Deluxe by Dana Thomas

How did I miss this read? At least I'm on it now.

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(Thanks Andrea!)

Wardrobe

Roland Barthes wrote in "The Language of Fashion":
Man invented clothing for four reasons:
1. as protection against harsh weather
2. out of modesty for hiding nudity
3. for ornamentation to get noticed
4. the function of meaning, in order to carry out a signifying activity; a profoundly social act right at the heart of the dialectic of society (beyond modesty, ornamentation, protection)

There is no doubt a link between certain types of dress that pertain to certain professions, social classes, religions, towns, etc. And this conscious coding in clothing is exactly why great writers such as Baudelaire, Edgar Poe, Michelet, and Proust, have always been preoccupied with clothing in their works. They understood that clothing is an element that "involved the whole of being". (Barthes, 96)

Then, it is only fitting that costume design in the film industry plays one of the most significant roles in creating a character. As Audrey Hepburn had once described in an interview about her praise for Hubert Givenchy:

He was "a personality-maker and a psychiatrist..." providing her with a look that gave her the confidence to act. "It was...an enormous help to know that I looked the part...Then the rest wasn't so tough anymore. Givenchy's lovely simple clothes [gave me] the feeling of being whoever I played." (Source: Christie's)

Audrey Hepburn's iconic wardrobe in Breakfast at Tiffany's is one of the main aspects of what makes this film a classic. Hepburn travelled to Paris herself to handpick this young designer and boldly overstepped the monolithic Edith Head (and her reign as Head Costume Designer at Paramount for many years). Head was credited the "Wardrobe Supervisor", an incredible insult for a designer of her calibre. However, she had full control as Costume Designer in To Catch a Thief (and was nominated for an Academy Award in Best Costume Design, though she did not win), giving an incredible boost to Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in their iconic roles of epitomized glamour.

Similarly, the costuming in La Dolce Vita, even in black and white, gave this film its aura of glamour. It is said that Federico Fellini was inpsired by Cristobal Balenciaga's "Sack Dress" (1957) for the storyline of La Dolce Vita. Brunello Rondi, Fellini's co-screenwriter and long-time collaborator, confirmed that "the fashion of women's sack dresses which possessed that sense of luxurious butterflying out around a body that might be physically beautiful but not morally so; these sack dresses struck Fellini because they rendered a woman very gorgeous who could, instead, be a skeleton of squalor and solitude inside." Balenciaga was an innovator in fabrics, and his sculptural creations were the most celebrated in haute couture of the 1950s and 1960s. And beyond this initial inspiration through fashion, the tone is continued throughout the movie, with Anita Eckberg's strapless black gown and Anouk Aimee's simple black sheath dress. "The transparent mesh at the decolletage and the back makes it incredibly sexy and restrained," says Jay Weissberg, Variety's film critic based in Rome. "Roman women tend to love clothes that create an impression of strength as well as femininity."

However, apparel and guise cannot hold their own without a fitting environment to display them within.

Visual Merchandising

Click for larger resolution.

This is my hypothetical window display of a department store in the league of Le Bon Marche, Galeries Lafayette, Lane Crawford, or Fortnum & Mason. The entire window of each bay is taken up by a larger-than-life image of (in)famous mugs of the people who make the haute couture world tick. Instead of the traditional mannequin or model on display, it is the behind-the-scenes masterminds who keep the fashion system in check. Because even at its most liberating, fashion is still sadistic, always in a dynamic state of power differential. Desire is created, and this moving target of beauty is fundamental or else there is no raison d'etre to objects of luxury. The floating decapitations are meant to evoke the mighty Wizard of Oz illusion pre-reveal to Dorothy. They stare down, with varying degrees of condescendance, indifference, or disdain. They impose, as a celebrity, and as the creative force that sanctioned the merchandise behind those walls.

The chosen are (from left to right):
Anna Wintour - editor of American Vogue
Karl Lagerfeld - own label, Chanel, and Fendi
Suzy Menkes - editor of International Herald Tribune
John Galliano - own label and Christian Dior
Vivienne Westwood - own label
Hamish Bowles - European editor-at-large Vogue

(thinking of making some more....)

