Dear readers,
I met Filep Motwary almost a year ago. Filep is a costume designer, photographer, and fashion features editor for Dapper Dan magazine. He founded Un nouVeau iDEAL in 2006. We have corresponded regularly since, sharing our views on fashion. We finally realized that we should share our insights with the larger audience in our respective publications. Below is our first conversation, conducted via Skype.
The new exhibit on punk and its influence on fashion by the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York may, naturally, raise questions, such as “What the fuck”? What is punk, with its emphasis on anti-establishment and disobedience, doing in the halls of this grand dame of culture? Would Sid Vicious hang out with the queen of England in her drawing room? Things get weirder if you start thinking about tonight’s gala and all the celebrities in ball gowns it will draw. Will they at least slash their Carolina Herreras with razor blades? One might only hope that Marc Jacobs will show up in plaid boxers.
I first met Barny Nakhle in Paris a year ago. I was preoccupied with finding a perfect pair of derbys at the time and therefore developed an unbecoming habit of staring at other men’s shoes. His were the first I liked in a long time. Hoping to score the same pair I asked where he got his. No cigar – the derbys were a prototype of a footwear collection he was working on after cutting his teeth at Guidi.
It is with incredible sense of sadness that I write about the departure of Yohan Serfaty, who succumbed to cancer earlier today. Yohan was a talented menswear designer, but, more importantly, a sweet and gentle human being. He worked quietly and showed his menswear in Paris without fanfare. He designed from the heart and the world is now just a little more impoverished because that heart is no longer beating. R.I.P.
When in 2006 the German art book publisher Steidl first released the book by one of the most famously provocative photographers, Guy Bourdin – A Message for You, it quickly sold out. The gorgeous two-volume series documented a period of Bourdin’s work from 1977 to 1980 with the dancer-turned-model Nicolle Meyer as his muse. Seven years later comes the second edition.
Bourdin was a notorious photographer; a precursor of in-your-face sexuality that now seems quite banal because of countless imitation and image overload. But not back then. Bourdin’s loud colors and unbridled sexuality of his subject matter were positively scandalous in the 70s. There is no denying that the women in his photographs look objectified. But it seems that Bourdin’s intent seemed to be reflecting and magnifying what he saw around him.
The work of the Swiss photographer Rene Burri is well known, especially the iconic photos from his Magnum Agency days. Just search Google Images for Che Guevara and his famous shot of Guevara smoking a cigar is one of the first that pops up.
Though most of Burri’s famous images are black and white, he has done a substantial amount of work in color. The new book Rene Burri: Impossible Reminiscences (Phaidon, $100) explores this underexposed side of the photographer’s oeuvre.
Fashion can be many things, likeable or not. Among these, fashion as theater is one aspect that gives it a certain kind of excitement. And by theater I don’t mean a mere parade of lavish outfits, but a convergence of the immaterial, in the form of designer’s ideas, with the material, in the form of a show that makes your heart jump even if for a second. Anyone familiar with the runway presentations of Alexander McQueen of Hussein Chalayan will know what I’m talking about. The fact that there is an incredible amount of painstaking work that leads up to the spectacle that lasts a mere fifteen minutes makes it all the more exciting because of how irrational the whole thing is.
Pattern, the new volume aiming to survey contemporary fashion from Phaidon ($79.95) is quite a tome to behold, with over 400 gorgeously laid out pages, printed on high-quality paper and with a beautiful cover, embossed and gold-foiled. It also comes in a paper Tyvek tote (no, you cannot rip Tyvek, ask me how I know). The book follows the same format as the previous survey, Sample (Phaidon, 2005), in which ten influential fashion figures served as curators, each picking ten designers to feature in the book. Each of the one hundred designers got a two-spread overview with a blurb and some photos.
That graphic design can unite fashion, art, and music is an unusual proposition, certainly one I haven’t thought about, but going through the new book M to M of M/M (Paris) (Rizolli, $85) was an eye-opening experience. It makes sense on a basic creative level. All three disciplines demand visual representation and M/M, the design firm that has worked with the likes of Bjork, Yohji Yamamoto, and Hans Ulrich Olbrist since 1992 does it by putting the three disciplines through their own stylistic prism.
Yesterday I stopped by the installation/trunk show of the New York label InAisce held in West SoHo at the menswear boutique Atelier. It is a first event of this kind for InAisce, where you can view the entire Fall/Winter 2013 men’s and women’s collections, pre-order the garments that you like, and chat with the entire InAisce team. You can also check out the remarkable wool felt pieces by the Dutch artist Claudy Yongstra. The trunk show will go on through today.