25 posts tagged "Charlotte Olympia"
Bubbly Love
On Saturday, the jet set will descend on the Hamptons to watch Veuve Clicquot’s annual Polo Classic, where ponies, bubbles, and pastels will undoubtedly abound. To commemorate the summer event, Charlotte Olympia’s Charlotte Dellal has teamed up with Veuve to create a champers-themed capsule. Aptly named Lovely Bubbly, the range, which will be available at the designer’s New York store and online this July, comprises such clever, booze-inspired wares as a gilded, bubble-embellished Lucite clutch, black satin sandals garnished with a Champagne flute, a “Cheers” bag, and a pair of the designer’s signature Dolly pumps that are made out of—what else?—gold-speckled cork. “I always enjoy designing with cork,” said Dellal, who offered that her favorite way to drink Champagne is in a large glass over ice, or á la piscine. “It has a natural beauty and functionality.” We do, however, suggest sipping in moderation while donning Dellal’s sky-high platforms—overindulging will likely result in a literal bottoms- (or, rather, soles-) up situation. Ranging from $595 to $995, the collection debuts above, exclusively on Style.com.
We Predict A Riot: Charlotte Olympia x Tom Binns
In the event that you didn’t get your “punk” fill during the Fall ’13 collections, Charlotte Dellal has got you covered. Just in time for the Met Ball, the Charlotte Olympia designer reveals her collaboration with jeweler Tom Binns. Featuring house signatures updated with Binns staples like safety pins and neon, the riotous capsule is badass but infused with a bit of cheeky banter.
“Dolly Riot gives you no excuse not to go out and party the night away!” said Dellal, referring to her recessed-platform best seller, which the designers have studded entirely in pins. Fans of her Kitty flats can embrace the anarchy, too—Binns gave the embroidered cat motifs a very smart-alecky set of nose and ear piercings.
“His designs are so distinctive. And I love the way he combines elegance with an anti-conformist sentiment,” said Dellal of Binns’ work. “I am also a big believer of his phrase ‘More is more!’”
Charlotte Olympia x Tom Binns will be available, from May 2, exclusively at Charlotte Olympia’s Mayfair and Manhattan stores, www.charlotteolympia.com, Jeffrey New York, and Moda Operandi. Prices range from $795 to $1,695.
The Must-Have Accessories of Fall 2013, According to the Editors
Each season, Style.com’s market director, Marina Larroudé, combs through every collection to find the most covetable accoutrements. In our Fall 2013 Accessories Index, she highlights the best and biggest trends—from funny furs and demure pearls to spikes, studs, and combat boots. We couldn’t help but pick our own favorites, so below, the Style.com editors reveal what we’ll be craving come fall.
“It’s a long process to work on the Accessories Index. We feature almost 200 brands and around 5,000 images. Every season, I like to discover new brands to add to our list. It’s unfair to ask me for a favorite accessory, but I would be happy to have Rochas’ earrings, any Prada shoe, or any Victoria Beckham day bag.” —Marina Larroudé, market director
“I love the schoolmarm-meets-sexpot look of this Narciso Rodriguez pump.” —Nicole Phelps, executive editor
“In my imagination, I’m that chic kind of girl who cabs to and from appointments in a pair of single-sole Manolos. In reality, I’m subway-ing everywhere and need shoes I can really stomp around in. These lug-soled Stella McCartney beauties are the footwear equivalent of all-terrain vehicles, placing them at the top of my must-have list for fall.” —Brittany Adams, associate fashion editor Continue Reading “The Must-Have Accessories of Fall 2013, According to the Editors” »
FIT’s Foot Fetish
What is it about women and shoes? According to Dr. Valerie Steele, the director and chief curator of The Museum at FIT and the author of Shoes: A Lexicon of Style (among many other fashion books), the fixation dates back to Cinderella and her glass slippers. But that doesn’t necessarily explain women’s willingness to defy death, gravity, and blisters with the super-stacked platforms and needle-thin spikes of modern day. Shoe Obsession, The Museum at FIT’s upcoming exhibition (which, running from February 8 through April 13, was curated by Dr. Steele, Colleen Hill, and Fred Dennis), explores the female shoe fetish via some of the most iconic, outrageous, and exceptional styles that have come out this century.
