opinions | | Page 21

Archive | opinions RSS feed for this section

Anna Piaggi, one of the last great exotics (part 1)

Anna Piaggi ( (22 March 1931 – 7 August 2012) was one of the last great exotics – a fashion editor in the true and traditional sense of the word, in possession of the finest eye and, most importantly, sparkling intelligence and wit.

This year the fashion world lost one of its true eccentrics when the scene-stealing, print-mixing, hat-wearing, blue-haired style icon and contributor to countless fashion magazines, Anna Piaggi, passed away at age 81. A woman with a closet so over-the-top containing 932 hats, 265 pairs of shoes, and 2,865 dresses….(according to the Victoria & Albert museum)

I saw Anna Piaggi many times in Paris during fashion week and a few times I dared to go up to her, I needed to compliment her on yet another outstanding outfit. As she left a show, a crowd always stirred around to photograph her. When the Victoria & Albert museum dedicated an exhibition to Anna, I went to London with my friends. I had to experience being in a room filled with Anna Piaggi’s outfits and see all those drawings Karl Lagerfeld made of her. I cherish the memories.

Anna Piaggi and Vern Lambert

Bohemian fashion in the ’60s meant regular trips to London and there Anna met dandy antique clothing dealer Vernon Lambert (born in Melbourne Australia 1 August 1937 and died Milan Italy 19 August 1992). Together, dawn after dawn, they would set off torch in hand to trawl the street markets of Bermondsey, Portobello Road and Petticoat Lane in search of treasures of fashion’s past. These weren’t destined for some museum but worn by them to surprise, inspire and please passers-by: a Mary Quant mini, worn with a Georgian waistcoat or a war officer’s jacket and a Victorian courtesan’s feathered toque. Together they played a delightful dressing-up game that lasted over 25 years and was often more entertaining and original than the catwalk fashion shows witnessed in all the fashion capitals of the world.

Anna Piaggi persuaded Vern to move to Milan in 1973, where he opened a gallery with antique clothing, aesthetic and Arts & Crafts furniture and objets d’art. His incredible knowledge – he could spot a Dior or Lanvin across a room and date it – was mixed with a love for the frivolity and joy of the subject. Holding a dress up to the light, he would tell when it was made, by whom and even when it was altered.

To Vern life was the joy of researching, seeing, making connections and sharing his passions. He became a close friend and inspiration to Karl Lagerfeld, who celebrated Vern’s last birthday with him and Anna in Paris. They admired one another and shared a curiosity for fashion in its different guises. Vern was a fantasist, but he was always modest, generous and impeccably mannered.

Anna Piaggi And Karl Lagerfeld

Karl Lagerfeld once wrote ‘Anna invents fashion’ (and you know that’s true when the Kaiser says it)

For a decade after their first meeting in 1974, Karl Lagerfeld and Anna Piaggi were a unit. Karl drew her regularly for years to record the combinations of the day, the mixing of vintage couture, fashion and costume. Karl appreciated her motto, to dress as performance art: ‘She was a great performer, but she is also the writer of the play’. The drawings by Karl during the ’70s and ’80s were collected into the book Karl Lagerfeld: A Fashion Journal. Later Karl and Anna also published another one Lagerfeld’s Sketchbook. Both books are real treasures and beautiful records of Karl’s sketches and Anna’s dressing art. Nowadays they are very collectable.

Anna Piaggi photographed by Tim Walker for W magazine

Vogue Italia, D.P. by Anna Piaggi

Anna Piaggi had a long relationship with Italian Vogue as a freelance fashion editor, starting in 1969 as reporter of trends and from 1988 as creator of her famous D.P.-Doppie Pagine (double pages), also revered to as Di Piaggi. Together with her husband, Alfa Castaldi, Anna set out each month to analyze an event, a happening, a garment, an accessory, a personality or a stylist, blending text and photographs in a unique and innovative way to create visual messages of rare effectiveness, admired by journalists all over the world. These double-page spreads were the subject for Fashion Algebra, published in 1998 to celebrate the first ten years in Vogue. The book brings together the best of the Vogue ‘Doppie Pagines’. Fashion Algebra is a very sought-after item,.

