Suzy Menkes - Journalist

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Romantic Yamamoto
Suzy Menkes International Herald Tribune  Tuesday, January 20, 2004

But shortly after the models at Yohji Yamamoto's show had scooped up the floral outfits and paraded in herbaceous layers of mixed blooms, winter took over: black tailoring with only a flash of flame red dress or a discreet flowered cuff.

The show was a metaphor for the haute couture season, for the Japanese designer opened the shows by presenting his autumn-winter 2004 line - as he has done twice before.

Meanwhile, the haute couture for spring-summer has been mowed down like blades of grass. Only six big houses - Chanel, Dior, Gaultier, Givenchy, Lacroix and Ungaro remain, with Valentino and Versace from Italy. The official calendar is matched by an "off schedule" of young hopefuls, who now outnumber the Paris houses.

Yet Yamamoto has some claim to couture status with his beautiful and romantic tailoring. No matter that we have seen it all before (apart from the floral patterns).

The designer still impresses with the modernity of his cuts that never have a jagged line, even if the loose, curved shapes, some standing away from the body as capes, were toughened up with silver chains or bold buttons marked with a signature Y. Bags built in at the hips like pockets seemed less the ironic take on the logo handbag culture, as Yamamoto has shown before - and more an understanding that the modern woman craves day clothes that are both graceful and practical.

I agree with her on Yamamoto.

 

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Dior's Cleopatra 
Suzy Menkes International Herald Tribune  Tuesday, January 20, 2004

An arched back, a proud Nefertiti head with the eyes of a Sphinx - the silhouette outlined at the back of the runway could only be Cleopatra. And with his Dior show that kicked off the haute couture summer season, John Galliano excelled himself in showmanship.
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Gilded dresses in reptilian leather, hieroglyphic prints, dangling scarab earrings, neckpieces with embedded turquoise and platform sandals draped in pearls were all masterpieces of imagination and craftsmanship.
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The celebrity-studded audience was speechless after this extravaganza that left Elizabeth Taylor's famous 1963 rendition of the Egyptian queen look like a peasant on the shores of the Nile.
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"Aah! Oh! I just can't even say anything," stuttered Sarah Jessica Parker from "Sex and the City," lining up with the French actress Arielle Dombasle to shower praise on Galliano, who in taking his bow had bent his body to recreate the Egyptian friezes that had inspired him on a trip to Cairo and Luxor. The Egyptian actress Youssra, invited especially for the show, gasped: "Amazing! What an inspiration." As a hyper-sophisticated image maker of fantasies and dreams, Galliano is nonpareil. How he translated in the blink of a sequined eye a 4,000-year-old culture into clothing was wondrous. Yet this was no history lesson. A sophisticated wink came from the eye that opened the show as part of a cartoon projected on the backdrop.
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"Working on all the details but always keeping it light," Galliano said backstage, although trying even to lift the beaded creations off the hanging rails would require a year's workout.
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The show was both superb and disturbing. Is Galliano the most amazing, evocative and extraordinary designer couture has ever had? Or is he a costumier who has invented a new two-dimensional haute couture, where the house of Dior builds up salable products behind a superbly decorated couture façade? Certainly the bags, with their tiny gilded scales, were delicious; the jewelry an opportunity to relaunch the Egyptian craze that Cartier set off in the 1920's. Many of the outfits could have been the stage costumes designed by Erté in that period.
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But whereas the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb in 1922 detonated a cultural moment, Galliano just picked Egypt as a seasonal theme. You could not call this show the same old story, because a lot had changed: The women were noble, their bodies covered and no trace lingered of Galliano's trashy couture sexpots. Even the colors were subtle: a wash of soft terra cotta and ochre, flashed with lapis lazuli and gold. Yet the collection still had little to do with the reality of dressing - even dressing up, although some of the embroidered outfits, stripped of their extras, could be adapted as grand gowns. But as the fashion world is unlikely ever to see another madly creative designer working with an exceptional haute couture atelier, this was a moment to savor.
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The season kicked off with Yohji Yamamoto, who presented his fall/$ winter 2004 line - as he has done twice before. And it seemed like a metaphor for the haute couture shows, which have been mowed down like blades of grass until only six big Parisian houses remain. Yamamoto's flowered coats - misty mixes of pink roses - laid on the runway were sweet harbingers of spring. But shortly after the models had scooped up the floral outfits and paraded in herbaceous layers of mixed blooms, winter took over: black tailoring with only a flash of flame red dress, knitted sleeve pieces or a discreet flowered cuff.
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Yamamoto has some claim to couture status with his beautiful and romantic tailoring. No matter that we have seen most of it before. The designer still impresses with the modernity of cuts that are never jagged, even if the loose, curved shapes, some standing away from the body as capes, were toughened up with silver chains or bold buttons marked with a signature "Y." Bags built in at the hips like pockets seemed less an ironic take on the logo handbag culture, and more an understanding that the modern woman craves day clothes that are both graceful and practical.

I do agree, though, that the Dior show was (kinda) noble. No couture sexpots there.

 

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Style: Ungaro's sweet bird of youth
Suzy Menkes IHT Thursday, January 22, 2004

A giggling gaggle of pretty young blondes, in short, bright dresses, perched on a white sofa like birds of paradise. By the time the bride appeared with a kimono floating over her pleated and draped gown, the models had turned the larky presentation into a hen party. For Emanuel Ungaro was out to capture the sweet bird of youth.
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Two haute-couture presentations - Ungaro and Givenchy - both held in the salons of their noble couture houses, raised intriguing questions about youth and age. For whereas Ungaro, a veteran of couture, trained by the great Cristobal Balenciaga, has never seemed so playful or light-handed; Julien Macdonald at Givenchy, in what is surely the 31-year-old British designer's valedictory collection, finally got what couture is all about - but did not make his collection seem as youthful as he is.
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The retreat to the salons is an important part of couture in this millennium. After two decades of extravaganzas, most houses realize that the exceptional workmanship that is the imprimatur of high fashion needs to be seen up close. Hence, the Ungaro models lingering in the salon, the better to see the multicolored beads edging the strap of a pink-and-green dress, or the shoes with their vivid shades and polka-dot heels.
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"I am sick of it all - the big shows, the showing off - I wanted to go back to how it used to be," said Ungaro, who deliberately did not take a runway bow, as clients and press waited expectantly for his appearance.
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Since the sorcerer of couture handed over his ready-to-wear to his apprentice, Giambattista Valli, there has been a fashion tension between the images of the separate lines. But with Wednesday's show, Ungaro gave a witty and playful version of youthful dressing up. It is hard to imagine some of the existing clients in skirts draped thigh high or sprouting multicolored feathers in their hair. But hemlines can be lengthened, there was a simple cream jacket and an easy jersey tunic with narrow pants - and the long-term client Liliane de Bettencourt described the collection as "ravishing."
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And so it was, in its chirrupy, optimistic way. Polka dots burst among flowers as short, colorful coats swung over the tiny draped dresses. Butterfly patterns sparkled, lace was subtly embroidered and roses flowered on a tulle cape. Was it all too much for the dripping Parisian skies, the morose economic climate and the need of most women for quiet chic? Hey! This was for summer - and can't a couturier have a dream?
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Whatever upbeat vision the effervescent Macdonald had on his arrival at Givenchy three years ago, it has been drummed out of him. The pep and frenzy that fills his London shows under his own label do not seem to make it on the Eurostar to Paris. The result was a polite and well-judged collection, but not one to create a fizzy new image for the French house.
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The powers that be at Givenchy did everything to whip up some excitement: a collection shown to a few behind closed salon doors; a long, long wait, fueled with Champagne; the front row positioning of the "Lord of the Rings" actress Liv Tyler; the tardy arrival of Christina Aguilera, kitted out in a leg-revealing Givenchy outfit. The pint-size pop star sat next to Ozwald Boateng, another British designer, who has been tapped to do Givenchy menswear and who, when asked whether he might also take over the women's line, smiled enigmatically.
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But there the excitement stopped - dead. Yet this was one of the most polished collections Macdonald has shown for Givenchy with its focus on crusty lace tailored into sharp suits and draped dresses suggesting that the designer is integrating with the workers in the ateliers.
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A trench coat with bold lacy cut-outs that opened the show was a promising start. Yet shown over a tulle skirt it seemed anchored in a vision of couture that dated from those old glory days in the 1950's.
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Nothing wrong with that. The "fifties" are having a fashion revival. But there was no wink of wit that might have made cut-outs on dresses look like they were an ironic take on vintage table linen. What you saw was what you got: a nice collection of client-friendly, wearable clothes.
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Macdonald had added a soupçon of himself: his skill with the crochet needles for hand-made dresses, and his fascination with macramé and tie-dye from the hippie era. But even though the designer has grown in sophistication, his bubbly personality seems to go as flat at Givenchy.
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International Herald Tribune

