Best Fashion Articles Archive

[Faust]

Hello all,

I would like to attempt another archival project that I think will benefit everyone - an archive of the best fashion articles. I encourage everyone to contribute links and/or scanned articles, even if they are paid access (someone might find it worthwhile to pay). Please make sure to credit the author/publication and link to the original piece.

Thanks!

[Faust]

Elegant Monsters | Rick Owens profile | Author: John Colapinto | [$]


ABSTRACT: LETTER FROM PARIS about fashion designer Rick Owens. One Friday morning last September, Valentine, a tall blond model, arrived at the studio of Rick Owens, the American fashion designer who lives and works in a five-story mansion on the Place du Palais Bourbon, in central Paris. It was two days before the beginning of fashion week, and Valentine had been selected by Owen as a fitting model for his spring, 2008, collection, which was to be presented at the École des Beaux Arts on Sunday.

Since the late nineties, stylish women have been wearing Owens’s long, clingy T-shirts, elegantly asymmetrical dresses, and skinny-armed leather jackets, which are constantly in demand at Barneys. Owens, a forty-six-year-old bisexual, has become the foremost purveyor of what he calls “glunge” (grunge plus glamour). He’s acquired a following that could be described as cultlike or exclusive, were it not for the fact that he sells tens of millions of dollars’ worth of clothes each year, in over two hundred and fifty high-end fashion stores around the world. This summer, he’ll open his first U.S. boutique, in Manhattan.

Owens looks uncannily like Iggy Pop, with long straight hair, dyed black. Like Iggy, he indulged in drugs and alcohol for many years before he stopped cold turkey, in the early nineties. Owens has built a multimillion-dollar business out of a talent for infusing garments with the poignant beauty that resides in imperfection. Courtney Love was among the first celebrities to discover him, in the late nineties, shortly after he launched his label. Owens has steadfastly pursued an anti-fashion ethic. His basic look—”drippy” forms in subdued colors—changes little from season to season. He gives few interviews, doesn’t employ a publicist, and has never advertised his line. Yet his diffidence seems to only enhance his cachet among fashion editors and insiders. Vogue sponsored his first runway show, in 2002, and that same year he won the C.F.D.A. Perry Ellis Award for Emerging Talent.

Since moving to Paris, in 2003, Owens has been embraced by the French with a passion rarely accorded an American. As Owens conducted his fitting with Valentine, his wife, Michèle Lamy, joined him. Lamy, a sixty-three-year-old Frenchwoman, helps design his fur line, Palais Royal, and she’s also the inspiration for many of his designs. She used to own Les Deux Cafés, a popular Hollywood night spot. Lamy and Owens met in Los Angeles and have been together for eighteen years; they’ve been married since 2006.

Describes a visit by Owens’s parents, John and Connie Owens, to his studio in Paris. Mentions the tension between Owens and his father. Describes Owens’s unconventional childhood. After Owens attended the Otis-Parsons Art Institute, he worked in knockoff houses in L.A., copying the work of well-known fashion designers. In 1988, he got a job as a pattern-cutter at a sportswear company owned by Lamy. They began an affair in 1990, and then soon moved in together. In 1994, Owens started selling his designs at Charles Gallay; a few years later, he negotiated an exclusive contract with Maxfield, in L.A. Mentions Lisa Love. In 1999, Julie Gilhart began buying his line for Barneys, where it became a top-seller. Mentions Sally Singer. In 2001, Owens signed a deal with EBA, an Italian sales agency, to distribute his line. Mentions Luca Ruggeri and Elsa Lanzo. Describes how Owens was featured in a spread by Annie Leibovitz in Vogue, in 2001. With each new favorable notice, Owens seems more determined to prove his independence from the fashion establishment. He doesn’t worry that his provocativeness will alienate customers or critics. Describes Owens’s spring 2008 fashion show. After the show, Owens and his party, including Courtney Love and his parents, went to dinner at Davé. Mentions his furniture line, at the Galerie Philippe Jousse.

[rider]

ABC of CDG

ABC of CDG
Edited by SULEMAN ANAYA and JOERG KOCH
this is a 14 page article in pdf format that is completely engrossing and entertaining. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

for example... F

FUN
“I duly asked her what she laughs at,
and she answered deadpan, ‘People falling
down.’”
Thurman, 2005.

[Florian]

Raf Simons

Profile on Raf Simons by Cathy Horyn, published in the NYT

Very interesting profile of a personal favorite of mine.

I'm working on the translation of a very elaborate dutch interview with Raf too, from back in his early days. For now, enjoy this one!

[Faust]

Lynn Yaeger eviscerates the Louis Vuitton sponsored Takashi Murakami exhibit. The Village Voice, April 2008

First part below, the rest is in the link.

