Kurihara re-worked old-fashioned bedcovers too, into exquisite, rainbow-coloured stoles and, more spectacularly still, turned her attention to the wedding dress, playing off the overblown and ornamental genre with nothing more overtly feminine or obviously decorative than a classic man’s white shirt. “I thought the idea of a man’s shirt meeting a white dress was a beautiful one,” she told at the time. “It’s because it is worn only once. Some people get married a few times but they don’t, I would imagine, wear the same outfit or go on to wear their wedding dress again as part of their daily outfit.”

For this reason, she continued, at least some of the designs in the collection were crafted in plain white paper, only pleated and folded in a manner that might upstage even the most overblown meringue. “That makes sense to me,” Kurihara said. “Paper is so fragile and not appropriate for over-use. I thought a paper wedding dress would be more special than one that was crafted out of a more traditional and typically extravagant material.

White silk knit short-sleeve polo shirt, white craft paper skirt from -A shirt and a wedding dress-

Ph. by Richard Avedon, 1973
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Lauren Hutton was advised to correct the slight gap in her teeth and tried using morticians’ wax to cover the gap, cutting a line in the middle of it; this was followed by the use of a cap, which she would often swallow, laugh out or misplace. She eventually retained this “imperfection”…..

Hutton, who is now 71, was the Kate Moss of her time – almost as famous for her partying as for her incredible and enduring fashion career – and the outspoken beauty explained that there were millions of dollars to be made from modelling, even in the Seventies.

She was illiterate until age 11. After her mother remarried (Hutton never knew her father), the family of three moved from Charleston to the swamplands of Tampa, which she calls “a magical place.” Hutton spent her days as a carefree tomboy, and learned how to interact with wildlife from her stepfather.

She first came to NYC for a few-month stint, earning her rent as a “Lunchtime Bunny” at the Playboy Club. (She explained that the position of “Lunchtime Bunny” was reserved for 18-20 year-olds). She was there around the same time that Gloria Steinem and Debbie Harry were also working at the Club, although they never interacted, since the ladies who would later be known as the godmother of feminism and Blondie, respectively, had the distinction of being Nighttime Bunnies.

Lauren Hutton as a Lunchtime [Playboy] Bunny
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She was born as Mary Laurence Hutton, but blame it on Playboy for the switcheroo: There were apparently too many cocktail waitresses named Mary, so she decided to riff on her middle name and go with Lauren, inspired by none other than Lauren Bacall.

Hutton got into moddeling after she saw a want ad in the New York Times for a Christian Dior model, “experience required.” Her friend’s boyfriend told her she needed to go to the audition anyway. “I said, ‘I don’t have experience,‘ and he said, ‘Of course you do.’ I had my first great New York lesson: Lie.” She did get the job—though the fact that she offered to do it for less than minimum wage ($50 a week) was probably also a factor.

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Hutton about her first meeting with Vogue editor Diana Vreeland. “‘You have quite a presence,’ Vreeland told me. I did not know what presence meant.  I figured it was good. I said, ‘Yes ma’am, so do you.’ She said, ‘You stay after.’ I opened my book and she said, ‘I think I’ll call Dick [Avedon.]'” 

It was her first big shoot with famed photographer Richard Avedon, and things were not going well. “I was trying to be Veruschka, and that was terrible,” she says. When, in the hopes of finding something that would inspire her, Avedon asked her questions about her childhood, she revealed that she used to love jumping over snakes. He told her to leap and jump in the photo, and the rest was history. “That started the run-and-jump pictures…because I couldn’t model.”

Run-and-Jump Pictures by Richard Avedon

She was the very first model to nab a beauty contract—and it was all her idea. Up until then, modeling was an occupation that was paid by the hour. But Hutton knew that she was a hot commodity. “Twiggy had quit, Veruschka was doing something else, Shrimpton was off doing something else—everyone had quit. I was the only one left!” But when she caught a glimpse of a New York Times article about a man who had received a $1 million contract for his own job, she said, “How can I do that?” She mentioned her idea to Avedon, who told her to up the ante and make it exclusive. She pitched it to Revlon, and in 1973, at age 31, she signed the first-ever modeling contract with Revlon for a sum of $400,000. She was the face of the mega-brand until they let her go about 10 years later.

