月別アーカイブ: 2017年9月

Where The Nerve Of Young Designers Was Infectious

You’d think the schizophrenia of the London Fashion Weekschedule would make for a hot mess. But while we now go back and forth between emerging designers and super brands several times a day, I found this London season to be as feisty as ever. In fact, the presence of the establishment, some of whom were visiting from afar – Emporio Armani, Tommy Hilfiger and Versus – only served to highlight the infectious nerve of our young designers. In a Brexit world, the British fashion industry cemented a strong message of defiance this spring/summer 2018 season: at London Fashion Week there’s room for everyone. Fur protesters, too.

After a sequins-centric New York show run, on Saturday in London, Michael Halpern could finally claim the influence his way with sparkle has had on the season. Watching the turnout for his show held at the Palladium it’s incredible to think that the American designer is only on his second season. “Michael! There are sequins everywhere! This is all you!” I insisted after the show, which saw him develop his trademark sequins with new ideas of surface decoration – now on top of the sequins. “I think maybe other people are feeling the way I am?” a blushing Halpern answered bashfully.

What I loved about Saturday was that the excitement I felt at Halpern – that feeling of experiencing something new – was echoed at Burberry later that night. The way Christopher Bailey is rediscovering himself as a designer and phases in Burberry’s history once deemed taboo felt both authentic and emotional. Not least because he turned the volume up on the Pet Shop Boys’ Go West, which has new meaning in a Brexit world. Embracing the football community’s appropriation of the Burberry check, which took place some two decades ago, Bailey had many of us scrolling through his online store that evening, where the collection was already available to buy.

This was after we had made our way through the rather aggressive fur protest outside – even that felt rather kicky. The degree of verbal hostility (and reported spitting) towards fashion guests, however – even those not in furs – felt more like a demonstration against the fashion industry itself than its fur-using designers. The protesters re-emerged the next day at the Versus show, but Donatella Versace wasn’t in a furry mood. “What I think of young people today,” she said, “is they don’t feel a need to be over-dressed – just to play with their personalities.” When I spoke to 83-year-old Giorgio Armanibefore his show, he didn’t quite agree.

“Last night, I was having dinner at a very nice restaurant, Cipriani, but there was a group of women who came in, who were dressed impossibly,” Mr Armani said. What were they wearing? “Le tutto!” Everything. “And it didn’t really fit.” He argued that the fashion media encourages young people to overdress – and offered his Emporio Armani show that evening as an antidote. “I know what Mr Armani means because sometimes I see people – not necessarily in London, but everywhere – overdoing it. And I think less is more,” Tommy Hilfiger reflected when I put the question to him before his and Gigi Hadid’s show on Tuesday evening.

“Maybe there are people in London and all over the world, who dress like what they think they’re supposed to and what’s based on social media, and not necessarily what makes them happy,” Hadid observed. “I think Londoners dress for themselves, and I still see those people around London.” With her ghetto grunge collection for Hilfiger, she flew the nostalgic millennial flag that seems to hover over this season wherever we go, as exemplified in Burberry reclaiming its chequered past loved by the social media generation. Who are these elusive youngsters, and what do they want? Look at Hadid’s proposals and you might find the answer.

Or, head over to Molly Goddard, who opened her show with another millennial spokesgirl, Edie Campbell, who trotted down the catwalk with a drink and a cigarette in hand. Girly Goddard captures the free-spiritedness of her generation, and this season she framed it in more than supersized tulle skirts, making that all-important leap for a young London designer: moving it on. Her show reflected another source of excitement at London Fashion Week: the joy of seeing with our eyes the evolution of these new-generation designers we so support.

Justin Thornton and Thea Bregazzi of Preen are the original example of the London success story, which a designer like Simone Rocha – with her young but highly lucrative business – now embodies. This season they all proved that authenticity and a beating heart gets you further in fashion than the industry’s reputation might suggest. Preen offered a poignantly political collection inspired by The Scarlet Letter and The Handmaid’s Tale, campaigning for a less suppressive world for their two young daughters to grow up in.

