2013年05月31日
Central Saint Martins' Reveal 【VOGUE UK】
MAO USAMI walked away as winner of the L'Oreal Professionel Award at Central Saint Martins' BA graduate fashion show last night - a strong and varied offering from this year's crop of students that played to pastel or neon strengths and more often than not wandered into homespun and crafty realms.
"I'm proud of them all for doing it. It requires being fearless which I wholly believe in. They're young and courageous. There was some real attitude and balls there, it felt exciting and I wish them well," prize-giver of the night and Celine creative director Phoebe Philo told us post-show. She was joined by master of ceremony Giles Deacon in her praise.
"It's incredible to get a collection together really when you're still at limited means but there was some super good creativity and something for everyone," he enthused.
Womenswear designer Usami showcased a collection that was causal to the core and riffed on American sportswear and PE kits and showed us that socks are the new shoes - the way to wear them is too long at the toe so that they attempt to trip you up as you walk (luckily no models made that mistake on the catwalk). Usami was joined by fellow students Narae Park and Giacomo Cavallari in the end-of-year celebrations, both of whom scooped second and third prize spots respectively - the former for bottle-soled slippers, bucket bags and stiff floral shapes, and the latter for glossy colour-blocked menswear accompanied by cutaway shoes to reveal jazzy-jaunty socks.
It was a night of fashion that teased the senses in every which way - from the humour of stuffed toy animal heads among Akiko Nei's collection and brick shoes from Xu Yuan Xin to the extensive and elaborate use of texture, embroidery and the touch of the human hand.
"The use of the sound in the clothes, mixed with the textures for amazing blends," noted CSM alumnus and designer Mark Fast. "I loved the easiness and the overall continuity of the show as a result."
And one of its key themes was hand-craftsmanship - ensembles that were underpinned by nostalgia, making do and mending, recycling and largely rejecting the cyber gloss and body-consciousness or techno-prints that we have so largely seen sweep across the student board in the past. Here, boys were playing at being frou-frou drag girls drenched in drama (James Buck), girls were playing at being punk rock gypsies (Matthew Bovan), and everyone was happy to make a very big statement - be it the broad shoulders of the great graffiti numbers from Beth Postle, the pretty quilted neon florals of Yoshimi Mita's serious silhouettes or the accessories to end all accessories (huge silver blocks, discs of sculptures) at Samuel Yang.
School's out for another summer - and with it a whole new set of ideas and designers to keep an eye on.
2013年05月22日
Anna Piaggi's Costume Drama【The Wall Street Journal】
When the style icon died last year, she left behind a colossal stockpile of clothing and accessories, the true extent of which only she knew. Now her family is struggling to find a permanent home for what might very well be the world's largest, unruliest most thrillingly unexplored closet.
Portrait ©David Bailey; Styling by Agnes Shultz
PORTRAIT BY DAVID BAILEY | Piaggi photographed for AnOther Magazine in 2003, wearing a hat designed by her friend Stephen Jones.
IN THE CAPRICIOUS WORLD of high fashion, there are two types of collectors: those who treat their acquisitions with white-glove care, cataloguing their inventory inside temperature-controlled shrines; and those who rip off the price tags, wear the hell out of their garments and then shove them back in their closets. Unsurprisingly, each views the other as deeply foolish.
Anna Piaggi, the late Italian fashion idol and longtime contributor to Italian Vogue, was the ultimate spontaneous and undisciplined fashion worshipper.
Until her death at age 81 last August, Piaggi lived with a vast collection of clothing in a dark and cluttered Milan apartment, where she continually begged her landlord to rent her extra rooms to accommodate an ever-expanding sartorial inventory. By the end of her life, 40 rolling racks had overtaken every wall in every room, where priceless pieces by Poiret from 1912 tangled with modern-day Dior and McDonald's staff uniforms. This supremely stocked closet was the source of the riotous outfits Piaggi created every morning, offsetting layers of valuable historical costumes, contemporary haute couture and worthless dime-store finds with her waves of dyed-blue hair, cupid-bow lips and powdered-white face.