 

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Chanel: Gallic to the core 
Suzy Menkes IHT  Wednesday, January 21, 2004

The American-French standoff has moved from the airwaves to the runways as two designers promoted Gallic gorgeousness on the haute couture runways on Tuesday.

Christian Lacroix called his spring collection of rococo ruffles and hand-painted dresses, worn with high chignons and bright hose, a "manifesto."

"It sounds pretentious, but we have to stand up for our culture and defend our individuality at this moment when France is in question," the designer said. Earlier in the day, Chanel's exquisite collection at the highest level of couture craftsmanship and French chic expressed the same spirit. "I want it to be very French in attitude - as only a foreigner can be," said Karl Lagerfeld, before sending out his models in the tented grounds of the historic Palais Bourbon Condé, which the designer said he had chosen to express the mood.

The two shows were yearning to distill the essence of haute couture, and it made for a fine moment for fashion - although not one that changed, or even challenged, the status quo.

Lagerfeld's show was refined, restrained, but also romantic in its froth of tulle spilling over clean lines. The palette of black and white, touched with face powder pink and a single splash of Chinese yellow, was quintessentially Coco. But in spite of its perfect ingredients and exceptional workmanship, this Chanel show was "vintage" only in the current meaning of the word: so lovely and so classic that it transcended time and place.

There is no arguing that Lagerfeld is the reigning monarch of reality couture. "It was just so beautiful," said the actress Kristin Scott Thomas, sitting beside singer Kylie Minogue.

The clothes were wearable and desirable: suits with easy-fit tweed jackets and tulle skirts, some hobbling the knees; or the inverse evening looks, when a ball of fluff rolled across the shoulders of a lean satin dress. Hairstyles were to match: small, androgynous heads with the fluffy stuff and wilder curls for the lean.

The designer is honest in offering at the elevated couture prices work that ready-to-wear factories could never replicate and clothes that are not gimmicky one-season wonders. Even on the runway, the delicacy of a tucked satin blouse or the intricacy of knitted tulle stood out as couture marvels. Chanel's own diamonds - cascades of stars or camellia finger rings - were the only decoration, with a Coco flat hat as a striking accessory. Lagerfeld had orchestrated a change of fashion pace, with an elongated torso that is a message of the season. There was just a hint of the 1920's, especially when an embroidered skirt had a linear art deco pattern. Now that Chanel has taken over the feather and embroidery supplies, it has an investment in putting them through their paces. Lagerfeld makes all that handwork seem light as a breeze, ribbons flowing, fringes dangling, paillettes winking. The show was an homage - maybe a fraction too reverential - to the glory of haute couture.

Lacroix's show was a master class in being himself. The designer still takes couture as a wild ride through color, pattern and decoration, but this show was totally under control. There were even - by a little stretch - wardrobe basics: a pants suit with just a froth of blouse and the sparkle of a spangled socklet that slipped under high-heeled sandals; or the stormy purple dress that seemed as simple: two panels of a dress tied with navy ribbon. Another gray satin dress just settled on the body like a cloud, while other more complex layers of lace and tulle still bared a leg or gave a sense of a body in movement.

Lacroix has learned that he can be an artist but not force the point. So although there were elaborate mixes of pattern and fabric, the pieces that stood out were strong but simple, from a khaki coat embroidered with birds through a white organza gown, sprayed fuchsia, with rose red velvet ties. That said, the show was as "simple" as a chef taking the finest ingredients, working on them for hours and coming up with a subtly flavored dish. And that is a French prerogative.

Against this Gallic background, Versace remains resolutely Italian.

Donatella Versace did a good solid job - although that is hardly the way to describe satin dresses pierced with flesh-revealing holes, skirts made out of strings of beads fringed like a lampshade. As the models came out, their elongated torsos emphasizing their bodies and their hairstyles the straight bottle blond of Versace herself, the line between the designer and her label seemed hard to divide.

The same look had even rubbed off on front row celebrity guest Christina Aguilera, who had a similar hairdo - but dyed black. The singer picked out a mauve beaded short dress from the parade of simple silhouettes with fancy workmanship.

This show at the Paris Ritz, where Gianni Versace traditionally showed this Atelier line, seemed entirely destined for the red carpet. Even the pants suit that opened the show was cinched with a sparkling belt and had exaggerated bell-bottom legs. It was all very Versace, which was the show's strength - and its limitation.

We both agree on Chanel.

 

[Spacemiu]

i thought over all this was areally boring season. witha few standotus.

 

[nqth]

Burberry's youthful military moment (IHT)

Suzy Menkes about first MIlan shows

Burberry's youthful military moment
By Suzy Menkes International Herald Tribune

MONDAY, JUNE 27, 2005


MILAN A powerful Burberry show, taking the brand back to its military and aristocratic roots, ignited the first day of the Italian fashion season.

The designer Christopher Bailey brought into focus the overall theme of the summer 2006 Milan season. Youth - sunny, surly, smart or scruffy - is the subject of the new menswear, as Jil Sander's clean preppy sportswear was pitched against Dolce & Gabbana's new wave London rock 'n' roll.

But this was Burberry's moment as Bailey proved how he has got inside the soul of British Burberry and its heritage, yet can still wear that baggage of the past as lightly as the models wore their brass-buttoned trench coats.

"I wanted to go back to feel the essence of Burberry, that sense of aristocracy and the military - I felt we had been everywhere," said Bailey backstage. Yet although there were strong references to England in the 1960s and the aristocratic images of Lord Lichfield and Anthony Armstrong Jones, the future Lord Snowdon, Bailey never gets mired in retro fashion. In fact, he took Burberry to a place it has never been before - except perhaps for naval uniforms - with a passage of tailoring, pin sharp as it sculpted the waistline. The jackets looked both spivvy 1960s and right on for current fashion. Floppy floral scarves and tasselled loafers were elegant.

The color palette, too, was English in its restraint, as shrimp pink pants were paired with sage green tops and the plain V-neck sweaters over trellis patterned shirts moved the collection from grandfather's era to modern times.

London in the 1960s remains an enduring inspiration - even for those who have never lived its scene - then or now.

"We have always loved London, from the beginning," said Stefano Gabbana, explaining Dolce & Gabbana's look at the hip London band Baby Shambles and the cool and chaotic rocker Pete Doherty as a current take on their perennial rock 'n' roll themes. As the models swung out in their suits with a metallic sheen, in jeans with strategic rips, coin-dot or flower-embroidered shirts and state-of-the-art sneakers, it was hard to swallow the backstage claim from Gabbana that this was a theme of young celebs ("Brad Pitt maybe") hiding from the paparazzi.

As the cameras' flashes reflected from the mirrored runway and chandeliers twinkled, it all seemed more like a paparazzi fest. But Dolce & Gabbana, without exploring anything new, hit the right music world notes to turn the familiar into the current. Body-hugging suede jackets caressing the torso above the inevitable jeans is a look of the moment. So is the casual way the clothes, hats included, are pulled on. And just in case those dress-down guys want to rip off their Pepsi-patterned T-shirts and dress for the red carpet, the finale was pure Hollywood: knife-sharp suits mostly in white, always metallic, to make a worthy partner to the female glamour pusses at the awards ceremonies.

