Posts from the “Fashion” Category

Debbie Harry: Punk’s Platinum Blonde Bombshell

Posted on August 12, 2020

*Richard McCaffrey. Debbie Harry of Blondie performs live at The Winterland Ballroom in 1977 in San Francisco, California.*

After learning she had been adopted, Debbie Harry would often dream her real mother was Marilyn Monroe, herself a foster child who became the quintessential Hollywood bombshell, radiating an intoxicating blend of vulnerability, seduction, and charm every time she looked at the camera.

“I felt that Marilyn was also playing a character, the proverbial dumb blonde with the little-girl voice and big-girl body, and that there was a lot of smarts behind the act,” Harry wrote in Face It: A Memoir. “My character in Blondie was partly a visual homage to Marilyn, and partly a statement about the good old double standard.”

At 14, Harry began dying her hair, going through a dozen colors but always returning to timeless glamour of platinum blonde. In 1965, Harry, then 20, moved to New York City and rented an apartment on St. Marks Place for a mere $67 a month. She worked as a go-go dancer, Playboy Bunny, and waitress at Max’s Kansas City before she found her true calling: rock star.

Read the Full Story at Jacques Marie Mage

*Gie Knaeps. Debbie Harry, Blondie, Paradiso, Amsterdam, Netherlands, September 21, 1977.*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Fashion, Jacques Marie Mage, Music

Ann Ray & Lee McQueen: Rendez-Vous

Posted on October 15, 2019

Follow the Line, 1997. Image courtesy of Ann Ray and Barrett Barrera Projects

The year was 1996, and a young upstart named Lee Alexander McQueen took the helm of Givenchy as head designer at just 27 years old. French photographer Ann Ray stepped inside his fantastical world, spending two weeks with him while he was creating his first couture collection that same year.

“I had to move to London, so Lee asked me to photograph his collections and basically, I never stopped,” Ray tells AnOther while visiting New York. The result was a lifelong friendship and creative collaboration that would continue until his tragic death at the age of 40 in 2010. Given unprecedented access to document his design process and behind-the-scenes moments during his legendary runway shows, Ray spent 12-hour days in the atelier over a period of 13 years, making more than 35,000 photographs that capture the complexity of McQueen: the man, the artist, and the iconoclast.

Now, in the new exhibition Ann Ray & Lee McQueen: Rendez-Vous, Ray reveals a portrait of the artist as a young man ascending to the heights of fashion by breaking all the rules to create an avant-garde spectacular replete with theater, performance art, and gothic fairytales. Here, Ray shares her memories of life in the inner circle, sharing a side of McQueen that only those closest to him ever knew.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Home, 2000 Image courtesy of Ann Ray and Barrett Barrera Projects

Categories: 1990s, AnOther, Art, Exhibitions, Fashion, Photography

Antoinette “Tony” Sales on Designing Costumes for Rock Stars

Posted on September 27, 2019

Antoinette “Tony” Sales at Norman Seeff’s studio on Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles, 1977 © Phil Fewsmith.

Over the past 50 years, American artist Antoinette “Tony” Sales has traveled through the rarefied world of rock royalty, designing and making stage clothes for icons including Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, Stephen Tyler, and Exene Cervenka. The mastermind behind Freddie Mercury’s iconic rhinestone fingernail gloves and Nick Lowe’s legendary Riddler suit has always believed that, “Each of us inherently has within us the ability to create the life of our dreams.”

Though shy and demure, the willowy blonde Texan has always been possessed by a fearless streak. “If I wanted to do something, I would,” Tony tells Document Journal from her home in Los Angeles, where she continues to create stage clothes for film, television, and music videos. It was a lesson gleaned as a child when her father, science-fiction writer and US military personnel Keith Laumer received an assignment to move to London in the early 1960s, and brought his family along.

“My older brother, Tom Wright, was Mr. Cool American with real Levis and all the good records. He went to Ealing Tech Art College, where he met Pete Townsend and they became lifelong friends,” Tony says. “Tom had walked into the lunchroom and this real shy guy was sitting alone, strumming his guitar, and all of a sudden, he went, ‘schwaaang!’ Tom said, ‘Oh my God. Do that again!’ Pete has said, ‘If it wasn’t for Tom coming into my life, there would never have been a Who.’”

Read the Full Story at Document Journal

Drawing of Dolly Parton © Antoinette “Tony” Sales.

