ZIGZAGGING...

Exquisitely beautiful, chic e impacting is the new collection Armani Privé Haute Couture Spring 2013, presented by designer Giorgio Armani in the Paris Fashion week (PFW), where an enormous 'zigzagging' white line, came from the background through over the black catwalk, that glowed in alternating colors, depending of the outfits passing by, illuminating   the decadence, the silky looks and the stunning liquidity from the Privé collection.

The 'leitmotiv' of this collection are the oversize cylindrical 'scepter' brooches, to fit the outfits, and the Fez hats, that were used by Andalusian Arabs in the city of Fez in Morocco by the 17th century.

Focal point are the 'zigzagging' line  and Asiatic Floral motives presented in the rich brocades and print fabrics, and in the borders of the silhouettes of the jackets as well, giving a Moroccan spirit to this impacting collection.

The color use in this collection is magisterial, beginning with the plum and violets tones, and the 'eternals'   Armani gray and silvers. But the colors which stole the show were the intense 'poppy' red and 'blackest of blacks' that created a big visual impact in the catwalk.

The collection that borrows from both, the masculine tailoring and the exotic fascinations of the 1940s all at the same time was unusual, hyper-modern, and slick.

'Kicky' silhouettes, composite for trim trousers, and gazar jackets, with tight cuts and unforgiving tailoring, are magnificent. The lovely, 'Mikado' silks, are fascinating and appropriate, to create a collection that was both 'edgy and restrained' with excellent diverse pieces for day and evening.

I love the spaghetti straps red dress, fastened over the bust with an oversize cylindrical 'scepter' brooch that been a leitmotive of the interne run of the show and looked like fitted for a modern royalty. The overall effect of this collection was one of in strength and I am pretty sure that many movie stars will be tempted to use some of these designs in the Red Carpet.

Enjoy the video...

HAND - IN - HAND...

On last Tuesday 22 January 2013, Karl Lagerfeld presented Chanel's Spring/Summer 2013, Haute Couture Collection. As usual the event was quite the spectacle and the looks were presented in a romantic forest backdrop inside of the Grand Palais.

Like the set, Lagerfeld showed us a very romantic and feminine collection, bringing the  ‘new gothic beauty' looks to Chanel's couture show in the Paris Fashion week (PFW) where the outfits that include both, tailored and more billowing silhouettes, jackets and dresses with focus squarely on shoulders with a special panels that looked like armor. The outfits were complemented with a dramatic styling where the dark 'smoky eyes' were the protagonist.

It was all glamour at the Grand Palais, but... the 'Gothic Beauty' Collection took a bigger 'Spin' when at the ending of the show, the German designer, reinventing the traditional bridal finale by ending the show, brought to the stage not one, but two brides, dressed in identical wedding gowns, 'hand-in-hand', and the controversy started...

The two brides in the catwalk.  Lagerfeld can be seen in the background.

The president Barack Obama is not the only prominent figure to advance the gay rights now, also his homolog, the current president of France, François Hollande has plans too, to legalize gay marriage and thus allow same-sex couples to adopt and conceive children. But not everyone in France agrees that's the way to go. On Jan. 13, hundreds of thousands of people marched in Paris to oppose such a law.

Asked if his use of lesbian couture at his show was designed to support gay marriage in France, Lagerfeld replied: "Of course it was."

"I don't even understand the debate. Since 1904 (in France) the church and state have been separate," the German-born designer told The Associated Press. 

The truth is that Lagerfeld created a proposal according to the problems that many countries currently have about gay marriage, consciously or not, I think he did great controversial and this sets tongues talking good or bad, but what I am pretty sure is that, if your intention was to put into the arena the Chanel's name, really made it.  Applause for Karl, because the controversial sells.

Enjoy this 'Floral Gothic' Collection...

The 'V' of 'Y'...

