Hollywood Costume at the V&A

If you’ve never watched even one Marilyn Monroe film, you’re still likely to have a mental image of her in a flyaway white dress, standing above a vent, trying to keep the hem of her dress from travelling up to her neck. This was in the film The Seven-Year Itch. In another Billy Wilder film – Some Like it Hot – rumour has it that Monroe had to film one simple scene more than fifty times. All she had to do was knock on a door, enter a room and ask for a glass of bourbon with those seductive red lips of hers, but she kept getting it wrong. So, maybe she wasn’t the best actress in the world, but Monroe had such strong personal style that it takes only a few iconic accessories – a mole on the cheek, a blonde bob, and a white dress – to perfectly capture her look.

This is the alchemy of a good Hollywood costume designer. In a few simple strokes, they tell a character and a story. Think Ruby Slippers and you are instantly transported to the world of the Wizard of Oz. There were around fifteen ruby slippers created for the film, of which Judy Garland wore several, and the dead witch and the witch of the East wore others. A pair of these notorious slippers are now on view at the V&A, along with iconic costumes such as those worn by Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean), Rose DeWitt (Kate Winslet in Titanic), and of course Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark.) You can also buy a pair of ruby slipper earrings at the V&A store.

On display are interviews with actors like Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep, talking about the role that costume has played in bringing their characters to life. Streep, who remarks on how her strong opinions about her costumes can often make the life of a costume designer difficult, says, “On every film, the clothes are half the battle in creating the character. I have a great deal of opinion about how my people are presented. We show a great deal by what we put on our bodies.”

The exhibition is divided into three sections. The first deconstructs screenplays. It shows us how the simple directions – “he wears a leather jacket, a flapped holster and a brimmed felt hat” – are transformed into Indiana Jones. The second sections deals with the dialogue between actor and designer, and how putting on a costume makes the actor feel like their character. The third – the finale – is a smorgasbord of famous costumes. So, what costume gives you your very own Becky Bloomwood moment? The Bride (Uma Thurman in Kill Bill), Dorothy’s pinafore in Wizard of Oz, or Tony Manero’s white suit (John Travolta in Saturday night Fever)?

Published at http://www.thelondonword.com/2012/11/hollywood-costume-at-the-va/ 

Breakfast at Buckingham Palace

So, I had breakfast at Buckingham Palace the other week. I just thought I’d mention it. In fact, I’m thinking that from now on, I’m going to drop this titbit of information into random conversations whenever possible. For example, if anyone complains about the constant rain we’re having in London, I will nod thoughtfully and say, “Yes, but the morning I had breakfast at Buckingham Palace, it was really rather a splendid day!” Or if someone comments on the heaven that is pain au chocolat at Bagatelle Boutique in South Kensington, I will simper and say, “Almost as good as the ones from the Buckingham Palace kitchens, darling.”

The curators at Queen’s Gallery have put together a wonderful new exhibition called The Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein, and their series of press views included an intimate breakfast-do for bloggers, and curators’ tours from two passionate women – Kate Heard and Lucy Whitaker – who know sixteenth-century portrait artists better than most people know their nephews. If you don’t think this exhibition is your cup of tea – if your idea of a historical painter is Andy Warhol, and you don’t do higher brow than David Hockney – then I would say, check out this exhibition. The paintings and prints are not only great examples of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century royal portraiture, but they also lead you from Brussels through Venice to London, as you watch the incredible journey of oil painting through Europe.

If you think of Leonardo da Vinci as a pioneer, think again. This exhibition charts the painters from the Netherlands tradition – like German-born Hans Memling (1430-1494) – that inspired the Italian artist and many after him. In fact, da Vinci was the first Master of the Italian Renaissance who painted in oils, a technique that travelled down from Memling, and his teacher Jan Van Eyck (1390-1441). The exhibition brings together royal portraits by court artists such as Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) and Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8-1543), and detailed ink-on-paper prints by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). A gorgeous snowy landscape by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, called Massacre of the Innocents tells a story of bloodshed and poverty. The original owner Rudolph II found the pathos of the painting so overwhelming that he had the massacre of children that was depicted in the work painted over.

