fashion

“Why do we need three shawl cardigans?” J. Crew president Mickey Drexler asks a stylish gaggle of his buyers. He doesn’t pause for a response. “We don’t!” Put on your colorblock stripe scoopneck tee and old faithful-wash jeans, UnBeige readers, because America’s favorite hands-on merchant and his latest success story are the subject of a documentary that premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on CNBC. Reported by David Faber (get that man a Ludlow suit!), J.Crew and the Man Who Dressed America unbuttons the piped wool hacking jacket to peek inside the retailer, which has seen revenues rocket by 170%—to $1.9 billion last year—since Drexler took the helm in 2003. Even longtime Drexler followers and die-hard J. Crew fans are likely to learn something in segments that follow the months-long process of conceiving, creating, and marketing a new line of clothing. Did you know, for example, that the production of the J. Crew catalog requires 120 shooting days a year? Or that the Garden City, New York store is something of a laboratory, where window displays and merchandising are perfected—and where new stuff hits racks first? And we like any CNBC program in which a Gerhard Richter book makes a cameo among the cashmere (look sharp toward the end of the first clip below). Meanwhile, we’d love to see Drexler’s motivational mantra on a tissue tee: “Cut back, sell out, and be very happy!”

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Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

“I don’t pull [a Chado Ralph Rucci collection] together until very late, because I keep on adding—and editing. It doesn’t all come together until the fittings are finished, and then I line up for the show, because I don’t work with a stylist. I don’t understand how I possibly could, for two reasons. Part of my work, after I design the clothes for consumption—for the buyers to pull apart and buy for their locations—is also to make a presentation that tells a story for the press and for the history of our profession. And so how could a stylist know what’s in my psyche? And after having this huge period of solitude of just working with my friends [to design, construct, and edit the collection], how could I sit down with a stylist and talk about all of that? Perhaps a psychiatrist that I’ve worked with, but not a stylist to put together clothes! The other part of that is that I find that the formula that has occurred in our industry in the past however many years while I’ve been in this business, where a stylist prepares it for the press so that all the messages read somewhat the same, I can’t do that. I would choke.”

-Fashion designer Ralph Rucci, in an interview with modaCYCLE (video below). Rucci will receive the André Leon Talley Lifetime Achievement Award this evening at the Savannah College of Art and Design’s annual fashion show. An exhibit of his work opens today at the SCAD Museum of Art.
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“Calvin actually once said to me that he never looked back. I think it’s probably the genius about him. I try not to look back. I try not to look in the archives or at stuff I’ve done. I think it’s so much more interesting what’s to come. I never consider myself a minimalist. But another word is reductionist, and that’s something I’m beginning to understand….What bothers me about the term minimalist is that it is so connected with a distinct period. It links me to the past. But I design for today. I’m a book freak. I’m buying five, six, seven books a week. I just want to feed myself. So I start with a lot—millions of pictures, millions of fabrics, millions of colors. Then as I work, it starts to be reduced and I pin the things that are relevant up. So, yes, those words carry a lot of weight and I don’t want them to be misrepresented, but I try not to associate myself with terminology. I want to be free to some extent.”

-Francisco Costa, women’s creative director at Calvin Klein Collection, interviewed by art photographer Ryan McGinley in this month’s issue of Interview with a stunning portfolio by Patrick Demarchelier. Click below to watch the fall 2012 Calvin Klein Collection runway show.
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(All photos courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

“I never thought people would want to wear clothes with monkeys and bananas on them,” said Miuccia Prada of her spring 2011 collection, a retail smash that featured madcap cotton separates printed with baroque scrolls, embroidered monkeys, and thick stripes. And the bananas? A wink at Carmen Miranda and Josephine Baker. More than 70 years earlier, when Miranda was still working the carnaval circuit in her native Brazil, Elsa Schiaparelli was feeling a circus theme. The designer described her summer 1938 collection as the “most riotous and swaggering” one she had ever created, and illustrator Christian Berard immortalized the “circus parade at Schiaparelli’s” in Vogue. “Clowns, elephants, horses, decorated the prints with the words ‘Attention a la Peinture,’” said Schiaparelli of her Barnum-infused couture. “Balloons for bags, spats for gloves, ice-cream cones for hats, and trained Vasling dogs and mischievous monkeys.” The two fanciful collections meet at long last in the “Naïf Chic” gallery in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s spring Costume Institute exhibition, “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations,” which opens today.

