One of the last pictures included in yesterday's post showed a sensual Kate Moss on the cover of the June issue of Vogue UK from a photoshoot (allegedly) celebrating sport, style and the Olympic Games.
Yet the more I think about sports, feminity, style and modern women, the more other visions of women come back to my mind such as this portrait of actress Colette Salomon by George Hoyningen-Huene.
The picture was part of a 1927 Vogue editorial entitled "La Femme Moderne". During the '20s there was a lot of interest in the rapid social and cultural changes in the role of women and in female identity.
Clothing, accessories, hair styles, makeup, body language and fashion photography contributed to create a new woman, more independent and enterprising, as embodied by Salomon in Hoyninge-Huene's picture.
Salomon, who starred in three films in the '30s - Y'en a pas deux comme Angélique (1931) by Roger Lion, Les trois mousquetaires (1932) by Henri Diamant-Berger and Club de femmes (1926) by Jacques Deval - raced a Bugatti T35 in 1927, the year this picture was taken.
The determination in her eyes, perfectly captured here by Hoyninge-Huene, is similar to the determination seen on the faces of many Olympic athletes competing in London these days. Wouldn't it be great to see more inspiring features and photo shoots about (real) modern women and about their roles in our society in fashion magazines?
They say religion is the opium of the masses, but, in the last few months, the London Olympics have provided some great opportunities to anaesthetise the global population.
The British media may have used the Games as a way to show us all how great is Great Britain, but, interestingly enough, it is the global fashion media that has put a horrid “style emphasis” on the games.
For months newspapers, magazines and sites published reports about which designer/brand was dressing which team.
First there was Stella McCartney and her deconstructed Union Jack Adidas performance gear for the Olympic and Paralympic Team GB with bits of the flag embarrassingly (or strategically?) appearing in some cases (think about the heptathletics uniform) on erogenous zones (plus, athletes from other countries may have difficulties identifying who they are competing against as the Union Jack is chopped up and its colours have been changed, but the British media put its seal of approval on the uniforms many months ago...).
Retail chain Next focused instead on Team GB's white and gold uniforms for that touch of kitsch and glam space oddity added; Italians opted for a safe choice, Armani, who designed a dark navy and white set (some of the garments also feature inside the lyrics of the Italian hymn - ideal for the forgetful athlete...), though Prada dressed the Italian sailing team, Salvatore Ferragamo went for the Republic of San Marino (comically renamed by British Vogue as the Republic of San Remo - dear oh dear...) and Ermanno Scervino, realising that all the main jobs in Italy had been filled, defected to the the Azerbaijan Republic and created its Olympic kit.
Luxury house Hermès produced instead the kits for the French equestrian team; Ralph Lauren designed the United States team uniforms, but had them made in China, the reason for a major global debate on many fashion magazines in the last few weeks, and the outfits of Jamaica’s track and field team were made by Puma but designed by the daughter of Bob Marley, Cedella.
The list of uniforms/performance kits and fashion designers could go on forever, and while this connection proves there is a strong interest in marketing and commercialising a global sport event (it is obviously now possible to buy some of the uniforms or some garments/accessories connected to them in sport stores all over the world), this is not the only reason why this edition of the Olympic Games will be remembered as the most annoying edition from a fashion and style perspective.
There have been satellite events that linked fashion with the Games; quite a few fashion magazines dedicated shoots to the Olympics, or featured lenghty and useless pieces about which First Lady was wearing which designer at the opening ceremony (some fashion journalists must have mistaken the opening ceremony for a major political event such as Inauguration Day...), or which young East End-based designers created the looks donned by the performers in some parts of the opening night ceremony (Christopher Shannon, Michael Van Der Ham and Nasir Mazhar).
We will have to wait till 12th August to see further connections with fashion as Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and other assorted supermodels will be part of a catwalk show obviously featuring creations by British designers.