'Y Project' is a new laboratory experiment brand, launched for the French Designer Yohan Serfaty, who started his own line in 2008, where he develops his esthetics, mixing all materials and especially, leather, witch became the heart of his collection. 

'Y Project' starts from the fact that the fashion industry, and especially men’s fashion, is in full creative renewal. New shapes, new materials enable the conception and the creation of innovative clothes, in line with the metamorphosis of the sensitivity and behavior of men around the world. 

'Y Project' is an extension of the designer’s personality and esthetics values. Indeed, this is where he looks for his inspiration and not from trend presentations or other creators’ vision. Each collection is timeless, with some details or their construction evolving over time, while staying faithful to the same general esthetics and creative principals.

The new 'Y Project' catwalk, started with a ‘V’- shaped formation of chairs inserted in the catwalk, where they were seating the models and lit  by a matching 'V' of down lights, where the models looked like enigmatic 'laboratory men' inside an  experimenting room of a science fiction movie.  After that they started moving trough the 'Y' shaped catwalk.

See the beginning of the 'Y Project' new fashion experiment performance show'…

MASSIMO...

MASSIMO VITALI 

Massimo Vitali is an Italian photographer, born in Como, in 1944, who studied photograhy in London. He first worked as a photojournalist in the 70s and then as a movie camera operator. His more recent work is fine art photography. For many of his works, Vitali stands on a podium four or five meters high, and uses large-format film cameras to capture hign-resolution details over a broad expanse in locations such as beautiful beaches and pools. 

In a recent interview when someone ask him, where do you feel most inspired? "When my tripod is set up on the right beach" said him.

And to the following question, about What does him considered her greatest achievement?

"To have transformed the way of taking pictures from the simple search for a photo to remaining static, seeing things from a personal point of view. The concept accounts for more than the photo" him answered.

What him, never imagined, was the fact that this beautiful pictures from the pools, could be choose used someday for any fashion designer, like a visual texture, but Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, creative designers for Proenza Schouler, used the creative and colorful, FADDISH pictures, like one of the subject of the last collection, where the dresses looked like a moving pictures, showing a rich visual message to delight the eyes.

Enjoy the video...

GLOWING IN THE DARK...

                        ARTIST KOO JEONG-A'S GLOW-IN-THE-DARK SKATE PARK

A FIREFLY

A '90S RAVE

I love when the Art meets Fashion and one sample of this is the last Alexander Wang’s Spring 2013 collection, where one of the subject was the Glow - in - the dark skate park, designed for Koo Jeong-A, and located on Vassivière Island in France, an living artwork, that is meant to live and be used, providing a sensorial experience to skaters and spectators alike. This project has a luminescent coating applied to the concrete sculpture, that produce the same effect that a beautiful fireflies at night on the dark, and was this together with the '90s rave, the principal subject of the last Wang Collection.

A mixed music and mixed subjects, to produce vanguard fluorescent light silhouettes.

Enjoy the collection...

ECLIPSE BLUE by KOO...

Koo Jeong-A was born in Seoul on March 13, 1967. Her subtle installations, which allude to the histories of Performance and Conceptual art while poetically highlighting seemingly unimportant everyday items and materials, often border on the invisible.

For the exhibition Unfinished History at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (1998), the artist created a shelter in the corner of the gallery, where she hid during the installation of the exhibition. When the shelter was removed, the artist had filled the corner with papier-mâché. This trace of her presence was titled Humpty Dumpty. Oslo (1998) is a miniature landscape of crushed aspirin on a small wooden base in the corner of a dimly lit room, and South (2000) consists of an overheated room and a mound of red earth assembled on a table.

Koo worked as an artist-in-residence in the Augarten Contemporary, part of the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna, in 2002. That same year, she had a solo exhibition at the Wiener Secession, titled 3355, for which she locked herself into the gallery space twenty-four hours prior to the exhibition opening and again created an installation of personal detritus.

In 2007 she produced a series of installations under the title Oussseux for the Centre International d’Art et du Paysage in Ile de Vassivière, drawing from the term “ousss” that she invented to signify a childlike, whimsical quality that defines many of her works.