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Lauren Hutton appeared on the front cover of Vogue magazine a record 41 times!

Lauren Hutton & Christy Turlington

Veruschka, Isabella Rossellini Lauren Hutton, Steven Meisel 1988

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In October 2000, Hutton joined a motorbike group, which included actors Dennis Hopper, Laurence Fishburne and Jeremy Irons, to celebrate “The Art of the Motorcycle” exhibit at the Hermitage-Guggenheim museum in Las Vegas, Nevada. Prior to the journey, Hutton informed the Las Vegas Review-Journal: “I love the feeling of being a naked egg atop that throbbing steel. You feel vulnerable — but so alive.” En route, Hutton crashed near Hoover Dam, on the border between the US states of Arizona and Nevada, going over 100 miles (160 km) per hour, and suffered multiple leg fractures, a fractured arm, broken ribs and sternum, and a punctured lung. Hopper later recalled from before the start of the ride: “She had on a little helmet, sort of tied under her chin. It was cute. And Jeremy [Irons] came up to her and said, ‘You got to be kidding.’ He took it off her and gave her a proper helmet.”

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About American Gigolo:

“Everyone knew it was great, that it was ahead of its time. Paul [Schrader] had been trying to get it made for ten years. He’s a genius idea man, and a genius producer. He was one of the first people to use popular music the way he did in that film, with Blondie. Originally, John Travolta had the lead role. He was fresh off of Saturday Night Feverand Grease, which together had made a quarter of a billion dollars. There were entire rooms in Paramount stuffed with his fan mail. What happened was, two weeks before we were to start, John’s mother died. He was just a 24 year-old kid. He was in real agony. Then his dad had a heart attack. So John asked for a two week extension so he could pull himself together emotionally, and also lose some of the weight he’d put on during this time. And they wouldn’t give him an extension. Everyone was going to sue him. It was just a mess. So what John had to do to get out of it, was give Paramount a deal where they chose his movies, and he had no say. And prior to that, John had what no other actor in town had, which was final cut. Plus, John was very romantic. If John had played the role, it would have been much more romantic and you would have seen the gigolo kiss. With Richard [Gere], you never really see the gigolo kissing. You see everything leading up to it. You see his expertise in dressing, more than his expertise at romance.”

“The character of Julian Kaye was a bit removed and completely narcissistic. It was his narcissism that blinded him to the conspiracy around him, but you would have had a populist hit if there had been more romance in the film. As it was, it wasn’t a hit when it came out, but became a classic in retrospect on cable and home video. So we ended up being lucky, because Richard is such a wonderful actor, and he became a star because of that role, deservedly.”

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“We have to be able to grow up. Our wrinkles are our medals of the passage of life. They are what we have been through and who we want to be. I don’t think I will ever cut my face, because once I cut it, I’ll never know where I’ve been.” 

Lauren Hutton

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info:

Wikipedia

http://www.vogue.co.uk/news/2014/05/16/lauren-hutton-interview—model-on-fashion-and-dating

Click to access LAUREN_HUTTON.pdf

What Tom Ford did for Gucci in the 90ties was revolutionary and some of the designs are still iconic. Lately I wondered what happened during those days with Tom Ford and Gucci.

I am clearly not the only one, browsing the internet I found a recent article ‘Tom Ford Gets Candid About His Years at Gucci’ ( at the NY Magazine website), which I like to share. And to refresh the memories of the epic designs I included some video’s and photographs….. 

