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ENGLISHMEN AND WOMEN IN NEW YORK
SIENNA MILLER, the Duke of Devonshire, Rose Marie Bravo and Christopher Bailey will co-chair this year's Costume Institute Ball with Anna Wintour in New York on May 1. Other special guests at the annual benefit gala, which will celebrate the forthcoming Anglomania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion exhibition from May 3 to September 4, will include Lily Cole, Lily Donaldson, Lady Gabriella Windsor, Gemma Ward and Camilla Al Fayed. The show will honour an esteemed list of British designers, tailors, milliners, jewellers and cobblers including John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Christopher Bailey, Hussein Chalayan, Vivienne Westwood, Stella McCartney, Paul Smith, Oswald Boateng, Carlo Brandelli, Stephen Jones, Philip Treacy and Manolo Blahnik. "It was really hard to come to the selection of designers because there is such a great breadth of creativity in Britain," Andrew Bolton, associate curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, told WWD. "We wanted the work of designers to reflect the themes of the English period rooms. We wanted clothes to have a direct dialogue. That made it easier for us to narrow down our focus and selection." Attempting to balance the "violent crash between tradition and transgression in British culture and British fashion", the 60-piece exhibition had a natural starting point. "We started with the birth of punk," went on Bolton. "It's the 30th anniversary of the official birth of punk and we wanted to start then because we felt it was a paradigm shift in terms of fashion because it introduced the vocabulary of postmodernism." (March 22 2006, AM)
[vogueuk]