The curators explain how lucky they are not only to have original paintings by the masters on display, but also a lot of preparatory drawings to show alongside. Kate Heard points to a copy of the Whitehall Mural (by Holbein the Younger) that depicts a bold-faced Henry VIII, accompanied by Henry VII, Elizabeth of York and Jane Seymour, and says, “Close your eyes and picture Henry VIII, and he will look something like this painting. Remember that we don’t know what Henry VIII looked like. We only know what Holbein tells us he looked like.” These artists were not just painters, but theologians, philosophers, scientists and life-long students of human psyche and morality.

Published at http://www.thelondonword.com/2012/11/northern-renaissance-buckingham-palace/

Alexander McQueen Goes to Savile Row

Article published on The London Word http://www.thelondonword.com/2012/10/alexander-mcqueen-hits-savile-row/

It was the arbiter of Regency men’s fashion – Beau Brummel (1778-1840) – that recommended that men’s boots should be polished with champagne and a man should take no less than five hours a day to get dressed. Though Brummel is accused of dandyism, the truth is that he was not a man to favour poppies on his China-silk waistcoat or heliotrope stripes on his peach-coloured britches. No. Brummel’s style was understated. Dark coats, full-length trousers, pristine shirts and a gloriously cascading cravat. Okay, maybe that explains the five hours a day spent in front of a mirror…

Beau Brummel is a nineteenth-century pop-culture icon. He appears in novels by Georgette Heyer, T. Coraghessan Boyle and Arthur Conan Doyle, and he stars in his very own detective series by Rosemary Stevens. Forget fragrance lines by J. Lo. and Nina Ricci. Brummel has his very own rhododendron: the Rhododendron Beau Brummel (does what it says on the tin, I guess). Unapologetically blooming, with what is referred to in gardening circles as a “ball-shaped truss,” the scarlet blossom was hybridized in 1934. Brummel has also inspired a watch, a poem, a line in a musical (Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats), and a Billy Joel song.

So, why am I going on about Beau Brummel? Men like Brummel and others of the dandy set, favoured tailors on Savile Row, a street of gentlemen’s fashions in Mayfair that now includes none other than Alexander McQueen – the newbie in bespoke menswear. Savile Row is home to bespoke. Bespoke means clothing that will “be spoken for” by individual customers, so that you get clothing tailored to your style and fit and – from a tailor worth his or her mite – for your personality. Says Sarah Burton of this new move, “It feels like a homecoming.” She says that McQueen started as an apprentice on Savile Row and always wanted to open a flagship store there.

The label has collaborated with Huntsman to produce a Prince of Wales check trouser-suit and a black cashmere overcoat for their first collection. Of course, it wouldn’t be McQueen if the collection didn’t have a sense of pastiche to spice various McQueen paraphernalia – horns and wings and skulls – that grace the premises. Victorian influences include looks that range from dandy to gamekeeper, lord of the castle to various military references. The premiere collection launches in October 2012, and will be showcased in a menswear show in January.

Pre-Raphaelite Supermodels

Mariana, John Everett Millais, 1851

Published on The London Word
http://www.thelondonword.com/2012/09/which-pre-raphaelite-supermodel-are-you/

A hundred and fifty years before Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, what you might call the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood modelled for Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Their timeless beauty, made more luminous by the vision (and no doubt the sexual acrobatics) of the Brotherhood, is now on display at the Tate, in a special survey of the works of the Pre-Raphaelites and their many followers. The exhibition looks at the PRB’s work from the time they formed in September 1848 through to the works of artists influenced by their style and ideology. The exhibition is a delicious prequel to the V and A’s display of the Aesthetic Movement last year.

