Yes, I cannot pass up a good red carpet. So here’s the 2012 Met Ball hit list.
Camilla Belle in Ralph Lauren
Isn’t it kind of intriguing how a designer can design multiple collections simultaneously? It is one thing to create nice clothes. It is altogether another talent to be able to distill the essence of a design house, in the absence of the founding visionary, and to design consistently with the feeling and aesthetic of the house, and at the same time completely shift gears and create a distinct vision for your namesake collection which is utterly separate.
In this context, Marc Jacobs’ relationship with Louis Vuitton is somewhat unusual. Although Louis Vuitton had long since established itself in the world of luggage and leather goods, Marc Jacobs was Artistic Director for the first ready-to-wear collection. So there is, in essence, no Louis Vuitton ready-to-wear style separate from Jacobs. Yet somehow, over the years, he has managed to weave a fairly distinctive look for the brand. Sometimes it is more distinct from the collection he puts out under his namesake label, sometimes less so. Looking ahead to Fall 2012 I’m having an awfully hard time telling the two apart. To a great extent it may have to do with styling. Styling plays a not insignificant role in giving an identity to a collection. But, however you look at it, I find the choices that Jacobs made in presenting these collections surprising.
Louis Vuitton Fall 2012
Yesterday’s post led me to think about not so much collaborations with artists, but instances in which fashion has modeled itself directly on works of art. In the twentieth century, no one really did fine art fashion as well as Yves Saint Laurent.
In 1965 he presented his Mondrian collection:
Last month, as part of Paris Fashion Week, the Louvre’s Musee Des Arts Decoratifs hosted a photocall in honor of the opening of its Louis Vuitton-Marc Jacobs exhibition running from March 9 through September 16. The exhibition relates the 143 year history of the fashion house through the lens of two men, Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs.
Picking up more or less where yesterday’s post left off, the flip side of H&M’s ability to produce incredibly refined looking clothing for low prices, is this vital role that styling plays in how we read the value in what we see, and how much poor styling can bring down truly lovely clothing. I know that sounds like a mouthful of justification for connecting two posts. I do think the connection is there. But the main inspiration for today’s post was a Chanel ad that I came across yesterday. I was blown away when I saw it — knew I had to blog about it — because I couldn’t get over how cheap it looked.
Generally, Chanel’s photography and ad campaigns are exquisite. The images themselves are so refined, that it’s hard not to think that you desperately want the clothes.
Prints don’t have to be bold — this spring we also have prints for the faint of heart and for children. (For the style-obsessed — and others — today is above all the day to discuss last night’s premier of Fashion Star. I dutifully watched it, but I can’t begin to imagine what to say … speechless (dumbfounded more like) … so I’ll just leave it at that.)
As discussed yesterday, I think the strongest trend for spring is prints, but another – as epitomized by Louis Vuitton – is saccharine sweet, candy-colored pastels. Pastels are hard to pull off without seeming like too much, so lace dresses of pastel pink have taken on boxy shapes, unexpected sheerness, or accents of black accessories to balance things out. Not surprisingly, when everything gets thrown into the mix, a number of designers have produced pastel hued prints. If the D&G thing is feeling like a little much, these more subtly hued prints present a reasonable alternative.
Perhaps my favorite of these collections came from Erdem. Every dress is impossibly refined and lady-like, but something makes them irresistible none the less (since refined and lady-like are definitely not clear-cut positive terms in my book). Perhaps it is the black in the patterns which in the midst of blue and white flowers on silken fabric is somehow completely unexpected.
Erdem Spring 2012 collection via Style.com
Okay, so it isn’t really spring, but it sure as hell feels like it. And that means that women and girls everywhere seem to be obsessing about finding the perfect dress — for graduation, for a wedding, whatever it is spring means outdoor parties and celebrations and that means an excuse to buy a fabulous dress. (Personally I find it much easier to buy fabulous dresses all year round. It takes the pressure off the spring dress and the holiday dress.) So here are my two cents (which will come in the form of a few posts and therefore feel maybe more like a dime) on the perfect dress this spring.
