Mister LeRoy's Fashion News: October 2008

Monday, October 27, 2008

http://www.tobiegiddio.com/

ASK LaMONT

Ask LaMont: Time to put the khakis away Monday, October 27, 2008 By LaMont Jones, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Q: It's almost November and I still see a lot of people -- especially guys -- wearing khaki pants. Aren't those out of season now? A: Basically, yes. Pittsburgh, with four distinct seasons, isn't one of those tropical climates where you can wear khakis nonstop. Although we've had some recent Indian summer warmth, khaki pants should have been cleaned and packed away by early September at the latest. Like seersucker, khaki fabric is too lightweight to wear in cold weather. For those who don't know what to replace it with when jeans won't do, options range from wool blends and corduroy to moleskin and suede. Send questions to fashion@post-gazette.com

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Robin Givhan

Robin Givhan (born 1965) is the fashion editor for The Washington Post. She won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, the first such time for a fashion writer. The Pulitzer Committee explained its rationale by noting Givhan's "witty, closely observed essays that transform fashion criticism into cultural criticism."

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

The Chanel Pavillion

NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF -- NY Times -- The wild, delirious ride that architecture has been on for the last decade looks as if it’s finally coming to an end. And after a visit to the Chanel Pavilion that opened Monday in Central Park, you may think it hasn’t come soon enough. Yet if devoting so much intellectual effort to such a dubious undertaking might have seemed indulgent a year ago, today it looks delusional. Chanel is paying a $400,000 fee to rent space in the park and has made a gift of an undisclosed amount to the Central Park Conservancy as part of the deal. It’s not just that New York and much of the rest of the world are preoccupied by economic turmoil and a recession, although the timing could hardly be worse. It’s that the pavilion sets out to drape an aura of refinement over a cynical marketing gimmick. Surveying its self-important exhibits, you can’t help but hope that the era of exploiting the so-called intersection of architecture, art and fashion is finally over. The company’s money couldn’t have bought a prettier site. The pavilion stands on Rumsey Playfield, near Fifth Avenue and 69th Street, on a low brick plinth at the edge of the park’s concert grounds. Groves of elm and linden trees frame the pavilion to the north and south; a long trellis draped in wisteria flanks it to the west, with the Naumburg Bandshell rising immediately behind it. The area is carpeted in colorful fall leaves. It’s not that hard to see why Ms. Hadid accepted the commission. One of architecture’s most magical aspects is the range of subjects it allows you to engage, from the complex social relationships embodied in a single-family house to the intense communal focus of a concert hall. Great talents want to explore them all; it is what allows them to flex their intellectual muscles. But traumatic events have a way of making you see things more clearly. When Rem Koolhaas’s Prada shop opened in SoHo three months after the World Trade Center attacks, it was immediately lampooned as a symbol of the fashion world’s clueless self-absorption. The shop was dominated by a swooping stage that was conceived as a great communal theater, a kind of melding of shopping and civic life. Instead, it conjured Champagne-swilling fashionistas parading across a stage, oblivious to the suffering around them. The Chanel Pavilion may be less convoluted in its aims, but its message is no less noxious. When I first heard about it, I thought of the scene in the 1945 film “Mildred Pierce” when the parasitic playboy Monte Beragon sneeringly tells the Joan Crawford character, a waitress toiling to give her spoiled daughter a better life, that no matter how hard she scrubs, she will never be able to remove the smell of grease. We have been living in an age of Montes for more than a decade now. For strivers aching to separate themselves from the masses, the mix of architecture, art and fashion has had a nearly irresistible pull, promising a veneer of cultural sophistication. Opening the pavilion in Central Park only aggravates the wince factor. Frederick Law Olmsted planned the park as a great democratic experiment, an immense social mixing place as well as an instrument of psychological healing for the weary. The Chanel project reminds us how far we have traveled from those ideals by dismantling the boundary between the civic realm and corporate interests. The pavilion’s coiled form, in which visitors spiral ever deeper into a black hole of bad art and superficial temptations, straying farther and farther from the real world outside, is an elaborate mousetrap for consumers. The effortless flow between one space and the next, which in earlier projects suggested a desire to break down unwanted barriers, here suggests a surrender of individual will. Even the surfaces seem overly sleek by Ms. Hadid’s normal standards; they lack the occasional raw-material touch common to her best buildings, which imbued them with a human dimension. One would hope that our economic crisis leads us to a new level of introspection and that architects will feel compelled to devote their talents to more worthwhile — dare I say idealistic? — causes.

Kevin Barnes - Of Montreal

Mr Blackwell

Fashion critic Mr. Blackwell in 2000, when he named the Queen as the third-worst dressed woman. Chris Ayres -- The London Times -- The acerbic American fashion critic known simply as Mr Blackwell, who invented the notorious annual Worst-Dressed List and lampooned everyone from Zsa Zsa Gabor to Britney Spears, has died in Los Angeles. Mr Blackwell, who rarely used his first name, Richard, was a failed Hollywood actor turned little-known dress designer when he issued his first tongue-in-cheek list of Hollywood fashion disasters for 1960 – long before the likes of the blogger Perez Hilton turned such ridicule into a lucrative business.