Anna Piaggi was in possession of sparkling intelligence and wit

In 1978, Anna described fashion to be like a ‘trance’, telling WWD (Women’s Wear Dailey): “It’s a moment, an expression. My philosophy of fashion is humor, jokes and games, I make my own rules. I never pick up something and just trow it on my back like that. There’s a little bit of study and it’s always better if I think about what I’m going to wear the next day. And what is to be avoided at all costs is the twinset look, the total look.”

Next week part 2, about her husband Alfa Castaldi, the Fashion-ology exhibition, Stephen Jones and Anna Piaggi’s influence on fashion of today….

Comments 3 Comments
Categories inspiration, stories

Peggy Moffitt in Blow-Up & Comme Des Garçons

2 Dec

Peggy Moffitt (born in California in 1939) was during the 1960s a premier model and muse for the late fashion designer Rudi Gernreich. She developed a signature style that featured heavy, Kabuki-like makeup and an asymmetrical hair cut.

Though her unique look has now become iconic of the 60s fashion scene, Peggy started out pursuing a career in film, beginning with an uncredited role in the 1955 film ‘You’re Never Too Young’. As a model, she developed a signature style, including false eyelashes and heavy eye makeup, drawing on Japanese Kabuki theater. Her hairstyle, an asymmetrical bowl cut, created by Vidal Sassoon, became known as the ‘five point’. Her unique look became an icon of the 1960s fashion scene. In 1964, she made international headlines when she was photographed by her husband since 1960 William Claxton wearing Gernreich’s famous topless monokini bathing suit. Peggy was one of the few models bold enough at the time to model it…..

Peggy’s career in film never took off, but she appeared in a film entitled ‘Who Are You, Polly Magoo’ and in Michelangelo Antonioni’s ‘Blow-Up’.

Peggy Moffitt & Antonioni’s Blow-Up

‘A mod London photographer seems to find something very suspicious in the shots he has taken of a mysterious beauty in a desolate park’

Blow-Up is filmed in London during the sixties. David Hemmings leading movie-character, a fashion photographer, is based on David Bailey, who was the it photographer at the time. Other people starring in the movie are: Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, John Castle and sixties model Veruschka. Also appearing in the movie are Jane Birkin, Peggy Moffitt and The Yardbirds.

The movie has become iconic for the theme, the cast and the fashion photo shoot scenes. The first is the scene with Veruschka and the second is the scene in which David Hemmings has to do a fashion shoot with five models (Peggy Moffitt among them).

The plot is a day in the life of a glamorous fashion photographer. It begins after spending the night at a doss house, where he has taken pictures for a book of art photos. He is late for a photo shoot with Veruschka at his studio, which in turn makes him late for a shoot with other models later in the morning. He grows bored and walks off, leaving the models and production staff in the lurch. As he leaves the studio, two teenage girls who are aspiring models (Jane Birkin plays one of them) ask to speak with him, but the photographer drives off to look at an antiques shop. Wandering into Maryon Park, he takes photos of two lovers. The woman (Vanessa Redgrave) is furious at being photographed. The photographer then meets his agent for lunch, and notices a man following him and looking into his car. Back at his studio, Redgrave arrives asking for the film, but he deliberately hands her a different roll. She in turn writes down a false telephone number to give to him. His many enlargements of the black and white film are grainy but seem to show a body in the grass and a killer lurking in the trees with a gun. He is disturbed by a knock on the door, but it is the two girls again, with whom he has a romp in his studio and falls asleep. Awakening, he finds they hope he will photograph them but he tells them to leave, saying, “Tomorrow! Tomorrow!”