Gucci '96/'97 ad by Mario Testino, styling Carine Roitfeld
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In October 1994, the publicist for Gucci nearly begged journalists to attend Tom Ford’s first women’s show in Milan. Within a year, Ford would behailed as “the most directional designer in Milan” for his sleek tailoring and retro ’70s glamour. And Madonna dressed in a teal-blue satin shirt and hip-huggers at the MTV Music Video Awards, would invite even more attention when she chimed about her outfit, “Gucci, Gucci, Gucci.”

FW 1996 Tom Ford for Gucci KeyHole Gown  .

http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/04/tom-ford-gets-candid-about-his-years-at-gucci.html

Since the book The Beautiful Fall and the movie Yves Saint Laurent there’s been an increasing interest in Jacques de Bascher, the man who fuelled the rivalry between former friends Karl Lagerfeld & Yves Saint Laurent by having a love affair with both of them and the reason Karl Lagerfeld suffered from a broken heart for years. Now the movie Saint Laurent has been released (24 September, 2014), I find even more people searching for information on Jacques de Bascher on my blog, so I decided to try to find out more about this mysterious dandy.

It wasn’t an easy task, because not a lot can be found about him, but ……

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What has been written about Jacques de Bascher:.

Behind every great designer there is often a nudging muse; an aristocratic aesthete who embodies not only the designer’s ideals but who also simultaneously pushes him towards greatness. This symbiotic relationship is at the heart of many a fairytale story; note Alexander McQueen and Isabella Blow, Yves Saint Laurent and Lou Lou de la Falaise. Jacques de Bascher represents this figure for arguably the most influential and important designer (bar perhaps Yves Saint Laurent) of the last half a century – Kaiser Karl, Karl Lagerfeld of Chanel, Fendi, and world domination.

Jacques was not born into actual French aristocracy, but into an affluent family who had borrowed the title to accompany their wealth. But he certainly dressed the part. For Lagerfeld, Jacques represented the dandy prince of the castle who he had always wanted to be. He came to Paris seeking fame and popularity, and found it first as Lagerfeld’s lover and companion, with a brief interlude as Yves Saint Laurent’s obsession. With his penchant for exquisite suits, and turn of the century details, Jacques made quite a stir in Paris society in the eighties until his untimely death from AIDS in 1989. Even David Hockney immortalized him in one of his famous pencil sketches, which now retail for $60 upwards. A true gentleman icon of the last century and something of a modern-day Dorian Gray, Jacques de Bascher was truly a tragic figure worthy of being remembered.  Oakazine.com

Jacques de Bascher 

In the early 70s, however, Karl Lagerfeld became enamored of Jacques de Bascher, a debauched young nobleman new to the Parisian scene, and began bankrolling his extravagant lifestyle. Bascher intrigued Saint Laurent, too, who saw in him a way to rebel against Pierre Bergé’s tight control and to “exorcise certain of his demons,” Drake (Alicia Drake, the writer of The Beautial Fall) writes. In 1973, Saint Laurent and Bascher began an affair — infuriating Lagerfeld and Bergé, and precipitating the fateful rupture between the two camps. 

For Drake, Bascher personified the “gilt-edged decadence” that defined his intimates’ milieu. Drawing on the link he himself made between “decadence” and “falling” (a link that apparently inspired her book’s title, The Beautiful Fall), she writes: “For Jacques, it was always beauty that justified the fall. Beauty made even the idea of self-destruction … a possibility.” By self-destruction, the author means not only drug addiction but AIDS, from which Bascher died at 38. But despite Drake’s presentation of him as a doomed artiste, his demise comes more as an anticlimax than as a tragedy of genius lost. Having “never carved a statue or painted a picture” or designed an article of clothing, Bascher left behind only a legacy of hatred between two men far more talented than he. The New York Times

Jacques de Bascher (right) & Karl Lagerfeld (middle)

People familiar with Paris fashion folklore readily recognize Pierre Bergé is talking about Saint Laurent’s liaison in the 1970s to the late Parisian dandy, Jacques de Bascher, who also carried on with Saint Laurent’s bitter rival, designer Karl Lagerfeld. 

