Hello, tailor.

Star Trek Into Darkness: Too many dicks on the Enterprise.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Tue, 21 May 2013 22:02:00 +0000

[From my Star Trek Into Darkness article at The Daily Dot.]

In 2009’s Star Trek, JJ Abrams successfully made the effort to appeal to new viewers as well as dyed-in-the-wool Trekkies. This time round, he seems to be going further afield— and alienating the original fanbase entirely.

The publicity for Into Darkness has been solidly high school: Don’t worry—it may be Star Trek, but it’s not for nerds anymore! In an interview with Jon Stewart this week, Abrams made it very clear that he’d never liked the show as a kid, because it was “too philosophical.” “I stopped listening when you said you didn’t like Star Trek,” Stewart joked. “I saw your mouth moving, so I assume you apologized.”

It’s not actually necessary for a director to be a lifelong fan if they want to make a successful adaptation. In fact, JJ Abrams’ first Star Trek movie was proof of that. But it’s another thing for an adaption to leave most of the original show’s values in the dust, which is what Into Darkness seems to be doing. The dialogue is snappy, the action sequences are fun, and the characters seem real enough, but the heart and the brain are now gone.

In 1966, Star Trek broke new ground with its international crew of hopeful explorers, scientists, and adventurers. True, the show was full of heavy-handed Cold War metaphors and casual 1960s misogyny, but its central messages were obvious: Racism is bad. Give peace a chance. That kind of thing. Men and women, Russians and Americans, aliens and humans: all could work together on a more-or-less equal footing. For many viewers, Nichelle Nichols (Lieutenant Uhura) was the first woman of color they’d seen playing anything other than a maid. Star Trek was pushing the envelope.

In 2013, not so much. [READ MORE]

Interview with Michael Kaplan, costume designer of "Star Trek" (2009) and "Star Trek Into Darkness".

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:59:00 +0000

I interviewed the Star Trek Into Darkness costume designer for Wired.com! You can read it here.

Since Star Trek first made its way to the big screen, its costume design has veered away from the classic color-coded uniforms in favor of experiments with red double-breasted uniforms and unfortunate flesh-colored jumpsuits. But for the 2009 J.J Abrams Star Trek reboot and its recently released sequel, Into Darkness, costume designer Michael Kaplan helped move the sartorial stylings of the Enterprise crew forwards by looking backwards–at the trusty old red, blue, and gold. It’s a comfortingly familiar detail amongst Abrams’ trademark lens flare and glowing spaceship interiors: a conscious chromatic nod to the vintage style of the original costumes.

“I wanted the film based in the ‘60s,” Kaplan told Wired. “Not literally the ‘60s, but I wanted my thinking to be grounded in the concept of the original Star Trek, almost like an homage…. I had a lot of books in my library that I’d consult: [André] Courrèges [inventor of the mini-skirt], designers like that. To keep things rooted in that, even if when you look at the movie, you don’t say, ‘Hey, this is the early 1960s.’" [READ MORE]

The evolution of the Star Trek uniform.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Fri, 10 May 2013 17:15:00 +0000

Just in time for the new Star Trek movie, I wrote this article for Empire Online! It follows the original series Starfleet uniform from the 1960s to the present day -- but don't worry, there aren't any spoilers for Into Darkness. You can expect a post about that sometime next week, after the US release date. :)

Even Star Trek’s most devoted fans wouldn’t dare claim that the original series was a high-budget operation. In among the cardboard sets, guest stars had to wear a selection of costumes that ran the gamut from the baffling (an evil baby in a silver lamé toga; girls in hot-pink fur bikinis) to the plain ugly. In one early episode, an entire alien species is kitted out in a vaguely familiar fabric that one later realises is also used for all the bedspreads on-board the Enterprise.

But in the original series Starfleet uniform, Star Trek struck costuming gold. [READ MORE]

How I learned to stop hating and love GOOP.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 22:51:00 +0000

[I've been pretty busy recently, but we should be back to regular HelloTailor updates in a couple of weeks! :) In the meantime, have this article I wrote about Gwyneth Paltrow's beauteously delusional millionaire lifestyle website, GOOP.]

If the experts at People magazine are to be trusted, then Gwyneth Paltrow is currently the most beautiful woman in the world. Happily, this means that beauty now comes with a comprehensive instruction manual. Thanks to her lifestyle newsletter, GOOP, it’s possible for us mere mortals to follow Gwyneth’s own advice on how to be exactly like her—that is, perfect.

According to its website, GOOP (cheerily named after Paltrow’s initials) is “a digital media and e-commerce company.” Its free weekly newsletter includes style tips, recipes, vacation recommendations, and miscellaneous words of wisdom from Paltrow’s rich and famous friends. The writing style is particularly intriguing—primarily first-person Paltrow, with occasional additions from a mysterious editorial “we” whenever Gwyneth wants to interview herself.

GOOP may not sound like it has much of a market aside from people who really, really like to read about quinoa and $350 yoga pants, but it’s mesmerizingly readable—mostly because of its Marie Antoinette–esque detachment from reality. It's a glimpse into a magical alternate universe where money is limitless and the most important things in life are selecting the most authentic Corsican spa for a weekend getaway and teaching one’s children to enjoy buckwheat grains. [READ MORE]

Hannibal: "Apéritif”

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 20:20:00 +0000

(Note: No major spoilers.)

Hannibal is a rare breed in that the first episode is genuinely good, mostly because there's no need for clumsy exposition. Anyone with half a brain already knows what's going on: Hannibal is a cannibal, but it will probably take at least one season for anyone on TV to work that out. It only takes a couple of minutes to illustrate who Hugh Dancy is: a guy who frowns a lot because of Confused Emotions, and whose brain is a holodeck for blood-spattered crime scenes. Hugh Dancy means we can watch people get murdered in dramatised flashback form, instead of having some generic CSI person explain it to us with Science.
Mads Mikkelsen is, obviously, fantastic. But for me, the harder sell was always going to be Hugh Dancy's character, criminal profiler Will Graham. Not because I'm familiar with his character (I'm not) but because the crime/mystery genre is already overflowing with cute-ish men in their 30s and 40s. Luckily Graham sidesteps the two main cliches of "asshole genius" and "dorky everyman", and is interesting enough to be a worthwhile foil to Hannibal. Still, like most stories about serial killers, Hannibal mostly features women as side characters or in the role of naked, brutalised corpses. In The Silence of the Lambs, this is less of an issue because Clarice Starling is just as important as Hannibal Lecter, but there's no real need to make a TV series about Clarice. We already know her story too well.

Hannibal Lecter is the ultimate glamorized serial killer, so it was a smart decision to keep him on the sidelines and use the first episode to focus on Will Graham's horrified empathy. While it's pretty easy to film gore and violence, it's harder to make the deaths in a crime show seem as emotionally "interesting" as the investigation process. Audiences are just too used to watching CSI and horror movies. In a serial killer mystery, the victims (as ever, a series of attractive young women whose interchangeable photos are pinned to a map) are often treated like little more than roadblocks on the journey to finding the murderer. Hannibal doesn't make a huge effort to humanise its various corpses (horrifying as they may be), but Will's awkwardness and disgust are very effective.

Visually, I'm already very satisfied. And not just by the pointless but deliciously nerdy set-design nods to The Shining. Even the promotional materials lean pretty heavily on the image of Hannibal as the vampiric centrepiece of a 17th century oil-painting, usually surrounded by fruit and skulls and slabs of raw meat. It must be difficult to avoid going overboard with all that gothic imagery, to be honest. Hannibal's already almost a parody of himself, sitting in a darkened room full of expensive furniture, eating exquisitely flambéed human lungs while the Goldberg Variations play in the background.

Mads Mikkelsen's costumes simultaneously crack me up and make me sigh because they are soooo good. Here, we're getting to see Hannibal at his absolute peak: taller, better-looking and better dressed than anyone else onscreen. The rest of the cast are serviceable crime procedural characters wearing everyday American TV clothes, but Hannibal looks like... well, exactly what he is. A luxury-obsessed European aristocrat and connoisseur, secretly looking down his nose at all the small-minded American plebs who eat food from chain restaurants and dress like Will Graham.

Graham is deliberately dressed to look soft and harmless, in the wrinkled shirts of an academic who doesn't care about his appearance and sleeps on the floor with ten stray dogs. Hannibal is the absolute opposite, his clothes just another extension of the obsessive care he puts into every other aesthetic aspect of his life. When we see him apart from Graham and the FBI (at his office, or at home by himself) he wears beautifully tailored suits with grace-notes in the form of pocket squares and a tie so wide it's practically a cravat. When he goes on the road with Graham, I suspect his toned-down outfit is for Graham's benefit. Since Hannibal wears a red pocket square and a jacket with metal buttons to eat dinner by himself, I doubt that his sudden adoption of open-necked shirts and conservative v-neck sweaters was for his own comfort.