What was Raf Simons thinking as he sat front row at Jil Sander - the brand he will be designing from now on? Probably the same as everyone else: that the team had done a good job keeping the Sander spirit alive - but without either her sense of pristine sobriety nor an undercurrent of sly sexuality. That said, there were clothes in this preppy collection to like and wear, especially the polo shirts with striped collars, the new proportions of summer suits with pants cropped just over the knee and the lace-up shoes soft as moccasins in leather, canvas or mesh.

As ever with Sander, touching the clothes backstage brought a new dimension: a Prince of Wales check jacket in a new-generation polyester or a seersucker suit with dimpled stripes.

The problem was in melding American sportswear style with artsy effects. They included smudged prints that made shirts look as if they had sweat patches; or flower patterns that treated the shirts too much like a canvas. Simons - whether or not he follows in Sander's noble footprints - will bring his strong personal handwriting. And the word from Germany is that Sander herself is already planning a project that will bring her back into fashion on a different scale.

At Costume National, Ennio Capasa went the rock 'n' roll route, reliving the era when Elvis was King, snake hips were shaking and long hair was shocking. Capasa has a neat way of taking a theme and working it, so for last season's Rudolf Nureyev read 1960s Teds. They wore their hearts on their rolled-up shirtsleeves and as playing-card motifs on shirts. Their hair was suitably slicked and their jackets met drainpipe pants at mid-thigh. Updated as light nylon trench coats or with narrow-toed shoes done with finesse, the show seemed modern - not least in its bandannas tied into high-fashion wristbands. But for all its fun and studiously worked eccentricity, there is no way of recapturing the rebellious, pelvis-gyrating energy of the period.

Burberry's sweet/sad take on young boys in military clothes seemed the most profound look at youth in 2006.

 

[Mr-Dale]

Nice article. I like what she says about about Burberry and Sander. I wonder what it is that she ment with

And the word from Germany is that Sander herself is already planning a project that will bring her back into fashion on a different scale.

Or do we at tFS already know so
Anyway, thanks nqth for the article.

Oh, a bit OT, but do you notice that you posted the article twice in the original post

 

[nqth]

You are welcome, Mr-Dale, and thanks:-)
Yes. it is double because I pasted the article from IHT and forgot to chceck it:-)

It always come twice:-))

Prada goes back to basics; for Versace, it's 'Miami nice'
By Suzy Menkes International Herald Tribune


TUESDAY, JUNE 28, 2005


In her fresh, clean-cut show and in her wise words, Miuccia Prada put into perspective the malaise pervading high fashion menswear, which other Italian designers have tried to face off with vivid color and graphic pattern for summer 2006.

"Fashion should become more egalitarian. I am not interested in dealing with a few sophisticated people," Prada said. "Crisscrossing everything is the main issue: the need to face the huge world and to appeal to new countries and new customers."

So for Prada, Monday's show was a stark return to basics: to the skinny silhouette, to fabrics treated with techno shine, to nylon work-wear, to hosiery-fine sweaters and to symbols to identify the label. And being Prada, with her penchant for a communist/populist aesthetic, that meant stars (but not necessarily red) printed on shirts, neckties or decorating the new must-have nylon backpack - along with hearts to put soul into a sober collection.

The result was a show of those perfectly judged and wearable clothes on which Prada built its empire. But the reprise did not include her much-copied brief coat, short boxy suits or sour colors. In fact, Prince of Wales tailoring was classic, and there was a wry sweetness to an aqua blue suit, to a dusty pink shirt or a moss green sweater. Pants with softening pleats offered a new cut.

Why is Prada so often ahead of the pack? Because she has an ability to invent new menswear classics as if they had always existed. After a few seasons of kooky effects, any piece of this show - and that includes the head-wrap hats - could have walked right out on silvered sneakers or smart leather shoes onto the Milan streets. It was fashion for the real world and for its future.

At Versace, where restraint is now the watchword, the designer Donatella took a bold step. And one front row guest was over the moon at the show, where the runway was a mosaic-tiled swimming pool and the backdrop was the company's Medusa head logo.

"I loved all the silk and I came here thinking to fill my closet," said the Grammy award-winning music star Usher. "But when I saw those beautiful women, I thought I should just buy all that."

His partner, Eishia Brightwell, glowed with anticipation, while Brooke Shields, her midriff bravely exposed to the mosquito-filled garden, took time out from appearing in "Chicago" in London to join the after-show dinner given by Donatella Versace.

The show was a homage to core Versace values of flash and pizazz - but done with style as Art Deco patterns (think Miami's South Beach architecture) and a finale of tropical swim shorts on hunky males. They could have been from Bruce Weber photographs of the earlier Gianni Versace era - or, as the program notes put it: "Miami Vice."

But the show was "Miami nice," if you discounted the female models with big hair and scanty clothing. Well-oiled torsos were to the fore, but so was subtle craftsmanship in the Deco-patterned shirts and polo tops, teamed with tailored pants. A brisk black-and-white palette was punctuated with strong shades. It was all very Versace, but also showed a clear vision. As Versace herself put it: "Looking back but bringing it to the future."

Gianfranco Ferre's message was pure white with a touch of gray and black, in a show that was the embodiment of a new strategy that focuses on the name "Ferre" and gives equal billing to couture, medium-priced lines and sportswear. The resulting show was clean, fresh and coherent. Drama appeared only for embroidered and crumpled silk evening jackets in oriental greens. Otherwise mauve, with blood orange leather shoes, were the only challenges to a neutral palette.

Playing with textures and tones of white, the parade started with a flourish: a white alligator jacket, followed by ostrich. White cotton pants were played off against parchment gauzy knits, or arcs of black traced the fitted silhouette of a sportier jacket. An "F" buckle on wide belt was a new logo. Ferre's shiny suits in metallic grays still look destined for shady people in sunny Mediterranean places. But this was a show that got to the architectural essence of Ferre, with only one peacock gesture: a grand beach robe.

Color - vivid primary shades - was the surprise element at Bottega Veneta, where even the classic vintage leather travel bags had stripes of yellow, green, red and blue round the girth. The same webbing strap came as belts, with their snazzy colors picked out for ties and handkerchiefs. Even the blunt-toed shoes came in four shades of antiqued leather.

"I really felt for spring colors after the austere and dark winter collection," said the designer Tomas Maier, who cited as his inspiration the color-field canvases of midcentury American painters. The hues seemed a bit rich for a house that prides itself on discreet elegance. But Maier's enthusiasm for contemporary art is genuine, and there were other graphic elements - especially the narrow cuts for jackets with shrunken seams.

The pervasive small jacket seemed minuscule at Neil Barrett, where cropped shorts on tailored suits reinforced the impression that the proportions were seen through Alice's Looking Glass. Barrett scored with his subversion of formal dress pieces: a tuxedo vest worn over a white shirt with a black scribble down the front; or dress shirts in denim, complete with frills and a jaunty bow tie.

Antonio Marras always has a cultural trigger for his poetic collections. From the Alexander Calder mobiles hanging over the runway through the bold, graphic patterns of modernist Italian painters like Lucio Fontana and including "Take Five" on the soundtrack, Marras was recreating a feeling of an era.

"Intellectuals in Milan in the 1960s," said Marras, who even put these unlikely heroes on T-shirts. The designer has a quirky vision, with its own codes, such as narrow pants and fresh white shirts, cut in a modern way to prevent this inventive collection from slipping into period costume.

At Vivienne Westwood this season's sea and fun-fair theme made for less tricksy clothes. Success stories included red gingham tablecloth shirts and striped jackets, but the so-called radical slogans "branded" and "propaganda" seemed oh-so-familiar!