So if you ever thought the Olympic Games were about sports, you obviously got it wrong, they are in fact about fashion, style, marketing, selling strategies and politics and, in some ways, they are also about forgetting and denying there is still a major crisis out there.
From a marketing/style point of view it was particularly interesting to note how the opening ceremony marked the final successful remarketing of the Queen as a British style icon, a process that started months ago when Britain got ready to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee.
Reinvented as a cool Bond girl at the Olympic Games opening ceremony, the Queen and her wardobe of pastel dresses and horridly matching hats are now officially supercool and dissenting makes you terribly uncool.
It is also terribly uncool to heavily criticise the collage/West End musical-like opening ceremony directed by Danny Boyle, a celebration of all things British, from the NHS (shame they didn't show us the current state of the NHS...) to, erm, Cruella de Vil and Mary Poppins (I dread thinking about the copyright bill from Disney...), Harry Potter, Chariots of Fire, Hugh Grant (dear oh dear), and Trainspotting (well, obviously Boyle couldn't resist including it, but at least that added a decadent note to the entire ceremony, so I was pretty pleased about it...), but to mention just a few ones. You wonder why there was no reference to art, cultural institutions, corps de ballet (well, actually now that I think about it, we will get the corp de ballet in the closing ceremony...) or events such as the Notting Hill Carnival.
You also naturally wonder why in this tremendous pastiche of Britishness, the music compilation was - allow me the pun - pretty vacant and sanitised with no space for genuine political anthems (even "London Calling" by The Clash, decontextualised and stripped of its apocalyptic visions, is currently a cheerful touristy hymn inviting to visit the British capital...), no reference to the 2 Tone movement or to any anti-Thatcher track featuring the infamous "repetitive beats" condemned by the Criminal Justice Act (rave being reduced in the opening ceremony to a smiley face and to The Prodigy mutating into Underworld – ah, if only the music consultant for the games had been the ghost of the late John Peel or a John Peel fan...).
All this stylish mess for roughly £27 million, a massive amount that could have been saved by broadcasting the 4 minute video for 1990 hit “Good Morning Britain” by Aztec Camera feat. Mick Jones, that, though bleak, would have made a perfect and more genuine compendium of British history.
So, for the next two weeks, the entire point for most fashion sites will not be who wins any medals, who will bring home a world record or which female athletes will be able to inspire young girls to pick a sport discipline, practice it and fight through it for their rights in an equally unequal world, but will the Spice Girls sing at the closing ceremony and which designers will be included in the catwalk show featuring Kate Moss?
Obviously fashion sites and the fashion section of the major British newspapers will also tackle some major key issues such as where do you buy vitally important body compression suits and swimming suits that reshape and sculpt our bodies, and which athletes should we be copying not for their strength, skills and endurance but for their hairstyles, nail varnish and performance kits.
That's not all, we will also have to go through another two weeks of lists of Olympic pop up shops to visit, stores with Olympic windows to photograph and, yes, even more reports about Karl Lagerfeld's Olympic inspired collection at Selfridges (oooohh, T-shirts with prints of gold and silver medals and gold splattered garments, totally desirable and new...).
In a way, it's as if the media and the event organisers were functioning on one and only motto “Let them all eat the Olympics”, almost reminiscent of that “Let them all eat culture” line in Aztec Camera's “Good Morning Britain” (referred at the time to Glasgow being awarded the title of "City of Culture" in 1990).
Time will tell if these games will make or break the UK like they broke Greece, but, for the time being, we will have to survive all these fashion and style reports that do not have anything to do with history and sports, but are just trying to inject some unnecessary fashion superficiality into a sports competition.
Will we be awarded a gold medal for surviving the most insufferably fashionable Olympic Games ever? Probably not, but dissenting a bit more with such reports (or finding slightly more entertaining and intelligent connections between the Olympics, sport and fashion) or cheering up for the true meaning of the Games - think about Italy taking all three medals in the women's individual foil fencing competition on Saturday - wouldn't hurt our intelligence and would maybe finally reshift the attention towards the main meaning and purpose not of the world's largest catwalk show but of the world's largest sport event.
