New York Times Video: 'Kruse" by Barnaby Roper

From The New York Times:

Fashion Week Video ‘Kruse’
Video, Women's FashionBy JUDITH PUCKETT-RINELLA February 11, 2011, 9:30 am

Barnaby Roper doesn’t do things by half. But he is not against the idea of using a 16-part grid. In his latest high-impact video, ‘Kruse,’ created exclusively for The Moment, Roper turns his lens on Christina Kruse, a ’90s catwalk queen and a talented artist in her own right. Kruse’s image is carved up into a digital chopping block that twists and turns and squeezes her through a series of kaleidoscopic formations. Look out for more videos from Roper as the year progresses — assuming the technology can keep up.

Enite Video can be seen at NYTimes.com

New York Times Video: 'Kruse" by Barnaby Roper

From The New York Times:

Fashion Week Video ‘Kruse’
Video, Women's FashionBy JUDITH PUCKETT-RINELLA February 11, 2011, 9:30 am

Barnaby Roper doesn’t do things by half. But he is not against the idea of using a 16-part grid. In his latest high-impact video, ‘Kruse,’ created exclusively for The Moment, Roper turns his lens on Christina Kruse, a ’90s catwalk queen and a talented artist in her own right. Kruse’s image is carved up into a digital chopping block that twists and turns and squeezes her through a series of kaleidoscopic formations. Look out for more videos from Roper as the year progresses — assuming the technology can keep up.

Enite Video can be seen at NYTimes.com

New York Times Article: Daphne Guinness, Fashion’s Wild Child, by Guy Trebay

Article can be read at The New York Times

Daphne Guinness, Fashion’s Wild Child

By GUY TREBAY

NO organ is more promiscuous than the eye, and no appetite more insatiable than the hunger to look. These truths go a long way toward explaining the preoccupations of a culture whose interest in imagery is defining. They also help one understand the ever-creeping appeal of fashion, a sphere that, like sport, is largely populated by arresting-looking people doing stuff that is legible without the help of words.

It is not that fashion never requires translation; a lot of it is arcane even to adepts. Certain people, too, contradictorily are both creations of the fashion world and yet somehow seem to exist outside it. Actors in a social theater, as we all are, they rise above the ordinary by giving sartorial performances unfettered by the bonds of convention or propriety or practicality or, often enough, common sense.

Daphne Guinness is one such wonderful oddity. Over the last year, hers has been among the most startling, engaging and snake-fascinating presences on the scene. Whether darting across the Place Vendôme in Paris or chatting with Alex Rodriguez at a mosh-pit art-world dinner during Art Basel Miami Beach or seated demurely at a staid dinner benefiting the American Academy in Rome, Ms. Guinness is a reliably otherworldly apparition.

Her mounds of skunk-dyed hair may be piled to “Bride of Frankenstein” heights or cantilevered in a lace kerchief that lends her a resemblance to a Rastafarian with an opulent mane of dreadlocks. Her lithe sparrow’s frame may be cinched into a sequined dress from the latest Chanel couture collection or swathed in majestic Grecian draperies or stiff garments that resemble something out of the wardrobe closet for “Spartacus” or gold lamé leggings that look as if they’d been applied with an airbrush.

Whatever else she has on, Ms. Guinness invariably wears the real jewels, her own, that distinguish her from the numerous society sandwich-boards seen strutting around, camera ready, in borrowed finery and gems. And she is typically shod in footgear whose platform soles are so high that they defy both the precepts of feminism and the laws of gravity (and the latter not always successfully; she has been known to tumble from the heights of her specially made Christian Louboutins). Venetian courtesans teetering on 17th-century wooden chopines had nothing on Ms. Guinness, whose progress to the women’s room from the dinner table at one charity dinner last fall kept a room full of guests in bated-breath suspense.

Who is this woman, what form of rara avis bedecked in diamonds and plumes?

You won’t have any trouble finding out if you ask a person with the least interest in style. Ms. Guinness — as Lady Gaga, an avowed fan, could tell you — is a titled brewery heiress; a granddaughter of Diana Mitford, the wife of the British nobleman and fascist Oswald Mosley; the ex-wife of Spyros Niarchos, scion of a fabulously wealthy Greek shipping dynasty; the 43-year-old mother of three children; the consort of Bernard-Henri Lévy, a wealthy French intellectual almost as renowned for his mind as for his luxuriant mane; and a muse to photographers as unalike as David LaChapelle and Steven Klein and to designers like the English tyro Gareth Pugh.

That she has always been defined in terms of the men in her life goes a long way toward explaining Ms. Guinness’s reinvention of herself roughly a decade ago as a kind of performance artist whose tool kit is her wardrobe. The febrile-looking, almost lunar creature that emerged from a wifely chrysalis can sometimes appear as a techno/aesthetic movement mash-up: part Huysmans and part Jules Verne. That she is handsome and even-featured only partly explains the way she captivates viewers and the lens of a camera. Plenty of good-looking women of fashion get themselves up in outlandish outfits; relatively few retain interest after the initial jolt of surprise has faded away.

Because she is rich and socially secure and also blessed with theatrical gifts hard to categorize, Ms. Guinness tends to fall outside the understanding of many observers, who look at her wearing shoes with no heels or face-obscuring veils or headpieces reminiscent of carnival ponies and brand her a freak.

What Daphne Guinness is not, she insists, is eccentric. “I truly hate the word,” she said recently, a complaint uttered first in a telephone call from London and repeated from 35,000 feet above the Atlantic as she flew to the South of France for Christmas (as a stipulation of the Guinness-Niarchos divorce settlement, her children spend the holidays with their father’s family). “I’m actually very grounded,” she added. “Also, eccentrics are almost asexual, and that is not something you can say of me, by any means.”

For Ms. Guinness, her wardrobe antics and often outlandish appearances in public “are kind of an ever-evolving art project,” she explained. “When I was a child,” being raised largely among the haute bohemians of the wealthy expatriate colony of Cadaqués, Spain, Ms. Guinness said: “I was overly serious and thoughtful, a real tomboy, always dressing up as a knight or a pirate or a red Indian. If there is anything you can say about me, it’s that I have not lost the imagination I had when I was 5 years old.”

