032c preview: Natasa Vojnovic, ph: Danko Steiner

As seen on the New York Times:


photo of the magazine by Patricia Wall, original photo by Danko Steiner

Celebrating the New World, Bravely

By CATHY HORYN

Scarlett Johansson is a very good actress, but since we don’t need any more articles about the brand kitten’s style, let’s enjoy a big gulp of the contemporary culture provided by 032c, the Berlin-based magazine that is published twice a year. The latest issue, the 19th, is just out.
I adore 032c. Many of us are feeling a little discouraged by the bombardment of stuff on the Web that doesn’t inform or surprise, and 032c is an antidote for that. It sort of destroys the notion that printed journals don’t have the quickness or relevance of blogs. No, they just have to be serious about what they do.

The magazine is operated by Joerg Koch, its editor, and Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain, its managing editor, and many of the big fashion brands — Dior, Prada, Tom Ford, YSL — advertise there.

The lineup for the current issue includes a look at the impact of a 1960 article about Cy Twombly, with photos by Horst, that ran in American Vogue and that was rediscovered in 2003 by the interiors magazine Nest. As Mr. Koch wrote, it’s a “story on the story on the story.” Despite Vogue’s solid name and Horst’s gorgeous images of Mr. Twombly’s house in Rome, the original article, “Roman Classic Surprise,” may have compromised the artist’s career. At that time artists were not supposed to be part of a chichi world. The 032c piece is an unusual way to consider views from the past in the context of current assumptions.

There is also a group of articles and photographs about the American writer William T. Vollmann — or, I should say, a rare published dialogue with him (based on a correspondence by mail) and extracts from his books. The standard of the choices of ideas and images, which include a fair amount from the fashion front, always feel a bit higher at 032c. Anyway, I plan to dig in this weekend between the mowing and mulching in the garden.

Of the new issue, Mr. Koch wrote: “In a time such as ours, when all forms of cultural expression seem to occur simultaneously — as if ‘contemporary’ were essentially just a byline for the past, present and future combined — stories like these become rough blueprints for the new creative aesthetic proposed within the pages of 032c.”

Karen Elson in the NY Times

From: The New York Times:

Karen Elson Is Dressing the Part, and Singing It

By MELENA RYZIK

LIFE is unfair and everybody knows it, but should you require a refresher, you need only to watch Karen Elson, the redheaded supermodel, design muse and wife of Jack White of the White Stripes, sing.

There she was Monday night at Le Poisson Rouge in the West Village, performing songs from her debut album in a voice that can go from retro-breathy chanteuse to rootsy belter in a few notes. It was the fourth stop in a whirlwind mini-tour that included Nashville, where she and Mr. White live with their two children, and Austin, Tex., where she played at the South by Southwest music festival. The shows were intended to introduce Ms. Elson as more than just a pretty face, or even a pretty voice, but as an artist in her own right.

At each gig she took the stage in a peach-dyed vintage gown and a 1917 Gibson Style O guitar to give a preview of her album, “The Ghost Who Walks,” which was produced by her rock star husband (who plays the drums on it) and is due out May 25.

At the New York show, a homecoming of sorts, the audience was filled with fashion and music folk: the bassist Melissa Auf der Maur; Agyness Deyn, the model and tastemaker; Grace Coddington, the Vogue editor. The latter sat close enough that Ms. Elson could banter with her about her coral suede shoes, a namesake pair — the Karen — made for her by Tabitha Simmons, also of Vogue.

Mr. White was not there — he is touring in Australia with the Dead Weather, some of whose members also moonlight for Ms. Elson. Her bandmates include Mark Watrous (who has also played with the Raconteurs, another of Mr. White’s bands) on fiddle and pedal steel guitar, and Jackson Smith — son of Patti and husband to Meg White — on electric. The video for the album’s title song, in which Ms. Elson alone sings and strums while her band stands around in the shadows, has already racked up more than 54,000 YouTube views.

This is not the way most bands get their start. But far from discounting her modeling career and famous collaborators, Ms. Elson is straightforward about the advantages they confer.

“If I wasn’t a model, I would never have been around interesting musicians, even had the financial capabilities to say, ‘I don’t have to work right now, I can sit and make my record,’ ” she said the morning after the Poisson Rouge show, over several coffees at the Breslin in the Ace Hotel. Though she has long been musically minded, “I could never have made this record five years ago,” she said. “This record only could have been made with Jack.” They were married in 2005.

Ms. Elson is hardly the first model to take up with a musician, or to aspire to make the transition from runway to stage. Recording an album is an ambition that stretches back at least as far as Twiggy, more recently attracting catwalk legends like Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. (Surely you remember “La La La Love Song”?)