“We’re living in an anarchy time when people have lost faith in leaders and society,” Thornton told me. “We want women to deconstruct their own femininity and reconstruct it so they can be whatever they want.” Simone Rocha was doing it for the kids, too, in a collection based on the china dolls she grew up playing with, now inherited by her toddler daughter. And the play for childlike innocence didn’t stop there – Mary Katrantzou presented an entire collection adopting kids’ crafts in couture techniques. “That nostalgia is kind of your building block for where you are today,” she said.

No shows imprinted themselves more in my mind this weekend, however, than Richard Quinn and Erdem. Here, it was the subtext that did the talking. Quinn was given his first-ever show by Liberty, who made their heritage prints available to him for the exertion of his severely subversive approach to florals, gimp suits in tow. It was a proper London show: early and intimate and underground – a little fetish in the morning, with prominent attendance, too.

Erdem is used to the royal treatment, and this season he turned it around in one of his best collections ever (big words for this original fan), which imagined a swap of roles between Queen Elizabeth and Dorothy Dandridge in the Fifties. How could he get the sexual tension between the two poles so right? This was Erdem flexing his sub-textual muscle at its strongest, fusing the dainty glamour of the royal wardrobe with the seductive lure of Harlem’s jazz clubs. It was intensely beautiful. “We live in such weird times and I think this exchange between two different worlds felt really beautiful,” he said after the show, summing up his collection and the entire London Fashion Week in one sweeping sentiment.Read more at:http://www.sheindressau.com/backless-wedding-dresses-au | http://www.sheindressau.com/wedding-dresses-perth

カテゴリー: wedding | 投稿者bestlook 16:25 | コメントをどうぞ

Rooney Mara on Her Challenging New Role—And Why She Doesn’t Care What Other People Think

“I have a backpack and a small carry-on for two weeks,” Rooney Mara tells me one afternoon, after collapsing into a stiff chair at a café on the eastern flank of Manhattan’s Chinatown. She has recently arrived in New York on a red-eye out of California. In a few hours she will leave again, to travel on to Europe. During the precious time in between, there is a restless version of a New York life to live. Mara has just emerged from a dusty storage unit where her whole apartment is being held on ice. (She vacated one place in February and hasn’t yet found a new home to her taste.) This afternoon she’ll visit friends, run errands, traverse Manhattan by foot; later in the year, she plans to leave the country once again, to see the gorillas in Rwanda. (“Who knows how much longer they’ll be there?”) All of this follows an astonishing two-year period during which Mara left behind the Hollywood movies that made her name—The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Carol—to focus on a run of daring, demanding indie roles, each different from the last. After years building her reputation, Rooney Mara is on the move.

“I hate having a lot of baggage. Traveling when you have nothing—no options—is the best,” she says. She is wearing a careworn vintage T-shirt (the Smiths), pants from Forever 21, and a Yigal Azrouël jacket made bespoke for her, using no animal skin. For ethical reasons, she has embarked on what she describes as the long, hard process of phasing leather out of her wardrobe. (The big challenge, she says, is the shoes.) She has her hair cut short and blends in among the café’s shiftless-chic clientele. “Don’t tell anyone where we are—no one comes here!” she says. Then, with a sly grin, “Just say we’re in Brooklyn.”

A waitress comes by, and Mara places a brisk order: “A half and half.” She catches herself. “Not the creamer,” she says. That’s half iced tea, half lemonade. She gives the tight, amused smile for which she’s known: sweet, self-aware, a little furtive, the hint of her dimples around the edges. She’s been a vegetarian most of her life, and for the past six years, also for ethical reasons, a vegan. Even in New York, the state where she grew up, there’s something otherworldly about Mara, as if she arrived from somewhere else and must translate the universe that she inhabits—the goals, the foods, the customs—into language all the rest of us can understand.

