Stylee Fridays: Grace Coddington and Her Catwalk Cats
- story Chioma Nnadi
It’s been one month, three weeks and two days since we went to see The September Issue, but our crush on creative director Grace Coddington shows no signs of abating. Aside from being the most amazing fashion stylist the world has ever seen, Coddington is a dedicated cat lady—she has been known to sneak kittens into her fashion stories (dyed-purple!!), and we’re pretty sure if she had her way there would be an annual issue dedicated to her four-legged friends on the Vogue editorial calendar. Alongside her partner Didier Malige, she has been nuturing a giant cat family for the past 20 years in the West Village. And her book The Catwalk Cats is Coddington’s illustrated love letter to the pack. Told through the eyes of Puff, the handsome red-headed Tabby in the bunch, the book is divided into four chapters and four seasons, starting with the birth of Bart, a drop dead gorgeous Blue Persian cat, and traces front-row antics, Met Ball outfits and frollickings with the likes of Karl Lagerfeld and Rei Kawakubo. Coddington does all of the drawings, and you can literally chart her own real-life adventures—parts of the spring chapter are scribbled on Ritz Paris note paper (covering the shows perhaps?) among other hotels in far lung locales. Hands down the sweetest moments in this tale: Maligne’s gallery of feline at home pictures, including snaps of Grace feeding Bart his first breakast.
Stylee Fridays: Albert Hammond Jr on Style and His New Suits
- story Chioma Nnadi
- photo Guy Eppel
Albert Hammond Jr launched his line of suits for Confederacy earlier this month, a collection the fashion press had been eagerly anticipating for months, and something we’d been quietly hoping he’d do for much, much longer. There are few men that can run the sartorial gamut of suiting quite like Hammond, and with everything from epaulettes on hunter-green suits to stunningly spiffy three-pieces in the line, it all looks and feels just like him. Alongside stylist and Confederacy store owner Ilaria Urbinati, Hammond put everything together from start to finish, and when he spoke to us via phone from his parents’ house in California, he was already percolating new ideas for round two. Read the full Q&A after the jump.
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posted on Oct 30, 2009 in Homepage Top Spotlight, STYLE INTERVIEWS, STYLEE FRIDAYS tags Albert Hammond Jr, Confederacy
Lover Have a New Harvest
- story Chioma Nnadi
This is the second Stylee Fridays dedicated to an Antipodean label in the space of the month, and it’s really no coincidence, since between Scandinavia, New Zealand and Australia we could probably create an entire fantasy shopping league. Susien Chong and Nic Briand started their label Lover off a weekend market stall in 2001, and their quiet rise to international fashion fame is a happy-ever-after fairytale in itself. The line has always been a big creative collage of all the things the couple admired, from French new wave movies to Wu Tang anthems to iconic photos like Joseph Szabo’s series Teenage. The Lover blog is equally awesome and intimate—Briand recently reminisced about his teenage crush on Denise Huxtable while Chong posted pictures from her high school “boy book,” a glorious scrapbook of late ’80s heartthrobs scribbled with hearts and full of glossy magazine clippings of River Phoenix and Ferris Bueller. The duo describes themselves as the “same album, different songs,” and the new collection for spring 2010 could have been pulled from the closet of any number of musicians living on their inspiration board, like Joni Mitchell, Yoko Ono or Joanna Newsom.
Stylee Fridays: Yang Du’s Surrealist Sweaters
- story Chioma Nnadi
Du Yang likes to think of herself as a surrealist designer, and given the trippy width and breadth of her work thus far, it’s obvious that she revels in the absurdist details. Browse through the catalogue of collections on the website for her line Yang Du, and there’s really no telling where you’ll end up—there is a model wrapped in plastic, with a giant bow wrapped around her knees and roses in her hair (the human bouquet of flowers), a buxom babe with a plastic horse head sprouting from her neck and an old lady sitting in the park in a top hat with a soft, cuddly ghetto blaster sewn in to her lap. Those farcical fashion days are, thankfully, a few years behind her, and the London-based designer has become progressively more wearable, without losing any of that tongue-in-cheek fun. Last season for example, Yang made a collection that was part Where The Wild Things Are, part Mrs Doubtfire, so just picture glorious and intricate animal suits with the heads cut off. Fall 2009 definitely skews more grandma, relying on the chunky charm of oversized knits. The models, male and female, all look like little kids prancing around in their mother’s wardrobe, a cozy, comfy look that actually doesn’t seem like such an absurd idea right now.