Mike Lunsford's "fully-dressed redesigns" of superheroine costumes @ The Daily Dot.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 15:41:00 +0000

Supergirl may be a woman of steel, but is a red, blue, and gold cheerleader uniform really the most practical outfit for fighting crime? While many superhero costumes can be a little beyond the pale (Ben Affleck’s red pleather catsuit in Daredevil comes to mind), their female counterparts are almost always worse.

Image by Mike Lunsford/ze-tarts.

Superheroine costumes can be a major point of contention for comics fans. Wonder Woman’s red bustier and star-spangled short-shorts are iconic, but do all female superheroes need to wear a swimsuit and heels when battling the forces of darkness? NBC’s failed Wonder Woman pilot tried to redesign her suit with pants rather than a skirt or shorts, but the end result was something that looked more like a Halloween costume. [READ MORE]

Star Trek: The Motion Picture -- A costume design nightmare.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 16:51:00 +0000

Previous Star Trek posts.

I came to Star Trek: The Motion Picture pre-warned. Kind of. It's famous for being The Worst Star Trek (a title for which there is already some stiff competition) and I'd already heard the various nicknames: The Motionless Picture, The Motion Sickness, etc. But even that didn't prepare me for what was in store. I mean, what were they even thinking?
In fact, watching The Motion Picture, it's pretty clear what they were thinking. They were thinking, "Let's make 2001: A Space Odyssey!" Except it turns out that if you give Gene Roddenberry a quadrillion dollars and too much creative leeway, what you actually end up with is a three-hour screensaver interspersed with shots of William Shatner emoting into the middle distance. Plus music. There are whole sequences where nothing happens except kaleidoscope space-travel effects and an impressive orchestral score for minutes at a time. Come to think of it, it's probably a great movie to watch while high. Thanks, 1979.

In all seriousness, this scene lasts for about 100 years in real time.

The many faults of this movie will surely be evident to anyone who watches it. It goes on for far too long. It's humourless. It lacks the emotional depth that made the original Star Trek series so compelling. The camera spends way too much time panning over William Shatner's increasingly luxuriant middle-aged arm hair. And then there's that whole situation going on with the costumes.

We need to talk about this.

Star Trek's original series ran on a budget of $3.75 per episode and regularly featured guest stars wearing bikinis made out of curtains and tinsel. Yet somehow its costumes still managed to look more plausible than the unsettling fleshbags we see in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Starfleet's oldschool "red shirt/blue shirt" uniforms are iconic for a reason. They're extremely simple by sci-fi costume standards (which is why the 2009 reboot movie barely had to update the uniform at all), and make it easy to differentiate between characters when they're running around. The Motion Picture's uniforms, on the other hand, are distractingly terrible in every regard. The palette runs from beige to pale blue -- a selection of colours usually restricted to hospital scrubs and control underwear. Worse still, they're actually less practical than the original series uniforms, which in 1979 were seen as frivolous and outdated.

The original intention of The Motion Picture's Starfleet uniforms was to depict a futuristic society where people wore egalitarian, recyclable, organic clothes. Sadly, the eventual result was the creation of some of the worst outfits in science-fiction history. While 1960s Star Trek revelled in tinfoil armour and various other accoutrements of classic sci-fi ridiculousness, its cartoonish atmosphere allowed for a certain suspension of disbelief that The Motion Picture never quite managed. Supposedly designed by the best minds in the galaxy, Starfleet's new uniform was a nightmare in every regard:

Physical impracticality. Catsuits with shoes attached to the legs are pointless and stupid. This is a prime example of what I think of as "idiot futurism". It's perfectly acceptable to design a stupid costume if it's for, like, Barbarella or Flash Gordon, but if you're trying to conceptualise a functional future society, then your costumes should make sense. If your cast is threatening to go on strike because they can't go to the bathroom without an assistant, then chances are your costumes aren't as great as you think they are.
Visual impracticality. From the perspective of the viewer, the new uniforms were downright confusing. The colour-coded science/communications/command uniforms of the original series provided a useful visual shorthand as to the positions of each crewmember, while the new uniforms had a near-incomprehensible internal logic. In an attempt to make Starfleet seem less militaristic, everyone had the same three uniforms: the dress uniform (the belted tunic thing Shatner wears in the picture above), plus two more casual outfits, which were (maybe?) interchangeable. The end result was that everyone on the bridge was wearing different outfits, all of which looked terrible.
Eye-boggling hideousness. This is already a problem from the perspective of someone watching the movie, but it's also pretty terrible as a worldbuilding detail. If Starfleet is meant to be so utilitarian and clever, then the uniforms wouldn't be so goddamn ugly.

There are so many contributing factors to the ugliness of the 1979 Starfleet uniforms that it's kind of miraculous. They're like the holy grail of bad fashion. In terms of colour, the problem is immediately obvious the first time you get distracted by a background extra who looks naked because they're wearing a skin-coloured body suit. Although of course, wearing flesh-tone clothes is already kind of an aesthetic disaster. For those of you who always feel guiltily puzzled when someone describes two colours as "clashing": it's similar to the Uncanny Valley. The closer two colours get to each other, the more uncomfortable they are to look at. This is doubly true for skin-tone clothes, because one of the colours that looks gross is you.

There is at least one scene in The Motion Picture where a male character ends up in an unfortunate moose-knuckle situation thanks to those flesh-coloured body suits. It's just not a good idea, is what I'm saying. The best type of uniform is one that's comfortable and practical enough that you can forget that you're wearing it, and it's difficult to forget about what you're wearing if you look really terrible in it. An argument could be made that 300 years in the future, people just don't care as much about appearances as we do in the 21st century, but this is plainly untrue because characters in The Motion Picture have a wide variety of hairstyles, makeup and jewellery. Anyhow, it's difficult to take your coworkers seriously if they're wearing beige catsuits that lovingly cling to every bra strap and roll of paunch, just like it's difficult to take Captain Kirk seriously when he's dressed like someone who works in a health spa onboard a luxury cruise liner:

The one breath of fresh air in this nightmare of taupe taupe onesies and weird Teletubbie belt-buckles is... Spock. Beautiful, beautiful Spock. When we first see him, he's on one of the most painted-on alien planet sets I've ever seen in a legitimate blockbuster movie. There's a giant glowing red foot statue that's probably meant to be made of volcanic rock but looks more like Lego, and a bunch of Vulcan notables wearing a selection of A+ robes. That's more like it.

Then once Spock inevitably decides to go back to the Enterprise, he's dressed in a cool hipster-goth cape and trousers. Not only would I happily wear this outfit myself, in real life, but it looks equally practical to the terrible Starfleet uniforms. Hell, take the poncho-cape off and he'll just be wearing a shirt and trousers, which is better than what Kirk and McCoy have to wear for 90% of the movie.

You can tell everyone on the bridge agrees with me, because they're all, "Holy shit! Someone wearing clothes that let him move around without getting a wedgie!" Spock is the fashion messiah. Which is kind of intriguing when you consider the fact that Vulcans are supposed to be ultra-rational and unconcerned with material things. I always found Vulcan fashion to be a particularly clever element of the visuals of Star Trek, because it's this blindingly obvious visual clue that Vulcans are nowhere near as logical as they claim. The intricacies of Vulcan style are completely in keeping with their love of tradition, ritual, and symbolism.

The weirdest thing about the costumes in Star Trek: The Motion Picture is that the same costume designer, Robert Fletcher, worked on the next three Star Trek films as well. In hindsight, this movie was an experiment that went embarrassingly wrong, and even the most intense Trekkies are hard-pressed to say much in its favour. I tend to assume that the costumes were another indicator of Gene Roddenberry going mad with power, and that Fletcher fared better when working with other directors.

Coming soon: The costumes of The Wrath of Khan.

Previous Star Trek posts.

Fight Like A Girl.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 16:18:00 +0000

Just realised I'd posted this on Tumblr, but not on my blog! Along with a variety of cool sci-fi/fantasy/YA writers from around the world, I'm participating in the Fight Like A Girl short story anthology, a book focusing on strong female protagonists like Katniss Everdeen, Hermione Granger or Lisbeth Salander. If you're into fandom at all, you might recognise the screennames of a few of the authors involved: gyzym, jibrailis, bookshop, eleveninches, and many more!

We've already received an amazing amount of support for our Kickstarter, which has almost reached its goal of $8,300, so we only need a few more people to pledge before we can get this thing published! And we have a bunch of awesome additions we can implement if we get much funding over the original goal.

You can pre-order the book from our Kickstarter, along with a bunch of other rewards for funding pledges. Plus, a few of the authors (including me!) are going to be on the podcast/radio show fandomspotting tonight! If you have any questions for myself or any of the authors involved, send them to fandomspotting's Tumblr askbox or tweet us @fandomspotting and we can answer them on-air! Plus we can read/answer any questions or comments sent to the show while it's still in progress. Fandomspotting's youtube channel is HERE, and we'll be on air at 7pm EST/11pm GMT.

