stylophile

eat cake!

2008-12-27T06:36:00.000-08:00

I'm a little late at posting Halloween pictures, but better late than never.

at the mermaid parade

2008-06-27T05:23:00.000-07:00

coney island madam

2008-06-21T17:32:00.001-07:00

At the Mermaid Parade in Coney Island.

gucci love

2008-06-10T08:20:00.000-07:00

Isn't this vintage Gucci dress from the 1970's lovely? I couldn't resist and bought it last night on ebay after a final and two blueberry beers. The description makes me swoon: "This Gucci dress features the class horsebit / saddlery icons of Gucci against a navy background. The colours are gold, brown, and a maroon/red. It is such heavy, soft high quality silk and it sits so beautifully on the body. It has a thick tie for the waist, prominent collar that isnt too 'retro' but dates it to the 1970's. It also has a discreet zip front and a pleated skirt." I spent a small fortune on it. Ebay stores charge just as much as overpriced NY vintage boutiques now. The price of gas, the price of food, the price of used clothes--all sky rocketing!

legendary designer Yves Saint Laurent dies at 71

2008-06-02T07:07:00.000-07:00

Catherine Deneuve and Yves Saint-Laurent, 1966

New York Times
By ANNE-MARIE SCHIRO
Published: June 2, 2008

Yves Saint Laurent, who exploded on the fashion scene in 1958 as the boy-wonder successor to Christian Dior and endured as one of the best-known and most influential couturiers of the second half of the 20th century, died on Sunday at his apartment in Paris. He was 71.

His death was confirmed by Dominique Deroche, a spokeswoman for the Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation.

During a career that ran from 1957 to 2002 he was largely responsible for changing the way modern women dress, putting them into pants both day and night, into peacoats and safari jackets, into “le smoking” (as the French call a man’s tuxedo jacket), and into leopard prints, trench coats and, for a time in the 1970s, peasant-inspired clothing in rich fabrics.

Mr. Saint Laurent often sought inspiration on the streets, bringing the Parisian beatnik style to couture runways and adapting the sailors’ peacoats he found in Army-Navy stores in New York into jackets that found their way into fashionable women’s wardrobes around the world. His glamorous evening clothes were often adorned with appliqués and beadwork inspired by artists like Picasso, Miró and Matisse. Above all, he was a master colorist, able to mix green, blue, rose and yellow in one outfit to achieve an effect that was artistic and never garish.

Among the women of style who wore his clothes were Catherine Deneuve, Paloma Picasso, Nan Kempner, Lauren Bacall, Marella Agnelli and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild.

Mr. Saint Laurent achieved instant fame in 1958 at the age of 21 when he showed his Trapeze collection, his first for Christian Dior following the master’s death. But unlike many overnight sensations, Mr. Saint Laurent managed to remain at the top of his profession as fashion changed from an emphasis on formal, custom-made haute couture to casual sportswear.

For many years after he opened his own couture house, in 1962, his collections were eagerly anticipated by fashion enthusiasts, who considered his the final word on that season’s style. His influence was at its height during the 1960s and ’70s, when it was still normal for couturiers to change silhouettes and hemlines drastically every six months.

Among his greatest successes were his Mondrian collection in 1965, based on the Dutch artist’s gridlike paintings, and the “rich peasant” collection of 1976, which stirred so much interest that the Paris show was restaged in New York for his American admirers. “The clothes incorporated all my dreams,” he said after the show, “all my heroines in the novels, the operas, the paintings. It was my heart — everything I love that I gave to this collection.”

Originally a maverick and a generator of controversy — in 1968, his suggestion that women wear pants as an everyday uniform was considered revolutionary — Mr. Saint Laurent developed into a more conservative designer, a believer in evolution rather than revolution. He often said that all a woman needed to be fashionable was a pair of pants, a sweater and a raincoat.

“My small job as a couturier,” he once said, “is to make clothes that reflect our times. I’m convinced women want to wear pants.”

A Rare Retrospective

By 1983, when he was 47, his work was recognized by fashion scholars as so fundamentally important to women’s dress that a retrospective of his designs was held at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first time the museum had honored a living designer. Diana Vreeland, the legendary magazine editor and the doyenne of the Costume Institute, who masterminded the exhibition, called him “a living genius” and “the Pied Piper of fashion.”

“Whatever he does,” she said, “women of all ages, from all over the world, follow.” That exhibition was followed by retrospectives in Paris, Beijing, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tokyo and Sydney, Australia.