While the PRB’s hedonistic pursuit of beauty at any cost is well known, it is their worship of nature that is embroidered all through their paintings. At the exhibition, I stood in front of Millais’s Ophelia for a good fifteen minutes, staring at the pathos of Hamlet’s Ophelia, her supplication to eternity, the splashes of colour from the wildflowers that cling to her drowning body, the delicate twines engulfing her gown as she slowly sinks. While the PRB made no bones about the reproduction of nature as one of their main inspirations, what you note in their paintings is actually the blissful harmony of people (well, mostly women) and nature, a match so divine that both nature and humanity are elevated by it.

So, if you were a Pre-Raphaelite supermodel, which one would you be? Would you be Lizzie Siddal, the PRB’s favourite muse, immortalized by Millais’s Ophelia, a woman whose life changed one day as she walked out of the London hat maker’s where she worked when she was spotted by the Brotherhood? Her addictive personality, the enormous abyss of longing in her for beauty, self-fulfillment, and for Rossetti’s loyalty make her a haunting figure. She was the perfect muse – while Millais was painting Ophelia, Siddal modelled for him submerged in a bathtub, and she stayed mute as the water slowly turned ice cold. She was a painter in her own right and found a supporter of her art in John Ruskin, though her art never quite matured enough and looks a little unfinished and childlike, all the way up to 1862 when she died of a laudanum overdose at thirty-two years of age. While her own paintings feature at the Tate, it is paintings like Ophelia and Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix that really speak of Siddal’s lingering impact on modern art.

Would you be Fanny Cornforth, another of Rossetti’s many flings? Earthy, sexy and gloriously unself-conscious, Cornforth was a stark contrast to Siddal’s other-worldly, somewhat consumptive looks. Cornforth became Rossetti’s housekeeper after Siddal died in 1862, and had a relationship with him that lasted till his death in 1882. Paintings like Rossetti’s The Blue Bower and Monna Vanna of this red-headed beauty give the exhibition a special sumptuous light, and it is these paintings that helped Rossetti mature from a hankering amateur to a full-blown artist.

Or would you be Jane Morris – keenly intelligent, self-made, of an ambitious and steadfast disposition? Morris – born Jane Burden, daughter of a stableman – taught herself Italian and French, learnt the piano, and developed what were often noted as “queenly” manners. She was married to William Morris, but had an on-again off-again relationship with Rossetti all his life.

Besides these iconic paintings, the exhibition also showcases cabinets and stained glass works by people like Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. While the exhibition is quite yummy, I have to say I was expecting a Tate Pre-raphaelite survey to be full of excess. I thought I’d be running breathlessly from room to room full of panic about not being able to take it all in. There are some works missing like Rossetti’s Love’s Greeting or later works like John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shallot (1888). Still, if you are a fan of the PRB, the exhibition is not to be missed.

Tate Britain

September 12, 2012 – January 13, 2013

Tickets: £14

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/pre-raphaelites-victorian-avant-garde

Ophelia, John Everett Millais (1851-52)

So, the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition is finally here! Since it is a Tate exhibition, I admit I was expecting excess all the way. Like the Miro and Watercolour exhibitions last year, I expected something like fifteen enormous rooms filled to bursting with PRB paintings, and paintings and paraphernelia from their various followers, leading straight into the Aesthetic Movement, Art Nouveau and Art Deco styles. I thought I'd be running frantically from room to room clicking pictures and taking manic notes, while hyperventilating about all of the other rooms still left to visit. The anxiety about how much I was missing would make me sweat and later seek therapy. While what is on offer at the Tate this autumn is ripe and sensual as you would predict of a PRB exhibition, it does leave you panting for more. Well maybe that's the point. Still, I expect my full dose of hysetria when I visit the Tate...

Thankfully, my all time favourite Ophelia (1851-52) is on display. No PRB exhibition would be complete without that haunting masterpiece. With Lizzie Siddal as muse and model, Ophelia lays half-submerged in water, vines, rose leaves, wildflowers cling to her neck and hair, willow around her body and slowly drag her under. Like much of PR art, this masterpiece celebrates female beauty but gives it more than a hint of pathos and longing. It makes it one with nature - there is a little robin in the corner, a pink rose by the hem of her dress, she is surrounded by breathless and breathtaking foliage - and while doing so, it also tells a classic tale. Like other PRB work, the painting tells the truth about nature.