Ozwald Boateng took his classic sharp-cut jackets and easy sportswear on to a predominantly white palette. He mixed peach with purple or a tan leather jacket with lemon yellow top. Familiar flashes of bright lining appeared under jackets.

There was no innovation here, but a bright and breezy show to challenge tough times.

 

[nqth]

Suzy Menkes on Paris Men Shows

from iht.com

From Jazz Age to Jagger: Alive with the sound of music

By Suzy Menkes International Herald Tribune


MONDAY, JULY 4, 2005
PARIS While Bob Geldof rallies his rocker cohorts to make a political statement with Live8, fashion is also tuned in to the power of music.

There was John Galliano with a jazz band, colorful hobo buskers and a Hare Krishna group as part of his powerful menswear show that ended with the designer at the wheel of a car flagged "Route 66."

Mick Jagger's rubber lips appeared as a print in a Comme des Garçons rock 'n roll show. And from Latino accordion players through a full-blown orchestra, the Paris menswear shows over the weekend were alive with the sound of music.

Galliano started with the Jazz Age, which seems to throb through the current summer 2006 season. For the first time, this men's line packed a creative punch. Impeccable tailoring showed the grace and glamour of the past, yet the taut manliness of this millennium. Even the elderly New Orleans-style jazz band wore precise black suits or vests that wafted at the back in Galliano's signature newspaper print silk.

Then Galliano changed the tune as blues signaled Alabama hobos in intricate and colorful patchworked denim.

Another scenario featured hunky, grease-smudged garage mechanics mimicking the iconic Herb Ritts 1984 images of "Fred with Tires." Yet whether it was green velvet pants decorated with Olympic rings, flowers appliquéd on a khaki top or a severe black coat, there were strong silhouettes for jackets and pants.

"Romantic, poetic - the power of music - and it all started with Bojangles," said Galliano backstage where rock posters from the Sex Pistols to Nirvana showed his other musical history inspirations.

What did L'Wren Scott, Mick Jagger's partner, think of the suits that came out at Comme des Garçons smothered in the Rolling Stones' "lips"? Or the graffiti scribbles on jackets of the signatures of Jagger and Ronnie Wood?

"I thought it was very interesting - very Comme des Garçons ," Scott said with an enigmatic smile. And we have indeed been down this route before. When Comme's Rei Kawakubo said backstage that "rock is a symbol of energy and rebellion," it was inevitable to think back to her earlier, hyper-creative explorations of Punk.

This show was on the one note that came out as another graphic pattern on white tailoring. It produced jolly prints, exceptional footwear in gilded, elastic-sided boots and dynamic sportswear. Sweat pants were labeled "DNA" or "anti-oxidant" and lips and tongues tumbled over T-shirts. Maybe Kawakubo will surprise us (but not that much) by dressing Jagger for the next Rolling Stones tour. But a rebel yell?

Led Zeppelin was the rowdy accompaniment to Junya Watanabe's show, which took its inspiration from classic American workwear - and then subtly subverted it. Four-pocket overalls became versions of jackets and pants where pockets moved about with the cunning of a card sharp. Jackets and thigh-length coats might have two pockets at the front but the other two on the hips at the back. Pants were cut narrow, dropped at the crotch to create a lean but easy silhouette.

Working with different labels, Watanabe played with the logos, too, so that the Lacoste crocodile slithered from chest to backbone. Lacoste is one of several brands, including the workwear company Pointer with which Watanabe collaborates, giving a modernist spin to authentic brands. The result was a smart show with just the right elements of irony and subversion to make it fresh.

Re-mixes of the past require the same subtleties in fashion or in music. And Yohji Yamamoto's interpretation of American baseball classics was too literal - in its deep-sleeved shirts and ballooning pants and in its naïve "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" jingle on the soundtrack. There were fine Yohji classics, such as soft black coats gathered at the back. And there was some smart innovation in the way that zippers were used to open up jackets to create cut-out effects. The proportions of cropped pants to the large tops were also new. But all that was subsumed into - and often overwhelmed by - the overall theme. Vast striped tops, coin dot pants and cute kids wielding baseball bats made the show seem like a pastiche.

The cricket pitch and the tennis court were inspirations for Naoki Takizawa. He struck a carefree Jazz Age note with his Issey Miyake show of graphic jackets, their silhouettes traced as if by a pencil. This fashion from the playing fields of Eton brought a focus to the ubiquitous blazer. To the classic period piece and school uniform stripes, Takizawa added his own pencil traits, as an outline following the lapels, for the smudgy effects across shirt shoulders or as a tennis crest on the pocket.

The colorful pennants, with their medieval figures and symbols, made Dries Van Noten's show seem like a homage to his Belgian roots. But the music, commissioned from Ozark Henry and played by an orchestra, expanded the cultural reach - and so did the Spanish matador jackets, bull-ring red raincoat and guipure lace under blazers.

"I wanted proud men who love fashion - so I thought of Spain and of Salvador Dalí on the beach," said Van Noten. The collection was less surreal than it sounded with just a sarong effect for Dalí's sun lounger and the rest a judicious mix of elegant tailoring, hot color, Moorish patterns on sweaters and silhouettes with a proud nobility.

Kris Van Assche also tapped into a Hispanic look. The Belgian designer said that he was moved by the "innate elegance" of Argentine males and, with the voice of Maria Pilar filling the Paris music hall and a homage to Carlos Gardel, the father of tango, Van Assche struck a romantic note. The fashion story was in the pants, which were often too complex in their ability to ride up and down the leg. But other work on tailored pants, with small pleats at front and back, showed interesting cutting. Van Assche was effective with a sense of proportion, of drama and of color, such as green and purple.

The sound of music would not be complete without the clash and crash of rockers. With Axl Rose on the soundtrack and skulls and roses as prints, the Japanese company called Number (N)ine showed a lot of attitude. The show included the "F" word printed on suspenders and pants abandoned in favor of swim shorts worn with blazers. Like some rock music, there was a lot of noise about nothing very much.

 

[nqth]

Dieselized!
By Suzy Menkes International Herald Tribune


The influence of Diesel on Martin Margiela, now that he is part of the Italian company, is turning the Belgian designer's work towards denim. All Margiela's codes of classic tailored pieces, treated to look vintage, are still in place. But the accent for the new collection is on jeans - even cut up into sandals, or worked with air-brushed leather. There were T-shirts with pen scribbles, shirts with water marks (looking suspiciously like sweat) and leather wallets heat-sensitive to finger marks. The details gave Margiela zest to casual wear. Among the dressier clothes, a paisley-patterned Lurex jacket and a vest with attached shirt tails were a neat fit with winkle picker shoes.

 

[KKnardi]

Suzy Menkes - Fashion Editor, International Herald Tribune

Suzy Menkes is fashion's authority. As fashion editor of the International Herald Tribune, the only daily newspaper with a global reach, her reports on the international collections are read around the world.

Frank, fearless and free from editorial constraints, Menkes has built a reputation for being a fashion picador. But far from seeking to be controversial or to claim a role as a fashion critic, she sees herself as reporter or observer and is inspired by an enthusiasm and a passion for her subject.

She covers the universe of style, from haute couture to talent spotting and store openings, including both women's and menswear. She also interviews leading designers and fashion executives in the luxury market, which is the focus of the International Herald Tribune.

Unique among fashion editors, Menkes, trained as a historian at Cambridge University in her native England, looks beyond the immediate trends to analyze changing style in a social context. She has examined the phenomenon of the working mother as it impacts on the burgeoning branded baby wear market; she has studied Italian family fashion houses and questioned the future of La Famiglia.

Her incisive reporting includes the jousting of fashion tycoons and industry facts and figures for the IHT's financial pages; and reviews of museum exhibitions in the arts section. She is based in Paris but traveling both in the caravanserai of the international collections and as a reporter, Menkes's beat includes New York, European capital cities and Asia from Tokyo and Hong Kong, through Beijing, Shanghai and Singapore.