a fashion show

The etymology of the word “glamour” comes from a variant of Scottish gramarye "magic, enchantment, spell," in a medieval sense of "any sort of scholarship, especially occult learning" from 1720. (http://www.etymonline.com/) and that is certainly what a fashion show is – a form of commercial seduction. According to Guy Debord, the fashion show is a self-absorbed “spectacle unto itself… sealed in the show space of the runway, with its attendant protocols and hierarchies. Like the spectacle, it spatialises time and destroys memory.” (Debord, 193) It is also, on a more practical level, to attract press coverage and fulfil the commercial realities of a design house. Because although there is a lot of media coverage of this field, its actual economic force is relatively meagre. Its significance lies in the fact that it’s “symbolically central, although economically peripheral” (Evans, 294). There is a cultural impact that these shows carry that filter to the masses. As Thomas Richards wrote, the fashion show is about allurement and advertisement: “the theatre through which capitalism acts” (Richards, 251). Worth and Poiret, pioneers in the haute couture world, often hid their commercial realities of their businesses behind justifications of artistry of the contemporary fashion show. (Duggan, 243-70)

Now, more than ever, the fashion garment circulates not as the object but as the image, meaning that the image has become the commodity itself. Due to increasingly visualised media outlets, the priority is to have the most graphic runway images transmitted via print for global audiences.

'Viktor & Rolf on strike' posters. Autumn-Winter 1996-7

But as Viktor & Rolf’s collections seem to parody this knowledge, it also realizes that resistance to the spectacle does not come easily, nor is there a dire need to resist at all.

scavenger hunt

[photo from garancedore.com]

Fashion designers have the luxury of taking inspiration throughout the eras without falsifying history. This means that historical references of the past can be scavenged and looped back to the present to give it contemporary meaning. Even though innovation and novelty are seen to be at the forefront of fashion, it is still a ‘network of historical constellations in which past and present are telescoped together.” (Evans, 22) These liberties designers can take are reminiscent of the character of the 19th-century ragpicker in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project: “Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall appropriate no ingenious formulations, purloin no valuables. But the rags, the refuse – these I will not describe but put on display.” (Benjamin, 860)

Since fashion imagery is inherently mutable, it can be seen as semiotically unstable, using select images of the past that are recontextualized for the present. Coherent narratives do not exist as the genealogy of the object keeps on being rewritten with temporal retracing influenced by current issues. Fragments of the past are articulated through the marketing and iconography around the physical product itself. Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory speaks of how objects are message and emotion bearing entities. This is the same method that contemporary fashion images can stimulate ideas and meanings beyond the object, and relate to the values, beliefs, attitudes, and relationships of the past.

In Writing and Difference, Jacques Derrida quotes Aldo Rossi speaking of the city as a skeleton “haunted by meaning and culture” and how contemporary fashion can act like these urban building types, as “skeletons of history into armatures for ideas.” (Derrida, 3). This is the defining characteristic of luxury fashion advertising today: that ‘in order to become the new, fashion always cites the old – not simply the ancient or classical, but their reflection within its own sartorial past.” (Lehmann, xx). But this pillaging is more of a reinterpretation of the range of ideas about spectacle and lifestyle, rather than a proper re-visit to previous aesthetics. And our society marks and loves these differences in citations, because, as Susan Sontag put it: “industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies.” (Sontag, 24)

Galliano and the Runway

Evans, Caroline. Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, modernity, and deathliness. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2003.

p.11
-in the late 20th c. fashion looped back to earlier moments of modernity in specific formations, not because the moments of past and present were the same but because a visual link between them uncovered interesting things about the present that echoed the past.
-Fashion designers can elucidate these connections visually in a way that historians cannot do without falsifying history
-For designers, it is because through the liberties they can take that contemporary meaning can be constructed
-Historical references and examples, not a history of past of present but rather a method
-The method is a kind of historical scavenging

p.67

John Galliano
First couture collection for Givenchy January 1996
-20 feet up in the air, on top of an over-scaled pile of mattresses, two models in vaguely 18th c. dresses and wigs preened and coquetted in a Princess and the Pea scenario

First couture show for Dior January 1997
-Staged in a fake maison de couture: in the Grand Hotel in Paris, created a scaled-up facsimile of the original Dior showroom, including the famous staircase on which Cocteau and Dietrich had sat in the 1950s to watch Dior’s presentations

-Subsequent shows stages in suburban sports stadium transformed into a forest scene with 40 foot high spruce trees

-The Paris Opera converted into an English garden where fashion photographers were given straw hats on entry

-The Carousel du Louvre, the official venue for the Paris collections, made over as a Manhattan rooftop scene, complete with battered chimney stacks, designed by Jean-Luc Ardouin

In every case, his transformation of the space involved effacing its real characteristics in the interests of imposing his own fantasy vision on the space, weaving instant mythologies and creating something out of nothing.

