JEANNE LANVIN AWAKES, GOES THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

The Lanvin exhibition plays with mirrors.

Fresh from its super-successful retrospective of Tunisian-born stylist Azzedine Alaïa, Paris’ Museum of Fashion, the Palais Galliera, is now offering an impressive show that honours French designer Jeanne Lanvin.

Running until 23 August 2015, the exhibition features more than 100 creations from the oldest French fashion house still in business, and Lanvin’s artistic director Alber Elbaz and the Galliera’s director and curator Olivier Saillard have designed the display in such an imaginative way that it will appeal even to those not necessarily interested in fashion.

Using mirrors to reflect and recreate Jeanne Lanvin’s world of the 1920s and 30s, Elbaz and Saillard manage to take visitors back in history while still highlighting the timeless beauty of the designs.

“The theme is sleeping beauty and the mirrors reflect the past and reveal the present,” Elbaz told Tasshon.

The poster for the show.

Most of the garments are displayed inside glass cases with a mirror-panel that plays tricks with the vision: viewers see multiple images, of the clothing, ceiling and even themselves.

Elbaz said the idea for the mirrors was just pure intuition. “Sometimes things just come,” he said. “When we put the mirrors up and turned the lights on, and we saw the reflection of the clothes and the ceiling, it was like magic. The idea is of sleeping beauty and magic.”

This theme has particular resonance for Elbaz because when he was brought in as Lanvin’s artistic director 14 years ago, the company’s owners set him the task of arousing a “sleeping beauty”.

Since then, he has done a much-lauded job, all the while expressing a deep admiration for Lanvin’s founder. Indeed, this exhibition seems almost like a private and heartfelt tribute to Jeanne Lanvin.

Lanvin started as a milliner.

Born in 1867, the designer started her career as a milliner and some of her exquisite hats are included in the display, alongside the haute-couture dresses for which she eventually became famous.

With their remarkable embroidery, intricate beading and elegant cut, these dresses are the stars of the shows, and viewers will find themselves marvelling at the originality and craftsmanship.

To prepare the garments for this retrospective, experts spent “hundreds of hours” doing repair work, Elbaz said.

“Have you ever seen museum experts at work, with the gloves and all that, as if performing a very delicate operation?” he asked as he gave a tour of the exhibition to fashion editors and writers.

Alber Elbaz

The show also includes sketches, scrapbooks, paintings and photographs, as well as dolls that may have belonged to Lanvin’s only daughter Marguerite, whom the designer considered her muse. The Lanvin logo actually represents a mother-and-daughter team.

“The whole spirit of the fashion house is summed up in that logo,” Elbaz has said. That spirit is just one reason this is a perfect exhibition to view en famille, as children will appreciate the fairy-tale quality.

“When you can have your feet on the ground and your head in the moon, it’s just perfect,” Elbaz said. - Tasshon 

PARIS FASHION WEEK: NOTES OF CASHMERE AND ELEGANCE

Allude: the amazing cashmere coat (photo: S. Fujii)

YDE: youthful, daring and elegant?

Danish designer YDE and German brand Allude ended Paris Fashion Week in fine style on March 11, with a collection of sophisticated garments for the woman “who knows herself”.

YDE had the final show of 90 official runway events, and featured materials such as cashmere, satin, silk and furs, all in designs with that intrinsic feminine cut for which Ole Yde has become known.

YDE

Each piece in his Ready to Wear Fall/Winter 2015 collection combined wearability and extreme elegance and would not have looked out of place in a haute-couture show. Short black evening dresses gave way to graphic prints and fur-bedecked coats, most worn with flat heels.

The pairing of the designs with shoes by Christian Louboutin added to the panache of the overall look, giving the whole collection a modern yet classic feel. And live piano music at the venue - the imposing town hall of Paris’ 4^th  district or arrondissement - enhanced the sense of sophistication, even as a street market took place on the sidewalk outside.