As evening falls, the photographer goes back to the park and finds a body, but he has not brought his camera and is scared off by a twig breaking, as if being stepped on. The photographer returns to his studio to find that all the negatives and prints are gone except for one very grainy blowup showing the body. After driving into town, he sees Redgrave and follows her into a club where The Yardbirds, featuring both Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck on guitar, are seen playing. At a drug-drenched party in a house on the Thames near central London, he finds both Veruschka – who had told him that she was going to Paris, and when confronted, she says she is in Paris – and his agent, whom he wants to bring to the park as a witness. However, the photographer cannot put across what he has photographed. Waking up in the house at sunrise, he goes back to the park alone, but the body is gone.

Befuddled, he watches a mimed tennis match, is drawn into it, picks up the imaginary ball and throws it back to the two players. While he watches the mime, the sound of the ball being played is heard. As the photographer watches this mimed match alone on the lawn, his image fades away, leaving only the grass as the film ends.

The film grossed $20 million (about $120 million today) on a $1.8 million budget and helped liberate Hollywood from its puritanical prurience.

Blow-Up fashion shoot scene

Blow-Up scene with Veruschka

http://www.amazon.com/Blow-Up-David-Hemmings/dp/B0000WN0ZK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1353939241&sr=8-1&keywords=blow-up+dvd

After Gernreich’s death, she retained legal rights to his designs and arranged for his designs to be displayed in an art exhibition. She also collaborated with Marylou Luther and photographer Claxton to release a comprehensive book chronicling Gernreich’s designs.

Peggy Moffitt & Comme des Garçons

Peggy’s resurge for the book led to contact with Comme des Garçons designer Rei Kawakubo and together they went over the Gernreich archives and selected key pieces to be re-created under the Comme des Garçons label as the Moffitt line, which also contained a series of t-shirts depicting Peggy Moffitt’s image…

The Chicago band The Handcuffs feature the song “Peggy Moffitt” on their debut album Model for a Revolution, with famous photographs of the revolutionary model on the CD cover. Boyd Rice and Giddle Partridge released a limited edition vinyl called Going Steady With Peggy Moffitt in 2008.

Peggy Moffitt, Muse & Model for Rudi Gernreich

Comments 1 Comment
Categories inspiration

Rudi Gernreich, misunderstood Fashion Prophet….

25 Nov

Although Rudi Gernreich is listed on ‘All-TIME 100 Fashion Icons’, his name is not as well-known as Dior, Balenciaga or Courréges. Perhaps because of his geographic detachment from the centers of fashion and the fact that he refused to show in Paris, but Rudi Gernreich had just as much influence on women’s appearance, especially during the 1960s and 1970s.

Rudolph (Rudi) Gernreich was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1922. His father was a hosiery manufacturer and his aunt kept a dress shop in which Rudi worked as a teenager. In 1938 with numerous other refugees, Rudi fled to the USA and settled in California. From 1942 to 1948 he worked with a dance troupe as a dancer and costume designer. In 1948, he became a freelance fashion designer. He toiled (to make the first garment in white cotton, before the pattern becomes definitive and goes in production) for a 7th Avenue firm making copies of Paris couture garments but really hated it. In 1951, he formed a partnership with manufacturer Walter Bass to supply clothes to Jax, a Los Angeles boutique.

Some years later, he opened his own company G.R. Designs Inc. which became named Rudi Gernreich Inc in 1964. Being a dancer himself, Rudi was interested in liberating the body from the limitations of clothing surfaced in his early swimwear designs of 1952 in which he eliminated the complicated boned and underpinned interior construction that had been obligatory in the 1950s. He revived the knitted swimsuit or ‘maillot’ of the 1920s, which he elasticized to follow the shape of the body. These experiments were continued in his knitted tube dresses of 1953. He was awarded the prestigious Coty Award for American designers in 1960. In the early 1960s Rudi opened a Seventh Avenue showroom in New York where he showed his popular designs for Harmon knitwear and his own more expensive line of experimental garments.

During the decade Rudi Gernreich acquired a reputation for being the most radical designer in America; his designs included the jacket with one notched and one rounded lapel, tuxedos made of white satin, and the topless bathing suit’ named Monokini of 1964, which reflected the new vogue for topless sunbathing. It was worn by Peggy Moffitt, his favourite model.