Neither has she lost the tendency to dress in a way that makes it sometimes seem as if she is pushing impatiently outward at the boundaries of gender. Yet critics who see in Ms. Guinness's tough technological style — in her slightly barbarous emphasis on wearing feathers and pelts, in her taste for hardware — a rebuke to traditional femininity might be surprised to learn that she is, in person, a surprisingly girly girl. “For so much of my life, it was about being as small as possible or even invisible,” she said. “As a Niarchos, I was told constantly that you must and mustn’t be this or that. After I left my marriage, I found I was able to flex my muscles, to play with the way I looked again.”

Fashion, noted Ms. Guinness, who said she never reads the fashion magazines that make a fetish of her (“Scientific American is my heaven,” she said), is not meant to be taken seriously. Rule-bound by definition, fashion nonetheless holds out the possibility for self-transformation, masquerade, serious flights of fancy and even occasionally cultural critique. In Ms. Guinness’s case, it also provides a pretext for the enactment of a continuing commentary on what it means to perform the public role of a woman; as a kind of 21st-century geisha, she finds herself with the means to bypass traditional systems of patronage and the wit to mount a lively, unorthodox theater of womanliness solely to amuse herself.

“Of course, I get it wrong 60 percent of the time, but it’s about the experimentation,” Ms. Guinness said. “So much spirit and freedom of experimentation died in the ’80s,” she added. “It started with AIDS; AIDS wiped all that out. And so many of the people who would understand what I’m doing are dead now. Still, even though I am not trained at this, I try to find new ways of expressing myself and to use whatever it is I have creatively. I am not an eccentric, and I am not some sort of multitrillionaire just interested in buying clothes.”

Clothes are far from a driving force, Ms. Guinness said. What inspires her experimental flights is something more hard-headed and ordinary — a bristling refusal to conform.

“What drives me now is the idea of something being against the world,” she said. “I’m an artist, I suppose.”

New York Times Article: Daphne Guinness, Fashion’s Wild Child, by Guy Trebay

Article can be read at The New York Times

Daphne Guinness, Fashion’s Wild Child

By GUY TREBAY

NO organ is more promiscuous than the eye, and no appetite more insatiable than the hunger to look. These truths go a long way toward explaining the preoccupations of a culture whose interest in imagery is defining. They also help one understand the ever-creeping appeal of fashion, a sphere that, like sport, is largely populated by arresting-looking people doing stuff that is legible without the help of words.

It is not that fashion never requires translation; a lot of it is arcane even to adepts. Certain people, too, contradictorily are both creations of the fashion world and yet somehow seem to exist outside it. Actors in a social theater, as we all are, they rise above the ordinary by giving sartorial performances unfettered by the bonds of convention or propriety or practicality or, often enough, common sense.

Daphne Guinness is one such wonderful oddity. Over the last year, hers has been among the most startling, engaging and snake-fascinating presences on the scene. Whether darting across the Place Vendôme in Paris or chatting with Alex Rodriguez at a mosh-pit art-world dinner during Art Basel Miami Beach or seated demurely at a staid dinner benefiting the American Academy in Rome, Ms. Guinness is a reliably otherworldly apparition.

Her mounds of skunk-dyed hair may be piled to “Bride of Frankenstein” heights or cantilevered in a lace kerchief that lends her a resemblance to a Rastafarian with an opulent mane of dreadlocks. Her lithe sparrow’s frame may be cinched into a sequined dress from the latest Chanel couture collection or swathed in majestic Grecian draperies or stiff garments that resemble something out of the wardrobe closet for “Spartacus” or gold lamé leggings that look as if they’d been applied with an airbrush.

Whatever else she has on, Ms. Guinness invariably wears the real jewels, her own, that distinguish her from the numerous society sandwich-boards seen strutting around, camera ready, in borrowed finery and gems. And she is typically shod in footgear whose platform soles are so high that they defy both the precepts of feminism and the laws of gravity (and the latter not always successfully; she has been known to tumble from the heights of her specially made Christian Louboutins). Venetian courtesans teetering on 17th-century wooden chopines had nothing on Ms. Guinness, whose progress to the women’s room from the dinner table at one charity dinner last fall kept a room full of guests in bated-breath suspense.

Who is this woman, what form of rara avis bedecked in diamonds and plumes?

You won’t have any trouble finding out if you ask a person with the least interest in style. Ms. Guinness — as Lady Gaga, an avowed fan, could tell you — is a titled brewery heiress; a granddaughter of Diana Mitford, the wife of the British nobleman and fascist Oswald Mosley; the ex-wife of Spyros Niarchos, scion of a fabulously wealthy Greek shipping dynasty; the 43-year-old mother of three children; the consort of Bernard-Henri Lévy, a wealthy French intellectual almost as renowned for his mind as for his luxuriant mane; and a muse to photographers as unalike as David LaChapelle and Steven Klein and to designers like the English tyro Gareth Pugh.

That she has always been defined in terms of the men in her life goes a long way toward explaining Ms. Guinness’s reinvention of herself roughly a decade ago as a kind of performance artist whose tool kit is her wardrobe. The febrile-looking, almost lunar creature that emerged from a wifely chrysalis can sometimes appear as a techno/aesthetic movement mash-up: part Huysmans and part Jules Verne. That she is handsome and even-featured only partly explains the way she captivates viewers and the lens of a camera. Plenty of good-looking women of fashion get themselves up in outlandish outfits; relatively few retain interest after the initial jolt of surprise has faded away.

Because she is rich and socially secure and also blessed with theatrical gifts hard to categorize, Ms. Guinness tends to fall outside the understanding of many observers, who look at her wearing shoes with no heels or face-obscuring veils or headpieces reminiscent of carnival ponies and brand her a freak.

