Kenzo Menswear AW10-11
24 Feb 2010
Antonio Marras: For this collection I wanted to create a mix between the French look of Monsieur Hulot, a character created and played by filmmaker Jaques Tati, and the British film Quadrophenia.
Monsieur Hulot has such a unique body language and silhouette, wearing his raincoat over his slightly too short trousers, with his hat, pipe and umbrella. It’s his unconscious anarchy that fascinates me; his eccentricity; his joy and his freedom, which makes him whistle in the street....
... I find the entire collection very inspiring, both in tailoring and texture-wise. Monsieur Hulot is iconic, which is liberating when styling with him in mind. And style I did:
Are short-sleeved shirts with ties ever acceptable for a man at work or do they, as I suspect, just make you look creepy and as if you still live in your parents' spare room and play Dungeons and Dragons?
- Rod, by email
To answer your queries in order, no and yes, you suspect correctly. I am very sorry if you suffer from sweaty wrists, Rod, but unless your personal style icon is Napoleon Dynamite, or you wish to resemble one of those guys who is eventually arrested when police discover piles of dead bodies in his freezer and his neighbours all give quotes saying, "It's so strange – he always seemed like such a pleasant fellow. Kept to himself, mind", then you will not pair a tie with a short-sleeved shirt. Truth be told, I object to button-down short-sleeved shirts full stop, and when I am Queen of the Universe – as shall soon come to pass, it has been foretold in the Book of Grazia – I shall ban them...
... It would seem that the only thing that can pull me out of this Post-TDW (three-day weekend) funk is a dress made entirely out of Marshmallow Peeps. But now the dilemma: what shoes do I wear?
Ah, mon chapeau haut de forme bien-aimée!
Anglicé - Ah, my beloved top hat!
I found this because of
dear MSiegel
Bra-fitting services fail to measure up for big-busted women
Bra-fitting services at high street stores like Marks & Spencer are failing to measure up for big busted women, an investigation by mystery shoppers has disclosed.
By Heidi Blake
25 Jan 2010
Which?, the consumer watchdog, sent 11 women with a DD cup or larger out hunting for well-fitting bras in 70 high street stores.
Only 29% of the bras sold to the mystery shoppers were rated as a good fit by experts, who said none of the services tested were good enough to recommend.
Some of the women were sold wildly varying sizes by different shops, the watchdog said, with one shopper returning with two bras seven sizes apart.
Another was sold exactly the same bra in two branches of a House of Fraser store but in sizes 34C and 34F, neither of which were a comfortable fit.
John Lewis, the department store, and Bravissimo, the large-bust specialist, received the best overall scores but were still not good enough to recommend, according to Which?
Other stores visited were Marks & Spencer, Debenhams, La Senza and House of Fraser.
Badly fitting bras can cause neck, shoulder and back ache as well as poor posture, experts at the watchdog said.
Jenny Driscoll of Which? said “Whatever their bra size, women want to look good and feel good. Heading to the high street for a fitting might seem like a simple solution, but the results we found were shocking – one bra was so poorly fitted there was room for a pair of socks in the cups.
“If stores are going to offer this service to customers they need to up their game: do it properly or don’t do it at all.” ...
Shame! Boobies, especially big 'uns, deserve proper care and attention!
You can't beat a yak, mate.
Jacket, 1996-97. Union Jack jacket designed by Alexander McQueen in collaboration with David Bowie, using distressed fabric. Worn by David Bowie on the Earthling album tour, 1996-97. Collection of David Bowie.
... A testy Duke of Bedford asked him why he insisted on making his wife look like a lesbian, but Vidal didn’t think that his clients looked like lesbians. He thought they looked modern, liberated — which they were: liberated from the rollers, the perming, the setting, the back-combing, the huge dryers and the humungous output of aerosol particles that constituted a trip to the salon throughout the Fifties. Vidal, despite having trained with “Mr Teasy Weasy” himself, the great Raymond of Mayfair, had sensed, as a new decade dawned, that the days of teasing and weasing were numbered. The signs could be divined everywhere, even in architecture: “You had only to look at Mies’s [van der Rohe] Seagram [a 1957 New York skyscraper] or Breuer’s Whitney [the 1966 art museum, also in New York] to know.” Or, indeed, at those geometric Sixties clothes. He clipped 4ft from Nancy Kwan’s hair....
Free your head, free your mind, take half the time you once did getting ready, buy shampoo only once a year: cut off your hair.