Curators Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton reveal the striking similarities between Schiaparelli and Prada by focusing on seven areas of aesthetic kinship, from “Ugly Chic” and “Hard Chic” to “The Classical Body” and “The Surreal Body.” That last one is the showstopper, celebrated in a final gallery of mirrors (pictured directly above) that tricks the eye into perceiving an infinity of Dali collaborations, trompe l’oeil accents, furs, feathers, and pailletes, which Prada believes are irresistible to women. (“Paillettes are a typical form of eveningwear,” the designer has said. “Because I hate eveningwear, I try to make pailletes problematic—by making them so big or so heavy, for instance, that they become problematic.”) It can be a challenge to tell a Prada from a Schiaparelli, particularly when hefty fabrics and exotic textures are involved, but as Judith Thurman writes in an essay in the masterpiece of an exhibition catalogue designed by Abbott Miller of Pentagram, “Prada’s citations of Schiaparelli are an exercise in sampling, not imitation. They enrich and complicate, rather than merely translate her models, and they illustrate the way that critics and artists of every generation reinvent the formal language they inherit.” Prada is neither a copycat nor someone who is interested in translating the work of the contemporary artists she collects into covetable clothing. For her, art is an entirely separate barrel of monkeys.
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Will Anna Wintour wear a zany Schiaparelli chapeau and Prada cat-eyed shades? Will Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, one of the evening’s honorary chairs, spread his infectious laugh from one end of the red carpet to the other? Will attendees be forced to swap their bejeweled clutches for shiny new Kindles? Who will stumble in their Prada racecar shoes? Find out for yourself this evening as the Metropolitan Museum of Art webcasts the arrivals to the Costume Institute Benefit that celebrates “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations.” The livestreaming fun begins here at 6:30 p.m., when Vogue-approved hosts Billy Norwich and Elettra Wiedemann will chat up gala co-chairs including Wintour, Carey Mulligan, and Miuccia Prada, along with whoever else swans past them in a sufficiently whimsical and/or impossible ensemble. Special pre-taped segments will offer a sneak peek at the exhibition, which opens to the public on Thursday, as well as the history of the gala benefit. Look hard and you might just spy Pentagram’s Abbott Miller, who designed the exquisite catalogue.

“There may be only one designer more absolute in her confidence than [Miuccia] Prada: her fellow-honoree at the Costume Institute. [Elsa] Schiaparelli did more than any of her peers to promote fashion’s status as an art, and she would no doubt have found it natural to mingle at the Met with Phidias and Vermeer. Prada’s statements about art suggest that she must find her own enshrinement somewhat ironic. Her fortune has financed an adventurous private collection, an exhibition space outside Milan, and a foundation that supports cultural experiments. In 2010, she was invited to present the Turner Prize at Tate Britain, partially in recognition of her prominence as a patron. (She wore a pair of plastic banana earrings with a stark black coat.) She has also worked with the Dutch architect and urbanist Rem Koolhaas on the design of her major retail spaces, which she calls ‘epicenters,’ in New York and Los Angeles. Yet Prada insists that her vocation and her avocation are unrelated. She has refused to collaborate on limited editions of Prada merchandise with any of the art stars in her collection. (‘Anything that doesn’t sell,’ she once said dryly, ‘is a limited edition.’) In her somewhat heretical view of a profession that often hankers after transcendence, fashion design may be a creative enterprise, concerned, as art is, with culture and identity, but it isn’t what artists do.”

-Judith Thurman in “Radical Chic,” her New Yorker preview of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s imminent spring Costume Institute exhibition, “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations”

Above: Elsa Schiaparelli in a 1932 portrait by George Hoyningen-Huené and Miuccia Prada photographed by Guido Harari in 1999. (Photos: Hoyningen-Huené/Vogue/Condé Nast Archive and Guido Harari/Contrasto/Redux)

(Photos courtesy Lisa Perry)

