My friend Eddy de Clercq is and has always been a very stylish man. During his teens he regularly went on a ferry-boat to London to buy the newest and hippest clothes. His shopping trips started at Biba, the most fashionable & exciting department store ever and to Seditionairies, the boutique by Vivienne Westwood & Malcolm McLaren at World’s End, where he bought the infamous t-shirt with the drawing of two half-naked cowboys by Tom of Finland.
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In Paris he strolled the streets wearing a black suit with pagoda shoulders designed by Yves Saint Laurent, who had recently opened his store ‘Rive Gauche’. Prêt-à-porter as still a new concept then and Yves was the first haute couture designer to embrace the London street style, as one of the first Parisian fashion designers promoting young fashion at affordable prices in specially designed stores.
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One of Eddy’s style icons, maybe even thé style icon, is Brian Jones, founding member of The Rolling Stones.
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When he was 14, he asked the barber to cut his hair just like Brian Jones. Little did he know that Brian never had a serious haircut in his life, he just grew his blonde tresses into a helmet type of hairstyle that covered his forehead and floppy ears completely. When Eddy’s father came into the barbershop and saw his son’s new haircut, he freaked out and ordered the barber to cut it again, but this time into a very short crewcut, American style.
Tears gushed and Eddy was so upset with the result that he ran away from home, only to return after a few months with a genuine Brian Jones hairdo.
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Biography
Lewis Brian Hopkin Jones was born February 28, 1942 in Cheltenham, UK. Young Brian was an excellent student at school and his father hoped his son would follow in his academic footsteps and go to university, but Brian decided against university and started a series of random jobs. He had only one passion: music.
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After being introduced to the music of Charlie Parker, Brian persuaded his parents to buy him a saxophone. Having mastered that instrument, he received an acoustic guitar. At nineteen, he went to a concert of the Chris Barber Band at Cheltenham Town Hall. The set they played included a blues segment and it stimulated Brian to practice the blues on a slide guitar.
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At twenty Brian hitch-hiked to London where he would go to the Ealing Blues Club. It was there one night Mick Jagger and Keith Richards heard Brian play slide guitar and were impressed with his version of Elmore James’s “Dust My Broom”. Soon after Brian, Ian Stewart, Mick and Keith formed a band. On the 12th July 1962 they played their first gig at the Marquee Club, billed as The Rollin’ Stones.
Brian came up with the name the “Rollin’ Stones” (later with the ‘g’) while on the phone with the venue owner.
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Brian’s musicianship had an inevitable influence on the singles that pushed The Rolling Stones into the pop charts. But he was also one of the ultimate 60′s pop stars, with a creative and cutting edge fashion sense and an iconic hairdo to match.
Though they were sharply dressed, Brian always stood out
The Rolling Stones looked like a clean-cut “boy band”.
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In the early days The Rolling Stones looked like a clean-cut “boy band”. Though they were sharply dressed, Brian always stood out (when they weren’t all dressed exactly the same) and he always played the coolest, quirky guitars. The short time he was in the band, Brian Jones transformed from a young lad keeping it sharp to a man living the full on rock and roll decadence.
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A fashion Icon, sharply dressed and always clean cut, Jones wore meticulously fitted velvet jackets. Always more than often, donned in shirts, some striped, others plain, or patterned and often worn with cravats. Style of an eccentric. Brian was the embodiment of unconventional, his famous blonde bowl haircut, hazel eyes and the aesthetic representation. Decorum and grace were all there.Brian had a tremendous lot of clothes and spent an awful amount of time preparing himself for late-night appearances into the clubs.
Brian Jones & Anita Pallenberg
Brian was featured alongside Anita Pallenberg, in an issue of ‘Men in Vogue’, in 1966.
Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg were a couple from 1965 untill she started dating Keith Richards in 1967. Anita suggested he always tried to look like Francois Hardy. He certainly took a good swing at it, almost hitting the look of darling Hardy, on the very fine nail. Jones’ biographer Geoffrey Giuliano writes about him and Pallenberg: “Together they forged a revolutionary androgynous look, keeping their clothes together, mixing and matching not only fabrics and patterns, but cultures and even centuries. Jones would parade the streets of London wearing a Victorian lace shirt, floppy turn-of-the-century hat, Edwardian velvet frock coat, multi-coloured suede boots, accessorised scarves hanging from his neck, waist and legs along with lots of antique Berber jewellery.”
Marianne Faithfull remembers: One of the best things about visiting Anita and Brian was watching them get ready to go out. What a scene! They were both dauntless shoppers and excessively vain. Hours and hours were spent putting on clothes and taking them off again. Heaps of scarves, hats, shirts and boots flew out of drawers and trunks. Unending trying on of outfits, primping and sashaying. They were beautiful, they were the spitting image of each other and not an ounce of modesty existed between two of them. I would sit mesmerised for hours, watching them preening in the mirror, trying on each other’s clothes. All roles and gender would evaporate in these narcissistic performances, where Anita would turn Brian into the Sun King, Francoise Hardy or the mirror image of herself(Quote from Faithfull by Marianne Faithfull & David Dalton. http://www.amazon.com/Faithfull-An-Autobiography-Marianne/dp/0815410468)
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That blonde bowl haircut that’s so indicative of Brian started to grow out as the suits and striped jumpers were replaced with velvet jackets and shirts with cravats. The jeans got tighter, the boots got bigger.
Beyond the music, trend setting hair style, loves, loathes and lusts, Jones was burdened, like many of his fellow artists, with the abuse of substances such as drugs and alcohol. Brian’s demise was a tragic one, like most of the 27 club ( Music artists who all died at 27 : Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain… and recently Amy Winehouse).
Brian saw his influence over the Stones’ direction slide as their repertoire comprised fewer of the blues covers that he preferred; more Jagger/Richards originals developed, and Andrew Loog Oldham increased his own managerial control, displacing Jones from yet another role. Bill Wyman stated: “There were two Brian’s… one was introverted, shy, sensitive, deep-thinking… the other was a preening peacock, gregarious, artistic, desperately needing assurance from his peers… he pushed every friendship to the limit and way beyond”.
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Brian pulled out of (or actually was forced out) The Rolling Stones in 1969, prior to a planned North American tour. He was unable to join, due to a criminal record for possession of cannabis, but he was also physically no longer able to play instruments. Brian Jones died on the 3rd July 1969, at the age of 27, after he was discovered motionless at the bottom of his swimming pool at Cotchford Farm.
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Book
Brian Jones The last Decadent
“This is the book that every Brian Jones fan has been waiting for, the most sensitive and honest portrait of Brian yet. Finally justice is done.”
‘The life of Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones was as wild as it was short, filled with gorgeous groupies, unimaginable decadence, and groundbreaking music. By age 26, he had achieved enormous fame and fortune; a year later he would be dead. The story of rocks forgotten father, Stoned unravels the mystery surrounding his death while re-living the sex, drugs, and rock and roll that made the sixties swing.’ .
After ending the collaboration with the house of Dior, Roger Vivier opens a new boutique at 24 rue François Premier, across from maison Dior. He consults with aeronautical engineers on the design of his swooping “comma” heel, that became another one of the most copied styles in footwear history.
Comma heel
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Roger Vivier’s collaboration with Yves Saint Laurent
He also creates shoes for top designers and couturiers, like Emanuel Ungaro, André Coureges, Cristobal Balenciaga and features risqué crocodile thigh-high boots for Yves Saint Laurent, who is now designing under his own name.
Another shoe debuts in Yves Saint Laurent’s “Mondrian” collection in 1965. The design has a square heel and a pilgrim-buckle placed on the extreme tip of the shoe, unlike the seveteenthe-century version where it was positioned on the top of the foot.
In 1966 Roger Vivier designs transparent-plastic shoes and boots for Yves Saint Laurent.
