Posted by Bethan Holt, Fashion Junior at Large, with assistance from Joshua Drew
New York Fashion Week is well and truly under way, but there's plenty of news from all corners of the fashion world keeping us entertained this week....
The Queen by Karl (image www.metro.us)
Editor-in-chief was the new title given to Karl Largerfeld last week. The creative director of luxury French house Chanel turned his cutoff leather gloves to editing one of France’s biggest national newspapers, Metro, demonstrating once again his infamous superhuman abilities.
Karl's sketch commenting on the troubles in Syria (image www.metro.us)
After recently promoting his KARL by Karl Lagerfeld collection for Net-A-Porter (in a unique interview in which Karl interviews himself) we were glad to see the German designer being interviewed by a third party once more. Among Karl's list of favourite places to shop and eat were controversial comments about Adele, which proved a hot water topic amongst tweeters worldwide as Lagerfeld described the singer as "too fat." Another controversial Karl comment (JD) We hasten to add that Mr Lagerfeld has since apologised!
Miu Miu's London bags (image from graziadaily.co.uk)
All the major fashion cities- New York, London, Milan and Paris- went head to head this week as Miu Miu spoiled us with more of their fab accessories, just in time for fashion weeks. The collection comprises 46 styles in everything from ostrich and python skin to brocade and glitter. Very nice, but naughty with pieces starting £1,295 (JD)
New York bags from Miu Miu (image from graziadaily.co.uk)
Talking of amazing accessories, YSL's Cruise video is a delectable three minutes of fashion and accessory p*rn...
You're safe with LV (image from telegraph.co.uk)
Louis Vuitton is getting sexy. With the release of the most exclusive contraceptive to date, the LV condom is taking the brand's sexy kudos even higher heights than THAT AW11 fetish show. Would you take Vuitton to bed?
Another batch of magazine covers for us to mull over. We're mostly loving Victoria Beckham on iD, a completely unexpected match made in editorial heaven....
image from telegraph.co.uk
Fabulous Kate Moss in Erdem on W
image from telegraph.co.uk
Despite the dodgy reviews of his debut SS12 show, Kanye West confirmed that he'll be back at Paris in a few weeks to show his second collection. On top of that, it looks like the rapper turned designer might be ready for a diffusion range. he was apparently spotted having lunch with Phillip Green this week. Naturally, this has fuelled rumours of a Topshop collaboration.
Kanye West SS12 (image from catwalking.com)
While everyone on Twitter was complaining about the number of English people who are now willing to stay up for Super Bowl, my theory (from the evidence of my twitter feed, so biased perhaps) is that everyone was staying up for Madonna's half time show. She didn't disappoint with her Givenchy costume. The performance was pretty awesome too.
Riccardo Tisci's sketches for Madonna's costume (www.vogue.co.uk)
All Madonna images from dailymail.co.uk
And one of our favourite looks for NYFW yesterday comes from label to watch, Creatures of the Wind. Happy Weekend!
Yayoi Kusama has taken over Tate Modern. Even before you enter her brilliant exhibition (which opens today!) proper you will walk across the fourth floor landing, usually a stark, minimal area. During Kusama's exhibit however, there are huge red and white spotty balls which take the space into acid trip territory. It's an ideal amuse-bouche for the exhibition itself, which I saw at Tuesday's press view. The museum has done a brilliant job of translating Kusama's key themes of proliferation, obsession and maximalism into an immersive experience for visitors. The exhibition's curator, Frances Morris, describes Kusama as 'ceaselessly productive'. It was apt then, that just as the press tour was about to begin, Kusama arrived in her polka dot wheelchair, resplendent in a red and white spotted dress, the brightest red jacket, orange Louis Vuitton bag (they're sponsoring the show) and the most scarlett hair I've ever seen. Although she's a tiny figure with a faint voice, her arrival heralded chaos, the tour was postponed while Morris walked through the show with the artist. And so everyone in attendance bustled around, resembling the kind of clustered formation which Kusama is famed for creating in her work.
