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WWD announced last week that Karl Lagerfeld will be shooting the 2011 Pirelli Calendar. The shoot with all the sexy top models is scheduled for April at Karl’s studio. Last year, the coveted calendar was shot by the libidinous Terry Richardson, and we’re curious to see how Karl will respond to the project’s traditional heterosexual charge….
The Maison des Arts et de la Culture de Créteil’s quality annual international performance festival EXIT opens this week. The 2010 edition presents a total of ten different performances and installations which explore the concept of how movement and technology, humans and the digital world, are connected with one another. Scoop: Philippe Starck has prepared especially for the festival, in collaboration with Soundwalk, and at the instigation of Dalbin, a ‘performance show’, a ’sonic exploration’ searching for humanity’s missing sound (Fri 19, Sat 20 March). Also, avant-garde NY theatre group Temporary Distortion present ‘Americana Kamizaze’, an East meets West psychological horror story that fractures reality and narrative and described by The New York Times as ‘Mind-blowing video images and theatrical tension, a nightmarish pop aesthetic that deserves your attention’ (Thu 18, Fri 19, Sat 20). You can download the complete festival program here. A number of ticket options are available, but it’s worth noting that for only 50€ you can attend every single performance of the festival! Parisian couture house Carven recently named Guillaume Henry (alumnus of both Givenchy and Paule Ka) as AD and his reasonably-priced daywear is making quite a splash. Asked what the the sixty-something year old label should do to rejuvenate itself, the 31 year-old Mr. Henry replied (by text): kill couture. Carven was largely responsible for the 1950’s high-end department store juniors’ line concept: pared down ready-to-wear for future couture consumers. So giving the label a shove towards faster-fashion shouldn’t arouse too much reprobatory French tongue-clucking. His impressive first collection, for S/S 2010 – silk blend mixes of coquette and career – can be found in Paris at Colette, Farida and Maria Luisa.
Fur! It’s a wonder there are any beasties left in the trees after 4 consecutive fashion weeks saw more fluff, scale, and skin rolled out than we’ve seen in the last two decades. Activists screamed for Gaultier’s hide, and he wasn’t even the biggest offender. Viktor & Rolf, Chapurin, Valli and Rick Owens’ show notes included SAGA Furs’ logo in the footer. But the resurgence of real fur isn’t quite as noteworthy as the Paris establishment’s acceptance of fake fur, notably at Chanel and Margiela. Serial fur recidivist Karl Lagerfeld presciently bucked the trend, choosing fake furs that varied from camp to convincing, though the spectacle of all that frothy outerwear parading around an imported iceberg was so desirable you didn’t care if any of it had ever been alive.
Mid-century Mélange: Maybe it’s the influence of cult US series Mad Men or maybe it’s because the forties have been done to death, dug up and done again. But the 50s and 60s are back and with none of the insufferably smug tongue-in-cheekiness usually reserved for their look and texture. Dries, Rochas, Miu Miu, Giles and – with BBC costume drama verisimilitude – Vuitton brought out the elegant conformity and sexual rebellion of the period with startling – and highly wearable – results.
Gothic: I almost wrote Belgian Gothic but I want to lock up Yves Saint Laurent in the same tower as Anne Demeulemeester and Haider Ackermann – even if it would be against Stefano Pilati’s will. We could tie him up with some of Anne’s whipcord. YSL’s bourgeois convent girl made mourning look hedonistic and Demeulemeester’s formal resignation was very adult but never madame.
Leather: Maybe I should have put this with furs but the story here isn’t about texture so much as colour: dark sand (Chloé), cognac (Haider), and patent (Karl and Céline) were dominant with matte blacks and browns in supporting roles (Hermès).
Minimalism: Whatever that means. For Céline’s Phoebe Philo it wasn’t anything prickly or cerebral. Philo used minimalism’s artificial simplicity to underscore the luxury of her tailoring and fabrics. Givenchy’s Riccardo Tisci seemed to be channeling some part of Helmut Lang’s brain and sketching it all in modernism’s signature colours: red, black, and white.
The Beige Coat: It showed up everywhere, like a young woman making her grand début, with everyone dutifully noting in their pads and blackberries: “little beige coat, uh-huh…” Chloé had the look cornered, as usual, with a buttery-blonde horde of seventies Dunaways marching out in handsome pieces full of tailoring tics imported from that decade’s bourgeois menswear.
The Parisian métro is starting to feel more and more like home. For a new advertising campaign, Ikea has set up its sofas and lamps in four stations: St. Lazare, Champs-Elysées Clémenceau, Concorde, and Opéra. For two weeks, metro commuters can wait for their trains on couches from Ikea’s new Ektorp and Karlstad collections. The brand is hoping to demonstrate the quality and durability of their products via the ‘bum test’ of thousands of Parisians.
