Tom Ford Fall 2011 Show
Time: February 20, 2011
Location: London
Models: Natasha Poly, Mirte Maas, Kristina Salinovic, Kasia Struss, Jourdan Dunn, Britt Maren, and Fei Fei Sun
Showing posts with label Tom Ford. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tom Ford. Show all posts
Monday, June 13, 2011
Tom Ford Fall 2011 Show Video
Tom Ford Fall 2011 Show
Time: February 20, 2011
Location: London
Models: Natasha Poly, Mirte Maas, Kristina Salinovic, Kasia Struss, Jourdan Dunn, Britt Maren, and Fei Fei Sun
Time: February 20, 2011
Location: London
Models: Natasha Poly, Mirte Maas, Kristina Salinovic, Kasia Struss, Jourdan Dunn, Britt Maren, and Fei Fei Sun
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
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.”
Monday, January 3, 2011
Tom Ford Spring 2011 Fashion Show Video (featuring Karen Elson and Daphne Guinness)
Tom Ford Spring 2011 Show
Time: September 12, 2010 at 6:30pm
Location: Tom Ford, 845 Madison Avenue, NY, NY
Casting Director: James Scully
Models: Karen Elson and Daphne Guinness
Soundtrack: "Pretty Babies" by Karen Elson
Time: September 12, 2010 at 6:30pm
Location: Tom Ford, 845 Madison Avenue, NY, NY
Casting Director: James Scully
Models: Karen Elson and Daphne Guinness
Soundtrack: "Pretty Babies" by Karen Elson
Tom Ford Spring 2011 Fashion Show Video (featuring Karen Elson and Daphne Guinness)
Tom Ford Spring 2011 Show
Time: September 12, 2010 at 6:30pm
Location: Tom Ford, 845 Madison Avenue, NY, NY
Casting Director: James Scully
Models: Karen Elson and Daphne Guinness
Soundtrack: "Pretty Babies" by Karen Elson
Time: September 12, 2010 at 6:30pm
Location: Tom Ford, 845 Madison Avenue, NY, NY
Casting Director: James Scully
Models: Karen Elson and Daphne Guinness
Soundtrack: "Pretty Babies" by Karen Elson
Thursday, September 30, 2010
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.
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.
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.
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:
Thursday, December 10, 2009
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.”
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.”
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Friday, March 20, 2009
Valentino on The View
I love The View.
I work during the day, when The View airs @ 11 am on channel 7. And I don't do Tivo. So I catch up on The View by going to Watching The View (So You Don't Have To). Winnie McCarthy writes the best recaps, and usually posts YouTube links to the "Hot Topics" section.
Hot Topics are the cream in an Oreo cookie. Joy Behar uses her freedom of speech to speak truth to power.Occasionally Barbara Walters uses her freedom of the press to speak her mind- but she retains her tenuous ties to journalism, and can't compromise her professional ethics by stating her actual opinions. When her attention is engaged, Whoopi Goldberg keeps it real. Rarely, Sherri Shepherd uses her life experiences to show me how to see things in a different light. Elizabeth Hasselbeck habitually utilizes mendacity and hubris to pee on my leg and tell me its raining.
Elizabeth Hasselbeck makes Debbie Matenopoulos look like Noam Chomsky.
Joy Behar is the new Edward R Murrow. She alone had the integrity to give John McCain and his mealy mouthed wife a beat down with tough, hard hitting questions- to their face!
The day Meredith Viera left The View was almost as bad as the day Jil Sander left Jil Sander.
The day Rosie O'Donnell quit the View was almost as bad as the day Helmut Lang shut down.
The day Lisa Ling moved on from The View to work on travel documentaries was almost as bad as when Tom Ford left Gucci. Worse actually, because Lisa's departure led to Elizabeth Hasselbeck voicing her intolerance, bigotry, homophobia and misogyny into my living room.
For me, the years when Meredith Viera was moderator, Joy was the funny one, Star was the legal expert and Lisa Ling was the voice of Young America were a Golden Age. Pre-9/11, was a more innocent time, and I treasure my memories of The View from those years the way I treasure my Liz Tilberis/Fabien Baron Harper's Bazaar complete collection.
Worlds collided when Valentino appeared as a guest on The View on Wed to promote the documentary: The Last Emperor.
