fashion

Jonathan Saunders, with models wearing looks from his spring 2012 collection, before his presentation to the BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund judges in December.

Print- and color-loving Jonathan Saunders has sewn up the 2012 British Fashion Council/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund, the across-the-pond version of Anna Wintour and co.’s wildly successful initiative to boost young design talent. Now in its third year, the BFC/Vogue award provides the winner with £200,000 (at current exchange, just a few dollars over the stateside $300,000 purse) and access to industry mentors. Also shortlisted for the award were Marios Schwab, Mary Katrantzou, Meadham Kirchhoff (designed by Edward Meadham and Benjamin Kirchhoff), Nicholas Kirkwood, Peter Pilotto, Richard Nicoll, Roksanda Ilincic, and Zoe Jordan.

Saunders, who also made the 2011 shortlist, was selected as the winner based on the strength of his critically acclaimed catwalk and pre-collections over the past few seasons, his business plan, and a presentation to a judging committee chaired by Vogue UK editor-in-chief Alexandra Shulman. So what’s next for Saunders’ burgeoning label? “We have four womenswear and two menswear collections a year—so we’ll be expanding these collections and launching accessories,” says the Glasgow-born designer, who counts Rei Kawakubo, Miuccia Prada, Le Corbusier, and Charlotte Perriand among his design heroes. Meanwhile, his fall 2012 collection hits the runway on Sunday, February 19, during London Fashion Week.

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“The most tragic moment of my life was the first show I ever designed for. I had been asked to make shoes for Ossie Clark‘s show in the early ’70s. I was so inexperienced that I didn’t put the steel in the heels of the shoes, which is required to support the shoe and the wearer. So the girls came out walking very strangely in these rubber, bendy high-heeled shoes I had made. I thought ‘Oh dear god! This is the end of me.’ But after the show, even David Hockney and Cecil Beaton said to me ‘It was so interesting that the girls were moving in such a different way.’”

-Manolo Blahnik, in an interview with Tina Gaudoin in The Wall Street Journal

Pictured: Blahnik’s first shoe, designed for Ossie Clark in 1970. (Courtesy Manolo Blahnik)

From left, spring looks from Eighteenth, James Long, Wes Gordon, and Mary Katrantzou.

Paris couture week wrapped up on Wednesday evening at Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild, where Valentino’s Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli sent out a breathtaking collection inspired by Enlightenment philosophes (Rousseau lovely!). Now it’s full speed ahead to the New York shows, which kick off on February 8, followed by fashionfests in London, Milan, and then back to Paris. The latest crop of awards provides a handy cheat sheet of emerging—and in some cases, downright emerged—designers to watch this season:

Fashion Group International took over the uptown NYC outpost of Cipriani yesterday for its annual Rising Star awards luncheon. Designers Isabel and Ruben Toledo offered keynote remarks, while presenters including Ralph Rucci and Thom Browne announced the winners: Wes Gordon and Nonoo’s Misha Nonoo (who tied for the top honor in the women’s ready-to-wear category), Simon Spurr (menswear), Blythe Harris of Stella & Dot (accessories), our Twitter pal Wendy Brandes (fine jewelry), Joe Manus of Shiner International (home/interior design), David and Kavi Moltz of D.S. & Durga (beauty/fragrance entrepreneur ), IFF’s Celine Barel (beauty/fragrance corporate), and Vasken Demirjian‘s Vasken Salon (retail). Check out the full list of finalists here.

Earlier this month, winemaker Ecco Domani announced the seven winners of the 2012 Ecco Domani Fashion Foundation awards (read: $25,000 grants), and the list is full of superfresh faces. The womenswear honorees are twin sisters Daphne and Vera Correll‘s twice-as-nice label Correll Correll, breezy Eighteenth by Alexa Galler, Julie Haus and Jason Alkire‘s Haus Alkire, and Sunhee by Seoul-born designer (and Geoffrey Beene alum) Sunhee. Rounding out the list are Tim Coppens for menswear, Dezso by Sara Beltran for accessories, and Titania Inglis in the sustainable design category.

And across the pond, the British Fashion Council (BFC) recently announced the four designers that will receive Fashion Forward sponsorships (read: satchels of cash) to show their collections in London for the next two seasons: womenswear designers Henry Holland, Louise Gray, and Mary Katrantzou, and menswear maestro James Long, who is the first menswear designer to receive support through this scheme. The awards program, established six years ago to help emerging British designers show and develop their businesses in London, also includes access to business support provided by the BFC.

Brad Goreski wasn’t always the beacon of style he is today. In our Media Beat interview, the star of It’s a Brad, Brad World revealed that he had to overcome a lack of access (he’s originally from a tiny town in Canada) and the doubts of others to climb to the top. One college career counselor, in particular, was quite taken aback by a young Goreski’s outsize ambition.

“She’s like, ‘Okay, so what do you wanna do?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m gonna get an internship at Vogue in New York.’ And she was like, ‘Excuse me?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m gonna get an internship at Vogue. Is that possible for me to get credit and go to New York?’ And she was like, ‘If you get the internship…’ And I was like, ‘Okay!’” Goreski told us. “And I came back later with all my paperwork, and she was like, ‘Are you really going to New York?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah! I’m going to work at Vogue!’”

Now, with a hit show on Bravo and Born to Be Brad: My Life in Style So Far due in bookstores in March, the taste maker credits those early work experiences for his success.

“Internships are so instrumental but, not only do you need to get them, you need to work at them,” he said.

Part 1: Breakout Styling Star Brad Goreski Takes Us Inside His Brad, Brad World
Part 2: Brad Goreski Sets the Record Straight on His Relationship with Rachel Zoe

Fans of The Rachel Zoe Project may have noticed that the star stylist doesn’t take kindly to staff members striking out on their own (and isn’t above launching smear campaigns when they do so). Her former protégé, Brad Goreski, found this out the hard way. He appeared to part with Zoe on good terms toward the end of season three of her reality series, but by season four, she was lobbing criticisms and allegations of client-stealing at her once-beloved style director. In this second segment of our Media Beat interview with Goreski, he opens up about his relationship with Zoe—or lack thereof. “It’s strange that it turned into this whole thing, because to me, it’s a very logical thing to assist somebody and then, after a certain amount of time, choose to leave ad go go off and do your own thing,” says the star of the new Bravo series It’s a Brad Brad World. “I think that’s a really natural progression.” As for the alleged client swiping, Goreski sees this as a non-issue. “Can you really steal people, and especially people who are celebrities?” He asks. “They choose who they want to work with.”

Part 1: Breakout Styling Star Brad Goreski Takes Us Inside His Brad, Brad World
Part 3: How Brad Goreski Got an Internship at Vogue

Even if you don’t know Thom Browne from Tom Ford, you probably recognize the bespectacled visage and signature coiff of Brad Goreski. The dapper Canadian was the breakout star of Bravo’s The Rachel Zoe Project, which documented his rise from steamer-wielding errand boy to Oscar-night styling protégé, and now he’s striking out with a celebrity-styling career and addictive reality series of his own. It’s a Brad, Brad World, which airs Monday nights on Bravo, follows Goreski as he starts a styling business and trades quips with his longtime boyfriend, TV writer and producer Gary Janetti (Will & Grace, Family Guy). A note to design fans: glimpses of the couple’s midcentury mod home in the Hollywood Hills, along with the show’s snappy and saturated setting shots, are reason enough to tune in. “We decided we would go on a crazy ride, a wild adventure, and hopefully the audience will come along with us,” Goreski tells us in this first segment of our three-part Media Beat interview. “I’m not exactly sure what a ‘Brad, Brad World’ is yet—it’s just that you never know where you’re going to end up.”

Part 2: Brad Goreski Sets the Record Straight on His Relationship with Rachel Zoe
Part 3: How Brad Goreski Got an Internship at Vogue

Last July, after the freshly launched design flash sale site Fab.com had landed its first round of venture funding (a cool $8 million, led by Menlo Ventures), founder Jason Goldberg touted the site’s diverse mix of merch, from chairs and stationery to bikes and biscotti. There was just one category he said that the company would steer clear of: fashion. “We don’t have any ambition in the fashion category,” Goldberg told Venturebeat, in what sounded like an attempt to differentiate his site from the flash-sale fray (read: Gilt Groupe). “That’s more about liquidation; our model is more about opening a new channel for suppliers.” Five months and $40 million in Series B funding later, Fab.com has flip-flopped on fashion and acquired FashionStake, which launched in the fall of 2010 as a kind of Kickstarter-style fundraising platform for independent fashion designers and evolved into an Etsy-like marketplace for their wares. “We’re going to do the exact same thing we’ve done with design products to fashion,” wrote Goldberg today in a blog post announcing the deal. “Make no mistake, we’re keenly aware that there are plenty of sites that sell high-end fashion for a discount. That’s not Fab. We’re doing fashion the Fab way; designed to make you smile.” Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but FashionStake founders Vivian Weng and Daniel Gulati will be joining Fab.com. According to Weng and Gulati, FashionStake will relaunch on Fab.com in mid-February.

With dynamo conductor Gustavo Dudamel at the helm and the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall as a venue, the Los Angeles Philharmonic is a cultural force to be reckoned with. This year, the LA Phil kicks off a three-year project celebrating the operatic collaborations of librettist Lorenzo da Ponte and composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with some impressive collaborations of its own. The upcoming production of Don Giovanni will feature sets by Gehry and costumes by Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte.

“This is a project very close to Gustavo Dudamel’s heart. He knows the music like the back of his hand, and has a unique vision that I find very exciting,” said Gehry in a statement issued by the LA Phil announcing the creative team and cast for Don Giovanni, which premieres on May 18. “Kate and Laura’s work reminds me of my early days—it is free and fearless and not precious.” This marks the Mulleavys first foray into operatic costume design, following their show-stopping tutus for the film Black Swan. “Opera has always been a part of us; our grandmother was from Rome and studied it as a young girl,” said the sisters, now at work on costumes that will create “a timeless context” for Mozart’s characters. “Working with Frank Gehry in the concert hall that he designed, alongside Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is a dream.”

“I hate collections when I am done with them. I love the show when…you know, if the show is at six o’clock, I like the show at ten to six, I’m like, ‘Wow. This is so amazing.’ After the show, everybody goes to a party, I go home. I wear pajamas, I call Pizza Hut, they do a delivery. Cheesy crust. And I sit home and I watch a movie by myself, and then at midnight they send me a video of the show. I look at it and my heart is beating, and I say, ‘Oh my God, it’s horrible.’ I went to Regine [a psychic] and I asked her, ‘What is wrong with me? How come I liked it one moment and I hated it the next?’ And she didn’t have an answer, but I did. I thought that, especially in my job, if you love too much what you do, you go nowhere. The fact that the moment I’m done with it I don’t like it anymore, it gives me the chance to go back to work and start all over again.”

-Alber Elbaz, creative director of Lanvin, in a conversation last fall at the embattled Centro Niemeyer in Avilés, Spain, with Cathy Horyn of The New York Times

In a year studded with beautiful new volumes by and about artists and designers ranging from Alexander McQueen to Andrea Zittel, these are the five that we found most inspiring.

Autobiography of a Fashion Designer: Ralph Rucci (Bauer and Dean) by Ralph Rucci, with photographs by Baldomero Fernandez
Fashion designer and artist Ralph Rucci has been betrayed by key members of the fashion press, who should have made him a household name years ago, but critics, curators, and connoisseurs have picked up the slack. This just-published volume is a fascinating follow-up to Ralph Rucci: The Art of Weightlessness (Yale University Press), published in 2007 to accompany the Museum at FIT’s exhibition of the designer’s work. Like Rucci’s exquisite creations, Autobiography of a Fashion Designer rewards patience and close-looking, with pages of lush color photos and descriptions of the couture techniques used (and in some cases pioneered) in the Chado Ralph Rucci atelier. Inspired by Sol LeWitt’s Autobiography (1980), a kind of exhaustive visual index of the artist’s life, this book also tells the stories behind 20 objects Rucci has collected in his lifetime. It’s a fitting tribute to an uncompromising designer with the soul of artist.

Alexander Girard by Todd Oldham and Kiera Coffee (Ammo Books)
Treat yourself to the amazing Alexander Girard mega-monograph by designer Todd Oldham and writer Kiera Coffee. The product of nearly four years of research and, at 672 pages, an innovative scheme of printing and binding, this book is a must for any design lover. Oldham was granted exclusive permission to sift through the fastidiously kept archives of Girard (1907-1993), who is best known for his folk art-infused textiles for Herman Miller but also designed everything from buildings to typography. “I’d estimate that 90 percent of the work in the book hasn’t been seen,” Oldham told us earlier this year. “Wait ‘til you see the stuff from his early design career, in the ‘20s.” And take a closer look at the image credits: many of the archival photos were taken by frequent Girard collaborator Charles Eames.
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