What Daphne Guinness is not, she insists, is eccentric. “I truly hate the word,” she said recently, a complaint uttered first in a telephone call from London and repeated from 35,000 feet above the Atlantic as she flew to the South of France for Christmas (as a stipulation of the Guinness-Niarchos divorce settlement, her children spend the holidays with their father’s family). “I’m actually very grounded,” she added. “Also, eccentrics are almost asexual, and that is not something you can say of me, by any means.”

For Ms. Guinness, her wardrobe antics and often outlandish appearances in public “are kind of an ever-evolving art project,” she explained. “When I was a child,” being raised largely among the haute bohemians of the wealthy expatriate colony of Cadaqués, Spain, Ms. Guinness said: “I was overly serious and thoughtful, a real tomboy, always dressing up as a knight or a pirate or a red Indian. If there is anything you can say about me, it’s that I have not lost the imagination I had when I was 5 years old.”

Neither has she lost the tendency to dress in a way that makes it sometimes seem as if she is pushing impatiently outward at the boundaries of gender. Yet critics who see in Ms. Guinness's tough technological style — in her slightly barbarous emphasis on wearing feathers and pelts, in her taste for hardware — a rebuke to traditional femininity might be surprised to learn that she is, in person, a surprisingly girly girl. “For so much of my life, it was about being as small as possible or even invisible,” she said. “As a Niarchos, I was told constantly that you must and mustn’t be this or that. After I left my marriage, I found I was able to flex my muscles, to play with the way I looked again.”

Fashion, noted Ms. Guinness, who said she never reads the fashion magazines that make a fetish of her (“Scientific American is my heaven,” she said), is not meant to be taken seriously. Rule-bound by definition, fashion nonetheless holds out the possibility for self-transformation, masquerade, serious flights of fancy and even occasionally cultural critique. In Ms. Guinness’s case, it also provides a pretext for the enactment of a continuing commentary on what it means to perform the public role of a woman; as a kind of 21st-century geisha, she finds herself with the means to bypass traditional systems of patronage and the wit to mount a lively, unorthodox theater of womanliness solely to amuse herself.

“Of course, I get it wrong 60 percent of the time, but it’s about the experimentation,” Ms. Guinness said. “So much spirit and freedom of experimentation died in the ’80s,” she added. “It started with AIDS; AIDS wiped all that out. And so many of the people who would understand what I’m doing are dead now. Still, even though I am not trained at this, I try to find new ways of expressing myself and to use whatever it is I have creatively. I am not an eccentric, and I am not some sort of multitrillionaire just interested in buying clothes.”

Clothes are far from a driving force, Ms. Guinness said. What inspires her experimental flights is something more hard-headed and ordinary — a bristling refusal to conform.

“What drives me now is the idea of something being against the world,” she said. “I’m an artist, I suppose.”

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

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.” .

T Exclusive Video | 'Dorothea' by Barnaby Roper, starring Dorothea Barth Jorgensen

Barnaby Roper directed a film for T/The New York Times, starring Dorothea Barth Jorgensen on August 5, 2010 with stylist Michelle Camron.

T/New York Times Video
Model: Dorothea Barth Jorgensen
Director: Barnaby Roper
Stylist: Michelle Cameron
Hair: Tuan Anh Tran
Makeup: Valery Gherman
Camera: Santiago Gonzalez

Video can be seen at: nytimes.com

From nytimes.com:

By Judith Puckett-Rinella:

Barnaby Roper, the innovative New York filmmaker and photographer, has created a short film exclusively for The Moment starring the model Dorothea Barth Jorgensen. In this captivating short, Roper combines powerful lighting and exquisitely timed edits — along with more than a little wax — to transform Dorothea into a three-dimensional otherworldly beauty. When not appearing in T films or posing for the pages of Italian Vogue or Love, the Swedish-born Jorgensen can often be found at Surf Café in Brooklyn, reading her beloved Anaïs Nin, or, you know, analyzing dreams. She also has a wicked blog called Displaced Bones, where you can see Jorgensen’s beautiful friends captured through her own lens and read her poetry and various musings.

T Exclusive Video | 'Dorothea' by Barnaby Roper, starring Dorothea Barth Jorgensen

Barnaby Roper directed a film for T/The New York Times, starring Dorothea Barth Jorgensen on August 5, 2010 with stylist Michelle Camron.

T/New York Times Video
Model: Dorothea Barth Jorgensen
Director: Barnaby Roper
Stylist: Michelle Cameron
Hair: Tuan Anh Tran
Makeup: Valery Gherman
Camera: Santiago Gonzalez

Video can be seen at: nytimes.com

From nytimes.com:

By Judith Puckett-Rinella:

Barnaby Roper, the innovative New York filmmaker and photographer, has created a short film exclusively for The Moment starring the model Dorothea Barth Jorgensen. In this captivating short, Roper combines powerful lighting and exquisitely timed edits — along with more than a little wax — to transform Dorothea into a three-dimensional otherworldly beauty. When not appearing in T films or posing for the pages of Italian Vogue or Love, the Swedish-born Jorgensen can often be found at Surf Café in Brooklyn, reading her beloved Anaïs Nin, or, you know, analyzing dreams. She also has a wicked blog called Displaced Bones, where you can see Jorgensen’s beautiful friends captured through her own lens and read her poetry and various musings.

Q. and A. With Carine Roitfeld

By Eric Wilson for The New York Times:

The 90th-anniversary issue of Vogue Paris hit newsstands here this week, just in time for the Paris collections and an elaborate masked ball that Carine Roitfeld, the editor, is planning on Thursday night in a hotel particulier. The theme of the party is “Eyes Wide Shut,” and Ms. Roitfeld expects everyone to look as good as her October cover model, Lara Stone, who appears in a lace mask by Philip Treacy.