At the moment, though, her attention is all ease and warmth; this summer, Mara is at last enjoying a break after two years of intense, emotionally draining work. A few years ago, explains Mara, who’s now 32, the contours of her creative ambition changed, and since then she has tried to make the films, and live the life, she personally cares about most. “I have more trust now in the universe and things happening when they’re supposed to,” she says. “What I try to live by now is: It doesn’t matter what other people think. I try to live for myself.” In some ways, it’s her most demanding standard yet. “I have to get good at myself, which is a challenge,” she says. “I’m the meanest critic there is.”

And so if 2011, when Mara starred in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was her year of going wide, 2017 could be her year of going deep. First she played a young widow in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, opposite Casey Affleck—an unusual role, in an even more brilliantly unusual film, and one she shot in only six days. Then, this fall, Mara stars in Una, Benedict Andrews’s daring movie about a suburban Lolita grown up. Mara fell in love with Blackbird, the David Harrower play on which it’s based, after seeing it on the New York stage in 2007. (“I was so affected by it,” she says. “Thinking about it, reading it.”) She confessed her nagging passion for the play to Cate Blanchett, while they were making Carol, and the universe smiled. “She’s like, ‘Oh, my God, my friend Benedict is doing it, and he’s desperate to have you!’ ” Mara recalls.

In the film adaptation, Mara plays Una, a woman in her 20s trying to reenter the life of an older man (Ben Mendelsohn) who sexually abused her when she was thirteen. He seems to want nothing to do with the adult Una, and they circle each other, sparring. The film was shot quickly, in five weeks, but its heightened emotional drama required close preparation with Mendelsohn—and a distinctive mix of vulnerability and strength. “That relationship was so important because it was really intense and it was mostly just the two of us,” she tells me. “We didn’t spend a lot of time bashing over stuff. We sort of felt for each other more than anything,” Mendelsohn says. He touts Mara’s craft. “I mean, blushing on-screen? That is a kind of holy grail.”

It’s unsurprising, then, that Mara’s Una—a questing girl who has grown into a haunted adult—shapes the film’s emotional core. “She possesses a fierce intelligence that is absolutely readable and clear on-screen, and, at the same time, she also has a beguiling sense of beauty and mystery that I thought was going to be very important,” Andrews explains. “One of the reasons for the shift in title from Blackbird to Una is that we’re drawn into questions that she is desperately seeking answers to. Was this love or was this abuse? Was I the only one?” He goes on, “Rooney’s completely unafraid to go into the raw nerves, the damaged places in characters.”

In the café, Mara takes a sip of her drink and offers her famously inscrutable smile. (“There’s an enormous amount you can’t know about Rooney, and that is a really powerful characteristic,” Mendelsohn says.) Many directors view her as something of a cipher, showing up to work with an almost magical mastery of the material. David Lowery recalls her appearing on the first day of filming for his first film with her, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. “She came to set with a character who was fully defined and was entirely hers,” he says. “She would not share with me the accent she was preparing until the first take.” Gus Van Sant, who recently directed Mara for the first time, describes her as “very self-contained.” He says, “She doesn’t need a lot from me.”

That opaque self-sufficiency has costs: A few years back, when she was chasing down a part she dearly wanted, she was brushed off. “The producers were like, ‘You’re just too Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. You’re not wide-eyed and innocent enough,’ ” she recalls. “It was right after I had shot Carol, but it hadn’t come out yet. I’m literally wide-eyed in that.”

She smiles wryly; she has come to take such disappointments in stride. “I’m sure at some point it will be the reverse: ‘You’re not edgy enough,’ ” she says. She chuckles. “It only makes me bolder. It only makes me want to be like, Fuck you! Watch me be wide-eyed and innocent!”

