Photo’s by Arij Den Otter, Devastator

During the 1960s women’s clothing fashions assumed a more significant role in American society than ever before. Reflecting the shifting political culture of the time, the styles were more rebellious than the rigid designs of the 1950s.

“Hippies,” college-aged youth bent on making a political statement, favored relaxed, comfortable and natural clothing such as blue jeans and tie-dyed T-shirts. More acceptable, were “modern” fashions characterized by bright colored bellbottoms, revealing mini-skirts, and hyper tailored designs.

Models who advertised the new fashions were young and appealed to a youth-driven Baby Boom generation. Among them was Colleen Corby, who became a cultural icon among the teen girl crowd.

One of the first young models to capitalize on the sensual look while retaining an innocent sweetness, Corby graced the cover of “Seventeen Magazine” an unprecedented 15 times during the decade. She also appeared on the covers of “American Girl,” “Teen Magazine,” “Ingenue,” “Co-Ed,” “Glamour” and “Mademoiselle” and modeled for “Simplicity,” “McCalls,” and “Butterick” sewing patterns.

Short Biography

Born on Aug. 3, 1947, in Wilkes-Barre, Colleen Corby was the eldest daughter of Peggy and Robert Corby, a public relations executive. She was raised nearby in Luzerne, where she led a “nice, normal childhood.“

“There was really nothing extraordinary about my childhood,” Corby recalled in an interview. “Just like all the other kids, I walked to school, came home for lunch and played outside after school.”

The only exception to the “normalcy” was modeling. As a child, Corby began posing for the Boston Store in Wilkes-Barre, usually doing back-to-school advertisements. Her career took off when the family moved to New York City in 1958. Two weeks after walking into Eileen Ford’s modeling agency (supposedly to look for a summer job), Corby was sent on her first modeling assignment, a cover shoot for “Girl Scout Equipment” magazine.

By the end of the summer the assignments were coming so steadily that her parents enrolled her in Manhattan’s Professional Children’s School, which allowed for the irregular schedules of actors and models.

With her dark brown hair, glowing skin and piercing, green eyes, Colleen attracted the attention of several teen magazine editors and posed for the covers of the “Girl Scout Magazine,” “American Girl,” “Teen,” and “Co-ed.” She was already an experienced model by age 16 when she first appeared on the cover of “Seventeen” in April 1963.

“Seventeen” was a magazine that helped to shape teenage life in America by running music and movie reviews, identifying social issues and celebrating icons of popular culture.

During the 1960s, the magazine was also becoming a major influence in defining notions of beauty and style among adolescent females. Girls combed its pages, choosing their favorite brunette and blond models – Terry Reno, Joan Delaney, Rinske Hali, Wendy Hill, Jennifer O’Neil, and, of course, Colleen Corby – usually depending on their own coloring. 

At 5 feet 7 inches and just 107 pounds, Colleen was more petite than some of the other regular “Seventeen” models, but her alluring combination of unmistakable innocence and tempered boldness made her an ideal cover girl for the magazine. During the 1960s, Corby’s image appeared on the cover an unprecedented 15 times (five times in 1964 alone), and seemed to be on every other page. As a result, she became a hero for a whole generation of 13- to 18-year old girls.

In a profession filled with sensitive egos, Corby was somehow able to bond with a fairly small group of models who appeared together in the ads and editorial pages for “Seventeen.” They played off one another so smoothly that Corby was comfortable taking center stage or complimenting the lead of another model.

Model Sisters Colleen & Molly Corby

Unlike today’s supermodels, Corby lived quietly in a Manhattan apartment with her businessman father, stay-at-home mother and little sister, Molly, who was also a model. Between modeling assignments, she spent time doing homework, listening to Andy Williams records and answering her considerable fan mail.

“To be honest, modelling was just a job like any other job,” said Corby. “I didn’t get carried away with it because my family kept me grounded. Though we lived in New York City, my parents’ value system was shaped by the Wyoming Valley. They stressed hard work, doing one’s best and maintaining a sense of humility.”