Ms. Roitfeld’s new issue set a record for the publication with 620 pages, many of them advertisements created specially for the anniversary, like one by Chanel that consists of a sketch by Karl Lagerfeld that shows the designer standing just behind Coco Chanel herself, her hands stuffed in her skirt pockets. For the magazine’s feature well, Ms. Roitfeld opened each photo portfolio with an archival image, followed by a contemporary take on fashion inspired by the same story. For example, a Horst P. Horst image of a masked ball from 1934 leads into a an erotic fantasy of masked models by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggot. Mario Sorrenti, David Sims, Steven Klein and Hedi Slimane also contributed to the issue.

Perhaps the most controversial story will be Terry Richardson’s images of Crystal Renn, the (not quite) plus-size model who has become a vocal advocate for incorporating different sizes in fashion magazines. Here, she is shown gorging on an endless feast, about to stuff an entire squid into her mouth in one picture, gnawing on beef, sausage and poultry in others. It’s a statement.

Ms. Roitfeld, when I met her in her office, said the shoot was actually inspired by the 1973 movie “La Grande Bouffe,” the dark Marco Ferreri film about a group of men who retire to a villa to eat themselves to death. Ms. Roitfeld said she realized, while looking at the provocative — and sometimes shocking — imagery from Vogue’s past, that it is the job of fashion magazines to continue to push boundaries and provoke, even in the face of attacks on their judgment.

Here are some excerpts from our conversation:

How do you feel about the magazine at 90?

In 90 years, we haven’t changed the mood of the magazine. It’s still very audacious. It’s still about beauty. It’s still about excess. It’s still very avant-garde. When we started to do the research, we discovered the same mood in the past, so we are very happy to feel that we are still looking like the iconic Vogue of Newton and Guy Bourdin. We try to be sophisticated, while a little on the edge all the time. But what I can see is that now, the censoring is bigger than it was 20, 30 or 40 years ago. I think we have less freedom. Today some pictures would not even be publishable. It’s not just about the nudity, but when you talk about things politically, the military, kids, it would all be politically incorrect and not publishable today.

How does that make you feel as an editor?

That we have to fight to keep this un-politically correct attitude of French Vogue, but it’s more and more difficult to be able do that. You cannot smoke, you cannot show arms, you cannot show little girls, because everyone now is very anxious not to have problems with the law. Everything we do now is like walking in high heels on the ice, but we keep trying to do it.

When you explain your philosophy about fashion to anyone who wants to contribute to French Vogue, what is it that you tell them?

Vogue is a very specific world. You are Vogue, or not Vogue. There are some editors and writers who can be very good, and still not Vogue. How can I describe it? It is, first, having the sense of luxury. It’s a sense of craziness, a bit. It’s a sense of beauty, because the images we are printing, most of them are going to be in a museum. It has to be cultural, because I think the French woman is not just interested in fashion. She is interested in painting, reading, movies and art, so it is a lot of things, altogether, to be a Vogue photographer, writer or stylist. And a Vogue reader.

What are you most proud of that you have brought to this magazine in the last 10 years?

When I see this anniversary issue, I think it is the best coffee-table book. I think it is good when something can stay interesting for a long time. It’s not just a trend for one month. What we did in this issue, I hope, in 10 years, will not be démodé, because now everyone can see fashion on the Internet. You can go on Style.com and see everything, but not how to wear it. This is what we try to give to the readers of Vogue.

How do you remain personally engaged with fashion when everyone else can see it online?

It’s still exciting to me, because when I am going to a fashion show, I’m not just looking at the clothes. I’m looking at the mood, I’m listening to the music, so sometimes, I can be a bit disappointed in one, two or three shows, and then I see a great one and my energy goes up again. There were some big fashion moments last week in Italy, like when you go to Prada, and wonder what’s she going to do this time, or at Dolce & Gabbana, and you are almost ready to cry. Maybe I still like the clothes. I don’t see them just to wear them, I see them as a piece of art sometimes.

With all the new designers hoping to be discovered, how do you know when someone really has it?

It is difficult. First, we have to find a moment to look at these young stylists, because we are overbooked with shows, overbooked with appointments and work like everyone else. But we try to find the time, because they are the future of tomorrow. When you talk to them, you know almost instantly. It’s like an instinct when you see a young painter or photographer. Because we have a big power, we have to use it to give an opportunity to some young kids, designers, makeup artists, photographers and models. It’s good that Anna Wintour was the one who needed to kick our butt, in a way, to do something. She did a lot in America, but in Paris, we were a bit slow. Now we understand, and we’ve seen so much return that we are going to be more and more aware to help.

Who do you think among the younger generation has the potential to become big?

I am very surprised by someone like Alexander Wang. I am amazed how he is good with fashion, with business, with public relations himself, with an attitude in his clothes that is spoken immediately. And I think a young guy called Joseph Altuzarra, who went to New York, is the next one to be big. The clothes he makes are very beautiful, and they are very wearable.

What bothers you about fashion today?

Sometimes I think, Why do I have to go to a show? Half an hour driving, half an hour waiting, seeing the show, then half an hour back. And when I get back, I see the show on the Internet. Sometimes it goes too quick sometimes. I like the idea of what Tom Ford did in New York. No one saw one outfit, except the 100 people who were guests. It was smart, because it makes envy. It’s too easy that Prada makes a collection and two hours later its on the Net and everyone can copy it. It’s too quick now, but I don’t think we can do anything about that. It’s just the time.

What’s next for you?

I’m full of ideas, and I want to have more parties and shows for the public. I want to make fashion more festive in Paris. This week we have the Vogue bar at the Crillon, where we changed the décor, the cocktail list, the pictures on the wall. The drinks are named after people. My drink is a Testarossa. It’s Campari and vodka, to fly very high, very far, very quick. We have the dirty martini of Stephen Gan — it’s delicious — and the apple martini of Tom Ford. I have a new job now: bartender. That is my dream, and also to open a karaoke.

What would be your song?

“You’re So Vain.” I think in this business, it’s a good song. It’s dedicated to a lot of people.