For Dreams and Thoughts (2003–08), hoards of unwrapped sticks of gum were stacked ad infinitum into small mounds in the gallery space, reminiscent of the cigarettes she orderly amassed in a corner for 3355.

Koo has had solo exhibitions at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1994 and 1997), Moderna Museet in Stockholm (1998), Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2004), Centre International d’Art et du Paysage in Ile de Vassivière, France (2007), and Pinksummer in Genoa (2008), among other venues. She has shown regularly in group exhibitions since 1994, including the Venice Biennale (1995, 2001, and 2003), Kwangju Biennale (1997), International Triennale of Contemporary Art in Yokohama (2001), Biennale of Sydney (2004), and Performa 05. In 2002, she was a finalist for the Guggenheim Museum’s Hugo Boss Prize. She lives and works in Berlin and London.

'THE SUBVERSIVE'...

"Eccentricity is such a badge of honor to be given in these conformist times" ...Westwood's maxim, 1941.

Vivienne Westwood, (born in 1941) the original and outrageous, British designer is one of the most recognized and influential designers of the late twentieth century, largely responsible for bringing modern Punk and new wave fashion into the mainstream.

By her mid twenties, Vivienne Westwood’s life seemed to be passing in a distinctly unremarkable way. At 25, she was married to an air steward; she lived in Willesden, went to church and taught in a local primary school. Then something remarkable happened, she met Malcolm McLaren, future manager of the Sex Pistols, and he led her into the underground of the late 1960’s street. He lectured her on the political power of art and liberated her creative desires from their bondage in working class conformity and Westwood became a subversive seamstress of pop.

Westwood came to public notice when she made clothes for Malcolm McLaren's boutique in the King's Road, which became famous as 'SEX'. 

Westwood was deeply interested in the punk fashion phenomenon of the 1970s, saying "I was messianic about punk, seeing if one could put a spoke in the system in some way". It was their ability to synthesize clothing and music that shaped the 70s punk scene, dominated by McLaren's band, the Sex Pistols. 

Elected three times like the British Fashion Designer of the Year in 1990-1991 and 2006, this vanguard designer, is the reference point to follow for mostly designer that found her collections, the best subject of inspiration to develop its commercial collections.

The 2013 Fashion Revolution has already begun with the autumn / winter 2013-2014, men collection, presented in Milan, by Vivienne Westwood. This show is totally irreverent and could be defined as extremely “subversive", Eccentric, but extremely chic too. 

The British designer takes on the catwalk models that are like returning from an insurrection, a not- violent, but beautiful insurrection, full of creativity, where Westwood faithful to her eclectic style, where it is mixing clothing, slightly mocking, from people of the British good society, are set it to living together with the street wear and instead of yell, her clothes did it, and graphically shouted slogans.

Enjoy the collection...

'MUSEUM MILE'...

Museum Mile is the name for a section of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan in the city of New York, in the United States, running from 82nd to 105th streets on the Upper East Side in a neighborhood known as Carnegie Hill. 

The Mile, which contains one of the densest displays of culture in the world, is actually two blocks longer than one mile.  Nine museums occupy the length of this section of Fifth Avenue. (Metropolitan Museum of art, Guggenheim Museum, Frick Collection and so on) witch line the Avenue (the Whitney Museum, a block to the east, is also close by).

But this part of Upper East Side is a museum in itself, dedicate to the mansions built at the beginning of the Century.

A tenth museum, the Museum for African Art, joined the ensemble in 2009, however its Museum at 110th Street, the first new museum constructed on the Mile since the Guggenheim in 1959, won't open until late 2012. In addition to other programming, the museums collaborate for the annual Museum Mile Festival, held each year in June, to promote the museums and increase visitation.

'LES MIS'...