Hitting the Vuitton Murakami Shop at the Brooklyn Museum

Instead try Canal Street.

A A A Comments (0) By Lynn Yaeger Tuesday, Apr 15 2008


"Guess what, Max? Mommy is going to take you to see a great big sculpture!" "Emma, don't bother the nice elevator lady!" "No, Caitlin, we are not going to see any more art unless you get back in your stroller right now!" This cacophony of fake enthusiasm, finger-wagging, and veiled threats follows me as I make my way through the day-care center that is the Brooklyn Museum on a spring Sunday.
Like the hundred thousand toddlers all around me, I am here to take in the Takashi Murakami exhibit. OK, so I never heard of this guy until he started collaborating with Marc Jacobs on a series of cutesy-poo Louis Vuitton handbags—now I want to see for myself the in-museum Vuitton boutique, much maligned in its previous incarnation at MOCA in L.A., where you can actually buy $2,000 handbags, not the usual boring books and scarves that dominate gallery shops.


As it turns out, I missed the real retail action, which took place at the opening-night gala a few days earlier, where attendees entered the show through a mock Canal Street. According to a spokesperson for the museum: "[Vuitton] created it in our sculpture garden at the rear of the museum. It resembled Canal Street, with shops that appeared to be selling bootlegged goods, some with their gates down, or with signs that said something like 'Closed by order of . . .' They were selling what at first glance appeared to be knockoffs, except the bags were real—the vendors were actors, and so were the buyers."
Actors impersonating impoverished illegal immigrants trying to make a living? Who came up with this swell idea? Not since Marie Antoinette dressed as a shepherdess has such blatant bad taste, such revolting hauteur infected a social gathering. (Maybe it's a French thing?) In any case, this grotesque Potemkin Village is torn down by the time I visit, so instead of expressing my outrage at fake fake-bag booths, I'm battling toddlers to get a look at Murakami's cartoon films.
No dice—the rug rats rule the screening room. So I wander over to a trio of the artist's lascivious pixies, who remind me of the talking animatronics (hey, they're sculptures, too) at Caesars Palace in Vegas. These creepy fairies pale in comparison to the larger-than-life nude wrangler entitled My Lonesome Cowboy, who has some kind of disgusting gray effluvia shooting out of his wiener. The same repulsive substance is emanating from the engorged titty of his companion. Stand and stare as long as you like, but don't attempt to take these wastrels home—"No pictures!" a guard says sharply. Well, maybe they're in the show's $65 catalog, if you must own a photo of them.
As for me, I'd rather own a handbag. In fact, as I pass a huge mural of mushrooms covered with eyes and realize I am approaching the Vuitton shop, my heart begins to flutter with excitement, an involuntary reflex that in this case is accompanied by just a little shame.
It's not like I don't have a long history with Murakami Vuittons, a sad saga that I have chronicled many times in print and in person to anyone who would listen. Because I am a pathetic victim, when these bags were first introduced several years ago, I put myself on a list for a stupid overpriced satchel decorated with pink smiley-face flowers. Just the fact that you couldn't buy the damn thing made me—and thousands of other suckers around the world—troop to their local LV outlet and give not just our names but an imprint of our credit cards to a snotty salesperson who promised to call the very day the bag arrived, which in my case was the 12th. Of never.
In the end, I went down to Canal Street, the same ratty Canal Street that Vuitton thought was so witty to make fun of. And there I found a wonderful fake flowered satchel for $35, which I thought a cool guy like Murakami would probably get a kick out of, since the nameless third-world artisan who made it added some flourishes that LV hadn't thought of, like silver faux-snakeskin trim and mirror studs. But it turns out I am wrong about Murakami, as I am about so many things. A wall text at the museum announces that "the concept of copyright itself holds an exalted position within Murakami's practice, rooted in the acknowledgement of his work as simultaneously interweaving deeply personal expression, high art, mass culture and commerce."
What care I about the concept of copyright? All I know is, it's a good thing I got this Murakami-bag business out of my system before I visit the museum Vuitton store, where the whole panoply of Murakami-Vuitton collaborations over the years—the cheery cherries, the inane flowers—are ensconced in glass showcases. I point to a jewelry box with a Murakami spaceman painted on it and ask the salesman, who is wearing a white suit and white loafers with little gold LVs on them, how much it costs. In a repetition of my humiliation at the Vuitton store years ago, Mr. White Suit tells me the stuff in the case is not for sale, it's part of the exhibit....

[interest1]

That's Lynn.

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[Wewe]

I would like to attempt another archival project that I think will benefit everyone - an archive of the best fashion articles. https://winrand.co.za/