Two other areas of expertise and fascination are jewelry and the British royal family. Menkes is the author of The Royal Jewels (1985) a study of the private jewelry collection of Queen Elizabeth; The Windsor Style (1987), an exploration of the lifestyle of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor; and Queen and Country (1992), a journey through the private rural world of Queen Elizabeth and the ecological interests of Prince Charles.

In 2006, Menkes was named an officer of the Order of the British Empire for her services to journalism and also named a chevalier of the Legion of Honor by then-President Jacques Chirac of France. /iht.com

 

[KKnardi]

No (fashion) country for old men -- Raf Simons, Givenchy, Lanvin, Hermes, Ann Demeule

PARIS: A scattering of old men - like an elegiac reference to an aging baby boom generation - have been appearing throughout the long weekend of Paris menswear shows. But for all the nobility of these elder statesmen (usually of the arty kind), the focus of the 2009 season has been on virility and red-blooded masculinity that inevitably fades with age.

A powerful Raf Simons show, its models in streamlined tailoring with filaments of decoration, proved that fashion is no country for old men - even if the designer showed in a French lycée and went back to the beginnings of his career when a schoolboy was his hero.

Teen promise had developed as exquisitely sliced tuxedos, sleeveless and pared down to a shorts jumpsuit. Worn with winged flaps on sandals that pushed the show toward the futuristic, the rigorously tailored outfits were, as Simons said, "the antidote to pajamas." There was nothing soft or sloppy in streamlined suits - with shorts or regular pants - played out in black and white. But the new element was decoration: craft work with a modern, graphic edge.

The real message of the show was written on the school courtyard: "There is a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in." Those words inspired Simons to use filaments of embroidery to enrich the stark silhouettes and to make each piece seem exceptional. Whether it was the quilted stitching that bulked out a jacket or the loose, colored threads creating an abstract hairy chest below the sculpted neckline of a sleeveless coat, there was an originality and a freshness to this Raf Simons show that was astounding and impressive.

At Givenchy, the black leather shorts layered over cropped leggings; lacy, see-through shirts; and roomy black football tops were unforgiving for anyone past the age of clubbing. To this once oh-so-gentlemanly brand, the designer Riccardo Tisci, in his first menswear show, brought three beautifully cut suits - although one was on a man dressed in fuchsia pink from shirt to shoes.

More typical of a collection that encompassed the Italian-born designer's meld of wild Gothic and deep Catholicism was the macho swagger of an eyelet-punched leather scarf tied, gypsy-style, at the neck of an open-mesh top. It made the show as much about the body as the clothes.

Yet in bringing to Givenchy menswear his rich, dark aesthetic and his creative energy, honed at Central Saint Martins school in London, Tisci is creating a coherent image with his women's line. This hard-bodied young man with vibrant sexual energy is the perfect partner to the darkly romantic Givenchy woman. Whether the male customer, more familiar with classic tailoring and symbols like pea-sized dots on shirts and scarves, will adapt to the new fashion regime is another story.

Lanvin has made the aesthetic link between the two sexes, and the show Sunday, with its advanced fabric treatments within a gentle comfort zone, was a triumph of intelligent thinking - the more so because the designer Lucas Ossendrijver works separately from the brand's creative director, Alber Elbaz. But as the two took a bow, after a classic suit with an arresting pebbled surface had ended the show, it was clear that they had worked in sweet harmony.

The display of soft suits, tailored with ruching at the spine or down the pant legs, had the luxurious elegance of ease, as found in the Lanvin women's collections. An ultra-light raincoat with a fluid ripple down the front or short jackets in the softest silk looked like the ultimate upscale version of wash-'n'-wear fashion. Whimsical, battered straw hats, some exuding flowers, added that kooky romanticism for which Lanvin now stands.

The secret was in the work put into these apparently easy clothes. That meant not just fabric research into the light and soft, but also the proportion of a tiny collar, the detail of black pearl beads at the neck or even on sneaker boots. Denim shorts, from Lanvin's collaboration with Acne, introduced traditional sportswear.

But even the most formal elements seemed nonchalant, from a cummerbund knotted at the back to colors that would take a crushed velvet suit from green to gray. The collection epitomized that rare art of making complexity seem simple.

"Tie-dye - it's never been done like this before," said Véronique Nichanian of the patterns, faded and bleeding, over classic Hermès prints. But the point of this show from an ultra-luxurious house was not that the designer had messed with the historic patterns but that she used them and other factors to make a collection that was as relaxed as anyone can be in a punched lambskin jacket that costs a small fortune.

Luxury oozes from Hermès products, but there was a natural, rather than a sharp urban feel, to the micro-check suits, sandy colors brightened with azure blue and to the dress-down sandals and brief, splodge-patterned shorts. Shorts! At Hermès? And virtually no signature ties, replaced by the casual silk kerchiefs or a deep-scoop sweater?

The brand has been steadily infiltrating a younger customer's closet. And even if some of those young hedge-fund Turks will no longer be able to splash out on vacation clothes, this was a beautifully realized collection for the stealth wealth world of the super-rich.

Hermann Hesse's "The Glass Bead Game" was an intellectual discourse from an aging literary lion. The iconic German author might seem an unlikely inspiration but Ann Demeulemeester - give or take a literal rendition of glass bead necklaces - produced a subtle, respectful and thought-provoking collection about "the art of growing older," as she put it poetically backstage.

So the young men, with their swashbuckling fedoras, pants rolled up calf-high under their sinuous black jackets, embraced graphic inky dots of black on beige and made the quintessential style of the Belgian designer look intellectual but spiffy. But then old age fell and the clothes became pale and limpid - weather-beaten hats and gauzy coats draped over fragile figures, as if walking to the book's ivory tower of intellectuals. The vision was touching - and proof that fashion need not end with the onset of old age.

John Galliano is interested only in aging disgracefully, irreverently, colorfully and madly. His all-too-familiar hodgepodge of manic inspiration and impressive execution included a few visible, wearable clothes, like a bleached denim jacket or a perfectly tailored coat with only a little glitzy embroidery. But who cares? Galliano is all about the spectacle of Indian daggers piercing the hair styles above drop-crotch dohti pants; or of Bonnie Prince Charlie with a tartan messenger bag as big as a kilt.

Maybe one day Galliano will feel the need to calm down his collections. This one required the statutory hour's wait in a distant venue before the show began. As ever, the description of a single outfit would require a paragraph. And much of the credit should go to the hair and makeup the artists Julien d'Ys and Pat McGrath. Their most extraordinary efforts went to recreating the utter eccentric Quentin Crisp, with Coke cans (and the rest) in a bird's nest of a wig. Now there was a madly fashionable old man. iht.com

 

[mishahoi]

I had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Menkes briefly -just long enough for some small talk and a photo- at the first Japan Fashion Week 3 years ago. We were sitting next to each other at Dresscamp--I was very excited, and she was as gracious and kind as ever.

 

[kasper!]

the title of this thread should be"Suzy - Fashion Critic"
because fashion editor means stylist in this sub-forum....

