Alexander McQueen: Unseen

Culture, Fashion

This hasn’t been the case with fashion designers until the 2010 suicide of Alexander McQueen. And while you couldn’t exactly sell his artwork at inflated prices, an entire post-mortem cultural industry sprang up around his legacy. This is a testament not so much to McQueen’s unquestionable genius, but to how much more central fashion has become to the contemporary cultural experience. (We did not see such an explosion of media after the murder of Gianni Versace, for example.)

Poise in the Poisonous

Fashion

In 1977, Yves Saint Laurent released his Opium perfume for women, taking a risk by basing a perfume on a poisonous flower, not exactly an alluring concept. The gamble paid off and Opium became one of the most successful fragrances ever produced (Dior followed suit almost a decade later with Poison.). Jean-Louis Sieuzac was the nose behind Opium, and his apprentice was Emilie Copperman, who went on to become a nose for Symrise, one of the leading producers of flavors and fragrances in the world.

Aitor Throup – Make It New

Fashion, Features/Op-Ed

Yesterday the Dutch denim company G-Star RAW announced the appointment of one of our favorite conceptual designers Aitor Throup as its Executive Creative Director. The designer has been consulting for the company for some time now, presumably with enough success to warrant a full time upgrade. After initial eyebrow raising the appointment has come to make sense. While the G-Star aesthetic leaves much to be desired, it has exactly the kind of construction and fabric know-how that Throup might take advantage of in order to create something interesting outside of his previous conceptual flights of fancy, which have been both creatively mind-blowing and mind-blowingly unattainable. In any case, I am curious to see what will happen, and I would like to share with you our in-depth profile of Throup that I wrote for our print volume 4, in which Throup makes clear that he would be interested to translate his creative vision and formidable design skills into something more accessible.

Iris van Herpen: Transforming Fashion

Fashion

Early last year the Atlanta High Museum of Art brought an unprecedentedly large-scale exhibit of the work of the Dutch designer Iris van Herpen to the United States (our coverage here). The wildly successful show titled Iris van Herpen: Transforming Fashion is taking a North American tour with the first stop at the Grand Rapids Art…