the primrose path

I told Brother about visiting the Yves Saint Laurent exhibit and he switched almost immediately to one of my favorite designers John Paul Gautier. "He's been doing some really weird stuff lately," he said.

"He always does weird stuff," I said, but realized I hadn't checked in on the latest collections.

( Clips behind the cut... )

While theoretically I'm a fan of the high-low blend of Target's designer collections, this ad made me feel very, very, sad:

Jean Paul Gaultier @ Target.

I am especially horrified this collection would invoke early 'Lucky Star' era Madonna, when Gaultier's bullet-bra was essential to her 'Vogue' era look.

Gaultier is... transgressive. It's always felt like an exploration of the female unconscious complete with our fantasies about power and desire. This collection is less American Muse and more American Idol.

In her coverage of the opening of Paris fashion week, NYTimes critic Cathy Horyn complimented Nicolas Ghesquiere at Balenciaga for his collection involving poster art and packing materials cut into square, but overlapping shapes. In a compliment to Ghesquiere and an homage to Alexander McQueen she writes:

The problem for fashion in the age of instant access to images is simple: Without extremely willful individuals exerting their imaginations, experimenting with new materials and shapes, the industry as a whole will seem weak to the people who follow it. There must be something exceptional, almost violently strong and not immediately accessible, if fashion is to be a force.

Gaultier's vision has always had that strength. While I love the idea of fashion being a force that has potential to be accessible enough to go buy at one's local Target, I hate Gaultier being diluted to make it happen. He has always been an exceptional, violent, force, not the immediately accessible bargain.

I haven't paid much attention to fashion this year, but you know I never miss a Gaultier collection. His spring HC collection seems to have a mermaid theme. The collection starts out with masculine suits and then metamorphosizes, first blurring the stark outlines into something looser and more drapey (almost pajama like), then becoming dresses emphasizing the female shape, and finally incoporating 'scaley' shapes and textures, until his last gown features, yes, shells you-know-where.

( Read more... )

AQUARIOUS: Nature artist Andy Goldsworthy is a skilled rock balancer. With infinite patience, he arranges stacks of them in seemingly impossible arrangements. Though he has a highly developed sensitivity to the heft and shape of his raw materials, his work still requires him to persist through frustration. While building one particularly intricate structure, he said, "The moment it collapses is disappointing. But since it has collapsed four times I'm beginning to understand the stones better." From what I can determine, Aquarius, you're at a stage in your own labor of love that's equivalent to Goldsworthy's third collapse. Keep at it.

RB's horoscope for this week included reference to Andrew Goldsworthy, whose landscape based art utilizing natural materials I find extremely beautiful. I'm posting this because I know those of you familiar with his art (dr_tectonic) would understand the reference, and those of you unfamiliar with his work should check out some of his images. I'm also under the impression that there might be some of his work on display along the Hudson, which might feed the souls of those of you in exile in the East.

Unfortunately, it seems RB is trying to find a nice way to insinuate there will be a fourth collapse before I understand the stones. That, along with his homework assignment: Compose a sincere prayer in which you ask God or Goddess for something you're not "supposed" to, give a pretty good indication of my current state. I am having a ton of fun, but I can't help but feel this goat has strayed. I need to refocus my purpose and find myself a job.

I keep trying to reframe my current situation positively. Instead of spending time feeling like a complete loser with extremely poor judgement when it comes to challenges like my work situation or intimate relationships, I'm trying see that the reason these things are causing me problems is because I'm reengaging with them, and they are things that really matter. And trying to believe this is a preferable state to not engaging with them at all.

Anyway, I think that's about all I can say for today, even though I realize I am being neither distinctive or specific in discussion of these matters. In closing, two things that amused me:

Yesterday's Pearls Before Swine a very caustic comic in which the characters are almost too cute to be doing such cruel things to each other. ("I like it because it validates my inner-crocodile," a friend of mine once said.)

And Jean Paul Gaultier's Fall 2007 couture collection, which I thought was restrained and elegant, and really beautiful. It's a coherent collection with a really clean line. I liked the Little Prince 19C military and mughal motif, along with all the badass boots and the use of cut-outs and frayed edges. These are definitely clothes the Aviatrix would wear. The crowns cracked me up, and provide a nice continuity with the halos of his exquisite Spring 2007 couture collection (which I thought of as 'Visions of the Virgins") and last Fall's hair hats, which had a lovely, predatory, feel like they were supernatural creatures who shape shifted to imitate humans, while leaving behind weird hair or fur bits that gave them away, or had grown 'round the men they'd devoured.

