Audrey Hepburn wearing Givenchy, photographed by Bert Stern for Vogue, 1963

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Hubert de Givenchy and Audrey Hepburn – a match made in heaven. Similar ages, the French couturier and Iconic screen star immediately empathized with each other – an intimate relationship that continued into old age. 

Givenchy intuitively understood Audrey’s petite frame – the perfect foil it would seem for the sophisticated and ladylike look of the late 1950s and early 1960s – tiny waist, full skirt – often with underlay and a simply cut bodice, often collarless to show Audrey’s swanlike neck. 

In turn, Audrey’s iconic movies served as the perfect environment for the ultimate catwalk – raising Givenchy’s profile. And perhaps due to the timeless design of both the couture and the movies both are still much admired decades later.

“His are the only clothes in which I am myself. He is far more than a couturier, he is a creator of personality.”

Audrey Hepburn

“Balenciaga once said the secret of elegance is elimination. I believe that. That’s why I love Hubert de Givenchy… They’re clothes without ornament, with everything stripped away.”

Audrey Hepburn

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Audrey & Hubert

Start of Audrey Hepburn’s movie career

In the Italian-set Roman Holiday (1953), Audrey Hepburn had her first starring role as Princess Ann, an incognito European princess who, escaping the reins of royalty, falls in love with an American newsman (Gregory Peck). While producers initially wanted Elizabeth Taylor for the role, director William Wyler was so impressed by Hepburn’s screen test that he cast her in the lead. Wyler later commented, “She had everything I was looking for: charm, innocence, and talent. She also was very funny. She was absolutely enchanting and we said, ‘That’s the girl!'”

Originally, the film was to have had only Gregory Peck’s name above its title, with “Introducing Audrey Hepburn” beneath in smaller font. However, Peck suggested to Wyler that he elevate her to equal billing so that her name appeared before the title and in type as large as his: “You’ve got to change that because she’ll be a big star and I’ll look like a big jerk.”

Audrey was nominated for an Academy Award for Sabrina, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Wait until Dark and did win an Oscar for Roman Holiday. She was the first actress to win an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA Award for a single performance.

And than they met

Audrey and Hubert de Givenchy first met in 1953, in a romantic twist of fate that rivals any of her films. He had in fact been expecting Katharine as the Mademoiselle Hepburn he was to dress for the forthcoming picture “Sabrina”. Audrey is said to have arrived in a tied-up T-shirt, tight trousers, sandals and a gondolier’s hat.

At that time the twenty-six-year-old Hubert de Givenchy was already the rising star of French couture, competing with the famous  forty-eight-years-old Christian Dior. The technique of Givenchy was influenced by his mentor and friend Cristobal Balenciaga. After he had worked for the well-known Lucien Lelong and Elsa Schiaparelli, the young designer  opened his own salon in Paris in 1952. His clothes were revolutionary for his time: feminine, yet very simple, and beautifully tailored.

Givenchy was in the middle of putting together his new collection. He suggested to Audrey to choose anything she liked from his current collection, a suggestion that satisfied her.  According to Givenchy, Audrey knew exactly what she wanted to have, as well as the fine points and faults of her body. She only wanted to adapt some designs… This would eventually become an incredibly popular  fashion style named after the film.

“Sabrina” would win only one Oscar, for the costume designs, and Edith Head would take all the credit. Audrey Hepburn felt very sorry for Givenchy, she called him immediately in Paris to apologize.

“I was very touched, but told her not to worry, because Sabrina had brought me more new clients than I could handle,” Givenchy recalled. “But Audrey was still upset, and she made a promise to me that  in the future she would make sure that it never happened again. And she kept her promise. This was one of the most marvelous things about her. She thought constantly of others.”

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Perfume

It was meant for Audrey’s personal use, and was given to her as a surprise. She loved it. Because many of her friends wanted to have it also, she kept asking Givenchy to put L’Interdit on the market. As soon as the designer was ready to launch it, Audrey offered her help for the advertising campaign. The color ad with a beautiful photo of Audrey Hepburn made by Richard Avedon, stated: “Once she was the only woman in the world allowed to wear this perfume. It was the first time the world had seen an actress as the face of a perfume.

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Pixie Haircut

Audrey Hepburn by Richard Avedon

A pixie cut is a short hairstyle worn by women, generally short on the back and sides of the head and slightly longer on the top. Pixie cuts were popularized first in the late 1950s when Audrey Hepburn wore the style in her debut film Roman Holiday, and later in the 1960s by actress Mia Farrow and British supermodel Twiggy.

Hair cutting scene in Roman Holliday 

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Auction

The clothes worn by Audrey Hepburn in the many movies she made are auctioned of through the years, like when Kerry Taylor previewed her Audrey Hepburn auction in Paris, 2,000 people showed up, including Hubert de Givenchy, who’d designed most of the dresses on display. Taylor introduced a little crowd control for Monday’s London preview—you had to buy a £10 catalog before you got in the door—but if the turnout was substantially smaller, it was just as avid. No surprises there: Given Hepburn’s unimpeachable style icon status.

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Book

Vogue on  Hubert de Givenchy

The fashions of handsome, aristocratic Hubert de Givenchy combined the traditions of haute couture creative, luxurious and perfectionist with a modern entrepreneurial sensibility. In a career spanning forty years he created the most glamorous of evening dresses, developed the influential ‘sack’ dress, pioneered the princess silhouette and fielded debonair daytime suits that have never gone out of fashion. He famously defined the sartorial image of Audrey Hepburn both on-screen and off creating the Sabrina neckline and the little black dress for Breakfast at Tiffany’s. A history of chic caught by leading photographers and illustrators, Vogue on Givenchy reveals what the magazine called his ‘stardust touch’.

 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vogue-Hubert-De-Givenchy-Designers/dp/1849493138

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information for this post : Wikipeia, Famous Women and Beauty & Vogue

Kurt Cobain

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March 04, 2013     Paris, Saint Laurent a/w 2013 by Hedi Slimane

By Tim Blanks     (edited version)

California grunge was the inspiration for Hedi Slimane’s second women’s collection for Saint Laurent.

With a little adjustment, that’s a pretty fair description of what Slimane has been trying to do with Saint Laurent. The legacy today was grunge, not YSL; the longing was his own ardent attachment to a scene that was a continent and an ocean away from a kid in Paris at the beginning of the nineties. Slimane is not the only designer motivated by a powerful impulse to reimagine youthful yearnings. Anna Sui and Marc Jacobs (for Perry Ellis, s/s ’93 collection) immediately spring to mind as masterful mediums of pop-cultural watersheds like The Factory or the Beats. And of course, it was Jacobs who famously lost a job over his original recasting of grunge in a high-fashion context.

But there was no job on the line, no sense of present danger, with Slimane’s collection today. And with regards to that adjustment, there was no expert skirting of nostalgia. Almost nothing looked new. Which didn’t trouble Alexandra Richards, Alison Mosshart, and Sky Ferreira in the least. Such dream clients were all thrilled by what they’d seen. “That’s the way I dress anyway,” was their party line on the baby dolls, the schoolgirl slips, the vintage florals, the random mash-ups of sloppy cardigans, plaid shirts, and sparkly dresses accessorized with ironic strings of pearls and black bows, fishnets and biker boots. All well and good, and money in the bank for retailers etc., etc., but anyone expecting the frisson of the future that Slimane once provided would have to feel let down yet again. At the odd moments when he allowed it to happen—as in a cutaway jacket over a plaid shirt over slashed black leather cuissardes—there was a glimpse of the kind of rigorous sensibility that hybridized passion and fashion into an irresistible force at Dior Homme.

But wouldn’t it be radical if Slimane was actually saying that there is nothing new under the fashion sun, that all that ultimately exists is the energy and inspiration you derive from those elements of the past that you value and love. The same kind of fanboy ardor makes, say, Shibuya 109 in Tokyo or Trash and Vaudeville in New York such wonderful retro romps. This collection will undoubtedly send orgasmic tremors through such places.

Hedi Slimane’s Saint Laurent a/w 2013

Grunge music is inspired by Alternative rock, hardcore punk, heavy metal, punk rock, hard rock and indie rock, Grunge fashion is a combination of the same, but it’s also boyfriends and girlfriends wearing each others clothes. And the ultimate icons of Grunge are Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love in the late 80ties and early 90ties.

Grunge

“Grunge is nothing more than the way we dress when we have no money,” designer Jean Paul Gaultier told Vogue in 1993, the year fashion co-opted the look. It had grown out of the raw, messy scene surrounding the raw, messy sound—produced by a bedraggled pack of flannel-clad Pacific Northwest dropouts—that was suddenly the talk of the fashion establishment.

Grunge’s Goodwill aesthetic was, as Gaultier observed, largely born of necessity; it was functional, too (flannels for warmth, boots to keep out the wet). In 1989, Everett True, reporting in Melody Maker about an upcoming band call Nirvana, had drawn readers’ attention to the authenticity of an emerging music genre: “Basically, this is the real thing. You’re talking about four guys in their early twenties from rural Washington who wanna rock, who, if they weren’t doing this, would be working in a supermarket or a lumberyard, or fixing cars.” The grunge-grunge style (as opposed to fashion-grunge) was slept in, picked up off the floor, swapped, scrounged from the ragbag. It was a sartorial representation of nihilism that had been evolving among members of the college-rock and hardcore underground for more a decade but was only just beginning to meet the commercial mainstream via MTV.