Stylee Fridays: New Lonely Hearts
- story Chioma Nnadi
Antipodean designers live in a topsy turvy fashion world compared to folk up here in the northern hemisphere, simply because the seasons are literally reversed. So before we get into the specifics of the new collection by Auckland-based label Lonely Hearts, it’s important to remember where all the shaggy fur coats and autumnal shades are coming from. For Kiwis and Aussies alike the new collection, What is your Damage?, is fall 2010 (that’s spring 2010 for the rest of us) and the pieces have all the moody romance of an early fall day—just like the eerie short film they put together with the wardrobe of new clothes.
Stylee Fridays: A Deertz Spring 2010
- story Chioma Nnadi
Sometime over this past summer, Wibke Deertz issued a statement on her website announcing to the world that she would be changing the name of her unisex line of clothing from ADD to A Deertz, and would be focusing exclusively on men. It’s a bold move for any designer to change the name of their brand after almost a decade, but in Deertz’s case, a pretty smart one.
Stylee Fridays: MAN Show London Fashion Week
- story Chioma Nnadi
- photo Catwalking.com
The MAN show at London Fashion Week is always a chance for the boys to get flashy, and obviously the first place to go shopping for new British menswear talent. A newcomer to the MAN fold, designer Katie Eary literally turned the human body inside out for her spring 2010 collection, taking the idea of underwear as outerwear right down to the bone with skeletal leggings, ribcage splashed tees and pigskin-covered shades with trompe l’oeil eyeballs. Hardly surprising then that William S Burrough’s Naked Lunch and Junky were the designer’s go-to texts for the wonderful weirdness of it all.
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posted on Sep 25, 2009 in STYLEE FRIDAYS tags Christopher Shannon, Eastpak, JW Anderson, Katie Eary, London Fashion Week, Reebok, Topman
Stylee Fridays: Dusen Dusen Spring 2010
- story Chioma Nnadi
Figuring out the psychology of our clothes doesn’t usually get more complex than picking out a baggy shirt on a fat day, or setting off a summertime tan with a neon dress. And that’s probably just fine for starters, because designer Ellen Van Dusen is happy to school us a little deeper with her line Dusen Dusen. Eschewing the traditional fashion school route, she put together a major of her own creation at Tufts University, studying a degree in the Psychology of Design. “I wanted to learn why some images are successful while others fall to the wayside,” she says. Which ultimately begs the question, what is beautiful, and how do we separate the beautiful winners from the losers in our own closets?
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posted on Sep 18, 2009 in STYLEE FRIDAYS tags
Stylee Fridays: Erro’s Debut Collection
- story Chioma Nnadi
Looking for new names on the NY fashion schedule this season is, sadly, a bit like digging for buried treasure. Erro designer Anna Larson made her debut at a dark and moody theatre space on Wooster Street this week, and the collection was that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow we honestly thought we wouldn’t find. Black isn’t usually a color to get psyched about—especially not for the spring—but there’s something about the Swedish designer’s gently faded shades of noir and clever use of texture that made for new and interesting pieces. As Larson tells it, her obsession with black started at age five, and even back then she would only let her mom pick the washed-out darks from the laundry pile. A quick post-show google search for the word Erro brings up a bunch of things—a river in Northern Italy, a town in Spain—but the most fitting match was a lunar crater on the east side of the Moon, since there were fabric treatments in the mix that looked like the blackened soil of some weird shadowy planet.
Funnily enough, the starting point for the collection was sunlight and the idea of sun-bleaching. Take a closer look and you’ll notice the strapping and lightened panels on dresses and pants actually function like windowpanes, allowing for different degrees of black, and some of the clothes were even streaked with a faded navy blue grind. Throw in the gauzy white tunics and tank tops, and this softer, sun-lightened take on black might just be the most stylish way to toughen up next summer.
Stylee Fridays: Hood By Air Spring 2010 Video
- story Chioma Nnadi
HOOD BY AIR//SS10 from PATENTLEATHERDADDY on Vimeo.
Right before the seasonal round of runway shows cranks up, fashion people all over the world start to get ants in their pants. Hood By Air will be showing spring 2010 on the 14th of September, right at the tail end of NY Fashion Week, which makes us kind of anxious and excited. Earlier this week photographer and filmmaker Reid van Renesse emailed us a little something to relieve the tension—or at least keep the nerves at bay—a collaborative video with HBA’s Shayne Oliver featuring clothes from the new collection.
If the video is a sneak preview of what’s in store for the show, then we’re definitely not mad at the new Hood By Air sneakers and crazy backpacks, pretty amazing accessory additions to their growing line of custom jewelry. The big theme here seems to be worship, which works really well in the signature HBA monochrome palette. The bondage whites also tie into the idea of surveillance and entrapment—that big-brother-is-watching you intro could be the voice in a cyber space boot camp or futuristic loony bin. And though this obviously doesn’t mean that HBA will be presenting their collection in a high-security church, we’ll be interested to see where the mood will take them this season.