Capitol Couture: Catching Fire.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 16:18:00 +0000

Previously: Capitol Couture in The Hunger Games.

Capitol Couture is back, but I'm a lot less optimistic about it than I was last time round. Although I love the Hunger Games books and thought the first movie was an excellent adaptation, the costumes leave much to be desired. I'd hoped that they might kick the weirdness up a notch after the relatively tame aesthetic of the first movie, but these publicity images seem to imply the opposite. From Star Trek to Blade Runner, futuristic sci-fi offers an opportunity to dream up some seriously interesting clothes that often end up influencing real-world fashion trends, but most of the costumes in the Hunger Games could easily be from everyday photoshoots of the actors.

Katniss Everdeen

In the books, a great deal of emphasis is put upon the lavish eccentricities of the people who live in the Capitol. On top of that, all the Tributes have stylists whose job it is to make them look as unique and eyecatching as possible. Why, then, did all the costumes in the first movie look like they'd been bought at the same store? And why are the promo pictures for Catching Fire so damn similar? Katniss, Effie and Johanna are all wearing some variety of frilly Alexander McQueen gown, while almost all of the men are wearing some type of suit.

Effie Trinket

In response to my review of the first movie, someone pointed out that the reason why so many extras in the Capitol look alike is because Effie Trinket is a trend-setter. This is a definite possibility, but we have to remember that during the first book/film, Effie Trinket is upwardly-mobile but not yet famous. She's the representative for one of the least interesting Districts, and presenting Peeta and Katniss to the Capitol is her big break. Considering the similarity between her clothes and the rainbow-coloured outfits of other characters in the first movie, it's more likely that she's following the extreme end of a particular fashion trend -- but even that, to me, seems slightly out of character.


Peeta Mellark

The Capitol is explicitly written as a society where appearance is key. Because Capitol citizens live off the wealth of the Districts, most of them don't "need" jobs, eliminating the direct connection between money and fashion. People try to look as individual as possible, because the ultimate status symbol is for people to applaud your originality as a trend-setter. To be a successful style icon in the Capitol, one must look fresh and new, have an easily recogniseable personal "brand", and be willing to put a great deal of effort into one's appearance -- including body modification. Effie's costumes would be perfect if they existed in a vaccuum, but their resemblance to the costumes of background extras detracts hugely from the overall effect.

Johanna Mason

Catching Fire introduces a whole new cast of Tribute characters, and their District-themed costumes should, in theory, give each one an opportunity to stand out. The most interesting outfits probably won't be revealed until the movie is released, but the pictures we've seen so far don't exactly fill me with confidence. Johanna Mason, who is portrayed in the books as looking spiky-haired, shameless, and implicitly butch, is wearing what looks like a bridesmaid's dress for Katniss' wedding. This outfit doesn't convey one iota of Johanna's personality or role in the movie, either within the context of the story (where she has her own stylist) or as a marketing image for the movie itself.

Gale

President Snow

Among the pictures we've seen so far, my favourites are probably Peeta, Beetee and Cinna. Cinna is relatively easy because his style is so subdued and cool, and Lenny Kravitz may or may not literally just be wearing his own clothes for the role. Peeta's costumes are good for similar reasons, because his aesthetic role is to complement Katniss rather than stand out. His image is "cute farmboy", and he knows it, so it makes sense for the Capitol stylists to dress him in comparatively simple outfits. As for Beetee, I enjoy the way the fabric of his waistcoat and trousers looks a little like circuit boards.

Beetee

Caesar Flickerman

Cinna

Finnick Odair is kind of an impossible character. In a movie full of attractive people in stylish outfits, he has to outshine all of them with his incandescent hotness. But even taking those difficult expectations into account, I'm not all that impressed by Sam Claflin -- partly because his name makes me think "COL = Claflin Out Loud", and partly because he's so blandly good-looking that I couldn't pick him out of a lineup of Taylor Kitsch lookalikes. (See this amazing Tumblr post about Jesse Williams as Finnick. WE COULDA HAD IT ALLLLL.) Hopefully his actual performance will be imbued with a Veela-like sexiness, but right now I'm not really feeling it. That being said, I do rather like his ocean-themed outfit, which is far more District-appropriate than any of the other new Tribute pictures we've seen so far. I could be wrong, but the sarong/trousers he wears look a bit like Thai fisherman's trousers?

Finnick Odair

Costume design and movie/TV review masterpost.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 15:26:00 +0000

In an attempt to make Hello, Tailor easier to navigate, I try to update my masterpost every few months. This post obviously doesn't include every post on the blog, but if you feel a real yearning for reviews of catwalk shows from six months ago then feel free to faff around with the tags. Try stuff like fashion week for more general posts, or Spring 2012 for more specific timeframes. More recent fashion posts are also organised by designer, ie Chanel; Alexander McQueen. Aside from that, the rest of the blog is mostly dedicated to costume design and TV/movie reviews.

My favourite costume design posts can be found under the movie costumes I have loved tag, which begins with A fan's introduction to costume design. Otherwise, I've divided this masterpost into various movie and TV subcategories, which are probably easier to browse than my tags.

Movie costumes I have loved.

Master & Commander Part 1 and Part 2.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Hanna

A Knight's Tale

True Romance

Doomsday

Skyfall: the costumes.

Superhero movies

The Marvel and comics tags are a good place to start, but here's a more conclusive rundown of my superhero posts:

Movie Costumes I Have Loved: Thor.

Movie costumes I have loved: Pepper Potts in the Iron Man franchise.

If there's no such thing as a vintage Captain America venereal disease PSA then I'm going to be so disappointed.

Some hopes and dreams for The Dark Knight Rises.

Avengers costume design posts:

Pre-Movie Avengers post: Loki's costumes, armour, and image-consciousness.

The costumes and characters of The Avengers. Part 1: SHIELD. Part 2: Tony Stark, Pepper Potts, and Bruce Banner. Part 3: Steve Rogers, Captain America. Part 4: Black Widow and Hawkeye.

Iron Man 3 promo pics.

Alien series

The costumes of Alien. Part 1: Uniforms and characterisation. & The costumes of Alien. Part 2: Space suits, retrofuturism, and Prometheus.

The costumes of Aliens, or, James Cameron says Put A Gun On It.

Disturbing viral marketing for Prometheus: Happy birthday David, from Weyland Industries.

Prometheus: Proof that epic sci-fi doesn't belong in the Alien franchise.

Prometheus and the fannish mindset: Plotholes Aren't Everything.

Costume design and the crew of the Prometheus.

General movie posts.

The iconic menswear of James Bond.

Skyfall: Bond as a blunt instrument, and the new Bond Girls.

The new Judge Dredd movie is a great chick-flick.

Les Miserables: Seriously, Javert? Seriously??

The Hollow Crown series: Richard II & Henry IV, Part 1 & Henry IV, Part 2.

Bill Cunningham New York

Oswald Boateng: A Man's Story.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, H&M, and the difficulties of marketing a female action heroine, and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo review post.

Dressing For The Apocalypse: a guide to post-apocalyptic movie fashion.

Capitol Couture in The Hunger Games.

Snow White & The Huntsman: How to tell a fairy story. and Snow White & The Huntsman: The prince doesn't get the girl; the girl gets the kingdom.

TV shows

The Teen Wolf tag should lead to all Teen Wolf posts, beginning with Teen Wolf 101: A guide to the eighth wonder of our world.

The Elementary tag should lead to all Elementary posts, beginning with From Arthur Conan Doyle to New York City's "Elementary": The Costume Design of Holmes and Watson, and Elementary: characterisation, the unaired pilot, and its relationship to Sherlock Holmes canon.

Check the Doctor Who tag for posts about Doctor Who.

Person of Interest: The man in the suit.

Costume design and The Hour: Freddie Lyons and Bel Rowley, Menswear, and Womenswear.

The Bletchley Circle (a female-led 1950s detective drama) and its costume design post.

The Revenge tag should lead to all Revenge posts, beginning with New style crush: Nolan Ross in REVEEEENNNGGE.

The Good Wife: Parenting Made Easy.

Star Trek's original 1965 pilot episode: The Cage.

The Killing (AKA Forbrydelsen), and the iconic status of Sarah Lund's jumpers.

The most important thing about BBC Sherlock's "A Scandal In Belgravia".

Game Of Thrones: Unwashed Northerners, royal conspiracies, and decapitations all round.

Miscellany

One Direction, teenage Tumblr fandom, and how to stay safe and private online.

Honour Among Punks: Sherlock Holmes like you've never seen her before.

Star Trek Into Darkness teaser trailer theories.

Secret Avengers #1.

Neil Marshall set to direct "The Last Voyage of Demeter".