The market, with fish, fruit and vegetable stalls, seemed an essential part of the set, as "the woman who knows herself" also knows what she needs to buy for dinner. Indeed, the filet of hake was fantastic, just like the fashion show.

ALLUDE

Earlier in the day, German designer Andrea Karg, founder of the Allude brand, also set a tone of ultra-elegance with her outstanding collection of winter wear, shown in a hotel particulier (mansion house) in the 16th arrondissement.

Allude

The “Queen of Cashmere” told Tasshon that for this season she wanted to “play with shapes”, so she experimented to see all the different ways this could be done with her preferred material.

She incorporated other fabrics as well into her cashmere designs, changing silhouettes and giving the garments a flow that somehow matched the wearer’s movement.

“I put my favourite material cashmere into a dialogue with other materials such as leather and I developed this to emphasize the intensity of each aspect,” she said backstage.

Combining unexpected hues with classic winter colours, Karg managed to highlight the versatility of cashmere, showing that it can be used for gowns, ensembles and hip yet stylish coats. And yes, sweaters too. - Tasshon

YDE

Allude (photo: S. Fujii)

FASHION WEEK: WOMEN WARRIORS KNOW WHAT TO WEAR

Manish Arora: walk like a warrior.

The riveting Fall/Winter 2015 collections of both Manish Arora and Bernard Chandran paid fitting tribute to female warriors ahead of International Women's Day.

Arora's show, presented on March 5 at Paris Fashion Week, was built around a heroine from a "far away land full of colour and shine". It celebrated characters who'd fought many battles in "shining armour and intricately embellished sweatshirts" and even braved "electric thunderstorms" to reach their goal. 

Manish Arora: warrior swag

The Indian designer featured “fighters” clad in embroidered cloaks and jumpsuits, star-wars-type headgear, woolen kilts and a wide range of exuberant ensembles that one has come to expect from him alone.

Faux-fierce pink feathers adorned the models’ faces and clothing, while brocades and velvet helped to give them the warrior-queen look. Someone dressed like this can only be a leader of course, so should we expect to see women “chieftains” sporting the Manish look in winter?

After the fashion show, the stylist hosted a party at his Paris flagship store in the Jardin des Tuileries area, and some confident-looking ladies were rocking his designs, as they sipped their Cointreau-lemon fizz and listened to the music. The legion even included the female deejay, who wore an eye-catching headpiece.

“He’s just different from everyone else,” said Julie, a tech professional from California. “His clothes make you feel good right away.”

For Bernard Chandran, meanwhile, it’s not the clothes that make the woman, but the woman who brings her personality to what she wears.

Bernard Chandran (photo: McKenzie)

“The ultimate style is to be yourself and to always believe in your own choices,” Chandran told Tasshon backstage after his remarkable debut show on March 7, the day before International Women’s Day.

The young designer said he'd drawn inspiration from the legendary Chinese female warrior Hua Mulan, who was also the basis for the 1998 Disney animated feature. 

“I wanted to show women as strong and not afraid of change, but also as very feminine,” he said of his Ready to Wear Fall/Winter 2015 collection. The show featured boldly cut evening dresses worn by models who strode like troopers across the stage, their hair knotted in long braids as if ready for battle.

Chandran's designs

Chandran used industrial metal, leather, stretch knits and fur to get his vision across of the “girl who has to survive against whatever is thrown at her”.

He said he also tapped into his own Asian background to give the collection an Eastern dynamic, explaining that he’s of mixed Indian and Chinese heritage and knows the cultures well.

The selection of colours - black, white, fiery red - and the inclusion of accessories made from huge coins were meant to signal good luck and prosperity and a nod to Chinese New Year, Chandran said.

