A new approach

A very good friend of mine has a list of books she wants to buy. It’s very long and she’s extremely disciplined about it. She constantly goes to bookshops with her list that always seems to get longer and searches for hours, the endless mystic quest for the long out of print or recently released book. It makes her heart race and the tears well up. She loves the quiver of anticipation and the feeling that she might find something very special. I, on the other hand, positively connect with the Internet on a daily basis and miraculously almost always find what I’m looking for on the web. So obviously I mock her relentlessly, as is only appropriate with one of your oldest friends. While I agree that exploring old and new bookshops for hours can be extremely enjoyable I find that buying online can be equally satisfying (although I do miss the intoxicating smell of dusty old books). In fact, I am always astonished that I get the same amount of pleasure buying online as I do in “real” life. Last week, I cheerfully bought several 80s issues of Zoom on ebay, a copy of the recently launched Twin magazine, More is More: Tony Duquette, Olivier Zahm’s Purple Anthology and The Marchesa Casati: Portraits of a muse. My taste for extravagant online book and magazine purchases probably comes from the fact that I’m deskbound during the week and it’s easy to practice Internet shopping during my lunch breaks! And I’m going to be completely honest: I may also be a little in love with buying clothes, shoes and accessories on the web too. Let me explore La Garçonne, Net-A-Porter, Browns and Colette for long enough and I can guarantee that I’ll feel the first stirrings of desire. I lost my Internet shopping virginity a very long time ago!
Books and magazines hold an irreplaceable romantic appeal, a simple way of life and there’s nothing better than a good fashion or art publishing hit offering escapism. But over the last few years traditional print media has had to compete with the sudden popularity of web magazines and high quality new media platforms embracing the world of fashion. This phenomenon has probably startled the publishing industry and the trend shows no signs of slowing down. I’ve been flirting with fashion related Internet tools for almost two years and it has blossomed into a true romance. When it comes to magazines, print continues to prevail in my heart. Fashion photography always seems a little too diluted online and certainly doesn’t have the same effect. But I’ve been conducting a very public affair with various fashion web platforms and I simply can’t imagine a better example than fly16x9. It is completely absorbing. The web channel was launched in October 2008 by Stephen Blaise and Catherine Camille Cushman and provides an engaging and outstanding video portal where fashion, art, photography and music collide to create and authentic and innovative voice. A genuine creative achievement that is defined by the influential personalities who collaborate on each film, bringing technology into sharp focus and complementing the world of fashion magazines. It’s a defiant riposte to the fashion greats who haven’t yet had the confidence and audacity to embrace moving images. It’s an impressive collection of experimental, sometimes provocative, exciting, vibrant and beautiful videos. Small ground-breaking fashion masterpieces!
Thank you Bon for the email and info.

Video courtesy of Fly16x9

Sportmax Code

My story begins with a blog focusing on fashion.
It started as a raw and unplanned example of blogging, a place to share haphazard thoughts and expand my horizons.
The fundamental point remains: it's all about the unholy alliance of words and fashion while improvising and remaining spontaneous!
Thank you so much Sportmax Code for the positive response and interview.
Read it here

Tina Kalivas

This week I was asked by a friend why I am so interested in exploring fashion. I think it’s to do with an insatiable desire for beauty. Only by hunting can you find the new and the beautiful. It’s a compulsive curiosity and a constant aesthetic investigation. It can sometimes become tiresome and limiting until unexpectedly you discover a designer who captures your imagination. Tina Kalivas is one of these designers who has acquired a spot at the top of my list. I’ve always been impressed by her work (I’ve talked about her before on the blog). Her strengths reside in the uniqueness, sheer quality and modern elegance of her pieces. In this collection, the shapes and details are created meticulously but there is something more about these looks – a hardly perceptible extra – that makes the clothes so much more than just beautiful pieces. Like a slight shiver across the surface of a lake, they also perfectly reflect the essence of African culture. They vary in terms of textures and silhouettes but they are all clearly of the same family, contained and controlled by a manifesto focusing on elemental indigenous colours and geometry. Tina Kalivas has her own distinctive and unmistakable dye, she’s a sort of fashion purist who does not deal so much in trends and finds it more satisfactory to treat each piece as a work of art or an experiment. With her entirely fresh and passionate approach to fashion she has lovingly designed an unforgettable and captivating colourful adventure. She’s authentic and it just seems somehow right to me that a designer should be exploring and not just imitating (like so many others do). I always hear stories from my friends who work in the fashion industry of how impossible it is at times to establish a genuinely creative space, it’s a continuing debate, but one which does not seem to apply to her. She learns from other cultures, adds a touch of her own stylistic insights, a spirit of spontaneity combined with carefully observed elements and a magic ingredient: the result is guaranteed.