Crocodile thigh-high boot
Pilgrim buckle shoe
Transparent-plastic boot
Belle de Jour
In 1967, French siren Catherine Deneuve pairs her Yves Saint Laurent wardrobe with Rogier Vivier pilgrim shoes in the movie Belle de Jour by Luis Buñuel . The movie becomes a cult hit right away and the pilgrim shoe becomes a runaway bestseller, two hundred thousand pairs are sold in one year and is the best sold modelfor Roger Vivier ever…..
‘There’s nothing like a movie that celebrates the Madonna-whore conundrum to get hearts racing and tongues wagging. Throw in English subtitles and Catherine Deneuve in various states of undress, and you have a winning cinematic equation. But while the guys were salivating over Deneuve’s sexy siren scenes, the women were likely captivated by her classic Roger Vivier pumps. Although Vivier had already established himself as a footwear master by the time Belle de Jour came out. The elegant Pilgrim pumps paired with the sleek Yves Saint Laurent wardrobe, and juxtaposed against Deneuve’s character’s sordid double life, elevated the shoes to instant cult status. But trust us when we say you can’t go wrong in a black mid-heel variety. Look what it did for Deneuve’s sex appeal.’
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In 1968 Roger ads scarves and gloves to his collection and a year later Monsieur Vivier men’s department opens in the Vivier boutique, which offers made-to-measure shoes.
Among Roger Vivier’s biggest fans were Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor , who enshrined his exquisite creations in a custom closet; and the cinema femme fatale Marlene Dietrich, who haunted his boutique almost daily and was rewarded with custom black satin pumps held up by glittering rhinestone balls. Vogue’s editor, Diana Vreeland, insisted her maid polish the soles of her Viviers with rhinoceros horn. Included in her vast collection were a dozen each of his pilgrims and rock-star vinyl boots. Vreeland was among the many who regarded Vivier’s work as true art; in her 1977 Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute exhibit, “Vanity Fair,” she contrasted examples of his craftsmanship with that of 18th-century artisans.
Diane Vreeland wearing Roger Vivier boots
Wallis Simpson closet with Roger Vivier shoes
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In 1994 the 86-year-old Roger Vivier signs a new licensing agreement with Rautureau Apple Shoes, which in turn allows him to open a shop in Paris the following year. The Rautureau venture gives Vivier the backing to continue doing what he loves the most—designing shoes. Yet three years later, in October 1998, Vivier dies in Toulouse, France. He is remembered by many, including fellow shoe designer. “People try to copy him, but it’s impossible to find that mix of technical skill and design.” Kenneth Jay Lane, who has worked with the master , declares,
“He was the world’s greatest artist of shoe design.”
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Random collection of Roger Vivier heels, shoes and boots
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Roger Vivier book by Rizzoli
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A gorgeous tribute to the legendary shoe and accessories designs of Roger Vivier. Master designer Roger Vivier elevated both the form and decoration of ladies’ shoes during his sixty-year career. His innate Parisian style embodied a sense of perfection and craftsmanship, and his work was coveted by style icons from Elsa Schiaparelli to Jackie Onassis. Described by Yves St. Laurent as bringing to his work a “level of charm, delicacy, refinement and poetry unsurpassed,” he created the first stiletto heel for a ready-to-wear shoe line with the house of Dior in 1955. His shoes are legendary, and the tradition of his innovative spirit continues with the revival of the house by current designer Bruno Frisoni, who has updated Vivier’s concepts, bringing his own touch to signature shapes and embellishments (including the buckle pump made famous by Catherine Deneuve in Belle du Jour). This lavish volume celebrates the history of the venerated house and charts the current evolution of the fantastic haute-couture designs that keep Roger Vivier at the top of every well-dressed woman’s list. With gorgeous new photography of the house’s collection of vintage shoes, beautifully rendered sketches, and details of the amazing accessories coming out of Roger Vivier today, this book is as chic as the shoes that fill its pages.
