Saturday, March 17, 2012
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Alexander McQueen’s Silver Visors
Clockwise from top right: Guido Palau with a model backstage; Looks from Alexander McQueen Fall 2012 (2)Photo: (clockwise from top right) Kevin Tachman; Gianni Pucci/GoRunway.com (2)
In the weeks before today’s Alexander McQueen show, hairstylist Guido Palau found himself faced with a curious question: “The clothes were so dynamic; the shoes were so dynamic,” he says, reflecting on designer Sarah Burton’s lushly ornate pieces for fall. “How do you make the hair equally dynamic without falling into couture?” He’d been looking at the collection with Burton and playing around with various stylized looks, “but it was all too elegant,” he says simply. In search of a more modern McQueen woman, he returned to the hallmarks of her identity—namely, strength. “Sarah likes me to toughen the girls up a bit,” says Palau, who ultimately found his answer in the sculptural platinum-colored wigs that his team could be seen rounding into a kind of smooth, futuristic “helmet” backstage, thanks to clouds of Redken Forceful 23 hairspray. To heighten the undercurrent of “iciness,” he affixed a high-shine reflective silver visor—produced to his specs by Burton’s in-house team—on each model’s head just before she stepped onto the runway. Eclipsing her face all the way to the nose, it kept the focus where it should be— on “those visors and those clothes.”
Alexander McQueen Fall 2012
Photographed by Kevin Tachman
Preview: The “Louis Vuitton–Marc Jacobs” Exhibit in Paris
It has been fifteen years since Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs first teamed up, and though naysayers said it wouldn’t last—the house is too stuffy! Jacobs is too young, too twisted!—like the best marriages, the partnership has only made both members cooler and stronger. Now this pair—one venerable and Gallic; the other frisky and New York City–born—are being feted with the exhibit “Louis Vuitton–Marc Jacobs,” opening March 9 at Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
It’s true that at first blush the two—the austere Monsieur Vuitton (at least by the looks of the portrait that greets you at the show’s entrance) and the kilt-clad rebel—appear to have little in common. But in fact the company’s founder was a genius in tackling the nineteenth century’s obsession with movement and innovation—trunks made to fit in the back of the first automobiles; trunks that transform into camp cots—and Jacobs, too, personifies a dramatic restlessness, a desire to burst boundaries, to create accessories and fashions—as the company’s first and only ready-to-wear designer—that astonishes with its exuberance. Just as nobody could have predicted the impact it would have when Louis Vuitton’s son Georges slapped his monogram on the outside of a case in 1896, who could have imagined that Jacobs would take the classic Speedy and allow Takashi Murakami to paint it with googly eyes, or have Stephen Sprouse splatter it with streaks of graffiti?
Louis Vuitton and his world are examined to great effect on the first floor of the exhibit, where the vast array of valises required for a simple trip crowd one vitrine, and another showcase displays the almost insanely elaborate outfits these trunks were destined to hold—tea gowns and morning dresses; dinner dresses and ball frocks; endless layers of undergarments and enormous crinolines, relics of an era when a woman changed seven times a day.
But the strains of Debbie Harry wafting down from upstairs quickly pull you to the second floor, where you are confronted by a wall of screens (rendered, according to curator Pamela Golbin, to resemble a Tumblr page) that highlight Jacobs’s free-spirited influences—Bertolucci mixed with South Park; Liz in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof next to SpongeBob next to Rainer Fassbinder’s Querelle.
The exhibit is more a celebration than a retrospective, and is organized by enticing subject rather than chronology. Jacobs has given names to each tableau (Blue-y Vuitton, an azure-themed one; Kage Moss with a beast-model behind bars) and each holds a selection of the fashions he has created over the past decade and a half, grouped thematically. Shoes are shown off by mechanical legs that move with Busby Berkeley precision; five Richard Prince mannequin-nurses sport caps that spell out L-O-U-I-S V-U-I-T-T-O-N while the insistent chorus of the Kingsmen’s 1963 “Louie, Louie” blares from hidden speakers.
But it is perhaps the case the museum calls the “chocolate box” that will engage visitors most intensely. Here are carryalls displayed as giant bonbons, from white mink pouches splashed with LVs to huge train cases in purple patent vernis, all manner of reworking and exploding the famous LV, in denim and metallics and even woven plastic, a world of seduction in a satchel that Louis Vuitton, even with all his prescience, could never have dreamed of.
“Louis Vuitton–Marc Jacobs” opens March 9 and is on view through September 16 at Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris; lesartsdecoratifs.fr/
It’s Elemental: Chanel’s Rock-Embroidered Statement Brow
Photo: Luca Cannonieri/GoRunway.com“Three weeks ago, [Lagerfeld] sent a quick sketch,” Peter Philips, Chanel’s creative director of makeup, said backstage. “It was a sort of impression, with lots of blush and stones floating on the face. I wanted to translate it into something that would look great on the girls. Contemporary and a little bit military—a kind of strong textural element.” He began dreaming of graphic arches made entirely of real, twinkling stones—but with 67 girls walking in the show, “I knew I didn’t have time to sit and [glue them on] one by one,” he said. Searching for a solution, he called his friends at Lesage—the storied French atelier now owned by Chanel and responsible for its legendary embroidery work. Together, they fashioned a pair of slim, rectangular fabric strips that could be pressed on with one simple gesture. “Each one has a base of organza that’s covered in hand-embroidered sequins,” he said. On top of that incandescent backdrop, the house’s artisans sewed dozens of miniature rock fragments into the fabric to create a dense, shimmering mineral effect on the runway. “There are 75 pairs in purples, greens, blues, grays,” said Philips, gesturing to a table of carefully marked fabric arches attached to a white heavy card bearing each girl’s name. “Saskia, Anja, Josephine. They’ve each been color-coordinated to what each girl is wearing.”
Naturally, such statement pieces called for a well-prepped canvas. Before gluing them onto the skin with theatrical adhesive at a sharp, horizontal angle, Philips blended Chanel Mat Lumière foundation onto the skin for a soft, natural finish. “It’s very cold today so a lot of the girls are coming in with red noses and cheeks. We need to even them out,” he said. In the spirit of Lagerfeld’s original sketch, he used a generous swirl of a cool, unexpected mauve-ish taupe powder, (the shade: Notorious), due out next fall. “I’m using it to sculpt the cheekbones and also as a veil on the eyelids that disappears all the way into the hairline.”
That pale, slightly punkish color also turned up on the nails in the form of Frenzy—a lavender-taupe polish plucked from the fall collection, as well. “With the Chanel girl, said Philips with a smile, “there’s always a bit of a twist.”
IM BAAAACCCKKKKKKK!!!!
i know school is nuts.. and im a bit overwhelmed with it but im gonna try my best here but again im so sorry if i cant give you as much as before ohgod please dont leave me and this site :p.
btw lets cheers for this season fashion week, gorgeous huh?
love you <3