Jean Paul Gaultier Fall/Winter 2008/09 Paris Haute Couture

Jean Paul Gaultier is a freak and everyone knows it, but this is actually what haute couture is about.

It seems blue became the new it nail polish color. We’re being tempted with this trend for some time now and I still cannot convince myself to try it out.

Well, maybe I’ll just wait till fall, so I can put on the new Chanel makeup collection. Or summer, to match it with a classic navy print. After years of black polish high on top, it would be the right time to make a change.

It’s an extreme collection that goes from light pastel to dark powerful blue. Called Aurora Blues? it contains the four shades in Bleu Cèleste?, mascara Inimitable in Noir-indigo, Joues Contraste in Enchateresse and Lune, Ombre D’eau in Rivage, Crayon Lèvres Cardamone, Rouge Hydrabase in Rose Drop, Rose Secret, Enigma, Rouge Allure in Frivole and Esquise, le Vernis in White Satin, Blue Satin, Rose Satin and Azur, Glossimers in Moonlight and Waterlily, Le Blanc de Chanel Sheer Illuminating Base and Poudre Cristalline.

New York — “Be considerate, be compassionate and please remember how powerful your words can be and use them to make a positive change.”

Model Coco Rocha’s words struck a note with the audience at Wednesday’s Council of Fashion Designers of America event, where CFDA president Diane von Furstenberg, Michael Kors and the model led a discussion on “The Beauty of Health: How the Fashion Industry Can Make a Difference.”

Illustrating a day in the life of a model, Rocha said: “She wakes up in the morning, goes to the bathroom to take a shower and runs by the full-length mirror because she can’t bare to look at herself naked. She only weighs 104 pounds, but all she can think is, I need to be thinner. She hurries to her first show, where she promises herself she’ll eat a few grapes. But when she gets there, there’s nothing but pastries. First looks are called, she puts on her dress and it takes three people to zip her up. The dresser makes a joke, ‘We almost had to call the agency and tell them you didn’t fit.’ All the girl can think is, I better not eat until tomorrow.”

The pressure to stay thin is immense and even Rocha wasn’t immune. The advice she got from industry types didn’t help.

“They said, ‘You need to lose more weight — the look this year is anorexia, and although we don’t want you to be anorexic, we want you to look it,’” she recalled. “My question is, how do you look anorexic unless you actually are?”

The model and some of her colleagues came up with four suggestions, including the importance of increased awareness of the impact dieting and eating disorders can have, from heart failure to osteoporosis; encouraging agencies to work closely with nutritionists, trainers and doctors to give models the resources for help, healthier food options at the shows and hiring bigger fit models.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, ‘Don’t worry, Coco, it’s not you, it’s our fit model. She’s so skinny,’” Rocha said. “That’s where the problem starts. And if that’s the case, then maybe we could do something about it.”

Kors said it is not a question of thinness, but how it can be achieved healthily. “Being thin, we know, is about genetics, sleep, a healthy diet and exercise and hopefully not about starvation, bulimia, too many cigarettes or dressing a preadolescent girl up to look like an adult,” he said.

Kors had several suggestions of his own to improve a model’s well-being. “You have to treat these girls as individuals, not mannequins,” he said. “Engage them in conversation when you meet them.”

A new exhibition shows the extraordinary lengths to which fashion photographers go for the perfect shot. As if Judy Rumbold - herself once a put-upon assistant used to satisfying their mad whims - really needed reminding…

I don’t think it struck me as wrong or even remotely tasteless to be pleading with a toothless Egyptian beggar to give me his hat. The hat, after all, was fabulous - battered, attractively misshapen, a to-die-for shade of buff - and I needed it. As a young fashion assistant just starting out, I had been instructed by a gobby, bullying photographer to get that hat, or else. It would, he said, look perfect with the pristine white linen clothing we had brought out to Cairo to photograph for a magazine shoot. Never mind the beggar’s impoverished circumstances and, in searing 40° heat, the crucial shade the hat afforded him. After a good deal of persuasion, the man - did I mention he was crippled? - accepted a single Polaroid picture of himself in exchange. He thought we were shooting a James Bond film and we didn’t bother to correct him. Any decent person would have given him money, and quite a lot of it, but we weren’t decent people. We were fashion people.

This was back in the early 1980s, when fashion somehow seemed a lot nastier and unprincipled, and photographers had ludicrously swollen egos. If the master had a vision, that vision had to be indulged. Later that day in Cairo I found myself faced with the task of re-arranging small drifts of tiny pebbles - virtually invisible to the naked eye - in a patch of desert in front of the pyramids. According to the photographer, the sand wasn’t ‘lying right’. Then I had to assemble half a dozen reeking, unco-operative camels for possible inclusion in the picture, while the people higher up the fashion food chain - photographer, hairdresser, make-up artist and model - sipped cool drinks in the shade.