But the New York exhibition could be considered the peak of Mr. Saint Laurent’s career, for after that he settled into a classical mode of reinterpreting his earlier successes. The boy wonder had turned into the elder statesman. He said in an interview in 1983: “A woman’s wardrobe shouldn’t change every six months. You should be able to use the pieces you already own and add to them. Because they are like timeless classics.”

Yet because so many of his early designs seeped into the public domain of fashion (and into many other designers’ collections), he managed to retain his stellar position in the world of fashion through his retirement in 2002.

Yves Henri Donat Mathieu-Saint-Laurent came a long way from Oran, Algeria, where he was born on Aug. 1, 1936, to Charles and Lucienne Andrée Mathieu-Saint-Laurent. His father was a lawyer and insurance broker, his mother a woman of great personal style. He grew up in a villa by the Mediterranean with his two younger sisters, Michelle and Brigitte.

His mother and sisters, all of Paris, survive him.
The young Yves was said to be a quiet and retiring child (and as an adult was also often described as quiet and retiring), who avoided all sports except swimming and developed a love for fashion and the theater at an early age. After seeing a play by Molière when he was 11, he recreated the play in miniature, pasting the costumes together. As a teenager, he designed clothes for his mother, who had them whipped up by a local seamstress. (His mother became his greatest fan, sitting in the front row at all his shows and wearing no one else’s designs.)

Although his parents wanted him to study law, Mr. Saint Laurent — lanky and brown-haired, his blue eyes framed by glasses — went to Paris when he was 17 to try his luck in theatrical and fashion design. He briefly studied design at the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, leaving because he said he was bored. Shortly thereafter, he won first prize in an International Wool Secretariat design competition for his sketch of a cocktail dress. This led to an interview with Christian Dior, who noted an uncanny resemblance between Mr. Saint Laurent’s cocktail dress and one he himself was working on. Recognizing the young designer’s talent, Dior hired him on the spot as his assistant.

Dior’s Protégé

For three years, Mr. Saint Laurent worked closely with Dior, who called him “my dauphin” and “my right arm.” After Dior died suddenly in 1957, shocking the fashion world, the House of Dior named Mr. Saint Laurent its head designer. At 21, he found himself at the head of a $20-million-a-year fashion empire, succeeding a legend, the man who had radically changed the way women dressed in 1947 with the wasp-waisted New Look.

Mr. Saint Laurent’s first collection in his new position, shown on Jan. 30, 1958, was based on the trapeze, a youthful silhouette that started with narrow shoulders and a raised waistline, then flared out gently to a wide hemline. The collection was received with great enthusiasm, and Mr. Saint Laurent’s name was well on its way to becoming a household word across Europe and America.

He was credited by many with rejuvenating French fashion and securing his country’s pre-eminent position in the world of haute couture. Newsboys shouted his triumph across the streets of Paris while he waved to the crowds below the balcony of the House of Dior on the Avenue Montaigne. The dauphin was crowned king.

His last collection for Dior, in July 1960, was based on a “chic beatnik” look of knitted turtlenecks and black leather jackets. It was less warmly received, though eventually the style became the uniform of the avant-garde.

In September of that year, Mr. Saint Laurent was called up for 27 months of compulsory military service during the war France was then fighting in Algeria. He had previously been given deferments because 2,000 jobs depended on his talent.

About three weeks after his induction, he was hospitalized for a nervous collapse. In October 1960, the House of Dior gave his job to Marc Bohan, his former assistant. In November, Mr. Saint Laurent was discharged from the army and entered a private clinic near Paris. In later years, he suffered from depression and a dependency on alcohol and drugs, a dependency he attributed to the drugs he was given in a military psychiatric hospital. But he almost always recovered in time to take the ritual walk down the runway, however unsteadily, at the finale of his shows.

In January 1961, Mr. Bohan’s collection for Dior was a huge success. Mr. Saint Laurent sued Dior for severance pay and damages after the house refused to reinstate him after his army discharge. He was awarded 680,000 francs by the court, then about $140,000.

In September 1961, Mr. Saint Laurent announced plans to open his own haute couture house in partnership with his lover, Pierre Bergé. Mr. Bergé remained his lifelong business partner and was responsible for the company’s financial success, although they split up as a couple in the early 1980s. The fledgling house was backed by J. Mack Robinson, an Atlanta businessman, who later said his confidence was based on the excitement Mr. Saint Laurent had created when he replaced Dior.