Rudi Gernreich’s freeing of the breasts was a social statement, somehow part of the emancipation of women, and a portent of the unfettering of the breast by the women’s movement in the 1970s. Rudi invented the ‘no bra’ bra in 1964, a soft nylon bra with no padding or boning in which breasts assumed their natural shape, rather than being molded into an aesthetic ideal. This kind of bra was later traded in again for boned and padded ones, because it didn’t do much good for breasts in the long ran…..

Rudi was the first to design unisex/interchangeable clothes for men and women such as floor-length kaftans or white knit bell-bottomed trousers and matching black and white midriff tops, and even, in 1975, Y-front underwear for women. Other designs included the first chiffon t-shirt dress, see-through blouses, coordinated outfits of dresses, handbags, hats and stockings known as the Total Look, mini dresses inset with clear vinyl stripes and the thong bathing suit, cut high to expose the buttocks. He experimented constantly with the potentials of different materials using cutouts, vinyl and plastic, and mixing patterns such as checks with dots.

Rudi Gernreich used plastic in his designs

Rudi was interested less in the details and decorations of clothes and more in how they looked in motion. In the 1950s he was designing relaxed, comfortable clothes fabricated out of wool, jersey, and other malleable materials, usually in solid colors or geometric shapes and checks. During the next decade he went on to use unusual fabrics and bold color disharmonies such as orange and blue or red and purple.

knitted swimwear by Rudi Gernreich, patchwork

In 1964 corset manufacturers Warner Brothers Co., commissioned Rudi to design a bodystocking made of flesh coloured stretch nylon. He was quite creative, he did leggings, designed furniture, stockings, even gourmet soups, as well as clothing for children and menswear.His boxer shorts for women predated the 80’s version by about 8 years. In 1971 he had a Military look collection and showroom models carried rifles. At the time the Viet Nam war was going on.

Rudi Gernreich designs

Peggy Moffitt : ‘He seamed to be 30 years ahead of time. Rudi Gernreich is a widely misunderstood fashion prophet….’

His notion of freeing the body was taken to its logical extreme in his last design statement, the pubikini, which appeared in 1982, revealing the model’s dyed and shaped pubic hair.

In the USA, Rudi Gernreich was an influential co-founder of the Mattachine Society, the USA’s first gay liberation movement.

Rudi Gernreich died in 1985. In 1992, his favourite model Peggy Moffitt and her husband photographer William Claxton collaborated and published a book called ‘The Rudi Gernreich Book’ detailing all the fashion ideas of Gernreich and his wonderful clothes. She explained that he was a widely misunderstood fashion prophet, who came up with all today’s trends yesterday. In the year 2000, the city of New York decided to honour American fashion designers by placing bronze plaques along 7th Avenue, the great street of fashion in New York. This has been called the “FASHION WALK OF FAME.” Rudi Gernreich was one of those honoured.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Rudi-Gernreich-Book-Series/dp/3822871974

Rudi Gernreich’s legacy, which was celebrated with an exhibit at MOCA in Los Angeles, hasn’t been forgotten and their will be a relaunch. Most information is still a mystery, but the man backing the business venture is a ‘German entrepreneur’ and while the global trademark rights have been obtained, the brand is still in need of a designer. The first runway show is expected in 2014….

(Almost all pictures in this post are made by William Claxton)

Next week: Peggy Moffitt

Comments 4 Comments
Categories biography, inspiration

Isabella Blow lived fashion like no other

18 Nov

Dressed as Joan of Arc in costume armour with a chain mail headdress, it was a typically dramatic picture of Isabella Blow and as part of a prestigious feature on British fashion icons in Vanity Fair magazine, it should have been one of the crowning glories of a legendary career.

Isabella Delves Broughton (Issie) was born 19 November 1958 in Marylebone, London. Isabella had two sisters, Julia and Lavinia, and a brother, John, who drowned in the family’s swimming pool at the age of two. In 1972, when she was 14, her parents separated and her mother left the household, bidding each daughter farewell with a handshake. Her parents divorced two years later. Isabella did not get along with her father, who bequeathed her only £5,000 from his estate, which was worth more than one million pounds.