All pictures courtesy of Tina Kalivas

Vivi Ponti

I was turned on to the work of Vivi Ponti by my lovely, quick-witted and soft-spoken friend Mademoiselle Robot (every time I see her I’m always surprised by how wonderfully soothing and sexy her voice is, listening to her speak is almost indecent). She interviewed the designer behind Vivetta back in August and served up a fun detailed Q&A. In fact, it was almost like a divine intervention: an avalanche of inspiring clothes just when I had reached a fashion lull. Mademoiselle Robot can be persuasive but in this case the love was immediately reciprocated. Vivi Ponti is a designer of undoubted talent to watch. She has elaborated a world for pretty, quirky preppy girls and she’s doing it with style, youthful enthusiasm and precision. I found myself investing a lot of time looking at her past collections and developing dependency issues! I confess that I even went as far as contacting her to ask if any of the pieces in her “tailored masterpieces” collection were still available. They’re not and this is an achievement of sorts: I’ve saved some money which is surely a good thing for my bank account. I wonder if Mademoiselle Robot could also see trouble coming when she first set eyes on Vivi’s clothes. The emphasis is on simple garments embellished with small details that are like the designer’s very own love tokens or personal mementoes. They serve to exquisitely sweeten the sometimes “serious” shapes and cuts. Some of my favourite pieces are shown here. They’re full of character and the weighty vintage feel is counterbalanced by the delicate and delicious collars, buttons, frills, pockets in the shape of a cat’s ear etc. There are many other treasures to be discovered, in particular the coats, and all encapsulate the same distinctive qualities. Each look is a highly captivating modern day combination of romantic etherealness, innocent heroines and technical abilities. Despite the fact that Vivi Ponti is tackling traditional pieces I find the stylistic touches irresistible and fresh. The old and the new subtly converge. They aren’t worlds apart. It’s clear that vintage pieces may have been a source of inspiration but Vivi Ponti hasn’t just meticulously observed, she has injected a contemporary spirit together with other magic ingredients to create her own authentic versions.

SWIDE

For the past three weeks I have been too busy to blog and it has been quite an eye-opener. Before embarking on the job of creating July Stars, I thought I would simply take the advantage of new technology to regularly share my thoughts on everything I find interesting in the fashion world. This was in theory a great idea but has turned out to be a risky enterprise. I love to write and I have a tendency to concentrate on words. I also love fashion but it’s a language that can become stale extremely quickly. My problem is that combining both is a long process, especially since an increase in quality definitely does not mean an increase in quantity! My sister keeps telling me that this is a shit strategy if I intend on gaining more readers and I guess she’s right. Despite my driving determination to write four times a week or more life and work always get in the way. I sometimes ask myself why it is so important to have a well-formulated direction and increase readership when you have a blog but I still don’t have the answer. I find it liberating to write only when I feel like it (and have the time) but people automatically assume that your engagement should result in daily material. I promise I’ll try.
Swide, the online Dolce & Gabbana magazine, recently published an interview I did with them. You can read it here: SWIDE
Thank you to the lovely Kerry!