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Exhibition
Virgule, etc… in the Footsteps of Roger Vivier
A RETROSPECTIVE paying tribute to the life and work of Roger Vivier is coming to Paris. The exhibition will be staged at the Palais de Tokyo in October, to coincide with Paris Fashion Week, and was curated by Olivier Saillard – director of the Musée Galliera.
The showcase is titled Virgule, etc… Dans Les Pas De Roger Vivier (Comma, etc… In The Footsteps of Roger Vivier), so named after the designer’s famous comma-shaped heels. The exhibition will take the form of “a pastiche of a museum dedicated to shoes”, explains a press release, featuring about 140 footwear designs.
The retrospective will pay tribute to the brand’s eponymous founder, who died in 1998, as well as tracking the more recent history of the footwear label. Roger Vivier was revived in 2000 by Diego Della Valle, chairman of Tod’s SpA, and Bruno Frisoni joined as creative director in 2002.
The exhibition will run from October 2 to November 18.
Roger Vivier is born in Paris, on 13 November 1907. At the age of 9 his parents die and Roger is adopted by Gérard Benoit-Vivier. In 1925 he enrolls in the Ecole des Beaus-Arts, hoping to become a sculptor. When a family friend gives him a job at a shoe factory outside of Paris, where he learns the ins and outs of shoe design, Roger realizes he can make sculptures to be worn. After he finished his job at the shoe factory Roger decides he prefers to learn all aspects of the trade by working in several other factories too and ends his study at art school. This ‘shoe-study’ takes him nine years.
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In 1936 he takes on an offer of Laboremus, a leather distribution firm, the French arm of a large German tannery. He is responsable for predicting trends, advising on which color skins will sell best. At night he is sketching shoes he could make of these colorful skins.
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A year later he opens his first workshop in rue Royale, one of the most prestigious addresses in Paris, carrying exclusive models for private clientele, including Josephine Baker and Mistinguett. A photograph by George Brassaï stirs interest within the profession and Roger begins to collaborate with wold’s greatest shoe manufactures, designing shoes for Pinet and Bally in France, Salamander and Mercedes in Germany, Rayne and Turner in England, Miller and Delman in the United States. His revolutionary cork-platform design is rejected by Delman, but Elsa Schiaparelli picks it up and includes it in her 1938 collection.
Josephine Baker
Dancer and actress Mistinguett
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Just before WWII, Roger takes the last train out of Spain and embarks from Lisbon on the Exeter, one of the last liner to cross the ocean to the United States, where he is invited to continue his work. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the US enters the war and economic recession hits the country. A law is passed restricting the production of any new shoes and Roger is forced to switch professions. With help of Suzanne Rémy, the former head of Agnes, the famous Paris milliner, he learns how to make hats and in 1942 they open a shop called Suzanne and Roger on Madison Avenue. It becomes the Parisian meeting place in New York.
Suzanne and Roger hats
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At the end of the war, Roger returns to designing shoes for Delman. He is one of the first to experiment with see-through plastic. In the early sixties, he creates entire collections in plastic.
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In June 1953 Roger Vivier designs garnet-studded, gold kidskin pumps for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. It made him become extremely famous. It’s amazing to imagine a British Monarch receiving the crown in French shoes.
Replica’s of the coronation shoes
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Roger Vivier makes all of Christian Dior’s shoes for ten years.Together they created a golden era of design.
In 1947, on the boat back to Paris, Roger Vivier meets Christian Dior. When Dior establishes a custom-made shoe line with Delman in 1953, Roger is named designer. After two successful years of custom work, they decide to create a ready-to-wear division. Roger parts ways with Delman. His name begins appearing alongside Dior’s on the label. It’s the first time a Parisian couturier associates himself with a shoemaker for mass-market distribution. .
Christian Dior/ Roger Vivier advertisement in l’Officiel, March 1960
Advertisement Christian Dior/ Roger Vivier, 1961
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In 1954 Roger introduces stiletto heel, at eight centimeters (around three inches) high. Roger Vivier is often credited with inventing the stiletto. Though he didn’t invent it, he certainly refined it. Who invented it still needs to be figured out. It’s more of a group effort: one person coming up with the concept for the shoe, the other person refining that concept. It’s give and take.