This is the kind of thing that goes on at fashion shoots all the time but isn’t necessarily apparent in the flawless images that end up in magazines. When, more than 20 years ago, a fashion team and I took a gorgeous fledgling model out to Crete to photograph puffball skirts on the beach it seemed like a perfectly delightful idea that would surely result in immaculately fresh and sexy photos. What could possibly go wrong? Two words: Naomi Campbell. When her stroppiness became instantly apparent in the departure lounge at Heathrow our mission couldn’t have felt more doomed if a voice from the flight-deck had told us we were heading, with low fuel and engine failure, straight for a mountain range in impenetrable fog. Retouching photographs wasn’t a widespread practice then, but, by the end of the shoot, these pictures badly needed it; she was crying in most of them. Her objections were many and whiny: it was too cold, the clothes were too short/thin/pink. The wig was rubbish. She was right about that: the wig was indeed rubbish, but, after five days of ceaseless tantrumming, the fashion team was so sick of her that a bit of wig humiliation in a national glossy seemed like delicious revenge.

An absorbing new exhibition, Fashion in the Mirror, at the Photographers’ Gallery in London, exposes some of the off-frame drama that happens in the process of creating a fashion image. And not before time. Even the most fervent fashion-magazine junkie must concede that there are only so many airbrushed, vacant cuties you can look at before wanting to stab at your own eyeballs with the business end of a pair of Manolos. Here, for a change, the stars of the pictures aren’t just the models and clothes, but also the lighting paraphernalia, the camera equipment and sometimes the photographers themselves. Jonathan de Villiers dug himself a 5ft hole in the sand in order to get the right angle for a bikini shot. Another of his photographs demonstrates the difficulties of working in camera-hostile environments. Thigh deep in water is another girl, another bikini, but who’s looking at the ho-hum model when, just behind her, there is the far more eye-catching spectacle of a lighting assistant being virtually swept out to sea by an unexpected tidal swell?

A scene familiar to anyone who has ever worked on a fashion shoot is the photograph by de Villiers depicting an off-duty model chatting away to a technical assistant. There is a lot of chatting on fashion shoots. A lot of chatting and a lot of waiting. It’s why fashion people so often look like pouty, unapproachable sociopaths. Their reserves of normal interactive skills have been drained dry by the hours, days, weeks, spent hanging around waiting for the photographer to get his lighting right, or the hairdresser to achieve just that level of mussed-up naturalness, or the make-up artist to work whatever laborious magic it takes to make the scrofulous, hungover teenage model who overslept and rolled in three hours late into someone half-appealing looking.

Before the digital era the sign that you’d finally be getting somewhere was when the photographer took his first test Polaroid. The appearance of that shot, sometimes as late as 10pm after a full day in the studio, was often greeted by the rest of the fashion team with the sort of tearful relief and emotional outpouring that accompanies the difficult birth of a much wanted first child. But, as in the labour ward, things in the studio are wont to get bloody. Very often the new arrival is not cradled adoringly and showered with love. No. Quite often, the photographer snarls horribly, rips the Polaroid into small pieces, and says he’s not ‘feeling’ it and wants to start all over again. More waiting, then. But no chatting now, because lengthy incarceration under halogen lights and prolonged exposure to Bruce Springsteen have made everyone hate each other and privately vow never to work with tartan outerwear again.

Of course, photographers rarely make life easy for themselves. Competition is fierce, and fashion worryingly repetitive. How to give your swimsuit picture the edge? And how to make yet another - yawn - trench coat look fresh and interesting? Enter props, and lots of them. Photographers are great ones for coming up with bonkers schemes without really thinking them through. Years ago, when I was styling some cashmere-sweater shots for a women’s magazine, the photographer decided that what this dull load of menopausal knitwear needed to cheer it up a bit was a dozen or so newborn lambs gambolling on set. The next day, after sheepishly explaining to the nice people at Brora why all their jumpers were snagged and covered in animal shit, the list of things I swore never again to work with gained a new entry. Pyramids, camels, Naomi Campbell, raspberry jelly (don’t ask) and now sheep.

Tim Walker, a wildly inventive photographer whose work has been compared to that of Cecil Beaton and Norman Parkinson, is a man who likes his props. A photograph in the exhibition shows a model sprawled across a hugely oversized open copy of Vogue. But this is a relatively modest concept compared with a recent Christmas shoot for the same title. His checklist ran thus: 20 ballerinas, 17 geese, 250 ostrich eggs (sprayed gold), a box of giant plastic hands, a roomful of white umbrellas, 20 Christmas trees, a wolf’s-head-and-feet costume, a giant pumpkin, fake silver armour, a horse (also sprayed gold), hundreds of Arabian Nights-style oil lamps and rack upon rack of dresses, costumes and ballerina tutus. But, I notice, no lambs. He may have a reputation as a fearless maverick, but even he isn’t man enough to take on the lambs, gold sprayed or otherwise.