Including shoes from established houses (Christian Louboutin’s Pigalle stilettos, Roger Vivier’s feather Eyelash pumps, Prada’s flame shoes, and Chanel’s gun heels), up-and-coming talents (Nicholas Kirkwood’s graffitied Keith Haring platforms, Charlotte Olympia’s Kiss Me Dolores pumps), and experimental designers (Masaya Kushino’s sculptural human hair, Cyprus wood, and lace platforms; Noritaka Tatehana’s eighteen-inch ballerina shoes), Shoe Obsession presents every type of high heel you can imagine—and several that you can’t. Here, Dr. Steele talks to Style.com about the fascination with extravagant shoes, the evolution of contemporary footwear, and the upcoming exhibition.
Let’s cut to the chase. Why are so many women obsessed with shoes?
Well, I think there are a couple of layers. First off, shoes are an intimate extension of the physical body. And they seem to say a lot about our personality, our sexual attitudes, and our social status. And high heels in particular seem to be the focus of a lot of our thoughts about gender, sexuality, eroticism, and femininity. I think there’s definitely an element of sexual fetishism involved in men’s fascination with women’s high-heel shoes. But for women, I think it’s not fetishism so much as it is an obsession with fashion and with shoes as the ultimate sartorial symbol of erotic femininity.
Have women always been obsessed with shoes, or was there a point in fashion history when the infatuation really took off?
It goes way back to Cinderella. Shoes have played an important role in cultural thought for a long time. In Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo?, a film from the sixties about French fashion, there’s a wonderful scene when a TV reporter is interviewing some pompous French sociology professor who says that the Cinderella story is all about the importance of tiny feet and beautiful shoes. Then he says, “So there you are: fetishism, mutilation, pain. Fashion in a nutshell.” [Laughs] But I do think that our show is unique, because we’re not just looking at the social and psychosexual reasons why we all love shoes. We’re focusing on the twenty-first century and calling attention to the fact that in the last twelve years or so, after the end of Sex and the City, the obsession with high-end designer shoes has spread from something that only a few people were really obsessed with to being something that everybody’s obsessed with.
Why have heels risen to such hilariously high heights in the past few decades? And what dictates heel height?
I think the key element there is the acceptance of hypersexual shoe design as part of fashion, as opposed to just a corner of the pornographic industry. Before he died, Helmut Newton said in an interview that in the seventies, you had to go to fetish and porn stores to get the kind of shoes he wanted for his fashion photographs. But by the early nineties, he could go to any high fashion designer—Chanel, Dior, they were all doing fetish-y shoes. So that’s one thing, which I think is crucial to the recent growth of heels. Another is the popularity of platforms on shoes. If you’ve got a two-inch platform, automatically your heel can go from three to five inches, or from four to six, or whatever you want.
What makes women willing to shell out so much money for a pair of shoes that they may or may not be able to walk in?
Part of it is that shoe shopping is probably the highest form of fashion shopping. It’s the most pleasurable. I mean, who doesn’t look good in a pair of beautiful shoes? And compare it with something like bathing-suit shopping, which is the nadir of horror. Also, you can get a lot more fashion bang for your buck with a pair of shoes. You know, it might be a thousand dollars, but if you’re going to buy a jacket or a dress by that same or a comparable designer, you’d be talking three, four thousand dollars or up. And right now, people are, in a way, dressing in more of a uniform. For instance, many people just wear a well-cut pair of jeans and a great black jacket. But with shoes, they can play and transform themselves—they can change the style image that they’re creating. Continue Reading “FIT’s Foot Fetish” »
Diving Into The Fashion World, Feet First
Let’s be real here. Fashion is a hypercompetitive industry full of people who can be witheringly (but often hilariously) critical of each other. So when it comes time for an awards gala, wherein the members of the fashion scene must play nice and hand out plaudits to their peers, most people cope by sighing into their free Champagne and mumbling that so-and-so was sorely overlooked…as usual. But every so often, an award is given out to a designer who is so self-evidently deserving that only the most vicious fashion misanthrope could protest. Such was the case recently at the Footwear News FN Awards, where Charlotte Dellal took home the Designer of the Year honor for her rapidly expanding five-year-old brand, Charlotte Olympia. This has been a threshold year for Dellal, one that saw her launch a range of bridal footwear, collaborate with Victoria Beckham, and open her first stateside store on New York’s Upper East Side. More generally, 2012 was the year that Charlotte Olympia firmly and finally established itself as a go-to brand for VIPs looking to rock a glam shoe on the red carpet. (Or anywhere else, for that matter.) Here, the cool and impeccably coiffed Dellal talks to Style.com about gilded platforms, her brand’s evolution, and the importance of having a sense of humor.