Bergé makes no effort to disguise his distaste for Bascher. “I had to address that period,” said Bergé. “These letters to Yves couldn’t have been written without saying one, that I love him, and two that there were very difficult moments during our relationship.”  thedailybeast .com

Insofar as being a muse can be called a function, he functioned as a muse to Karl Lagerfeld. He (Jacques de Bascher) follows a certain dandyish template that I like — let’s call it the charming satanist– and, according to Agenda Inc. the “notorious Moratoire Noir party organized by Jacques de Bascher which introduced the fashion world – for the first time – to the darker edges of the Parisian suburbs and Mapplethorpian quantities of leather.” 

I did find his pretensions to French aristocracy to be, well, pretensions to French aristocracy.

Like most people in the book, he’s fairly disagreeable but what he lacks in character is mitigated by what he lacked in good intentions. (One can forgive anything except meaning well.) Pictures do him less justice than words, which, in this case, is a good thing.  thegrumpyowl.com

Jacques de Bascher & Kaiser Karl

He (Karl Lagerfeld) doesn’t talk about his sexual orientation and maintains that he never had sexual congress with the man he calls the love of his life, the Parisian “It” dandy Jacques de Bascher, who called Lagerfeld “Mein Kaiser” and died of aids in 1989. When Lagerfeld says he “hated the nineties, for some reasons,” it is code for many miserable years suffering with a broken heart, partially expressed by naming his Hellenic-inspired villa in Hamburg “Jako,” an amalgam of their names, and briefly selling a perfume of the same appellation. In fact, De Bascher was the reason Lagerfeld gained weight to begin with. He writes in The Karl Lagerfeld Diet that directly before De Bascher’s death, “I started to lose interest in my appearance, because I knew what was going to happen. I lost interest in myself and trivial matters. I felt old-fashioned in my proper made-to-measure Italian clothes. I started to buy my clothes from Matsuda, Comme des Garçons, and Yohji Yamamoto. I went from small to medium, medium to large, then to extra-large.”   New York Magazine

Jacques de Basher

Ultimately Pierre Bergé would move out, unable to cope with Yves’s utter self-absorption. As the years went on they both had other interests, other passions, other lovers (most notably Lagerfeld protégé Jacques de Bascher, whose affair with Yves added another dimension to the bitter Lagerfeld/Saint Laurent rivalry).   The Guardian

Jacques de Bascher by David Hockney

This book ( The Beautifal Fall) is about the fashion designers Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld in their heydays in Paris in the 1970s. The city then was awash with wild, glittering young things who spent their nights dancing and schmoozing and stripping off and spraying each other with champagne. There were wild parties with weird installations and vast amounts of drugs. Lagerfeld’s companion Jacques de Bascher de Beaumarchais (yes, the name is fake) loved to titillate his guests. On his parquet sitting-room floor you might find a gynaecologist’s chair, or a posse of firemen, or a Harley Davidson with the wing mirrors pointing upwards and, on each mirror, a pile of cocaine with a straw and a razorblade…  The Telegraph.uk

Jacques de Bascher and unknown female

Yves Saint Laurent & Jacques de Bascher

Paloma Picasso (born Anne Paloma Ruiz-Picasso y Gilot in Paris on 19 April 1949)  is the youngest daughter of Pablo Picasso and painter and writer Françoise Gilot. Paloma’s older brother is Claude Picasso (born 1947). .

‘My parents always taught me that I have to be my own person. At the same time when you have such parents and such a name you don’t want people to associate the two. When I got to be 14 or 15 it started making me feel very nervous. For a number of years I wouldn’t touch a pencil for anything other than writing, I was so afraid I might become an artist.’

