Friday, February 20, 2009

pubic hairs par cocteau - bien sur!


There are those, supposedly, who don’t like fashion. There are poor souls out there who read the entire NYT except for the style section. Thus, they miss the highlights, things that one doesn’t expect to read in a paper that keeps on call a kennel of Chicago economists to advise us on the zona. For instance, this today, about Vera Wang’s show:

“Ms. Wang’s provisional muse was Peggy Guggenheim, an ugly woman who embraced Wilde’s maxim that, “One should either be a work of art or wear a work of art.” She sewed Cocteau’s pubic hairs to a bedsheet. Ms. Wang did not pursue motifs of that kind.”

Dry, knowing humor! In the NYT! About Cocteau’s pubic hairs!


Cathy Horyn, who wrote this, has been writing some very good stuff about fashion week.

See, news from the zona is not always bad.

However, I can’t imagine PG did the sewing. The maid who did it no doubt discovered that pubic hairs are impossibly curly and hard to sew to anything, threw them out, plucked a few hairs from the poodle, and done is done.

I must be getting old, since I actually liked a few of the Oscar de la Renta gowns. Okay, one wonders if, up close, they would smell of mothballs. But I’ve read that slow + fashion is the latest and greatest, so bring on the naphthalene.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

LI, I like the nifty crossover from Adario to Fashion Week. Nothing like Glam to keep one warm in the Zona. And that is quite the PG/Cocteau story! B-b-but Oscar de la Renta! Don't they have Isabel Marant at the NYC show?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmWILvqJ3a0

Amie

Roger Gathmann said...

Amie,I'm glad you are keeping a weather eye on fashion week! I'm beggin my nyc acquaintances to go down to Bryant park and take me a pic of the tents. So far, no dice.

Oscar is a sly fox. His show is very much for the dowager set. People who want a lot of stuff when they get a 30-40 thou ensemble.

I've been looking for Isabel. And I continue to like this Cathy Horyn. If only NYT book reviewers wrote like her! Here she is about Francisco Costa, making me want to touch the fabric: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/21/fashion/21REVIEW.html?ref=fashion

"But what about those mothy dresses at Calvin Klein, or a dense black coat that appears to have the texture and shimmer of cracked asphalt? This collection — one of Mr. Costa’s finest since he took over women’s design at Calvin Klein — accomplishes many things. It opens the conversation more aggressively to fabrics made by new processes; such fabrics are already used in depth by European and Japanese designers. It shows how potent and continually enriching the minimalist template first laid down by designers like Jil Sander and Yohji Yamamoto is. And it provides — or should provide — Mr. Costa with a road map for his future work at Calvin Klein. His designs could use more consistency.

Photographs don’t really convey the detail and movement of the clothes. Viewed straight on, a jacket in pierced black wool felt with a crescent hem and an A-line almost suggests Dior’s New Look. Viewed in profile, though, the skirt sweeps away from the body. It’s actually based on a pants pattern, Mr. Costa said. Some of the prettiest dresses combine two matte black fabrics in a simple puzzle design. Just as lovely were fitted shifts in stretch black silk crepe with a pleated piece of fabric snaking around the body and over the shoulder."