Those readers who saw Mike Leigh's 1999 film Topsy-Turvy may remember not only the plot, revolving around the relationship between W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan trying to work on a new opera, but also its rich and lavish costumes and sets.
After “Princess Ida”, the playwright and composer find themselves in a creative rut that puts their artistic partnership at risk. Mrs. Gilbert indirectly rescues them from the crisis when she convinces her husband to take her to an exhibition about Japanese arts and crafts.
Inspired by the exhibition and by a katana sword he purchases there, Gilbert comes up with a story set in Japan that, accompanied by music by Sullivan, turns into "The Mikado", one of the most successful operas by the duo.
The film features some great scenes based on historical incidents providing some insights into Victorian society and life, but also rich costumes by Lindy Hemming (Topsy-Turvy received the Academy Award for Best Costume Design and the Academy Award for Makeup).
The colours of the kimonos donned in one scene came back to my mind after seeing the colour palette for the “Hagi” 100% silk yarn from Hasegawa's A/W 2013-14 collection (second row, third from the left in the picture in this post).
Hasegawa's "Hagi" is a super thick yarn in tussah silk filament. The final yarn is composed of 240 original filaments and retains all the shiny and bulky consistency typical of tussah (if you're interested the Item Number is HKA1307; Catalogue Number: HC-70).
I found this connection interesting since usually it's easy to spot links between fashion collections and film costumes, but I don't think that a specific yarn/yarn collection ever made me think about a film. Guess that, from now on, I will have to start looking at yarns with a cinematic eye...
I rarely get inspired by just one thing when I sit down to create something.
For a while I've been mesmerised by a René Gruau advert for Dior's lipsticks from the late '40s featuring an elegant woman in a bright red lipstick being gently pecked on her lips by a stylised white dove.
Yet the latter rather than making me think about the current animal trend, brought back memories of Henry James' novel The Wings of the Dove and the eponymous film taken from the book, directed by Iain Softley and featuring Sandy Powell's rich costumes.
How to combine all these inspirations together (stylised minimalism, whiteness and rich costumy inspirations), I thought, without spending a fortune but re-using plenty of leftovers from other personal projects?
Solution came after staring for too long at some white leather and at a small pile of interior design fabrics by Sanderson.
The latter is one of the oldest surviving English brand in the interior design and decorating fields (it's over 150 years old, since it was founded in 1860...) and it's also renowned for supplying fabrics, paint and wallcoverings to the Queen and the British Royal Palaces.
Among the Sanderson fabrics I had left there were some lovely bits and pieces in pastel shades from its "Blossom Tree" series.
I picked a pink one in silk and a pale blue one in cotton coming up with this reversible dove necklace, with one side in white leather and the other decorated with interior design fabrics.
I must admit I'm pretty happy with the final results, especially because the fabric version, once matched with its own Sanderson textiles skirt, looks like a Haute Couture piece (though it costs a tiny fraction compared to a Haute Couture design...).
Looks like this may be the first case of "accidental Haute Couture" I create, but while I enjoy it, why don't you try and experiment a bit with interior design fabrics and other assorted leftovers?
We first met Hungarian-Romanian fashion designer Olah Gyarfas while he was part of Romanian art and fashion collective Rozalb de Mura. With the latter on hold at the moment, Gyarfas moved onto another fashion project, lifestyle menswear label Patzaikin
Based in Romania and inspired by the story of multiple world and Olympic canoeing champion Ivan Patzaichin (who’s also a member of the creative team behind the label), Patzaikin debuted at Berlin Fashion Week and will indirectly make its London debut this week since the label also created the uniforms for the Romanian delegation to the 2012 Olympic Games.