Presented outside of the official French fashion trade union shows, his warriors got warm applause from all the guests, indicating that his vibrant creations are going to be in great demand quite soon. - Tasshon

Manish Arora: face armour

Bernard Chandran: ready for the day

Manish Arora: colourful heroines

PARIS FASHION WEEK: NO, IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT THE CLOTHES

Workers rights, protecting the environment, ethical choices - these are just some of the issues being discussed during Paris Fashion Week, alongside the 90 runway shows.

Tansy Hoskins, the author of the polemical book Stitched Up, will be in town at the venerable Shakespeare and Company bookshop to give her views about the failings of the global, trillion-dollar fashion industry.

On March 9, she’ll discuss its impact on the environment and on employee conditions in some developing countries - where factories churn out garments for Western companies without safety concerns for workers.

Nearly two years ago in Bangladesh, more than 1,100 workers died and 2,500 were injured when a factory building collapsed, after safety warnings were ignored. The workers made clothing for brands including Benetton, which only recently announced that it would contribute to a compensation fund for the victims.

That agreement followed a campaign in which one million people signed an on-line petition calling for the company to do the right thing.

For Hoskins, “ethical fashion” are two words that don’t mean much when huge luxury concerns own most well-known brands and care mainly about profit.

Still, representatives from the Ethical Fashion Initiative (EFI) will also be in Paris this week, working to drum up support from more designers. The EFI is part of the International Trade Centre, itself a joint agency of the United Nations and the World Trade Organisation.

According to founder Simone Cipriani, the Ethical Fashion Initiative wants fashion to help to lessen poverty by connecting top designers with artisans in regions such as East Africa and parts of the Caribbean.

Another goal is the “eradication of exploitation, hardship and environmental damage from the supply chains to the fashion industry and the practices of fashion businesses”.

Designers including Stella McCartney, Vivienne Westwood and Italy-based Stella Jean are active in the project, and a growing number of international stylists show interest.

“The many hands behind fashion goods are often ignored and forgotten. This is wrong. The lives and work behind fashion products should be cherished and celebrated,” says the EFI.

When one keeps this in mind, one can’t help seeing fashion shows in a different light, which now brings us to Paris’ Ready to Wear Fall-Winter 2015 defilés. The week started on Mar. 3 with shows by Christine Phung, Each x Other and Sofie Madsden, among others.

Phung staged her show at the gleaming Institut du Monde Arabe (Arab World Institute) and offered elegant costumes of purple, blue, grey and black, worn by a multi-cultural cast of models. Phung called the collection "Glitchology", saying she was inspired by the digital malfunctions that can cause both frustration and a certain kind of beauty. She gets added credit for including models of different ethnic backgrounds in her shows.

Each x Other

The Parisian brand Each x Other used “digitalization” as inspiration as well, but in the sense of perhaps rejecting it for art - with designs of muted colours and clean lines, used for dresses, trouser ensembles and flowing coats.

Danish designer and illustrator Anne Sofie Madsen was distinctly more outre, with her unpredictable pairing of materials and shapes: fur draped over silk, ruffles and fringes, a body-hugging dress highlighted with her own drawings. She and other Danish stylists are rapidly setting trends in Paris and other capitals. (See previous article on Nikoline Liv Andersen.)

One looks forward to what the rest of the week will bring, and wonders which designers will join the debate about ethical fashion. - Tasshon

DANISH DESIGNER GIVES DIFFERENT VISION OF FASHION

As the exclusive Haute Couture shows get underway in Paris following five days of men’s ready-to-wear, the French capital has been hosting numerous other fashion displays, but those in the know recommend one event in particular.

Ready to soar? Art by Andersen.

On the Champs Elysees, the Maison du Danemark is the venue for a fascinating exhibition of works by Nikoline Liv Andersen, a young award-winning Danish designer who brings art, fashion and crafts together in unexpected ways.

Andersen’s creations immediately strike one with their colour, artistry and theatrical scope. But it’s on closer examination of her garments, or more precisely installations, that one gets to appreciate her original take on fashion and haute couture.