Mid-1960s

During the mid-1960s, Corby’s popularity was at its peak. She had blossomed into a wholesome young woman whose 32-23-33 measurements attracted a new, adolescent male audience. Her image seemed to be everywhere: TV commercials, magazines and catalogs.

Naturally comfortable before a camera, Corby signed a multi-year movie contract with Universal Pictures. “Acting wasn’t really something I wanted to do,” she admitted. “As a model I had to take acting lessons and I was offered the contract. But I never actively pursued it”

By the 1970s, Corby’s teen market had vanished, but she continued to appear in magazines like “Glamour” and “Mademoiselle.” She was also a fixture in the catalogs of major retailers like Sears and JCPenney.

1970s

Corby retired from modeling in 1979 after her marriage only to return briefly to the profession in the early 1980s. After giving birth to two sons – Alexander and Christopher – she left New York and the fashion world for good and turned her full attention to raising a family.

“I had no regrets about walking away,” said Corby. “I wanted to get married and to have children, and you can’t really raise a family and be a full-time professional model. Besides, I was always very busy doing a lot of volunteer work at my sons’ schools.” Corby’s last public appearance came in 2000 on the “Oprah Winfrey Show,” though she had some initial reservations. “I had put the modeling career in the past, and I really didn’t want to do the show,” said Corby. “But Oprah’s producers kept calling me, and many of my friends encouraged me to do it.

“As it turned out, the appearance was a very pleasant experience. I enjoyed meeting Oprah and was flattered to find out that I was her favorite model as a child. Apparently, she even papered her bedroom walls with some of the covers I did for ‘Seventeen.’

Corby, now age 68, believes she was fortunate to have been a fashion model in the 1960s. “It was a very different industry than it is today,” she said. “You didn’t have the same pressures (i.e., short deadlines, intense competition, anorexia, designer drugs) that now exist. We were very protected, especially working for ‘Seventeen Magazine.’ The Ford agency was also very careful with young models. It was just a more innocent time.” That innocence can still be found in the smiling face of an 11-year-old Corby who appeared on the cover of “Girl Scout Magazine” 50 years ago.

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Written by William Kashatus 

Info: http://citizensvoice.com/arts-living/colleen-corby-teen-fashion-icon-of-the-1960s-1.215293

Yves Saint Laurent & Piet Mondrian

No art and fashion collaboration list would be complete without the classic and iconic Yves Saint Laurent dress inspired by artist Piet Mondrian. Saint Laurent released the 1965 dress for the Autumn season; its simple A-line, and tidy shift silhouette was typical of the mid-sixties. What was perhaps less typical was the clear allusion Saint Laurent was making to Mondrian in his uses of graphic black lines (running both horizontally and vertically) and white and primary color blocks. Its seamlessness is deceiving—the dress is made up of many of individual pieces of wool jersey and was hand-assembled to hide obvious seaming. This dress is not only an icon for Western fashion but also records the importance of Mondrian’s work during the period of the 1960s.

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Yves Saint Laurent & Andy Warhol

Yves Saint Laurent and Andy Warhol (two men who need no introduction) collaborated in 1974, Saint Laurent is the subject, and the product is a silkscreen image of a youthful Yves by Warhol himself. The work is done in a style similar to Warhol’s other works-an even square divided into four equal quadrants. The portraits are paired diagonally, but the paired images are painted in decidedly different and fanciful ways. The painting stands today as a commemorative gesture to the great fashion designer. Although the painting itself is not a garment or accessory per se, the object stands a reflection of the intimate ties between the culture of fashion and art.

