Derelicte - Homeless Chic

It can sometimes be difficult to really appreciate fashion without wondering if knowing that those exorbitant price tags could be put to much better use elsewhere. On the other hand, I think fashion is the closest thing to art without actually being art - interestingly enough, I read a lot of press last week about the brouhaha created by the latest biography of Yves Saint Laurent, written by a Frenchwoman called Marie-Dominique Leliévre. Expressing her reservations on the widely accepted view that Saint Laurent was an artist, she writes: "An artist recreates, reinvents the world, a couturier only dresses it."

I'm not sure how much I agree with her, since great fashion designers change the way the world looks at clothes and their wearers, which makes them creators and perhaps, using Madame Leliévre's definition, artists in their own right.

Regardless, there are times when the boundaries between art, fashion and sheer ludicrousness get a bit blurry, especially when it comes to quotidian outfits using everyday materials to make products that are more often than not factory produced in China. Gawker seems to share my views and has put together a visual of what one could purchase for $15,000 in the quest for homeless chic (a concept I would find hilarious if it weren't a sartorial reality).

What do you think? Is spending almost $3,000 for a threadbare, geeky, falling-apart-at-the-seams sweater fashion, art, or just a subversive statement?

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Rodarte Go Home - Rodarte Fall / Winter 2010

I've never been a big fan of Rodarte. I thought those threadbare cobweb sweaters were heinous to look at, the sisters have always come off in media interviews less like the quirky, eccentric, nonchalant designers they try so hard to be and more like annoying, nerdy kids, and blood and guts does less to describe the themes of their collections as it does my state of mind while looking at them.

It's a harsh thing to say, I know. Maybe Rodarte caters to this niche subversive ugly-is-pretty aesthetic that I'm just not cool enough to get, but I don't care. Their clothes are often just plain ugly and that's not fashion to me. Their most recent collection did little to appease my indignation for their so-called aesthetic, based as it was on a horrifyingly fugly interpretation of their hankering for their Mexican roots. Somehow a drive from El Paso to Marfa in Texas got them thinking about their homeland, and more particularly the hazy atmosphere in what I believe is a particularly drug-addled town called Juarez in Mexico, and from that they arrived at sleepwalking as a theme.

So we have old blankety-looking garments whose mustiness I feel like I can almost smell through my computer screen, chunky layers adorned by tassels galore, and that horribly lurexy quality to the sleeves and leggings that makes my skin itch by just looking at it.

I couldn't click through the entire collection - if I had, I might have seen some of the more passable stuff, like this:

But there was nothing inherently wearable about most of the collection - unless of course you're hoping for people to gaze at you sympathetically as they whisper to their companions about the state of public healthcare, and why oh why don't they provide better treatment for the crazies? - and I'm not saying that all fashion must always be wearable, god no - but there's no art to this. There's no real beauty in the clothes, nothing that makes the heart beat faster, or justifies their existence. There is no reason for these clothes to exist.

When considering their theme, one thing becomes apparent - the Mulleavy sisters may not have captured the ethereal dreaminess of the actual act of sleepwalking, but they have certainly put forth a collection that looks like it was made in their sleep.

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Um...

Why is Calista Flockhart wearing my grandmother's tablecloth? She is going to be pissed.

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Surge-a-licious

Oh lord. Fergie's dress (by Elie Saab, who makes me swoon, no kidding) is gorgeous, although I wish she'd have gone up a size on the bodice. Why is squashed boob syndrome not more of a sartorial faux pas?

Regardless of what she's wearing however, every time I see a picture of Fergie all I can think of is this - why on earth would anyone in their right mind want to willingly go from this:

to this?

Plastic surgery: not a good option when you're already gorgeous, Ferg.

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Cockney Chic? À la Coke? I don't get it!

HAS the world gone mad.

Kate Moss, that unholy of unholies, anathema to anything mildly resembling taste, sophistication, class or elegance, is set to design for Longchamp, a French brand of leather goods and accessories that seems to me to embody everything that she does not.

+

= say quoi?

The noughties were clearly the decade of the celebrity, where we (and by we I mean everyone but me, seemingly) wanted to eat, beautify, holiday and dress exactly the way celebs did. I was hoping that this decade would be about the celebrity backlash, celebrating individualism and all that but so far all we've had in the fashion world is news of collaborations so ludicrously unrelated to each other that you have to wonder if CEO's of fashion companies are all on crack (Tony Blair and LVMH anyone?)

Moss modeled for Longchamp in 2006 has been more or less a permanent fixture at the brand ever since. She helped design the Legende bag (apparently the red lining was her idea - genius!) and has been featured in pretty much all their ads since 2007. Everytime I saw her campaigns I'd just squeeze my eyes shut and hope that she'd have dispersed into nothingness when I opened them but this nightmare is clearly here to stay.

Oui, Kate. I too mourn the loss of style.

I love Longchamp. I have three Le Pliage totes in varying sizes and colours and have been contemplating adding a couple of their leather handbags to my collection but have been precluded from doing so by a) my proximity, or lack thereof, to anywhere that has anything remotely resembling a Longchamp store and b) my inherent vegetarian dilemma about refusing meat but lusting after leather.