His Own Collection

The first Yves Saint Laurent collection was shown on Jan. 19, 1962. It was the beginning of a success story that led eventually to a ready-to-wear line sold in the designer’s own Rive Gauche boutiques around the world; to hundreds of licenses for scarves, jewelry, furs, shoes, men’s wear, cosmetics and perfumes, and even cigarettes; to set and costume designs for the ballet, theater and movies (most notably, for Catherine Deneuve in “Belle de Jour” in 1967); to a listing on the Paris Bourse, and to a host of awards, including the French Legion of Honor in 1985.

The House of Saint Laurent had various owners over the years, including Lanvin-Charles of the Ritz and Squibb-Beach Nut. In 1993, in a $636 million transaction, it became part of the state-owned French pharmaceuticals conglomerate Elf Sanofi, but 43 percent of the fashion group remained in the hands of Mr. Bergé and Mr. Saint Laurent. In 2000, Gucci Group bought the ready-to-wear and fragrance divisions of the company, while Mr. Bergé and Mr. Saint Laurent retained the haute couture business until the designer’s retirement. Under Gucci, to Mr. Saint Laurent’s vocal displeasure, the YSL ready-to-wear line was designed by the American fashion star Tom Ford.

“The poor guy does what he can,” Mr. Saint Laurent said of his successor.

Mr. Ford, who simultaneously designed the Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent collections with an overtly racy and sexualized aesthetic during those years, left the company in 2003; the Yves Saint Laurent collections have since been designed by one of Mr. Ford’s former assistants, Stefano Pilati.

In January 2002, Mr. Saint Laurent announced his retirement in Paris at a press conference at his couture house at 5 Avenue Marceau, where many fashion editors and teary-eyed friends of the house considered the possibility that Mr. Saint Laurent had felt pressured to resign. He and Mr. Bergé denied that, and a week later announced plans to turn the house into a museum, which has since displayed exhibitions of Mr. Saint Laurent’s tuxedo jackets and the clothes he designed for Ms. Kempner.

‘Opium’ Wars

The designer, of course, managed several times to create controversy during his career with, of all things, his fragrances. In 1971, he appeared nude in an advertisement for his men’s cologne YSL. Then, in 1977, he named one of his women’s perfumes Opium, which led to charges that he was glamorizing drug use and trivializing the 19th-century Opium Wars in China. Its slogan was “Opium, for those who are addicted to Yves Saint Laurent.” In 1992, his plans to call another perfume Champagne prompted a lawsuit by French wine makers (the Saint Laurent company lost).

In another legal battle, Mr. Saint Laurent won a 1994 suit in the French courts against Ralph Lauren, whom he accused of copying the design for his tuxedo dress (a style Mr. Saint Laurent reinterpreted many times over the years).

In 1992, a celebration at the Bastille Opera in Paris of the 30th anniversary of the House of Saint Laurent was attended by 2,750 admirers who applauded as 100 models took to the stage in clothes from the three decades. Writing about the event in The New York Times, Bernadine Morris said, “What was wondrous about these clothes, besides their breathtaking beauty, was that nothing looked dated.”

As befitted his success, Mr. Saint Laurent lived elegantly. All his homes — including famous ones in Deauville, France, and Marrakech, Morocco — which he shared with a succession of French bulldogs, always named Moujik, were lavishly decorated and filled with antiques and artwork by his favorite artists, who included Picasso, Cocteau, Braque and Christian Bérard. He often said that Bérard was one of the greatest influences on his designs, particularly in the use of color.

“Every man needs aesthetic phantoms in order to exist,” Mr. Saint Laurent said at the announcement of his retirement. “I have known fear and the terrors of solitude. I have known those fair-weather friends we call tranquilizers and drugs. I have known the prison of depression and the confinement of hospital. But one day, I was able to come through all of that, dazzled yet sober.”

warmer!

2008-05-28T19:39:00.000-07:00

Sent: Wed, 28 May 2008 4:20 pm
Subject: MARC JACOBS

ALL SHOES ARE NOW 70% OFF.... APOLOGIES FOR THE MASS EMAIL :) WE HAVE SOME NEW FALL BAGS IN AS WELL...