 

[Katie123]

warning: this is very long but it was a very good read imo

A Samurai in Paris: Suzy Menkes
From The New Yorker
March 17, 2001

It was just before noon on a chilly January day in Paris when Suzy Menkes, the International Herald Tribune's influential fashion editor, bustled into the newspaper's headquarters, in the suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. The evening before, Menkes had filed the last of three stories on the weeklong spring/summer couture shows--stories composed in virtuoso displays of deadline brinkmanship, begun on her laptop in a front-row seat beside the catwalk, finished in the back of a cab, as she and a photographer crept through the Paris traffic, and then transmitted from the cab to the Tribune using a wireless modem, in time to appear on the streets of Tokyo and Hong Kong four hours later.
Menkes, who is fifty-nine years old, and who recently became a grandmother, was dressed in a navy-blue Issey Miyake Pleats Please pants suit, with a gray-blue pin-striped Mandarin-style silk jacket lined in pink, and black jodhpur boots. She looked a bit like an Asian empress on a shooting holiday in the English countryside. Her personal style, which features pillowy vintage jackets and scarves and a preference for soft, luxurious fabrics like velvet and silk, is nearly the opposite of the sleek, clothes-as-combat approach to dressing favored by the other fashionistas you see at the shows. Her most distinctive feature is her hair, which she wears with an odd-looking flip in front: a long demi-pompadour that is coiled back on the top of her head, creating a dinner-roll-size opening that you can see through from the side--a style that, combined with fearless reporting, has inspired people to call her Samurai Suzy.
The elevator rose to two, where the Tribune's editorial offices, in an undistinguished modern building, take up the entire floor--news on one side, features on the other. The features wing had beat-up-looking furniture and a stale smell of cigar smoke. I had imagined something more glamorous, having seen Jean Seberg, wearing a T-shirt with the Trib's yellow-and-black logo on it, selling copies of the paper in Jean-Luc Godard's film "Breathless." Menkes's desk was strewn with the gilded invitations that fashion houses send out for the shows. These were to the upcoming men's collections in Paris, which followed the couture shows, and would be followed by the Women's Ready to Wear Collections, beginning in New York, then moving on to London, Milan, and finally Paris. (New York used to come last, but some American-based designers wanted the order changed.) On the wall behind her desk were rows of file boxes with designers' names on them, in alphabetical order, and there were stacks of magazines everywhere, as well as a case of champagne, unopened, and shopping bags with gifts from fashion houses, waiting to be returned. Menkes doesn't accept freebies, and, unlike most members of the fashion press, does not routinely wear the clothes of the designers she writes about. (She can't afford them.) When fashion houses send free items, she gives them to the American Hospital of Paris or returns them with a note saying, "I was brought up to believe a girl should never accept anything but flowers and chocolates."
As Menkes sat down at her desk, she made a weary oufff sound and began to regale her assistant, Jessica Michault, with the saga of last night's "nightmare" involving her wireless modem, which had failed to work in the cab and had occasioned a "frantic dash" back to Menkes's apartment, on the Rue Jean-Goujon, to use the landline. Menkes has a musical voice with a Wagnerian range of pitch. She speaks in perfectly formed sentences, as though dictating copy over the telephone, and her precise diction and British accent give a note of propriety to her utterances. Although frequently overwrought by the struggle to make the dilatory and capricious world of fashion comply with her relentless and unyielding deadlines, she rarely uses strong language, preferring expressions like "Oh, bother!" and "What a muddle!" and "Today went pear-shaped!"
"I literally thought I might lose my mind," Menkes was saying now, of her technical problems following the show. She seemed pleased by the prospect. She shot a reproachful look at her laptop, a cheap machine that she had bought, she said, "in one of my misbegotten and idiotic attempts to save the Trib some money." She added, "The truth is I just don't think the thing is up to the word count I produce."

Last year, Menkes produced about two hundred and ninety thousand words for the paper. She is only the Tribune's third fashion editor in forty years, and, carrying on the tradition of her predecessors, Eugenia Sheppard and Hebe Dorsey, she offers Trib readers verbal snapshots from the world of fashion, written in a staccato and tough-talking journalese--she's a Fleet Street Diana Vreeland. There are vivid descriptions of the clothes ("a masculine pants suit in a carapace of whiskey brown pearl buttons") and piquant judgments of their effect ("If you want a pick-me-up fashion cocktail of color in a tutti-frutti print, gaudy suede Puss-in-Boots and look-at-me accessories, this show was caricatural Versace"), and the occasional devastating put-down (as when Menkes wrote, of last spring's Jil Sander show, that the below-the-knee dresses "looked like something a woman who had lost her waist would choose from a mail-order catalogue"). Her byline is closely read both by fashion insiders--Domenico De Sole, the president of the Gucci Group, says that during the collections the workday always begins with "Did you see Suzy?"--and by the general public. Menkes gives you not just the clothes but the pounding music, the celebrities and society ladies in the front row, the breasts swaying on the runway, and the gleaming bare torso of John Galliano, the Dior designer, as, "dressed for the trapeze," he wriggles and prances down the catwalk at the end of his show.

 

[Katie123]

cont

Menkes appreciates the humor in a prim and bookish-seeming British woman, whose personal tastes run to a quiet evening at the ballet or the opera, continually finding herself in the midst of "louche" (a favorite word) backstage gatherings of celebrities, half-naked models, and assorted fashion zanies, and unable to resist the revelry. "Like a slightly mad auntie, she is," the model Kate Moss says of Menkes. "Some of these fashion people can be a bit, you know"--she turned her head to one side and looked down her nose--"funny. But Suzy's never like that. When you see her backstage, you can always just have a nice chat about shoes with her."
For some designers, Menkes functions as a proud but demanding mother--one who wants you to succeed, and takes it personally when you let her down. Alber Elbaz, the head designer for Lanvin, says, "When I am designing an invitation for a fashion show, I will write Suzy's name on the trial proof. If her name looks good on it, I know I can send it." The night after the show, he has trouble sleeping, waiting for her review, which he will read at 6 a.m. "When we designers do a good collection, Suzy is so happy for us, and when we do a bad one she seems almost to get angry." Several years ago, Menkes wrote that the classic Chanel bag was over, and Chanel took out a full-page ad in the Trib to rebut her. Oscar de la Renta said, "I have gotten as mad at what she has written as anyone, and while I sometimes feel that she is off in her judgments of my collections, and she hurts my feelings--very deeply--in the end I must concede that her knowledge is vast." He added, "She doesn't base her reviews on what she likes--a lot of critics can't divorce themselves from their own taste."

The Herald Tribune has three times as many editors as writers--the opposite of the usual proportion, reflecting the paper's longtime role as a digest of stories written by New York Times and Washington Post reporters. The best-known Tribune bylines tend to be those of the culture writers (in addition to Menkes, there is Souren Melikian, who writes about art and auctions, and Patricia Wells, who covers food). Perhaps this is because while Parisian politics and diplomacy are no longer so important to American political interests, Parisian culture still influences our culture, at least as far as clothes, art, and food are concerned.
The Tribune, which was founded in 1887, has been struggling financially in recent years (it lost about four million dollars last year) and has been trying to remake itself as a newspaper for a new kind of international reader. Twenty-four-hour global news and sports channels and the Internet have altered the notion of what an expatriate is--the American in Paris, reading the box scores before heading out for a day at the Louvre, seems a relic of the past, perhaps part of the old Europe that Donald Rumsfeld evoked when he criticized France and Germany for opposing United States policy on Iraq. The new American empire would be needing a new imperial newspaper, and, as recent developments at the Tribune suggest, that paper would see the world less from the point of view of Paris and more from the perspective of New York.
For thirty-five years, the Tribune was published as a partnership between the New York Times and the Washington Post. But, in October 2002, the Times forced the Post to sell its stake in the paper, for sixty-five million dollars (according to the Post, the Times refused to invest in the paper, and threatened to start a rival publication unless the Post sold). On January 2nd, stories from the Post stopped appearing. The Times is currently making decisions about the content and production of the Tribune, and while "there are no plans at this time to change the name," Howell Raines, the Times' executive editor, told me, "that's not to say that down the road that couldn't happen."
When Raines visited the Tribune's offices, in December, he made a point of meeting with Menkes privately. "I wanted to tell her that she writes our kind of journalism," he said. As Menkes was studying the menswear calendar, I brought up the subject of the Times and her place in the new order. Earlier in the week, the office had been the site of a remarkable announcement by the Tribune's outgoing chairman, Peter Goldmark, who told the assembled staff that the Times takeover meant "the end of the Tribune as an independent newspaper, with its own voice and its own international outlook." Goldmark had added, "This is a great loss. . . . At a time when the world is growing to mistrust America, it needs thoughtful voices and independent perspectives that see the world whole and are not managed from America."
The Times already has four fashion writers, headed by Cathy Horyn, who cover the same collections that Menkes covers. I suggested to Menkes that she might split responsibility for the collections with the Times writers, but she said that "the whole thing about fashion is that it's global, and you can't really follow it unless you see everything." Nor was she interested in spending less time in Paris; she is forthright about her Francophilia. "Paris is the breeding ground of fashion at all levels," she said. "Whether it is Belgian designers out in the burbs putting on cool shows, bourgeois ladies putting on the chic for Chantilly races, or those couture seamstresses with their gossamer hand-stitching. It's the taxi-driver thing: the London cabbies care about sport; the New York cabs care how many blocks you are going; and the Parisian taxi-drivers care about how John Galliano is doing at Dior."
On the other hand, she would be happy if the Times would rationalize the paper's confusing and inefficient international deadlines. For example, that morning the staff was preparing an edition for the suburbs of Tokyo, which would then be "replated" for the Tokyo city edition, three hours later, and replated again for the next European edition. "As a result of all this speed-of-light technology," Menkes said, "we all have to work harder than ever."

