Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

~ Posted by Kassia St Clair, May 17th 2012

Our most popular piece on the website at the moment is "The Shapes We're In".  Our deputy editor Isabel Lloyd wrote that women often favour clothes of a particular decade. “Ask any woman which decade suits her and odds are, she’ll have an answer ready”, she says. “A lifetime of staring glumly at changing-room mirrors, however painful, does give you a clear picture of your own proportions.” Isabel discussed this with women who regularly wear clothes from different eras—actresses from the Royal Shakespeare Company. One of the surprises that emerged was the attitude to corsets.

As the corset seems such an embodiment of pre-suffrage restriction, I had expected our actresses to hate them. Yet here’s Cecilia relishing every minute of it. Another actress I spoke to, Isla Blair, also had good things to say about them. Isla (“short, into my 60s; I’d have been good in the fin de siècle because I have a curvy bust and small waist”) wears them in period plays not just because they help her achieve the historically correct, upright posture, but because they make her feel supported. “You get less tired in one—in fact I asked a dressmaker I know to make me a slightly softer version of an Edwardian corset, which I wear under certain of my real clothes."  read more »

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• FASHION

~ Posted by Kassia St Clair, January 24th 2012

Congratulations to Lisy Christl, Mark Bridges, Sandy Powell, Michael O'Connor and Arianne Phillips, who were all nominated today for an Academy Award. No, none of them are exactly household names. The Oscar nomination is for their work, respectively, on "Anonymous", "The Artist", "Hugo", "Jane Eyre" and "W.E.". They are all costume designers.

Each year at the Oscars, enormous publicity surrounds what actresses wear on the red carpet: from Chanel, Valentino and Calvin Klein to Marchesa, Versace, Elie Saab and Rodarte. But we never hear much about the people who design what's worn in the movies themselves.

This may change in the autumn. A new blockbuster exhibition, announced in London last week, opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum in October. “Hollywood Costume” will showcase more than 100 years of movie costumes.  read more »

When Alexander McQueen, a British fashion designer, committed suicide last year at the age of 40, the fashion world mourned. The public could gauge his brilliance by watching the reaction of those in the know. Still, many did not fully understand the extent of his talent. A recent exhibition of McQueen’s work in New York has made it abundantly clear. 

“Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has been a runaway success. Between May 4th and August 7th it drew over 660,000 visitors, making it the museum’s eighth most popular exhibition ever, up there with shows dedicated to Tutankhamun (1978) and Picasso (2010). Such was the demand that the exhibition’s run was extended by a week and it stayed open until midnight on August 6th and 7th in order to let the hungry crowds feast their eyes. This despite the rise in the museum’s suggested admission fee, from $20 to $25, which took place on July 1st.

Yet there are no plans for the show to go on tour. Imran Amed voiced his disappointment on his Business of Fashion blog, which inspired Melanie Rickey, a journalist at Grazia magazine, to start a petition and a social-media campaign (#bringmcqueenexhibitionhome on Twitter) to bring “Savage Beauty” to London.   read more »

THE MAN

Simon Morris likes the word “love”. “There’s something about it that just works,” he says. But Morris is no wide-eyed romantic. He’s a 46-year-old London adman turned entrepreneur and one of the driving forces behind Lovefilm, the mail-order rental service, which was sold to Amazon in January, for a sum, the Financial Times reported, in the region of £200m.

The company began in 2004 and was immediately pitched into what Morris calls “a real street-fight” with several rivals. It emerged victorious—names such as Screen Select and Webflix are long gone, while Lovefilm claims 1.6m subscribers in Britain, Germany and Scandinavia. Morris is clearly good at listening to his customers, but also talks a good battle: he makes the dry business of mergers and acquisitions sound as adrenaline-pumped as the bare-knuckle brawls in “Fight Club”, a favourite movie of his. He even turns up at the interview sporting a black eye and a limp—the result of an overenthusiastic kick-boxing session.
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"Every part of something has to be perfect or you haven’t done your job," says Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte, a small, Los Angeles-based fashion house, which she runs with her sister, Kate. The two describe their inspirations ("the colour red in the 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre'") and their reverence for the history of ballet costumes in this unexpectedly compelling video about their work for "Black Swan":

What shoes would Judy Garland wear? Probably something that helped to compensate for her tiny five-foot frame, such as the platform sandals in rainbow suede that Salvatore Ferragamo designed for her in 1938 (pictured). What about Peggy Guggenheim? Andy Warhol? Marilyn Monroe? Ferragamo designed shoes for them all, and each bespoke model is beautiful, unique and odd. These shoes may be decades old, but their designs are still fresh, and timelessly weird. Owning a pair is enviable. 