The stiletto heel was not invented until after WW II. Prior to the war, no designer ever attempted to create the stiletto because wood couldn’t support the weight of a woman. It would have been the equivalent of walking on chopsticks. After WW II you have the extrusion of steel allowing designers to make steel rods that could support a woman’s weight. .
When Christian Dior dies in 1957, Roger begins collaboration with Dior’s successor, the young Yves Saint Laurent. A year later Vogue hails the new elongated, square-point toebox.
Roger’s square toe is “one of the Paris details that may make fashion history.”
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Roger introduces the “choc” or “Shock” heel, which is inward-curving, in 1959. A year later, a streamlined update of the 19th-century d’Orsay pump becomes a prototype for many copycats. Roger is honored with the Neiman-Marcus Fashion Award.
Three years later, in 1962, the collaboration between Roger Vivier and the house of Dior comes to an end.
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Stiletto heel
Square toe
Choc or Shock heel
(Streamlined and updated 19th-century) d’Orsay pump
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After Roger Vivier ended the collaboration with the house of Dior, he designed shoes for his new shop in Paris and the American versions of Vivier style are manufactured and sold by Saks Fifth Avenue. He also created shoes for top designers as Emanuel Ungaro, André Courreges and Cristobal Balenciaga. He still has to produce his most successful shoe
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Random collection of shoes by Roger Vivier for the house of Dior
Matador César Rincón after a bullfight in Seville. This must be the sexiest picture ever taken of a bullfighter!
The photograph is made by Peter Müller, who was born in Peru. He studied art and architecture at Zurich university before working as assistant to photographer Bert Stern and chief camera operator under director Eddie Vorkapich. After many years living in Spain, working on major advertising campaigns and for various magazines including Vogue, he decided to look more closely at the crafts and lifestyle of southern Spain.
Two books by Peter Müller have been published, featuring photographs of Spanish bullfighter costumes.
Oro Plata: Embroidered Costumes of the Bullfight
Costumes of light
According to Spanish tradition, the bullfighter should never wear his costume outside the bullring. Published for the first time, the greatest stars of the Corrida, resplendent in their elaborately embroidered costumes, are brought to readers in a series of stunning studio portraits. Matadors dressed in gold and banderilleros wearing silver re-enact the dramatic gestures and intricate choreography of their profession, displaying the most artistic, appealing aspects of the bullfight as seen today in Spain, France and South America. Oro Plata and Costumes of light are the perfect showcase for both the colorful history and tradition of these costumes, and for the living legends of the men who wear them.
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Bullfighter’s costume influence on fashion
Ann Demeulemeester ‘matador’ jacket
Jeremy Scott designed these sweaters for Adidas Originals
Jeremy Scott in his matador inspired Adidas Originals jacket
Matador inspired jacket
Moschino 2012
Sarah Jessica Parker in Matador look
And last but not least, the king of dress-up, John Galliano as a Matador
February 14, 2006 a photograph of a pond taken by Edward Steichen sold for more than $2.9 million, easily setting a world record for the highest amount a photograph has sold for at auction, Sotheby’s said (today this record has been broken a few times). The photograph, titled ”The Pond-Moonlight” and taken in Mamaroneck, Westchester County in 1904.
There are only three prints which were made under Steichen’s supervision, and are a great example of a rare vintage photograph by an artist who had an influence on later 20th-century photographers. Steichen’s early painterly photographs, possibly naive to our image-soaked modern eyes, helped establish photography as an art form.
The Pond-Moonlight
A few days ago I went to an exhibition with photographs by Edward Steichen and realised I recognized so many of his pictures, but knew nothing of the man himself. Reading about his tumultuous life, I got fascinated with this multi talent.