Yes, I am disgusted that this page also features a link to a "Six steps to the beehive: this season's must-have hair" article. Fuck that teasy-weasy shit. Why be a slave, or look like one?
Selfridges launches 'mantyhose' - tights for men
Selfridges is selling a new range of tights for men dubbed “mantyhose” in response to soaring demand for the leg wear.
Published: 7:00AM BST 24 Sep 2009
The tights, priced £70 a pair, are made by lingerie brand Unconditional and are a tough 120 denier thickness.
However, those hoping to recreate the Errol Flynn look will be disappointed – they are only available in black, beige and charcoal.
The boom in sales represents a comeback for tights in men’s wardrobes after a two-century hiatus.
But it would appear that their place in fashion has still yet to be revisited, as today’s fans prefer to wear them as underwear rather than showing them off.
Mantyhose are usually worn under suits to keep the legs warm and to give the hips and legs a smoother line.
David Walker-Smith, Selfridges' director of menswear and beauty, said: “This winter the city's most stylish men will have a secret weapon hidden in their trousers. ..."
Oh, my!
I hate pantyhose - they make my leg-hair itch abominably.
It’s a lame old mantra, “Changing the system from within”, and one most often spouted by sell-outs in denial. So when Nick Knight fixes me with his pale blue eyes and says “I’ve tried to affect any changes I can from the mainstream”, I groan a little inside. This, after all, is one of fashion’s biggest big-ticket photographers; the man who John Galliano used to reboot, then revive the image of Christian Dior, and who in the past year has had four ultra-lucrative cosmetics campaigns and a Cheryl Cole album cover under his belt. It’s hardly, I pshaw internally, the CV of a radical.
Then Knight does something entirely unexpected — he aims his mouth at where the money is and lets fly: “I’ve always found the fashion industry to be extremely racist, to the point that I don’t know how they get away with it. When I first started I couldn’t believe what I was hearing: ‘We can’t have a black model — they’re not aspirational’. You can’t say that!”
And here’s Knight on the hand that feeds him: “I have friends in the City who are amazed by how the fashion business is conducted. It’s controlled by a few people, and not particularly well.”
And here’s Knight on sizeism and ageism, fashion’s two other sorest points (fur notwithstanding). “Issues I believed in were not being articulated in my professional work. Issues as simple as that fact that nobody was photographing women who looked like my wife”. (This is Charlotte, who Knight describes as “curvaceous” and “the most beautiful woman in the world”.) “Only people in their teens were being photographed — if you were older than 21 you didn’t have a look in. Lancôme dropped Isabella Rossellini when she turned 40: biggest mistake they ever made. All these examples were around me, and they didn’t sit well with me.” ...
... So what we get is little Gabrielle in a moodily chiaroscuro convent-orphanage where her itinerant market trader father had dumped her and her sister (the nuns’ habits imbued her with an enduring love of black minimalism); Chanel as an ambitious but not notably talented showgirl (her soubriquet Coco came from a vaudeville song about a lost dog) whose day job was working as a seamstress in Moulins, a garrison town in the middle of France; Chanel as the mistress of Étienne Balsan, a local toff who opens a door on to a gentler, more refined life.
No wonder Chanel refused to be shaken off after he’d had his way with her, following Balsan back to his château and staying there long after the two-day invitation he had reluctantly issued expired. Balsan made her hide out of sight (as she later did with her brothers) when his fashionable friends visited.
At Balsan’s Chanel learnt to ride horses like a man, eschewing the uncomfortable precariousness of the side-saddle (cue a life-long passion for androgynous, equestrian tailoring); to despise the overblown, elaborately garnished clothes of fin de siècle society with their constricting whalebone corset and feather-smothered, headache-inducing picture hats. “How can you think in one of those?” she inquires of one of Balsan’s ex-mistresses.
Cue Chanel’s uncorseted, bone-simple sack-dresses and unadorned boaters. She learnt, too, how to hold her own with the smart set, and that she needed to be independent (Balsan, having initially viewed her as a rather embarrassing leech, came to admire, adore and eventually propose to her).
But independence was a way off. In the meantime, the surest route for a poor but pretty girl intent on making her way was to sleep with men. Chanel was too modern to become a grande horizontale (the wonderful French euphemism for high-class kept women); too classy to be an out-and-out hooker. She settled for something in between. ...
This is a craptastic article. Red looks well on pallid women? Pah! It sure as hell doesn't - it makes them look blood-splashed, and it clashes with ginger hair like nobody's bizness unless it carries a ton of blue.