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Document Journal, Fashion, Music

Paolo Roversi: Intangible Presence

Posted on September 24, 2019

Guinevere in a Nina Ricci Haute Couture dress, Paris, 1996 © Paolo Roversi, courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery

When Paolo Roversi steps inside his Paris studio, he is on a quest in search of that which lies beneath the flesh. Whether capturing the glamour of haute couture or the intimacy of a nude, for Roversi, “a photograph is always a portrait, and always autobiographical in a way. Fashion photography is a double portrait: a girl dressed in a certain outfit and this outfit dressed by a certain girl. This is magic to me.”

In celebration of his extraordinary body of work, Roversi’s new exhibition Intangible Presence delves into an archive that includes portraits, nudes, and even still lifes that underscore the artist’s love for that which can be seen with the heart.

“Every show is another story. I try to put together a little new fairytale so I see my work in a different angle,” says the photographer and AnOther contributor. “This time it was about the idea of the intangible presence. For me, photography is always a presence and an absence at the same time. It is a little phantom, a little ghost in the photograph. Even if it is silent photography talks a lot.”

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Anna, Paris, 2015 © Paolo Roversi, courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery

Categories: 1990s, AnOther, Art, Exhibitions, Fashion, Photography

Andrew Kung: The All-American

Posted on September 3, 2019

Austin © Andrew Kung, styling by Carolyn Son

Lim © Andrew Kung, styling by Carolyn Son

The “American Dream” is a myth packaged, peddled, and sold to those who prefer appearance to truth. Scratch the surface of the fantasy, and the horrors of systemic oppression emerge. No one is truly safe from the nightmare, despite how much they may choose to assimilate into a culture that is not their own. In the words of African-American writer and activist Audre Lorde: “Your silence will not protect you.”

First-generation Chinese-American photographer Andrew Kung is speaking out with The All-American, a limited edition book that features portraits, made in NYC and LA in 2018 and 2019, of his friends, like Alexander Hodge from HBO’s Insecure, wearing clothing made exclusively Asian fashion brands like sundae school, Prabal Gurung, PRIVATE POLICY.

“When you think about an ‘All-American,’ you think about a prototypical white man who is an attractive, built, outspoken, confident man who plays sports and is admired by all women – the model American citizen representing what ‘success’ looks like,” Kung tells Dazed.

“Asian-American men, on the other hand, have always been classified as ‘other’ – desexualised, emasculated, perceived as passive or weak, and most of all, invisible. No matter how hard we try to fit in, we are never ‘American’ enough — reinforced with questions and statements from everyday people like ‘Where are you really from?’ ‘Your English is actually really good,’ and, “You’re really good looking for an Asian guy.’”

Kung has had enough. Inspired by photographers like Larry Sultan, Kung began to create narrative images exploring universal themes of the human condition. He added a fashion component to the project as a reminder of how rare it is to see Asian-American men modelling ideals of beauty and style in our image-driven world. Here, Kung reflects on the importance of controlling the narrative to create images the offer a new space for exploration of Asian-American identity today.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Kris © Andrew Kung, styling by Carolyn Son

Categories: Art, Books, Dazed, Fashion, Photography

Elspeth H. Brown: Work! A Queer History of Modeling

Posted on August 19, 2019

Ruth Ford, c. 1930s. Portrait by George Platt Lynes

Lily Yuen with fellow performers, in Lily Yuen Collection, Schomburg, Folder 6: scrapbook 1926-1930. Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Fashion models, first described as “mannequins” arrived in New York via London in 1909. Their purpose, as their name denotes, was to sell merchandise to a burgeoning consumer class — while simultaneously advertising archetypes that simulated insatiable desire.

This desire was cultivated within something the product could never supply — a psychological state of want and aspiration designed to heighten insecurity and anxiety through the creation of a state of constant craving. Tapping into the psychological underpinnings that can only exist when survival is no longer the mainstay of one’s being, merchandisers understood the link between consumption and identity necessary to maintain the capitalist enterprise.