--
Julie
Marc Jacobs
2123431490

(in no order)

2008-05-28T05:15:00.000-07:00

my ebay wishlist is so long.

and now

2008-05-25T07:41:00.000-07:00

In preparation for a school year's close, I vow to stop, notice and appreciate my surroundings. As I perused the internet this morning in a haze of procrastination, I came across my favorite high school poem (that was 10 years ago...eek!), O Taste and See by Denise Levertov:

The world is
not with us enough
O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

And then, if nostalgic prose was not enough, I came across the story of a painter ignored on a street corner in Paris in Style and the City. We get so many small signals every day that scream "slow down!" The wisest words I've gotten this year came from my undergraduate advisor, "and life is, we must trust, longer than we experience it at any given moment and filled with unexpected possibilities."
And so, for someone who measures her years according to the academic calendar, this one is coming to completion. But I will take time to listen to the music, despite the rush.

mandals!

2008-05-25T05:26:00.000-07:00

"would you wear them?"
"probably not."

i tend to have a one track mind these days

2008-05-24T07:13:00.000-07:00

what does this mean?

2008-05-23T20:50:00.000-07:00

I think this means that Marc Jacobs Spring 2008 at 90% off is just around the corner. Joy!

Sent: Fri, 23 May 2008 11:35 am
Subject: Marc Jacobs

Hello! Sorry for the mass email.. but we just went on sale this morning! 40% off on shoes... collections.. let me know and I can tell you exactly what's on sale or not.. stop in and see me if you have time! Thanks!

--
Julie
Marc Jacobs
2123431490

you walk wrong

2008-05-04T18:46:00.000-07:00

Makeup by John Maurad and Jenai Chin. Photo: Tom Schierlitz

eek!: http://nymag.com/health/features/46213/

murakami madness

2008-04-21T14:29:00.001-07:00

In case you are curious, the Murakami exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum is wonderful. Of course there is a Louis Vuitton shop stuck in the middle of the thing. In addition to the marketable psychedlic mushrooms and bears, there are some controversial surprises that will make the most wanton character blush. Pictures were strictly prohibited so I don't have any of the interesting ones to show.

ooh, take a look: http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=97318d8fc5523d7c512e8daf608b357a884ac908

elfin chic

2008-04-17T06:46:00.001-07:00

Joanna Newsom. It only goes to show that playing with archetypes can have a powerful effect on your appearance. There are so many choices but very few people dress in "costume"--the result here is otherworldliness. Instead of waking up putting together an outfit with a magazine for inspiration, use an illustrated fairytale book instead.

homebody

2008-04-12T17:07:00.000-07:00

In a recent interview with We Make Money Not Art, Kate James described her strained relationship with fashion fed by her love of dance and architecture. She is a second year graduate student in the Visual Arts Program at MIT. She studied dance/kinesthesia and architectural history at Brown University, did a Masters of Architecture at MIT and later transferred into the Visual Arts program.

All of the photos here are atHABITat costumes.

They are about a contemporary vision of the woman in the home, and a need to multi-task and overlap the upkeep habits of the body and the home. They are costumes worn to augment the household maintenance task, transforming it into an iso-kinetic exercise. Each costume records and accentuates the ergonomics of the activity.

In one, resistance band connects the vacuum wand to the wearer, intensifying the sweeping motion of the vacuuming. The 'putting away dishes' costume attaches a similar resistance band between the dishwasher and the wearer's vinyl gloves. In the 'serving food' costume, bands run through an oven mitt corset piece to accentuate the tension in the serving motion.

And, lastly, Kate James on her relationship with fashion:

As an artist, I certainly engage with fashion. By this I mean that I think closely about how the body is clad, and how clothing can inform the body and vice-versa. Fashion becomes a key interface in the investigation of the body in the environment.

In terms of performance and the impact of costuming, fashion offers a fantastic bank of codified aesthetics, which can be drawn from for conceptual and phenomenal meaning.

this is news to me

2008-04-12T06:50:00.000-07:00

photo from egotastic

Color me surprised. Devendra Barnhart's music is wonderful but I can't imagine such a level headed gal (yes, that's Natalie Portman pictured above) being in a relationship with an acid trip (see interview below music video).

the long and the short and the in between of it

2008-04-08T18:11:00.000-07:00

Hey guys, lets not leave out the cropped pants in this whole "hurrah, it's spring, lets shout it from the roof tops and dance in the rain in stiletto sandals" business. The shoes are amazing, please don't think anything less of me for shifting the spotlight a little heaven-ward to the pants that these women are wearing. There is something so fresh, structurally interesting and just plain beautiful about the tulip pants in the photos above. I've seen them in a few shops: a wonderful dark grey pair at anthropologie several months back and a black pair at H&M now. They are just the thing, with a ballet slipper, to put a spring (eh, eh, get it?) in my step on regular days--not the stiletto ones (which are few and far between nowadays).