Obviously, Elizabeth Hasselbeck had to embarrass herself by asking Valentino if he would design a line for Target. As if! Valentino designed Jacqueline Kennedy's wedding dress to Aristotle Onassis. He is now retired, and has said goodbye to all that. Why would he design a sportswear capsule collection for Target? Lets not push it.
I for one cannot wait until the weather gets warm enough to wear my Thakoon for Target windbreaker & trench.
Check out this clip of Valentino on The View, and this weekend take a little time to enjoy The View:
I work during the day, when The View airs @ 11 am on channel 7. And I don't do Tivo. So I catch up on The View by going to Watching The View (So You Don't Have To). Winnie McCarthy writes the best recaps, and usually posts YouTube links to the "Hot Topics" section.
Hot Topics are the cream in an Oreo cookie. Joy Behar uses her freedom of speech to speak truth to power.Occasionally Barbara Walters uses her freedom of the press to speak her mind- but she retains her tenuous ties to journalism, and can't compromise her professional ethics by stating her actual opinions. When her attention is engaged, Whoopi Goldberg keeps it real. Rarely, Sherri Shepherd uses her life experiences to show me how to see things in a different light. Elizabeth Hasselbeck habitually utilizes mendacity and hubris to pee on my leg and tell me its raining.
Elizabeth Hasselbeck makes Debbie Matenopoulos look like Noam Chomsky.
Joy Behar is the new Edward R Murrow. She alone had the integrity to give John McCain and his mealy mouthed wife a beat down with tough, hard hitting questions- to their face!
The day Meredith Viera left The View was almost as bad as the day Jil Sander left Jil Sander.
The day Rosie O'Donnell quit the View was almost as bad as the day Helmut Lang shut down.
The day Lisa Ling moved on from The View to work on travel documentaries was almost as bad as when Tom Ford left Gucci. Worse actually, because Lisa's departure led to Elizabeth Hasselbeck voicing her intolerance, bigotry, homophobia and misogyny into my living room.
For me, the years when Meredith Viera was moderator, Joy was the funny one, Star was the legal expert and Lisa Ling was the voice of Young America were a Golden Age. Pre-9/11, was a more innocent time, and I treasure my memories of The View from those years the way I treasure my Liz Tilberis/Fabien Baron Harper's Bazaar complete collection.
Worlds collided when Valentino appeared as a guest on The View on Wed to promote the documentary: The Last Emperor.
Obviously, Elizabeth Hasselbeck had to embarrass herself by asking Valentino if he would design a line for Target. As if! Valentino designed Jacqueline Kennedy's wedding dress to Aristotle Onassis. He is now retired, and has said goodbye to all that. Why would he design a sportswear capsule collection for Target? Lets not push it.
I for one cannot wait until the weather gets warm enough to wear my Thakoon for Target windbreaker & trench.
Check out this clip of Valentino on The View, and this weekend take a little time to enjoy The View:
Monday, February 23, 2009
Steven Klein Selected Works
Steven Klein: Selected Works
Wayne Sterling interviewed Steven Klein exclusively for The Imagist:
Wayne Sterling: How common is it for mainstream magazines to find the images in an editorial too strong?
Steven Klein: 'I FIND MOST MAGAZINE EDITORIALS WEAK IN COMPARISON TO THE VISUAL FIELD OF CINEMA AND ART.'
WS: Do you think today's audience wants pushed images or do they want to sit in a comfort zone given the recession fears of today?
SK:'PEOPLE CRAVE TO SEE IMAGES THAT WILL COMPEL THEM OUT OF THEIR BOREDOM.'
WS: Do you think your images lose something when they're seen on the Internet as opposed to print?
SK: 'I AM FINDING MANY IMAGES TO BE STRONGER ON THE INTERNET. IN FACT WHEN THE NY POST PUBLISHES AN IMAGE FROM MY SHOOT OR I SEE MY EDITORIAL FEATURED ON A BLOG AND MIXED IN WITH ITS GRAPHICS AND TEXT, THE IMAGES TAKE ON A NEW LIFE, NOT SO PRECIOUS BUT VITAL.'
WS: What do you see as the future of print magazines and lavish fashion editorials?
SK: 'THEY NEED TO CATCH UP TO THE MODERN LOOK OF MANY OF THE BLOGS I SEE.'
WS: Your images are certainly cinematic. Do you think we'll be watching fashion ads+ editorials that are mini- videos or mini-films in the near future?