Q. and A. With Carine Roitfeld

By Eric Wilson for The New York Times:

The 90th-anniversary issue of Vogue Paris hit newsstands here this week, just in time for the Paris collections and an elaborate masked ball that Carine Roitfeld, the editor, is planning on Thursday night in a hotel particulier. The theme of the party is “Eyes Wide Shut,” and Ms. Roitfeld expects everyone to look as good as her October cover model, Lara Stone, who appears in a lace mask by Philip Treacy.

Ms. Roitfeld’s new issue set a record for the publication with 620 pages, many of them advertisements created specially for the anniversary, like one by Chanel that consists of a sketch by Karl Lagerfeld that shows the designer standing just behind Coco Chanel herself, her hands stuffed in her skirt pockets. For the magazine’s feature well, Ms. Roitfeld opened each photo portfolio with an archival image, followed by a contemporary take on fashion inspired by the same story. For example, a Horst P. Horst image of a masked ball from 1934 leads into a an erotic fantasy of masked models by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggot. Mario Sorrenti, David Sims, Steven Klein and Hedi Slimane also contributed to the issue.

Perhaps the most controversial story will be Terry Richardson’s images of Crystal Renn, the (not quite) plus-size model who has become a vocal advocate for incorporating different sizes in fashion magazines. Here, she is shown gorging on an endless feast, about to stuff an entire squid into her mouth in one picture, gnawing on beef, sausage and poultry in others. It’s a statement.

Ms. Roitfeld, when I met her in her office, said the shoot was actually inspired by the 1973 movie “La Grande Bouffe,” the dark Marco Ferreri film about a group of men who retire to a villa to eat themselves to death. Ms. Roitfeld said she realized, while looking at the provocative — and sometimes shocking — imagery from Vogue’s past, that it is the job of fashion magazines to continue to push boundaries and provoke, even in the face of attacks on their judgment.

Here are some excerpts from our conversation:

How do you feel about the magazine at 90?

In 90 years, we haven’t changed the mood of the magazine. It’s still very audacious. It’s still about beauty. It’s still about excess. It’s still very avant-garde. When we started to do the research, we discovered the same mood in the past, so we are very happy to feel that we are still looking like the iconic Vogue of Newton and Guy Bourdin. We try to be sophisticated, while a little on the edge all the time. But what I can see is that now, the censoring is bigger than it was 20, 30 or 40 years ago. I think we have less freedom. Today some pictures would not even be publishable. It’s not just about the nudity, but when you talk about things politically, the military, kids, it would all be politically incorrect and not publishable today.

How does that make you feel as an editor?

That we have to fight to keep this un-politically correct attitude of French Vogue, but it’s more and more difficult to be able do that. You cannot smoke, you cannot show arms, you cannot show little girls, because everyone now is very anxious not to have problems with the law. Everything we do now is like walking in high heels on the ice, but we keep trying to do it.

When you explain your philosophy about fashion to anyone who wants to contribute to French Vogue, what is it that you tell them?

Vogue is a very specific world. You are Vogue, or not Vogue. There are some editors and writers who can be very good, and still not Vogue. How can I describe it? It is, first, having the sense of luxury. It’s a sense of craziness, a bit. It’s a sense of beauty, because the images we are printing, most of them are going to be in a museum. It has to be cultural, because I think the French woman is not just interested in fashion. She is interested in painting, reading, movies and art, so it is a lot of things, altogether, to be a Vogue photographer, writer or stylist. And a Vogue reader.

What are you most proud of that you have brought to this magazine in the last 10 years?

When I see this anniversary issue, I think it is the best coffee-table book. I think it is good when something can stay interesting for a long time. It’s not just a trend for one month. What we did in this issue, I hope, in 10 years, will not be démodé, because now everyone can see fashion on the Internet. You can go on Style.com and see everything, but not how to wear it. This is what we try to give to the readers of Vogue.

How do you remain personally engaged with fashion when everyone else can see it online?

It’s still exciting to me, because when I am going to a fashion show, I’m not just looking at the clothes. I’m looking at the mood, I’m listening to the music, so sometimes, I can be a bit disappointed in one, two or three shows, and then I see a great one and my energy goes up again. There were some big fashion moments last week in Italy, like when you go to Prada, and wonder what’s she going to do this time, or at Dolce & Gabbana, and you are almost ready to cry. Maybe I still like the clothes. I don’t see them just to wear them, I see them as a piece of art sometimes.

With all the new designers hoping to be discovered, how do you know when someone really has it?

It is difficult. First, we have to find a moment to look at these young stylists, because we are overbooked with shows, overbooked with appointments and work like everyone else. But we try to find the time, because they are the future of tomorrow. When you talk to them, you know almost instantly. It’s like an instinct when you see a young painter or photographer. Because we have a big power, we have to use it to give an opportunity to some young kids, designers, makeup artists, photographers and models. It’s good that Anna Wintour was the one who needed to kick our butt, in a way, to do something. She did a lot in America, but in Paris, we were a bit slow. Now we understand, and we’ve seen so much return that we are going to be more and more aware to help.

Who do you think among the younger generation has the potential to become big?

I am very surprised by someone like Alexander Wang. I am amazed how he is good with fashion, with business, with public relations himself, with an attitude in his clothes that is spoken immediately. And I think a young guy called Joseph Altuzarra, who went to New York, is the next one to be big. The clothes he makes are very beautiful, and they are very wearable.

What bothers you about fashion today?

Sometimes I think, Why do I have to go to a show? Half an hour driving, half an hour waiting, seeing the show, then half an hour back. And when I get back, I see the show on the Internet. Sometimes it goes too quick sometimes. I like the idea of what Tom Ford did in New York. No one saw one outfit, except the 100 people who were guests. It was smart, because it makes envy. It’s too easy that Prada makes a collection and two hours later its on the Net and everyone can copy it. It’s too quick now, but I don’t think we can do anything about that. It’s just the time.

What’s next for you?