Yayoi Kusama arrives at the Tate Modern
Kusama is described by Tate Modern's director Chris Dercon as 'Japan's greatest living artist'. Her career spans six decades and her influences come from East and West. She was born in rural Japan to a well-to-do family whose trade was in seeds. It was expected that a girl like her would make a good marriage and become a dutiful wife and mother. However, Kusama was an unfailingly enthusiastic and talented creative from a young age; Morris speaks of the beauty of drawings Kusama did as young as ten years old. Her very early art references the traditional Japanese Nihonga painting, which is where the Tate exhibition begins. However, when she moved to the US at the end of the 1950s, there is a huge leap in Kusama's aesthetic. The room of white 'Infinity Net' paintings demonstrates how she immediately immersed herself in the techniques being employed by the people she connected with in Seattle and, later, in New York. Morris comments that, for many artists, that jump have been done over an entire career, but for Kusama it was 'almost overnight'.
The Infinity Net room- the most minimal of
the show but beautiful studied up close.
As Kusama settled in the US, she was both an 'insider' and an 'outsider'. She was at the heart of the art world, with Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg among her contemporaries. But she also used her status as a woman from the East in her art; the slide show Walking Piece shows her looking distinctly Japanese in bright pink kimono and parasol, walking through the streets of New York.
Walking Piece, 1966
She continued living in New York and constantly evolving her work, experimenting with techniques including painting, sculpture and performance. In 1973, Kusama returned to Tokyo where she later admitted herself to a psychiatric facility. The hallucinations and obsessions which engulf her come out in her work to haunting and moving effect, especially in her sculptures where the scale and sense of uncontrollable multiplication are quite amazing. Yayoi Kusama still works from a studio across from the hospital.
Heaven and Earth, 1991
This exhibition is a must-see, no question. But there's a whole other aspect of Yayoi Kusama which makes it doubly worth a visit and that is, of course, fashion! As I mentioned, the exhibition is being sponsored by Louis Vuitton, ostensibly as part of their Young Arts Programme. But one of Kusama's other big projects this year just happens to be her collaboration with Louis Vuitton which the FashEd reported on back in January. My visit to the exhibition yesterday put Kusama's relationship with Vuitton into context though; fashion has punctuated her life. When she arrived in the US, Kusama sold kimonos which she'd brought with her from Japan to make money. Her art features shoes, bags and dresses, particularly in sculpture and collage form. She also had a fashion concession in a corner of Bloomingdales in the New York days.
One of Kusama's Accumulation collages
The Fash Ed and I have been trying to guess if there any clues about the collaboration which the exhibit might lend us...
The boxy shape of the pink and grey phallic dress is not so different to the silhouette we often see from Marc Jacobs. The phallic theme is possibly not super commercial, however we're sensing that Yayoi likes her metallics (see silver dress and bronze shoes below) and the big flowers on the silver dress are completely fabulous.
Silver Dress, from 1966
A Phallic shoe, from 1965
In her more recent work, Kusama has produced huge experiments in colour and pattern. Room 12 of the show is full of canvases which all show evidence of Kusama's 'codes', which Morris told us are evident from the very beginning of her career; eyes, ears, seeds, worms... So we reckon it's highly likely that we might see some bright and beautiful colour combos and all these little symbols on scarves. But then again, maybe not, because Kusama has teamed up with the Tate to do cards, hankies and tea towels in this style for their own shop.
Recent paintings by Yayoi Kusama
Of course, pumpkins and dots are Kusama's other main signatures. Given the outfit she chose for her London appearance, dots are still high on her love list. Or she might surprise us all with something completely different, which would hardly be surprising given the massive variation in all her work. We can't wait to see!
P.S This is a fab little film about Kusama's life as an artist...
Yayoi Kusama is on at Tate Modern from today until 5th June. Book here to avoid disappointment
When I first started out in this career in 1996 Topshop wasn't the fashion hero it is today. Designers moaned about how high street stores like Topshop copied their ideas without paying for them. And they were right to moan. High street stores did copy, often brazenly. For designers, the high street was the Big Bad Wolf come to gobble them up.
Back in 1998 two visionary women working at Topshop decided to see if they could reverse the dynamic. Jane Shepherdson, then Brand Director of the store (now CEO of Whistles) and Sarah Mower MBE, esteemed American Vogue fashion critic and nowAmbassador for Emerging Talent for the BFC was then Fashion Director of Arcadia Group. They had the bright idea to invite designers to collaborate with the store, giving them the opportunity to reach new consumers and make money to help grow their businesses. Topshop also part sponsored their catwalk shows.