“After Carla Bruni, I expect every model to pick up a guitar,” said Dmitry Komis, a curator and writer who came to the Poisson Rouge show with the designer Zaldy, who styles the Scissor Sisters and who named Ms. Elson as one of his muses. (“She’s so down-to-earthy,” he said.)
Ms. Elson, 31, picked up a guitar — and a four-track — nearly a decade ago when she was living in the East Village, and taught herself to play. Since 2004, she has performed with the Citizens Band, a political cabaret act she helped establish. Before she left her hometown near Manchester, England, to model at 16, she fronted a salsa band.

“I was always singing, as a kid,” she said. “That’s honestly all I’ve ever wanted to do. But really, I doubt I would have ever done it” if not for modeling.

Growing up in “a sleepy, grim, Northern English town,” she said, “there was nothing expected of me. You grew up, you got married, you had kids, and maybe you worked in the supermarket. You didn’t have any aspirations to anything grand.”

Ms. Elson’s fashion career is beyond grand; she has walked or posed for nearly every major designer and photographer, carried campaigns for Yves Saint Laurent and Chanel, graced countless magazine covers and really no longer needs a last name.

So despite the musical credentials, she must now battle an attitude succinctly summed up by a fan at one of her Austin shows. “She’s great,” he said as Ms. Elson sang in a tiny pop-up shop for Third Man, Mr. White’s record label. “I mean, look at her. Look at her!”

Told of the comment, Ms. Elson shrugged it off. “You know, models, people roll their eyes,” she said. She herself was one of them. “I for years just believed that this had to be a personal project,” she said of her music. She feared ridicule: “like it’s like me trying to get more attention. I was cautious because if there’s something bad out there, it’s doubly as bad because you’re a model. It’s like, oh, stick to the day job.”

Now she is in the position of both being in thrall to her looks — because they’re a big part of what makes people interested in her — and pushing against them.

Her album leans toward dark, spare Americana in instrumentation and themes. Ms. Elson wrote the guitar parts and lyrics, and the band and Mr. White did the rest. Ms. Elson said she listened to Harry Smith’s Smithsonian folk anthology for inspiration. Onstage, eyes closed, she weaves like a 1960s folkie.

The title track comes from a nickname she had as a child — Ms. Elson says she was teased about her appearance — but the story is even more gruesome: it’s about a man who murders his lover. “Have you ever been in a relationship where you see a gleam in the person’s eye you’re with and it’s like, wow, you’re scary, you hate me?” she said. “Pre-Jack, there was a lot of anxiety even the men I was dating had, about me being a model or maybe me earning more money than them.”

She credited living in Nashville with helping her gain perspective. She and Mr. White set up house there five years ago and have two children: Scarlett, 3, and Henry, 2.
She wrote the album largely in her walk-in closet and recorded it with Mr. White and friends in their backyard studio. (Real estate is unfair, too.)

Still, Ms. Elson said, South by Southwest, with all the insiders and hype, was daunting. “Put with all the industry types and like, ‘All right girl, sing’ — it very much felt like that, like, O.K., I’ve got to prove myself,” she said.

Mr. White did not respond to requests for comment. But he has been hands-on in the album’s marketing, said Kris Chen, a vice president at XL Recordings, which is releasing “The Ghost Who Walks” with Mr. White’s label. But the album “was carried by her voice,” Mr. Chen said.
Asked who the audience is for her music, Ms. Elson said, “I have no idea.” Still, she plans to tour, likely without Mr. White. “Getting my sea legs, that’s I how I describe it.”

Ms. Elson doesn’t expect to give up modeling. “I think that would be really pretentious — ‘I’m sorry, I’m now a musician,’ ” she said. “Other than viewing them as the golden handcuffs, I might as well just appreciate it. I only hope I can improve the idea of model-slash-anything. I only hope I can do it justice.”

Now Showing | Deyn’s Debut

From T Magazine/ The New York Times Blog:

Agyness Deyn is the latest model trying to make the transition to acting, but she’s doing it via the art gallery rather than Hollywood. In “Mean to Me,” a visually sumptuous 12-minute film noir written and directed by David McDermott and Peter McGough, Deyn trades her gamine look for raven-hued finger waves and crimson lips — all the better to deliver a blow to the head of her lover (the “Law & Order” star Linus Roache), wrestle him into the bathtub, tie him up and extort a sizable check. Set in the Great Depression and named for a popular song of the era, the artist duo’s first scripted film chronicles the disastrous end of an affair. McDermott and McGough began collaborating 30 years ago, and capturing the essence of a time past has always been part of their work, so recreating the 1930s proved no challenge. Period-perfect down to its wallpaper, telephone and radio, McGough’s Art Deco Manhattan apartment provided the set. Deyn’s costumes, by Zac Posen, might as well be of that vintage. The Shalimar perfume and pearls, around which crucial plot points turn, were courtesy of Guerlain and Mikimoto, which underwrote the project. Deyn got the gig at the suggestion of McGough’s pal Louie Chaban, director of Women Management. “Peter asked for a girl who wanted to act,” Chaban says. And can she? McGough proclaims: “A star is born.”