Let me know what you think!

I don't know what I expected, but it certainly wasn't this:

Jean Paul Gaultier's Vision of the Virgin

I don't know what to say, it's just so... beautiful! I want to mock it, but I can't, the garments are cut so well and the headresses are exquisite and it's just so... beautiful! I like the sapphire blue on the second page in the lower left hand corner.

Gaultier has always had an interesting relationships with fetish wear. His gowns consistently end up on the Hollywood's Worst Dressed list, in part because there is something about them that is not quite appropriate to express in public. They are a little bit dangerous, and seem to express a private, boudoir, part of the personality we are not really sure we want to see parading around the streets or plastered on the covers of our favorite celebrity magazines.

He has had some really lovely Couture collections these past few seasons, and I always look forward to what he does next. One of my favorite aspects of his clothing is that it always uses fashion as an extension of the body, like tightly fitting hoods that connected to his gowns via the spine, that he did several years ago (Fall 04?) There is something organic about his creations, almost as though it is not certain where the body of the model ends, and his creation begins.

( Gaultier's Couture Fall 2006 )

See for yourself:
http://www.elle.com/collections/8987/jean-paul-gaultier-fall-2006-haute-couture-collection-page2.html

I think one of the reasons I love fashion is the blend of idea and identity. I have long been a fan of the NYTimes fashion critic Cathy Horyn. She got her start in Detriot. She didn't know a thing about fashion, but agreed to become the fashion editor because it guaranteed two trips annually to New York.

Her review of Milan's fashion week is the kind of thought piece I really appreciate when approaching fashion. Not a consideration of what's hot and not, but more a sense of what does this ephemera say about our lives:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/22/fashion/shows/22FASH.html

Here's the opening paragraph:

Tom Ford, in his salad days at Gucci, once said his female ideal was someone who looked like she "would pour hot wax over her lover before straddling him." It was a memorable line, and its forced note of aggression — the woman on top — tingled with a suspicion that he, like many designers, was interested only in selling an image; he didn't actually know anything about women.

The cold contemporary truth is that women don't need the respect or love of men. They lead lives of exceptional dignity and exceptional aloneness....

Later she asks:

Why aren't more designers sensitive to emotional lives of women? And how come female designers are often guilty of perpetuating the same clichés? I looked at Consuelo Castiglioni's collection for Marni, with its bedroom-lace skirts, woolly gray tights and blousy jersey tops, and I thought, perhaps cruelly: These are clothes for hobbyists. They brought to mind Joan Didion's famous censure about feminists deciding, in lieu of a revolution, to become "gifted potters." Why can't female designers create fashion commensurate with the largeness and complexity of their lives?

Her review hit a nerve in me, the angry-poignant one, as did the Jil Sander collection, which I think is very well summed up by the phrase "quiet dignity." It is also, from the distance of thumbnails on the computer monitor, a little dull. Yes, these are clothes "real women" would wear, but what does that say about our lives, that we are so bounded by line and the absence of color?

It is in some ways a relief to the frivolity of past collections. The weird New Look nostalgia trip that has clogged runways for the past few seasons. Fashion need not be frivolous to be feminine, the Sander collection seems to say, but at the same time I can't help but ask why it suddenly lacks passion, vigour, and color. (And why so many lives lack the same.)

I am familiar with that Didion essay on feminism, appearing in her collection The White Album. It makes a lot of the same criticisms I arrived at 30 years later. Didion and I are seperated by the boomer generation. I don't think either of us understand what all the fuss is about.

For me there is a sense that women are only just beginning to understand how different their lives will be from those of their mothers or grandmothers. What sacrifices will have to be made (our generation knows we can't have it all, even as we saw our mothers destroy themselves to try to achieve it) along with a sense of disengagement...

I can't write about this coherently today; except to say I wish someone could write as critically and urgently about feminism today as Didion did in her essay 30 years ago. Something has happened. Something has been lost, despite the gains. There is something sad about women's lives, and we are still a long way from having achieved equality.

Christian Doir doing something fablous that looks part vampire, part Marie Antionette, a lot post-Revolutionary punk. Whatever it is, I wish I could be it for Halloween:

http://www.elle.com/article.asp?section_id=9&article_id=7951

I agree with Cathy Horyn, the Rochas show is gorgeous; but then I'm a sucker for a long skirt and a long-lean line:

http://www.elle.com/article.asp?section_id=9&article_id=6321&page_number=1