I’m full of ideas, and I want to have more parties and shows for the public. I want to make fashion more festive in Paris. This week we have the Vogue bar at the Crillon, where we changed the décor, the cocktail list, the pictures on the wall. The drinks are named after people. My drink is a Testarossa. It’s Campari and vodka, to fly very high, very far, very quick. We have the dirty martini of Stephen Gan — it’s delicious — and the apple martini of Tom Ford. I have a new job now: bartender. That is my dream, and also to open a karaoke.

What would be your song?

“You’re So Vain.” I think in this business, it’s a good song. It’s dedicated to a lot of people.

"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

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.

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.”

Karen Elson in the NY Times

From: The New York Times:

Karen Elson Is Dressing the Part, and Singing It

By MELENA RYZIK

LIFE is unfair and everybody knows it, but should you require a refresher, you need only to watch Karen Elson, the redheaded supermodel, design muse and wife of Jack White of the White Stripes, sing.

There she was Monday night at Le Poisson Rouge in the West Village, performing songs from her debut album in a voice that can go from retro-breathy chanteuse to rootsy belter in a few notes. It was the fourth stop in a whirlwind mini-tour that included Nashville, where she and Mr. White live with their two children, and Austin, Tex., where she played at the South by Southwest music festival. The shows were intended to introduce Ms. Elson as more than just a pretty face, or even a pretty voice, but as an artist in her own right.

At each gig she took the stage in a peach-dyed vintage gown and a 1917 Gibson Style O guitar to give a preview of her album, “The Ghost Who Walks,” which was produced by her rock star husband (who plays the drums on it) and is due out May 25.

At the New York show, a homecoming of sorts, the audience was filled with fashion and music folk: the bassist Melissa Auf der Maur; Agyness Deyn, the model and tastemaker; Grace Coddington, the Vogue editor. The latter sat close enough that Ms. Elson could banter with her about her coral suede shoes, a namesake pair — the Karen — made for her by Tabitha Simmons, also of Vogue.

Mr. White was not there — he is touring in Australia with the Dead Weather, some of whose members also moonlight for Ms. Elson. Her bandmates include Mark Watrous (who has also played with the Raconteurs, another of Mr. White’s bands) on fiddle and pedal steel guitar, and Jackson Smith — son of Patti and husband to Meg White — on electric. The video for the album’s title song, in which Ms. Elson alone sings and strums while her band stands around in the shadows, has already racked up more than 54,000 YouTube views.

This is not the way most bands get their start. But far from discounting her modeling career and famous collaborators, Ms. Elson is straightforward about the advantages they confer.

“If I wasn’t a model, I would never have been around interesting musicians, even had the financial capabilities to say, ‘I don’t have to work right now, I can sit and make my record,’ ” she said the morning after the Poisson Rouge show, over several coffees at the Breslin in the Ace Hotel. Though she has long been musically minded, “I could never have made this record five years ago,” she said. “This record only could have been made with Jack.” They were married in 2005.

Ms. Elson is hardly the first model to take up with a musician, or to aspire to make the transition from runway to stage. Recording an album is an ambition that stretches back at least as far as Twiggy, more recently attracting catwalk legends like Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. (Surely you remember “La La La Love Song”?)

“After Carla Bruni, I expect every model to pick up a guitar,” said Dmitry Komis, a curator and writer who came to the Poisson Rouge show with the designer Zaldy, who styles the Scissor Sisters and who named Ms. Elson as one of his muses. (“She’s so down-to-earthy,” he said.)
Ms. Elson, 31, picked up a guitar — and a four-track — nearly a decade ago when she was living in the East Village, and taught herself to play. Since 2004, she has performed with the Citizens Band, a political cabaret act she helped establish. Before she left her hometown near Manchester, England, to model at 16, she fronted a salsa band.

“I was always singing, as a kid,” she said. “That’s honestly all I’ve ever wanted to do. But really, I doubt I would have ever done it” if not for modeling.

Growing up in “a sleepy, grim, Northern English town,” she said, “there was nothing expected of me. You grew up, you got married, you had kids, and maybe you worked in the supermarket. You didn’t have any aspirations to anything grand.”

Ms. Elson’s fashion career is beyond grand; she has walked or posed for nearly every major designer and photographer, carried campaigns for Yves Saint Laurent and Chanel, graced countless magazine covers and really no longer needs a last name.

So despite the musical credentials, she must now battle an attitude succinctly summed up by a fan at one of her Austin shows. “She’s great,” he said as Ms. Elson sang in a tiny pop-up shop for Third Man, Mr. White’s record label. “I mean, look at her. Look at her!”

Told of the comment, Ms. Elson shrugged it off. “You know, models, people roll their eyes,” she said. She herself was one of them. “I for years just believed that this had to be a personal project,” she said of her music. She feared ridicule: “like it’s like me trying to get more attention. I was cautious because if there’s something bad out there, it’s doubly as bad because you’re a model. It’s like, oh, stick to the day job.”

Now she is in the position of both being in thrall to her looks — because they’re a big part of what makes people interested in her — and pushing against them.

Her album leans toward dark, spare Americana in instrumentation and themes. Ms. Elson wrote the guitar parts and lyrics, and the band and Mr. White did the rest. Ms. Elson said she listened to Harry Smith’s Smithsonian folk anthology for inspiration. Onstage, eyes closed, she weaves like a 1960s folkie.

The title track comes from a nickname she had as a child — Ms. Elson says she was teased about her appearance — but the story is even more gruesome: it’s about a man who murders his lover. “Have you ever been in a relationship where you see a gleam in the person’s eye you’re with and it’s like, wow, you’re scary, you hate me?” she said. “Pre-Jack, there was a lot of anxiety even the men I was dating had, about me being a model or maybe me earning more money than them.”

She credited living in Nashville with helping her gain perspective. She and Mr. White set up house there five years ago and have two children: Scarlett, 3, and Henry, 2.
She wrote the album largely in her walk-in closet and recorded it with Mr. White and friends in their backyard studio. (Real estate is unfair, too.)

Still, Ms. Elson said, South by Southwest, with all the insiders and hype, was daunting. “Put with all the industry types and like, ‘All right girl, sing’ — it very much felt like that, like, O.K., I’ve got to prove myself,” she said.