Girl Walk//All Day

Dolce and Gabbana, Fall 2013.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 14:52:00 +0000

Entirely by accident, this season's Dolce & Gabbana turned out to be incredibly topical. Inspired by the Vatican and showing at Fashion Week just after the news broke about the Pope's retirement, this collection was guaranteed to appear prominently on the pages of every fashion magazine in the known universe. The only thing better than tall thin ladies wearing sparkly clothes is tall thin ladies wearing sparkly clothes in a newsworthy context. For this reason, I'm going to take a few moments to consider the implications of our briefly Popeless world. NEWS.

photos from Style.com

You know in movies when there's a retired cop (probably played by Bruce Willis) who is brought back for One Last Job? Well, I'm kinda wondering if it's the same with popes. Like, if in the next couple of weeks there's an unexpected demonic armaggedon, can we call Pope Benedict XVI out of retirement to lead the faithful into holy war? Ignoring the fact that it's kind of illogical already to be able to hand in your resignation from being the earthly voice of god, I'm curious about the Pope Emergency issue. Hopefully we can still rely on Ratzinger to come to our aid in times of Biblical disaster.

Back to D&G: this show was so luxuriously detailed that it looked more like Couture than Ready To Wear. The embroidery and beadwork was inspired by Catholic art such as the Byzantine mosaics in the cathedral at Monreale, although the focus was more often on D&G's home island of Sicily.

The aesthetic was a combination of celebrations of Catholic imagery, and outfits inspired by the red vestments of Cardinals. If anything, this show offered a classier view of the Catholic church than is currently being projected by the church itself, as the focus was purely on the beauty of its art rather than any deeper meaning.

The only real low point was the interlude of ten grey tweed outfits in the middle of the show. Why were these outfits even there? They were certainly more traditional for Fall/Winter RTW styles, but the transition from the red and gold luxury of the Vatican to old-fashioned grey tweed seemed needlessly abrupt.

The shoes were a major highlight, with their intricate gold designs fitting perfectly with the theme. Rumour has it that the Pope's red shoes used to be manufactured by Prada -- perhaps D&G are angling for a Papal endorsement?

Les Miserables: Seriously, Javert? Seriously??

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 22:34:00 +0000

At the very end of its theatrical release schedule, I have finally gone to see Les Miserables. To be honest, I'm pretty impressed with myself because I managed to remain completely information-free about the whole thing. As in, I knew nothing whatsoever about the book, the musical or the movie prior to actually watching it. In fact, here is the sum total of my Les Mis background knowledge as of this morning.

It's a musical.
It's set in France.
Anne Hathaway plays a prostitute who gets her hair cut off for some reason
There are some cute young guys that Tumblr seems excited about. They might be revolutionaries?

Also, I sort of assumed that because it was categorised in my head as "a musical", there would be a) some spoken dialogue, and b) dancing. Wrong on both counts, but NBD.
Anyway, it was definitely the movie to watch if you like your onscreen emotions turned up to 11 on the Overwrought-o-meter, and are OK with the camera being rammed up Hugh Jackman's nose at all times. Like seriously, chill out with the close-ups. People had actually warned me about this beforehand and I was all, "No, what do I know about cinematography? I won't notice." But no, I noticed. It was like someone's parents were there with a camcorder, trying to zoom in on every important moment of their kid's school play. ZOOM IN MORE ON ANNE HATHAWAY'S SNOTTY NOSE WHILE SHE'S CRYING!! ZOOM IN MORE ON HUGH JACKMAN'S FACE WHILE HE'S EMOTING ABOUT GOD!! ZOOM IN MORE ON THIS TRAGIC STARVING KID WHO DOESN'T HAVE ANY FACIAL SORES LIKE THE OTHER KIDS, BECAUSE SHE'S THE STAR! etc etc.
The main thing I got from Les Mis, though, was that Russell Crowe's Javert is A+++ hilarious. Like, every time he came onscreen I started laughing uncontrollably because he was 100% straight-up doing an impression of when Harry was obsessively stalking Draco in Harry Potter and the Halfblood Prince. JAVERT JUST REALLY WANTS TO CHAIN UP THAT TALL, SWEATY, MUSCULAR CRIMINAL, OK? HE WANTS TO CHAIN HIM UP AND CONTROL HIM AND PUNISH HIM FOR HIS SINS

I couldn't help imagining what all the other cops must think of Javert. Javert thinks he's the most upstanding, hard-working, god-fearing guy in the entire police force, but the other cops totally talk about him behind his back: Do you know that Inspector Javert guy who always looks like he hasn't showered in a week, and stands slightly too close when he's talking to you? Yeah, yeah, he's literally been stalking this random ex-con for like thirty fucking years. Not like a murderer or anything. This guy stole some bread and now Javert's all up in his grill, following him around the country, I don't even know. One time I went to his house to pick up some paperwork and it was just a mattress bed on the floor with Wanted posters of Jean Valjean taped all over the walls, the ceiling, the windows, every-fucking-where. Some things you just don't want to know, you know?

Aside from the roiling tide of Javert's sweat and/or self-loathing obsession with that evil, villainous thief who totally has the muscle power to lift an entire cart on one shoulder, I... guess there was some other stuff in the movie? Like, Anne Hathaway was good but I wouldn't personally have given her an Oscar for Fantine. But then again, I would have given her an Oscar for Rachel Getting Married in 2009, so all's well that ends well. I admit I started to feel a little tired whenever Helena Bonham Carter came onscreen, because she really does play herself in every role now, and not necessarily in a good way. Philosophically speaking I don't have anything against never brushing your hair, but if you're an actor it's kind of helpful to look slightly different in each role, you know? Whereas Helena Bonham Carter, charming though she is, looks like she's been wearing her own clothes, hair and makeup in every role she's played in the past 5 years.
Someone who knows more about the literary merits and background of Les Mis will probably have to explain to me just what the impact of the story is meant to be. Perhaps I'm a pessimist, but all I thought when I came out of the cinema was "revolutions are pointless, and there are definitely going to be food poverty riots in real life, near where I live, in the near future". The fact is that I don't actually think revolutions/direct action/political protests are pointless in the slightest, but all the cute young idealist boys in Les Mis certainly were hideously familiar. Particularly Marius. It's very difficult to warm to a poor-little-rich-boy character in a movie where are starving on the streets in every scene -- even if he does have cute freckles and the guileless expression of an anime character.

Threeasfour, Fall 2013: The 13th sign of the zodiac.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 18:10:00 +0000

Thirteen outfits long, this collection was based on the signs of the Zodiac. Technically Ophiucus, the so-called thirteenth Zodiac sign, is actually a Zodiac constellation and therefore not directly connected to the exacting and fact-based science that is astrology, but whatevs. The combination of mysticism and stargazing made for an intriguing mix, resulting in some excellent sci-fi priestess outfits: one for each sign.

pics from Style.com

Sadly I couldn't work out which was which. The first was Ophiucus, but where did it go from there? Perhaps there's someone out there with some more astrology expertise who can help me out. But I don't think the designs are very literal. There certainly wasn't any single outfit out there that reminded me specifically of a bull, a ram, or a pair of twins.

New Age themes aside, this was an interesting and well-developed collection. Threeasfour tend to be a little eccentric anyway, but they're consistent in their eccentricities. Lots of asymmetrical tailoring and patterns made up of repeated circles, as seen in previous seasons.

One of my favourite aspects of this collection was the headwear, which was straight out of Gallifrey. Laser-cut (presumably?) from leather and what may have been cardboard, these crowns looked like clockwork or 3D renderings of mathematical diagrams.

We can only theorise who will actually end up wearing these designs. They'd make excellent costumes for a high-budget 1970s sci-fi movie, but sadly not many people in the real world actually dress like this. However, Threeasfour have successfully managed the weirdness of their brand for several years now, so I can only assume (and hope) that there are some people out there who are enthusiastically willing to spend $$$ on grey woollen chaps and wraparound Zodiac robes.

Person Of Interest: The man in the suit.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 20:36:00 +0000

Person Of Interest is three different genre shows stuck together. For Detectives Carter and Fusco it's a police procedural drama, whereas John Reese lives in a spy thriller and Harold Finch's story is gradually edging towards being a full-on dystopian cyberpunk sci-fi. Overall it's marketed as a crime show, more or less, which is what it mostly looks like on the outside. Like the majority of characters in procedural cop shows Carter and Fusco have very boring dress-sense, for practical and professional reasons. In costume design terms, the real interest lies with Finch and Reese.
Before I even saw the show, Reese had been described to me as a man who wears his clothes like a uniform. When he first appears he has nothing: no home, presumably no money, no real identity... until Finch comes along and sets him up with his very own apartment and a wardrobe full of identical black suits. Mysterious benefactors are a popular theme in fiction -- who doesn't wish a nameless billionaire would show up and randomly gift you with a new house? -- but Person Of Interest has a refreshing way of tackling the subject. Rather than twisting himself up in knots about receiving so much help from a total stranger, Reese just takes it.