Essential viewing: Plato's Atlantis

There is so much competition for our attention from Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and the Internet in general that I wonder if there’s anyone who hasn’t watched the live stream of the McQueen spring 2010 fashion show. As we are being taken over by high tech gadgetry, it has become incredibly easy to follow the fashion action moving between New York, London, Milan and Paris. The Internet is becoming increasingly used to hit the spot, drawing us in because of its vivid virtual atmosphere. A door has been opened and two worlds coincide. Fashion is embracing technology and recognizing its importance as the ideal vehicle to rapidly flash ideas and access a bigger public. As more and more designers indulge in streaming their shows live to the world, traditions and attitudes are challenged. Nostalgia is definitely not on the menu. This week, Alexander McQueen captured a moment of truth. He must have woken up one day with a vivid premonition of what’s going to happen in the future and decided to show us what it would be like with his imaginative putting together of an integrated programme featuring fashion, live feed, music, sounds and film. And it worked. Never afraid to put on a spectacle of epic proportions McQueen has approached change with a bold, ambitious and radical agenda. He is telling us that fashion is about to adopt a completely new direction. The show was so insanely enormous and of a brash blockbusting scale that it can no longer be defined as a “fashion show”. It was emotional fantasy, theatre, art, powerful marketing and advertising, innovative entertainment. The world of fashion is already completely dislocated from reality and McQueen pushes this concept even further, deliberately blurring the dividing line between fashion and entertainment. The standard of the “performance” (I’m not too sure how else to describe it) was of such overwhelming intensity that I’m inclined to say that I’ve rarely experienced anything like it in the fashion industry. The two movie cameras mounted on gigantic and ferocious rolling cranes moved robotically backwards and forward, the sanitized hospital white runway added a funeral air to the proceedings, the background screen showing a provocative naked Raquel Zimmermann with snakes writhing across her body told a mythological poetic story of life and death and the tribe of disturbing looking slow moving creatures all contributed to the permeating uneasiness, exploding gloomy energy and real darkness. In no way did the clothes seduce me but the new shapes, silhouettes and shoes evoked a disturbingly provocative, tough, dreadful and dysfunctional new world that attracted my attention immediately. I know that a lot of work went into the clothes but they go far beyond anything I would ever wear.

Watch the show here: http://alexandermcqueenlive.showstudio.com/

All pictures courtesy of Style.com

Something from the weekend

I enjoyed the autumn sunshine in London and celebrated by wearing my favourite pair of Wolford Merino wool tights (although I have to confess that my joy soured at the sight of Sofia’s romantic black lacy version, the more I think about it the more I realise that I will have to find a pair too. The girl has style!).
Amazon is revolutionary and I will continue to sing its praises: I ordered the last book in the Stieg Larsson trilogy on Friday morning and received it the next day. I would recommend his books to anyone looking for a good Swedish thriller. Larsson energetically and skilfully writes puzzles of emotion, mystery, absorbing intrigues and bizarre romance. My husband complained that conversation with me was non-existent when I read the first two (it is also true that I forgot to cook one evening)!
I watched “Une femme est une femme” for the first time and loved the extremely beautiful and sensuous Anna Karina. Got sucked into the insane series 3 of The Shield (obsessed). Went to Alfies market looking for lights, desperately boring, even Vincenzo Caffarella left me skeptical (prices) and unenthusiastic. Hours of fun, unimaginable and naughty Sunday gossip with my adorable and wonderful N.
The quiet life.

Lula love

My feverish love affair with fashion magazines started when I was extremely young. I would sometimes steal copies of French Vogue, Jardin des Modes, Elle and l’Officiel from my mother’s office, even relishing this bad behaviour just as long as I could turn my attention to supermodels, extravagant fashion shoots, trends and the spectacle of glossy fantasy and dreams. My interest is roughly at the same level now but there is one crucial difference: I have firmly expounded my convictions and am no longer a slave to a myriad of fashion magazines. I have read plenty of publications and I have a lot of experience. I have spent much of the past 20 years talking, thinking and practicing fashion. The need to distil my list of titles emerged when I realised that my weakness fundamentally consisted of huge quantities of modern crap featuring articles like “How to look like Kate Moss”, “The return of the eyeliner” or “Update your style”! These are intended to serve the majority of the population and entertain girls or women on their way to work and during their lunch breaks. They’re certainly not supposed to be subjected to intensive investigations and interpretations. No need to be clear eyed or even attentive. They’re the straight in the recycling bin kind. They have no legacy, don’t achieve very much and all share a common thread – the conjoined obsession with celebrities and dramatic or grotesque buzzwords. Today, I still want my share of fashion gossipy pleasures and confessions but I tend to get it on the Internet (essentially Twitter). When it comes to fashion magazines I’ve moved towards more extensively researched publications, created with freshness of detail and perception, evoking a sense of expectation and wonder through a vivid and descriptive mood and atmosphere. Encens, Self Service, Fantastic Man, the newly revitalized Pop, Jalouse and Lula are all gracing my bookshelves. Lula is the most inimitable of the lot and I still can’t help thinking that each issue is a stylistic treasure. It has an ineradicable distinctiveness and its sultry, mysterious, magical and romantic voice is iconic. Since its first issue, Lula has been evolving in its very own dimension under the careful supervision of Leith Clark. All 9 published issues have enjoyed the contribution of the most fascinating photographers, stylists, models, illustrators, writers and clothes. Reading this magazine is a strong and emotional experience, absorbing and sometimes even poetic. A unique genre.