In creating those smashing Roy Lichtenstein shifts, Lisa Perry gave herself a tough act to follow, but when the going gets tough, the tough call Jeff Koons. “He gave us full access to his entire body of work,” says Perry, whose five-year-old label offers a mod mix of clothing, accessories, and homegoods. “It was more inspiration than I could have ever dreamed of!” She selected some of Koons’ greatest hits—including his stainless steel “Rabbit” (1986), the porcelain sculpture that proved to be the Pink Panther’s ticket to Versailles, and the inflatable simian star of “Monkey Train” familiar from Koons-sanctioned beach towels and skate decks—and turned them into a capsule collection of dresses, jackets, handbags, and jewelry. Although a few of the pieces are reminiscent of Stella McCartney’s 2006 collaboration with Koons, a shiny bunny-accented range of chiffon dresses that excerpted canvases from his “EasyFun – Ethereal” series, Perry excels in showcasing details from these same works in fresh ways: the dollop of whipped cream eyed lasciviously by the Trix rabbit in “Loopy” (1999) becomes the cherry-topped bodice of a frothy white shift and pops up again on a colorful bangle. Priced from $150 to $4,500, the collection is now available at Perry’s Madison Avenue shop, which recently moved a few doors down into the corner space previously occupied by the Gagosian Store.

“Before microphones and television were invented, a leader had to stand in front of a crowd and bellow,” notes Rick Stengel, managing editor of TIME. “Now [one] can tweet a phrase that reaches millions in a flash. Influence was never ­easier—or more ephemeral.” Which makes the task of selecting TIME‘s list of the 100 most influential people in the world all the trickier. This year’s list, announced today and on newsstands tomorrow in the magazine’s April 30 issue, includes those who have wielded influence through fashion design (Sarah Burton of Alexander McQueen), exquisite gadgets (Apple CEO Tim Cook), political cartoons (Ali Ferzat), Nordic cuisine (René Redzepi of Noma), and spandex underthings (Spanx founder Sara Blakely).

Then there’s the influencer who is lauded for his way with time itself: Christian Marclay, creator of the 24-hour cinematic odyssey known as “The Clock.” Geoff Dyer was up to the task of composing a concise yet evocative summary of the video piece, which he describes as stemming from an idea “audacious in its simplicity and herculean in execution.” As for the writer’s own experience of the work—well, it’s something of a chrono-cautionary tale. “During the film’s opening run in London, I had intended to stay long enough to get the gag—10 minutes?—before hurrying on to a lunch date,” writes Dyer. “It was so hypnotic, so thrilling, that I ended up watching 20 hours over a month, arranging life and appointments (for which I was invariably late) in such a way as to catch previously unseen segments of that celluloid epic called a day.”

“I think I just do what I feel is good to do. Everybody can give me their suggestions, but at the end, the final risk is mine because it’s my name on the magazine. So I only do what I really feel. Everybody tries to influence you, of course: ‘Oh, this is the right moment to do this’ and ‘This is the right photographer to choose,’ and ‘This is the right model to have…’ I listen, but I must go my own way. When you take risks, it means that you know every month people are there to judge you. Some months are good; some months are bad. When you make a mistake, they call you immediately. And when you do something good, they send flowers to the stylist. So this is a way to say that I want to do it myself. I don’t care if you like it or not. I do the magazine that I think is correct. If you like this issue, I am more than happy. If you don’t like this issue, you will like the next because we do 14 issues a year. So once in a year you will love, no?”

-Franca Sozzani, editor-in-chief or Vogue Italia and editorial director of Condé Nast Italy, in an Interview interview with Livia Firth. On May 4, Sozzani will be in New York to discuss her career (and, if history is any guide, a lot more) at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Register here to attend the free event.

Looks from the spring 2012 Jil Sander collection.

“When I was at industrial-design school, we were all expected to like the Memphis Group and Philippe Starck, but I’ve always been attracted to midcentury modernism. My favorite is the French designer Jean Royère. I love the marriage between different things in his work—the aspects of kitsch, premodernism, and modernism, along with an extreme femininity—but there’s also a robustness. Royère’s designs are very eclectic, but they all come from the world he has put together. His work has had a huge impact on me, but I’ve never bought any of it—it’s unaffordable. Recently, a Royère table came up at auction; the estimate was €12,000 to €15,000. I thought, That’s mine. Then I was on the phone with the auction house wondering if I should go up to €18,000. My God! I didn’t have time to say a thing. The thing went to €120,000!”

-Raf Simons, newly appointed artistic director of Christian Dior, in a recent interview with Alice Rawsthorn for W. Among the designer’s other favorite things, lest you want to send him a congratulatory gift: art by Sterling Ruby, Valentine Schlegel‘s ceramics, the architecture of John Lautner, the Todd Haynes film Safe, and vintage Margiela.