Patzaikin Designer and Creative Director Gyarfas felt immediately drawn to the sport aura of the label and created for its S/S 2013 collection 16 playful looks. Versatility is the key to the designs - trousers, overalls, jackets, coats and waistcoats, shirts and blouses are characterised by austere cuts and a restrained palette including greys, beiges and hand-dyed denim pieces.
Emphasis is on natural fabrics - mainly cotton, linen and hemp - and all the designs are accessorised with hand-made pieces such as bulrush hats, leather sandals and shoes. Though Patzaikin was launched as a menswear label, Gyarfas highlights that most pieces he created are definitely unisex and dedicated to women willing to experiment with different shapes and silhouettes. The label is currently also preparing the large scale project “Danube Connection” in Vienna, Bratislava and Budapest.
What prompted you to join Patzaikin? Olah Gyarfas: Patzaikin is a fresh, Romanian-based lifestyle label. I was immediately drawn to the sport aura the label intends to create with its clothing, accessories and boat lines that will address the eco-aware citizen, more adventurous in taste and willing to discover nature.
What’s the inspiration behind the debut collection? Olah Gyarfas: The untamed beauty of the Danube Delta is a background source of inspiration. It is one of those mysterious, almost magical places that undeniably put people under a spell. The whole Patzaikin team is enchanted. Not coincidentally, it is also Ivan’s birth place. All these notions of pristine beauty, rough nature plus the straightforwardness, endurance and tenacity of a sportsman collide on the inspiration moodboard.
Do you feel that your own background somehow influences this collection? Olah Gyarfas: I live in a small village deep in the cold Carpathian mountains. Nevertheless the unspoiled, rough, yet so exotically tropical waters and smells of the Danube Delta seemed instantly familiar – the same absolute honesty that nature has, the same innocence, the same indifference to us, humans. I hope I can catch this feeling in whatever I’ll embark on.
How was Patzaikin’s presentation at Berlin Fashion Week? Olah Gyarfas: Intense, with all the inherent stress, preparations, exasperation, waiting around and haste in the backstage; all that beauty getting ready, only to have a few incredibly short minutes on the runway. The adrenaline of a fashion show is always exhilarating. We are quite happy with the results, and the feedback was very good.
You also designed the uniforms for the Romanian Olympic committee, did you find it challenging? Olah Gyarfas: It was a privilege and a challenge. The aim was to breathe a contemporary mood into clothes worn by the Romanian athletes at the Olympic games ceremonies in London. It was interesting to closely collaborate with Ivan Patzaichin who, as a multiple gold Olympic medallist and participant into countless official ceremonies brought in precious insights. Another challenging point - from a logistic and stylistic perspective - was the number of the outfits: the delegation counts more than 150 athletes, trainers, officials and medical staff, and a wide range of sport disciplines - swimming, polo, athletics, canoeing, cycling, fencing, gymnastics, judo, table tennis, tennis, etc. - so we needed to create a design that would compliment all types of physical built and produce personalised outfits for all the team members in a relatively short time.
What happened to Rozalb de Mura? Olah Gyarfas: It’s on hold right now. It was a rollercoaster – we had amazing, exciting times working on it, but we all needed a break and the backing of a real investor, in order to continue without harming the integrity of the project. Sometimes it takes a great deal of courage to put an end to something you love so much.
First of all, though, let's look at Zegna Baruffa's Autumn/Winter 2013-14 yarns and at the inspirations behind them. The starting point for the collection was a Walt Whitman quote, “The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity”, combined with Leonardo da Vinci's “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”.
Simplicity is embodied in the main colour palette employed for the new collection: neutrals prevail, even though most of them are sweetened by a hint of red or blurred by a light grey gloss; blue tones are rich and deep and include cold and deep nuances verging towards purple.
Surface elaborations, embroideries, glittery elements and more colourful tones such as cherry, pink and plum, add bright dissonant notes and courageous combinations to the collection.
Together with the classic yarns – “Millennium”, “Today” and “Diamante” – the new collection also features “Antibes”, characterised by a slightly crumpled appearance and dedicated to all those designers who are into elegant and conceptual pieces, and “Babalight” for ultrasoft garments.