What with his CIA training, subsequent betrayal, homelessness and total lack of friends or family, Reese is a man who has been stripped down to his bare bones. The things that normal people care about just do not bother him any more. Actually, Finch is like that as well, but for him it's more because he's been elevated beyond ordinary society thanks to his wealth, genius, and devotion to the Machine. With Reese there are scenes in almost every episode where you see him just fail to react to things that would have any normal person shying away in discomfort.
He doesn't care about people touching him or getting in his personal space. He doesn't care about money. He doesn't care about being watched and tracked constantly via CCTV. He doesn't care about getting beaten up, except in the sense that it's an inconvenience. When Finch picks him out of the gutter and sets him up in an enormous loft apartment with his own private arsenal, the only thing Reese is openly thankful for is that Finch has given him a purpose again. When you get right down to it, the only thing he really cares about is efficiency, which is why he wears the same outfit every single day of his life -- barring necessary disguises. Not having to think about clothes or look in the mirror every morning just removes another obstacle between him and his mission.
From a purely practical standpoint, Reese's monochromatic wardobe of identical suits is a stroke of genius. For all that you can compare the John Reese/Harold Finch duo to Batman and Bruce Wayne, Reese's main strength lies in his complete lack of distinguishing features. Although he's definitely good-looking enough to get by with a little superficial charm when the need arises, Reese is forgettable enough to be the perfect spy. The fact that his nickname during the police manhunt was "the man in the suit" tells you all you need to know, because as soon as he changes out of the suit? They don't even have a physical description. The sheer boringness of the outfit just amplifies how forgettable he can be, never mind how ridiculously easy it is to get into almost anywhere when you're a white, middle-aged man in a suit.

Finch's attitude to clothes is the polar opposite of Reese. Just by looking at him you can tell that he really enjoys dressing up -- even before you find out that he's a tailoring nerd. While Reese dresses to look as forgettable and generic as possible, Finch dresses for himself. Despite the fact that he spends most of his time alone in a disused library, he wears a three-piece suit almost every day, often including a pocket square. He definitely has different grades of suits, though. When he's just going to be sitting in front of a computer he wears softer, more comfortable outfits in warm colours like brown and maroon, whereas on days when he's going undercover in one of his millionaire personas he wears suits that are more obviously businesslike and luxurious in appearance.

Both Finch and Reese's suits have been cleverly matched up to the physical appearance intended for each character. Jim Caviezel, who is in reality beginning to look rather thicker around the middle than is ideal for a elite special-forces agent, looks far slimmer in his black suits than in anything else he wears on the show. His jackets are very rarely buttoned, both because an open jacket allows for more flexibility during fight scenes and because it's far more flattering to Caviezel's broad-shouldered frame. Finch's suits are typically quite soft by contrast and the waistcoats make him look a little rounder, which fits in with his list of harmless, birdlike cover identities: Finch, Crane, Wren, Partridge. Like most stories that focus on a partnership, the two characters have to balance each other out. While brains/brawn would be an unfair description considering Reese's skill as a tactician, it's certainly the case that much of Reese's strength lies in his ability to physically intimidate, whereas Finch relies on people mistaking him for the boring, fussy middle-aged man he appears to be.

Teen Wolf creator answers fan questions about season 3.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 16:05:00 +0000

Jeff Davis, Teen Wolf's creator and lead writer, was answering fan questions on Tumblr last night! He's given a whole bunch of hints about season 3, as well skillfully dodging most of the Sterek-related questions. ;) Click here to read the highlights.

Secret Avengers #1

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 17:26:00 +0000

Previously: The costumes and characters of The Avengers: Black Widow and Hawkeye.

As someone who has quite happily been using fanfic to cut through the Gordian Knot of Marvel comics canon for years, I found Secret Avengers #1 very easy to understand because it basically is Avengers fanfic. Clint and Natasha are bros, a reasonably Clark Gregg-looking Coulson shows up, and the story focuses on the mysterious Budapest incident Joss Whedon namedropped in last year's Avengers movie. There's even an explanation as to why Clint and Natasha might remember the incident in different ways, but that doesn't necessarily mean this comic locks in perfectly with movie canon. For one thing, Nick Fury is a field agent.

Images from Secret Avengers #1, which can be bought here.

Following Battle Scars (yes, another comic I read because Coulson was in it, shut up), we know that "this" Nick Fury is the illegitemate son of "original" Nick Fury, and was recruited to SHIELD at the same time as old army buddy Coulson. Apparently some Marvel fans are butthurt about the Fury switcheroo, but I'm tempted to attribute that to boring old racism -- particularly since I remember people complaining about this exact same "problem" a couple of years ago. The thing is, superhero comics canon is already such utter chaos that updating Nick Fury from David Hasselhoff to Samuel L Jackson almost makes things seem less complicated. Secret Avengers is aimed pretty solidly at fans who were introduced to the characters via the Avengers franchise, so why bother reintroducing 1980s white Nick Fury when we already know the other guy from like four different movies?

Anyhow, this issue was a promising prologue to what seems like a vaguely Dollhouse-esque storyline. Coulson recruits Hawkeye and Black Widow to join a taskforce that requires them to have their memories wiped after every mission, which sounds to me like a great way for SHIELD to avoid paying them. As for connections to the movie universe, it's kind of difficult to see how much characterisation carries through. Coulson was satisfyingly Coulson-y, but the focal character in this issue was Hawkeye, who for obvious reasons had very little character development in the Avengers movie.

Mostly I'm interested to see how the movie and comicbook canons converge and divide. You can do so much more with a comic than a film, mostly because it's way easier to suspend disbelief when you're looking at a cartoon instead of a real human person with split ends and mud on their shoes. While Marvel's Hollywood adaptations restrain themselves to relatively realistic robots and supersoldiers, in one 22-page comic we've already had Jason Bourne-style amnesia, a presidential assassination attempt, magical portals, a Hungarian wizard arms dealer, and Hawkeye being kidnapped and tied up in a room with a giant, unexplained Cthulhu statue in the corner. You couldn't get away with that shit on the big screen.
The only real problem I had with Secret Avengers was Natasha's painted-on suit. I haven't read superhero comics since I was in highschool, and I'd kind of forgotten how Hawkeye Initiative the costumes can get -- even when the characters are just standing around talking. Like, have you met boobs? Boobs don't just stand around like two separate water balloons duct-taped to your chest, not unless you've specifically tailored your catsuit to encase each breast separately in its own boob-pod. Which would be kind of an unusual choice, tactically speaking, for someone who has to scale walls and kick people in the face on a regular basis. I know that there's an Uncanny Valley of superhero comic realism, but at the same time I find it kind of implausible for Black Widow to be infiltrating Eastern European terrorist cells with her suit unzipped to her sternum. Especially since we've all seen Scarlett Johansson's equally skin-tight but way more practical Black Widow costume in "real" life.
Final note on the tangled web of alternate canons: I'm curious to see what relation, if any, this comic will have to the SHIELD TV series. At this point I'm not hugely optimistic about a Black Widow or Hawkeye/Widow movie ever happening (IF ONLY), but Coulson has only shown up in a couple of comics so far. I say it's entirely possible that they'll graft his comicbook backstory onto the TV show's own canon.

Previously: The costumes and characters of The Avengers: Black Widow and Hawkeye.

Womenswear and The Hour.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 17:44:00 +0000

Previously: Bel Rowley and Freddie Lyon & Menswear and The Hour.

As a kind of doomed swansong for The Hour's recent cancellation, here's the third and final part of my series of costume posts.

Marnie is absolutely the classic stereotype of 1950s womanhood. In season 1 she doesn't get much to do, but by season 2 Hector's terrible behaviour has shaken her up enough that she transforms into what I can only really describe as a 2010s-style ultra-femme liberated woman. Probably my favourite detail of this was the fact that she clearly had an affair at some point, but it was so subtle that we'll never really know who with. With any other character I'd dismiss this as meaning they didn't have enough time to include it onscreen, but with Marnie you know that it's because she's just so damn discreet -- unlike Hector, whose affairs are all an unmitigated disaster and end up splashed all over the tabloids.

Marnie dresses like confectionary every day of her life. She's terrifyingly put-together, at first because she's a rich young aristocrat and has nothing else to do except look good, and later because she'll be damned if she'll let things slide just because she's done the unthinkable and got herself a career. I particularly loved her super-coordinated pink swirling skirts and aprons for when she was appearing on television -- in black and white. In some ways Marnie can look a little cartoonish because of her permanent glossy smile and carefully arranged layers of brightly-coloured skirts and petticoats, but the fact is that the fashionable colour palette in the 1950s was a lot brighter than nowadays. Meaning that oddly enough, Marnie's candy-coloured costumes are actually more realistic than Bel's skin-tight businesswear.