All photos courtesy of Lula

Photography notes

Ten minutes to go before I’m supposed to take pictures of guests at the book launch of a good friend and the studio’s atmosphere is already full of a sort of supercharged excitement and tension. My photographic depth of knowledge is haphazard and it could so easily all go wrong. I call my husband at work when I realize that the workings of my D80 leave me perplex and irritated. I seem to have forgotten what is a shutter speed, aperture, F number or ISO but I won’t switch to automatic. His less than reassuring explanations confirm my fears and the only way I will make this experience pleasant is by getting extremely drunk or accept the inevitable: automatic setting. Martina’s official and professional photographer failed to materialise and with only a couple of days to go I was asked if I could act as the alternative for want of a better option. I have displayed a commitment to fashion photography on this blog and I have been vocal about my passion but that does not make me a good photographer! I did my best for a few hours (imagine a self-conscientious impromptu firing squad) and endeavoured to take beautiful and charming shots. It is the morning after and I’m still reluctant to download the masterful portraits of my subjects! Hahaha.
I’ve been looking at a Wendy Bevan shoot instead. I love all aspects of it: the romantic and poetic elements, the slightly weird sensibility, the colours, the dream-like qualities, the drama and whisper of melancholy. You can catch glimpses of the haunting style of Sarah Moon, they share the same quirky fantasy. It’s really no surprise that I absolutely adore Bevan’s work and I’m sure that a lot of you share my enthusiasm. She creates beautiful and striking imagery in a magical way, blatantly different from mainstream fashion photography, which seems to be dominated by a certain sensationalism, drama of subject and treatment. Her photos are more quiet and I believe that the aim of her exquisite compositions resides in the subtle variations of tone, colours, softness and emotion. Perfect viewing for those who like fashion photography that tells a story with a hint of surrealism and decadence.
Lots of shows to look forward to in the next few days. Paris is always my favourite fashion week and usually delivers great results. I’m expecting good things from Anne Valérie Hash, Balenciaga, Isabel Marant, Lanvin, Ann Demeulemeester and Dries Van Noten. The usual suspects.

Photos courtesy of Wendy Bevan

Rick Owens

I have often toyed with the idea of writing about furniture and there’s something about a designer doing fashion and objects that thrills me to the core. Rick Owens is part of that small tribe of people who is successful at both (funnily enough I’m not referring to Versace, Armani or Ralph Lauren) and is crazy enough to draw on his fascination with raw and primitive arts to create surprising, unlikely and beautiful chairs, sofas, tables and lamps made from antlers, plywood, marble, shearling, bone, concrete and fisher fur. His furniture is a testament to what can be achieved away from the tyranny of marketing and commercialism. Samples have recently been on display at Sebastian + Barquet in London and did not disappoint me. They seem to reflect an impressive quiet energy while remaining quite brutal and naturalistic. While until now I had only been vaguely aware of Rick Owens’ interest in furniture I have been completely seduced by his bold, skilful, dark and out of the ordinary pieces. The show at Sebastian + Barquet runs until Wednesday 30th September.
Pictures courtesy of Wallpaper and Taschen