This is surely why Coccodrillo, a designer shoestore in Antwerp, Belgium, has collaborated with Ferragamo on a new line of shoe called "Ferragamo's Creations". The two companies have selected ten designs to update and reissue from the 13,000 models in Ferragamo's footwear archive, and the results are being sold in limited numbers at select stores and Ferragamo boutiques (with certificates of authenticity, body-guards, etc). Sounds like fun. The rest of us can simply gaze at the pictures with something like awe that feels more like desire.

Recalling a particular picture of Maria Callas, Diana Vreeland once quipped, “If eyes were bullets, everyone in sight would be dead!”

As a minter of epigrams, Vreeland is surely up there with Andy Warhol. Before she died in 1989, aged 86, she had been a fixture at Harper’s Bazaar for 26 years and then editor-in-chief at Vogue from 1963 until 1971. When she was fired from Vogue, Vreeland went on to work as a special consultant to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she helped to arrange exhibitions for the Costume Institute. She was known for her exacting tastes, her personal style and her bon mots, many of which are collected in a reissue of her 1980 book “Allure”. The volume assembles Vreeland’s favourite photographs with her personal commentary on each one. The subjects range from Gertrude Stein to Martha Graham and the photographers include Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and Cecil Beaton.  read more »

As guests lined up outside the Hosfelt Gallery on West 36th Street for the Spring 2011 runway show of United Bamboo, a fashion label, a ruckus erupted over at the garage next door. Two men armed with sledgehammers pounded a detached car door flat on the ground, creating a noise that made the line of skinny editors and retailers cringe. The fashion people on West 36th wore hazardous shoes and thousand-dollar shirts. The men in the garage wore dirty jeans. For an outsider, the sledgehammering offered a welcome dose of reality into the fantasy of New York's Fashion Week 2011.

Inside the gallery a swarm of retailers, bloggers and editors angled to find seats with a good view of the models. Runway shows are an index not only of trends but also of branding: a designer who sticks Michael Douglas, Laura Linney and Donald Trump in his front row is projecting a certain sensibility, whereas a show with Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Harmony Korine up front is conveying something quite different. The latter three occupied the front row at United Bamboo, reaffirming the label's identity as fashion's intimidating cool kid. Founded in 1998 by Miho Aoki and Thuy Pham, the label is known for its collaborations with artists including Brian DeGraw and Tim Barber, and for producing feminine, preppy-influenced clothes.  read more »

A gift purchased for my mother years ago landed me on the "Friends of Judith Leiber" e-mail list. Although I'm hardly a candidate for a bejewelled $2k clutch, these occasional e-mails are amusing enough to deter me from unsubscribing. The latest—a preview for the label's Fall Collection—just hit my inbox, and the designs couldn't make it more clear just who has the money for luxury goods these days:

When I say they were beauties, I don’t mean the tall, super-slim, super-cool models on the catwalk at Frieda Weyer’s fashion show at Berlin Fashion Week last Wednesday. Weyer’s bridal and evening dresses were indeed superb, and a pleasant change from the usual casual street clothing Berliners’ wear on all occasions (even to the opera). But my fascination is for “Sibylle – Modefotografien 1962-1994”, a new book of fashion photography from the former East Germany, released with an accompanying Berlin exhibition just in time for fashion week. The women in these photographs captured a vision of the country that allowed for independent, emancipated, self-possessed and, yes, beautiful women (many of them models plucked from the street). It was a magazine that hinted at a world of possibility beyond the one that we knew.

Named for the prophetess in Greek mythology, Sibylle was an up-market magazine of art and fashion, published six times a year for decades. It was a trend-setter, the "Vogue of the East", despite its modest circulation of 200,000. Copies were limited in part because of the country’s shortage of raw materials, including paper, and the fact that its contents were considered somewhat provocative and avant garde, and so were politically suppressed. But the magazine's rarity had the effect of making it more precious. My mother managed to get a subscription, and I would proudly brandish copies of Sibylle on my train journeys from home to East Berlin, where I was a student in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  read more »