the luxury list

luxury is hard to define because more often than not, money is not an indication, only a repercussion. the issues of quality, taste, and rarity all feed into its formalization. and of course, that is a large part of its allure. and a collection of items that exemplify luxury speaks to a certain aspect of cultural literacy, a litmus of aesthetic sense, a pulse on the proverbial. and at a time when attention and care to the individual object is rapidly decreasing, the importance of things in general seem to be on the exponential rise. so this list comes at an opportune time to reassess where the archetype of things mass-produced originate. but as this essentially must be a personal interpretation, this is by no means a conclusive list. nor is it ranking the finest of each category. it is basically a smattering of items that have embodied certain ideals of modern culture, without stating the over-obvious or over-saturated. the items listed are from the 19th to 20th century, as anything before become the realm of historical nostalgia and anything after has not withstood the test of time to formulate enough worth. (and although strongly suggested by Don to keep items under $100, this was nearly an impossible feat...)

1. entrée at Davé, Paris
2. one night at the Mercer Hotel, NYC/Chateau Marmont, LA/Hôtel Costes, Paris
3. Diana Vreeland era Harper's Bazaar & Vogue collection
4. Rashômon (1950), Akira Kurosawa
5. The Apple Macintosh (1984)
6. Juicy Salif (1990), Phillipe Starck
7. Moleskine Notebook (1998)
8. Elsa Schiaparelli anything
9. an "It" bag with a designer's name or initial that cannot be visible from a distance of 10 feet or further, nor one with high-knockoff potential/presence
10. vintage jewelry (no costume)
11. ticket stub from Goa, India
12. Veuve Clicquot champagne
13. One ounce jar of La Mer Face cream
14. the classic martini
15. C. Gilson silk bra, panties, chemise and robe set
16. a vintage straight razor
17. the right scent
18. a Helmut Newton print
19. Timor Desk Calendar (1967), Enzo Mari
20. Coco Chanel's cardigan suit
21. makeup by Pat McGrath
22. Christian Louboutin heels
23. Moka pot (1933) from Bialetti
24. The Polaroid Land Camera (1947)
25. Wassily Chair (1925), Marcel Breuer

(special thanks to Mike Lin & John Lee for their insights; also influenced by Nancy MacDonell's "In the Know")

Couture Number-Crunching

Numbers don't lie. And these numbers are all-round impressive, giving a more mathematical glimpse of what goes on behind one of these haute couture collections:

Click on thumbnail for larger version.


Gaultier, Chanel, Lacroix, Margiela

[The Cut, 7/13/09 and Style.com]

Frocks and Blocks

[Thurman, Judith. “Frocks & Blocks”. The New Yorker, Dec. 4, 2006]

An Article Review

The “Skin+Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture” Exhibit in MOCA, put on several years ago tried to relate the field of architecture with that of fashion. By juxtaposing similar building projects with their couture counterparts, similarities begin to emerge. However, the extent of how much they relate is the crux of the debate. Thurman asserts that the exhibit too readily complies with this establishment of relations, saying that the affinities are only through semantics. She then goes on to descriptively list some pairings of edifice-ensemble displays:

Cables: Yeohlee Teng’s Suspension Dress with Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette
Pleats: Alber Elbaz’s pleated day dress with Winka Dubbeldam’s Greenwich Street Project
Lace: Tess Giberson’s abstract crochet with Toyo Ito’s Mikimoto Tower
Composites: Martin Mangiela’s disjointed patchwork with Gehry’s anarchic jigsaw
Angles: Viktor & Rolf’s cantilevered shirt collars with Zaha Hadid’s Vitra Firestation

All of these seem true enough at their surface, but the two disciplines are none the less still really non-proportional to each other. And there is a good point taken when Thurman writes that most fashion retrospectives within major art institutions are mostly just about honouring a style, period, or couturier, whereas this is trying to do something a bit more. The curator of Architecture and Design of MOCA, Brooke Hodge, notes that this exhibit couldn’t have even happened ten years ago. This was only possible because the gap between the two fields has slowly tapered in recent times, and architects have finally started to relax the modernist teachings of form follows function. As Hodge says: “the younger generation tends to know more about fashion than designers know about architecture. They’ve grown up with its influence, and the question of legitimacy doesn’t arise.” Basically, we architects have gotten off our high horse and started to realize we can all benefit from each other. Bikinis to burkas, screens to walls, they all just mediate public and private zones to varying degrees of enticement to austerity.