The range of sparkling yarns that already included “Sirio” and “Selene” will be completed next year with the introduction of a new one, “Mira” (NM 9000), while new colours have been added for one of the most successful series of yarns (both with Italian and foreign customers) produced by Zegna Baruffa, the “Cashwool” range.
Designers who are looking for the perfect yarns for their outdoor pieces shouldn't look further than “Holiday” (an elastic yarn), “Wellington”, “Journey” and “Sailor”, also available in water-repellent Teflon finishing. A touch of technology is added to the outdoor yarn series with the highly technological “Brandnew Wool” in Super 120s wool, that guarantees extreme comfort and high breathability (and it's also easy to wash/dry).
Wool and cotton blends such as “Ghibli”, “Mistral” and “Silver” have a pleasant handfeel and are therefore ideal to create velvety surfaces, while eco-fur effects can be created using yarns such as “Mousse”, “Alpafur”, “Vello”, “Flair”, “Orsetto” and “Teddy”.
If you're on the lookout for yarns to make sculpted pieces with a reasonable weight-volume ration, go instead for the “air-spun” series, a collection of extralight yarns that for the next season will become larger thanks to the arrival of “Flor” and “Thyme”.
Chiavazza is known for its cashmere yarns for high end pieces and designers who are into luxury should maybe opt for “Cashmere 2/28” (available in 165 colours), “Cashmere Multifilo” and “Muse” (twisted NM 3500 and 1100 threads) or “New Cashmere” in 100% cashmere, ideal for multilayered knits.
The designs showcased in the Zegna Baruffa stand were the result of a joint project between the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design, Zegna Baruffa and Stoll Germany. Four textile students - Velia Dietz, Pina Jax, Sophie Probst and Sarah Wendler - designed pieces inspired by one main theme “Flamboyant”.
Students explored the possibilities offered by a wide range of yarns in their designs executed first on simple hand-flat knitting machines and then using cutting edge technology at Stoll. The main point was trying to understand the limits and advantages offered by both the methods (a very good point to explore, especially if you're a student).
The four designers followed a trial and error approach throughout the project, coming up with knitwear pieces that incorporated three-dimensional voluminous elements (see for example Pina Jax's shoulder warmer - sixth image in this post), architectural skypscraper-like features (Velia Dietz - last image in this post), golden rubbery motifs (Sophie Probst - image 12 in this post) or delicately glittery yarns mainly employed to create sculpted shapes (Sarah Wendler - images 9 and 13 in this post).
Some of the students opted for Zegna Baruffa's glittery "Sirio" and "Millennium", characterised by special finishes that illuminate organic fibres; others went for "Cashwool" and "Flair" to create elaborate 3D motifs, but each of them experimented as much as possible with the materials and the machines they were offered.
After being showcased during Pitti Filati, the pieces will be exhibited at the Stoll showroom in New York, so, if you're around, try not to miss them while they're there.
Each of us needs a sense of direction in their lives and Swedish artist and jewellery designer Sara Engberg seems to have finally found hers.
After running the jewellery and clothes brand mori & mimosa with fashion designer Christina Wemming, Engberg - an MFA graduate in Metalwork Design from Konstfack, the University College for Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm - decided to focus on jewellery and give it an arty twist.
Her new pieces will be part of a solo exhibition opening at Konsthantverkarna, Sweden's oldest crafts association, in August.
The event, entitled “A Sense of Direction”, revolves around the theme of maps and cartography, the main inspirations for Engberg's new designs. Stepping into the gallery will be a bit like being transported into a museum or an old classroom as the visitors will be surrounded by maps and old-fashioned school wall charts.
Yet all the maps and coastlines are fictitious and will contribute to create a dream landscape and the background for Engberg's designs - jewellery pieces in pastel colours or in dark red and gold with plexiglass pendants shaped like imaginary islands, golden compass roses or streamers, hanging from hand-stitched silk and cotton ribbons with map prints.
