Posts from the “Fashion” Category

A Tribute to Gianni Versace on the 20th Anniversary of His Death

Posted on July 15, 2017

Designer Gianni Versace at home. (Photo by David Lees/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)

On the morning of Tuesday, July 15, 1997, Gianni Versace, the adored Italian fashion designer, was returning home after taking a walk down Ocean Drive in Miami Beach to pick up his morning papers. It was a task he usually had an assistant do, but he had been in high spirits after a week of haute couture fashion shows in Rome for the biannual Alta Moda Alta Rome.

Just as he as unlocking the wrought iron gates outside Villa Casa Casuarina, his Mediterranean Revival style mansion, a young white man approached Versace and shot him twice in the back of the head at point blank range. The killer fled the scene in a vehicle that looked like a taxi and dumped his clothes in a nearby garage.

Police arrived quickly to the scene but it was too late. Versace, just 50 years old, was dead.

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Categories: 1990s, Crave, Fashion

Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore

Posted on July 6, 2017

Photo: Djuna Barnes US novelist and illustrator 1892 to 1982. © Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy.

“Where would fashion be without literature?” Diana Vreeland asked in D.V., her legendary memoir published in 1984. One to pay homage where it is due, Vreeland understood this it is not just the sartorial splendors of the characters that writers have graced us with over the years, but the very nature of the author’s personal style that has influenced the our tastes and sensibilities.

Consider Mark Twain’s white suits versus those of Tom Wolfe, or the lavender ascots and fanciful hats of Quentin Crisp. Reflect on the penchant for men’s wear shared by Fran Lebowitz and Colette in contrast to the flamboyant Victorian get ups of Oscar Wilde. Contemplate the brunette bouffant of Jacqueline Susann, the glorious dreadlocks of Toni Morrison, and the crisp thatch of white hair on Susan Sontag versus the signature beard of Ernest Hemingway.

Terry Newman pulls it all together in the new book, Legendary Authors and The Clothes They Wore (Harper Design), a charming collection that reveals style is more than a way of dressing: it is a state of mind. The book includes chapters of icons from Patti Smith and William S. Burroughs to Marcel Proust and Zadie Smith, along side special sections on signature looks including glasses, suits, hair, and hats of everyone from Robert Crumb and Allen Ginsberg to Bret Easton Ellis and Edgar Allen Poe.

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Categories: Books, Crave, Fashion, Photography

Dandy Lion: The Black Dandy and Street Style

Posted on June 27, 2017

Photo: Photo: Arteh Odjidja, Red Square Moscow, Russia, 2012, from the series Stranger in Moscow; from Dandy Lion (Aperture, 2017). © Arteh Odjidja/Arteh Creative.

The dandy first appeared on the scene in late eighteenth century Britain just as the bourgeoisie was coming into vogue and a new leisure class was becoming a la mode. They aspired to the aristocratic aesthetic and lifestyle, seeing themselves as a cut above the working class in all manner of things. But it was in sartorial pleasures that they distinguished themselves, drawing attention to their status through garb.

For many, clothes make the man—but the dandy makes the clothes, so seamless is his style that he embodies the timeless spirit of chic. The bourgeoisie grew in power and influence at the same time European imperialism conquered the globe. With political and economic oppression and exploitation came an unexpected twist: the transmutation of dandy culture into new realms.

In black culture across the globe, the dandy was more than a symbol of middle class yearnings—it was a radical act of self-expression and independence. The black dandy takes from the traditions of European fashion and subverts the aesthetic by infusing it with elements of the African diaspora. Where the European aesthetic has come to embrace subdued tones, clean cuts, and understated effects, the African sensibility embraces color, pattern, and contrast. The result is visually daring and dedicated to distinction.

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Photo: Omar Victor Diop, Alt + Shift + Ego, 2013; from Dandy Lion (Aperture, 2017). © Omar Victor Diop, Courtesy Galerie MAGNIN-A, Paris.

