Posted by
awais on January 7, 2010 |
23 comments
Earlier we’ve blogged about how art inspires fashion, but how about when the artistic inspiration is a person – a muse? One such person, the Marchesa Luisa Casati, has inspired many writers, painters and also fashion designers .
The Marchesa was born into a wealthy Austrian-Italian family in Milan in 1881. A patron of coutouriers such as Paul Poiret, Mariano Fortuny and Erté and jewellers like Lalique, Casati astonished European society for the first three decades of the 20th century with her eccentric personality and outrageous style. In his autobiography Erté described her as the “the most extravagantly odd woman I have ever met”. She would wear living snakes as jewellery, throw parties where her servants were covered in leafed gold from top to toe and parade her pet cheetahs around in Venice on leashes covered with gold and diamonds whilst wearing nothing but a fur coat. Her hair was a dyed a deep henna red, her skin powdered pale white and her eyes heavily kohled.
The Marchesa painted by Augustus John to the left. Carina Roitfeld as Casati, photographed by Karl Lagerfeld.
More after the jump
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Tags: Carine Roitfeld, Chanel, Christian Dior, Couture, Giorgio Armani, John Galliano, Karl Lagerfeld, Marchesa Luisa Casati, muses, Tilda Swinton, Tom Ford, Yves Saint Laurent
Posted by
awais on September 12, 2009 |
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Maybe it’s because of all the recent hype surrounding The September Issue, Valentino: The Last Emperror and The Day Before, but as of lately I have a new addiction – watching fashion documentaries. What I love about documentaries like the ones listed below is that you get to see what things are really like behind the scenes. You get an insight into how the designers work and what inspires them. Here’s a few of my favourites from YouTube:
BBC: The Secret World of Haute Couture 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07
CNN: Carine Roitfeld Revealed 01 | 02 | 03
BBC: The Secret World of Haute Couture >> Playlist
Loïc Prigent: Signe Chanel >> Playlist (episode 1 – 5)
Loïc Prigent: Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton >> Part 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09
Masters of style: John Galliano >> Playlist
Vivienne Westwood >> Part 01 | 02
Yves Saint Laurent >> Part 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06
Although I do like to watch fashion reality shows and find them entertaining, I find it kind of sad that a lot of people seem to think that reality shows like Project Runway is what fashion is really all about. As Loïc Prigent told Maya Singer in a recent interview:
I’ve seen a little bit of these reality shows, and whatever they’re about, they’re not about fashion. Competition, making fun of people, but not fashion. It’s very hard to convince people to do a real fashion show— there’s a prejudice against fashion people in TV, even in France.
I really hope that the recent popularity of the fashion documentary genre will help change this and that people realise that there’s more to fashion than creating dresses out of chocolate wrappers (heads up to Hershey’s for the great PR effort though!).
Photo source: NY Magazine/Christopher Anderson
Tags: Chanel, Haute Couture, John Galliano, Loïc Prigent, Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, vivienne westwood, Yves Saint Laurent
Posted by
awais on August 30, 2009 |
10 commentsEarlier this summer I was watching the video of La Roux’s Bulletproof and in the video she is wearing a Mondrian-inspired jacket by Jean-Charles de Castalbajac.
The fact that designers often take inspiration from art is hardly anything new, but what I find really fascinating is how different designers’ interpretation of the same piece of art can be. The brief for one of the first projects I did when I was in fashion school was to design an outfit inspired by an art piece. I remember chosing Mondrian’s iconic grid-based paintings and drawing a white skirt and jacket with black lines – it looked like a butchered version of Yves Saint Laurent’s iconic Mondrian dress from 1964.
Designers taking inspiration from art is hardly anything new. One thing I find really fascinating though is how different the outcome of different people’s interpretation of the same piece of art can be. One of the most famous examples of “fashion-inspired-by-art” is probably Yves Saint Laurent’s day dress from 1965 inspired by Dutch artist Piet Mondrian’s work. Earlier this summer I was watching the video of La Roux’s Bulletproof and in the video she is wearing another nice Mondrian-inspired piece – a jacket from Jean-Charles de Castalbajac’s Spring/Summer 2009 collection.
One of my favourite Mondrian-inspired collections though, has to be Norwegian design duo Batlak & Selvig’s spring/summer 2009-collection. Click >> here for a video of the fashion show which was held at Galleri Riis in Oslo in August 2008.
For those interested in reading more about Mondrian-inspired fashion, please check out this blog post by John Coulthart. In the post he also links to another great blog post on this topic by Couture Allure.
Photo source: Galleri Riis
Tags: Batlak & Selvig, Jean-Charles de Castalbajac, La Roux, Piet Mondrian, Yves Saint Laurent
