words on Frida Giannini’s latest Gucci collection before I fire up the curling iron and go blearily to the Tod’s party, where Gwyneth Paltrow is the guest of honor and there is certain to be mob panic. Giannini has become an expert not so much in expressing an idea as packaging it. Everything is presented in easy-to-digest units—the boyish pantsuit in cotton or linen (with perky fedoras), the swingy mini caftan (now in a tropical print), the sexy safari section (some adorable poncho dresses and mean python jackets washed to a lovely thinness), and the filmy evening dress. There was sort of a travel experience embedded in the show, with some of the pantsuit colors evocative of an airline palette.
And in a way that makes sense: these clothes can travel anywhere, and tourist spending has been a bright spot for American and European design houses.
Natasha Poly
Toni Garrn
Mariacarla Boscono
Yulia Kharlapanova
Shannan Click
Natasha Poly
Kasia Struss
Vlada Roslyakova
Toni Garrn
Shannan Click
Natasha Poly
Mariacarla Boscono
Kasia Struss
Toni Garrn
Marni Spring 2009
So I am sitting at the Marni show this morning, grateful for that shot glass of rose tea a waiter handed out, and enjoying the Peter Blake circles and rainbow colors, only more saturated and with the metallic gloss of sequins, when a model walks by in a bolero made of tiny, tiny furrows of color, all packed together in a softness that makes me think it’s fur.
“What is that?” I say to a magazine editor next to me.
Over the dreadful clanging music I thought I heard her say something that begins with a ch…
“Chipmunk?” I answer.
“Chiffon,” she says, and laughs.
“What is that?” I say to a magazine editor next to me.
Over the dreadful clanging music I thought I heard her say something that begins with a ch…
“Chipmunk?” I answer.
“Chiffon,” she says, and laughs.
Katrin Thormann
Kasia Struss
Nimue Smit
Toni Garrn
Katrin Thormann
Lovisa Ingmann
Kasia Struss
Katrin Thormann
Toni Garrn
Lovisa Ingmann
Kasia Struss
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