Tag: fashion
Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses
Friday, September 20th, 2024 Art Column,When you’re born in the same town as Hieronymus Bosch, it’s a hard act to follow. In the Prado in Madrid, visitors stand transfixed in front of Bosch’s triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1510), with its outlandish visions of heaven and hell, the former packed with exotic animals, the latter a nightmare scene of […]
High & Low: John Galliano
Sunday, June 2nd, 2024 Film Reviews,In December 2010, John Galiano, one of the most celebrated British designers of all time, murdered his own career with a drunken anti-Semitic tirade in a Paris café. Kevin Macdonald’s feature-length documentary, High & Low: John Galliano, features footage of Galliano’s meltdown, and it’s not a pretty sight. The same could be said of Galliano’s […]
Quant
Friday, May 19th, 2023 Film Reviews,Fashion is a frightening business to be in. Mary Quant Having just seen the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Karl Lagerfeld exhibition, I’m […]
Alexander McQueen: Mind Mythos Muse
Monday, December 26th, 2022 Art Column,“I don’t see fashion as curing cancer or AIDS – or anything else for that matter,” said Alexander McQueen. “At the end of the day they are just clothes.” This statement, like so many others uttered by this prodigiously talented designer, testifies to the contradictions that defined his career and character. For McQueen (1969-2010), fashion […]
Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris
Friday, October 28th, 2022 Film Reviews,One wonders what the late Jean-Luc Godard would have made of Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris. When the famous avant-garde director died last month, the tributes were predictably fulsome, but I can’t believe anyone actually enjoyed sitting through anything Godard made after about 1965. For the vast majority of people there is only one reason […]
Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto
Thursday, February 10th, 2022 Art Column,“I am not a heroine,” Gabrielle Chanel told one of her biographers. “But I have chosen the person I wanted to be and am. Too bad if I am disliked and unpleasant.” Like most things this famous couturiere said, this statement requires unpacking. Madame Chanel could be extremely unpleasant, but also wildly generous. She was […]
The House of Gucci
Friday, January 14th, 2022 Film Reviews,Shakespeare allegedly set tragedies and comedies in Italy because the stereotype of the excitable Italian was engraven on the Elizabethan mind. One finds the same view at the end of the 18th century in the memoirs of playwright, Vittorio Alfieri, who, caught in an adulterous affair with an English woman, was astonished by the calm, […]
Christian Louboutin: The Exhibitionist
Saturday, March 14th, 2020 Art Column,This weekend sees the launch of the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, the first ever to showcase the work of indigenous artists from around the world. I’ll be taking a look at the Biennale next week, while keeping my fingers crossed. I’ve learned in the past that it’s best not to go into this event with […]
Alliance Française French Film Festival 2019
Thursday, March 7th, 2019 Film Reviews,Aside from the Indians, the French are probably the greatest talkers in the world. We Aussies, by comparison, are notably inarticulate. Perhaps that’s why we have such an inexhaustible affection for the annual Alliance Française French Film Festival, an event packed with movies in which characters babble on and on in a language which most […]
The Gospel According to André
Friday, July 13th, 2018 Film Reviews,Those who watched The September Issue – the 2009 documentary that sparked a wave of fashion movies, will remember André Leon Talley as a larger-than-life presence in Vogue magazine’s inner circle. Loud, camp and flamboyant, Talley is the big black guy who seems to hang around the office doing nothing in particular. If Vogue’s uptight […]