Mr. White did not respond to requests for comment. But he has been hands-on in the album’s marketing, said Kris Chen, a vice president at XL Recordings, which is releasing “The Ghost Who Walks” with Mr. White’s label. But the album “was carried by her voice,” Mr. Chen said.
Asked who the audience is for her music, Ms. Elson said, “I have no idea.” Still, she plans to tour, likely without Mr. White. “Getting my sea legs, that’s I how I describe it.”

Ms. Elson doesn’t expect to give up modeling. “I think that would be really pretentious — ‘I’m sorry, I’m now a musician,’ ” she said. “Other than viewing them as the golden handcuffs, I might as well just appreciate it. I only hope I can improve the idea of model-slash-anything. I only hope I can do it justice.”

Now Showing | Deyn’s Debut

From T Magazine/ The New York Times Blog:

Agyness Deyn is the latest model trying to make the transition to acting, but she’s doing it via the art gallery rather than Hollywood. In “Mean to Me,” a visually sumptuous 12-minute film noir written and directed by David McDermott and Peter McGough, Deyn trades her gamine look for raven-hued finger waves and crimson lips — all the better to deliver a blow to the head of her lover (the “Law & Order” star Linus Roache), wrestle him into the bathtub, tie him up and extort a sizable check. Set in the Great Depression and named for a popular song of the era, the artist duo’s first scripted film chronicles the disastrous end of an affair. McDermott and McGough began collaborating 30 years ago, and capturing the essence of a time past has always been part of their work, so recreating the 1930s proved no challenge. Period-perfect down to its wallpaper, telephone and radio, McGough’s Art Deco Manhattan apartment provided the set. Deyn’s costumes, by Zac Posen, might as well be of that vintage. The Shalimar perfume and pearls, around which crucial plot points turn, were courtesy of Guerlain and Mikimoto, which underwrote the project. Deyn got the gig at the suggestion of McGough’s pal Louie Chaban, director of Women Management. “Peter asked for a girl who wanted to act,” Chaban says. And can she? McGough proclaims: “A star is born.”

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:

Natasa Vojnovic in The New York Times

Natasa Vojnovic in todays New York Times:


Photo Michael Falco for The New York Times
NO FRILLS The designer Alexander Wang with the models Missy Rayder, center, and Natasa Vojnovic in his New York studio. In five years Mr. Wang, 25, has built a $25 million company

by Ruth La Ferla

DON’T tell Alexander Wang that blue is the new black or that wedge-heel boots are the season’s must-have. Such airy edicts would most likely make him laugh. “No one talks like that anymore,” said Mr. Wang, whose keen sense of what young women want to wear is matched only by his no-nonsense approach to his, um, métier.

“Fashion in some people’s eyes is very untouchable and super-indulgent,” he said. “For me, it’s just clothes to be worn. And at the end of the day, the point is to sell the product.”

That sounds pretty hardnosed, coming as it does from fashion’s latest It Child, a lanky, tousled 25-year-old design-school dropout who, in a scant five years, has leapfrogged from toting garment bags for Vogue to mapping out the vision behind a $25 million family business that is growing at a gallop. Mr. Wang’s aggressively street-inflected collections (only six to date) are as avidly monitored by fashion insiders as they are by the shoppers who snap up his leather leggings, draped jersey dresses and biker vests.

Mr. Wang’s success is partly an outgrowth of his unstudiedly sexy aesthetic, a tough but sultry look that is as much his stock in trade as his signature filmy T-shirts.

His style is “humorously slutty,” said Sally Singer, the fashion features director of Vogue. “He gives you that effortless, languid look that is the province of the young and the club-going.”
But lately this go-to designer for models and assorted urban sylphs has shown signs of growing up. His sophisticated shapes and wallet-friendly prices are now speaking compellingly to a mature population of bankers, teachers and Botoxed social dragonflies who aspire to his brand of urban cool.

“His clothes just hit the edges of what’s acceptable,” Ms. Singer said. “They appeal to that part of you that wishes you were a skinny hipster.”

No need to clue in Veronica Chu, a makeup artist in Manhattan who recently attended a personal appearance by the designer at Barneys New York. “Most of us aren’t a Size 2,” Ms. Chu said. “It’s nice to be able to wear sexy but comfortable clothes that are not overly girly. I’m kind of over that look.”

Another fan, a marketing associate on Wall Street who asked not to be identified because she should have been at work, wore a pinstripe approximation of a banker’s jacket, a straitlaced departure for Mr. Wang. “His merchandise used to be just for the hip and young,” she said. “Now all kinds of women wear his clothes.”

That may be in part because Mr. Wang demonstrates a canny-beyond-his-years grasp of commercial realities. “Ever since the business has launched, it’s been very measured,” said Jennifer Wheeler, the vice president for designer apparel at Nordstrom. “He hasn’t bitten off more than he can chew. His deliveries are steady, and his quality is consistent. He hasn’t gone through some of the growing pains new designers can go through if they have success right off the bat.”

Mr. Wang runs his mini-empire without outside backers or benefit of a family fortune. He works alongside his mother; his sister-in law, Aimie Wang, an accountant; and his brother, Dennis Wang, who brings to the enterprise a background in international business development. “Alexander is the ultimate shopper,” Dennis Wang said. “He’s very aware of what’s out there — the different looks, the different price points. He has a very innate sense, a clarity of vision, of where he sees the company going. Everybody we bring on, from accounting to production, he has an interest in meeting.”

Ms. Singer, who worked closely with the designer at Vogue last year, when he received a cash prize and mentoring from the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, was struck by his patent affection for the bottom line. “What impressed the judges,” she said, “was that he is on to every aspect of what he does: the clothes, the image, the retail growth. It slightly blows you away that someone so young could have taken in so much so quickly.”