The designs integrate materials Engberg picked all over the globe, often from rather unexpected or remote places, that will contribute to give a further “sense of direction” to the wearer.
Where does the title of the exhibition come from? Sara Engberg: Having a sense of direction means finding your way around, so there is a connection to geography there, but to me the title also has a wider meaning. I think everyone needs to have a sense of direction in life – a feeling of continuity and progress that things are moving forward.
When you were a child you had a dream about maps: can you tell us more about it? Sara Engberg: I used to have really strong and colourful dreams as a child. One night, I dreamt that I opened the window and the sky was covered with maps – as if we were inside a terrestrial globe, lit up from the outside. I had this overwhelming sensation of beauty, which has followed me ever since. Maybe that's where my fascination with maps started!
What fascinates you about maps and cartography? Sara Engberg: Looking at maps is exciting, it makes you wonder what it’s like in all those faraway places – what does it look like, what does it smell like, what’s it like to live there. It’s a bit like being in an airport: you get this feeling of adventure and possibilities. I also like how maps can change your perspective: I have a Laotian world map on the wall at home, and it looks completely different from the Eurocentric world map I grew up with – the centre of the world is located in Southeast Asia, and Europe looks really peripheral somewhere up there in a corner.
Can you tell us more about the materials employed/incorporated in these pieces? From which countries do they come from? Sara Engberg: I have picked up the materials I used all over the globe, sometimes in completely unexpected places, like a gas station in the North of Sweden or a stationery shop in Saigon. The plexiglass comes mainly from an old sign manufacturer outside Stockholm who had this amazing stock of acrylic sheets from the '50s, but I also found some nice plexiglass on Canal Street in New York and at Tokyu Hands in Tokyo. I always search for new materials when I travel, and over the years I’ve discovered that I instinctively choose materials in a specific set of colours – map colours! It's as if everything I like boils down to a map.
How would you define the new pieces - art or jewellery? Sara Engberg: I prefer not to draw a line between art and jewellery, because to me, everything creative is part of the same field. As soon as one starts trying to define something that has to do with art, it gets complicated. But if I had to choose I would say that these pieces are jewellery: they are clearly wearable, and they are made to look beautiful. A lot of what's going on on the jewellery art scene today is highly conceptual and some jewellery artists are challenging the notion that jewellery should be beautiful. But I have always been into this field for the beauty of it, so I keep trying to make pretty things. They may sometimes be conceptual in other ways, but you can always enjoy them and wear them just because you think they look nice. I guess it also depends on the expectations of the viewer – to me these pieces are jewellery, but someone who has a more strictly conventional idea of what jewellery should be - like a pearl necklace or a diamond ring - might perceive my works as art.
Will the exhibition feature also videos or visual installations? Sara Engberg: There will be a set of custom printed wallpaper lengths with inspiration from maps hanging from the ceiling, reminiscent of old-fashioned school wall charts. There will also be a photographic piece with ten framed pictures from a field of grass, where the grass has been shaped to form different letters. When you view them in order, you can read the sentence ”you are here” in the grass.
Do you feel that this new career – artist and jewellery designer – fits you better at the moment? Sara Engberg: Yes, I think so. I love it that the creative process gets to take a lot more time than it did when I was in fashion. Fashion is fun too, but I guess I’m really more of a bohemian artist type than a businesswoman, and I felt that the business part was taking over too much. Also, the fashion world was a bit too fast-paced for me. I like to work with the same theme for extended periods of time, and it feels completely absurd to discard what I did six months ago just because it’s “last season”.
Will we be able to buy any of the pieces included in your exhibition? Sara Engberg: Yes, they will be for sale through the gallery, Konsthantverkarna, here in Stockholm.
“A Sense of Direction: Sara Engberg” opens at arts and crafts gallery Konsthantverkarna in Stockholm on 25th August.