Glamour, romance, sex, and pleasure became the foundation upon which the mannequin was based — making the very spectacle of the human body and visage an object available for purchase. In the creation of the model, the individual was reduced to a thing that could be commodified and exploited for the express purpose of profits.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

George Platt Lynes with Paul Cadmus, on the set, c. 1941 Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

Categories: Books, Fashion, Feature Shoot, Photography

Guzman: Scenes from a Pivotal Era in Louis Vuitton History

Posted on July 10, 2019

Photo: Guzman. Louis Vuitton Centennial Collection. Helmut Lang Record Album Case. Grandmaster Flash styled by Basia Zamorska. Hair Danilo Dixo. Make Up Mathu Andersen. Art Direction Maurice Betite at Euro RSCG Paris. Art Buyer Catherine Mahe. French Photo Agent Veronique Peres Domergue.

When Tom Ford joined Gucci in 1990, a new era was born: one that brought luxury goods to the forefront of popular culture. As the return of the double Gs took the globe by storm, in 1997, LVMH’s Bernard Arnault appointed Marc Jacobs as Creative Director of Louis Vuitton to design the company’s first ready-to-wear clothing line.

To prime the public for this pivotal moment in the esteemed fashion house’s 143-year history, Vuitton’s French advertising agency, Euro RSCG Paris, hired Guzman, the American husband-and-wife photography team of Russell Peacock and Constance Hansen, to shoot the 1996 campaign for the Louis Vuitton Centennial Collection—a celebration of the iconic Monogram Canvas print featuring original clothing designs by Vivienne Westwood, Manolo Blahnik, Azzedine Alaïa, Helmut Lang, Romeo Gigli, Isaac Mizrahi, and Sybilla.

“Vuitton’s past campaigns were focused on travel. This was a big departure for them,” Peacock says. “They were conservative and traditional. Wealthy people would buy Vuitton but it wasn’t a fashion statement. They wanted to be hip.”

By the mid-90s, Guzman had achieved recognition creating unconventional advertising campaigns for companies like KOOKAÏ and Tag Heuer as well as shooting album covers artists like Janet Jackson, Jody Watley, and Total. But, as Hansen explains, “We were outside the fashion box. We weren’t reverential. We didn’t understand the respect of the couture. We were working in hip hop culture, and went with what we knew.”

Read the Full Story at Document Journal

Guzman. Louis Vuitton Damier Collection. Styled by Basia Zamorska. Hair Danilo Dixo. Make Up Mathu Andersen. Manicures by Bernadette Thompson. Art Direction Maurice Betite at Euro RSCG Paris. Art Buyer Catherine Mahe. French Photo Agent Veronique Peres Domergue.

Categories: 1990s, Art, Document Journal, Fashion, Photography

Lee Stuart: Street Dreams – How Hip Hop Took Over Fashion

Posted on July 7, 2019

Jamel Shabazz. Young Boys, East Flatbush, Brooklyn, NYC 1981

“Rap is something you do! Hip hop is something you live!” KRS-One memorably said. Born in the Bronx in 1973, hip hop is not just music, dance, and art; it is a way of being in the world.

“I am a child of hip hop,” says Lee Stuart, Brand Director of Patta, a Dutch streetwear brand, who has curated the new exhibition Street Dreams: How Hip Hop Took Over Fashion. Organised chronologically, the exhibition presents the visual legacy of hip hop through a series of 30 songs and illustrates them with the art, fashion, and photography that defined the era.

“We’re not trying to be historians,” Stuart says. “We are trying to immerse people in these images, show them and make them part of this energy.”

To select the songs, Stuart did what all heads love: he gathered his team and debated the merits of each track. He then chose corresponding work by artists including Nick Cave, Kehinde Wiley, Jamel Shabazz, Janette Beckman, Dana Lixenberg, Hank Willis Thomas, Kambui Olujimi, and Earlie Hudnall.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Earlie Hudnall, Gucci Brothers, 3rd Ward, Houston, TX, 1990 Courtesy PDNB Gallery, Dallas, Texas

Jamel Shabazz. Rude Boy, Brooklyn, NYC 1981.

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Fashion, Music, Photography

Fearless Fashion: Rudi Gernreich

Posted on July 1, 2019

Peggy Moffitt modeling the topless swimsuit designed by Rudi Gernreich, 1964. Photograph © William Claxton, LLC, courtesy of Demont Photo Management & Fahey/Klein Gallery Los Angeles, with permission of the Rudi Gernreich trademark.

