5 posts tagged "Charles Anastase"
London Parties For Fashion Week, With Dinner, Drinks, And A Few Well-Placed Torsos
You don’t get to much shopping in the course of a busy day of London fashion-week shows. But last night, two of the city’s marquee boutiques found another way to welcome fashion weekers to town: Over in Chelsea, Joseph was hosting dinner at the store’s Joe’s Café, and back in the center of town, Browns had set up shop in the Royal Academy vaults to celebrate the store’s launch of Club Monaco in the U.K.
First, dinner. Joseph served up a nicely British repast of beet carpaccio and sea bream, one partaken of by Charles Anastase, Pat McGrath, Tamara Mellon, and Katie Hillier, as well as acclaimed chef and British-cuisine cheerleader Mark Hix. Meanwhile, over at Browns, where the likes of Tracey Emin and Sophia Hesketh could be found, Hix’s team of mixologists from his pop-up Speak Easy were treating guests to high-class cocktails, including a dangerous dark-cherry-flavored concoction. The spirit at Browns was a bit more Frenchified: The party’s host was Lou Doillon (left), and Le Baron’s André Saraiva had hopped the Channel to deejay. Or perhaps the mood was more transcontinental, what with Club Monaco being an American-owned brand, and the after-party going down at London’s recently opened outpost of the Box. Welcome to the global village.
Best to down another cherry cocktail, stop thinking about geography, and start looking at the art decorating the scene. The Royal Academy vaults had never before been opened to a private event, and the sculpture-strewn space may have been the real star of last night’s party. Vaguely creepy and seriously cool was the general verdict, and designer Saloni Lodha, who had presented her collection the previous day, was already making plans to relocate her show to the Royal Academy next season. “You think they’d let me do it?” she mused, staring up at a bank of muscular stone torsos hanging off one wall. “I mean, I don’t even know how Browns managed to pull this off. I didn’t even know this was down here!” As Doillon might have noted, après moi, le deluge.
Nicholas, Chloé, Ann, And More Take On Alice
Last week, we previewed a sketch of Nicholas Kirkwood’s Alice in Wonderland-inspired heels, made on commission for the French department store Printemps, which is giving over its windows to all things Alice through March. (Sad to say, they’re window-only—you’ll have to find another pair to wear to the theater.) For the installation, Kirkwood is joined by Ann Demeulemeester, Alexander McQueen, Bernhard Willhelm, Charles Anastase, Christopher Kane, Chloé, Haider Ackermann, Manish Arora, and Maison Martin Margiela, each of whom were given a window to fill as they saw fit. The windows went up this week in Paris. Below, Style.com takes a tour through the various Wonderlands and asks a few of the participating designers and design teams about their trip there.
The windows are on view through March 14 at Printemps, 64 Boulevard Haussmann, Paris, 33-1-42-82-57-87, www.printemps.fr.
“I think my favorite Alice character is the March Hare. You can see I’ve made his watch rather prominent. This was a different design process for me, because I’m not usually so applicative—typically, I’m thinking about line, silhouette. But this time, I figured, why not just pile as much as I can on top?” —Nicholas Kirkwood
“I went to John Tenniel’s original illustration of Alice for inspiration. She’s seated at a table having tea, and her dress looks much more asymmetrical and theatrical than that boring Walt Disney version. It was also an auto-reference to my collections, as Lewis Carroll’s work has been one of the main inspirations of my label since its creation. Alice Liddell, the real little girl with long dark hair who inspired Carroll, is one of the very few icons that I have. The pictures of her are a constant inspiration for me.” —Charles Anastase
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New Longchamp Collabs Mark 20 Years Of ANDAM
A chic doughnut-shaped, caramel leather bangle that turns into a Longchamp Le Pliage tote (pictured at left) is a boon to anyone still working out the logistics of the whole reusable-shopping-bag thing. And for that convertible convenience, you have Bless designers Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag to thank. The Bless bag for Longchamp is part of a trio of new Le Pliage totes that the brand is launching in celebration of the 20th anniversary of ANDAM, the Association Nationale pour le Développement des Arts de la Mode. ANDAM promotes emerging French and international fashion talent, and three of the recent winners of the annual ANDAM Award have been recruited for the collaboration: longtime Longchamp tricker-outer Jeremy Scott, U.K.-based It girl favorite Charles Anastase, and the aforementioned Bless. The bags come out October 1 and will be available at Longchamp stores worldwide as well as at a selection of boutiques.
Linda Farrow Goes Behind The Archives. Way Beyond.
Nirvana, for sunglasses fanatics, is to be found in a converted schoolhouse in the Clerkenwell area of London. That’s where the Linda Farrow archives are housed—a few filing cabinets’ worth of specs dating from the origins of the Linda Farrow brand in the late 1960′s. Aviators of all shapes and sizes and superbly wacky ’80′s frames in iridescent metal and candy-colored plastic number among the styles that Simon Jablon found in his mother’s warehouse several years ago. The trove inspired him to launch the Linda Farrow Vintage brand in 2003. Initially, Jablon and partner Tracy Sedino were selling off the archive; these days, they’re working to augment it. The brand is already a profligate collaborator, working with Raf Simons, Luella Bartley, Veronique Branquinho, and Jeremy Scott, to name a few, and with the launch of the new Projects range this summer, Linda Farrow Vintage will
be bringing yet more designers into its fold. “We’ve always loved working with young, creative designers,” explains Jablon, “because every time we do, we learn something. They’re constantly bringing us ideas that seem impossible to execute.” Projects comprise styles from designers such as Giles, Tim Hamilton, Antonio Berardi, Charles Anastase, and Preen. As Jablon notes, additional designers may be added to the Projects roster in seasons to come. And in the meantime, he and Sedino have combined the very new and the very, very, very, very old in the latest Linda Farrow Vintage frame—the Mammoth. This limited-edition addition to the archive features—seriously—woolly mammoth tusk. “We’re only doing 100 pieces,” says Jablon. “The melting of the polar ice caps has exposed quite a lot of mammoth tusk, enough that a bit of it has found its way to market, but the bottom line,” he adds, “is that you can only produce so many sunglasses that are over a million years old.”
Acid Wash At Charles Anastase
With acid wash making appearances on the runways of such for-the-people retailers as Miss Sixty and Topshop, the sight of the fade on at Charles Anastase on Saturday makes three a very plausible trend. At Anastase, it came in somewhat sickly green and purples (it is acid, after all; it’s not supposed to be good for you) and in not-so-easy-to-wear capri and skinny versions. Model Daisy Lowe, the lovechild of Gavin Rossdale, for one, was ebullient about the look (never mind she was so late she missed her front-seat allotment next to Pixie Geldof and had to slum it in the back with the fashion hinterland). “I must have it. I want it in any nuclear color they offer,” she declared. Agree? Was acid wash questionable enough the first time around, or are we ready for a rematch?