“Punk was antifashion,” James Truman, then editor in chief of Details, said. “It made a statement. Grunge is about not making a statement, which is why it’s crazy for it to become a fashion statement.” Truman’s quote appeared in The New York Times in November 1992, the month that Grunge was served up to Seventh Avenue by a trio of young downtown designers: Marc Jacobs at Perry Ellis, Anna Sui, and Christian Francis Roth. (At Roth, models were accessorized with laminated backstage Nirvana passes strung on ball chain.) The shows’ immediate impact was one of those tempests in a teapot that are rehashed with relish in the fashion annals.

Critics were then, and remain, divided over the new up-from-the-street look. The English actress Sophie Dahl, then an impressionable pro-Grunge teenager, would later reminisce in Vogue: “The word itself was antisocial, the premise antidotal to what had gone before. The style was perfect for that awkward stage of adolescence, layers that one could shrug off and hide behind, an armor of sorts.” In contrast, the fashion critic Suzy Menkes distributed “Grunge Is Ghastly” buttons among her colleagues.

Jacobs, the prime mover of the trend, described his infamous grunge collection, which eventually cost him his job at Perry Ellis, to the Times as a “hippied romantic version of punk.” Visually, the look dovetailed neatly with the neogypsy chic coming out of Europe and modeled by Madonna on the October 1992 cover of Vogue. Yet grunge was, on a deeper level, more about garages in Granite Falls than ganja on the beach in Goa. And unlike the bondage pants and shellacked mohawks of punk, it wasn’t just low-maintenance, it was no-maintenance. The faux-real grunge aesthetic was a difficult fit for fashion, which is—by the very nature of the beast—marketed with aspirational images and biased toward fantasy.

“Your rendition of grunge fashion was completely off,” one disgruntled reader complained in a letter to Vogue. “If the whole idea is to dress down, why picture models in $400 dresses? No one who can honestly relate to the music labeled grunge is going to pay $1,400 for a cashmere sweater (especially when they can buy a perfectly comfortable flannel shirt for 50 cents at the local thrift store).

It irked retailers in the extreme and, materially speaking, didn’t amount to much. Jacobs’s famous collection was never even produced. Still, the movement was a game changer. It challenged the status-oriented status quo, and introduced a layered, rumpled new silhouette. “All fashion is loosening up, in an apparent rejection of the hard-edged styles and attitudes of the ’80s,” observed a reporter for Knight Ridder Newspapers in the seminal year of 1992. “Grunge is the realization of that backlash at its most extreme. And ugliest.” (Vogue, too, would later lump the “clunky downtrodden look” among the “worsts” of the 1990s.) And while grunge disdained—or just didn’t think about—the hierarchies of fashion, it also played loosey-goosey with gender. Though a male-dominated scene, it embraced androgyny. “In the wake of an overload of macho,” the journalist Charles Gandee wrote in Vogue the following year, “and with the rise of the gamine, a new breed of young actors, models, and musicians is reshaping our idea of what’s attractive in a man.”

Fashion images, both in advertisements and in editorial pages, began to attempt to represent what was “real.” The photographer Juergen Teller talked about this sea change in the March 1994 issue of Vogue: “We’re not this generation of finding a girl with tons of jewelry attractive—nobody has to have some bloody nose job and breast implants,” he said. “We live in very hard times, and that’s why the people in my pictures maybe look a bit fucked-up or, you know, maybe tired. Because life is tiring.”

Grunge & Glory

Vogue US December 1992 Steven Meisel (this story was based on the grunge collection Marc Jacobs presented for Perry Ellis)

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La fièvre Grunge

by Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott for Vogue Paris September 2013

(shortened version)

information : www.style.com  and  http://www.vogue.com/voguepedia/Grunge

I have been fascinated by traditional costume for as long as I can remember. Not only the Dutch traditional costume, but from countries all over the globe. Whenever I travel, I always try to find something of the regional clothing. It can be shoes, a handbag, jewelry, a hat or an element of the clothing, for men or women.

Vaguely I remember cycling to my grandmother on Sundays, together with my mom. Grandma was dressed in traditional clothing every day and it made her look very impressive. Together with my grandfather, she lived in the village they were born and had grown up in and there a lot of the older people were still wearing the lace caps, embroidered vests and I don’t know how many skirt piled over each other. Strangely enough I don’t remember much of my grandfathers clothes, but I think it was traditional too.

Through the years, many designers have been inspired by traditional clothing.Cristóbal Balenciaga was influenced by the Spanish folk tradition, being from Spain himself, but other designers were also influenced by clothes from all different countries. John Galliano and Alexander McQueen produced several collections inspired by China, Mongolia, Japan, Russia, etc. And in 2007, Viktor & Rolf created a collection on Dutch folk costume: tapestries, checks, and pure white buttoned-up blouses,  their fall 2007 collection.

Dutch Traditional Costume from different districts

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Viktor & Rolf fall 2007 ready-to-wear collection

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most pictures in this post come from:  http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20665/20665-h/20665-h.htm  and  www.style.com

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