But after reading the article, I’ve come to realize this:

All the hype around connecting the dots between both disciplines into this hybrid mesh of some new product is an irrelevant effort. No matter how stimulating the dialogue between the two discipline – issues of body as site, shelter and identity – they will never parallel each other. They can approach some sort of complementary state within each other’s spheres of influence, but to say that one is a metaphor for the other just cannot be. For one thing, architecture is at its most basic level a search for permanence. It has a gravitas that the fashion world would never even fathom of nearing. It is the ephemerality of the flesh and its qualities that makes fashion visceral, whereas architecture is about the creation of the void to occupy. Tectonic strategies are interesting to co-relate between the two fields and as long as society has clothed themselves and lived under roofs, no one has contested that both fields are able to convey status and encode identity. But that can be said about any commodity-based industry, with some examples as the automobile one drives or the class they fly in. The interesting thing is, as it has become “de rigueur” for luxury fashion houses to commission starchitects to design their flagship epicentres, so is the notion that aesthetic coherence has been transmitted from one artist to another. Bernard Arnault of LVMH sought out Frank Gehry for their contemporary art centre, while Francois Pinault of P.P.R., owner of the Gucci Group, hired Tadao Ando for their building. But this pairing off of architect and designer is not an entirely new phenomenon. The past has had many architects paired with kings and rulers, of whom dictated the fashions of the day. But again, design aesthetic pairing of the like-minded does not give rise of equals. Take a look at this formula of architecture to fashion I’ve developed, as a modification with what Thurman asserted in the article:


It explains that the cultural prestige of architecture is approximately inversely proportional to the name recognition of its main exemplar as compared with fashion’s multiplied by the money spent on advertising and marketing, all over the variable of time. This is to say it applies to the case of the general public. So in another sense, one could say that architecture and fashion are two very different languages that developed from the same root. And they are both used for communication and expression of self, but often times when they try to communicate with each other, things are lost in translation.

On Curation

When speaking of luxury, how do we separate what is legitmately opulent from the ordinary? The issue of curation arises. With any museum, the curator is in esence a content specialist. The responsibilities are to seek and catalogue relevant objects in line with the raison d’etre of the institution. In smaller, more amateur operations, this could be a free-for-all documentation of goods. There is no structured scrutiny of what is kept and what is tossed. An amalgam of unrelated anythings, the assemblage still paints a picture of the intended issues, for better or for worse. The difference between this and a professional curator is that the latter will subscribe to a master narrative. The boundaries are clearly marked, and there is a slightly unforgiving ostracization for that which does not comply.

So when does fashion become truly luxurious? When does it completely extend past the limits of merely covering up oneself and become an utterly sumptuous indulgence that it often in need of an argument for its own existence? When can be it curated to the realm of haute couture. Haute couture has been dated back to the days of Louis XIV (17th century), who promoted fashions that were only deemed worthy if it cost the equivalent of one’s annual salary. Then in the 18th century, it continued with couturier Rose Bertin as Minister For Fashion, as well as with Leroy after Napoleon became Emperor in 1804. However, the one main difference is that in those days, all the power of creativity still laid with the royal personages that commissioned the dress. Charles Worth, regarded as the father of modern Haute Couture, is the first person to put his name on the label of the clothes he made. And in 1858, he began to make collections of clothes in Paris from his own ideas, and then asked his clients for their opinion. And then showing his finished garments on live models completed the entire power shift. In detail, he would have a portfolio of designs through these showings, where the client could still specify colour and fabric, and then the duplicate garment would be tailor-made in Worth’s workshop. This was an innovative meld of customized tailoring with a slightly more standardized method emerging at this time of the Industrial Revolution. It was so well received that from then on, designers began to take charge of the direction couture. And in 1868, Worth founded the first Chambre Syndicale. Throughout its progression it has evolved into what is known today as The Fédération française de la couture, du prêt-à-porter des couturiers et des créateurs de mode (officially established in 1973). Its location has been 100 rue du faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris 8e.since 1935.

With the Fédération, there are three parts:
- the Chambre syndicale de la haute couture (created in 1868),
- the Chambre syndicale du prêt-à-porter des couturiers et des créateurs de mode (created in 1973)
- The Chambre syndicale de la mode masculine (created in 1973)


And there are strict rules in order to be legally called a House of Couture. Although colloquial English has abused the term often enough for it to be erroneously related to an item without a second glance, it is actually a very difficult right to earn. In order for an item to be legally haute couture, the design house must:
- show a collection to the Parisian press, private buyers, and manufacturers twice a year (January for Spring/Summer, July for Fall/Winter; intentionally fast-forwarded)
- produce 35 new and original designs of both day and evening wear for each of these collections
- employ a minimum of at least 15 full-time technical staff in at least one atelier or workshop located in Paris
- and most importantly, design custom made-to-order outfits that involve one or more fittings
With all these requirements met, a fashion house can officially call itself a House of Couture. Interestingly, its members are privileged to free advertising on state run French television channels.