"Young designers had zero tolerance of the high street and it was my mission to make sure that [if they collaborated with Topshop] they wouldn't be raped [by the experience]. Over my dead body," Sarah Mower, told me this morning. "Among the first designers we worked with were Hussein Chalayan and Clements Ribeiro. We had a dream that London would become the world number one centre for emerging talent. Today when I look at the number of people that have come though NewGen, like Christopher Kane, Erdem and Jonathan Saunders, I feel we have achieved that."
In 2002, seeing further mileage (and now doubt enjoying its rehabilitated image as the saviour of young designers, rather than the usurper) Topshop began its headline sponsorship of the NEWGEN program. Today it not only sponsors NewGen, but also Fashion East and it has created the Topshop Show Space at London Fashion Week, which offers a free venue and production for the hottest young British designers. This brings us neatly to the photos you see here, the store's way of celebrating their 10 years of supporting NewGen.
On February 17th on the first day of London Fashion Week, Topshop owner Philip Green is scheduled to do a presentation that will outline his plans for his next ten years of fashion industry support. Also on the 17th these T-shirts launch in-store and online at topshop.com. In the meantime enjoy 10 of the 20 £30 T-shirts shot by Scott Trindle on a selection of new models (all profits go to homeless charity Centrepoint) and decide which one/s you want to get your hands on. I love the Erdem, Chris Kane and Mary Katrantzou tees... What about you? You can catch the other 10 T's in this weekend's edition of The Times.
Yesterday marked the 60th anniversary of the Queen's accession to the throne. For me, and for most of you reading, we've always known her as the head of the Royal Family and a stalwart of British life. I can't quite imagine life without her. But as a 24 year-old, I only know a few 'versions' of Her Majesty. Growing up in the 90s, she was just 'The Queen'- a distant, almost unreal figure. Later, I started reading my Mum's Hello! magazines and she became a matriarch, quietly looking over the dramas which were playing out in the lives of her children and grandchildren. Of course, the Queen is a real person with a real family, but hers is a unique situation because millions of people feel a kind of claim over her. This means that the Royals have to develop a way of communicating who they are, or who they should be, to the nation. Official photographs are a pretty key way of doing that, and tomorrow the Victoria and Albert Museum in London celebrates the Jubilee by opening the doors on Queen Elizabeth II by Cecil Beaton.
The Official Photo released yesterday to mark the Diamond
jubilee, by John Swanell (image from thediamondjubilee.org)
The image above is the 2012 way of doing an official portrait, but in the early years, Cecil Beaton was one of the family's favourites for that job.
Cecil Beaton by Curtis Moffat, 1930
The shows curator Susanna Brown splits the 100-image exhibit into several sections, and in so doing demonstrates how Beaton adapted his imagery from fantastical, fairytale portrayals of the young Princess to relatable, intimate images of the Queen as a Mother. These are yet more 'versions' of the Queen for us to compute.
Brown pointed out that Beaton's images served a very particular purpose as 'great PR images' for the Royals. These are not simple photos like those that you and I might take to record the birth of a child or a special family occasion. No, these were published in papers to be be lapped up by a public who, in a pre-internet age, were made to get their fix from a few carefully selected portraits. There were no pap shots as there are now of Duchess Kate shopping on the King's Road or Harry on the lash. The Royal family had a great deal more control over how they came across. Although, the exhibition notes do mention that the press would often break the embargoes which they were given, such was the demand for a new picture of the Queen and her family.
A proper Princess- The Queen at Buckingham
Palace, 1945, by Cecil Beaton (image courtesy of the V&A)
Beaton's talent as a photographer was to 'rise to the occasion', as Brown puts it, knowing the appropriate mood for the sitting. Indeed, perhaps he knew what the public wanted from their royal family a little better than the family themselves. A letter from Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother suggests that they were quite aware of that fact, 'as a family we must be deeply grateful to you for producing us, as really quite nice and real people'. I got the impression that the Queen Mother might have been the real driving force behind the Royal Family's relationship with Cecil Beaton. On the day of the coronation, Beaton wrote in his diary 'All at once and because of her, I was enjoying my work’. She was also the one who initially recruited him.