Les Misérables is a 2012 British musical drama film, based on the musical of the same name by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg which is in turn based on Les Misérables, the 1862 French epic novel by Victor Hugo (1802-1885) that is considered by many to a great novel of the nineteenth century. 

The film is directed by Tom Hooper, scripted by William Nicholson, Boublil, Schönberg and Herbert Kretzmer, and stars an ensemble cast led by Hug Jackman, Russell Crowe,   Anne Hathaway, and Amanda Seyfried.

The novel follows the lives and interactions of several characters, focusing on the struggles of ex-convict Jean Valjean, who becomes mayor of a town in France. Soon exposed, Valjean agrees to take care of Cosette, the illegitimate daughter of a dying Fantine, but as a fugitive must also avoid being captured again by police inspector Javert. The plot spans 17 years (1815-1832) and is set against a backdrop of political turmoil, which in the film culminates in the June Rebellion of France that was an unsuccessful, anti-monarchist insurrection of Parisian Republicans.

Les Misérables premiered in London at the Empire, Leicester Square on 5 December 2012, and was released on 25 December 2012 in the United States, on 26 December 2012 in Australia, and on 11 January 2013 in the United Kingdom. The film has received divided, but generally positive reviews, with many critics praising the acting of Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway.

The film won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy, the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor, for Hug Jackman and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress, for Anne Hathaway. It is currently nominated for nine BAFTA Awards, including Best Film, Best British Film, Best Actor in a Leading Role (Jackman) and Best Actress in a Supporting Role ( Hathaway) and eight Academy Award nominations that include Best picture, Best Actor (Jackman) and Best Supporting Actress (Hathaway). That's why Les Misérables is the most FADDISH movie of the year.

IN BLACK and WHITE...

If you are in New York, you have the last chance to see the interesting exhibition, Through January 23, "Picasso Black and White", from one of the most-recognized figures in 20th, century art, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), at the Guggenheim Museum, located in the area called, the Museum Mile, at 1071 Fith Avenue, between 88th and 89th Street.

"Picasso Black and White is the first exhibition to explore the remarkable use of black and white throughout the Spanish artist’s prolific career. Claiming that color weakens, Pablo Picasso purged it from his work in order to highlight the formal structure and autonomy of form inherent in his art. His repeated minimal palette correlates to his obsessive interest in line and form, drawing, and monochromatic and tonal values, while developing a complex language of pictorial and sculptural signs.

 The recurrent motif of black, white, and gray is evident in his Blue and Rose periods, pioneering investigations into Cubism, neoclassical figurative paintings, and retorts to Surrealism. Even in his later works that depict the atrocities of war, allegorical still lifes, vivid interpretations of art-historical masterpieces, and his sensual canvases created during his twilight years, he continued to apply a reduction of color.

Picasso was born in Málaga, Spain, on October 25, 1881, to María Picasso López and José Ruiz Blasco. His father, a painter, art teacher, and curator, encouraged his son to become an artist after quickly realizing Picasso’s astonishing artistic gift. Following his studies in Spain, he settled in Paris and embarked on an extraordinary career to become the most influential figure in twentieth-century art.

Managing a complicated composition without having to organize contrasts of color, Picasso created such masterpieces as The Milliner’s Workshop (1926), The Charnel House (1944–45), and The Maids of Honor (Las Meninas, after Velázquez) (1957). 

The graphic quality of Picasso’s black-and-white works harks back to Paleolithic cave paintings created from charcoal and simple mineral pigments (Female Nude with Guitar, 1909), to the tradition of grisaille (Study for Sculpture of a Head [Marie-Thérèse], 1932), and to European drawing (Man with Pipe, 1923). 

Picasso used this distinctive motif to explore a centuries-long tradition of Spanish masters, such as El Greco, José de Ribera, Francisco de Zurbarán, Diego Velázquez, and Francisco de Goya, whose use of black and gray was predominant.