Quite a few shoes addicts recently expressed their unconditional love for the Charlotte Olympia Reseort 2013 sandals with a colourful pompom and a caged heel containing a little bird. Footwear experts and historians may actually remember how this was a model that originally came out in the mid-to-late '50s.
There is actually a brief film in the British Pathé archives entitled Shoes of Tomorrow that features a pair of mules with the caged heel and a plastic animal inside it (a monkey in this case); the film is dated 1957. The shoes in the film are actually stored at the Bata Museum, in Toronto, and they are by fancy and short-lived label Creazioni Mariorty.
Looks like this is another I.P.F.O. case successfully uncovered. But, now that I think about it, the video also features another fancy pair of mules with a little lake complete with lovely swans incorporated in its heel. Shall we see it appearing soon in any shoe collection by any famous designer? Time will tell, but, in the meantime, if you're a fashion design student, remember that whatever is on the Internet is bound to be seen by millions of people, even historical videos, so do not assume you're the only ones copying/pilfering/taking inspiration from such materials.
One of the most incredible things about the fashion industry is its “brass neck”: people working in this industry often do not have any sense of shame about what they do and, bizarrelly enough, almost feel proud when they pilfer a design, reuse an old idea making it pass for a tribute to the person who originally created it (or as an alternative never acknowledge where they actually took it from...) or commit other assorted “fashion crimes”.
Take the recently unveiled images from the photo shoots that will be featured in the first issue of the hotly anticipated C(arine) R(oitfeld) Fashion Book (hitting the newsstands on September 13). There are quite a few ones that seem to be reminiscent of William Klein's film Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo?(1966).
Some of the images featuring a series of models in similar hairstyles that you can preview in the video currently uploaded on CRfashionbook.com evoke some bits and pieces of the film, but there is also a particular spread by Sebastian Faena that is undoubtedly taken from it.
The image is featured on today's WWD and shows model Juliet Ingleby covered only by a lavender veil walking through a cemetery followed by three women dressed in black attire from head to toe. The spread echoes the fashion photo shoot in a graveyard in Klein's film.
What's interesting though is that, in the movie, the rather annoying magazine editor used it to wonder if Paris was dead fashion-wise, while Klein used the shoot and the entire film as a parody of the fashion industry and the modelling business.
It's somehow interesting that rather than being offended by what the film says about fashion (albeit in a funny and ironic way...), fashion is revomiting 46 years after that film was first released a specific scene, attaching to it no specific meaning.
You wonder if Roitfeld is quoting Klein's movie through Faena's lenses to build hype around the magazine or if she thinks that the graveyard shot is particularly edgy or controversial.
I personally find it rather sad and proving that fashion probably doesn't have a lot to say at the moment. After all, as Grégoire says in Klein's film, “Fashion is about money and deception”. Guess nobody ever managed to describe the fashion industry better than this.
Yesterday's post looked at the work of two Scottish artists, so let's remain in Scotland for another day and another comparison. Though visiting a loch on a rare sunny day can be a charming experience, weather can be pretty inclement even on a summer day, with a hazy mist wrapping up the woods, tingeing in neutral tones the intense green of the forests and the muddy green of the water.
This view of Loch Lomond, the largest lake in Great Britain by surface area, containing also around thirty islands, is a perfect example. In this view white/grey tones alternate to the green shades of the loch's “bonnie, bonnie banks”.
Millefili moved from a "Scottish inspiration" for some of its A/W 2013-14 yarns. The colour combination of this sample (see front and back in the picture) featuring three different yarns - "Loch Ness" (the white polyamide, wool, cotton, viscose and cashmere yarn - extremely soft), "Splash" (the blueish/grey wool, alpaca and acrylic yarn) and "Miao" (the angora and polyamide yarn integrating tiny dots of colour) - makes me think about the "Loch Lomond palette", while the stitches somehow seem to evoke the islands scattered around the lake. Anybody up for geography-inspired yarns/collections?