"She was not a fashion curator," says designer Karl Lagerfeld, who first met Piaggi in the early '70s. "She lived with her clothes, old and new, and never paid attention to them in a special way. They were part of her daily life."
Piaggi died of a heart attack while watching TV at home alone. She was scheduled to finalize her pages for Italian Vogue's October 2012 issue the following morning, but she never made it to the meeting. With no children of her own, her clothes and accessories were passed on to her brother, Alberto. Overwhelmed by the size and significance of their inheritance, he and his son, Stefano, called Judith Clark, professor of fashion and museology at University of the Arts London, who had collaborated with Piaggi on a popular exhibition dedicated to her style at London's Victoria and Albert Museum in 2006. "We met down in the basement of her apartment building to see the clothes she had never shown anyone," Clark recalls of meeting Alberto and Stefano after Piaggi's funeral. "They were in one of the worst states of conservation I've ever seen, but at the same time, [her collection] was full of historic gems."
Piaggi's estate also piqued the interest of Milan's former cultural assessor, Stefano Boeri, who wanted to lay the foundation for the city's first fashion museum using the clothes. Alberto put Clark in touch with Boeri and together they began talking about creating a professional database for each piece, hoping to find a permanent home for them at Milan's Fabbrica del Vapore. But in March, Boeri was fired, and the plan disintegrated.
The collection now hangs untouched in her brother's storage space, its future uncertain.
DESPITE HER VERY LOUD LOOK S, Piaggi was a quiet woman. "She was very discreet," says Italian Vogue's editor in chief, Franca Sozzani, who worked with Piaggi for 23 years. "I never knew anything about her personal life."
Born in Milan in 1931, Piaggi was inducted into the fashion world by the photographer Alfa Castaldi, to whom she was married until his death in 1995, and with whom she collaborated on Arianna—one of Italy's first women's magazines—and the avant-garde publication Vanity. But her style compass was set by vintage dealer Vern Lambert, a longtime friend who introduced her not only to the allure of old clothes but to Karl Lagerfeld. (Her relationship with him was recorded in Karl Lagerfeld: A Fashion Journal, a book published in 1986 of his many sketches of Piaggi and her clothes.)
"The period after Vern Lambert died [in 1992] started to be a sadder period of her life," remarks Lagerfeld, who fell out with Piaggi around the same time. But even so, Piaggi continued to enthusiastically champion designers, acting as both muse and client to young names like Gareth Pugh and established talents such as Manolo Blahnik, who famously called her "the only authority on frocks left in the world." Another of her closest relationships was with milliner Stephen Jones—beginning in the '80s, she capped off every one of her looks with a hat bursting with anything from fruit and fur to a warped clock and dead pigeons.
Though she spent nearly a half century contributing to Italian Vogue, where her doppie pagine—double-page spreads of collages of text and images—revealed esoteric cultural references and an academic knowledge of fashion, Piaggi was best known for how she got dressed in the morning.
Whether it was for a lightbulb-flooded front-row seat along a runway, or a banal trip to the butcher (where she once ordered a slab of beef in 15th-century Milanese chain-mail regalia), her outfits were laborious constructions of fashion theater. "My philosophy of fashion is humor, jokes and games," she told WWD in 1978. "I make my own rules." She wore giant Union Jack capes with 19th-century pantaloons; nurses' uniforms with Manolo Blahnik boots; and dresses whose 'page layers' made her look like a walking novel.
Some might say Piaggi was a precursor to the conspicuously costumed bloggers, editors and aspiring glitterati who now populate fashion shows, hoping their pictures will end up online. But Sozzani disagrees. "You can't even compare the two—those people are sponsored by brands, and it's more like watching shop windows," she says. "Anna never wore something because it was the latest skirt or newest shoe. She experimented with fashion on herself and liked to have a story for each object she was wearing."