Picasso’s palette reveals the development of a unique working process, which he pursued until his death on April 8, 1973, in Mougins, France. His innovative works in black and white continue to influence artists today. This chronological survey, spanning 1904 to 1971, includes paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, all of which highlight the artist’s choice of black, white, and gray in lieu of color."

By Carmen Giménez, Stephen and Nan Swid Curator of Twentieth-Century Art, with the assistance of Karole Vail, Associate Curator.

WITH BELGIAN ACCENT...

Rene Magritte pictures(up)

Dior's 2013 campaing

 A new Minimalist vision has the ready-to-wear collection of Raf Simons, the Belgian, and current Creative Director at Christian Dior; which is running parallel and in perfect harmony, with the new Dior campaign, the one complementing the other, as a perfect visual team.

The campaign lense by the also Belgian, Willy Vanderperre, is sleek and colorful yet completely understated, following Simons aesthetic. The stage  has a clear influence from the also Belgian surrealist painter, Rene Magritte  where models and flowers look like floating in the space, as well than in the catwalk.

While previous Dior campaigns gave focused on one well-known model - most recently Karlie Kloss, and previously the likes of Kate Moss and Gisele Bündchen - Simons has opted to use four relatively unknown beauties; Daria Strokous, Anna Martynova, Diane Conterato, Nicole Pollard and Marie Piovesan.

For this Collection, Raf Simons takes the codes of Mr. Dior and transposes them to make the Haute Couture dynamic. It is this looking back to go forward and for instance he takes the architectural symbolism of the 'Bar' suit, which goes to many permutations, as do the ligne 'A' and ligne 'H' jackets in the collection; pleats are inserted architecturally, but perhaps what is most significant is the transformation of the jacket into a mini dress. This new jacket - dress together with the recurring "mini" silhouette are the key motif in the collection.

Enjoy the video... 

See what Raf Simons said about his spring summer 2013, ready-to-wear, collection...

" I am a fan of Minimalism", says Raf Simons. "It is a conceptual approach I like, but it is not the only I like. Neither is it only one type of woman that I want to appeal to".

THE 'BAR'...

Christian Dior, backstage, before  showing his Collection

In 1947, Christian Dior (1905-1957) presented a collection, which he called 'La Ligne Corolle', silhouettes with sloping shoulders-line, the wasp-waisted and hips-padded designs, that required myriad underpinnings, that in this case were built in rather than purchase separately. The American press inmediately dubbed it the 'New Look' and the name endured.

The 'New Look' became one of most distinct and recognizable silhouettes of the twentieth century. In contrast con the early 1940s femenine dresses, which borrowed heavily from masculine military uniforms, the 'New look' exagerated the curves and contours of the femenine forms.

To create this ideal female body, the 'New Look' relied on a rigid framwork of strategically placed padding and boning, not to mention corsets and petticoats. The full skirts of the 'New Look'  required a tremendous amount of fabrics, up to 15 yards in some cases.

After the restriction and rationing of the World war II years, the 'New Look' was escandalous in its extravagant usage of raw materials and in its presentation of the female body.

Though perceived as shockingly new, the 'New Look' was actually a return to the physical ideals of the later nineteeth century and a continuation of a trend interrupted by World War II.

Despite these precedents, when it appeared in 1947, and without been affected by official complains, the 'New Look' was a resounding success, a watershed moment of fashion. Though other silhouettes achieved popularity in the 1950s, the 'New Look' informe all subsequent fashionable silhouettes throught the 1960s.

The signature esemble of the 'New Look' was the 'Bar' suit, a two-piece suit consisting of a pale, fitted jacket with narrow waist, padded hips and a black ,mid-calf, knite pleated skirt, considered the most popular and Iconic model in Dior first Collection, manifesting all the attributes of Dior's dramatic atavism.

Harper Bazaar published detailed line drawings of the 'New look' contruction, and the'Bar' suit was also illustrated in Vogue and L'Officiel magazines.

     The "Bar" suit of Christian Dior, lense by Willy Maywald