Categories: Africa, Art, Books, Crave, Fashion, Photography

James Pomerantz: A Successful Artist

Posted on May 11, 2017

Photo: Barneys $1,790.00 © James Pomerantz

When photographer James Pomerantz turned 40 in January of this year, he took a moment to reflect on success and what it meant. As the father of two young children, he recognized the importance of financial security, but understood that being a successful artist went deeper than this. It required him to be “true to my ideas, able to do it, and keep doing it. If I didn’t have to worry about the finance, I’d have the freedom to just create.”

With this awareness, something snapped into place. For the first time in several months, Pomerantz found the mental space to get back to work on personal projects. Suddenly, he was able to move outside his comfort zone, discovering new means to create photographs that went beyond the commercial work that paid the bills each month.

Pomerantz did something he had never done before: he made himself the subject of his work. For the new series, A Successful Artist, the photographer hit upon an idea: he would visit various haberdashers across his native New York and tell the sales clerks, “I need to look like a successful artist. Could you pick out something suitable?”

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Photo: The Kimono House & The Hat House $317.95 © James Pomerantz

Categories: Art, Fashion, Feature Shoot, Photography

Jamel Shabazz: Sights in the City

Posted on April 18, 2017

Photo: Courtesy of Jamel Shabazz / Jamel Shabazz: Sights in the City, New York Street Photographs

When Jamel Shabazz took up photography back in the 1980s, he gave voice to a new generation of young black men who were redefining the look of street-level New York City with their colorful Kangol caps, Adidas shell-toe sneakers, and graphic Cazal glasses. A former corrections officer, Shabazz would wander neighborhoods like Harlem, Brownsville, and the Lower East Side with his camera, approaching strangers who caught his eye, engaging them in conversation, and concluding with a portrait.

For Shabazz, style is more than self-expression; it is an act of resistance, a refusal to be invisible, erased, or diminished. The strength of that vision can be traced throughout his new book, Sights in the City: New York Street Photographs (Damiani), selections of which will be on view at United Photo Industries in Brooklyn, starting May 4. Shabazz, who has worn custom-tailored clothing for 30 years, is just as sharp as his subjects. From his gold-rimmed glasses and butter-leather coats to his two-piece suits and cashmere sweaters, Shabazz has a commanding presence that is counterbalanced by a genuine and gracious smile. Here, the Brooklyn-born photographer reflects on the personal memories that shaped his idea of street style in the city.

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Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Brooklyn, Fashion, Photography, Vogue

Per-Anders Petterssen: African Catwalk

Posted on August 27, 2016

A model poses for photos at a test shoot with the Ivorian designer Barros Coulibaly in the Hôtel des Almadies during the Dakar Fashion Week, Senegal 2014. © Per-Anders Pettersson, courtesy of Kehrer Verlag.

In 1994, Swedish photographer Per-Anders Pettersson (b. 1967) came to South Africa to cover the historic elections that saw Nelson Mandela become President—and he never left. Based in Cape Town, Pettersson has honed his talents on documenting stories across the continent, covering the stories the West knows so well: civil war, famine, disease. But Pettersson’s work shows not only the horrors of life, but its beauties as well—for the story of Africa is as vast, as rich, and as complex as the land itself.

With the new millennium, global industry has become a phenomenon, bringing the four corners of the earth together as one. In doing so, emerging markets are formed, stages where local talents can shine their light to the world. Since 2010, Pettersson has been privy to a nascent scene, an industry on the come up beyond your wildest dreams.

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Categories: Africa, Art, Books, Crave, Fashion, Photography

“Made You Look” at The Photographers’ Gallery

Posted on August 10, 2016

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Sartorial style and splendor is synonymous with black culture. No matter where you go on this earth, rest assured the men and women of African descent have are freshly dressed, so much so others are quick to knock it off, as though copying was not a cardinal sin. Such are the perils of creativity: not everyone can be an originator or a pioneer. But for those who are, one thing is clear. The attention never stops. The heads will turn, the jaws will drop, and the tongues with clack because invariably style dominates.

The Photographers’ Gallery, London, understands this and present Made You Look: Dandyism and Black Masculinity now through September 25, 2016. Curated by Ekow Eshun, the exhibition features works from taken from artists working around the world over the course of the past century, Starting with a rare series of outdoor studio prints made in 1904 from the Larry Dunstam Archive, thought to be taken in Senegal. Taken more than a century ago, the young men are nattily dressed in the latest European clothes, belying a love for the three-piece suit and accessories.

