Thanks to my friend John (who is finally taking his first baby steps into the world of blogs), I recently had the opportunity to attend a press screening of the Black Swan, courtesy of the lovely people at L’Oréal and Yves Saint Laurent’s fragrance La Nuit de l’Homme. What’s the connection between the fragrance and the movie, you ask? Well, there’s a several. The movie’s male lead is played by none other than French actor Vincent Cassel, who also happens to be the face of YSL’s new campaign for La Nuit de l’Homme.
Some might recall that this isn’t the first time he is fronting a campaign for the maison’s best selling fragrance; he also fronted their campaign in 2009. Very well, another connection with the movie is that the TV commercial for the fragrance was shot by none other than Darren Aronofsky – the director of Black Swan.
The perfume is spicy and masculine, but at the same time very sensual with notes of bergamot, cedar and lavender. It is definitely one of my all-time favourite men’s fragrances and I’m currently on my third bottle!
The movie itself was amazing. Not only was the story really captivating, but all the imagery surrounding it was beautiful as well. The fantastic ballerina costumes by Rodarte, or the amazing makeup by M.A.C. should be reason enough for any fashionista to want to see it. Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel and Winona Ryder all delivered amazing performances in the movie. I think this might be Natalie’s strongest role till date, and if she doesn’t get an Oscar for this role, there just is no justice!
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.
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
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!).
Earlier 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.
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