SK: 'I AM ALREADY CREATING MINI FILMS ON MY WEBSITE THAT ARE DERIVED FROM MY SHOOTS,'
TO SEE THE MOVIES ON THE STEVEN KLEIN SITE :
stevenkleinstudio.com
enter site
go to: Moving Image
proceed to Film Projects
One of Steven Klein's fans, Robster16, edited a tribute video to Steven Klein:
Wayne Sterling interviewed Steven Klein exclusively for The Imagist:
Wayne Sterling: How common is it for mainstream magazines to find the images in an editorial too strong?
Steven Klein: 'I FIND MOST MAGAZINE EDITORIALS WEAK IN COMPARISON TO THE VISUAL FIELD OF CINEMA AND ART.'
WS: Do you think today's audience wants pushed images or do they want to sit in a comfort zone given the recession fears of today?
SK:'PEOPLE CRAVE TO SEE IMAGES THAT WILL COMPEL THEM OUT OF THEIR BOREDOM.'
WS: Do you think your images lose something when they're seen on the Internet as opposed to print?
SK: 'I AM FINDING MANY IMAGES TO BE STRONGER ON THE INTERNET. IN FACT WHEN THE NY POST PUBLISHES AN IMAGE FROM MY SHOOT OR I SEE MY EDITORIAL FEATURED ON A BLOG AND MIXED IN WITH ITS GRAPHICS AND TEXT, THE IMAGES TAKE ON A NEW LIFE, NOT SO PRECIOUS BUT VITAL.'
WS: What do you see as the future of print magazines and lavish fashion editorials?
SK: 'THEY NEED TO CATCH UP TO THE MODERN LOOK OF MANY OF THE BLOGS I SEE.'
WS: Your images are certainly cinematic. Do you think we'll be watching fashion ads+ editorials that are mini- videos or mini-films in the near future?
SK: 'I AM ALREADY CREATING MINI FILMS ON MY WEBSITE THAT ARE DERIVED FROM MY SHOOTS,'
TO SEE THE MOVIES ON THE STEVEN KLEIN SITE :
stevenkleinstudio.com
enter site
go to: Moving Image
proceed to Film Projects
One of Steven Klein's fans, Robster16, edited a tribute video to Steven Klein:
Monday, February 16, 2009
Tom Ford Spring 2009 campaign: Karen Elson, photo: Tom Ford
Tom Ford not only art directed his spring men’s wear and eyewear advertising campaigns, he also shot the photographs for the first time. “I have taken pictures for years, but recently have become more serious about it and have started shooting portraits,” said Ford. “I have always felt that an advertising image is in a sense the last layer of the design, and so decided this season to just shoot the campaign myself.“
Ford has been busy shooting and editing his film, based on Christopher Isherwood’s “A Single Man,” in Los Angeles since November. The story is set in midcentury, the era to which the spring ad campaign also harkens back.
The ad images were shot in a Los Angeles studio featuring the label’s signature male model, Jon Kortajarena, and model Karen Elson. They will launch in March magazine issues. The company has planned ad pages in line with last year.
“Fashion advertising lately has become very complex in terms of production, and I think that often, in these dense, heavily art directed campaigns, that the clothes seem to get lost a bit,” said Ford. “I wanted to create clean, straightforward shots of a handsome man in beautifully cut clothes. Simple, clear, and fresh.”
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Ron Galella
Ron Galella's new show, "That's Great!", opens Thursday May 1st (reception 6:00pm to 8:00 pm) at the Staley Wise Gallery . The show focuses on Andy Warhol and the beautiful people who were the celebrity, fashion, art, and social world of New York in the 1970’s and 80’s. Staley Wise is at 560 Broadway (Prince Street x Spring Street), open Tuesday through Saturday 11:00 am to 5:00 pm.
Ron Galella is a legendary fashion photographer. What makes his work transcend the photos published in tabloids is that he captured the clothes and the lifestyles of the people wearing them. He caught the subtle details of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis - the wind tousled hair done by Mr. Kenneth, the silk knit top from Henri Bendel private label, and suede trousers from Paraphernalia. He also caught the way that Jackie carried her Hermes Trim bag under her arm, with her hand in the pocket of her loose Burberry trench. She was probably on her way to have her hair done at Mr. Kenneth's and didn't want her hair to be seen, so she covered with a silk scarf, knotted at the nape of her kneck.
Ron's photos of celebrities like Jackie O inspired Tom Ford's designs - his version of the Hermes Trim bag was named the Jackie bag. The Jackie bag (in turquoise) completely sold out when it luanched in the spring of 1999.
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