Menkes first fell in love with Paris as a teen-ager, when, during her "gap year" between leaving school and going to university, she studied dressmaking there. "It was a very stuffy couture place, which is where I learned about bias cuts and how to make patterns out of paper. Everything was very proper--I was 'Mademoiselle Menkes.' It was certainly not the louche Left Bank life I had imagined from reading Jean-Paul Sartre." In Paris, Menkes lived with a White Russian ÈmigrÈ family, whose matriarch took her to her first couture show, at Nina Ricci. "I just loved it," Menkes recalled. Later, when she returned to Paris as a university student, she would sneak into the ready-to-wear venues at five in the morning and hide under the stage for four hours, until the audience arrived and she could safely emerge and mingle with the crowd.
She already had a taste for luxury, which she believes she inherited from her father, a Belgian cavalry officer who was evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940. He met and married Menkes's mother during the war, and then was killed in 1943, several months before Suzy was born, when the plane he was flying for the R.A.F. disappeared off Malta. "My mother used to say that the only thing he brought with him on the boat from Dunkirk was a pair of silk socks," Menkes recalled. "And that's what I love, real luxury, the kind of luxury you can feel and smell--I will always spend the extra money to get a silk vest, not a cotton vest."
During the war, the Menkeses (Suzy has an older sister, Vivienne, who is a travel writer and a translator) moved from London to a village near Brighton, not far from the cliffs. "My mother lived on a widow's pension, so times were hard," Menkes said. But her mother always made an effort to dress well; one of Suzy's earliest memories is of her mother's moss-green car coat, which she wore with matching shoes.
Menkes was a good student and won a scholarship to Cambridge, where she read history and English literature. She signed up for Varsity, the university newspaper, and in her final year became its first woman editor-in-chief. She wrote a fashion and society column called "A Bird's Eye View," and one of her first scoops was reporting that Marianne Faithfull's boyfriend at the time, John Dunbar, had been busted for pot. It was the mid-sixties, swinging London was the center of the fashion world, and Menkes wore a miniskirt and white CourrËges boots that she had saved up for. ("Actually, they were knockoffs, but I didn't tell anyone.")
After university, she got a job as a junior fashion reporter for the Times of London, and it was there that she met her husband, David Spanier, then the paper's diplomatic correspondent, who later became a renowned author of books on chess and poker. They were married in 1969, and Menkes, whose father was Jewish, converted to Judaism, Spanier's religion. (Some fashion designers prefer not to show on Yom Kippur, which usually falls during the collections: everyone knows that Menkes doesn't attend fashion shows that day.) She became the fashion editor of the Times in 1978. "Milan was just coming up, and the nineteen-eighties belonged to Italy, with the rise of Armani, Versace, and Gigli, and I covered all that," she recalled. "And then the Japanese started to come to Paris, and then Lacroix came in with his froufrou, and Calvin Klein and Helmut Lang with minimalism, and Ralph Lauren, who sensed people wanted to be defined as much by their habitats as by their uniforms."
In 1988, the Tribune hired Menkes as Hebe Dorsey's successor. Menkes, who doesn't look the part of a grande dame--she's neither tall nor especially regal--needed to invent a persona to go along with her new status. Her solution was her hair style, which, as her friend Marion Hume put it, transformed her from a "North London middle-aged woman with a slightly bouffy bob into an icon."

 

[Katie123]

As a fashion writer, Menkes says, she lives "for those moments when there is a sense that nothing after this show will ever be the same." She goes on, "Prada had a moment in the mid-nineties, which was the beginning of the ugly aesthetic--the end of sweet colors, and so forth. Rei Kawakubo, of Comme des GarÁons, had a moment like that in the late nineties, with those punk-rock clothes, and Helmut had a moment when he did feathers under clear plastic, and another moment when he did his angel-wing collection. And then there was the Sean John collection, in 2000--a time when minimalism was big, and everyone was in navy and gray--and there was Lil' Kim in the front row in a multicolored fur coat."
Unlike some people in the fashion world, who seem to have no life outside it, Suzy and her husband raised a family of three boys, Gideon, Joshua, and Samson, who are now thirty, twenty-eight, and twenty-four. As we drove around between fashion events, she used her cell phone to keep up with family matters, including the activities of her oldest son's baby daughter, Jessica (Menkes recently had a handbag made with her granddaughter's picture silk-screened on it, "and I intend to show it off among the Guccis all over Milan"); her middle son's upcoming wedding, in California, in August; and her youngest son's efforts to begin a career in journalism. Sam was writing a trial piece for the Financial Times about Al-Jazeera's new English-language Web site, and Menkes was concerned about the lead. "It seems as though one should at least mention Iraq in the first paragraph," she said.
Since taking over at the Tribune, Menkes has covered every set of collections, attending some six hundred shows a year. She continued to work following the death of her husband, in April of 2000, which was, by all accounts, a terrible loss. When I brought it up, her voice got shaky. "He was sixty-seven, in perfect health, exercised, never smoked, and just dropped dead one day of a stroke," she said. She paused for a long time and then said with a laugh, "Maybe that's how I'll go--just pop off at a fashion show."

