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Dürer Drawings

Albrecht Dürer (1471 – 1528) was a German painter and printmaker from Nuremberg.

Syllabubs and Jellies

"Though we eat little flesh and drink no wine,
Yet let's be merry; we'll have tea and toast;
Custards for supper, and an endless host
Of syllabubs and jellies and mince-pies,
And other such ladylike luxuries."
- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Pitti Uomo: Jil Sander by Raf Simons

Pitti Uomo kicks off in Florence tomorrow, and the headliner is Raf Simons, who will unveil his Spring 2011 menswear collection for Jil Sander on Thursday night. Mr Simons is bringing Sander to Florence to mark his five years as the brand’s creative director; he says it's a fitting celebration of his work, "It’s a whole event. We’re bringing people to an estate in the hills, showing outside in a tremendous garden with a view of the city below. Afterwards, there will be a dinner. We are creating an atmosphere of celebration. Next season, back to Milan."
His assessment of fashion now:
"I’d like to see fashion slow down a bit. What freaks me out about fashion today is the speed—the speed of consuming, the speed of ideas. When fashion moves so fast, it takes away something I always loved, which is the idea that fashion should be slightly elusive. Hard to grasp, hard to find. We say this word, elite, like it’s bad to be elite, but is it? Shouldn’t there be some things, fashion included, that you can enjoy as creativity, as a message that requires thinking over? I’d like there to be time for that again." - Raf Simons

And Then Luxury Lost Its Lustre

If anyone on earth is clueless enough to still thinks Hermes plus Croco means to die for style, you need only look at this. Poor Brit Brit...

Get Happy!

Dreamily drag...
Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand sing Get Happy and Happy Days Are Here Again in a counterpoint duet. This performance is from the Judy Garland Show, broadcast on October 6 1963. Ms Streisand was 21 years old at the time and received an Emmy nomination for this guest appearance. And then years ago, this Steven Meisel ad for Clinique put a smile on my face everytime I saw it at Tangs's Beauty Hall, where I was working for a couple of years...

Goyard Book

Goyard, in collaboration with Éditions d’Art Devambez, announces the launch of its first book. The legendary Parisian trunk maker is selling this limited edition publication to celebrate its heritage of luxury travel, from horse-drawn carriages to the great transatlantic ocean liners. The book is presented within a made to order trunk. Each client is invited to make a named copy of this highly collectible book into a unique piece. You are not only able to choose the colour of the case's canvas, but also to affix specific initials and stripes upon it.
Copies are numbered from 1 to 233, validating the rarity and authenticity of both the book and the Goyard trunk which encases it.
This art book uses traditional letterpress techniques for the text, features its own watermarks and is printed upon custom made vellum paper à la forme of Arches Mills.
Text: In French with an English translation.
Pages: 280 pages with additional supplements.
Colours: You choose the colour of the canvas of the trunk from twelve colours, two of which - silver and gold - are reserved exclusively for the subscription, that is pre-order from now till 30 June. The addition of initials and stripes are at the expense of the client. The book will not be sold in bookstores and is only available by special order.

Price: 5,000 € plus VAT ( till June 30th, 2010)
From July 1st: 6,000 € plus VAT.
Price does not include shipping and customs.
Copies are named on the book and are numbered on the book and the trunk.
Book size : 300 x 390mm.
Trunk size : 340 x 440 x 160 mm.

(For publication during the fourth trimester, 2010.
Impression is 285 copies from 1 to 233, A to Z and I to XXVI.
233 trunks numbered from 1 to 233 are reserved for sale.)

Tonchi's Touch

Finally, English coverlines on W!

Northanger Abbey

A good synopsis as any of my least fave Jane Austen novel: "Catherine Morland, the heroine of Northanger Abbey, is the crude prototype of the Austen heroine, a teenage provincial whose worldview, such as it is, has been shaped by her extensive reading of gothic novels. Just 17 years old when she embarks on her first trip beyond the family manor to the great resort of Bath, Catherine is good-natured but gullible. She befriends the duplicitous and supercilious Isabella Thorpe and gradually falls for the wellborn, well-read cleric Henry Tilney. Though she is not always quick nor erudite enough to understand Tilney, her attraction to him suggests, despite much evidence to the contrary, that she is capable of good judgment. The narrator, who keeps popping up to wink at us, seems determined to exploit Catherine’s lack of experience and infatuation with Romantic fiction for comic effect. When she is invited to the Tilney family seat by Henry’s sister Eleanor, she insists on infusing the environs of Northanger Abbey with gothic menace, and while she seems to be cured of this tendency after a few weeks at the Abbey, the best we can say of young Catherine is that she may someday grow up to be the kind of heroine who populates the later novels." - Jay McInerney

Wicked Wild

I love this spread in June's Vogue Italia. It is classic Steven Meisel, and the styling is wicked and wild: poetic, romantic and yes, classic.