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Childhood photographs Paloma Picasso & Family

Françoise Gilot & Pablo Picasso

Françoise Gilot & Pablo Picasso, ph.Robert Doisneau

Paloma, Pablo & Claude Picasso

Claude, Pablo, Fran;coise & Paloma, 1953

Paloma, Claude & Pablo, 1956

Pablo & Paloma Picasso

Paloma Picasso

Paloma Picasso

Claude, Pablo & Paloma Picasso

Pablo Picasso with his daughter Paloma, 1960s

The Young Picasso’s (Paloma & Claude) by Richard Avedon, 1966

And then she became the IT girl…

Paloma Picasso had never had the luxury of escaping notice. Carrying the name of one of the most celebrated artists of the twentieth century was no small burden for a young girl coming of age. “I was very shy and having the name meant that I could never just go and be myself,” she once said. “I decided to start dressing up in a way to shift the attention from the person I was to what I was wearing. It became like a shield.”

Paloma Sphynx—her mother’s nickname for her—became the coolly confident IT girl who held her own at the center of the French art, theater, and fashion worlds. “Her dresses were copied, choices followed, appearance imitated”. Among her most ardent admirers were Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld. (That she managed to straddle the divide between the warring superstars was a coup of considerable grace in and of itself—but, after all, Paloma was named after the dove her father drew for the 1949 World Peace Conference.) On her wedding day, she wore Saint Laurent’s white Spencer jacket, ruffled red silk blouse, and red gauntlet gloves. For the candlelit banquet that followed at Lagerfeld’s eighteenth-century salon, she slipped into his heart-shaped dress of scarlet satin; later, revelers headed to Le Palace to watch female wrestlers tussle to the strains of Carmen in a ring decorated like a giant wedding cake. Filled with glee and goodwill,Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent forgot their feud and danced the flamenco together.

Paloma in her vintage 40s style

Paloma Picasso & Xavier de Castelle at Le Privilege, 1983  ph.Roxanne lowit

Paloma Picasso, in YSL, and Rafael Lopez-Sanchez wed in 1978

Karl Lagerfeld, Paloma & husband Rafael Lopez-Sanchez 

Paloma & Rafael

Paloma wearing Karl Lagerfeld

Paloma Picasso & Yves Saint Laurent

Paloma Picasso & Andy Warhol, ph. Jean Paul Goude

Paloma Picasso, ph. Helmut Newton

Paloma wearing YSL & her own jewelry

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Beyond her status as a seventies fashion fascination, Picasso became an accomplished designer of jewelry and accessories. She began by creating costumes for avant-garde theatrical productions, stringing necklaces with rhinestones plucked from Folies Bergère bikinis. Soon, her sculpted wings and shooting stars—and other bijoux hand-soldered in her Paris loft—were being commissioned by Yves Saint Laurent as house exclusives.

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The Scandal Collection

Yves was very inspired by Paloma Picasso, who liked to dress from flea markets. In the 1970s young Parisian’s were reviving the fashions worn by their mothers, wearing turbans and picking up forties clothes in flea markets. Seventies Chic. At the time, people weren’t at all used to seeing vintage. 

Yves always cited “the fashion on the street” as his greatest influence; he was quick to tune in to the trends of the time and give them an aristocratic allure. “From the end of the war through the ’60s, not much changed in the world of high fashion,” said Serge Carrera (an employee of YSL) in France magazine, “then with one collection, Yves Saint Laurent upended everything and made fashion fresh by borrowing elements from the past and mixing turbans with prints. All of a sudden, fashion moved toward the realm of spectacle.”

Yves Saint Laurent, Scandal Collection


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But  a couturier was supposed to invent something new and for the French, these silhouettes evoke the Occupation as well as the gay camp aesthetic of Warhol’s drag queens and the gay liberation movement. The press was outraged. Yves openly dismissed the critics as “narrow-minded and reactionary, petty people paralysed by taboos” and denigrated couture as “a museum” that was “bogged down in a boring tradition of so-called good taste and refinement.”

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Paloma Picasso, ph.Mario Sorrenti Vogue Paris Mars 2009