Summer sales are almost done now and stores are putting out their fall/winter collection. I’ve been thinking much about college street style lately. Most of college students aren’t dressed anything special, however there are some that stood out. My highschool, I must say, was very »cliqueish« and who stood out the most? The future generation of »Ivy league«. I usually don’t really care what I wear (I mean, as long as it’s clean and in personal style), but when I go to college/classes, everything has to be perfect (fit perfectly). Why is that? Because we can’t let down on our parents who sacrifice so much for us. It is common that we go to the same highschool/college that our parents went to. Our parents »struggle« for us and has sacrifice everything for us, so we try to live up with their expectation. We are trying to be perfect. Which, unfortunatly never happens. We are never good enough. Of course they didn’t fight that much, just to let us go with what we really want. Sometimes we forget about our own dreams and try to fit in, in their »perfect little world«. Finishing our last details on our »college uniform«, standing infront of the mirror, we are trying to convince ourselfe that this is really what we want. Unfortunatly we’ll never know.

Yale, Cornell here I come …

(This is for everyone who don’t know, how to appreciate what they have!)

Lots of love,

Lorri.

APOLOGY - this is for the readers who were trying to read and keep looking for posts in lifestyle, I’m really sorry I didn’t post anything, I’ve been having computer problems, but I finally bought a laptop, so from now on, expect posts quite often! I’m really sorry!

New beginning…

I just finished my second year at University - studying Economics and Maths and I decided to do my final year in Sweden. Yes, you heard right - SWEDEN. All the craziness about how cold it is up there and how rainy, cloudy didn’t scare me. It made me start thinking about new wardrobe. Sure, I’ll need a new coat/jacket for real winter (where I’ve been living now was hardly ever below zero), ohh and new shoes of course - waterproof one! But, that is not all I’ve been thinking about lately. I had quite few personal issues.

When a dream comes to an end, a huge emptiness in your heart is left. You want to give up on everything and you’re not in the mood to do anything. It is a really hard period in our lifes. We don’t know how to go on, and hours seems endless. Why is that many things that we like/love come to an end? We want to be happy forever, but happiness isn’t always around. Until one day,, we find a new dream, something new that gives us enegery, fill us with power. Our new dream is full of surprises that gives us a “thrill”. Our will to live becomes bigger and bigger. We have to transform every single moment in great moment. Remember, don’t give on being happy. If happiness is running away from you, run faster and one day you’ll grab it!

Right now, in my life I’m starting to live a new dream and leave bad things behind. I think Sweden was a good decision. I’m really excited to go there, for all the new things that will come to my way. New people, new beginning, new life.

… And how can a girl start her new beginning better than with shopping ? To make my day better I bought something that will fulfill my “granny-chic-college” look and what will bring a part of old me into my new life. You can see the picture of my new “Valentino F/W 08″ collection piece.

In hopes of being able to attend “Stockholm fashion week”, I’m leaving you for now, but won’t be away for long! I promisse!

What you should always remember is, although it may seem you are beginning your new life, don’t forget to let your old friends, old important things, and most important old you enter it.

Lots of luv,

Lorri

Gucci Fall/Winter 2008/09

70th Anniversary of the Gucci Via Condotti store and showing of the Gucci 2009 Resort Collection, held at the Villa Aurelia.

Valentino Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2008/09

Giorgio Armani Haute Couture Paris Fall Winter 2008/09

What’s totally HOT during FALL 2008 and WINTER 2009 by Giorgio Armani?

100% classique fashion, but so predictable I would say. Black and white which has always been glorified by Giorgio Armani plus satin trousers - a fall 2008 and winter 2009 must. Balanced grey has also been visible during his show, but it’s rather typical for fall and winter. As Natasza has said Armani’s statement for this season is: ‘don’t go out without any bow’! Also, clutches-mania is still in progress. For the night, Armani suggests striped dresses with cequines and wavy hair. No more straight hair, ladies!

Thanks Natasza for the pics!!!

Christian Dior Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2008/09

These photos have been sent by Natasha who has just joined the Fashion Allure crew! Thanks Girl! There are only few pics, but as she’s said, she’s going to add some more, so please check back for more.

If you are willing to contribute to Fashion Allure HQ gallery then please register here: http://fashion-allure.com/photos/register.php and then you can add pics freely here: http://fashion-allure.com/photos/upload.php marking in the description of which fashion show these pics were taken from, meaning designer and season (in case of any questions, please do contact me =] @ victoria/at/op.pl )

Have a fab day! =*