Those stories were about '20s Chanel dresses, costumes from the Ballets Russes and an entire wardrobe created in the 1870s for a Roman princess by Charles Frederick Worth (the world's very first haute couture designer), bought for her by Lagerfeld. But even with highlights such as these to give shape to her closet, its full extent remains a mystery. "Anna was the only one who had access to the clothes and who understood where everything was," says Moreno Fardin, Piaggi's assistant of 16 years. "Every once in a while she'd call me in to help her move a rack and then discover something—like the beautiful [Pierre] Cardin she got married in. She never archived anything."
For the 2006 Victoria and Albert exhibition, Piaggi provided the museum with a list of her wardrobe's contents: 265 pairs of shoes, 932 hats, 2,865 dresses, 1 exercise bike and 31 feather boas. "I am rather certain Anna made all of that up," says Clark. "She didn't have a clue as to what was in her closet."
When it came to getting dressed, Piaggi's intimacy with her clothes came quite literally at a price. "When you wear the dress, you also wear it out," says Pat Frost, director of textiles and costumes at Christie's. "Its value goes down, and it is much less likely it will end up in a museum." Conversely, in perfect condition, high-end couture can yield big results. A '30s design from Vionnet, according to Frost, can fetch over $75,000, while Christie's sold a Schiaparelli jacket for nearly $100,000 last November.
In 2009, when Christie's auctioned a small portion of Piaggi's best historical pieces, the 17 garments in the lot yielded an unspectacular $51,867. "The only truly successful item was a Jean Paul Gaultier cone dress [sold for $20,000]," says Rome-based fashion historian and curator Enrico Quinto. "This is a woman who used to use a Fortuny dress as a scarf. She was cutting and customizing her pieces. Anna desanctified the clothing. She deconsecrated it."
What now lays in storage is an assemblage of garments that reflects a full life. "The collection is more interesting as a whole rather than in single pieces," says Clark. "It's an accumulation of her looks and moods and how she wanted to dress up that day." But what's to be done with a collection that gives equal weight to Juicy Couture as Dior Couture? Alberto and Stefano Piaggi are hoping to organize a series of exhibits in Milan, "and maybe even a fashion show of her clothes," says her brother. "I don't think Anna would've liked to have been in a big museum."
Clark has offered to help the family make sense of the inventory. "It is such an idiosyncratic collection, and the point of the archive is to reveal exactly that," she says. "I think by documenting everything, we will keep all possible interpretations alive"—just the way Piaggi liked to dress.
記事はこちら⇒ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324715704578481230138795900.html
投稿者 unicon : 12:23
2013年05月09日
Harold Tillman To Chair LCF Fundraising Committee 【VOGUE UK】
HAROLD TILLMAN has been appointed chair of the London College of Fashion's fundraising committee. The former British Fashion Council chairman takes on the role with immediate effect.
Tillman will support the college's efforts to secure scholarships, awards and commercial partners for its students. His tenure at the BFC ended in January 2013, when he was succeeded by Natalie Massenet. The businessman is also a trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and was awarded a CBE for services to the fashion industry in June 2010.
"We are delighted to welcome Harold as chair of our fundraising committee because of the enormous wealth of experience that he brings," said Professor Frances Corner, head of LCF. "We constantly strive to provide a supportive and creative environment for our students, which ensures that we continue to produce some of the industry's most talented professionals. This makes our fundraising efforts vitally important."
News of Tillman's appointment follows the recent announcement that the Countess of Wessex will be a patron of the school for the next three years.
投稿者 unicon : 10:12
2013年05月07日
GALLERY: Swarovski X CSM jewellery students 【Professional Jeweller】
Swarovski has teamed up with third-year Central Saint Martins jewellery students, encouraging them to push the boundaries of design using Swarovski Elements and Swarovski Gems, with the theme of Fiction and Fanstasy. Design by Emily Wright.
記事はこちら⇒ http://www.professionaljeweller.com/pics-12935-gallery-swarovski-x-csm-jewellery-students/
投稿者 unicon : 11:10