Longchamp stands for reserved, understated chic, a way of life that let's face it, is quintessentially French and seems to belong almost exclusively to the Parisienne, but that's never stopped the rest of us from trying to emulate it in any way, much to the company's benefit. The pairing with Kate Moss makes no sense but is regardless understandable - Kate Moss is widely regarded as a fashion icon (pourquoi, je ne sais pas - outfits one can only call braless wonders, a permanent expression of sneery drunkenness and prematurely wrinkly skin doth not a fashion icon maketh). She fits the mould of the nonchalantly renegade mistress of the social scene that has recently become so desirable to women around the world (for reasons, once again, that are completely lost on me). For a brand that's trying to amp up their street cred and appeal to a younger market, she's a villainously perfect fit, I will admit.

What I don't understand is why Longchamp feels the burning need to sell out the way it has.

p.s. In other news, as was earlier feared, it has now been confirmed that Sarah Jessica Parker is indeed set to take on a definitive role at Halston, although the capacity under which she will do so has yet to be announced. The joy.

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"Women become sexy when they are bound" - Nobuyoshi Araki

Idiot.

Nobuyoshi Araki, Japanese photographer, known for his often pornographic photography filled with sado-masochistic and feshitistic subtexts.

His images resemble crime scenes and make you wonder about the kind of life this man had growing up

Compare his images to those by Helmut Newton, the iconic photographer of the 80s and 90s, also known for his sometimes pornographic photography filled with sado-masochistic and feshitistic subtexts, and it becomes clear that great photography lies in the nature not so much of the image but the eye behind the lens.

Newton at work while his wife and colleague Alice Springs looks on

I love his work immensely. I once laboured over a three-month project in school that focused on him and his career and he made an indelible impact on my views on photography and imagery in general. He took inspiration from the strangest of places - there is this picture that I've spent hours trying to find, to no avail - it's of a woman in a fur coat with her back to the camera, gazing at a wall in front of which are several men, with their backs to the camera.

He was walking through Paris one day when he had to take a leak, and asked his wife to wait for him while he did so, against a wall where, I imagine, urinating was allowed. Struck by the idea of woman watching man, he decided to explore that in his next photoshoot and the results are incredibly mysterious and even sexy. He could turn the most quotidian occurences into images of great sensuality and intrigue - such was his gift.

His photographs may have featured much female nudity, but nobody could accuse Newton of being sexist. Newton's women were strong, powerful, Amazonian, often representative of the idea of beauty in an era that birthed the supermodel. Nude, never naked, his women never seemed like objects even while they posed without a stitch of clothing on. He loved role reversal too, one of my very favourite aspects of his photography. Like this image, for example, which created waves at the time for turning the traditional urban gender roles on its head.

Woman Examining Man, St. Tropez, 1975

You want subversive, sexual images? Fetishistic, risque, really daring?

This is how you do it.

Araki, you who traverses the fine line between photography and pornography with such sordid ease, take note.

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Say it Isn't So!

The net is ablaze with rumors that Sarah Jessica Parker might be taking on the role of creative director at iconic seventies fashion brand Halston (who gave now famous designer Naeem Khan his start). There are so many things wrong with this that it's making my head spin.

First of all, who on earth is Sarah Jessica Parker without a certain Ms. Field? If it wasn't for her incredibly stylings on Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw wouldn't be so much a fashion icon as much as just a whiny, horse-faced, flighty New York City jaded single woman - who, by the way, had nobody to blame but herself for it. Honestly, if you give someone like Aidan up for an ageing, overweight commitment-phobe like Mr. Big, you're not all there in my book.

And girl, please. If you really were all about the independence you'd have ended up with motorcycle guy who threw a fit over the Prada shirt which by the way looked fabulous on him I will give you that OR Aidan, the creative carpenter, was it? That had a house in the woods, was it? I don't remember. I never really saw past the disarming smile and ridiculously nice persona. NOT with Mr. Big because let's face it, you loved being whisked around in a limo and the fact that he said stuff like "I got it" when you were wondering if you could afford the apartment you were looking at together.

Anyway. Real life. Argument for Why Carrie Jessica Parker Shouldn't be Creative Director of Anything, Let Alone a Brand like Halston Number 1:

We all know what her style is like off the sets of SATC:

Just. No. I'm all for experimental fashion and while I can honestly say that I'd make no great haste to get to a Maison Martin Margiela sale, I appreciate the designer's uniqueness. And while indiviudalism is great especially the sartorial kind and hurrah for designers who fly the freak flag high and so on and on, there's just no excuse for cloven hoofed boots that literally look they a) have been shipped to you straight from the bowels of hell or b) pander to their owner's particularly fetishistic taste in well, pretty much everything.

Argument Number 2:

The last time an actress with a flagging career (yes, flagging. Have you seen the trailer for Did You Hear About the Morgans?) decided to install herself as Creative Director of a once-popular fashion brand, this is what happened:

Emanuel Ungaro S/S 10

Which isn't to say that this is any indication that it'll all go pasty-shaped for Parker, of course.

Which leads me to argument Number 3, being that we all know how successful she's been as a designer in the past with her Bitten line, which ended up in discount bins everywhere:

Mmmhmm.

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