He Said She Said

"Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary." - Steve Jobs

Steven Klein on Alejandro

This is too deliciously idiotic not to record. Steven Klein, director of the Lady Gaga video Alejandro has this to say (to MTV) about this particular piece of commercial pop :

"I felt a narrative drive you could make interesting, and we both aligned on the vision for the film. I was not thinking in terms of influences. I saw it more as a combination of cinema and theater. It is about a woman's desire to resurrect a dead love and who can not face the brutality of her present situation. The pain of living without your true love." Have you got over laughing your heads off? There's more. "The religious symbolism is not meant to denote anything negative, but represents the character's battle between the dark forces of this world and the spiritual salvation of the soul. Thus at the end of the film, she chooses to be a nun, and the reason her mouth and eyes disappear is because she is withdrawing her senses from the world of evil and going inward towards prayer and contemplation." And as for the scene in which Lady Gaga ingests rosary beads, Mr Klein says it was meant to represent "the desire to take in the holy."
His agent should forbid him to ramble to the public, thereby making a nonsensical piece of work even more ludicrous. It's as if the video was not banal enough. Are all photographers (of this ilk) like that? Where's Meisel when you need him?

Weekend Reading List

I don't think I've ever written anything about the iconic illustrator Rene Gruau (1909 - 2004) in this blog and this weekend I'm looking through the gigantic book Gruau, so I might as well; He's a formative influence for me as far as style, elegance and drawing goes, and predates Antonio Lopez for me. I first became conscious of his work when I was very little. I remember spending most of my 13th year not studying hard in school (I was dreamy and still am in a way) but instead, copying Mr Gruau's Dior ads in my exercise books and the margins of my textbooks. If I dig deep enough, I can pull out from the dusty depths of drawers and cupboards my first childish attempts at Gruau's iconic sweeping fluidity, his pure economy of line, at once precise, yet sensual. And then came Erte (1892 – 1990). His works always make me think of Serge Lutens for some strange reason. A classmate in ACS showed me a book of Erte illustrations and I was hooked. Thirteen years old, can you imagine? Those ACS queens were a precocious and sophisticated bunch.I don't have the energy to pick up a pencil this weekend, as it has been an exhausting week and all I want to do is retreat to the dark depths of my various pillows and read my Agatha Christie of the week: Murder Is Easy. This is terrifically chilling, Ms Christie at her best, and a perfect anitidote to dashing about all week. It's like smelling salts for the soul, right up there with watching laundry spin in a bath of suds.
Because of an article in the Financial Times on Paulo Coelho, I decided to pick up his bestseller The Alchemist; I've never read this even though millions apparently have, and later today, I shall crack it open and see what the fuss is about. I'm also dipping into an old favourite of Anton Chekov's collected short works The Comic Stories, all of them unpretentious, lively and inventive, and just perfect for an early Sunday night, hot and muggy

1,000!

1,000 Posts!!!
I never thought I would make it this far, but here I am!

Fall Haute Couture Schedule

Monday, 5 July
2.30 pm CHRISTIAN DIOR

Tuesday, 6 July
11 am GIORGIO ARMANI PRIVÉ
Espace Vendôme - 7 place Vendôme
4 pm GIVENCHY
8 pm CHANEL
Grand Palais - Avenue Winston Churchill

Wednesday, 7 July
2.30 JEAN PAUL GAULTIER
325 rue Saint-Martin

Megan Fox/ Gaga Don't Preach

"I don’t want to open my mouth or speak anymore, because everything I say becomes scandalous. It wears you out. . . . So I’m a bit jaded. " —Megan FoxNow who's the dummy here? The Craig Mcdean photos, which appear in June's Interview are in the well-trodden style of Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin. I feel dumb typing that because it's such an obvious (and banal) thing, with so little re-invention or value add it makes me want to run back to bed and put on the eye shades and snooze till its 2020. Mr Mcdean has lost his way, slowly but surely and his work has, over the years, become as thin and bloodless as his visage. These photos are surely as unshocking, and unprovocative as the new Lady Gaga video Alejandro. In a sense they are the least new of all her videos, in the way it heavily, and humourlessly, trods the well trodden path that Madonna has made her own... 20 years ago? Where's the outrage? Even the Catholic iconography feels lazy and banal. It's just deja vu all the way, safely within the familiar territory of director Steven Klein's fashion work, it's merely a cheaply garbled remix of familiar Madonna videos like Express Yourself (1989, David Fincher), Vogue, Erotica etc. Even model Evandro Soldati's cameo is but a pale reflection of Cameron Alborzian's (British-Iranian) in Express Yourself.
Gaga has been promoting the video as a tribute to gay people and the gay people have been wagging their tails but it's hard to see where the honour is. Do gay people see themselves as worshipful (of Gaga) S&M drones? Still? In 2010? How pathetic. Gaga don't preach.Snooze... Wake me up when there's really something to see.

L'Officiel Hommes Special Mode

More new pictures of Andres Velencoso to brighten up your summer. Pant.

He Said She Said

"We are all of us stars, and we deserve to twinkle." - Marilyn Monroe