“I don’t think about trends or targets,” she says. “In fact, I try to keep all of that outside my awareness. I prefer to allow myself to be inspired by other things such as divinity or nature.”

The exhibition, which runs until March 15, comprises artwork that underscores this approach; Andersen plays with the theme of angels or sprites in some of her designs, adding wings and other-worldly elements to the garments.

Andersen at work.

She also uses unusual materials such as drinking straws and industrial metal rivets to produce items that deconstruct the idea of couture, making one think about consumerism and the state of the world while still wanting to try on the clothing.

“A lot of it is made more for the expression, than for the wearability,” Andersen told Tasshon. “I’ve always loved to try to change the feeling of a material, and I love working with objects not normally seen in the fashion industry.”

She transforms these materials into delicate items that “look organic”, according to critics. Dresses made entirely from drinking straws, cut to different sizes, seem fairy-tale like - something one might dream of wearing to an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of ball. One billowy, flamboyant gown required 45,000 straws, she said

Another stand-out piece is the dress she designed for Denmark’s Emmelie de Forest, the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest winner who wore it for a performance at the Grand Finale of last year’s competition held in the Danish capital (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNdrYzZ55gI).

This dress combines metal, plastic and reclaimed fur for a chic yet cutting-edge item. At the exhibition, one clearly sees how much work went into its creation. 

Besides Paris, Andersen has presented her designs in her native Copenhagen, and in Berlin, Brussels and other cities, since her graduation from Denmark’s Designskole in 2006. If this exhibition is anything to go by, everyone will be hearing a lot more about her soon, and not just during Fashion Week. (Text: McK-DeC)

THEY CAME TO PARIS WITH NEEDLE, THREAD AND A DREAM

Fashion and immigration. What could the two have in common? For the answer, a visit to Paris’ Museum of Immigration History (Musée de l’Histoire de l’Immigration”) is a must this year.

Dresses from the first fashion immigrants.

Until 31 May 2015, the Museum is hosting “Fashion Mix”, an enthralling exhibition about the contributions of “foreign-born” designers to French couture. 

Many countries have produced great or aspiring designers who lived in Paris at some point in their career, and the exhibition takes viewers on a journey through the history of this particular migration.

From the Briton Charles Frederick Worth to the Tunisian Azzedine Alaïa, from the Italian Elsa Schiaparelli to the American Patrick Kelly - they all enriched as well as learned from French expertise, and helped to build Paris’ status as the world’s fashion capital.

The cover of the expo catalogue.

Subtitled “Mode d'ici, créateurs d'ailleurs” (French Fashion, Foreign Designers), the exhibition allows viewers to experience the journeys of selected stylists. It presents private and public archive documents such as passports, letters and naturalisation applications alongside the striking garments, headwear and accessories that the designers created.

The show is done according to nationality or “schools” and so manages to categorize the roles played by the fashion artists from specific countries or regions, such as the United Kingdom, Spain, Asia, northern Europe  and the United States.

The “British School”, for instance, is headed by Charles Frederick Worth, who is considered the father of Parisian haute couture. The story goes that he arrived in the city without a penny to his name (perhaps only with a needle) in the mid-19^th century, when he was 20 years old, and went on to conquer with his crinolette and “princess cut”.

Worth’s peers included Henry Creed and others, and the exhibition draws a line to later British designers such as Vivienne Westwood, Lee Alexander McQueen, John Galliano and Stella McCartney.

A Balenciaga dress from the Sixties.

The “Spanish school” includes Cristobal Balenciaga, who fled the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and set up shop in a Parisian hotel; and Paco Rabanne, who also quit Spain for political reasons, studied in France and took the fashion world by storm in the 1960s with his iconic metal and plastic dresses. Their creations are among the most striking of the items on display.