It was painted with Lizzie Siddal lying submerged in a bathtub. The artist - John Everett Millais (1829-1896) - got so thoroughly absorbed in the painting and Siddal was so committed to being the perfect artist's model and not interefere in the artistic vision of the painter that she lay in the water even as it got colder and colder to the point that she was shivering uncontrollably by the end of it. It is thought that Millais created the river scene at Hogsmill River at Ewell in Surrey.

Of course, you could say that this painting gives a premonition of Lizzie Siddal's life and death. Siddal was the PRB's favourite muse, but mere ten years after the painting of this classic, she died of a laudanum overdose. The poppies and violets so gorgeously painted in this work perhaps point to Ophelia's - and maybe Siddal's - death and loyalty. And there is a sense of the divine in the pose - the supplicating hands, the calm repose in the face, the fatalistic acceptance, the eternal merging with nature.

Pre-Raphaelite Exhibition at the Tate

Don't miss the Pre-Raphaelite Exhibition at Tate Britain
September 12, 2012 - January 13, 2013

The Best of British Ballgowns, V&A

When Vesper Lynd (played by Eva Green, in Casino Royale, 2006) walks into the Casino Royale in Montenegro where James Bond is playing a high-stakes poker game with Le Chiffre, all eyes – including Bond’s – turn to watch her in her aubergine gown, with its plunging silver neckline, its sexy little knot at the centre of her chest, and the kiss of the long skirt around her thighs. Lynd is a complicated character. Vicious, cynical and prickly on the outside, with a startlingly black hole of longing on the inside. Her dress – picked by Bond, of course – matches her personality. An unusual colour, an enigmatic V of silver, and a confident hugging of the curves.

Then there is the iconic black-embroidered strapless gown that Sabrina (played by Audrey Hepburn) wears for the Larrabees’ garden party in Sabrina, 1953. Remember that dress? White gloves? Detachable train? Rumour has it that Hepburn, ever the style queen, chose this confection from Givenchy’s S/S 1953 collection. “His are the only clothes in which I am myself,” she said of the designer. “He is far more than a couturier, he is a creator of personality.” This dress, too, has something to say about the wearer – Hepburn, the elegant ingénue, a curious mixture of naïve schoolgirl and pink champagne.

To celebrate the opening of the newly renovated Fashion Galleries, the Victoria and Albert have opened the 2012 summer season with an exhibition of ballgowns displayed over two floors. The exhibition scans sixty years of British eveningwear and features designers like Hussein Chalayan, Alexander McQueen, Erdem, and Jenny Packham. Iconic gowns include Norman Hartnell’s concoction for the Queen Mother, Princess Di’s “Elvis Dress” by Catherine Walker, and dresses worn by Sandra Bullock and Bianca Jagger. Each gown (whether you like the dress or not) has its own unique imprint – for some, this is the stamp of the designer, while for others, it is the wearer that has left on the gown a hint of their perfume.

The Norman Hartnell gown is a full-bodied cream silk, with a multitude of gold-embroidered colonial-style tentacles (a little too Memsahib for my tastes, but who’s arguing with the Queen Mother?) The Erdem is a bird of paradise, with a canary-yellow bodice, and a skirt that Van Gogh wouldn’t sneeze at (actually, neither would the exotic bird. It may actually try to make a nest in it.) The McQueen confection is, as always, a show stealer. A full furry-licious skirt with feathers hugging the bodice, this dress is definitely more glamorous swan than fuzzy chicken. The Roksanda Ilincic is a different kettle of fish. My favourite retro-rose colour, with shimmying bits of lace and silk, this is a stunning pastiche of a cocktail dress – probably not an Ilincic that you can find on Net-a-Porter, huh? 

Alexander McQueen

Victor Edelstein

Erdem

Victoria and Albert Museum, May 19, 2012 – January 6, 2013

Pictures from Victoria and Albert
Article upcoming in The London Word