We’ve all heard of Cannes and Sundance, but what about The European Independent Film Festival? Taking place at Left Bank arthouse cinema Le Grand Action and Le Triomphe this weekend , the European Independent Film Festival (ÉCU) seeks to discover, promote and screen the very best independent filmmaking talent from across the world, focusing particularly on Europe. Over the course of the weekend, 72 films from 28 countries, including feature films, short films, experimental films and documentaries, will compete for the title ‘Best European Independent Film 2010′. Alongside the film screenings, ÉCU organises a number of workshops led by industry professionals, including sessions on scriptwriting, editing, acting and directing, all of which are open to the public. In addition, festival-goers will have the chance to participate in Question and Answer sessions with some of the filmmakers and attend music events organised by Access Film-Music. “Curtains”, directed by Julian Barratt & Dan Jemmett, is competing in ECU 2010’s European Dramatic Short category. Check out this teaser: Paris this season has been particularly tribal, with clan identities breaking out in very different directions: midcentury revivalism chez Dries, Rochas, and Giles, a healthy dose of Belgian Gothic chain-rattling at Demeulemeester and Ackermann, the neo-minimalists at Céline and Givenchy, whole zoos’ worth of fur creeping around at Chapurin, Chanel, Gaultier, etc. And then there’s Chloé’s beige-bourgeois Breck-girl army of 1970’s archetypes. Hanna MacGibbon deserves credit for plunging Chloé into a purifying acid bath of WASP minimalism and hacking away at all of the trivial, girly logo-mania of the golden age. The collection was anything but diverse and save for a few flashes of strikingly bad taste – I’m sorry but Southwestern style fringed leather pants should only be worn with turquoise jewellery, Virginia Slims, bourbon breath and a Texas accent – made for the kind of clean, aspirational purchases working women make in times of austerity. MacGibbon also brought us a beige fantasia last spring so it seems the formula’s working for someone. To be fair, this collection was richer in colour and texture – leather piping on woolens and large-gauge seventies knits, and even a passage of black leather which must have caused the designer many a sleepless before being rubber-stamped. And the 1970’s yearbook photo hair and makeup were spot-on.
Originally part of the same photographic movement as Martin Parr, celebrated artist Karen Knorr has transitioned from her earlier documentary style to one defined by the imaginary. With works exhibited at the Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou, this London-based artist is certainly no stranger to the museum space, but it is this very space on which she now fixes her artistic gaze. Photographing arts institutions with one eye trained on the fantastic, Knorr transforms what can often be forbidding, inaccessible, and static into something playful and unexpected (not to mention slightly mischevious). And Knorr has done just this at the Musée Carnavalet, where her recent series of large-format photographs of the museum now hang. Entitled Fables – Photographie, this collection of works pictures all manner of woodland fauna roaming the luxe apartments of the Musée: pigeons flutter manically around flawless blue satin, and squirrels climb over 18th-century armoires. Knorr was inspired by the fables written by Aesop and La Fontaine, but in picturing this animal transgression of such a sanctified cultural institution she is also asking visitors to reconfigure their relationship to the space of the museum itself – to reinvent and re-imagine it.
Martena Duss and Sissi Holleis have just opened this original new neighbourhood project, a ‘café couture’ where sewers can make their projects come alive. The cosy atelier space is available to anyone who wants to rent one of the ten Singer workstations for just 6€ per hour, or for a whole day (25€) in a cyber-cafe style set-up. The Sweat Shop also offers daily workshops taught by professionals in the industry and held in small groups of 5 to 10 (20€-80€); the program is here. We recommend Sat afternoon’s (2-6pm) Custom Atelier: ‘Where excentric fashion meets extreme customizing!’, by Vava Dudu. Coffee and home-made cake (from neighbour Bob’s Juice Bar) will set you back just 5€. The Sweat Shop is also open to anyone who wants to just repair and recycle old clothing, but doesn’t have the luxury of a sewing machine of their own. Their mantra: ‘Less buying – more trying !’ (Btw, there’s a special opening party next week Tue 16 March from 4pm with drinks, cake, and music by The Peter Von Poehl & Marie Modiano Songbook and Bent Van Looy.)
Sixteen looks from the late Alexander McQueen’s final collection were presented yesterday afternoon, not on the catwalk, but in a private showing in a lavish Paris drawing room. The mood was heavy as friends and admirers of McQueen – who committed suicide February 11th – were presented with the last examples of the designer’s genius in a collection – finished by McQueen’s design team – that drew inspiration from 15th and 16th century painting and decorative arts. Images of Fouquet’s 15th century Virgin and child, angel motifs in silk imprimés and metallic boot heel reliefs, and grotesques drawn from the hellscapes of Hieronymous Bosch may offer glimpses into the mental state of McQueen, reportedly devastated by both the death of his mother – whose funeral followed his suicide by one day – and the 2007 suicide of close friend and mentor Isabella Blow. Pieces included a coat sculpted from dipped, gold feathers and short pleated skirts that hung low on the hips, styled with headpieces fashioned from varnished feathers and tightly wrapped bandages. Insiders predict a scramble within the Gucci Group – a subsidiary of PPR, the French luxury conglomerate with a controlling stake of the McQueen label – to find a replacement for McQueen. Talk of Gareth Pugh and Olivier Theyskens spiced industry gossip during fashion week, which closes tomorrow with Miu Miu’s 7pm presentation. |
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