Beaton's cuttings book
In fashion, things move fast. Working with Vogue and Vanity Fair meant that Beaton was acutely aware of that. The exhibit describes how Beaton befriended David Bailey in the early 60s. That could be quite surprising given that by then, Beaton had a well-established style which now so beautifully recalls the fantasia and escapism of the post war period. The decadence and sweetness of his floral backdrops (put together with cuttings from his own garden) and demurely posed women in the most ostentatious of ball gowns became the antidote to real-life rationing and austerity. But Bailey called Beaton 'Rip Van With-it' because of his willingness to try a new way of doing things once the 60s ushered in a less stylised approach.
The Queen's coronation, June 1953, buy Cecil Beaton (image courtesy of the V&A)
Vogue's coronation special is on display at the exhibition
After the grandeur and obvious royal-ness of Beaton's portraits up to the coronation, the images of Her Majesty with her two younger children, Edward and Andrew, highlight how Beaton responded to a new hunger for seeing the royals as real. They are more simple, allowing the emotion of the subjects to take centre stage rather than the paraphernalia of props and costumes.
The Queen with Prince Andrew in 1960 by Cecil Beaton (image courtesy of V&A)
Despite Beaton's apparent ability to move with the times, his relationship with the Queen seems to have come to an abrupt end. Before he took the iconic portrait of the Queen in the admiral's boat cloak in 1968, he wrote in his diary, ‘the difficulties are great. Our points of view, our tastes are so different. The result is a compromise between two people and the fates play a large part’. It seems like a sad end to a partnership which produced so many images which will become some of the most enduring of the 20th century.
Cecil Beaton's last portrait of the Queen, in 1968 (image courtesy of the V&A)
For those of you too young to remember when shoes were not gimmicky, odd-looking, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink affairs with platforms, wedges, frills, multi-colours and ugly heels, here's a surprise. Once upon a time not very long ago, high-heeled fashion shoes were simply beautiful. They had sleek lines, no gimmicks and were generally a joy to behold. You slipped then on, they elevated the body by a few inches, lengthened the legs pushed out the hips at a certain sexy angle and that was it - good for a sexy sashay, and if needs be, to sprint a bit too.
The go-to man for beautiful shoes was Manolo Blahnik. Then along came the very lovely Mr. Louboutin, Mr. Kirkwood, Prada, Miu Miu, YSL and co adding more and more inches to their platforms until the day someone, somewhere said ENOUGH! Marc Jacobs was one of them. For both his Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs shows, his shoe designs directly referenced Manolo Blahnik signature mules and stilettos, and they were gorgeous, and now much copied on the high street.
Another was American Vogue editor-at-large Andre Leon Talley, who told the New York Times in a very prescient feature last October, "Fashion had to turn on its heel and return to beautiful shoes. They're a staple, something you have to have in your refrigerator like butter, or milk." My favourite line in the story was what the writer, Guy Trebay, saved until last. It was a quote from Sarah Jessica Parker, who should have shares in Manolo Blahnik, or at least a lifetimes supply, after she popularised Blahnik through her character Carrie's obsession with the shoes. "I walked in and looked around and saw all these shoes, and then I spotted the Manolos and it was like water in the desert," she said. "I was just so excited to see a simple black pump."
I'm with them. My latest shoe purchase is the "Opyum" by YSL. A beautiful shoe. Or as the Americans say a beautiful "pump".
The other day I was re-arranging my shoe cupboard so I could lend my little sister a pair for a wedding, and I came across an old pair of YSL platform ankle boots. You know the ones with a gold line around the platform? At one point in about 2006 or 7 every fashion editor I knew had a pair. At the time, they felt like serious platforms. I wiped the dust off them and slipped one on for old times sake. They felt like wearing nothing. To think they once they seemed so high.
For sure, there is now a backlash in place against gimmicky shoes. Perhaps for now they have scaled their highest heights and reached the weight limit for studs and other hardware. That isn't to say I don't love Nicholas Kirkwood's shoes for Meadham Kirchhoff. I LOVE, but I would look like a clown in them.
The Fashion Editor at Large blog is the independent work of Melanie Rickey, the views are my own. The Fashion Junior at Large is Bethan Holt. PORTRAIT: Neil Haynes
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