But designs from the “Japanese school” also create a buzz. The members of this group shook up the couture scene in Paris in the Seventies and early Eighties, and their names have become intrinsically tied to French fashion. Kenzo Takada and Issey Miyake are undeniably the leaders, but the group comprises Junko Shimada, Henae Mori, Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto, among others.

Then there are the innovative Belgians and the fun-loving Americans.  The exhibition highlights the contributions of the Antwerp 6 + 1 (particularly Ann Demeulemeester, Dries Van Noten and Martin Margiela) who made a noticeable impact on French couture in the 1990s with their iconoclastic designs, and it also details the birth of “Belgian fashion”.

The colours of Issey Miyake.

Members of the “American school” are said to have realized their dream by being able to live in Paris, and many have become household names, such as Marc Jacobs, Michael Kors and Tom Ford.

But according to the curators of the exhibition, no other American designer expressed as much love for Paris as Patrick Kelly, the first American designer and first person of African descent to join the exclusive Chambre syndicale du prêt-à-porter des couturiers et des créateurs de mode - the fashion trade union that dates from 1868.

The love apparently was reciprocal as Kelly gained numerous fans with his playful and audacious designs. He lived in Paris for just over a decade, from 1979 to his death in 1990 (at the age of 35), and he’s buried at Père Lachaise cemetery. His tomb bears the epitaph “Nothing is impossible”.

Olivier Saillard

What’s nearly impossible for some visitors to believe is that besides Kelly, the only other designer of African descent listed in the exhibition is Mali’s Lamine Kouyaté, creator of the Xuly Bët clothing line.

Olivier Saillard, director of the Palais Galliera, or Paris’ Museum of Fashion - which co-organized the exhibition, said the curators would have liked to include more African designers but that very few have taken part in the official Fashion Weeks. He said he hoped that would change.  (Text & photos: copyright McK-DeC)

ITALY, AND THE ART OF ENJOYING BOTH NORTH AND SOUTH

Florence shows the colours of Tuscany.

So you've decided on Italy for this month's holiday, but you can't make up your mind whether it's going to be North or South. Your friends tell you that Florence will be the trip of a lifetime, yet you're kind of intrigued by that saying: "See Naples and die". 

Your pals aren't being of much help, however. Those who've been to Florence tend to wax lyrical about the charms of the Tuscan capital, known as the birthplace of the Renaissance and home to the largest concentration of art in the world, but when you ask them about Naples, you draw a blank.

Still, you should know that Naples has its own devoted fans, who love the rough-and-tumble atmosphere, the great pizza restaurants, the striking views of the bay, and the no-nonsense demeanour of residents. Even devotees, though, are aware of the seedier sides of the city, notorious for its history of organized crime and garbage piling up in the streets because of corruption in the waste disposal industry.

A view across the Bay of Naples.

The two towns are a study in contrast, offering very different "attractions" to travellers. Art lovers will find their visual feast in Florence, which seems to have a statue on every corner, often surrounded by hordes of photo-snappers. The city has palaces and historic buildings galore, with art on the ceilings and walls, in the courtyards and gardens. But you will have to brave the crowds to see some of the treasures as Florence generally has more tourists than residents in the high-season months of April to October, and sometimes in December.

Naples, meanwhile, attracts those who don’t mind, or may even enjoy, a certain form of realism: the roar of scooters, the bustle of people who don’t live for tourism, the view of a volcano in the distance, sturdy landmarks of a rich history, and an edgy ambience infused by illicit activity. North or South? The art of travelling is to appreciate both, and while most people might give the nod to Florence, here are some images to help you decide. Our tip: see Naples while you can walk without a cane!

Art on the piazza - a common sight in Florence.

Naples: a culture of litter?

Florence, with Il Duomo as centrepiece.

Yes, Naples has castles too, both historic and neo-Gothic.

Florence's Ponte Vecchio, Medieval  bridge with shophouses.

One of Naples' charming, challenging streets.

Florence by night.

Naples at dusk.

(Text and photos, copyright McK-DeC)