In and around the time of Worth, there were certain designers who followed suit, some of which have even become household names until today: Callot Soeurs, Patou, Poiret, Vionnet, Fortuny, Lanvin, Chanel, Mainbocher, Schiaparelli, Balenciaga, and Dior to name a few. And then later, Yves Saint Laurent established his own house after working under Dior, Karl Lagerfeld went on to create his own brand after working under Balmain and Jean Patou, André Courrèges left Balenciaga, as did Emanuel Ungaro to create their own lines. All this apprenticeship turned master relations are being explored in the “Designer Family Tree”. There are also completely new houses started in the 20th century that have garnered a lot of success. Some of these include Jean-Paul Gaultier, Thierry Mugler, and Christian Lacroix. However, it is very timely to note that last Tuesday (07 July 2009) may have been Lacroix’s last haute couture collection for the house. It has much to do with the economic recession, but it is also attributed to how he gave himself over to the boundlessness of extravagance and luxury. People often describe his designs as a pursuit beyond real-world restraints, of a beauty without a hint of sacrifice. And if his house was to really fall, it wouldn’t be against the ongoing general trend. In 1946, there were 106 couture houses. In 1952, that declined down to 60, 2000 had 18, 2002 had 12, 2004 had a mere 9, and this year, 2009, there are 11.

The current Official members are:

Adeline André
Anne Valérie Hash
Chanel
Christian Dior
Christian Lacroix
Dominique Sirop
Franck Sorbier
Givenchy
Jean Paul Gaultier
Maurizio Galante
Stéphane Rolland

However, there are also Correspondent members (meaning foreign) that include:

Elie Saab
Giorgio Armani
Maison Martin Margiela
Valentino

Former members include:

Donatella Versace, Elsa Schiaparelli, Emilio Pucci, Chado Ralph Rucci, Erica Spitulski, Erik Tenorio, Fred Sethal, Guy Laroche, Hanae Mori, Jean Patou, Jean-Louis Scherrer, Lanvin, Loris Azzaro, Louis Feraud, Mainbocher, Marcel Rochas, Nina Ricci, Paco Rabanne, Pierre Balmain, Pierre Cardin, Ralph Rucci, Torrente, Yves Saint Laurent, Gai Mattiolo, and Anna May.

It is a hefty list of names with many talents and skills but also a lot of drama and business involved. But let us take a moment to focus on what actually goes on behind the doors of those that finally considered as houses of haute couture. This video is from Chanel, inside its atelier and condenses the process of the making of one of their dresses this season. Note the level of skill, attention to originality and detail, and quality of material.



(However, Roberto Cavalli, though not an official member, still has an atelier in Paris, calling it “made-to-measure” and still charging a minimum of 30,000 euros per dress)


On the Fédération française de la couture website, they list the responsibilities they owe to its members:
1. Reinforce Paris as the world capital of creative couture
2. Update database of accredited press list
3. Receive journalists and buyers at the International Press Centre at the Carrousel du Louvre (since 1994)
4. To facilitate the development of emerging brands (“En Avant-Première”)
5. Establish synergies between buyers, subcontractors, etc of fashion industry
6. Defend Intellectual Property Rights (fight against forgery)
7. Develop training in conjunction with l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs
8. Solve collective problems of Federation members

And speaking of the Carrousel du Louvre, it has a special place in the heart of the fashion world. Since 1982, the Federation has utilized very notable locations for the site of each of its shows. The Cour Carrée and Cour Napoléon in the Louvre, then the Jardin des Tuileries and later the restored Cour Carrée. Then in 1994, the rooms of the Carrousel du Louvre were built to be the central point from which all other locations of shows during Paris fashion week were determined (based on transportation time and scheduling). There is a link to the floor plans of the Carrousel, particularly the two rooms they use most: Salle Lenotre and Salle Soufflot. I am in the process of trying to find more discernable plans and even sections for these rooms. And as of July of last year, Karl Lagerfeld presented his Chanel haute couture show at the fully restored Grand Palais. The runway set up and dimensions play a significant role in the presentation in this highly playful yet ridiculously serious world of couture.

The Fédération site also has very complete links to all the fashion houses it supports, official and guest members, and is a great collection for the general public to peruse. A more edited take on the Paris fashion week that just occurred would be through noted blogs, such as Jak & Jil. Tommy Ton’s perspective of the collections is a privileged yet still streetsmart take, with special attentions paid to what adorns the perfectly pedicured feet. It is a revised collection of a collection – which brings us back to the issue of curation