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Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Africa, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Fashion, Photography

Michael Gross: Focus

Posted on August 3, 2016

Richard Avedon © Adrian Panaro

Michael Gross has had his finger on the pulse of high society, documenting their luxurious lifestyles for more than three decades. With a chair in the front row of the fashion shows for a decade, Gross delved into the corners of the world that few had known with his seminal book, Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (William Morrow, 1995), exposing the underbelly of the industry at the height of the supermodel craze.

The book had been Richard Avedon’s idea. Gross had a column in The New York Times and was writing long form pieces for New York magazine, including a cover story detailing the historic rivalry between Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Gross had been thinking of expanding the story into a book but Avedon, who had been a major source, thought no one cared about ancient beef between Carmel Snow and Diana Vreeland. Instead, he suggested a book on the modeling industry, which no one had ever done before.

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Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Crave, Fashion, Photography

Girls on Film: Michele Quan X Guzman X Geoffrey Beene

Posted on December 1, 2015

Michele Quan, photo by Guzman

Fashion designer Geoffrey Beene was an American pioneer, challenging the industry at every turn. He had his own way of doing things, breaking and rewriting the rules. He created new seasons, Summer/Winter, and designed brilliantly crafted pieces accordingly. “Design is a revelation to me. It’s like taking something that is not alive and giving it form, shape, substance, and life,” Mr. Beene observed.

While his clothes reflected his intuitive understanding for women’s desire to be comfortable and glamorous at the same time, Mr. Beene also understood the power of the photograph to communicate this understanding to consumers. Mr. Beene observed, “Clothes should look as if a woman was born into them. It is a form of possession, this belonging to another.” And if the clothes belong to the woman, the photograph is the perfect invitation to the viewer to participate.

From 1988–1995, Mr. Beene partnered with Guzman, the husband/wife photography team of Russell Peacock and Connie Hanson, to produce a series of photographs of Michele Quan modeling the clothes. As Guzman recalls, “Mr. Beene introduced us to Michele. She was a good choice for his designs during that period. Both were elegantly streamline! Mr. Beene always played with contrasts. He would juxtapose an androgynous jumpsuit with a provocative layer of sheer lace. He would mix refined fabrics with quotidian materials like cashmere with metallic lame. He was thinking about the approaching millennium (2000) and what women should wear. For the modern woman comfort and simplicity were essential. Michele represented the modern woman in that not to distant future. Her personality matched his objectives. Elegant yet understated, feminine but powerful.”

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Michele Quan, photo by Guzman

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Crave, Fashion, Photography, Women

Flurina Rothenberger: Just as Dandy As You Are

Posted on August 6, 2015

Photograph by
Flurina Rothenberger

I have as yet to meet Flurina Rothenberger in person, but from her photographs I feel as though I know something of her. Through her eye, I have see the way she looks at the world, the way she raises her camera to capture a fraction of a moment in time for us to consider at our leisure. From her photographs, I have a sense of style, grace, and poise alongside a wit that gently enjoys the beauty of life, a sensibility that gives one a feeling of being at home in the world, wherever she may go. When I first received her book, project I love to dress like I am coming from somewhere and I have a place to go (Edition Patrick Frey), I was absolutely beside myself. What better than a pocket paperback of Africa to gaze at all day? The people, the landscape, the streets, the style, the feeling of art, culture, and life. Flurina’s photographs are about a sense of being as just as dandy as you are.

Miss Rosen: Can you please speak about your early experience in art, and some of the early influences that inspired you to create art ? How did growing up in Africa influence your aesthetic sensibilities?

Flurina Rothenberger: I grew up in Côte d’Ivoire, in an hybridized environment driven by the genuine remix of tradition and contemporary. The skills, crafts and creative inventions I was exposed to weren’t of self-fulfilling beauty, they beared witness to a specific art of life. Nothing was meaningless and in spite of the high aesthetic value served a practical benefit. Be it the toys my friends fabricated from scratch or the enigmatic result of a specific weaving technique, the beauty always emerged from a thought materialized in a unique practical shape of expression. It may be a coincidence but my sisters and I all ended up in similar fields of activity and each one of us has remained strongly influenced in her design by references from West Africa. Most likely our visual perception was sensitized by growing up in a surrounding infiltrated by the genuine presence of someone always inventing and crafting something. I don’t consider myself an artist. I’m simply a photographer attracted to places where people don’t operate within a single, but a quadruple consciousness.