Sissy is a relatively minor character, but her costumes are so good she draws the eye whenever she appears onscreen. To me, Sissy looks a lot like a modern woman dressing up in retro/vintage styles, because she's so incredibly on-trend while still wearing the kind of widely available working-class clothes that show up in vintage stores in the 21st century. Marnie's brand of femininity is such that she wears pretty much nothing but frothy, full-skirted dresses, which is actually a look that shows up at weddings and upper-crust social functions even today. Essentially, the idea of what we think of as super-feminine formalwear has not really changed in about sixty years. Sissy is part of the next generation of fashion-conscious girls, following inner-city London trends, going to mixed-race nightclubs and moving in with their boyfriends before they get married. Sissy wouldn't look out of place in Camden in 2013.

Freddie's wife Camille is kind of the flip side of Sissy. They're both very modern, young and trendy, but Camille represents the hipster (in the old sense of the word) beat-generation side of 1950s pop culture. She wears men's sweaters and is a member of the fledgling Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. She and Freddie live in an unfurnished flat in a neighbourhood run by a Rachman-esque slumlord. Camille's main role in the show is to introduce some conflict into the Bel/Freddie story, so we only ever really see her in a negative light. I suspect they gave her less screentime on purpose, because the more we saw of her the more likely we'd be to empathise with her. She moved to another country to be with her husband, but as soon as they arrived he transformed from a cool, poetry-loving bohemian into a BBC workaholic who clearly has some kind of ongoing thing with his female best friend. Really, Camille is better off without Freddie.

source

It's difficult to pick out a favourite character from The Hour because everyone is just so brilliant, but if I had to choose one I'd go for Lix Storm. I can't even just call her "Lix", it has to be LIX STORM all together: the coolest name for the coolest lady. In season 1 she was mostly a side-character, providing pithy commentary and drinking at two in the afternoon ("Whisky is God's way of telling us he loves us and wants us to be happy."), but her season 2 plotline with Peter Capaldi's Randall Brown was one of the most gripping aspects of the show.

Lix has some of my favourite character-based costume design on the show. She dresses in a purposefully masculine way, to the extent that some of her suits are a direct analogue for menswear. In a show full of well-written female characters, this isn't the two-dimensional indicator of tough womanhood that it might've been in another show. Instead, it's a nod to her backstory. In her role as a kind of surrogate mother/mentor figure to the younger people at The Hour, Lix is the voice of experience -- and the voice of the past. She's a war reporter who was on the ground, alone, during the Spanish Civil War. And unlike Bel and Freddie, she can remember WWII from an adult perspective. Lix's dress-sense is stuck in the 1940s, when for practical purposes womenswear fashions skewed more towards masculine styles. Even though she's working in an office in central London in the 1950s, she's still dressed as an on-the-ground reporter ten years in the past.

If we're going to get over-analytical here, I'd say that in the offices of The Hour, Lix, Bel and Sissy represent three different generations of women in the workplace. Similarly, we see three generations of womenswear on the show. Lix is the practical wartime woman, wearing a limited selection of simple, durable shirts and trousers, whereas Marnie is the postwar New Look woman who dresses as girlishly as possible in reaction to the clothes rationing and utilitarian styles of the 1940s. Sissy and Camille are both edging towards the 1960s, with Sissy representing the working-class trends that would rule the later decades of the 20th century, and Camille representing the counterculture.

Previously: Bel Rowley and Freddie Lyon & Menswear and The Hour.

Petition to save The Hour.

Fall 2013: Thom Browne Womenswear.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 18:38:00 +0000

Previously on Thom Browne.

Amazingly, this is Thom Browne's Ready-To-Wear collection. If you've heard of Thom Browne, chances are it's either because of his rather eccentric menswear or because Michelle Obama wore one of his designs to this year's Inauguration -- you know, the dress that made her look kind of like a Vulcan. This collection drew far more from his menswear than from his more sedate womenswear designs, however. Not because it was remotely masculine in appearance, but more because of the exaggerated proportions and Browne's unique ability to make grey look like the loudest colour on the spectrum.

Many of the outfits on display this week reminded me of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, not just because of the red rose imagery but because the styling seemed so in tune with Helena Bonham Carter's hair and makeup as the Queen of Hearts -- and her personal appearance in real life. The overall themes, however, were not particularly gothic. This wasn't so much a Twilight rose with sharp thorns as the image of a rose taken from girlish embroidery or cake decorations.

Thom Browne loves to play with gender in his designs, and viewed through the lens of his recent menswear shows, this collection does show some aspects of that. Where the silhouette of his menswear designs was rounded and soft (even if it was the roundness of overly-padded muscles), many of the coats and dresses in this show were angular in the extreme, going well beyond the squared-off shoulderpads of the 1930s and '80s. Some of these outfits reminded me of nothing less than the duo of oblong-torsoed spies in Belleville Rendez-vous:

As well as the resolutely right-angled 1930s box suits, there were a few nods to 1950s Dior, in the form of ladylike dresses with nipped-in waists. Even these were exaggerated, however, with Browne including bulky crinolines at the hips.

This collection was a real breath of fresh air when compared to the multiple New York Fashion Week shows that focussed on leather trenchcoats and conservative cocktail dresses. While obviously very costumey, most of the clothes were far more season-appropriate than much of the other supposedly "Fall" designs I've seen on the runway over the past few days. Following on from the beautifully weird suits and gowns at the beginning of the show, the final few outfits focused on outerwear, featuring rose-red fur and layer upon layer of heavy wool tweeds.

images from Style.com

Youtube guide to watching New York Fashion Week online.

A Youtube guide to New York Fashion Week.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 15:05:00 +0000

Thanks to the snow storm that buried New York this weekend, watching Fashion Week from the comfort of your laptop is suddenly seeming a lot more appealing than being among the models and movie stars who have to freeze their extremities on the red carpet.

Not every Mercedes-Benz FashionWeek show is available online (this season, anyway), but there are still many to watch each day, including such big names as Vera Wang and Oscar de la Renta. If you don’t have time in your schedule for livestream viewings, we already have a few recommendations from the first couple of days of shows...

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Elementary: "M", "The Red Team" and "The Deductionist", Part 2.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 18:49:00 +0000

Previously: "M", "The Red Team" and "The Deductionist, Part 1.

I hope everyone else was as invested in Clyde the turtle as I was. Sherlock used him as a paperweight. He said he was going to make him into soup. If you don't find this unspeakably, twistedly adorable then I despair of you. SHERLOCK FAILS THE VOIGHT-KAMPFF TEST. SHERLOCK IS A REPLICANT. IF SHERLOCK SAW A TURTLE ON ITS BACK IN THE DESERT, HE'D MAKE IT INTO SOUP.

On top of the introduction of this vitally important new supporting character, "The Deductionist" was another legitimately good episode all round -- except, perhaps, for the opening scene. Man, could you lay on the whole "we're pandering to the Superbowl audience" thing any thicker? There were a few seconds where I was like, "wow, has Sherlock seriously hired a couple of hookers to do a criminal roleplay striptease for him?" but no, it was pretty much just a gratuitous girls-in-underwear scene. I can't be bothered getting all angry feminist about that, but I will say that right now, Holmes' sexuality seems like the weak point in some otherwise very solidly-written characterisation. Some moments, such as when Holmes is being up-front about his sex life to the point of social awkwardness (ie, when he's talking to Watson about the profiler in "The Deductionist") seem very in-character, but other things just don't ring true. One scene that comes to mind was when Holmes was waving off a couple of hot blonde twins at the beginning of one of the earlier episodes. That brought me right out of the show because it just seemed like such a cheap shot: "I AM MAN".

Maybe this is just me being unnecessarily neurotic, but the writing for Holmes' sex-life feels very unbalanced. I'm totally willing to remain open-minded about Sherlock Holmes as a sexual being, particularly since Elementary is already such a different setting from the original stories, but it seems a lot like the writers went too far in the other direct and are now hanging in mid-air, windmilling their arms around. What is Sherlock, really? Is he an emotionally damaged former addict whose attitude to relationships was ruined by the death of his ex-girlfriend, and who now can only engage with sex workers? Is he the man we saw in the pilot episode, who views sex as a passionless bodily function? Is he a submissive who hires professionals because he wants to be in experienced hands? Or is he the guy who engages in dire American teen-boy TV fantasies like threesomes with a pair of blonde twins?

Overanalysis of Sherlock's sex-life aside, I'm hoping that the story structure of episodes like "M", "The Red Team" and "The Deductionist" will be carried through to the rest of the season. The main issue with the crime-writing the first 11 episodes was that they were trying to emulate the structure of a classic Holmes short story in a modern crime TV style. Unfortunately, weird set-ups and overly complicated resolution scenes do not a Holmes story make. "M" wasn't just good because it was an emotionally-charged backstory episode, but because there was no need to liven up the story with unnecessarily wacky twists and turns. Like "The Deductionist", it was a chase story in which audiences and characters both (more or less) already knew the culprit. Apparently, removing the whodunnit factor from Elementary makes it a significantly better crime show -- who knew? "The Red Team" was more similar to an early Elementary episode, except the silliness of its storyline fit in perfectly with the silliness of many classic Holmes storylines. Secret cabal of anti-terrorist war game geniuses, slowly being killed off one by one? Straight from Conan Doyle's typewriter, seriously. (Although the smarmy old rich white guy in the sweater vest turning out to the murderer was maybe the least surprising development ever.)