Isabella Blow……I‘ve done the most peculiar jobs. I was working in a scone shop for years, selling apricot-studded scones. I was a cleaner in London for two years. I wore a handkerchief with knots on the side, and my cousin saw me in the post office and said, What are you doing? I said, What do you think I look like I’m doing? I’m a cleaner!

In 1979 Isabella moved to New York to study Ancient Chinese Art at Columbia University and shared a flat with the actress Catherine Oxenberg. A year later she moved to Texas and worked for Guy Laroche. In 1981, Issie married her first husband, Nicholas Taylor (whom she divorced in 1983), and was introduced to the fashion director of American Vogue, Anna Wintour. She was hired initially as Wintour’s assistant, but it was not long before she was assisting Andre Leon Talley, now Vogue’s editor-at-large. While working in New York, she befriended Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Both ended up doing assignments for Vogue as a result of Issie’s introductions.

In 1986, Isabella Blow returned to London and worked for fashion director Michael Roberts (Tatler and the Sunday Times Style magazine). Two years later she married her second husband, art dealer Detmar Hamilton Blow (he is a grandson and namesake of the early 20th-century society architect Detmar Blow). Milliner Philip Treacy designed the bride’s wedding headdress and a now-famous fashion relationship was forged.

Why the hats? ‘ ….to keep everyone away from me. They say, Oh, can I kiss you? I say, No, thank you very much. That’s why I’ve worn the hat. Goodbye. I don’t want to be kissed by all and sundry. I want to be kissed by the people I love.

In 1993, Isabella worked with photographer Steven Meisel producing the Babes in London shoot featuring Stella Tennant, Plum Sykes, Bella Freud and Honor Fraser. Isabella had a natural sense of style and a good feeling for future fashion directions. Spotting Sophie Dahl, she described Dahl as “a blow up doll with brains”, and launched the model’s career. During the Babes shoot, Issie told Stella Tennant, ‘If I make you famous, I want a bottle of my favourite perfume.’ A bottle of Fracas duly arrived.

Isabella Blow & Alexander McQueen

Detmar Blow……One of the main reasons my wife became the fashion icon she did was because of her passion for combing the streets in her endless quest for new designers. And her biggest discovery was undoubtedly the incredible talent of Alexander McQueen. I clearly recall how she returned home in London’s Pimlico one evening in June 1992, enraptured by the graduate show of a 23-year-old student from Central St Martins College of Art and Design. There had been no seats left, so Issie simply sat on the stairs and watched the clothes go past her. The student’s name was Lee Alexander McQueen. ‘Det, his clothes move like birds,’ she told me. ‘He can cut material like a god.’ From that very first moment, Issie, who was 33, knew that here was a fashion genius, the likes of which are seen just once in a lifetime.

Isabella bought his entire postgraduate collection, which he presented to her in a binbag, for £5,000, paying in weekly installments of £100, and made herself part of his world. She introduced her favourite milliner to her favourite fashion designer, and the two have collaborated ever since. ‘They both love birds,‘ she explains.

Detmar Blow, recalls the deep bond that united the designer and his muse. I first met Alexander when Isabella invited him to live with us at 67 Elizabeth Street in Belgravia. We were on the top floor, Philip Treacy on the first, and Alexander was on the ground. Issie was working at British Vogue at the time.

Detmar Blow …Issie was the one who suggested that McQueen use his middle name, Alexander, for his designs, as she thought it sounded nobler – like Alexander the Great. And she was a deeply significant creative influence for him, as he acknowledged when he dedicated his fourth show in 1994 to her.

In 1996 Alexander McQueen became chief designer at Givenchy, certainly not without Isabella’s help and determination. But Alexander didn’t give her a job, instead he took Katy England with him to Givenchy. Isabella was very hurt.

