Tag: Fashion

Jean Paul Gaultier doesn’t have a menswear line anymore but most of today’s best menswear lines have a bit of Jean Paul Gaultier.

The migration of avant-garde ideas from the university, the art world and intellectual bohemia towards mass commerce and prime-time television marks the cycle of their cultural acceptance, of what is generally understood to be “mainstreaming.” The people you consider marginal end up shaping the reality of your children. The drag queen your father’s generation had locked up now sells lipstick to your daughter. Progressive minds find this is proof of the positive evolution of society. Which is why it’s so disturbing to hear Jean Paul Gaultier say: “I feel that if I were starting now I couldn’t have done what I had done at the time.” Continue reading “L’Homme Objet: Gaultier’s Male Gaze” →

Julien d’Ys is more than a hairstylist. He is a storyteller, a poet and a fashion veteran who finds amusement in mixing the strangest materials together for the sake of beauty. Each of his projects serves as a testimonial—a point of reference in contemporary fashion’s history and the key to the gates to dreamland.
A good fashion show is everything together: the clothes (of course), the music, lights, casting, hair and make-up. The most incredible hair stories have carried his signature for almost 40 years. He also likes to paint, keep his notes in sketchbooks, and to flirt with photography. Julien d’Ys responds to my phone call in a very good mood. He has just returned from New York where he participated in “Art of the In-Between”, the Metropolitan Museum’s retrospective on Comme Des Garçons and Rei Kawakubo, with whom he has worked closely for more than two decades creating the hair for her shows and occasionally the make-up as well. He asked me to call him precisely at 11:32, as 32 is his lucky number. Continue reading “Julien d’Ys talks to Filep Motwary” →

Hair can be defined and shaped by the use of hands. Hair can be immortalized through photography, complimented by clothes, makeup, through a story, in a context where instant reality becomes a global fantasy or a fact for the years to come. A champion in his own right, today Luigi Murenu creates fashion via hair styling and photography, and observing him at work is like attending a masterclass. His recent hairstyles for Rick Owens Homme and his photographic stories alongside Iango Henzi make fashion seem to be a game with rules to be broken. Continue reading “Luigi Murenu talks to Filep Motwary” →

The clothes that Junichi Abe creates under the label Kolor have a magnificent just-rolled-out-of-bed quality. They are crumpled, lived-in and perfectly imperfect, and come in cocooning shapes that are as comfortable as they are precise. Trousers are loose, with raw hemlines that can dangle down or roll up; outerwear has the softness of knitwear; precious details—embroidery, frills, a satin ribbon—pop up on utilitarian pieces, adding nuance. A jacket starts life on top as a woolen bomber, only to morph halfway down into something else, and end up at the bottom as a cardigan. A knitted piece is treated as a tailored one. Colors are dense yet watery, like a gouache with a hint of fragility. There is a sense of endless morphing to Abe’s modular wardrobe, the kind of hazy fluidity that you might get when you are half asleep and cannot decide whether you’re in the real world or still in the realm of dreams. Continue reading “Kolor: Liquid Pragmatism” →

Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli, creative directors at the house of Valentino, form a solid, unbreakable couple, even if only in professional terms. They’ve been working together since they met, and immediately clicked, at Fendi in 1989. Their creative dialogue is fuelled by mutual trust, complementary tastes and a great deal of sincerity and ease. “I am a very loyal person,” laughs Chiuri, all smoky eyes and bursting emotionality. Piccioli has the nonchalant demeanor of a true Roman—he never seems to register stress—and an insatiable curiosity. He lives in Nettuno, a coastal town not far from the città eterna, and proudly enjoys the detoxifying balms of provincial life. Continue reading “Valentino: Modernists In The House” →

Stephen Jones may be England’s most beloved milliner; he is certainly its most radical, and its most playful. In the late 1970s, he famously attended Central Saint Martins by day and the Blitz club by night, where his extraordinary self-made hats attracted the attention of New Romantic royalty including Boy George, Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran, as well as future fashion legends Isabella Blow and Jean-Paul Gaultier. The year after Jones graduated, Blitz owner Steve Strange offered him backing to open a millinery shop under his own name, and the rest is history. Jones is now entering his fourth decade of endlessly inventive collaborations with Gaultier, John Galliano, Thierry Mugler, Comme des Garçons, Vivienne Westwood and more, which he produces alongside biannual collections for men and women under his own name, and a seemingly inexhaustible flow of one-off designs for modern icons such as Grace Jones, Björk, Beyoncé, Kylie and Princess Diana. Continue reading “Stephen Jones talks to Filep Motwary” →