Was there a point where you realized that making art would be your life’s calling? We love to know the moment when artists realized there was no turning back, and they were committed to pursuing art.

I never had a sudden strike of insight but there was a sort of turning point. After moving back to Switzerland I had trouble settling in. I felt lost and disconnected. A short introduction to the photo lab triggered something. The particular atmosphere shook my senses wide awake. It became a place of comfort, wild experiments and most importantly of crucial awareness that a certain image is one choice among endless other options. I guess in a sense the darkroom sparked both: my first real commitment to visual expression and the belief that images can challenge thoughts.

Can you speak about your work in Africa: how does working as a photographer give you access to people, places, and perspectives you might not otherwise reach as a “civilian” (so to speak)? What do you find to be the most rewarding aspect of traveling with a camera?

As a photographer I have my individual way of looking into things. This naturally also determines the nature of access I reach out for. I tend to seek and find a welcoming door if people understand my motif and commitment to sharing life. In my experience every photograph and every project begins with trust, insight and integrity. As for what I love about traveling with a camera in Africa, is that my ideas aren’t triggered by life in theory. They wash up almost physically in the bus, on the street, in a conversation, handed out like a palpable invitation. In most places people have a strong opinion about images and it’s far from uncommon to communicate issues visually. Considering this background both is true: approaching people and situations as a photographer often results in opportunities of close proximity, the camera though also exposes my incentive to critical questioning. I appreciate both of these aspects in Africa very much. If the former is the palpable invitation, the latter is the reality check of my intention and approach.

Can you speak about the challenges of photographing in various nations?

I see two main challenges when I photograph in other nations than my own: One, the fear that my pictures could create a simplistic distorted reflection of the place, the situation or the individual. Second, finding the appropriate balance between familiar and exotic, a visual language which stirs something inside the viewer all the while remaining unpretentious. I keep those two aspects in mind as a guideline while I choose work, photograph and edit. It’s a high set bar and in some terms idealistic. Another thing I’ve learned from portraying the fates of very different people : no matter how committed I remain to the task of showing lives and subjects in their legitimate complexity, it’ll always result in a perspective tainted by my own cultural mentality and story, be this conscious or not.

Photograph by
Flurina Rothenberger

How do you, as a photographer, work to avoid the more obvious visual tropes and reductive narratives that the Western media often associates with third world nations?

I wish my work was fully free of the kind of images Binyavanga Wainana labeled as “poverty pornography”. It certainly isn’t. I’ve fallen into that trap just like most Western photographers. Mass media operates in terms of which message sells fastest and cheapest to the widest audience possible. Obviously this isn’t the best equipped vessel to explain a context from a place with great diversity and complexity. Yet it is mass media which has significantly shaped our collective and increasingly global visual memory. A a photographer I’m aware that the viewer assigns a certain message to a descriptive clue and will prioritize this one from the overall picture. The devastating aspect though is that the audience grows bored and sated by topics due to the way they’re pictured, when just these should urgently stir us to take action.

I try to follow a working style and ethics which considers this fait acompli. If I get carried away in the excitement of the moment, I’ll censor those images later in the edit. At times it’s frustrating since I submit the actual content in which the photograph was created to precisely those very rules I question in their legitimacy to condition how we perceive things.

There is a photograph in my recent book showing a four year-old girl in Moçambique. Sent to help her sisters fetch water from the well, she marches down a long empty road. In my consciousness this image elicits a chuckle and reflects the amazing maturity, singular determination, flexibility and courage I’ve experienced countless times with children deprived of certain opportunities. On the counterpart this image belongs to the risky ones. It embeds several of the earlier mentioned indications, a large audience is conditioned to associate with poverty, struggle and vulnerability. It’s not an easy decision which one to give in to: the origin context of the image or the general public’s eye.