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Comme Des Garçons & Cindy Sherman

This 1994 collaboration with internationally acclaimed photographer, Cindy Sherman, and Rei Kawakubo, still holds an edge over a lot of the more recent fashion photography campaigns. Sherman is best known for her self-portrait series Untitled Film Stills that feature a number of typified feminine characters. Sherman, inspired by Kawakubo’s already pointedly unconventional fashion sense is driven to create a campaign equally unique. The coquettish personalities of her Film Stills are replaced by the slumped, unhappy and imperfect female persona. These photographs confront the consumer with a model that isn’t particularly ideal at all; she floats in isolated contemplation, caught forever pensive in the frame of Sherman’s photograph. Cindy Sherman would go on to a number of other fashion-related collaborations moving forward with names like Marc Jacobs and Balenciaga.

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Comme Des Garçons & Merce Cunningham

Rei Kawakubo first started designing under the name Comme des Garçons in 1969, and since then she has been making her name known as one of the foremost avant-garde fashion designers in the world. Merce Cunningham was making himself known under similar terms, but within the dance context. Kawakubo had always “shared similar creative philosophies with Merce Cunningham, including interests in engaging multiple artistic disciplines and aggressively pushing the boundaries of the unknown.” After Cunningham’s initial offer to give her complete freedom in designing the costumes and the set, Kawakubo declined. As myth has it, while working on her notorious spring collection of 1997, titled “Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body,” she changed her mind. The collection was an aggressive response to her feelings of boredom with fashion. She padded the dresses in a way to reshape the body under new circumstances—her own circumstances. Similarly to the “Body Meets Dress” collection, the costumes Kawakubo designed for her collaborative work with Cunningham (tilted Scenario) featured the same “irregular bulges on the dancers’ hips, shoulders, chests, and backs.” Wearing these costumes altered the dancers’ proportions, their balance, sense of space, and even their fundamental extent of movement. 

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Marc Jacobs & Juergen Teller

It all began in 1998, and many of us can’t even remember what Marc Jacobs (the brand) looked like before Juergen Teller. Teller’s overexposed and slightly rosy tint make his photographs feel more like adventurous polaroids between friends than esoteric fashion photography. His imagery is playful but always with a little tinge of deflation, grunge or raunchiness—like Jacobs’ clothing. Since the auspicious beginnings of the Teller-Jacobs collaboration in 1998, Marc Jacobs’ ads have become a celebrity fashion yearbook with notable subjects like Winona Ryder, Sofia Coppola, Helen Bonham Carter, Dakota Fanning and photographer Cindy Sherman.

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Alexander McQueen & Björk

This epic relationship began when Icelandic native Björk released her fourth record, Homogenic in 1997 – and the image that held the album cover got nearly as much press as the music. The “elfin chanteuse” her fans had come to love had transformed into a different almost unrecognizable creature; a creature that, today we know was borne from her collaborative conversations with then, 26-year old Alexander McQueen. “When I went to Alexander McQueen, I explained to him the person who wrote these songs—someone who was put into an impossible situation, so impossible that she had to become a warrior…a warrior who had to fight not with weapons but with love.” The respective work of these two creative geniuses seemed to discuss similar themes of man, nature and machine. The two went on to collaborate several times: McQueen directed Björk’s video for “Alarm Call,” and in 2003, the pair reunited for a Fashion Rocks! performance, where she sported a McQueen gown and crystal mask for the finale of her performance. McQueen was also responsible for Björk’s fantastical bell-covered dress worn in the 2004 video “Who Is It?” And in a 2003 conversation between Björk and McQueen with Index magazine, he said of his own designs that sound like it could have come from either virtuoso, “my work is always in some way directed by nature. It needs to connect with the earth. Things that are processed and reprocessed lose their substance.”

