Vera Wang: Fauvist Femme

New York – Dutch fauvist painter Kees van Dongen inspired the artful, frequently stunning Fall 2008 collection by Vera Wang, which she showed early Thursday morning, Feb. 7, in Bryant Park. Van Dongen’s charged portraits of women, with their crimson lips, emotive, smoky eyes, and draped in loose folds of richly colored fabric, proved to be a ripe starting point for Wang, who was an art history major in college. Wang’s collections exude romantic eroticism in a way that is as sensuous as van Dongen’s paintings are.

Fauvism (“les fauves” or “wild beasts” was how this circle of artists was known, Henri Matisse and Georges Braque among them) is characterized by strong brush strokes and vivid colors in their depictions of French bohemian society.

In van Dongen’s paintings, silk stockings might peek out from underneath a lifted hem. For Wang, opaque stockings could be viewed beneath sheer slips of silk gauze, with an overpowering allure of transparency taking hold. That which is revealed (the legs) still remains concealed.

Marc Jacobs: The Emperor’s New Clothes

Originally published in Fashion Wire Daily on Sept. 11, 2007.

The Marc Jacobs show started two hours late last night, but then again, who ever expects it to start on time? All the conventions of a typical fashion show are hardly the point at Marc Jacobs, one of the only designers in New York who can get away with doing just about anything he wants and still retain pope of American fashion status.

Indeed, it’s almost like taking a semi-annual trip to church to worship at the altar of MJ. For good reason. Whether you love his collections or hate them, they have a way of setting the tone of the season. And because he and his people are so clued into what’s cool, you are pretty much guaranteed to find out what trends to expect from fashion in the next six months. Will it be Wednesday Addams goth punk? Grunge? Soviet Constructivist? Jacobs had everyone waiting at the edge of their steamy seats for his Spring ‘08 presentation, held in the Lexington Armory, wondering what would happen next.

Donna Karan: Bright Lights, Big City

Originally published in Fashion Wire Daily on February 12, 2007

Everyone has their first fashion memory, the “a-ha” moment when you realize that there is more to dressing than simply putting on a set of clean clothes in the morning, regardless of what they look like. Some of us have that moment early on in life – that would be an early indicator we were “fashion people,” one supposes.

I had that moment when I was 12, an avid reader of Vogue, obssessed with New York City and certain that I wanted a haircut just like Linda Evangelista’s (my favorite supermodel at the time) that changed colors just as often (and why I started dyeing my hair various shades of red, a practice that continued well into college). I was also obsessed with finding a perfect white shirt and a black body suit, all because of Donna Karan and her concept of seven easy pieces. She, and the wardrobe she created, represented everything that I, as an awkward student in a backwards town, wanted in life: to be a successful woman living and working in New York City with a fantastic, but deceptively simple wardrobe to go with that.

On the Sublime and Beautiful at Costello Tagliapietra

Originally published in Fashion Wire Daily on February 10, 2007
The painter Romaine Brooks was quite unlike her Symbolist and Aesthetic movement contemporaries of the early Twentieth century – think Gustav Klimt or Georges de Feure, with their emphasis on rich, decadent multicolored palette and graphic patterns.

Brooks, a woman with an affinity for wearing custom designed men’s wear, made her mark as a portraitist in the Teens and Twenties and was known as the “Master of Gray” for her focus on painting subdued, nearly monochromatic works that might have only the occasional dab of ochre.

Like Brooks, the collections of Jeffrey Costello and Robert Tagliapietra, which they’ve been showing for the past two years in New York, have had little to do with trends du jour.

By Invitation Only: Hysterics at Heatherette

Originally published in Fashion Wire Daily on February 7, 2007

Throngs of near-hysterical people waved meaningless pieces of white paper in the faces of security guards on the steps outside of the tents at Bryant Park on Tuesday night, February 6, the site of many shows during New York fashion week. But it wasn’t enough to get them past the barricades and into the Heatherette show, which has become one of the most circus-like shows on the fashion calendar.

It wasn’t fall fashion that Heatherette hungry people were hoping to witness. Rather, they were hoping to catch a glimpse of a celebrity – or see and be seen – as though they were at a hot Manhattan nightclub and not at an industry press event.

But, as most in the industry know, it’s not about the clothes at Heatherette, designed by Richie Rich and Traver Rains – there were practically no wearable or saleable looks on display Tuesday night, save for a few of their moneymaking items like embellished denim and scarf print dresses made for department store clients like Bergdorf Goodman, one of the few members of the industry we saw in the audience. It’s about the entertainment.

SANS: The New Now

Originally published in Fashion Wire Daily on February 5, 2007

There has been a lot of talk recently about fashion’s so-called “futurism” moment. In the latest issue of the New York Times magazine, columnist Guy Trebay questions, rightly so, just how futuristic and forward-thinking is it for fashion designers to be referencing a backwards B movie version of the future, all Jetsons and Tron. Yes, the clothes might be shiny, metallic or cut to make one look like a robot, but these are all very quaint notions of “futuristic.” Critiquing that by saying that there’s something very surface about fashion embracing such ideas, and one sounds very naive about the role of fashion, which is all about the surface. But Trebay ends his article at exactly the place we will start this review: that perhaps the future in fashion is not so much a futuristic fantasy vision of 2025, but rather a heightened consciousness of “the now:” the world we inhabit, the way we live and how our clothes are a reflection of it.

What we’re talking about, of course, is that dreaded and much-used phrase “eco-friendly.” There’s no need to rattle off a list of cliches usually associated with the term, because the point is that it is on a steady path away from its stigma as the domain of the unfashionable and even beyond being something that is fashionable but wholly self-conscious of its status as eco-friendly.