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Edward Steichen was born in Luxembourg in 1879, migrated with his parents to the United States only two years later, eventually settling in Milwaukee. In his mid-teens be became an apprentice lithographer and took up photography as a hobby. But his first love was painting and it was painting that inspired him to travel to Paris in 1900.Years later Steichen destroyed the canvasses in his possession, instead he learned to achieve Impressionist effects in his photographs, by blurring his lenses with petroleum jelly or manipulating his negatives and prints in the darkroom.
“If it looked like a painting, it was art”.
(the photographer struggled to gain the recognition as an artist)
Self Portraits
Steichen with his wife Clara Smith .
Steichen’s pictorialist period ended in 1917, when he joined the United States Army and created an aerial photography unit innorthern France to gather intelligence about artillery positions and troop movements behind enemy lines. And after the war, Steichen’s lifelong interest in horticulture resulted in near-abstract images of flowers, plants and insects.
Then he went through a bad and expensive divorce. By 1922, when Steichen was 43, he was undergoing what we now call a midlife crisis. He had serious misgivings about his talent as a painterand told fellow photographer Paul Strand that he was sick and tired of being poor. He needed something to renew his energies and a means of making his alimony and child-support payments.
Flowers
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A crucial change happened in 1923, when Condé Nast offered him a job as chief photographer for Vanity Fair, which meant essentially house portraitist, but regular fashion work for Vogue was also part of the deal, following Baron Adolphe de Meyer, who was fashion photography’s first star. Some of his pears felt like Steichen was selling out to commercialism.
Steichen’s portraits for Vanity Fair brought him new fame. In part because of the status of celebrity subjects as Gloria Swanson and an incredibly handsome Gary Cooper.But on his Vogue assignments Steichen produced pictures as extremely careful and precise as any painting by Gainsborough or Sargent—even though he needed to fill page after page, month after month.
Gloria SwansonGary Cooper
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Steichen’s corner-to-corner attentiveness, coupled with his painterly training, allowed him to make fashion pictures that ranged in style from classic 19th-century illustrations to Art Nouveau and Art Deco. “He was designing with his camera and after starting out as a [soft-focus] pictorialist, he brought sharp focus to bear and had a tremendous effect on the field.”
Typical of his work is a 1933 picture of a model wearing a patterned dress by a designer named Cheney. Steichen poses her in front of a two-tone background covered with calligraphic curves that echo the dress, then adds a white hat, scarf and gloves, a bentwood chair and tulips—all of which make a composition reminiscent of a Matisse painting. But he also used movie conventions to make even studio photographs—which are by definition artificial—appear to be life at its most enviable. If two women and a man sat at a well-appointed dinner table, Steichen made sure that part of another table, set with equal lavishness, appeared behind them, turning the studio into a fine restaurant in which the black dresses and tuxedo found their proper context. Matchsticks and matchboxes study for fabric Piano of Steichen’s own design, one of his favorite props .
Astonishing is a pattern of matchsticks and matchboxes he photographed as a study for a fabric (silk) design. And his work as a designer appears in his Condé Nast work in the form of a piano of his own design he favored as a prop.
In 1937 he ended his contract with Condé Nast and devoted his time to raising Delphiniums (common name “larkspur“). He became an accomplished gardener in France. During WWII he put on the uniform of a Navy officer and never returned to photographing clothes, though he kept taking pictures untill his death in 1973 at the age of 93.
Portraits
Marlene Dietrich Louise BrooksMary HeberdenCarlotta MontereyAnna May WongAnna May WongGreta Garbo
Pola Negri
Katharine Hepburn
Lillian Gish
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Edward Steichen was recognized in his lifetime as one of the great photographers of the 20th century.
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Fashion
Steichen had the instinct of a communicator who was supremely confident in his eye as an artist. And if he was criticized for using art to sell clothes and magazines, he saw no reason to apologize.”I don’t know any form of art that isn’t or hasn’t been commercial,”Steichen said in old age. After all, he added with no small immodesty, Michelangelo also liked to be paid well for his work.
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(information for this post comes from the Smithsonian magazine, article by Owen Edwards)
agnautacouture.com 