How to dress for Summer? Go to ebay, find the clothing categories, pick a suitable one (women's clothes/men's clothes/vintage/shirts/skirts/dresses, whatever) and type "India*" in the search box. You'll get a ton of both bright and subtle, beautiful, inexpensive clothes in rayon, cotton, silk, and cotton/silk blends.
Worried you'll look like a damn hippie wearing Indian gear? Spike your hair, wear a ton of dark eyeliner - which was the Egyptians' (and still is the Middle Easterners') version of sunglasses, and carry an obnoxious handbag.
Fuck fashion anyway - Style's the thing. Your own style, not what idiotic "journalists" or tv show hosts tell you you must wear. Those morons put uncomfortable fat ladies in tight outfits and I just want to die of embarassment for them, and take a baseball bat to the eejits.
What you like, and what really truly ahem suits you is always best.
Tell the fashion fascists to jump in a lake, and hope their clothes will shrink.
Their bags are too cool!
The Mouth hipped me.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Smithsonian asks Aretha Franklin for her inaugural hat
Susan Whitall / The Detroit News
If you wondered when news about Aretha Franklin's gray large-bowed inaugural hat would die down, well... it's not happening yet.
The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., has asked the Queen of Soul if she will donate the hat she wore to sing "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" (also known as "America") before the swearing-in on the steps of the Capitol for an exhibit on President Barack Obama's inauguration.
Other items the Smithsonian will have on display in the presidential exhibit include Michelle Obama's off-white ball gown.
So will Franklin donate the famous chapeau that rocketed Detroit milliner Luke Song of Moza Inc., 6513 Woodward Ave. in Detroit's New Center, to worldwide fame (and a lot of sales)?
"I am considering it," Franklin said in a statement. "It would be hard to part with my chapeau, since it was such a crowning moment in history. I would like to smile every time I look back at it and remember what a great moment it was in American and African-American history. Ten cheers for President Obama." ...
Aretha Franklin's inauguration hat becomes overnight fashion sensation
Detroit designer flooded with orders
By BILL MCGRAW
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
January 21, 2009
Paris? No.
Milan? No.
New York? No.
New Center? Yes!
Aretha Franklin’s now-famous bow-tied, gift-wrapped, jewel-studded, $179 inaugural hat was designed, produced and sold to the Queen of Soul by Mr. Song Millinery, a family-owned business on Woodward Avenue just south of W. Grand Boulevard, a couple of blocks from the Fisher Building.
Starting minutes after Franklin finished her distinctive rendition of “My County ‘Tis of Thee” Tuesday, the store’s phones started ringing.
By this afternoon, they had sold hundreds of hats. A store they work with in Dallas had sold 500 more, and the material was running out.
“People are calling from England, asking for the hat,” said Luke Song, who designed Franklin’s chapeau. “I’m shocked. I had no idea. We did not expect this.” ...
Hand Barack Obama his hat
JEFF GERRITT
January 16, 2009
The next commander in chief will help set the tone for the country -- and the style for millions of American men. Too many presidents have neglected their sartorial duties, presiding over a nation of sweatpants and baseball hats.
President-elect Barack Obama can chart a new course at his inauguration by wearing a dress hat. It’s going to be cold, anyway, so why not stay warm in style?
For Obama to put on a brim, with all eyes on him, would be as revolutionary in 2009 as John F. Kennedy appearing hatless at his inauguration in 1961.
Don’t think the nation didn’t notice. Dress hat sales tanked after Kennedy took office, and took further hits in the dress-down decades that followed. Even today, though, Detroit remains a good hat town, and Obama could show solidarity with our hurting city by wearing one.
Other well-dressed politicians have kept their lids on. Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown wore Borsalinos to complement his Brioni suits. Detroit’s Dennis Archer wore wide-brimmed fedoras. Kwame Kilpatrick -- well, let's not go there. Hats of all kinds, including Kangols, have also been popular with jazz and hip-hop artists. Remember those derbies and homburgs Tupac and Biggie sported in the mid-1990s? Suddenly old-school became new-school.
Obama should probably stick with a fedora — the most popular dress hat — in presidential black or dark grey. A homburg or top hat might come off as a bit pompous and aristocratic in these tough times. A derby or porkpie would be too eccentric for the occasion, causing investors to panic. ...
I don't wear heels because I find facial bruising rather unattractive and quite painful.