A 37,000-foot view of Mara’s childhood reveals how little of it seems to carry forward into her adult self. There’s the famous football dynasty: Her father’s family founded the New York Giants, and her mother’s, the Rooneys, founded the Pittsburgh Steelers. Nothing could seem more distant from Mara’s narrow-shouldered hipster frame. There’s her early-teenage passion for horror films, a genre that she says she now loathes. And, of course, there’s what she describes as her shy, distrustful demeanor as a child, so unlike that of her older sister, Kate, also an actress. “She has a better personality than I do,” Rooney says, deadpan. “People like her more.” When they were growing up, Kate and their cousins would put on dance shows around the house, but Rooney (then called Tricia) was so timorous that she could never do anything except press stop and play on their cassette player.

“Kate knew definitively that she wanted to be on Broadway and do music and acting by age ten,” Rooney explains. “Maybe because I was a contrarian, I wanted to go to school and not be a child actor.” Her essential taste in films has never changed—“dark, cerebral, deeply romantic, goth, weird”—but at eighteen and nineteen she tried out for everything. “Auditioning is like going on a job interview. You have to wear a certain outfit and behave a certain way and play the game a little bit, and I’m just not good at that. I’m really not,” she says. She hates small talk. “I either want no conversation or ‘Let’s talk about your failing marriage,’ ” she says.

The roles came slowly at first; it wasn’t until David Fincher cast her as the lead in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, after working with her in The Social Network, that she got her break. And yet, where many actresses would use such a role as an entrée into Hollywood, Mara has taken a different path. Following The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, she’s made relatively few big studio films, building out her reputation instead in emotionally demanding indie proj­ects. There was her performance as a Texan outlaw turned young mother in Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, and as an aid worker in Rio de Janeiro in Stephen Daldry’s Trash. Mara makes a point of avoiding the “girlfriend or wife” roles that young actresses are often slotted into, but she’s been known to take interesting iterations: as a murderous sleepwalker in Side Effects, as the ex of a man in love with his operating system in Her, and, of course, as the department-store waif who falls in love with an older woman in Carol. Earlier this year, she starred with Robert Redford in the philosophical sci-fi thriller The Discovery, made by her own former boyfriend of several years, Charlie McDowell.

All of this is a fittingly broad range for a woman who prefers to move through the world less like a movie star than like a student on a gap year, hopping planes and living out of carry-ons. A few years ago, while shooting Trash in Brazil, she insisted on exploring the local favelas alone. It wasn’t her first time in a struggling foreign quarter: After spending a college summer in a volunteer program in Nairobi’s Kibera slum, one of the largest in the world, Mara founded a charity to administer care and services to children there. She has a lengthy bucket list of places she hopes to visit—India, Nepal, Bhutan, parts of South America—but returns to Africa from time to time, both to check in with kids in her charity and to take in what she hasn’t seen before.

What’s she chasing? A certain kind of immersive experience that carries into acting, too, she says: “I need to really be feeling like this is the truth of what’s really happening.” David Lowery was surprised, as a relatively unknown indie filmmaker, to get a cold call saying Rooney Mara might be interested in Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. “My first thought was, This actress is at the top of the world right now, and there’s no way she’d want to do a tiny film in Texas,” he says. She did, though, and turned up not just ready but alert. “She is so intelligent, so sharp, that you can see the wheels turning in her head—it’s almost as if you can feel her judging your direction as you give it to her,” he says with a laugh.

I have the idea that, after the twelve-hour window in New York and her ten-day European vacation, but before the trip to see the gorillas in Rwanda and the start of her next film, I will finally be able to see Mara in the rarest of conditions: a state of rest. She insists that when she’s not insanely busy, she is insanely indolent. (“I like to spend a lot of time in bed. If I could take all my meetings and calls there, I would love that.”) I meet her one bright afternoon at the Trails Cafe, an outdoor coffee-and-snacks spot near the foot of the trailheads in Griffith Park.