On June 16, 1964, Rudi Gernreich’s infamous monokini went on sale in New York’s most prestigious department stores. Buyers at B. Altman & Co., Lord & Taylor, Henri Bendel, Abraham & Strauss, Splendiferous and Parisette placed orders after William Claxton’s photograph of Peggy Moffit rocked the pop culture landscape.

Moffit was Gernreich’s muse and Claxton’s wife, and together this ménage a trios was pure fire. The idea for the monokini first came to Gernreich in December 1962 and first appeared in futuristic fashion feature in a late 1963 issue of Look magazine — after LIFE refused to publish them. In The Rudy Gernreich Book, Moffit recalls the editor at LIFE shamelessly told Claxton, “This is a family magazine, and naked breasts are allowed only if the woman is an aborigine.”

LIFE’s racist policy about women’s bodies cost them one of the biggest news stories of the year. They “goofed” Moffitt politely says. The magazine ordered a reshoot, demanding Moffitt cover her breasts with her arms. Moffitt described their art direction as “dirty.”

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Peggy Moffitt modeling dress designed by Rudi Gernreich, Fall 1971 collection. Photograph © William Claxton, LLC, courtesy of Demont Photo Management & Fahey/Klein Gallery Los Angeles, with permission of the Rudi Gernreich trademark.

Categories: 1960s, Fashion, Feature Shoot, Photography

Sex, Frocks and Rock & Roll

Posted on June 18, 2019

“Sometimes reality is the strangest fantasy of all,” a deep voice slowly says before the pitch-black screen explodes with a heavy guitar riff and a montage of scenes beautiful and bizarre in the original trailer for the 1966 film Blow-Up — the ultimate art house tale of sex, frocks, and rock & roll.

We enter into a day in the life of Thomas (David Hemmings), a fashion photographer modeled on 1960s bad boys David Bailey, Terence Donovan and Brian Duffy. Produced by Carlo Ponti for MGM, Michelangelo Antonini’s first English language film deftly combines aestheticism and existentialism to flawless effect, giving us everything and nothing — much like the troop of mimes that bookend the film.

We first encounter Thomas dipping out of a doss house at the break of dawn and hopping into his Rolls Royce Silver Cloud III Drop Head Coupé, offering the first of many stark contrasts between the artist and his subject. Though set in Swinging London, the city is eerily empty, quiet, and perfectly manicured — an unnerving sense of alienation at every turn.

Read the Full Story at Jacques Marie Mage

Categories: 1960s, Art, Fashion, Jacques Marie Mage, Music, Photography

Marc Jacobs Introduces THE Marc Jacobs

Posted on May 30, 2019

All clothes, shoes, and accessories THE Marc Jacobs Photography Cruz Valdez, styling Emma Wyman

Marc Jacobs is sitting in the showroom of his Spring Street offices in New York, vaping, and thinking about something which, for almost four decades, has been a hallmark of his work. “I like something old, something new, something borrowed,” Jacobs says with his natural effervescence. “A mix: high and low – when people with style don’t dress head-to-toe off a runway, they incorporate pieces that work for them into their own language and tell their own story with their clothes.”

It’s a sensibility that has inspired and guided the designer throughout his career, perhaps most notably in the controversial (and recently reissued) SS93 grunge collection for Perry Ellis that put him on the map – and got him fired. Inspired by what he saw on the street, the designer took a $2 thrifted shirt and had it remade in $300-a-yard silk, before hitting up Converse to make Duchesse satin sneakers. “I grew up in a time when young people wore bits of army surplus like thermals and t-shirts, went to vintage stores and had one or two pieces of designer clothing if they could afford them by saving money,” he surmises of his approach.

Reminder: this was decades before must-have $900 trainers, back when the idea of high-end casual was still a novelty – a notion Jacobs took to new levels when he introduced Marc by Marc Jacobs for SS01. At the time, he was setting trends both at his own label and Louis Vuitton – where he went on to introduce ready-to-wear in 1997 – and getting promptly ripped off in the process. With a debut collection featuring girlish rainbow glitter belts and plastic cherry hair ties alongside military-esque button downs, smartly tailored blazers, and denim mini skirts, the new, lower-priced MBMJ elevated the ordinary, putting youthful fun and irreverence firmly on the NYFW runway.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

All clothes, shoes, and accessories THE Marc Jacobs Photography Cruz Valdez, styling Emma Wyman

Categories: Dazed, Fashion