I solve the struggle by getting advise from someone who understands my motive but doesn’t share the specific story of the pictures origin. For my latest project I love to dress like I am coming from somewhere and I have a place to go, I chose a tight collaboration with Hammer, a graphic design studio founded by my sister Sereina Rothenberger and David Schatz. I handed them a large chunk of my archive and they curated the final selection along with the edit and illustrations of quotes. Sometimes it’s best to let others kill a few darlings in the benefit of a fresh and fair view.

What do you think that the photograph does that no other medium can do? How do you find people respond to your interest in photographing them?

Photography is a medium of great generosity. It can easily stretch it’s boundaries between dream and reality giving up neither one nor the other. It suggest optional views on a complex, yet unpretentious level. It is both, humble and powerful. A photograph sets our thoughts into motion by taming life to stand still. Most cultures and societies have their own popular imagery which also influences how people respond to the medium. In a way by taking a picture of someone in this context, the portrait is reciprocal, tainted by both backgrounds. Mine and the subjects. I enjoy that for my deep belief that how we want to be seen, points out the reality we’re shaped by. I make my presence and intentions obvious and in exchange, with few exceptions, people respond with positive and active complicity. I love the intimate moment of unspoken consent, when the other suggests a pose, changes the setting with small arrangements or simply agrees by addressing the camera with an assertive presence.

What did you find to be the most inspiring aspects of photographing the people and places of Africa ?

The diversity of scenarios and the relationship people generally entertain with the medium, exhausts the whole range of photography’s pliable and enigmatic nature. It’s all there woven into the pattern of every day life: the flickering of value and meaning, the shift of visual boundaries, the remix of traditional and contemporary, the fusion of carefully arranged and incredibly improvised. In Africa, my wrestling thoughts are put at ease, my fears untangled and my senses wide awake. This alone is very inspiring!

I like that in most areas and African countries I’ve been to, images act in a different and in a way stronger narrative context than I experience in Europe. A response to this is the individual ownership people tend to take on, when being portrayed. Even now in times of social media there is a particular poised nature of self-perception most Africans I meet from very different backgrounds seem to share. I rarely experience fidgeting, restlessness or any other lack of confidence. If someone agrees to be photographed, regardless the scenario, they will meet me and the camera with doubtless presence. Intuitively or consciously adding their intention and vision to mine. It’s one of the many stimulating aspects I love, admire and at times envy a bit.

Visit FLURINA ROTHENBERGER

Photograph by
Flurina Rothenberger

Categories: Africa, Art, Books, Fashion, Photography

Meryl Meisler: Purgatory & Paradise

Posted on August 1, 2015

Plaid Suit and Cadillac in Chelsea, NY, NY, May 1978.

The 1970s was an age of innocent decadence, the time before the fall, a time where the country cracked open and out of it came creatures with big hair and vibrant personality, the kind of characters that have that old school je ne sais quoi that makes their shenanigans a delight to watch.

Take Judi Jupiter as she weighs the situation in the new book by Meryl Meisler, Purgatory & Paradise: SASSY ‘70s Suburbia & The City (Bizarre Publishing). It was July 1977, Westhampton, NY, and Miss Jupiter was taking her top off as she weighed big nuggets of weed on a triple beam balance scale. She looks at the camera through a thicket of bangs all but obscuring her eyes. She’s but one of hundreds of subjects Meisler came upon in her travels across Long Island and NYC, subjects that were outrageously stylish and sexy.

As Meisler writes in the introduction, “This book encapsulates my coming of age: The Bronx, suburbia, The Mystery Club, dance lessons, Girl Scouts, the Rockettes, the circus, school, mitzvahs, proms, feminism, Disco, Go-Go, Jewish and LGBT Pride, the New York streets, friendship, family and love. I had to photograph it to make sense of it all. To hold onto the time, to release and share it, to put it in perspective and move on. It was sassy, but also sweet, and so was I.”

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Judi Jupiter Weighs the Situation, Westhampton, NY, July 1977.

Street Ventriloquist, NY, NY, July 1979.

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Brooklyn, Fashion, Manhattan, Photography