One of the first things she tells me, though, is that she’s selling her Los Angeles house—another move in process. Also, adding to the chaos of the day, the house is full of moths. She returned from Europe to find part of her home full of pantry pests: those tiny yet alarmingly fast-breeding creatures that haunt cupboards. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to her to call an exterminator. Instead—as usual—she is trying to solve the issue herself, by swatting. “I’m so ashamed. I feel horrible,” she says.

Still, the sunshine is enlivening, and Mara—albeit lathered in sunscreen to preserve her sensitive skin—seems pleased to be out. Although she loves the pedestrian ease of New York, she prefers the quality of life in Los Angeles, where she takes the outdoors seriously: On arriving, even before saying hello, she reflexively stoops to pick a plastic cup littering the ground, and ferries it to a trash can nearby. On the red carpet, she is known for her romantic-goth taste, wearing almost exclusively black or creamy white. (Who could forget the intricate lace Givenchy dress she wore to the 2016 Oscars, or the slick, black Louis Vuitton ensemble she donned for the Una Canadian premiere—part Blade Runner, part ballerina?) Today, though, she’s back in crunchy-traveler mode: a favorite black T-shirt, matching Eckhaus Latta jeans, black Converse sneakers, and a vintage-style broad-brimmed hat.

I order an iced mint tea. Mara asks for the same and, after rummaging in her knapsack, produces a Mason jar. “Can you put it in here?” she asks the cashier. She’s trying to spare the Earth another disposable cup. We settle at a picnic table, underneath a lovely parched oak.

Mara assures me that in L.A. she is a homebody. In New York, she often goes out for dinner with friends, most of whom she’s known since childhood. But in California her friends are from work, and she claims she leaves her house only to go grocery shopping (“I’m a winter cook—banana muffins or soup”) and to exercise (“important for me mentally”). Here in California, she works out with her friend Andie Hecker, a former ballerina. In New York, she goes to Katonah yoga with Danielle Rosati. In both places, she drops in on The Class, a calisthenic regimen by Taryn Toomey. She recently started karate.

It is dipping into afternoon, and the Southern California light has taken on a buttery blur. This evening, Mara says, she plans to buy a ticket at her local theater and see A Ghost Story for the first time. She much prefers slipping into the back of a dark theater than parading into a premiere, but it’s the rare film that allows such freedom. In the end, she quails; she hasn’t yet watched A Ghost Story as of late summer. Mara says she never looks forward to seeing herself on-screen. “For me it’s all about the experience of making a movie,” she explains.

The coming months will bring two films that reflect the range of that experience. In Van Sant’s new biopic about the late quadriplegic cartoonist John Callahan, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, Mara plays Callahan’s Swedish-American caretaker. And she spent much of last autumn in Italy, shooting what may be her most daring part to date: the title role of Mary Magdalene, directed by Garth Davis, with whom she first worked in last year’s Lion.

Mara was brought up Catholic, and, although she still considers herself broadly spiritual, she has moved away from the faith. At first, she says, the prospect of playing Mary Magdalene struck her as absurd. “I’m like, ‘I can’t do a scene with Jesus. I just can’t!’ ” Yet she was heartened to learn that Joaquin Phoenix would be playing Christ; they are reported to be dating. (Although Mara is coy on details—“I cannot confirm or deny!”—she reports that all is going well. Or, in fact, better: “My love life is great,” she corrects.) Along the way, Mara developed a special creative relationship with Davis, the director: He is also the favorite to direct the first film she has been developing herself. Based on the best-selling memoir A House in the Sky, about Amanda Lindhout’s time as a young journalist held hostage by militants in Somalia, the movie is one Mara has been working toward for most of her adult career. After four years of work with Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures, Mara hopes the film will be made in 2018.