The men's collections were held in a wide variety of spaces around Paris--from the dilapidated music hall where the Belgian hot shot Raf Simons staged his defile, to the headquarters of UNESCO, where the HermËs men's collection was presented (and where not much else seemed to be going on). I plunged into the rush and bustle of securing the invitations and getting to the shows on time, but I soon learned that when you're in Menkes's company there's no rush, because, as they say in the fashion business, the show doesn't start until Suzy arrives.
The couture shows had summoned Menkes's rhapsodic, swooning style. Christian Lacroix's gowns were "rich with mille-feuille layers and sweet-toothed patterns from a tiny wallpaper print jacket to lacy hose," and there were Chanel's "wispy hems that, like so many of the couture special effects, just evaporated into an ethereal mist." At the Azzedine Alaïa couture show, she had even joined the flatterers backstage in a moment of fanship with the diminutive master, before switching back to her reporter persona and hurtling out the door to make her deadline. But the men's shows, coming after the high theatre and artistry of the couture shows, were dispiriting--"the tedium of good-looking guys parading quite nice stuff," as Menkes once wrote.
Couture preserves the old notion of fashion as an art, one led from above by a few fantastically gifted designers, in whose "febrile" (another favorite Suzy word) imaginations are born important conceptual changes that move fashion forward. These ideas then filter down to ready-to-wear, and down again to the mass market--a process, Menkes told me, that takes about seven years. That's how fashion used to work, but men's clothing is actually much more characteristic of the business today. Men's fashion is less about design and artistry and more about image and marketing. What's important in men's clothes is the blend of male archetypes that the company chooses to create--businessman, hippie, mod, rocker, gigolo, schoolboy. Making an image isn't like making an amazing dress; it's a collaborative process involving lots of people, on both the design and the marketing sides. It is not an accident that two of the most successful designers in the business, Giorgio Armani and Ralph Lauren, began in menswear.
Menkes has covered the rise of the image-makers, but I got the feeling, during our time together, that her heart was with the vanishing world of "artists" who create "high fashion." One day, I asked her how she felt about denim. She said, "My weakness is I can't quite bring myself to really care about jeans. I've tried everything. Even when Dolce and Gabbana dress them up with all that embroidery and have Naomi's backside hanging out of them--to me, jeans are just jeans. There, I've admitted it. And, so long as I'm being absolutely honest, I don't really find sneakers so fascinating, either."
On another occasion, while she was sipping tea at the Hôtel Costes, a trendy spot on the Rue Saint-Honoré, I asked whether a woman who was almost sixty was too old to cover such a youth-oriented enterprise as fashion. Menkes replied, "But why should fashion be the province of youth? Certainly, it shouldn't be exclusively the province of older people--God forbid--as it was in the nineteen-fifties, when young girls were encouraged to dress like their mothers as soon as possible. But nowadays mothers think they must dress like their daughters, which is, in its way, just as silly."
One night, while we were having dinner at DavÈ, a Chinese restaurant that is a favorite of the fashionistas, I asked Menkes whether she thought the fashion industry still served to reinforce notions of class, or whether class had been replaced by a kind of tribalism based on brands. "Margaret Thatcher said there was no such thing as society," Menkes replied, "but, certainly, where I was brought up there was a society--and everyone knew what you could get away with and what you couldn't. You could go out and buy all the right clothes, and you'd still be sneered at, because you were aspiring to something beyond your place. This is what I find remarkable about Americans--they believe that if you buy the right clothes you will be accepted by the right people, regardless of where you come from. It's quite touching, really. I don't know if I believe that. But I suppose it's a good thing they think it, as it keeps the fashion business going."

We saw a few good shows, like the Dior presentation put on by Hedi Slimane, who Menkes feels is the "buzziest" young designer of the moment. Bernard Arnault, the chairman of LVMH (MoÎt Hennessy Louis Vuitton), which owns Dior, embraced Menkes before the show, and the two chatted amicably. After Menkes's review of John Galliano's women's ready-to-wear collection for Dior in 2001, in which she wrote, "Isn't there enough aggression in the world without models snarling at the audience?" LVMH banned her from all its shows. (The ban had been lifted by the end of the week.) When I asked Suzy about Arnault's apparent change of heart, she reminded me that "this is fashion--people like to make dramas out of things."
Menkes praised Junya Watanabe's collection, where cowboy-hippie clothes offered an imaginative twist on Sergio Leone Westerns; Helmut Lang and Louis Vuitton also met with her approval. After a good show, Menkes would become almost giddy, but when a show was dull it would drag her spirits down. "Oh, I was so hoping for a lift from Saint Laurent," she croaked as, at ten on a Sunday evening, she fought her way through rain to Raf Simons and, clutching the railing on the slick marble stairs to take the pressure off her knees, descended into the clammy music hall. (Menkes broke her kneecap in a fall four years ago, and covered the collections in a wheelchair.) On hearing that the music was going to be loud, she rooted around in her bag for a pair of earplugs. At breaks in the schedule of runway presentations, while other members of the fashion press knocked off for lunch or went shopping, we visited the showrooms of lesser-known designers, who were not established enough to show. Menkes pursued these designers (some of whom were just out of school) partly in the hope of discovering something new and partly out of a British sense of fair play. One criticism of Menkes as a fashion arbiter is that she is too Parisian in her outlook; she doesn't give young designers in New York the same consideration she devotes to those working in Paris. But Menkes says this is simply because working in Paris makes designers better: "Every young designer should come to Paris at some point in his career--Paris just sharpens you up."

 

[Katie123]

Christoph Broich, a fledgling German designer, was so startled to see Menkes at the door that it took him some minutes to work up the courage to speak. In a showroom in the Marais district, Veronique Branquinho, a Belgian who was making menswear for the first time, explained the thinking behind her designs. Menkes liked her. "I admire people with modest aspirations like this," she said. "They seem to get the whole point of clothes, which is to make things that people just want to wear."
Occasionally, the pressure and consternation of covering so many shows seemed to overwhelm Menkes, and I'd see her sitting in the front row, her head in her hands, exhausted. On certain occasions, she has been known to slide to the floor in a faint. But, on leaving the venues and entering the streets of Paris, she always revived a little. "You'll never see anything more beautiful!" she exclaimed, as we came into the Place de la Concorde after the Comme des GarÁons show, pointing out how the wet, cloudy weather brought out the different shades of slate and brown in the broad tree-lined boulevards.

New York's Fashion Week, which occurred this year during the frigid second week of February, when the city was under orange alert, was Menkes's first visit here since the Times assumed sole possession of her newspaper. She had lunch with an editor from the Times on Tuesday, and when I saw her afterward she said, "Do you know, they have forty-one staff salaried culture writers? It's staggering, really." She did not think that the fate of the Tribune had been decided, but hoped that the people at the Times "would let me know when they do make up their minds."
In New York, Menkes would review shows from nine in the morning until ten at night, have dinner with colleagues and friends, get back to the Wyndham Hotel at around midnight, write until about one-thirty, file, then try unsuccessfully to fall asleep ("After you write, your mind is whirling"), and finally doze off at around three, only to be awakened at 6 a.m. by her editors in Paris, who needed to edit her copy in time for the Tokyo deadline. However, neither fatigue nor the brutal weather could diminish her zeal for work; she was delighted to have been seated beside P. Diddy's mother, Janice Combs, at the Sean John show, and she described in detail Mrs. Combs's champagne mink coat and gold miniskirt. Menkes also spent an afternoon in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, meeting some young designers, and an evening in Williamsburg. In the resulting column, she proclaimed Brooklyn the new downtown.
Outside the tents in Bryant Park, where Fashion Week is held, the talk was of duct tape and sarin gas, but inside, once the lights went down and the music started, it was all miniskirts and sixties innocence--"faux optimism," as Menkes described the mood--with accompaniment by Dylan, the Beatles, the Stones. Menkes seemed annoyed by the Americans' empty-headed return to the styles of her youth; she was outraged by Tommy Hilfiger's "slight and silly rerun of CourrËges and Mary Quant," as she wrote in her column. (In the same column, she also gave the twenty-two-year-old designer Zac Posen a short lecture on the meaning of high fashion: "It may be inevitable that a generation brought up on easy sportswear yearns for the old-fashioned elegance of couture. But there is a fine line between complexity and complication.")
"New York is such a vibrant city," Menkes told me when we met for lunch, not far from the tents, "but that's not really reflected on the runway. This is partly because, with so many of the shows, there is no designer behind them at all--it's just a management team. Also, there's the timing. We always used to do New York after the European women's collections. It was as if, after eating this rich meal, New York was a salad or a refreshing sorbet--it cleansed the palate. But when you do New York before Europe it seems dull--more like the *** end of last season than a new one." Menkes continued, "I don't really understand what's going on in America. I see everything from a Parisian perspective, and, to me, New York's Fashion Week, with all its sponsors and branding and whatnot, and its obsession with celebrities--it all seems very tawdry indeed."
I asked what would become of her Parisian perspective as the Tribune was branded by the Times. "In my world," Menkes said, "Paris will always be the center."


k i'm done

 

[mishahoi]

I rather bumped into Suzy (literally) at NYFW the other day. I believe it was before the Philip Lim show. She seemed absolutely lost, in a rush, and was walking in circles trying to find the entrance. One of the Tasty DLite girls gave her some icecream and her eyes lit up--but then realized the girl forgot to give her a spoon..so then she ran around trying to find one. Not talking to anybody, but looking downright panicked, lost, and exhausted. I actually felt pity! She works so hard.

 

[KKnardi]

^why didn't you show her the entrance then?

thank you for the article Katie123! much appreciated.