I've never been to NYC so perhaps this is just me being a n00b, but I looooved Joan's pornstar subletter storyline. I mean, it's always cool to see these hints of how Joan is gradually becoming a detective in her own right (which is something Elementary does better than any other Holmes adaptation I've seen, I think), but "subletters making a porno in my apartment while I'm not there" seems like such a NYC horror story that I had to love it. It was practically a Sex And The City subplot.

As for costuming, I adore the almost religious attention to consistency the designer has been putting into Joan's outfits. As well as the purple/grey colour scheme that she and Sherlock share in many scenes, Joan's clothes are incredibly uniform: mini-skirts, opaque tights, an untucked shirt or t-shirt and soft knitwear in pretty much every episode. Plus the costume designer shops specifically at realistically affordable stores like H&M. Sherlock, I think, has been getting more formal recently. In the last couple of episodes we've seen way more appearances from the shirt-and-waistcoat combo rather than all the thriftstore t-shirts, although that may just be coincidence. The best detail of all was when Sherlock barged into Joan's room while she was asleep and laid some clothes out for her to wear.... and then later on in the episode you see that she's wearing the outfit he picked out for her.

Previously on Elementary

Elementary: "M", "The Red Team", and "The Deductionist" -- Part 1.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 12:05:00 +0000

Previously on Elementary

After the unexpected excellence of the Moriarty-reveal episode, "M", I was kind of expecting last week's Elementary to be a return to form. "M" was everything I'd been hoping from this show: interesting crime-writing as well as the typically adorable and intelligently-written Holmes/Watson dynamic. So I was pleasantly surprised when "The Red Team" was similarly free of the weird tangents and embarrassing cop-show detective work we'd seen in most of the first 11 episodes of the season.
I haven't seen this week's episode, but right now it feels like Elementary has taken a real turn for the better. Between "The Red Team" and the extra Superbowl episode, "The Deductionist", it's beginning to seem like Elementary has done away with weird-ass storylines like the child psychopath episode that literally left me saying "what are you talking about??" out loud to the screen. Anyhow, I think the M/Red Team/Deductionist arc has worked really well for a couple of reasons:

"M"'s success was that it only really had one big-reveal moment, and that revelation was way more plausible than any of the dozens of brain-wrinkling red herrings doled out to us in previous episodes. Anyone who has any familiarity with Sherlock Holmes could predict that Moriarty would turn out to be behind Moran's actions, but the revelation that Moran hadn't killed Irene was believable and (for me, anyway) a plausibly surprising twist. Although I do still find it difficult to be invested in the "dead woman inspires the whole plot" trope, which in this case is particularly unnecessary because Sherlock Holmes is essentially a character who is programmed to never need a reason to fight crime. The dead-girlfriend motivation serves no real purpose other than to smooth out the potentially douchey implications that he regularly employs sex-workers, which... is also kind of pointless from a plot/characterisation standpoint.

Regarding Moriarty, I actually prefer Elementary's route to the way Moriarty was introduced in BBC Sherlock. Andrew Scott's performance in Sherlock is fantastic, but this type of theatrical villainy wouldn't work in the context of a relatively slow-moving show like Elementary. Once again, this is an instance where Elementary is actually running closer to Sherlock Holmes canon, with Moriarty being portrayed as a distant figure whose power is only evident through the actions of others. In the two most recent Sherlock Holmes adaptations -- BBC Sherlock and Robert Downey Jr -- Moriarty has been very hands-on and has had face-to-face interactions with Holmes quite early in each story. This is pretty much unavoidable in a feature film or three-part miniseries, simply because isn't enough time to build up the kind of ominous, "Napoleon of crime" machinations required for a direct-from-canon interpretation of Moriarty. But in a long-form series like Elementary there is definitely room to introduce a few more hints of Moriarty's control of the criminal underworld before he shows up in person.

Elementary's ability to move slowly is one of its greatest strengths. Although the murder-of-the-week nature of the crimesolving does allow for some weak points, the Holmes/Watson relationship is more solidly written than pretty much any other show I've seen in this genre. Usually it's the case that either the central relationship in a show is BFFs-from-the-start with occasional moments of quickly resolved "you'd have to be an idiot to believe this" conflict, or the two main characters are needlessly antagonistic beyond the point where it'd be remotely believable for them to still "dislike" each other. In Elementary, it's taken 15 episodes for Watson to tentatively suggest that she and Holmes are friends, and although it's clear that both characters are now fully invested in each other, they're still trying desperately to hide it. The pair of scenes in "M" where Holmes and Watson awkwardly mutter to each other that they like spending time together was beyond adorable, and seemed far more believable than the kind of instant buddy-cop dynamic manufactured by many other crime shows.

Similarly, the decision to have Captain Gregson not forgive Sherlock for his actions in "M" seems astonishingly mature when you remember it's happening in a show that aired a non-profit brothel Russian spy murder conspiracy episode. Obviously they couldn't have Sherlock actually be fired as an NYPD consultant, both for narrative reasons and for the perfectly sensible points Sherlock puts across in the episode himself. But in having Gregson explicitly state that he no longer trusts Sherlock, audiences actually have to remember that Sherlock tying up a serial killer with plans to viciously torture him to death was a bad thing. To be honest, I'm pretty happy to see this because there are a hell of a lot of TV shows and movies that cheerfully handwave all sorts of terrifying vigilante justice, to the point where I'd barely have batted an eyelid if Sherlock's homicidal attitude had been completely ignored as soon as the episode was over. The emotional continuity in this show is just good, you know? Characters don't immediately forgive and forget what happened in last week's episode, even if the writers seem to forget major continuity details like, oh, the brand new sponsor who was a) awesome, and b) introduced like five episodes ago and then never spoken of again. Alfredo, we hardly knew ye.

Continued in Part 2.

Fall 2013 Menswear: Alexander McQueen.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 16:55:00 +0000

Previously on Alexander McQueen.

The backdrop for this show was more like a movie set than a traditional catwalk, with models traveling between wood-panelled rooms that had the look and feel of vintage train compartments. But while the decor was old-fashioned, the clothes were all about extreme, disturbing smoothness. Every outfit focused in on classic tailoring (a nod to McQueen's recently-opened Savile Row menswear store), with an overtly creepy tinge thanks to the smooth, almost android-like appearance of the models. Some even wore transparent masks, giving their faces a glassily inhuman appearance to match the sculpted Brylcreem hair.

pics from Style.com unless captioned otherwise.

These outfits are proof that it's entirely possible to make a supposedly sombre black pinstripe suit look loud and weird. McQueen wisely kept the tailoring slim and subtle while experimenting with pattern work, meaning that almost every suit was a recognisable one-off without looking too out-there. The main on-trend detail was the lack of tie, which in this instance actually worked quite well. First of all, a full suit, buttoned to the neck but without a necktie, is traditionally the outfit of nebbish weirdos -- which fits in perfectly with the unsettling, serial-killerish vibe of this collection. Secondly, these suits are far more mature than the typical buttoned-to-the-collar shirt outfits we've been seeing on the catwalks (and on hipster guys. And Jonny Lee Miller's Sherlock Holmes.) for the past year or so.

There's a trick to wearing a collared shirt with no tie, and it's mostly to do with the shape and spread of the collar. As a rule, the distance between the points of the collar should correspond with the width of the tie, meaning that wider ties go with collars that spread out at a wider angle, and so on. If you think about it, this makes sense because the closer together the points of the collar, the less room there is for a tie. If you look at the shirts in this McQueen show, the collars are all long and thin, and point almost directly downwards. If you were to wear a tie with these shirts, there would barely be enough room for the knot.

Also, if you take a look at the outfits as a whole, there isn't really any "need" for a tie. Ties are an essentially functionless object, and these suits are already busy enough that they don't need to be accessorised. Either the gap between the collar and the top of the waistcoat/lapels is so small that the presence of a tie would make it seem cramped, or the collar itself serves the decorative purpose of a tie -- for example, the bright, contrasting red of the collar in the picture below.

Probably the two most old-school nods to Savile Row tailoring are the wide lapels (not usually seen with narrow-spread collars, since lapels also tend to correspond with the width of the tie) and pagoda shoulders. Pagoda shoulders take their name from the smooth, concave curve (like the roof of a pagoda!) formed by the peak at the edge of each shoulder, the best example in this post being the jacket pictured above.

The stained glass patterned outfits were undoubtedly the most modern in the collection, tying in with current womenswear trends for soft but brightly-patterned trouser suits.

The show closed with some of the most old-fashioned ensembles, taking inspiration from 19th-century smoking jackets, evening coats and velvet dressing gowns.

from here.

Previously on Fall 2013 Menswear: Dior Homme and the Illuminati.

Fall 2013 Menswear: Dior Homme and the Illuminati.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 19:01:00 +0000

This show was very important to me for two reasons:

Ferociously minimalist suits.
Fucken ILLUMINATI, YOU GUYS:

Ferociously minimalist suits are a major area of interest to me. From what I've seen so far, the extremely pared-down, knife-smooth suit is a main fixture this season -- and before you point out that at least 50% of Menswear Fashion Week is always grey suits: yes. I know. I'm aware that this distinction isn't necessarily important to everyone, but I tend to home in on every infinitesimal alteration made to the overal generic suit pattern. And as for the whole Illuminati thing: read on.

pics from Style.com

For whatever reason, Illuminati-inspired triangles are everywhere at the moment. Look up "Illuminati" on Tumblr, and half the tag is full of hipster teens taking pictures of themselves making triangle symbols with their hands. Ke$ha's latest music video was a mess of triangle/Illuminati imagery. There is even a subReddit for triangle enthusiasts. Dior Homme has taken this idea to its cleanest, most formalised extreme, with a single geometric pattern emblazoned across the chest and arms of several outfits in this season's show.

Compared to the severity of the rest of this collection, the simple red or white lines of the triangle/circle pattern seemed almost garish. The pinstripes on Dior Homme's suits were so slim as to be practically invisible, and anything so ostentatious as a necktie was exchewed in favour of a tiny, airplane-seatbelt style buckle. Although there were relatively few alterations made to the classic menswear suit silhouette, the fabric, accessories (or lack thereof) and ultra-narrow cut made these outfits seem like a very distant relative to the suits one sees in everyday life.

The creases and pinstripes on these trousers will be the death of me. Truly, I overidentify way too much with the protagonists of Jon Armstrong's Grey, a cyberpunk/sci-fi novel about minmalist suit enthusiasts.

There was something almost inhuman about the cleanliness of this show. Even the models wearing warm-weather gear looked as if they might not have a natural pulse, or were crafted entirely from plastic. And as we'll see in future posts, this is actually a popular theme among several other Menswear Fashion Week shows this season.

Couture Fashion Week 2013: Chanel, Dior, and Ulyana Sergeenko

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 20:34:00 +0000

Click here for previous Chanel posts.

Chanel's Mary Queen Of Scots collection last season was fantastic, so I can only assume that Karl Lagerfeld used up his yearly quota of awesome on that one. Bearing in mind that this is a Couture show, one would think that it would be better than Pre-Fall. Not so. Instead, the theme (Weimar Germany... something...?) was unclear at best, and totally absent at worst As a kind of psychological palate-cleanser, I'm going to start this post with the ugliest outfit of the show, just so we can get it over with and move on to better things:

This looks like someone put a bunch of lei garlands in a blender, spackled them all over a tube dress, and accessorised it with an apron jacket worn by a Midwestern housewife in the 1980s. Karl Lagerfeld, what were you thinking?

Most of the show was rather more sedate. 68 looks in all, this collection was mostly dedicated to Chanel-classic suits, although the tailoring was unfortunately even boxier than usual. Most puzzling of all were the shoes, which in addition to being open-toed boots (WHY?), were attached to lacey leggings that looked itchily uncomfortable and made the models' legs look wrinkly and shapeless.

The one dress that I'd actually wear:

I find it constantly bizarre that for someone so pathalogically obsessed with thinness (both personally and for women in general), Lagerfeld designs clothes that are just... not slimming at all. I mean, the suits this season are pretty damn cuboid, but this dress is just... a cone. A cone with arm-protectors. No wonder the model is crying her mascara all over her face: her knees are bleeding because the dress is made of concrete and doesn't bend when she walks.

This is what the woman from the blended-garlands picture wore to her Prom:

Instead of the traditional solo bridal dress finale, Lagerfeld ended the show with a pair of brides as a kind of "fuck you" to the gay marriage debate currently going on in France at the moment. I agree in spirit, but the gowns themselves were... really not all that great.

Dior
Dior relies upon the sweeping, formal gown in the same way that Chanel relies upon the skirt-suit. Moreso, really, since Chanel is really Lagerfeld's brand now, whereas Dior is still very much reliant upon the same designs it was producing in it's heyday, the 1950s. The hope is that new Creative Director Raf Simons will revitalise the brand and become their very own Lagerfeld (or a scandal-free Galliano), but I'm yet to be convinced.

Raf Simons' previous role was Creative Director at Jil Sander, where he introduced a very minimalist design style that led to the hugely popular colour-blocking trend that's been everywhere for the past couple of years. He wouldn't have been my first choice for a ladylike, old-fashioned brand like Dior, but perhaps Dior is trying to take a step away from ladylike and old-fashioned. Whether or not that was their actual aim, this show was not particularly impressive. It had little of the luxurious detail of recent Dior couture collections, seeming more like a combination of rather conservative classic Dior designs with a few jarringly unexpected Raf Simons outfits thrown in to remind everyone that he was there.

This yellow dress was one of my few genuine favourites. The two-layer cutaway is interesting, but the extreme simplicity of the shape and colour of the dress as a whole helped to balance it out. Honestly, it looks far more Raf Simons than Dior, but I'll take it.

Ulyana Sergeenko
I had nothing but good things to say about Ulyana Sergeenko's Couture show last year, and even though this was a little cheesier than expected, it had its good points.

In a complete u-turn from last year's nod to Sergeenko's Russian heritage, this collection was all about America. On the bright side, it didn't have any denim-clad cowboys, which is more than one can say for 99% of other USA-themed fashion shows. But it was guided by Hollywood's depiction of America (not exactly an unexplored topic in the world of fashion), leading to things like this pretty but somewhat pointless version of Scarlett O'Hara's green curtain dress in Gone With The Wind:

Rather more to my taste was this ultra-tailored black Puritan dress, which had a kind of fetishised conservatism that the goth in me just can't resist. I'm glad to see that Sergeenko is retaining the long, heavy skirts from her earlier work, since there are so few designers who ever go for this look. Most designers are so concerned with femininity and a slim silhouette that skirts like this are dismissed as unflattering, but Sergeenko is proving that they can be worn with style.

I'm not 100% clear on what this final outfit was supposed to be, but I'm pretty sure Tailor Swift is going to be wearing it in her next video.

Click here for previous Chanel posts.

Alexander McQueen, Pre-Fall 2013: Puritans, Popes, and Vampire Queens.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 17:28:00 +0000

Previously on Alexander McQueen.

As is often the case with Alexander McQueen, it was very difficult for me not to include every single outfit in the collection. This was a show so beautiful that the background for the lookbook photoshoot had to be blank, because anything else might have run the risk of overpowering the beauty of the clothes. Plus, the austerity of a whitewashed backdrop fit in with the puritanical theme.

pics from Style.com

And when I say "puritanical", I don't mean that metaphorically. This season, Sarah Burton took her inspiration directly from priestly vestments, nuns' habits, and the severe black outfits of the Puritans. Featuring everything from medieval robes to 17th-century style buckled shoes, this collection was dramatic while still remaining entirely serious throughout.

The cape-effect tailoring on these gowns seems closely inspired by the chasuble (the outermost layer of a clergyman's ceremonial clothes), with some of the outfits going so far as to look like actual priests' robes. Others were a little more fantastical, allowing for conservatively high necklines and Puritan shoulders on top, but short skirts and leather thigh-highs on the bottom half.

I often see the word "costumey" used in fashion editorials, usually preceded by the phrase, "to avoid looking...". Well, it will probably come as no surprise whatsoever that I have no qualms about looking costumey. What's the point of high fashion if not to look interesting? And with with Alexander McQueen, "interesting" is a guarantee. The nipped-in waists and simple, tailored silhouettes could have come from any McQueen collection of the past ten years, but the severely monochrome colour palette and religious overtones are a definite step away from the more organic, animalistic inspirations of the pre-Sarah Burton era.

Regarding the costumey nature of Sarah Burton's designs, there were, as always, several ensembles that seemed to have been taken directly from the wardrobe of an evil witch-queen. I can only hope that one day the McQueen brand and/or Burton herself is hired to provide costumes for a fantasy movie, as with Jean-Paul Gaultier's work on The Fifth Element.

The black robes pictured below were probably the most literal interpretation of Christian liturgical clothing in the entire collection. Interestingly, there was no religious imagery present at any point in the lookbook. Rather than going full-on Madonna and festooning everything with crucifixes, the collection was accessorised by long chains with acorn pendants, an indication that Sarah Burton is very aware how easily this design theme could slip into parody.

Sarah Burton is known worldwide for designing Kate Middleton's wedding dress, so it's hardly surprising that this collection was rounded off by multiple wedding-appropriate gowns rather than the traditional one. Personally, I think this next outfit is a far more daring and beautiful style of wedding dress than the rather more conventional efforts put forward by most other big-name labels.

Previously on Alexander McQueen.