Will A House in the Sky be enough to bring Mara in for a landing at last? “We’ve all been working really hard to get it made, but we want to do it right,” she says. “Hopefully it all works out.” She jingles her jar of iced tea in the sun and takes a sip. She smiles. “But you never know.”Read more at:wedding dresses australia | bridesmaid dresses online

カテゴリー: wedding | 投稿者bestlook 18:47 | コメントをどうぞ

Suzy Menkes at New York Fashion Week

In the Calvin Klein store on Madison Avenue, the company’s fresh design image swings from the rafters. There are twisted ribbons, mannequin dummies and all the colour and artistic imagination the fashion world now expects from the collaboration between Calvin’s Belgian designer Raf Simons and the American artist Sterling Ruby.

The clothes on sale are modern, streamlined and appealing; luring in from the street outside those in search of sleek tailored coats, impeccably cut trousers, wispy chiffon blouses and references to vintage patchwork quilts from rural America’s past.

Above all, the collection seems appealing, even joyous: a colourful new dawn for a designer who founded his company in 1968 as ‘Calvin Clean’.

How chic to see that early minimalism transformed by Simons into an ode to America today.

But these clothes are the fruits of a show held six months ago for the winter season. The spring/summer 2018 presentation this week was familiar. There was the same rendezvous in the Calvin Klein New York headquarters; same concept of decoration with ribbons – mostly blood red or sunshine orange, put up as overhead decoration. And an even more impressive line-up of famous faces, on the performing arts side from Lupita Nyong’o and Kate Bosworth to Jake Gyllenhaal.

But what’s this? Over my head is hanging, like the sword of Damocles, an axe swinging from red distressed cheerleader pompom fabric. The merry exuberance of Sterling Ruby seemed to be turning into a horror movie.

“For me, it’s about speaking about America – and Calvin Klein’s America,” said Simons backstage. “I think of it as a mighty trilogy, with something that is needed to bring the whole company together. For me, it’s about speaking about America – Calvin Klein’s America.

The show notes were far more specific. “An abstraction of horrors and dreams,” read the introduction under the ironic headline ‘Sweet dreams’. The show, it explained, “takes its inspiration from cinema, from the dream factory of Hollywood and its depictions of both an American nightmare and the all-powerful American dream.”

“The ‘clues’ of horror, but also of dreams, inspire the collection,” the story behind the fashion show continued. It was played out on the runway in innocent, mid-century silhouettes given a dark tinge with the use of nylon and rubber. Andy Warhol, who defined the culture of 15 minutes of fame, was also part of the equation, which tipped towards suggestive images of shattered innocence.

The movies quoted as inspiration to Raf Simons and his right hand Pieter Mulier included Knives (1981-82), Electric Chair (1964-65) and Ambulance Disaster (1963-64) – all chosen from Warhol’s Death and Disaster series. The uncomfortable irony was that references might appear on a floaty nightdress as a symbol of young female innocence, or played out in the cowboy boots that the designer had introduced in his debut season. One ongoing reference was to Amish quilts; another to wild west-style fringing that hung and swung from and across the body. These skinny streams were even made into bags as well as creating layers of silken fringes on the body.

Another statement came with rubber used as cloth, helping to create the unsettling vibe of the show.

But what did it all mean in terms of clothing? I could see references to the Raf Simons heredity in voluminous skirts that he had presented as a silhouette in his time as designer for Dior. A series of rain coats for both sexes showed the designer’s faultless cutting and captured a hint of the clean, clear lines from the original Calvin Klein collections. But strong colours – green, blood red, golden yellow or sky blue ­– mostly had splodgy black markings to enhance a sense of discomfort.

The American Dream has always been particular to the United States, the idea of an achievable goal that no other country feels so deeply. But whatever political trauma the big country is going through currently, it seemed awkward to translate it into clothes, especially by a designer who comes from outside the continent.

Edited through and placed in the Calvin Klein Madison store, this collection will look like what it is: cleverly cast garments with an intriguing artistic feel. But like horror movies, there is an underlying feeling of discomfort that left a question mark on the show itself.Read more at:wedding dresses australia | simple wedding dresses

カテゴリー: beauty | 投稿者bestlook 18:11 | コメントをどうぞ