child's play

2008-03-26T13:36:00.000-07:00

This is cute, frighteningly cute. This kiddie looks more put together than most adults.

gladiator bandwagon

2008-03-25T18:47:00.000-07:00

I am jumping on the gladiator sandal bandwagon only because I have wanted a pair for the past 4 years and only recently started seeing a large enough selection to find some that satisfy me. For those lucky size 9's out there, take a look at the puppies above sold by Clair Incorruptable.
Of course now, Ebay is being hounded by patient fashionistas bidding on vintage sandals. My favorite internet stores have wonderful options for those of us who can afford them. Here are some offerings from Farylrobin, Givenchy and Modern Vintage Shoes.

and now back to our regularly scheduled program

2008-03-24T19:05:00.000-07:00

I am back from my spring vacation in Atlanta, GA. Now I have to muster the motivation to keeping on plugging through.

patrick dougherty at max azria

2008-03-13T08:11:00.000-07:00

Max Azria Melrose Avenue Boutique, Los Angeles, CA. photographer: David Calicchio

I find the work of Patrick Dougherty incredibly beautiful. Here he weaves a beautiful cocoon around the Max Azria boutique in Los Angeles. It reminds me of the painting technique of Van Gogh (think Starry Night).

"Dougherty's works allude to nests, cocoons, hives, and lairs built by animals, as well as the manmade forms of huts, haystacks, and baskets, created by interweaving branches and twigs together. Many of his works look 'found' rather than made, as if they were created by the natural force of a tornado sweeping across the landscape. He intentionally tries for this effortless effect, as if his creations just fell or grew up naturally in their settings."

- Linda Johnson, Curator

rick owens' monsters

2008-03-11T16:41:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, The New Yorker publishes a retrospect on a fashion designer that will rival devotional poetry in its complete reverence for the artist. This week's piece on Rick Owens not only succeeded in describing why Owens has established a cult-like following, but also to elevated him to the level of the great conceptual designers such as Rei Kawakubo. Rick Owens' aesthetic has been described as "broken idealism." His elaborately sculptural pieces evoke the sentiment of a seedy crumbling city--perhaps Lima or St. Petersburg. The walls of his own Paris apartment, which he shares with his wife Michele Lamy, are crumbling, shorn of wallpaper, the floors are dusty concrete slabs, the ceilings are a tangle of ducts, wires and pipes. Owens has a similar attitude to clothing--he takes something perfect and fusses it up a bit, whether it be the shape or the fabric. Soft leather jackets are machine washed and dried, semi-transparent organza is layered, t-shirts are long and clingy, dresses are elegant but always asymmetrical: this is glunge (glamour + grunge) at it's finest.

Shown here: jacket, cashmere jersey tube skirt and top from the Lilies collection (2007)

There is a sad romanticism that all of his pieces have which draws me to them. His designs embody the crumbling paint on a cathedral wall. In fact, a large inspiration to Owens are the robes worn in church:

"In Catholic school I always loved that aesthetic of all those robes dragging in those dusty temples, with Jesus and the disciples and all that. It was very exotic and very alluring to me in my very safe little world of small-town California. When I look around here in the studio, I see wanting to re-create those dusty temples and robes and stuff."

At times, I was annoyed with Owens' California-boy-in-Paris life, his conservative parents following him around fashion week and his insistence that he was a "deeply cultured person." All of these trappings of celebrity probably made his personality a bit grating to me from the page but the laudatory style with which the article was written really put Owens in a position of high esteem. Check it out if you get a chance!

chloe sevigny and opening ceremony

2008-03-07T06:08:00.001-08:00

Chloe Sevigny for Opening Ceremony is now being sold at Barneys...and it actually looks good.

natalie portman for te casan

2008-03-06T22:13:00.000-08:00

What do you do if you can't find any vegan footwear you like? If you're Natalie Portman, you design your own.

best in show

2008-03-06T21:55:00.000-08:00

With Spring upon us and day light savings time just a few days away, I would like to recognize the wonderful clothes of winter one last time. These chic ladies were captured by Scott Schulman in February.