UrbanicaBlog
by Israel Baumgartner
Currently viewing the category: "Fashion"
Jean-Charles de Castelbajac called his collection Fire on Ice, and invoked Iceland as the magical land of volcanoes that spawned Björk. It resulted in something enchanted and tribal, with a sometimes heavy-handed avian motif that the designer juiced up with primary comic-book colors.
The Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced Wednesday that its spring 2012 exhibition, set to open on May 10, will be “Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada: On Fashion,” a fascinating exploration of these two Italian designers from two very different eras, in a format inspired by Miguel Covarrubias’s “Impossible Interviews” published in Vanity Fair in the 1930s. This exhibition celebrates the extraordinary creativity of the Italian-born designer, Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973) who, together with Coco Chanel, dominated fashion between the two world wars. Schiaparelli designed for the modern woman and had a close relationship with the Parisian artistic community of the 1920s and 1930s. In addition to over 150 dresses, the exhibition will include shoes, hats, jewelry and other accessories, drawings and fashion illustrations, works by the period’s leading fashion photographers, paintings and sculpture by Man Ray, Salvador Dali and others, archival news reels and movie stills and clips from some of the many American, British, and French productions with which she was associated.
For Fall/Winter 2011 the Eye Of The World Designs accessories collection continues to use natural and reclaimed materials from the UK, primarily wood, to create one off hand made accessories in Peckham UK. This beautiful collection is a collaboration between fashion stylistHope von Joel, wood craftsman Liam Moyter, and knitwear designer Brooke Roberts. Touching on inspirations of Pierre Cardin, and Paco Rabanne, who’s design aesthetic focused upon sleek modernism and interesting materials and translating these key focuses into fresh, unique accessories. Eye Of The World Designs is based on quality and hand finished craftsmanship. Each piece is unique, designed and hand crafted in house by our design duo Liam Motyer and Hope Von Joel in Peckham, South London, UK
Ethel Granger had the smallest waist of any woman ever, but it was not necessarily by choice. Her husband, astronomer William Arnold Granger, was tired of his wife’s shapeless 1920s dresses and requested that wear corsets and more figure-flattering garments. According to Vogue Italia, he thought, “if she can outshine other members of her sex in some way, this is a victory worth any amount of suffering.” Granger eventually convinced his wife to wear corsets every day, and even while sleeping. Slowly her waist transformed from 24-inches to the insanely tiny size of 13 inches—the smallest waist ever recorded by The Guinness Book of Records.
Guinness is the daughter of Jonathan Guinness, 3rd Baron Moyne and his second wife, Suzanne Lisney. She has designed a range of clothing with Dover Street Market and released an eponymous fragrance in 2009 with Comme des Garçons. Guinness has collected fashion, specifically haute couture, for a number of years, and in 2010 bought the entire wardrobe of the late Isabella Blow , in her owns words, to ‘prevent Issie’s possessions becoming mere morbid memorabilia… to preserve it’. She has a fascination with armour, and in 2006 approached her great friend Shaun Leane to create a gold and diamond arm glove. Titled ‘Contra Mundum’ or ‘Against The World’, this handcrafted, intricately made objet d’art took five years to create and develop and is perhaps one of the most technically advanced pieces in the world of artisan jewels.
Vogue Italia Supplement September 2008
Documentary filmmaker Brennan Stasiewicz infiltrates the cosseted world of Daphne Guinness in Daphne’s Window. Featuring intimate footage of the icon at her Fifth Avenue apartment, the short follows the eccentric fashion patron and socialite as she prepares for her recent installation in the windows of Barneys New York. The storefront showcased her collection of pieces by designer Lee Alexander McQueen and a selection from the archive of fashion editor Isabella Blow, which Guinness purchased in its entirety last year. The display culminated in a performance art piece in which Guinness dressed for the Met ball in one of the flagship’s windows, modeling a lilac feathered gown designed by McQueen’s Sarah Burton. “She appears to me as someone always in a window,” says Stasiewicz. “Someone you can approach and see, but you remain on the other side.” This year brings a multitude of projects for the heiress: her sculptural armored glove collaboration with jeweler Shaun Leane (pictured in today’s film) will be exhibited by Jay Jopling in a private viewing in London later this month; and in September a retrospective at The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology will pay homage to her style. “Daphne is someone to take pleasure in, and in many ways, someone who incites moments of wonder,” says Stasiewicz.