Cathy Horyn has something to say

Natasha Poly at Joseph Altuzarra fall 2010 show:


from today's New York Times:

February 14, 2010

Three Nominees for Who’s ‘Next’

By CATHY HORYN

Joseph Altuzarra is a Swarthmore-educated Paris-bred son of an American mother and a French father. Prabal Gurung grew up in Katmandu and trained at Bill Blass. At 25, Alexander Wang is the hitmaker of contemporary urban fashion, his $25-million business already surpassing that of many established designers.

If fashion didn’t routinely select a new group of designers to acclaim, it wouldn’t be fashion. There must always be someone waiting in the wings, the “next” one. These three designers now appear to be the leading candidates.

It is clear that Mr. Wang has managed to give his collections the properties of high fashion — top models; coveted accessories; a cool, insolent sensibility — while making affordable clothes that many women, not just skinny hipsters, can wear. His show again achieved the illusion of being something more than a contemporary-priced collection. With their matted hair and vacant gazes, the models, led by Natalia Vodianova, looked possessed by zombies, but you can bet that people will wonder when they can get their hands on the elephant-belled thigh-high tights that Mr. Wang showed with his miniskirts and platform boots. Like an old-fashioned merchant, Mr. Wang knows how to get value out of a single item.

The collection drew heavily on deconstructed tailoring: pinstripe blazers and vests lopped off at the midriff, blended with a furry layer or a broken lace top and a pair of boy trousers with part of the waistband snipped away. If it sounds a little tricky, with many extra parts, it was. Traditional garments of power and formality were the sources for swallowtail minidresses and camel wool clergy capes, and the general gloominess. Still, the collection was an ambitious step up for Mr. Wang, and despite the moving parts, it looked polished.

Mr. Gurung has a knack for the languid, jazzy tailoring of a Blass or a Saint Laurent, his spiritual mentors, and that feeling was captured in a fresh way in his first show last February. He also demonstrated in the next season that he could do chic dresses in double-silk satin with pleats and peplums.

So he didn’t need to repeat himself this time. While most of the day clothes were fairly solid — two-tone coats and suits in cashmere with curvilinear lines, boxy metallic tweed blazers — the ruffled evening looks didn’t seem new and indeed looked a bit tortured. A lanky jacket, shown with pants, that combined fox, mink and broadtail captured the lighter, offhand attitude that Mr. Gurung first conveyed, and to which he should return.

What gives Mr. Altuzarra an edge over virtually all the new young designers in New York is that he has a masterfully light hand with couture materials. His admiration for Tom Ford’s ability to give familiar shapes an extra kick of design and urgency was evident in this collection, his fourth. And the sexy fierceness of the mostly black clothes was incredibly appealing.

A number of designers this season are showing jackets that combine two or three different materials — fur and wool, say. In their straightforward collection, rich in texture, Alexa Adams and Flora Gill of the label Ohne Titel mixed suede with what appeared to be knitted fur, or black leather and a softer ribbed fabric.

But the motive in this collection and others seems to be to lend novelty to an otherwise basic garment. Nothing new or interesting is being proposed. And in some cases the contrasting textures come together in a lumpy way.

The difference with Mr. Altuzarra’s clothes — belted, close-to-the-body suits in black boiled wool with shoulders or fronts of glossy black goat hair — is that the choices feel more considered. He’s not just making a collage. Also, the workmanship on rather tough-looking materials, like leather and the glazed wool of a dress with laced vents, is consistently delicate.

Mr. Altuzarra used Frankenstein stitching on many of the pieces, in part to suggest the feeling of things coming apart, but the stitches are fine and random in length. As much as the big showy gestures, like the goat hair or the raised storm collars or the wool coats shaped by rows of buckled straps, the sutures play their part in an excellent collection.

The news at Preen, which is designed by Justin Thornton and Thea Bregazzi, was a bold, dark floral print used for blouses and dresses with articulated bra cups. There were a lot of familiar plays on transparency (dresses cut with random holes, sheer yokes). What looked fresh was a straight-line charcoal pantsuit over that blue-gray print.

Regina Feoktistova at Alexander Wang fall 2010 show: