Showing posts with label New York Times. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New York Times. Show all posts
New York Times | Daria Strokous by Greg Kessler
New York Times Model-Morphosis
Model: Daria Strokous
Photographer: Greg Kessler
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/model-morphosis-daria-strokous-at-jason-wu/
Model: Daria Strokous
Photographer: Greg Kessler
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/model-morphosis-daria-strokous-at-jason-wu/
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:
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:
Natasa Vojnovic in The New York Times
Natasa Vojnovic in todays New York Times:
Photo Michael Falco for The New York Times
NO FRILLS The designer Alexander Wang with the models Missy Rayder, center, and Natasa Vojnovic in his New York studio. In five years Mr. Wang, 25, has built a $25 million company
by Ruth La Ferla
DON’T tell Alexander Wang that blue is the new black or that wedge-heel boots are the season’s must-have. Such airy edicts would most likely make him laugh. “No one talks like that anymore,” said Mr. Wang, whose keen sense of what young women want to wear is matched only by his no-nonsense approach to his, um, métier.
“Fashion in some people’s eyes is very untouchable and super-indulgent,” he said. “For me, it’s just clothes to be worn. And at the end of the day, the point is to sell the product.”
That sounds pretty hardnosed, coming as it does from fashion’s latest It Child, a lanky, tousled 25-year-old design-school dropout who, in a scant five years, has leapfrogged from toting garment bags for Vogue to mapping out the vision behind a $25 million family business that is growing at a gallop. Mr. Wang’s aggressively street-inflected collections (only six to date) are as avidly monitored by fashion insiders as they are by the shoppers who snap up his leather leggings, draped jersey dresses and biker vests.
Mr. Wang’s success is partly an outgrowth of his unstudiedly sexy aesthetic, a tough but sultry look that is as much his stock in trade as his signature filmy T-shirts.
His style is “humorously slutty,” said Sally Singer, the fashion features director of Vogue. “He gives you that effortless, languid look that is the province of the young and the club-going.”
But lately this go-to designer for models and assorted urban sylphs has shown signs of growing up. His sophisticated shapes and wallet-friendly prices are now speaking compellingly to a mature population of bankers, teachers and Botoxed social dragonflies who aspire to his brand of urban cool.
“His clothes just hit the edges of what’s acceptable,” Ms. Singer said. “They appeal to that part of you that wishes you were a skinny hipster.”
No need to clue in Veronica Chu, a makeup artist in Manhattan who recently attended a personal appearance by the designer at Barneys New York. “Most of us aren’t a Size 2,” Ms. Chu said. “It’s nice to be able to wear sexy but comfortable clothes that are not overly girly. I’m kind of over that look.”
Another fan, a marketing associate on Wall Street who asked not to be identified because she should have been at work, wore a pinstripe approximation of a banker’s jacket, a straitlaced departure for Mr. Wang. “His merchandise used to be just for the hip and young,” she said. “Now all kinds of women wear his clothes.”
That may be in part because Mr. Wang demonstrates a canny-beyond-his-years grasp of commercial realities. “Ever since the business has launched, it’s been very measured,” said Jennifer Wheeler, the vice president for designer apparel at Nordstrom. “He hasn’t bitten off more than he can chew. His deliveries are steady, and his quality is consistent. He hasn’t gone through some of the growing pains new designers can go through if they have success right off the bat.”
Mr. Wang runs his mini-empire without outside backers or benefit of a family fortune. He works alongside his mother; his sister-in law, Aimie Wang, an accountant; and his brother, Dennis Wang, who brings to the enterprise a background in international business development. “Alexander is the ultimate shopper,” Dennis Wang said. “He’s very aware of what’s out there — the different looks, the different price points. He has a very innate sense, a clarity of vision, of where he sees the company going. Everybody we bring on, from accounting to production, he has an interest in meeting.”
Ms. Singer, who worked closely with the designer at Vogue last year, when he received a cash prize and mentoring from the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, was struck by his patent affection for the bottom line. “What impressed the judges,” she said, “was that he is on to every aspect of what he does: the clothes, the image, the retail growth. It slightly blows you away that someone so young could have taken in so much so quickly.”
Mr. Wang, of course, is a study in precocity, his affection for the rag trade nurtured, it seems, from the cradle. “I can’t remember when he wasn’t into fashion,” Dennis Wang said.
Once, thumbing through a dog-eared copy of Harper’s Bazaar that he had taken from a hair salon, Alexander, then 8, encountered an image that is still etched on his retina. “It was a model in a pinstripe Tom Ford suit for Gucci,” he recalled. Even as a schoolboy, he was savvy enough to recognize the model as Georgina Grenville and the photographer as Patrick Demarchelier. “I carried that picture with me everywhere,” he said.
Growing up in San Francisco, where his parents owned a packaging company, Mr. Wang dreamed of traveling to Paris and London “to check out the stores.” In his teens he visited London, enrolling in a summer course at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, spawning ground for Alexander McQueen, among others. He said he found school, including Parsons, which he briefly attended in New York, exasperating.
“What was missing was how would I be able to execute my ideas into a business,” he said. “I knew from Day 1 I wanted to do a lifestyle brand.”
That phrase would not come trippingly to most adolescents. To Mr. Wang, it meant catering to a constituency of skinny, loose-limbed school chums and fashion muses like the model Erin Wasson and the social figure Victoria Traina, who wear his designs with a throwaway flair. Close inspection reveals that he has placed their after-hours uniforms — sweat pants, slouchy T-shirts, shredded jeans — under a microscope, inspecting every hole and blotch and incorporating those gritty touches into his designs: a lacy top, for instance, patterned after sweat stains.
Some observers, unacquainted with such subtleties, dismissed his early efforts as self-conscious and derivative of designers like Rick Owens or Daryl Kerrigan.
Few would argue that Mr. Wang is a trailblazer on the order of his early idols, designers like Helmut Lang. “His clothes have a little more oomph,” said Humberto Leon, an owner of the downtown Manhattan boutique Opening Ceremony. Unconventional without being outrageous, they allow a wide range of women to “feel they can think out of the box,” Mr. Leon said.
Such muted praise is fine with Mr. Wang. “I am not reinventing the wheel,” he said. “I’m not an artiste.”
No ivory tower recluse, he had no sooner sketched and draped his first collection, a six-piece knitwear line introduced in 2005, than he was dashing into stores to see where it was hanging and who had bought it.
“From the very first season I would look at the numbers, check our profit margins,” he said. “Not that I micromanage, but I like to be involved in each process.”
That attention to detail goes some way toward explaining why, when other designers are downsizing, Mr. Wang’s sales have tripled since late last year, according to his brother. Some 400 stores, including 220 in the United States, now carry the Wang label, which encompasses ready-to-wear, shoes and handbags (some 30 percent of the business); a secondary T-shirt line (20 percent); and a recently introduced men’s wear collection.
Was it only a half-dozen years ago that Mr. Wang was prowling eBay for coveted tickets to the CFDA Awards, the Oscars of fashion? That his name could not be uttered without the obligatory qualifier, “no relation to Vera”? Retailers say that more than 50 percent of his clothing sells at full price, impressive compared with less than 20 percent for some more established brands.
Though his name is mentioned these days in the same breath with style-makers like Marc Jacobs, Mr. Wang has hung on to the easy laugh and a sense of cool that seems almost a birthright.
“He is real,” Ms. Wheeler of Nordstrom said. “He’s not having to create some mystique.”
Mr. Wang himself seems taken aback by his swiftly rising fortunes. Smiling sheepishly and tugging at his trademark curls, he could only offer, “It’s, like, weird to see my name on things.”
Photo Michael Falco for The New York Times
NO FRILLS The designer Alexander Wang with the models Missy Rayder, center, and Natasa Vojnovic in his New York studio. In five years Mr. Wang, 25, has built a $25 million company
by Ruth La Ferla
DON’T tell Alexander Wang that blue is the new black or that wedge-heel boots are the season’s must-have. Such airy edicts would most likely make him laugh. “No one talks like that anymore,” said Mr. Wang, whose keen sense of what young women want to wear is matched only by his no-nonsense approach to his, um, métier.
“Fashion in some people’s eyes is very untouchable and super-indulgent,” he said. “For me, it’s just clothes to be worn. And at the end of the day, the point is to sell the product.”
That sounds pretty hardnosed, coming as it does from fashion’s latest It Child, a lanky, tousled 25-year-old design-school dropout who, in a scant five years, has leapfrogged from toting garment bags for Vogue to mapping out the vision behind a $25 million family business that is growing at a gallop. Mr. Wang’s aggressively street-inflected collections (only six to date) are as avidly monitored by fashion insiders as they are by the shoppers who snap up his leather leggings, draped jersey dresses and biker vests.
Mr. Wang’s success is partly an outgrowth of his unstudiedly sexy aesthetic, a tough but sultry look that is as much his stock in trade as his signature filmy T-shirts.
His style is “humorously slutty,” said Sally Singer, the fashion features director of Vogue. “He gives you that effortless, languid look that is the province of the young and the club-going.”
But lately this go-to designer for models and assorted urban sylphs has shown signs of growing up. His sophisticated shapes and wallet-friendly prices are now speaking compellingly to a mature population of bankers, teachers and Botoxed social dragonflies who aspire to his brand of urban cool.
“His clothes just hit the edges of what’s acceptable,” Ms. Singer said. “They appeal to that part of you that wishes you were a skinny hipster.”
No need to clue in Veronica Chu, a makeup artist in Manhattan who recently attended a personal appearance by the designer at Barneys New York. “Most of us aren’t a Size 2,” Ms. Chu said. “It’s nice to be able to wear sexy but comfortable clothes that are not overly girly. I’m kind of over that look.”
Another fan, a marketing associate on Wall Street who asked not to be identified because she should have been at work, wore a pinstripe approximation of a banker’s jacket, a straitlaced departure for Mr. Wang. “His merchandise used to be just for the hip and young,” she said. “Now all kinds of women wear his clothes.”
That may be in part because Mr. Wang demonstrates a canny-beyond-his-years grasp of commercial realities. “Ever since the business has launched, it’s been very measured,” said Jennifer Wheeler, the vice president for designer apparel at Nordstrom. “He hasn’t bitten off more than he can chew. His deliveries are steady, and his quality is consistent. He hasn’t gone through some of the growing pains new designers can go through if they have success right off the bat.”
Mr. Wang runs his mini-empire without outside backers or benefit of a family fortune. He works alongside his mother; his sister-in law, Aimie Wang, an accountant; and his brother, Dennis Wang, who brings to the enterprise a background in international business development. “Alexander is the ultimate shopper,” Dennis Wang said. “He’s very aware of what’s out there — the different looks, the different price points. He has a very innate sense, a clarity of vision, of where he sees the company going. Everybody we bring on, from accounting to production, he has an interest in meeting.”
Ms. Singer, who worked closely with the designer at Vogue last year, when he received a cash prize and mentoring from the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, was struck by his patent affection for the bottom line. “What impressed the judges,” she said, “was that he is on to every aspect of what he does: the clothes, the image, the retail growth. It slightly blows you away that someone so young could have taken in so much so quickly.”
Mr. Wang, of course, is a study in precocity, his affection for the rag trade nurtured, it seems, from the cradle. “I can’t remember when he wasn’t into fashion,” Dennis Wang said.
Once, thumbing through a dog-eared copy of Harper’s Bazaar that he had taken from a hair salon, Alexander, then 8, encountered an image that is still etched on his retina. “It was a model in a pinstripe Tom Ford suit for Gucci,” he recalled. Even as a schoolboy, he was savvy enough to recognize the model as Georgina Grenville and the photographer as Patrick Demarchelier. “I carried that picture with me everywhere,” he said.
Growing up in San Francisco, where his parents owned a packaging company, Mr. Wang dreamed of traveling to Paris and London “to check out the stores.” In his teens he visited London, enrolling in a summer course at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, spawning ground for Alexander McQueen, among others. He said he found school, including Parsons, which he briefly attended in New York, exasperating.
“What was missing was how would I be able to execute my ideas into a business,” he said. “I knew from Day 1 I wanted to do a lifestyle brand.”
That phrase would not come trippingly to most adolescents. To Mr. Wang, it meant catering to a constituency of skinny, loose-limbed school chums and fashion muses like the model Erin Wasson and the social figure Victoria Traina, who wear his designs with a throwaway flair. Close inspection reveals that he has placed their after-hours uniforms — sweat pants, slouchy T-shirts, shredded jeans — under a microscope, inspecting every hole and blotch and incorporating those gritty touches into his designs: a lacy top, for instance, patterned after sweat stains.
Some observers, unacquainted with such subtleties, dismissed his early efforts as self-conscious and derivative of designers like Rick Owens or Daryl Kerrigan.
Few would argue that Mr. Wang is a trailblazer on the order of his early idols, designers like Helmut Lang. “His clothes have a little more oomph,” said Humberto Leon, an owner of the downtown Manhattan boutique Opening Ceremony. Unconventional without being outrageous, they allow a wide range of women to “feel they can think out of the box,” Mr. Leon said.
Such muted praise is fine with Mr. Wang. “I am not reinventing the wheel,” he said. “I’m not an artiste.”
No ivory tower recluse, he had no sooner sketched and draped his first collection, a six-piece knitwear line introduced in 2005, than he was dashing into stores to see where it was hanging and who had bought it.
“From the very first season I would look at the numbers, check our profit margins,” he said. “Not that I micromanage, but I like to be involved in each process.”
That attention to detail goes some way toward explaining why, when other designers are downsizing, Mr. Wang’s sales have tripled since late last year, according to his brother. Some 400 stores, including 220 in the United States, now carry the Wang label, which encompasses ready-to-wear, shoes and handbags (some 30 percent of the business); a secondary T-shirt line (20 percent); and a recently introduced men’s wear collection.
Was it only a half-dozen years ago that Mr. Wang was prowling eBay for coveted tickets to the CFDA Awards, the Oscars of fashion? That his name could not be uttered without the obligatory qualifier, “no relation to Vera”? Retailers say that more than 50 percent of his clothing sells at full price, impressive compared with less than 20 percent for some more established brands.
Though his name is mentioned these days in the same breath with style-makers like Marc Jacobs, Mr. Wang has hung on to the easy laugh and a sense of cool that seems almost a birthright.
“He is real,” Ms. Wheeler of Nordstrom said. “He’s not having to create some mystique.”
Mr. Wang himself seems taken aback by his swiftly rising fortunes. Smiling sheepishly and tugging at his trademark curls, he could only offer, “It’s, like, weird to see my name on things.”
High Fashion Faces a Redefining Moment
From the New York Times today:
Joseph Altuzarra, a young designer in New York, specializes in ruched georgette dresses, priced around $2,000, which are made in France. Recently, he asked his factory there if it might simplify the ruching process to lower costs. The factory refused.
“They said they would be ashamed to produce a garment that way,” Mr. Altuzarra recalled.
Then he took a sample to a New York City factory to see if it might produce garments for him. “They looked at the sample and passed it around the factory and 15 minutes later said, ‘We can’t do it,’ ” Mr. Altuzarra said. “It was technically impossible for them to do it.”
Joseph Altuzarra, a young designer in New York, specializes in ruched georgette dresses, priced around $2,000, which are made in France. Recently, he asked his factory there if it might simplify the ruching process to lower costs. The factory refused.
“They said they would be ashamed to produce a garment that way,” Mr. Altuzarra recalled.
Then he took a sample to a New York City factory to see if it might produce garments for him. “They looked at the sample and passed it around the factory and 15 minutes later said, ‘We can’t do it,’ ” Mr. Altuzarra said. “It was technically impossible for them to do it.”
RIP Octavia Saint Laurent
From The New York Times:
R.I.P. Octavia Saint Laurent
By Horacio Silva
The world is a decidedly less chic place this week with the passing on Monday of the legendary transgendered beauty Octavia Saint Laurent, who won hearts and an honorary place in the pantheon of the fabulous with her star turn in Jennie Livingston’s 1990 voguing documentary, “Paris Is Burning.” Octavia, who later changed her name to Heavenly Angel Octavia Saint Laurent Manolo Blahnik before settling on the more recession-friendly Octavia Saint Laurent Mizrahi, will be remembered not only for her encyclopedic knowledge of feminine allure — her deconstruction of the many of the looks of Paulina Porizkova in “Paris Is Burning” should be required viewing for every drag artiste in training heels — but also for having lived a glamorous life worthy of tens across the board.
R.I.P. Octavia Saint Laurent
By Horacio Silva
The world is a decidedly less chic place this week with the passing on Monday of the legendary transgendered beauty Octavia Saint Laurent, who won hearts and an honorary place in the pantheon of the fabulous with her star turn in Jennie Livingston’s 1990 voguing documentary, “Paris Is Burning.” Octavia, who later changed her name to Heavenly Angel Octavia Saint Laurent Manolo Blahnik before settling on the more recession-friendly Octavia Saint Laurent Mizrahi, will be remembered not only for her encyclopedic knowledge of feminine allure — her deconstruction of the many of the looks of Paulina Porizkova in “Paris Is Burning” should be required viewing for every drag artiste in training heels — but also for having lived a glamorous life worthy of tens across the board.
Richard Avedon opening tonight at the International Center of Photography
Tonight I will be attending the opening of the Richard Avedon exhibition at the International Center of Photography.
Veruschka with Richard Avedon, dress by Kimberly, New York, January 1967
From the ICP:
Richard Avedon (1923–2004) revolutionized fashion photography starting in the post-World War II era and redefined the role of the fashion photographer. Anticipating many of the cultural cross-fertilizations that have occurred between high art, commercial art, fashion, advertising, and pop culture in the last twenty years, he created spirited, imaginative photographs that showed fashion and the modern woman in a new light. He shook up the chilly, static formulas of the fashion photograph and by 1950 was the most imitated American editorial photographer. Injecting a forthright, American energy into a business that had been dominated by Europeans, Avedon's stylistic innovations continue to influence photographers around the world.
This exhibition will be the most comprehensive exploration to date of Avedon's fashion photography during his long career at Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, The New Yorker, and beyond. Working closely with The Richard Avedon Foundation, ICP curator Carol Squiers and guest curator Vince Aletti will present new scholarship on the evolution and extraordinary, ongoing impact of his work. The exhibition will feature more than 200 works by Richard Avedon, spanning his entire career, and will include vintage prints, contact sheets, magazine layouts, and archival material.
Several Women models were fortunate enough to work with Richard Avedon, including Veruschka, Kylie Bax, Christina Kruse and Karen Elson.
Veruschka, dress by Kimberly,New York, January 1967
Veruschka, Photo: Richard Avedon
Kylie Bax
Kylie Bax
Kylie Bax
Kylie Bax
Christina Kruse
Christina Kruse
Karen Elson
Karen Elson
Despite the hullabaloo she caused, which the writer Thomas Whiteside described in a profile that year in The New Yorker, Twiggy’s career was actually brief. It is Avedon’s pictures that make us think of her as the definitive ’60s child.
His gift was not merely for the alive moment — the model, her chin up, leaping cleanly over a puddle. Rather, it was for knowing which of the myriad of gestures produced the truest sense of the moment. Whiteside found Avedon’s process utterly unique, explaining he “exercised meticulous control over his model, almost as though he were working from a blueprint.”
That blueprint is, broadly, the subject of a retrospective at the International Center of Photography, from May 15 to Sept. 6.
From his earliest, sun-splashed pictures in 1944 to portraits in 2000 that convey his fashion fatigue, the I.C.P. exhibition is the largest survey of Avedon’s fashion work since the Metropolitan Museum show in 1978.
In both appearance and personality, Avedon cut the ideal figure of a fashion photographer, and five years after his death, at age 81, he remains that. His photographic style has been widely imitated, not least by Steven Meisel. Generations of models have sprung across mid-tone seamless backdrops, or sat pensively in cafes, or pretended to be in love or quite alone — all because of Avedon. And yet if his images retain their special power, if the experiences and emotions they present seem lived and not merely imitated, it may be because he is the more complete photographer.
A twice-married man, whose energy and trim, compact looks seemed to embody the word “flair,” Avedon often harbored doubts about his next project, yet recovered quickly. His great passion, outside of picture-making and his family, was the theater. A friend, the writer Adam Gopnik, reckoned that Avedon saw Mandy Patinkin’s one-man show 35 times in the space of a summer. “He lived for performance,” Mr. Gopnik said.
It’s probable that as a teenager in New York in the early ’40s — Avedon dropped out of DeWitt Clinton High School and enlisted in the merchant marine, where he learned basic photography — he saw not so much the fashion in the streets as the cosmopolitan gestures that animated it. Movement entered his pictures for Harper’s Bazaar soon after he arrived there. Storytelling followed, especially once he began shooting the Paris collections and invented street scenes for models like Dovima and Dorian Leigh, or his first wife, Doe Avedon.
Already on the masthead at Bazaar was Martin Munkacsi, the Hungarian-born photographer whose action shots impressed Henri Cartier-Bresson, among others. In later years, when he discussed his beginnings, Avedon often made Munkacsi out to be a more distant figure than he was, according to the exhibition’s curators, Carol Squiers and Vince Aletti.
Then again, Avedon always maintained that in every picture he was photographing himself. When Ms. Squiers asked the photographer Lillian Bassman, who spent summers with Avedon and their families on Fire Island, why he had his models running — or laughing — she replied: “Did you ever meet Dick? He was always jumping around.”
Outdoor shots and innovative photography were part of the terrain at Bazaar in the ’40s and ’50s. The cultural life in New York similarly enriched the work of other photographers, notably Irving Penn, who was at Vogue and who would be Avedon’s friend and rival for the next 40 years. So what made Avedon different?
HE was keenly aware that beauty had an element of tragedy — it faded, for one thing, or it came at a terrible loss of self. Growing up, Avedon heard his mother say to his sister Louise, who would eventually die, at 42, in a mental institution, “You’re so beautiful you don’t have to open your mouth.” This notion that beauty can be intoxicating but, equally, impoverishing to the soul, Ms. Squiers said, tinged Avedon’s early pictures with a feeling of compassion.
And it may never have completely left him. A photograph he made in 1998 of a robotic-looking model wearing a mouth plug seemed to circle back to his sister. Such pictures, made when he was a staff photographer at The New Yorker, suggested Avedon’s long view of fashion, but also a distinct side of his personality. “There was a real sadness about him,” said Norma Stevens, who joined his studio in 1976 and today runs the Richard Avedon Foundation. “He loved working, and he would be up for that. But it was like a performance. After that there would be a drop.”
Drawn to theatrical performers, Avedon took numerous portraits when he was at Bazaar, and, like Penn, derived a lot of artistic satisfaction from them. Yet into the ’60s, influenced by the Civil Rights movement and the poets of the counterculture, the portraits acquired a hardness that made critics question Avedon’s right to be more than a fashion photographer. An eviscerating review in 1964 by Robert Brustein of “Nothing Personal,” the book Avedon did with James Baldwin, left him unable to do serious projects for the next five years.
The crisis also affected his fashion work. “You can see he’s been knocked off his game in a lot of those pictures,” Ms. Squiers said. In 1965, Avedon left Bazaar and followed his close ally, Diana Vreeland, to Vogue. As at Bazaar, Vreeland gave him free rein and, more important, said Mr. Aletti, the curator, protected him from the interference of Vogue’s art director, Alexander Liberman.
Surprisingly, Avedon’s pictures in the ’60s of models like Twiggy and Penelope Tree were seen by some critics as anti-fashion. Avedon — the ’50s golden boy, the inspiration for Fred Astaire’s suave character in the movie “Funny Face” — was now savaging beauty and elegance. Not only was he fleeing from the confines of fashion magazines, he was also seeking revenge.
COMMENTS of this sort make you wonder how much the critics knew about fashion. If anything, Avedon’s stripped-down aesthetic and motion are representative of the era’s frenetic energy.
Mr. Gopnik, who first met Avedon in 1985 when the photographer was completing his series of portraits called “In the American West,” believes the attacks were motivated by jealousy and envy. People resented the famous, good-looking man who took such delight in his work and, at the same time, kept exploring new areas. “I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that,” Mr. Gopnik said.
Avedon’s photography has always amounted to a plea for beauty — to see it mysterious, to see it raw but ultimately to see it whole. To view his portraits in the ’50s and ’60s is to see the flip side of the decades’ stylish obsessions. And whether the faces were beautiful or ravaged, famous or not, the portraits relentlessly informed the fashion images, and vice versa.
Certainly by the ’90s, with notions like Prada’s ugly beauty, the categories of beauty had dissolved. For Avedon, though, the lines had faded long before, if they were ever that clear. Perhaps the famous “Avedon blur” expressed the futility, even the tragedy, of permanent beliefs.
“I certainly think — I know — that the apparent line between his fashion photography and his portraits was false, that he saw it as continuous work,” Mr. Gopnik said, adding that Avedon was amused at how people could look at the empty face of a model and find it more beautiful than the worn face of a coal miner. “It was not an affectation on his part,” he said. The I.C.P. exhibition, picking up where the 1978 Metropolitan show left off and allowing the first complete view of Avedon’s fashion photography, strips away the last shadows on his art.
Veruschka with Richard Avedon, dress by Kimberly, New York, January 1967
From the ICP:
Richard Avedon (1923–2004) revolutionized fashion photography starting in the post-World War II era and redefined the role of the fashion photographer. Anticipating many of the cultural cross-fertilizations that have occurred between high art, commercial art, fashion, advertising, and pop culture in the last twenty years, he created spirited, imaginative photographs that showed fashion and the modern woman in a new light. He shook up the chilly, static formulas of the fashion photograph and by 1950 was the most imitated American editorial photographer. Injecting a forthright, American energy into a business that had been dominated by Europeans, Avedon's stylistic innovations continue to influence photographers around the world.
This exhibition will be the most comprehensive exploration to date of Avedon's fashion photography during his long career at Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, The New Yorker, and beyond. Working closely with The Richard Avedon Foundation, ICP curator Carol Squiers and guest curator Vince Aletti will present new scholarship on the evolution and extraordinary, ongoing impact of his work. The exhibition will feature more than 200 works by Richard Avedon, spanning his entire career, and will include vintage prints, contact sheets, magazine layouts, and archival material.
Several Women models were fortunate enough to work with Richard Avedon, including Veruschka, Kylie Bax, Christina Kruse and Karen Elson.
Veruschka, dress by Kimberly,New York, January 1967
Veruschka, Photo: Richard Avedon
Kylie Bax
Kylie Bax
Kylie Bax
Kylie Bax
Christina Kruse
Christina Kruse
Karen Elson
Karen Elson
Karen Elson
How Avedon Blurred His Own Image
By CATHY HORYN
Published: May 13, 2009
ON a morning in April 1967, Twiggy, the doe-eyed British modeling sensation, sat on a stool before Richard Avedon in his studio on East 58th Street. She had on a plain black dress and black fishnets, and it was her first session with the fashion photographer. She was 17.
By CATHY HORYN
Published: May 13, 2009
ON a morning in April 1967, Twiggy, the doe-eyed British modeling sensation, sat on a stool before Richard Avedon in his studio on East 58th Street. She had on a plain black dress and black fishnets, and it was her first session with the fashion photographer. She was 17.
As Avedon stood behind a Rolleiflex camera mounted on a tripod, the Kinks blared from a phonograph nearby. Since he began photographing beautiful women in the mid-1940s — first for Harper’s Bazaar, then Vogue — Avedon made it a practice to ask his models what music and food they preferred. This more than contributed to the relaxed atmosphere of the studio. “They all wanted to please him,” said Polly Mellen, the Vogue editor on that shoot.
Bending over the Rolleiflex, Avedon said, “All right, now, very straight,” and Twiggy sat up straight and turned her gaze to the camera.
Despite the hullabaloo she caused, which the writer Thomas Whiteside described in a profile that year in The New Yorker, Twiggy’s career was actually brief. It is Avedon’s pictures that make us think of her as the definitive ’60s child.
His gift was not merely for the alive moment — the model, her chin up, leaping cleanly over a puddle. Rather, it was for knowing which of the myriad of gestures produced the truest sense of the moment. Whiteside found Avedon’s process utterly unique, explaining he “exercised meticulous control over his model, almost as though he were working from a blueprint.”
That blueprint is, broadly, the subject of a retrospective at the International Center of Photography, from May 15 to Sept. 6.
From his earliest, sun-splashed pictures in 1944 to portraits in 2000 that convey his fashion fatigue, the I.C.P. exhibition is the largest survey of Avedon’s fashion work since the Metropolitan Museum show in 1978.
In both appearance and personality, Avedon cut the ideal figure of a fashion photographer, and five years after his death, at age 81, he remains that. His photographic style has been widely imitated, not least by Steven Meisel. Generations of models have sprung across mid-tone seamless backdrops, or sat pensively in cafes, or pretended to be in love or quite alone — all because of Avedon. And yet if his images retain their special power, if the experiences and emotions they present seem lived and not merely imitated, it may be because he is the more complete photographer.
A twice-married man, whose energy and trim, compact looks seemed to embody the word “flair,” Avedon often harbored doubts about his next project, yet recovered quickly. His great passion, outside of picture-making and his family, was the theater. A friend, the writer Adam Gopnik, reckoned that Avedon saw Mandy Patinkin’s one-man show 35 times in the space of a summer. “He lived for performance,” Mr. Gopnik said.
It’s probable that as a teenager in New York in the early ’40s — Avedon dropped out of DeWitt Clinton High School and enlisted in the merchant marine, where he learned basic photography — he saw not so much the fashion in the streets as the cosmopolitan gestures that animated it. Movement entered his pictures for Harper’s Bazaar soon after he arrived there. Storytelling followed, especially once he began shooting the Paris collections and invented street scenes for models like Dovima and Dorian Leigh, or his first wife, Doe Avedon.
Already on the masthead at Bazaar was Martin Munkacsi, the Hungarian-born photographer whose action shots impressed Henri Cartier-Bresson, among others. In later years, when he discussed his beginnings, Avedon often made Munkacsi out to be a more distant figure than he was, according to the exhibition’s curators, Carol Squiers and Vince Aletti.
Then again, Avedon always maintained that in every picture he was photographing himself. When Ms. Squiers asked the photographer Lillian Bassman, who spent summers with Avedon and their families on Fire Island, why he had his models running — or laughing — she replied: “Did you ever meet Dick? He was always jumping around.”
Outdoor shots and innovative photography were part of the terrain at Bazaar in the ’40s and ’50s. The cultural life in New York similarly enriched the work of other photographers, notably Irving Penn, who was at Vogue and who would be Avedon’s friend and rival for the next 40 years. So what made Avedon different?
HE was keenly aware that beauty had an element of tragedy — it faded, for one thing, or it came at a terrible loss of self. Growing up, Avedon heard his mother say to his sister Louise, who would eventually die, at 42, in a mental institution, “You’re so beautiful you don’t have to open your mouth.” This notion that beauty can be intoxicating but, equally, impoverishing to the soul, Ms. Squiers said, tinged Avedon’s early pictures with a feeling of compassion.
And it may never have completely left him. A photograph he made in 1998 of a robotic-looking model wearing a mouth plug seemed to circle back to his sister. Such pictures, made when he was a staff photographer at The New Yorker, suggested Avedon’s long view of fashion, but also a distinct side of his personality. “There was a real sadness about him,” said Norma Stevens, who joined his studio in 1976 and today runs the Richard Avedon Foundation. “He loved working, and he would be up for that. But it was like a performance. After that there would be a drop.”
Drawn to theatrical performers, Avedon took numerous portraits when he was at Bazaar, and, like Penn, derived a lot of artistic satisfaction from them. Yet into the ’60s, influenced by the Civil Rights movement and the poets of the counterculture, the portraits acquired a hardness that made critics question Avedon’s right to be more than a fashion photographer. An eviscerating review in 1964 by Robert Brustein of “Nothing Personal,” the book Avedon did with James Baldwin, left him unable to do serious projects for the next five years.
The crisis also affected his fashion work. “You can see he’s been knocked off his game in a lot of those pictures,” Ms. Squiers said. In 1965, Avedon left Bazaar and followed his close ally, Diana Vreeland, to Vogue. As at Bazaar, Vreeland gave him free rein and, more important, said Mr. Aletti, the curator, protected him from the interference of Vogue’s art director, Alexander Liberman.
Surprisingly, Avedon’s pictures in the ’60s of models like Twiggy and Penelope Tree were seen by some critics as anti-fashion. Avedon — the ’50s golden boy, the inspiration for Fred Astaire’s suave character in the movie “Funny Face” — was now savaging beauty and elegance. Not only was he fleeing from the confines of fashion magazines, he was also seeking revenge.
COMMENTS of this sort make you wonder how much the critics knew about fashion. If anything, Avedon’s stripped-down aesthetic and motion are representative of the era’s frenetic energy.
Mr. Gopnik, who first met Avedon in 1985 when the photographer was completing his series of portraits called “In the American West,” believes the attacks were motivated by jealousy and envy. People resented the famous, good-looking man who took such delight in his work and, at the same time, kept exploring new areas. “I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that,” Mr. Gopnik said.
Avedon’s photography has always amounted to a plea for beauty — to see it mysterious, to see it raw but ultimately to see it whole. To view his portraits in the ’50s and ’60s is to see the flip side of the decades’ stylish obsessions. And whether the faces were beautiful or ravaged, famous or not, the portraits relentlessly informed the fashion images, and vice versa.
Certainly by the ’90s, with notions like Prada’s ugly beauty, the categories of beauty had dissolved. For Avedon, though, the lines had faded long before, if they were ever that clear. Perhaps the famous “Avedon blur” expressed the futility, even the tragedy, of permanent beliefs.
“I certainly think — I know — that the apparent line between his fashion photography and his portraits was false, that he saw it as continuous work,” Mr. Gopnik said, adding that Avedon was amused at how people could look at the empty face of a model and find it more beautiful than the worn face of a coal miner. “It was not an affectation on his part,” he said. The I.C.P. exhibition, picking up where the 1978 Metropolitan show left off and allowing the first complete view of Avedon’s fashion photography, strips away the last shadows on his art.
Three Hundred and Seventeen and Counting
From the New York Times / T The Moment:
Fine Print ‘Three Hundred and Seventeen and Counting’
By David Sebbah
The photographer Steven Meisel has photographed every single cover of Italian Vogue for the last 20 years and nine months. From visual parodies of super models heading into rehab, to B-listers posing on the red carpet, to photographing the artist Elizabeth Peyton for the cover way back in 1998, Meisel has used his lens to tap into the zeitgeist. This week, the photographer’s third book, “Three Hundred and Seventeen and Counting,” will be published by Mallard/Janvier. For information about purchasing the book, write to mallard.janvier@gmail.com.
Fine Print ‘Three Hundred and Seventeen and Counting’
By David Sebbah
The photographer Steven Meisel has photographed every single cover of Italian Vogue for the last 20 years and nine months. From visual parodies of super models heading into rehab, to B-listers posing on the red carpet, to photographing the artist Elizabeth Peyton for the cover way back in 1998, Meisel has used his lens to tap into the zeitgeist. This week, the photographer’s third book, “Three Hundred and Seventeen and Counting,” will be published by Mallard/Janvier. For information about purchasing the book, write to mallard.janvier@gmail.com.
24 Hours From Tulsa
Last night my friend Liz Rywelski was in town to see Younger Than Jesus at The New Museum. Ryan Trecartin's films Sibling Topics (Section A and Section B), featuring Liz, debuted at the show. In January I (minimally) worked as a PA on these films - it was exciting to see Ryan's vision come to fruition. Ryan is a modern Cassandra - his prophecies about the economy are coming true every single day.
Ryan Trecartin's videos are included in “Louis Vuitton: A Passion for Creation”, which is slated to run from May 22 to Aug. 9 at the Hong Kong Museum of Art. It recounts the French luxury firm’s long association with the art world, from the Art Deco designers who collaborated with the founder’s grandson on trunks to more recent hook-ups on leather goods with contemporary art stars such as Takashi Murakami and Richard Prince. His videos are amongst Vuitton's permanant collection.
Ryan Trecartin, photographed by Moris Moreno for The New York Times
Composite image from Ryan Trecartin's Sibling Topics (Section A and Section B):
Liz Rywelski Portraits: Kmart, Walmart, and Olan Mills, Suits 1, 2 and 3 2002-present:
Before the show, Liz and I visited my new neighbor on Lafayette Street: Baby Grand, a cocktail lounge with a karaoke machine.
Liz performed Smells Like Booty - she requested Nirvana's "Smells like Teen Spirit", and sang the lyrics to Destiny's Child's "Bootylicious". Her voice and dance moves turned the mother out.
I sang Gene Pitney's 24 Hours From Tulsa. I didn't turn the mother out, but a great time was had by all. 24 Hours From Tulsa, written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David is a very hard song to sing. All of Burt Bacharach's songs are epic (in every sense of the word)
Burt always had a cinematic vision:
24 Hours From Tulsa is the story of a man (or a woman) who was travelling home (to a lover in Tulsa, Oklahoma) when he met someone else, had a one night stand, fell in love, and can never go home to Tulsa. I do believe in love at first sight.
Gene Pitney version of 24 Hours From Tulsa:
Dearest, darling
I had to write to say that I won't be home, any more
For something happened, to me
While I was driving home
And I'm not the same any more
Oh, I was only, twenty-four hours from Tulsa
Ah, only, one day away from your arms
I saw a welcoming light
And stopped to rest for the night
And that is when I, saw her
As I pulled in outside of a small hotel, she was there
And so I walked up, to her
Asked where I could get something to eat
And she, showed me where
Oh, I was only, twenty-four hours from Tulsa
Ah, only, one day away from your arms
She took me to the café
I asked her if she would stay
She said, "okay"
(instrumental)
Oh, I was only, twenty-four hours from Tulsa
Ah, only, one day away from your arms
A juke box started to play
And that turned into today
As we were dancing, closely
All of a sudden I lost control as I, held her charms
And I caressed her, kissed her
Told her I'd die before I would let her out, of my arms
Oh, I was only, twenty-four hours from Tulsa
Ah, only, one day away from your arms
I hate to do this to you
But I love somebody new
What can, I do?
And I can never, never, never, go home again
Dusty Springfield version of 24 Hours From Tulsa:
Ryan Trecartin's videos are included in “Louis Vuitton: A Passion for Creation”, which is slated to run from May 22 to Aug. 9 at the Hong Kong Museum of Art. It recounts the French luxury firm’s long association with the art world, from the Art Deco designers who collaborated with the founder’s grandson on trunks to more recent hook-ups on leather goods with contemporary art stars such as Takashi Murakami and Richard Prince. His videos are amongst Vuitton's permanant collection.
Ryan Trecartin, photographed by Moris Moreno for The New York Times
Composite image from Ryan Trecartin's Sibling Topics (Section A and Section B):
Liz Rywelski Portraits: Kmart, Walmart, and Olan Mills, Suits 1, 2 and 3 2002-present:
Before the show, Liz and I visited my new neighbor on Lafayette Street: Baby Grand, a cocktail lounge with a karaoke machine.
Liz performed Smells Like Booty - she requested Nirvana's "Smells like Teen Spirit", and sang the lyrics to Destiny's Child's "Bootylicious". Her voice and dance moves turned the mother out.
I sang Gene Pitney's 24 Hours From Tulsa. I didn't turn the mother out, but a great time was had by all. 24 Hours From Tulsa, written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David is a very hard song to sing. All of Burt Bacharach's songs are epic (in every sense of the word)
Burt always had a cinematic vision:
"When I was doing songs with Dionne, I was thinking in terms of miniature- Burt Bacharach
movies, you know? Three-and-a-half-minute movies, with peak moments and not one
intensity level the whole way through. ... You can tell a story and be able to
be explosive one minute, then get quiet as kind of a satisfying resolution."
24 Hours From Tulsa is the story of a man (or a woman) who was travelling home (to a lover in Tulsa, Oklahoma) when he met someone else, had a one night stand, fell in love, and can never go home to Tulsa. I do believe in love at first sight.
Gene Pitney version of 24 Hours From Tulsa:
Dearest, darling
I had to write to say that I won't be home, any more
For something happened, to me
While I was driving home
And I'm not the same any more
Oh, I was only, twenty-four hours from Tulsa
Ah, only, one day away from your arms
I saw a welcoming light
And stopped to rest for the night
And that is when I, saw her
As I pulled in outside of a small hotel, she was there
And so I walked up, to her
Asked where I could get something to eat
And she, showed me where
Oh, I was only, twenty-four hours from Tulsa
Ah, only, one day away from your arms
She took me to the café
I asked her if she would stay
She said, "okay"
(instrumental)
Oh, I was only, twenty-four hours from Tulsa
Ah, only, one day away from your arms
A juke box started to play
And that turned into today
As we were dancing, closely
All of a sudden I lost control as I, held her charms
And I caressed her, kissed her
Told her I'd die before I would let her out, of my arms
Oh, I was only, twenty-four hours from Tulsa
Ah, only, one day away from your arms
I hate to do this to you
But I love somebody new
What can, I do?
And I can never, never, never, go home again
Dusty Springfield version of 24 Hours From Tulsa:
Balenciaga Fall 2009 Show
Balenciaga Fall 2009 Show
Time: March 5, 2009 at 10:00 am
Location: Hotel de Crillon, 10, place de la Concorde 75008 Paris - France
Designer: Nicolas Ghesquiere
Casting Director: Ashley Brokaw
Kasia Struss
Olga Sherer
Natasha Poly
March 5, 2009, 6:17 am — Updated: 6:41 am -->
Balenciaga: Paris Under the Skin
By Cathy Horyn
It sort of adds up: the whispering tingle of Serge Gainsbourg on the soundtrack, the smart-looking shoulders, the mix of Persian blue and kelly green, the draped satin dress in a blend of colors. Today’s Balenciaga show was all about Yves.
Even the setting, in a salon room at the Crillon Hotel, seemed a nod to Yves Saint Laurent, who used to present his haute couture collections at a nearby hotel. And yet, considering how many designers have been influenced by Saint Laurent, this was a very good show on its own merits, an interpretation by a pro who understands the connections between one designer and another, between one generation and the next. Nicolas Ghesquiere has always looked to the women around him; his early collections at Balenciaga captured a style he saw on the street, and Saint Laurent himself was similarly influenced.
A virtue of this collection — certainly from the perspective of sales — is that the overall look is softer and more frankly feminine than Ghesquiere’s recent collections. The main event is the draped skirt or (even better) the draped trousers in dark satin; they ripple softly over the hips and taper down the leg. One pair was shown with a tailored jacket in black wool with black satin draped on the lower half. Another black blazer, showed with a black lace bandeau top, came out with dark gray striped pants. In a sense, Ghesquiere made his mark with trousers, and it’s great to see him again make a statement with them.
The other news was the draped coat dress, in black wool but predominantly in spotty, splashy prints, which Ghesquiere said after the show were inspired by the Balenciaga archive. Suede heels came in a blend of colors, typically with a swag of satin at one side.
One wonders if Ghesquiere has long harbored an itch to interpret Saint Laurent. He bided his time, and chose his motifs carefully. Still, this is a modern Balenciaga collection through and through.
Time: March 5, 2009 at 10:00 am
Location: Hotel de Crillon, 10, place de la Concorde 75008 Paris - France
Designer: Nicolas Ghesquiere
Casting Director: Ashley Brokaw
Kasia Struss
Olga Sherer
Natasha Poly
March 5, 2009, 6:17 am — Updated: 6:41 am -->
Balenciaga: Paris Under the Skin
By Cathy Horyn
It sort of adds up: the whispering tingle of Serge Gainsbourg on the soundtrack, the smart-looking shoulders, the mix of Persian blue and kelly green, the draped satin dress in a blend of colors. Today’s Balenciaga show was all about Yves.
Even the setting, in a salon room at the Crillon Hotel, seemed a nod to Yves Saint Laurent, who used to present his haute couture collections at a nearby hotel. And yet, considering how many designers have been influenced by Saint Laurent, this was a very good show on its own merits, an interpretation by a pro who understands the connections between one designer and another, between one generation and the next. Nicolas Ghesquiere has always looked to the women around him; his early collections at Balenciaga captured a style he saw on the street, and Saint Laurent himself was similarly influenced.
A virtue of this collection — certainly from the perspective of sales — is that the overall look is softer and more frankly feminine than Ghesquiere’s recent collections. The main event is the draped skirt or (even better) the draped trousers in dark satin; they ripple softly over the hips and taper down the leg. One pair was shown with a tailored jacket in black wool with black satin draped on the lower half. Another black blazer, showed with a black lace bandeau top, came out with dark gray striped pants. In a sense, Ghesquiere made his mark with trousers, and it’s great to see him again make a statement with them.
The other news was the draped coat dress, in black wool but predominantly in spotty, splashy prints, which Ghesquiere said after the show were inspired by the Balenciaga archive. Suede heels came in a blend of colors, typically with a swag of satin at one side.
One wonders if Ghesquiere has long harbored an itch to interpret Saint Laurent. He bided his time, and chose his motifs carefully. Still, this is a modern Balenciaga collection through and through.
Women Loves Noah Kalina
Women Loves Noah Kalina
I have worked with Noah Kalina for several years now, beginning at Supreme, and now at Women. He is a master at manipulating natural light and augmenting it to make Women look beautiful.
Yesterday he emailed me about shooting a model, and we spoke a for a bit. He casually mentioned his YouTube Video.
Every day, Noah take a self portrait to document the day, and passage of time. These daily self portraits can be seen at: Every Day Noah Kalina. I was aware of the stills he had shot, and admired his dedication to pursuing this project as part of his everyday life.
I had no idea of how this project has gone from a private passion to become a phenomenon!
Noah is extremely modest.
He compiled YouTube video of images from January 11, 2000 - July 31, 2006. This video has been watched 12,122,954 times. That is amazing!!!!!!!! I feel so ignorant that literally millions of people had seen this film before me.
This project has been written about in New York Times, The Washington Post, inspired a Simpsons episode, exhibited at an exhibition at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne and been featured on VH1 Big in '06 awards.
I am happy to see Noah's work recognized by pop culture, and celebrated by the art community.
Noah is amongst the first photographers to recognize the beauty in models such as Valeria Dmitrienko, Heloise Guerin, Lisa Gregusson, Daiane Conterato and Cecilia Mendez
Valeria Dmitrienko, photographed January 24, 2008
Heloise Guerin, photographed October 26, 2007
Heloise Guerin, photographed October 26, 2007
Heloise Guerin, photographed October 26, 2007
Heloise Guerin, photographed October 26, 2007
Lisa Gregusson/Supreme, photographed June 2nd, 2007.
Daiane Conterato/Supreme, photographed May 27th, 2006
Cecilia Mendez/Supreme, photographed May 4th, 2006
Cecilia Mendez/Supreme, photographed May 4th, 2006.
The Simpons did a parody of Noah's project, featuring the life of Homer Simpson:
From the Washington Post:
He Oughta Be in Pictures
If you watched VH1's "Big in '06" awards show earlier this month, you might have noticed the random photos of stars leading into and out of commercial breaks. From Paris Hilton to Flavor Flav to Danny Bonaduce, they all had one thing in common: Noah Kalina. Who is Noah Kalina? He's the mastermind behind the Web site Noah K. Everyday -- a six-year (so far) archive of self-portraits -- and the viral video hit based on the project. VH1 asked Kalina to slightly modify his project for the awards show and the result is now compiled on Kalina's flickr stream.
Yesterday, Kalina and I e-mailed about what it's like being an Internet sensation, which stars played nice and why Will.i.am was kind of annoying:
Liz: Although you're probably sick of it, can you briefly describe the premise behind Noah K. Everyday?
Noah Kalina: I have been taking a photograph of myself every day since January 2000. It was originally just a photo project but about five months ago I saw a project done by a woman name Ahree Lee where she had taken a photo of herself every day for three years. It inspired me to do the same, so I put my photos together into a time-lapse and put it on YouTube. Within three weeks it became somewhat of an international internet sensation.
Liz: The flickr pix with celebrities -- how did you get them to pose with you? Were the pictures snapped over time or all at one event?
NK: That project was done backstage at the VH1 Big in '06 awards. I got a call from one of the producers of the show and they invited me to come out to Los Angeles and do this project backstage. A little hesitant, I asked if any of the celebrities would even know who I was. They assured me that my video was so big and such a huge part of popular culture everyone would know who I was. Of course that was not the case.
The concept was pretty straightforward. I would basically take my photo in the same fashion that I have done my everyday project, just with the celebrities in the frame. All of the photos would run as a time-lapse during the credits. I even sent them photos of my bedroom which they put as the background. I had a lot of creative control as to how it was to go down, so I was satisfied.
If you watch the show you basically see me between every commercial break, and then they run about eight seconds of the project at the end.
The funny thing is that they never explain it or even make mention of it during the show. If you never saw my video you would probably be scratching your head wondering who the hell I am. I think that was the best part.
Liz: How did you convince them to pose with you or were they already familiar with the phenomenon that is Noah K.?
NK: I just sat there while the producers wrangled all of the celebrities once they got off stage. It was funny hearing the producers trying to explain the project to the different celebrities. They should have had a TV playing my video so they could see what it was all about, but instead they had a black and white printout the front page of my everyday Web site. It was impossible to get the idea of who I was just by looking at this piece of paper. I wouldn't have even understood what they were talking about.
Just about everybody was a good sport since it was actually a legitimate part of the show. I only witnessed two stars decline the offer. They were Dominic Monaghan and Megan Mullally. The former was a disappointment because I am a big fan of "Lost," the latter, well, no big deal...
The only celebs that were actually familiar with the phenomenon that is Noah K were Weird Al Yankovic and Paris Hilton. How perfect is that?
Liz: Who was your favorite subject?
NK: I would have to say the Hulk Hogan and family. I think it's one of the best photos and they were all really nice people. It's too bad mom got cut out of the shot. After we took our shots, The Hulkster asked me "What made you start to do this project" And I said, "I don't know, I just thought it was a good idea." (That is my short answer, when I don't have a lot of time to get into it.) The Hulk shook his head and said, "It was a good idea... I think I am going to start doing that."
Liz: Any interesting stories/anecdotes from the photo shoot?
NK: After I did the photos with Fergie and Will.i.am, Fergie turned to me and started asking me questions about my project. She seemed genuinely interested which I thought was really cool, most of the other stars immediately walked away after we were done. But there is Will.i.am stepping over my answers not letting me speak. Apparently he just wanted to hear his own voice. So Fergie ends up walking away, and Will stood next to me and started talking to me for about five minutes about how we gotta "tax" the man and that YouTube is stealing all our money. I tried to explain to him that it was never about the money, but he wasn't buying it. He just kept saying "We gotta tax the man." I just shook my head and agreed. He finally had to go do something and let me alone.
Liz: Was it difficult to keep your trademark catatonic look in the pictures with the celebrities? I'd imagine it'd be a little more distracting than your normal solo self-portraits.
NK: I don't know if I would call it a catatonic look, I just consider it a blank emotionless stare. It really wasn't that difficult. I was really focused on what I was trying to do so I was able to block out all the distractions.
Liz: What is David Hasselhoff doing to you in the photo?
NK: I would like to think that he is calling KITT to come pick us up.
Liz: What's your day job?
NK: I am an artist and freelance photographer. I do a variety of work from portraits to landscapes to interiors. My work is often seen on Web sites and magazines. You can check out more of my work at http://www.noahkalina.com/ and http://www.interiors.noahkalina.com/.
Mario Lopez with Noah Kalina
Joey Lawrence with Noah Kalina
David Hasselhoff with Noah Kalina
Flava Flav with Noah Kalina
Danny Bonaduce with Noah Kalina
Dennis DeYoung with Noah Kalina
From the New York Times:
Look at Me, World! Self-Portraits Morph Into Internet Movies
By KEITH SCHNEIDER
NOAH KALINA flew to Switzerland last month to attend the opening of “We’re All Photographers Now,” an exhibition at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne. The show is a survey of trends in digital photography, particularly portraiture, and Mr. Kalina produced its foremost example of how technology is changing the genre. His globally popular video “everyday” is composed of 2,356 daily self-portraits shot from Jan. 11, 2000, to July 31, 2006.
Mr. Kalina, 26, lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and earns his living photographing the interiors of Manhattan bars and restaurants. Ever since he posted “everyday” to YouTube in August, this six-minute film has generated a low-level conversation in photographic circles about its artistic merits.
But what makes “everyday” truly exceptional is how easy it was to make and how quickly it attracted a huge audience, said William A. Ewing, director of the Musée de l’Elysée, who selected it for the exhibition.
“Noah’s video represents a phenomenal amplification not just in what he produced and how he did it, but how many people the piece touched in such a short period of time,” said Mr. Ewing, the author of “Face: The New Photographic Portrait” (Thames & Hudson). “There is nothing comparable in the history of photography.”
“Digital technology, computers, software and the Internet multiply the number of people with access to taking and viewing pictures,” he added. “Once you buy the camera, there are almost no other costs. That is increasing the variety and creativity in how people take pictures, and what they do with them.”
“We’re All Photographers Now” (http://www.allphotographersnow.ch/) continues through May 30.
Mr. Kalina, like other photographers in the show, many of them amateurs, used a combination of digital tools and technical know-how that has become routine for his generation. By adroitly joining digital still photography, computer software and the Internet, he turned a student art project characterized principally by self-absorption into a global phenomenon.
“Everyday” succeeds in large part because it adheres to all three of the new principles of digital media, said Jonathan Lipkin, a professor of digital media at Ramapo College in New Jersey and the author of “Photography Reborn” (Abrams).
“The hallmarks of the new age of digital imagery are distribution, combination and manipulation,” Mr. Lipkin said. “The use of digital technology is especially revealing in portraiture. The digital camera has changed the genre. Before now it was just about impossible to do what Noah Kalina has done.”
Just one facet of the film project took real devotion: Mr. Kalina’s daily routine of snapping his own picture for nearly six years. The other part — transforming portraits that individually had attracted no attention into a film that is riveting — was almost too easy.
One afternoon in late August, prompted by a similar film of time-lapse portraiture made that month by the California graphic designer Ahree Lee, Mr. Kalina collected the digital self- portraits he had taken since he was a 19-year-old student at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He downloaded them into the Windows Movie Maker software program on his desktop computer, spaced the portraits at an interval of six images per second, set the film to a shadowy and insistent piano soundtrack (composed and performed by Carly Comando, his girlfriend at the time) and wrote the credits and title.
Making the film took four hours. That’s all. Then Mr. Kalina, like millions of others of his generation for whom stylized digital self-portraits are an important personal message and a form of self-actualization, posted it on Aug. 28 to YouTube. (It can also be found on noahkalina.com.) The response, he said, was instantaneous and unnerving. Thousands of young people, who regard the Internet as a vast digital campfire, found “everyday,” shared links with their friends and built an audience that has reached 5.3 million and is growing by 10,000 per day.
“Until that moment it was always a still-photography project,” Mr. Kalina said. “A friend suggested that it could be a movie. I was never convinced it would really work until I saw Ahree Lee’s movie. Now there’s a whole group of people making these kind of films and posting them on the Internet.”
One of the distinguishing characteristics of the new age of digital portraiture is the ease with which photographers, professional or amateur, can so easily produce images, videos, sequences and other projects that are dramatic, fresh and interesting. “Digital technology has changed what portraits look like,” Mr. Lipkin said. “If you pay attention to Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and the other social Internet sites, you see right away how stylized the portraits are. How they are taken from odd angles and with interesting lighting. It’s the angle of the hand-held digital camera.”
Jonathan Keller, a 31-year-old multimedia graphic artist studying at the Cranbrook Academy of Art outside Detroit, turned eight years of daily self-portraits into a video titled “Living My Life Faster” and posted it to his Web site (c71123.com/daily_photo). But his more significant contribution to the new form is his online archive of what he calls “passage of time” and “obsessive” photo projects.
Among the 40 projects on the site is Ms. Lee’s “me,” composed of more than 1,000 self-portraits taken from November 2001 to November 2004 and regarded as the first digital video portrait. Ms. Lee said she used a Nikon digital camera that had a flip screen so she could see herself while snapping the image. She used Photoshop software to align her eyes and After Effects software to create the animation. It took her 200 to 300 hours, she said, and on Aug. 8 “me” was posted on AtomFilms (me.atomfilms.com), an Internet site for independent filmmakers. She also posted it on YouTube, where it has attracted more than three million viewers.
“It would be possible to do this without digital technology, but it would be so much more difficult and expensive,” said Ms. Lee, 35, who lives in San Francisco (ahreelee.com). “If you use a film camera, you would have to buy rolls of film and get them processed, and do whatever you would need to do — and I don’t know what that is — to turn it into a film.”
Whether “me” or “everyday” or any of the other projects archived on Mr. Keller’s site qualify as art is in dispute in some quarters of the photography world. Richard Benson, a photographer, printer and professor of photography at Yale University since 1979, called them “a complete waste of time.”
“They are people who don’t know what they are doing and who celebrate themselves,” Mr. Benson said. “I find it completely boring.”
But Mr. Ewing and Mr. Lipkin say such views may reflect generational insecurity, prompted by the old-guard notion that good work that isn’t laborious isn’t worth much. Mr. Kalina’s “everyday” is a dramatic challenge to those conventions, Mr. Ewing said, because it breaks barriers, has helped to establish a new form of portraiture and sets a new standard of audience interest.
Mr. Kalina’s instinct for narrative makes the film work. The background is the room in which he’s living at the time. It changes episodically, producing visual interest and adding information. Ms. Comando’s soundtrack, which she now sells on the Internet, is appropriately portentous. Mr. Kalina doesn’t age, though at times he looks worn, and his haircut evolves through phases of short, long and unkempt. His gaze also doesn’t waver.
“He hypnotizes you with those eyes,” Mr. Ewing said. “The changing background and the changing hairstyle enhances a frenetic pace, the feeling of hurtling through space. But there is also a sense of a kind of dispassionate distance, the feeling of being the observer. Unlike a single digital image, the kind that appears on Flickr, in this film there is a sense of rapidity and infinite possibility.
“It’s a remarkable piece,” Mr. Ewing continued. “That’s why we ask in our show: Is this a revolution or just an evolution? The answer is it’s a revolution.”
I have worked with Noah Kalina for several years now, beginning at Supreme, and now at Women. He is a master at manipulating natural light and augmenting it to make Women look beautiful.
Yesterday he emailed me about shooting a model, and we spoke a for a bit. He casually mentioned his YouTube Video.
Every day, Noah take a self portrait to document the day, and passage of time. These daily self portraits can be seen at: Every Day Noah Kalina. I was aware of the stills he had shot, and admired his dedication to pursuing this project as part of his everyday life.
I had no idea of how this project has gone from a private passion to become a phenomenon!
Noah is extremely modest.
He compiled YouTube video of images from January 11, 2000 - July 31, 2006. This video has been watched 12,122,954 times. That is amazing!!!!!!!! I feel so ignorant that literally millions of people had seen this film before me.
This project has been written about in New York Times, The Washington Post, inspired a Simpsons episode, exhibited at an exhibition at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne and been featured on VH1 Big in '06 awards.
I am happy to see Noah's work recognized by pop culture, and celebrated by the art community.
Noah is amongst the first photographers to recognize the beauty in models such as Valeria Dmitrienko, Heloise Guerin, Lisa Gregusson, Daiane Conterato and Cecilia Mendez
Valeria Dmitrienko, photographed January 24, 2008
Heloise Guerin, photographed October 26, 2007
Heloise Guerin, photographed October 26, 2007
Heloise Guerin, photographed October 26, 2007
Heloise Guerin, photographed October 26, 2007
Lisa Gregusson/Supreme, photographed June 2nd, 2007.
Daiane Conterato/Supreme, photographed May 27th, 2006
Cecilia Mendez/Supreme, photographed May 4th, 2006
Cecilia Mendez/Supreme, photographed May 4th, 2006.
The Simpons did a parody of Noah's project, featuring the life of Homer Simpson:
From the Washington Post:
He Oughta Be in Pictures
If you watched VH1's "Big in '06" awards show earlier this month, you might have noticed the random photos of stars leading into and out of commercial breaks. From Paris Hilton to Flavor Flav to Danny Bonaduce, they all had one thing in common: Noah Kalina. Who is Noah Kalina? He's the mastermind behind the Web site Noah K. Everyday -- a six-year (so far) archive of self-portraits -- and the viral video hit based on the project. VH1 asked Kalina to slightly modify his project for the awards show and the result is now compiled on Kalina's flickr stream.
Yesterday, Kalina and I e-mailed about what it's like being an Internet sensation, which stars played nice and why Will.i.am was kind of annoying:
Liz: Although you're probably sick of it, can you briefly describe the premise behind Noah K. Everyday?
Noah Kalina: I have been taking a photograph of myself every day since January 2000. It was originally just a photo project but about five months ago I saw a project done by a woman name Ahree Lee where she had taken a photo of herself every day for three years. It inspired me to do the same, so I put my photos together into a time-lapse and put it on YouTube. Within three weeks it became somewhat of an international internet sensation.
Liz: The flickr pix with celebrities -- how did you get them to pose with you? Were the pictures snapped over time or all at one event?
NK: That project was done backstage at the VH1 Big in '06 awards. I got a call from one of the producers of the show and they invited me to come out to Los Angeles and do this project backstage. A little hesitant, I asked if any of the celebrities would even know who I was. They assured me that my video was so big and such a huge part of popular culture everyone would know who I was. Of course that was not the case.
The concept was pretty straightforward. I would basically take my photo in the same fashion that I have done my everyday project, just with the celebrities in the frame. All of the photos would run as a time-lapse during the credits. I even sent them photos of my bedroom which they put as the background. I had a lot of creative control as to how it was to go down, so I was satisfied.
If you watch the show you basically see me between every commercial break, and then they run about eight seconds of the project at the end.
The funny thing is that they never explain it or even make mention of it during the show. If you never saw my video you would probably be scratching your head wondering who the hell I am. I think that was the best part.
Liz: How did you convince them to pose with you or were they already familiar with the phenomenon that is Noah K.?
NK: I just sat there while the producers wrangled all of the celebrities once they got off stage. It was funny hearing the producers trying to explain the project to the different celebrities. They should have had a TV playing my video so they could see what it was all about, but instead they had a black and white printout the front page of my everyday Web site. It was impossible to get the idea of who I was just by looking at this piece of paper. I wouldn't have even understood what they were talking about.
Just about everybody was a good sport since it was actually a legitimate part of the show. I only witnessed two stars decline the offer. They were Dominic Monaghan and Megan Mullally. The former was a disappointment because I am a big fan of "Lost," the latter, well, no big deal...
The only celebs that were actually familiar with the phenomenon that is Noah K were Weird Al Yankovic and Paris Hilton. How perfect is that?
Liz: Who was your favorite subject?
NK: I would have to say the Hulk Hogan and family. I think it's one of the best photos and they were all really nice people. It's too bad mom got cut out of the shot. After we took our shots, The Hulkster asked me "What made you start to do this project" And I said, "I don't know, I just thought it was a good idea." (That is my short answer, when I don't have a lot of time to get into it.) The Hulk shook his head and said, "It was a good idea... I think I am going to start doing that."
Liz: Any interesting stories/anecdotes from the photo shoot?
NK: After I did the photos with Fergie and Will.i.am, Fergie turned to me and started asking me questions about my project. She seemed genuinely interested which I thought was really cool, most of the other stars immediately walked away after we were done. But there is Will.i.am stepping over my answers not letting me speak. Apparently he just wanted to hear his own voice. So Fergie ends up walking away, and Will stood next to me and started talking to me for about five minutes about how we gotta "tax" the man and that YouTube is stealing all our money. I tried to explain to him that it was never about the money, but he wasn't buying it. He just kept saying "We gotta tax the man." I just shook my head and agreed. He finally had to go do something and let me alone.
Liz: Was it difficult to keep your trademark catatonic look in the pictures with the celebrities? I'd imagine it'd be a little more distracting than your normal solo self-portraits.
NK: I don't know if I would call it a catatonic look, I just consider it a blank emotionless stare. It really wasn't that difficult. I was really focused on what I was trying to do so I was able to block out all the distractions.
Liz: What is David Hasselhoff doing to you in the photo?
NK: I would like to think that he is calling KITT to come pick us up.
Liz: What's your day job?
NK: I am an artist and freelance photographer. I do a variety of work from portraits to landscapes to interiors. My work is often seen on Web sites and magazines. You can check out more of my work at http://www.noahkalina.com/ and http://www.interiors.noahkalina.com/.
Mario Lopez with Noah Kalina
Joey Lawrence with Noah Kalina
David Hasselhoff with Noah Kalina
Flava Flav with Noah Kalina
Danny Bonaduce with Noah Kalina
Dennis DeYoung with Noah Kalina
From the New York Times:
Look at Me, World! Self-Portraits Morph Into Internet Movies
By KEITH SCHNEIDER
NOAH KALINA flew to Switzerland last month to attend the opening of “We’re All Photographers Now,” an exhibition at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne. The show is a survey of trends in digital photography, particularly portraiture, and Mr. Kalina produced its foremost example of how technology is changing the genre. His globally popular video “everyday” is composed of 2,356 daily self-portraits shot from Jan. 11, 2000, to July 31, 2006.
Mr. Kalina, 26, lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and earns his living photographing the interiors of Manhattan bars and restaurants. Ever since he posted “everyday” to YouTube in August, this six-minute film has generated a low-level conversation in photographic circles about its artistic merits.
But what makes “everyday” truly exceptional is how easy it was to make and how quickly it attracted a huge audience, said William A. Ewing, director of the Musée de l’Elysée, who selected it for the exhibition.
“Noah’s video represents a phenomenal amplification not just in what he produced and how he did it, but how many people the piece touched in such a short period of time,” said Mr. Ewing, the author of “Face: The New Photographic Portrait” (Thames & Hudson). “There is nothing comparable in the history of photography.”
“Digital technology, computers, software and the Internet multiply the number of people with access to taking and viewing pictures,” he added. “Once you buy the camera, there are almost no other costs. That is increasing the variety and creativity in how people take pictures, and what they do with them.”
“We’re All Photographers Now” (http://www.allphotographersnow.ch/) continues through May 30.
Mr. Kalina, like other photographers in the show, many of them amateurs, used a combination of digital tools and technical know-how that has become routine for his generation. By adroitly joining digital still photography, computer software and the Internet, he turned a student art project characterized principally by self-absorption into a global phenomenon.
“Everyday” succeeds in large part because it adheres to all three of the new principles of digital media, said Jonathan Lipkin, a professor of digital media at Ramapo College in New Jersey and the author of “Photography Reborn” (Abrams).
“The hallmarks of the new age of digital imagery are distribution, combination and manipulation,” Mr. Lipkin said. “The use of digital technology is especially revealing in portraiture. The digital camera has changed the genre. Before now it was just about impossible to do what Noah Kalina has done.”
Just one facet of the film project took real devotion: Mr. Kalina’s daily routine of snapping his own picture for nearly six years. The other part — transforming portraits that individually had attracted no attention into a film that is riveting — was almost too easy.
One afternoon in late August, prompted by a similar film of time-lapse portraiture made that month by the California graphic designer Ahree Lee, Mr. Kalina collected the digital self- portraits he had taken since he was a 19-year-old student at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He downloaded them into the Windows Movie Maker software program on his desktop computer, spaced the portraits at an interval of six images per second, set the film to a shadowy and insistent piano soundtrack (composed and performed by Carly Comando, his girlfriend at the time) and wrote the credits and title.
Making the film took four hours. That’s all. Then Mr. Kalina, like millions of others of his generation for whom stylized digital self-portraits are an important personal message and a form of self-actualization, posted it on Aug. 28 to YouTube. (It can also be found on noahkalina.com.) The response, he said, was instantaneous and unnerving. Thousands of young people, who regard the Internet as a vast digital campfire, found “everyday,” shared links with their friends and built an audience that has reached 5.3 million and is growing by 10,000 per day.
“Until that moment it was always a still-photography project,” Mr. Kalina said. “A friend suggested that it could be a movie. I was never convinced it would really work until I saw Ahree Lee’s movie. Now there’s a whole group of people making these kind of films and posting them on the Internet.”
One of the distinguishing characteristics of the new age of digital portraiture is the ease with which photographers, professional or amateur, can so easily produce images, videos, sequences and other projects that are dramatic, fresh and interesting. “Digital technology has changed what portraits look like,” Mr. Lipkin said. “If you pay attention to Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and the other social Internet sites, you see right away how stylized the portraits are. How they are taken from odd angles and with interesting lighting. It’s the angle of the hand-held digital camera.”
Jonathan Keller, a 31-year-old multimedia graphic artist studying at the Cranbrook Academy of Art outside Detroit, turned eight years of daily self-portraits into a video titled “Living My Life Faster” and posted it to his Web site (c71123.com/daily_photo). But his more significant contribution to the new form is his online archive of what he calls “passage of time” and “obsessive” photo projects.
Among the 40 projects on the site is Ms. Lee’s “me,” composed of more than 1,000 self-portraits taken from November 2001 to November 2004 and regarded as the first digital video portrait. Ms. Lee said she used a Nikon digital camera that had a flip screen so she could see herself while snapping the image. She used Photoshop software to align her eyes and After Effects software to create the animation. It took her 200 to 300 hours, she said, and on Aug. 8 “me” was posted on AtomFilms (me.atomfilms.com), an Internet site for independent filmmakers. She also posted it on YouTube, where it has attracted more than three million viewers.
“It would be possible to do this without digital technology, but it would be so much more difficult and expensive,” said Ms. Lee, 35, who lives in San Francisco (ahreelee.com). “If you use a film camera, you would have to buy rolls of film and get them processed, and do whatever you would need to do — and I don’t know what that is — to turn it into a film.”
Whether “me” or “everyday” or any of the other projects archived on Mr. Keller’s site qualify as art is in dispute in some quarters of the photography world. Richard Benson, a photographer, printer and professor of photography at Yale University since 1979, called them “a complete waste of time.”
“They are people who don’t know what they are doing and who celebrate themselves,” Mr. Benson said. “I find it completely boring.”
But Mr. Ewing and Mr. Lipkin say such views may reflect generational insecurity, prompted by the old-guard notion that good work that isn’t laborious isn’t worth much. Mr. Kalina’s “everyday” is a dramatic challenge to those conventions, Mr. Ewing said, because it breaks barriers, has helped to establish a new form of portraiture and sets a new standard of audience interest.
Mr. Kalina’s instinct for narrative makes the film work. The background is the room in which he’s living at the time. It changes episodically, producing visual interest and adding information. Ms. Comando’s soundtrack, which she now sells on the Internet, is appropriately portentous. Mr. Kalina doesn’t age, though at times he looks worn, and his haircut evolves through phases of short, long and unkempt. His gaze also doesn’t waver.
“He hypnotizes you with those eyes,” Mr. Ewing said. “The changing background and the changing hairstyle enhances a frenetic pace, the feeling of hurtling through space. But there is also a sense of a kind of dispassionate distance, the feeling of being the observer. Unlike a single digital image, the kind that appears on Flickr, in this film there is a sense of rapidity and infinite possibility.
“It’s a remarkable piece,” Mr. Ewing continued. “That’s why we ask in our show: Is this a revolution or just an evolution? The answer is it’s a revolution.”
RIP Estelle Bennett
The Ronettes in 1966. From left, Estelle Bennett, Ronnie Spector and Nedra Talley-Ross.
From left, Nedra Talley, Estelle Bennett, Phil Spector and Ronnie Bennett in a Los Angeles recording studio in 1963.
Photo of the Ronettes on the sleeve for their 1964 single, "Walking in the Rain."
Estelle Bennett of The Ronettes passed away recently.
I just found out the sad news........I'm wrecked.
The music of The Ronettes touched me at a very young age, and today they remain one of my favorite bands ever. Their music is youth, innocence and love amplified to epic levels.
Like Estelle, I also went to The Fashion Institute of Technology. Estelle had a truly iconic look. Her look (teased beehive, thick eyeliner, fitted clothing) inspired Amy Winehouse, whos look inspired a Peter Lindbergh French Vogue editorial starring Isabeli Fontana.
This Christmas, I listened to Phil Spector's Christmas album over and over and over. Their music is the only thing I look forward to at Christmas time.
Estelle Bennett's music captured a time when she was young, successful, beautiful and adored. I will always listen to her music, and remember her that way.
From The New York Times:
Estelle Bennett, a Singer for the Ronettes, Is Dead at 67
By BEN SISARIO
Estelle Bennett, one of the beehived queens of 1960s girl-group pop as a member of the Ronettes, has died at her home in Englewood, N.J. She was 67.
She was found on Wednesday in her apartment by a friend, after family members had been unable to reach her for several days, said her daughter, Toyin Hunter. The cause was colon cancer, Ms. Hunter said.
With their short skirts, heavy makeup and enormous towers of Aquanet-steadied hair, the Ronettes were New York’s sassy, street-smart variation on the virginal girl-group model. Their biggest hits, like “Be My Baby” and “Baby, I Love You,” embodied the forceful “wall of sound” aesthetic of their producer, Phil Spector, with a simple but reverberant backbeat and swells of strings and vocals.
The group was led by Ms. Bennett’s younger sister, Veronica (better known as Ronnie), who, with Ms. Hunter, survives her. It also included their cousin Nedra Talley. Their unpolished but flirty voices, and Ronnie’s breaking “whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh” in “Be My Baby,” have echoed through generations of female rock singers.
After winning a talent contest at the Apollo Theater in 1959, they started to make a name for themselves dancing the twist at the Peppermint Lounge. The three young singers sang backup for Joey Dee, Bobby Rydell and others, and beginning in 1961 began making their own records. After several early singles failed to become hits, they signed with Mr. Spector’s Philles label in 1963 and released “Be My Baby” that August.
An immediate hit, the song went to No. 2 and sold two million copies. Over the next three years the Ronettes released a series of singles that have become classics, including “(The Best Part of) Breakin’ Up” and “Walking in the Rain,” though none of the singles after “Be My Baby” reached the Top 20.
The three young women developed their signature look together, but Estelle, who attended the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan, had a particular flair for fashion and design. Ronnie — who married Mr. Spector in 1968 and later divorced him — dominated the group, while Estelle developed a role as “the quiet, sophisticated one,” Ms. Talley, who now goes by the name Nedra Talley-Ross, said in an interview on Friday.
As the group became famous, Estelle had a series of famous suitors, including Mick Jagger, George Harrison and Johnny Mathis, Ms. Talley-Ross said.
The group broke up in 1966, leaving Estelle devastated. She released a single, “The Year 2000,” which set a vision of nuclear apocalypse to Ronettes-like music, and made a few other recordings. But soon she left music, and for much of her adult life Ms. Bennett struggled with mental illness; she was also homeless for a time, her daughter said.
The Ronettes sued Mr. Spector in 1988, seeking $10 million in what they said were unpaid royalties and income made from licensing the group’s songs to movies and commercials; they said that they had received only one payment from Mr. Spector, for $14,482.30. They lost the licensing part of the case but were still able to collect more than $1 million in royalties, according to Jonathan Greenfield, Ronnie Spector’s husband.
In 2007 the Ronettes were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, introduced by Keith Richards. Ms. Bennett made a brief acceptance speech but did not perform with her old band mates. Still, Ms. Talley-Ross said, she had not seen her so happy in years.
“Estelle did not want the Ronettes to end,” she said.
Also from The New York Times
A Life of Troubles Followed a Singer’s Burst of Fame
By BEN SISARIO
She was the quiet Ronette, the one people called the prettiest, the one who was content to remain in the shadow of her younger sister, Ronnie, because even in the shadow there’s still some spotlight.
For a few years in the mid-1960s Estelle Bennett lived a girl-group fairy tale, posing for magazine covers with her fellow Ronettes and dating the likes of George Harrison and Mick Jagger. Along with her sister and their cousin Nedra Talley, she helped redefine rock ’n’ roll femininity.
The Ronettes delivered their songs’ promises of eternal puppy love in the guise of tough vamps from the streets of New York. Their heavy mascara, slit skirts and piles of teased hair suggested both sex and danger, an association revived most recently by Amy Winehouse.
But Ms. Bennett’s death last week at 67 revealed a post-fame life of illness and squalor that was little known even to many of the Ronettes’ biggest fans. In her decades away from the public eye she struggled with anorexia and schizophrenia, and at times she had also been homeless, said her daughter, Toyin Hunter.
“I want to know who my mother was,” Ms. Hunter, 37, said in an interview. “From the time I was born she suffered with mental illness; I never really got to know Estelle in a good mental state.”
Those who knew Ms. Bennett in her healthier days portray her as gentle and intelligent, and as playing a critical part in the development of the Ronettes’ style. The eldest of the group, she worked at Macy’s and attended the Fashion Institute of Technology, and the look she helped devise for the group was all superlatives: bigger, badder and sexier than anybody. Racial ambiguity lent an exotic element: the Bennett sisters had black, American Indian and Irish blood; Ms. Talley was black, Indian and Puerto Rican.
“We called them the bad girls of the ’60s,” said the singer Darlene Love, who met the Ronettes in 1962, a year before they became famous with “Be My Baby.” “They had the really, really short skirts and they had big, big, big hair. Most of the black entertainers of the ’60s didn’t look like that, but they wanted to be separate from everybody else.”
By the time they met Phil Spector and began recording with him in 1963, the Ronettes had their look precisely calibrated. That August “Be My Baby” went to No. 2, and the Ronettes were instant stars. When they toured Britain in 1964, the Rolling Stones were an opening act.
But even in the early days there were signs that Estelle was fragile. When their grandmother died in 1959, Estelle was shattered, said her cousin, now known as Nedra Talley Ross.
“She was going to buy Mama knee warmers,” Ms. Talley Ross said, “and I remember Estelle being so devastated — screaming, like she would never go on. Just screaming for this thing that would never get done.”
After the Ronettes broke up, in 1966, and Ronnie married Mr. Spector, in 1968, Estelle was lost, Ms. Talley Ross said. She made several failed attempts at a solo career, and when Ronnie Spector, who divorced Mr. Spector in 1974, formed a new version of the Ronettes in the early ’70s it did not include either of her former band mates. (Ms. Spector did not respond to messages left for her.)
Meanwhile, Ms. Bennett was gradually becoming more ill. When she brought her infant daughter to visit, Ms. Talley Ross said, she slept straight through the baby’s crying. Not long after, Ms. Bennett was hospitalized with anorexia, and her grip on reality continued to loosen. In recent years, Ms. Hunter said, she sometimes wandered the streets of New York, telling people that she would be singing with the Ronettes in a jazz club.
“Estelle had such an extraordinary life,” Ms. Talley Ross said. “To have the fame, and all that she had at an early age, and for it all to come to an end abruptly. Not everybody can let that go and then go on with life.”
In 1988 the Ronettes sued Mr. Spector for back royalties, and the suit dragged on for 14 years. Part of the case was dismissed, but the three women won the right to some royalties, and according to Jonathan Greenfield, Ms. Spector’s husband, they received “in excess of $1 million.” After lawyers’ fees, Ms. Hunter said, each woman took home about $100,000. Ms. Talley Ross said the figure was a little higher.
During the litigation Ms. Love was called as a witness, and one day at court she saw Estelle.
“She didn’t remember me,” Ms. Love said. “They cleaned her up and made her look as well as possible. She wore white gloves. She looked the best she could for somebody who lived on the street. It broke my heart.”
Her daughter and her cousin said they also helped her to look her best for the Ronettes’ induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame two years ago. They were worried that the ceremony would overwhelm her, so one of Ms. Spector’s current backup singers performed in Ms. Bennett’s stead. But before the concert Ms. Bennett did give a brief acceptance speech.
"I would just like to say thank you very much for giving us this award,” she said. “I’m Estelle of the Ronettes. Thank you.”
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