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Marni & Rop van Mierlo

Italian-based brand, Marni, continues its playful collaborations with artist and illustrators from around the globe. Perhaps one of the most successful choices has been with Dutch artist, Rop van Mierlo. Mierlo, based out of Amsterdam, is best known for his children’s book Wild Animals, which won the Best Dutch Design Award in 2011. The book features pages of blotchy, watery-diffused animals: a snake, a rabbit, a lion, a pig, and a squirrel to name a few. He describes his process as interested in “creating animals he could not control”—how romantic. Though the entirety of Mierlo’s aqueous menagerie is not featured in Marni’s collection—released in mid-January of 2013—his donkey, parrot, ostrich and tiger don the tops, purses, and scarves of many of the most popular looks. In a recent interview with SSENSE Mierlo was asked, “Your animals seem soft, gentle and sweet. In the world of the wild animals you paint, would a tiger ever eat a pig? Would a dog ever bite an ear?” In response he said, “I sure hope so. Otherwise the pig bites the tiger in the rear.”

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Louis Vuitton & Takashi Murakami

Amidst the millions of anime eyes and smiling flowers of Tokyo-born pop-artist Takashi Murakami’s 2007 exhibition “Superflat,” was the world’s most indulgent museum shop. Monographs, posters, and key chains were reserved for MOCA’sactual in-house store, a Louis Vuitton pop-up establishment with thousand-dollar totes. The monogrammed merchandise featured familiar characters and motifs of Murakami’s and was specially designed for the in-situ boutique. The gesture was an unprecedented one for any American art museum, and in an interview at the opening of the exhibition, supermodel Linda Evangelista was asked by a reporter, “What do you think of this synergy of art and fashion?” Her response, “Well, it certainly makes fashion more interesting.” The collaboration that began in 2003 as multicolored L’s and V’s had evolved into so much more. 

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Louis Vuitton & Yayoi Kusama

2012 was a good year for Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. She is best known for her use of polka dots, and a retrospective exhibition of her artwork was shown at two major international museums over the course of one year. If you don’t recognize her name, you may have seen the dotted flower sculpture of Beverly Hills or theYellow Trees that enveloped the Whitney Museum development in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan. Kusama told Women’s Wear Daily, “Marc Jacobs came to see me in Tokyo in 2006, and he asked me if I wanted to come to the States and do fashion. That sort of encouraged me because…Fashion has always attracted me.” From this 2006 encounter, blossomed a series of garments, window fronts and shop designs that—thanks to Jacobs’ collaboration—made Kusama’s artistic visions come alive across the globe. Unfortunately, the clothes paled in comparison to the graphic and hypnotic storefronts. Most notable was London’s Selfridge department store that featured Kusama’s favored giant pumpkins—and subsequently, a completely sold out collection. Printemps in Paris donned mirrored window fronts with polka dotted mannequins and silver baubles reminiscent of Kusama’s 1966 Narcissus Garden work.

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Raf Simons & Sterling Ruby

Belgian fashion designer, Raf Simons, invited German-born, Los Angeles-based artist, Sterling Ruby, in 2008 to use his “Tokyo boutique as a canvas.” Sterling’s intervention transformed the store’s interior from a clinical white space into something that in some ways is hard to describe. The walls were left white by Ruby, and in his typical style, appears to have haphazardly thrown paint everywhere and ended up with something beautiful, simultaneously minimal, and chaotically expressive. The plinths used to display the clothing are black with bleach splashed across them (a technique favored by Ruby in his textile manipulation work), which creates a seductive and unifying tension between the architecture holding the clothes, and the greater structure holding the entirety of the shop. Simons brought on Ruby to create a unique capsule collection following the same aesthetic theme of Tokyo boutique installation the following year. Simons and Ruby have continued their collaborative relationship as recently as 2012, when Simons created fabric with images of four of Ruby’s recent works. The textiles debuted as a part of Simon’s premiere haute couture collection with design house Christian Dior.