Every fashion magazine lists a slew of trends for spring — floral, sporty, global, metallic, neons, yada, yada, yada — until it seems like you’ve covered pretty much every base imaginable and now your really not talking trends but describing every article of clothing ever designed. But for me the most compelling is prints. I’m a prints on prints kind of a person anyway, so that’s not a big change, but trends this spring have fallen perfectly into my wheelhouse, and colorful clashing outrageous prints abound. It’s going to be hard to get away with this kind of manic effusiveness again, so I say go for it.
It feels like Mary Katrantzou as fashion’s darling is the starting point for this whole prints obsession, but I suspect that’s just my personal infatuation talking (see The Most Incredible Collection This Spring – I <3 Mary Katrantzou). But wherever it came from, it seems to have spread like wild-fire. Personally, I have an aversion to purple. Almost every little girl goes through a purple phase – I sure as hell did – and in my opinion it kind of ruins the color forever. And yet Prabal Gurung took a limited palate, almost completely centered around the color purple, and came up with something awesome (in the true sense of the word) and absolutely irresistible.
Prabal Gurung Spring 2012 collection
This month’s every-time-I-see-something-I-love-it-turns-out-to-be-by-the-same-designer is Carven. The House of Carven has in fact been around for decades, but in 2010 Guillaume Henri came on board as art director and breathed a new life — of the ready-to-wear variety — into the fabled haute couture house. At least I’m going to go with that as my excuse for not noticing it sooner. Henri is just fantastic.
So, here we have some looks from his spring 2011 collection, Henri’s third collection for Carven, which the designer referred to as “bourgeois, but with a nasty side”. You kind of already have to love it right there.
Carven Spring 2011 collection via Style.com
Of no interest to more philosophical types, but of the utmost importance to shoe addicts, there are a lot of exciting developments on the shoe front. The trends in shoes seem to be particularly fun for this spring anyway (I know I’m sounding like a bit of a fluff here, but I’m telling you, if you’re obsessed with shoes, this is nirvana) with even brighter colors, and more floral prints and patent leather than usual. So it is perfect timing for some new players to enter the shoe market.
In case you forgot, the Aldo Rise for Preen, Libertine, Mark Fast and J.W. Anderson collections arrive in Aldo stores and online tomorrow. All of the styles are precariously high, but a pair of the Preen Giffee just arrived on my doorstep yesterday and the shoes are surprisingly comfortable.
Preen for ALDO Rise
We have all been aware for some time that most of the products we consume are made in China. Go to China and you can get cheap manufacturing for American products. But as global economy shifts and develops, more significantly, the Chinese consumer is become an ever more significant market force, and apparently isn’t consuming in quite the way that American companies might have hoped. For one thing, they are not so brand driven. Given how central brand is to not only our marketing, but our sales in Europe and in Japan, that throws many a U.S. executive off his game. It will be an interesting challenge in the upcoming decade to see what happens as American company come to understand what kind of consumers the chinese are.
This applies in no small measure to the fashion industry. Huang Hung wrote recently in Women’s Wear Daily that “if there is Haute Couture in China, it would have to be in the Rose Studio by Guo Pei”. Guo Pei’s design philosophy proves instructive. She dresses extremely high profile clients, but the aim is not to garner attention and fame for herself in the process. Politicians must be politicians first, wives try not to upstage their husbands, the focus does not appear to be on seasons on trends, but beauty and fine workmanship. The Rose studio employs more than 300 workers in its in-house embroidery workshop.
No doubt, the West will shape Chinese fashion as well. Guo Pei seems to be becoming something of a celebrity despite herself. Most of the pieces worn in high profile situations are more understated than those created for show. But all in all, the clothes are unlike anything you’ve ever seen — or at least unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
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