Detmar Blow…. his treatment of her, once he hit the big time as chief designer at Givenchy in 1996, all the more deplorable. Brutally, after all the help she had given him, McQueen did not find a role to give Issie at the fashion house. But, despite the hurt, Issie was determined to stay friends with her former protégé. She would continue to be given pride of place in the front row of his shows and he was always welcome down at Hilles. But the balance of power had shifted….

Isabella became fashion director of Tatler and consulted for DuPont Lycra, Lacoste, and Swarovski. In 2002, she became the subject of an exhibition entitled When Philip met Isabella, featuring sketches and photographs of her wearing Treacy’s hat designs. In 2004, she had a brief acting cameo in the film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and in 2005 she starred in a project by artist Matthieu Laurette, commissioned and produced by Frieze Projects 2005 and entitled “What Do They Wear at Frieze Art Fair”. In the same year MAC cosmetics honoured her with a lipstick (named of course): Isabella.

Toward the end of her life, Isabella had become seriously depressed and was reportedly anguished over her inability to “find a home in a world she influenced“. Although Isabella continued to produce incredibly creative shoots, her depression really took hold. In 2003, she had her first spell in a mental health clinic. On 6 May 2007 Isabella made her seventh suicide attempt. When Detmar got to her hospital bedside after she had swallowed poison (weedkiller), he dared hope she might survive, even though a nurse told me she was dying.

After her death, Detmar Blow confirmed that his wife suffered from depression and that she had once declared, “I’m fighting depression and I can’t beat it”.

At the funeral in 2007, Alexander McQueen was utterly devastated, distraught. Isabella was buried in McQueen, in a red-and-gold brocade dress. Alexander McQueen, Philip Treacy and her sister Julia helped dress the body.

Alexander McQueen tribute Spring 2008 show: La Dame Bleue

On entering the white-on-white space the mood had an affectionate nostalgia for Issie Blow, whose favourite Robert Paguet scent, Fracas had been sprayed liberally around the room and pink boxes containing fragrance were on the seats: all denoted that this would be a fitting tribute ~ love was in the air. As her two most successful discoveries and close friends, Philip Treacy and Alexander McQueen collaborated on the show in tribute to Issie

The brilliantly eccentric, beautiful and iconic Isabella Blow lived fashion like no other.

Comments 4 Comments
Categories biography, inspiration

Queen Elizabeth I; Alexandra Byrne, Cate Blanchett & Kirsten McMenamy

11 Nov

I love the costume drama’s Elizabeth (1998) and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) in which Cate Blanchett portrays Elizabeth I as a woman with great political and strategic knowledge, but also the feelings and doubts of a woman of real flesh and blood. Though not only Cate Blanchett’s performance is intriguing, her movie wardrobe consists of true masterpieces all designed by Alexandra Byrne, who got nominated for an Academy Award for Elizabeth I and won an Academy Award for Elizabeth: The Golden Age.

A vintage photograph that Alexandra Byrne posted on her costume mood board of a ruffled Spanish renaissance black velvet dress conceived by Cristóbal Balenciaga in 1941, was the overriding influence for Elizabeth’s court gowns.

Alexandra Burne confesses that she sacrificed historical accuracy to portray the splendorous wardrobe of the monarch who, at the height of her power, had 3.000 dresses in her wardrobe. Elizabeth’s jewelery was made by Erickson Beamen of Belgravia and her plumed heats by Christian Dior’s milliner, Stephen Jones.

The End of the first movie Elizabeth I decides to marry nobody except England. She has her hair cut off by lady in waiting, Kat and assuming the white-faced and gowned persona of the Virgin Queen. A breathtaking movie-moment.

Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I, photographed by Irvin Penn in 2007 for Vogue. Dress by Nicolas Ghesquiëre based on the costume Cate Blanchett wears in the final scene of Elizabeth

W Magazine produced a stunning Queen Elizabeth I inspired fashion shoot entitled ‘Dame of Thrones’ for their September 2012 issue, featuring the story’s heroine Kirsten McMenamy beautifully captured by Tim Walker and styled by Jacob K.