Feature and Op-Ed articles
Several days after his Spring/Summer 2016 men’s show Haider Ackermann was in his showroom, which was buzzing with buyers. Ackermann came down from the top floor of the building where he was already shooting the looks for his e-commerce platform, to be launched soon.
I meet Veronique Branquinho on the 21st floor of a high rise in Chelsea where she’s showing her pre-Spring 2016 collection. She’s in a corner suite with floor-to-ceiling windows that glance out over the Hudson, where industrial barges and cruise ships coarse by in clouds of spray and vapor. The evening is pearly grey and the room feels weightless, suspended up here in a box of steel and glass. Weightless, too, is the effect of the collection: dresses, all white and long, draped on a sparse cluster of forms with a lone live model at their center. Her dress is black with leather straps and falls to the floor. I think of Greek columns and their counterpart in ancient draperies, where the cloth is suspended simply from the shoulders and takes shape only with the moving body.
“Nothing,” answered a prominent New York buyer when I asked her what she liked during this past men’s fashion week. While I wouldn’t go this far, the Spring/Summer 2016 season was decidedly mixed. The overarching question, which began forming in my head during the first day of shows in Paris was, “What makes a good collection?” Is it the theme or its execution? Do we look for a designer to tell an interesting story, to interpret a theme worth exploring through clothes, or to produce beautiful, interestingly constructed garments? Ideally, both.
Bookshelves line the walls of the American sculptor Barry X Ball’s compact office and, while walking me through the blueprints depicting his new Greenpoint, Brooklyn production facility and studio, he directed my gaze up to some palm-sized sculptures resting on them.
“So,” began the New York sculptor Barry X Ball who was kind enough to allow us a visit to his Brooklyn studio some months back, “we bought a 200 foot by 100 foot piece of land.” And, while I couldn’t have imaged it at the time, this was a highly appropriate beginning to telling his story. It was a story that began at the end: the land in question was purchased in Greenpoint, Brooklyn to house Ball’s new studio and production facility.
Two weeks ago the latest of Rei Kawakubo’s protégés, Kei Ninomiya, was in New York to present a preview of his Fall/Winter 2015 collection for the “noir by kei ninomiya” line that he helms under the Comme des Garcons umbrella.
This week at the Collective Design Fair the Polish-born, Chicago-based interior designer Lukas Machnik is presenting an array of furniture and objects from Rick Owens, Parts of Four, Lonney White III, and Phoebe Knapp.
It is no big secret that “perfume” is a bit of a dirty word in fashion. Often, it is seen, not without justification, as an easy way to make money by capitalizing on one’s brand name. The typical arrangement is to license out one’s name to a big perfume conglomerate, tell them what you want it to smell like, and sit back while the money rolls in. A successful perfume can be immensely profitable. Thierry Mugler, to take one example, has not designed a garment in decades, but his enormously successful perfume “Angel” has made him a millionaire many times over. All you need is a brand name and a good formula. It is no wonder then that every newly minted fashion designer and celebrity is eager to sign a perfume deal.
We would like to present to you Part II of our coverage of Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty exhibit at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
We would like to present to you an in-depth review of the Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty exhibit at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Tomorrow, we will publish a comprehensive photo essay of the exhibit shot for StyleZeitgeist magazine.