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Info: http://www.complex.com/style/2013/04/the-50-best-artist-collaborations-in-fashion/

Issey Miyake was born on April 22, 1938, in Hiroshima, Japan. In the 1960s, he designed for Givenchy in Paris, after which he designed for Geoffrey Bean in Manhattan. In 1970, Miyake started his own design studio. During the 1970s, he toyed with avant-garde Eastern designs. In the 1980s, he began using technology new East meets West textiles. He started Pleats Please in 1993 and A Piece Of Cloth in 1999. 

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Short Biography

Issey Miyake, original name Miyake Kazumaru, is a Japanese fashion designer best known for combining Eastern and Western elements in his work.

Miyake studied graphic design at Tokyo’s Tama Art University, and after graduation he moved in 1965 to Paris, where he enrolled at the renowned tailoring and dressmaking school École de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. He began his career in 1966, working behind the scenes for four years in ateliers operated by a trio of 20th-century fashion legends—French couturiers Guy Laroche and Hubert de Givenchy as well as the meticulous American designer Geoffrey Beene. In 1973, three years after he established a Tokyo studio, Miyake displayed his own independent collection in a Paris group fashion show and developed the layered and wrapped look that became his trademark.

Tokyo Design Studio

1977

1997

Soon the New York department store Bloomingdale’s devoted a section to selling Miyake’s “East meets West” look—mostly T-shirts dyed with Japanese tattoodesigns as well as coats featuring the sashiko technique, a Japanese embroidery that strengthens fabric and was typically incorporated into labourers’ clothing. Miyake became an internationally recognized name in the 1980s together with Japanese designers Rei Kawakuba and Yohji Yamamoto, who presented their avant-garde creations alongside his fresh, boldly coloured work during the Paris ready-to-wear collections.

East Meets West

In the late 1980s, he began to experiment with new methods of pleating that would allow both flexibility of movement for the wearer as well as ease of care and production. In which the garments are cut and sewn first, then sandwiched between layers of paper and fed into a heat press, where they are pleated. The fabric’s ‘memory’ holds the pleats and when the garments are liberated from their paper cocoon, they are ready-to wear.

Pleating

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1994/95

He also developed a friendship with Apple’s Steve Jobs and produced the black turtlenecks which would become a part of Jobs’ signature attire. Jobs said, “So I asked Issey to make me some of his black turtlenecks that I liked, and he made me like a hundred of them.”

A-POC

In 2005 the Japan Arts Association awarded Miyake a Praemium Imperiale for outstanding achievement in the arts. In 2006 he became the first fashion designer to receive the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for lifetime achievement, awarded by the Inamori Foundation in Japan; the prize included a diploma, a 20-karat-gold prize medal, and 50 million yen (about $446,000). The organization singled out as seminal the clothing line Miyake developed in 1993 called Pleats Please, which “allows unrestricted body movement while enabling the fabric to maintain its form,” and A-POC (“A Piece of Cloth”), which was made from a single thread with the aid of an industrial knitting or weaving machine programmed by a computer. Miyake had begun experimenting on A-POC more than 10 years earlier with textile expert Dai Fujiwara before launching it commercially in 1999. Insisting that A-POC was an ensemble piece, he refused to imprint his name on that collection. He sold it simply as a long tube of jersey, and it was then up to the customer to cut and shape it.

In 1994 and 1999, Miyake turned over the design of the men’s and women’s collections respectively, to his associate, Naoki Takizawa, so that he could return to research full-time. In 2007, Naoki Takizawa opened his own brand, supported by the Issey Miyake Group and was replaced, as a Creative Director of the House of Issey Miyake, by Dai Fujiwara.

As of 2012, he is one of the co-Directors of 21 21 DESIGN SIGHT, Japan’s first design museum.

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Books

East Meets West by Issey Miyake

ISSEY MIYAKE East Meets West
[Heibonsha Limited, Publishers, Tokyo]
ISBN 4-582-62001-9

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Pleats Please

PLEATS PLEASE ISSEY MIYAKE

Taschen

ISBN 978-3-8365-2575-6

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Origami

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info: http://www.britannica.com/biography/Issey-Miyake