Mr. Wang, of course, is a study in precocity, his affection for the rag trade nurtured, it seems, from the cradle. “I can’t remember when he wasn’t into fashion,” Dennis Wang said.
Once, thumbing through a dog-eared copy of Harper’s Bazaar that he had taken from a hair salon, Alexander, then 8, encountered an image that is still etched on his retina. “It was a model in a pinstripe Tom Ford suit for Gucci,” he recalled. Even as a schoolboy, he was savvy enough to recognize the model as Georgina Grenville and the photographer as Patrick Demarchelier. “I carried that picture with me everywhere,” he said.

Growing up in San Francisco, where his parents owned a packaging company, Mr. Wang dreamed of traveling to Paris and London “to check out the stores.” In his teens he visited London, enrolling in a summer course at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, spawning ground for Alexander McQueen, among others. He said he found school, including Parsons, which he briefly attended in New York, exasperating.

“What was missing was how would I be able to execute my ideas into a business,” he said. “I knew from Day 1 I wanted to do a lifestyle brand.”

That phrase would not come trippingly to most adolescents. To Mr. Wang, it meant catering to a constituency of skinny, loose-limbed school chums and fashion muses like the model Erin Wasson and the social figure Victoria Traina, who wear his designs with a throwaway flair. Close inspection reveals that he has placed their after-hours uniforms — sweat pants, slouchy T-shirts, shredded jeans — under a microscope, inspecting every hole and blotch and incorporating those gritty touches into his designs: a lacy top, for instance, patterned after sweat stains.
Some observers, unacquainted with such subtleties, dismissed his early efforts as self-conscious and derivative of designers like Rick Owens or Daryl Kerrigan.

Few would argue that Mr. Wang is a trailblazer on the order of his early idols, designers like Helmut Lang. “His clothes have a little more oomph,” said Humberto Leon, an owner of the downtown Manhattan boutique Opening Ceremony. Unconventional without being outrageous, they allow a wide range of women to “feel they can think out of the box,” Mr. Leon said.
Such muted praise is fine with Mr. Wang. “I am not reinventing the wheel,” he said. “I’m not an artiste.”

No ivory tower recluse, he had no sooner sketched and draped his first collection, a six-piece knitwear line introduced in 2005, than he was dashing into stores to see where it was hanging and who had bought it.

“From the very first season I would look at the numbers, check our profit margins,” he said. “Not that I micromanage, but I like to be involved in each process.”

That attention to detail goes some way toward explaining why, when other designers are downsizing, Mr. Wang’s sales have tripled since late last year, according to his brother. Some 400 stores, including 220 in the United States, now carry the Wang label, which encompasses ready-to-wear, shoes and handbags (some 30 percent of the business); a secondary T-shirt line (20 percent); and a recently introduced men’s wear collection.

Was it only a half-dozen years ago that Mr. Wang was prowling eBay for coveted tickets to the CFDA Awards, the Oscars of fashion? That his name could not be uttered without the obligatory qualifier, “no relation to Vera”? Retailers say that more than 50 percent of his clothing sells at full price, impressive compared with less than 20 percent for some more established brands.
Though his name is mentioned these days in the same breath with style-makers like Marc Jacobs, Mr. Wang has hung on to the easy laugh and a sense of cool that seems almost a birthright.

“He is real,” Ms. Wheeler of Nordstrom said. “He’s not having to create some mystique.”
Mr. Wang himself seems taken aback by his swiftly rising fortunes. Smiling sheepishly and tugging at his trademark curls, he could only offer, “It’s, like, weird to see my name on things.”

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.”

New York Times Pulse: Jamie Bochert

From The New York Times Pulse by Karin Nelson :


Photo:Samantha Rapp

JAMIE BOCHERT, model and musician.

WHAT I’M WEARING NOW The dress is Camilla Staerk. The belt came off a kimono-style robe from the Park Hyatt hotel in Tokyo, and the jacket and shoes are Ann Demeulemeester. I don’t wear a lot of designer clothes, but when I do, it’s mostly Ann’s stuff.

STYLE CREDO I like to be comfortable. But if I’m not feeling well, I’ll dress up. I remember one time I wore this dress to Home Depot, and my heels were clicking down the aisle. My boyfriend said I was like Marisa Tomei in “My Cousin Vinny,” but you know, if you’re not feeling good, at least you can look good.

MOST RECENT PURCHASES It’s a rare occasion that I go shopping. I have to be in a really bad mood and need instant gratification. Designers give me things, or I take stuff from my mom, who’s a little Italian woman from New Jersey. The last thing I bought was a tie-dyed jumpsuit from the designer Leana Zuniga. That was good. And a hat from Marc Jacobs’s spring collection — one of the boaters, but I haven’t worn it yet.

THE ONE THING I WANT These Rick Owens boots that are no longer available. But it’s O.K. I’ll live.

CURRENT INSPIRATIONS Gypsies, Morocco, ballet. I’m having a big Ballets Russes phase. I’ve been wearing a lot of dance cover-ups, and I want to find a feather hat and wear eye makeup like they did. I’m also really into the 1920s and ’30s. I’ve been wearing old nightgowns from that time.

CURRENT PROJECTS I’m writing an album that I plan to record in January. I play piano, guitar and sing under the name Frances Wolf. The same things that inspire my style, inspire my music.

RIP Octavia Saint Laurent

From The New York Times:

R.I.P. Octavia Saint Laurent
By Horacio Silva

The world is a decidedly less chic place this week with the passing on Monday of the legendary transgendered beauty Octavia Saint Laurent, who won hearts and an honorary place in the pantheon of the fabulous with her star turn in Jennie Livingston’s 1990 voguing documentary, “Paris Is Burning.” Octavia, who later changed her name to Heavenly Angel Octavia Saint Laurent Manolo Blahnik before settling on the more recession-friendly Octavia Saint Laurent Mizrahi, will be remembered not only for her encyclopedic knowledge of feminine allure — her deconstruction of the many of the looks of Paulina Porizkova in “Paris Is Burning” should be required viewing for every drag artiste in training heels — but also for having lived a glamorous life worthy of tens across the board.