Congratulations! I guess this is as good a time as any to ask you that burning fashion question: What is the deal with women and shoes?
You mean, why do women love shoes? I always have a hard time with that one. They just do. I think, maybe, it has something to do with the fact that they’re objects—beautiful objects that you can wear. They look good on, and they look good off.
Did you always know you wanted to design shoes?
Actually, I wanted to do fashion design. Or so I thought. But when I did my foundation course, my tutor suggested I go into Cordwainers and train to make shoes. All my sketches of clothes were heavily accessorized. So I was accessory-focused from the beginning, I guess. And I do love accessories. I love how they personalize a look—you can be wearing the most sober outfit, and add an amazing shoe, a crazy bag, a hat, whatever, and make it something else entirely. It’s that old Hollywood, 1940s thing that I love so much; a way of not just finishing a look, but really elaborating it with your own sense of style.
You have a very distinctive, ’40s Hollywood-inflected personal style, and that’s reflected in Charlotte Olympia. When you design, are you designing for yourself?
Yes and no. I mean, as a designer, you create things that you love, don’t you? And as a female designer, it’s pretty inevitable that you create things that you love and want to wear. They go hand in hand. For me, anyway. So, of course, my sensibility is in the brand; it wouldn’t work otherwise. But my experiences as a woman also inform my sense of what’s missing in the market. Launching bridal—that came pretty directly out of my own experience of being a bride. I was looking around at the shoe options, and it was all, various shades of white and off-white. Like, peep-toe heels and things. And of course, I love color, I love pattern, and I just felt like, well, on your wedding of all days, you should be wearing a pair of shoes you really love, that represent who you are. I had on a huge dress, no one was going to see my shoes, but it made me happy knowing that I had on a pair of leopard-print pumps. And then, in the meantime, I did have women coming to the shop, and buying, like, red shoes to wear at their weddings. So I saw this niche.
How do you see your line as having evolved since you launched five years ago?
Well, this is obvious, but it’s gotten a lot bigger. My first few collections, I was only doing 140mm heels, with the recessed platform. That was about establishing an aesthetic, by the way; it wasn’t that I thought all women should wear super-high heels all the time. But I wanted to establish a silhouette, and a certain…I guess the only way to say it is a certain glamour. You know, as an aside, my true signature, initially, was the recessed gold platform. Some people saw that as really bling-y, but my thinking was, you know, it’s a recessed platform; when you wear the shoe, it’s under your foot, and so all that is is a little golden glow underfoot. A little magic, because—why not? Anyway. Sorry to digress, I just always felt like that gold platform was misunderstood. And of course now I design all sort of shoes—flats, sandals, the whole lot. Plus bags, now, too.
Are there other categories you’d like to explore?
There are lots of things I’d love to do, eventually. Like hats—I’m a big fan of hats, and I’ve been working with Piers Atkinson on some styles. I don’t need to do hats in-house; not right now. There are a lot of milliners I respect. Down the line, who knows? But anything that develops, it will develop organically. I like to joke that my accessories have accessories. Like, the bags started because I wanted a Perspex clutch to match the Perspex heels in a collection. And here we are, doing all these bags. And I love it. The novelty bags we make each season, they’re like the exclamation point at the end of the collection.
Do you have any shoe heroes?
Salvatore Ferragamo. The old Salvatore Ferragamo—the man. He used all this wonderful color and amazing materials. And of course, he was from the era that I love and made special shoes for the Hollywood actresses that have inspired me. And then, of course, when I was a child, my mother’s closet was full of Manolos. And when you’re a child, you’re always in your mother’s closet, trying on her shoes. Again, so many wonderful colors. And such a distinctive femininity—I still really appreciate that.
People tend to talk about your shoes being glamorous. It’s a word you use quite a bit yourself. But I feel like they rarely point out that your shoes are also kind of…funny. You know they’re funny, right?
Of course! I like to bring a sense of humor to my designs. A little silliness.What I really love to do is to play with the obvious—my collections are usually inspired by places, and I love doing things like, when we did the Paris collection, playing on all these Parisian super-clichés, like frou-fy poodles and the Eiffel Tower. I like to make the obvious more obvious. But it’s like I was saying, about the gold platform—why not? It’s so much easier to be bold or silly or over-the-top with your shoes than with pretty much any other part of your wardrobe. I can easily understand women who are shy about wearing some kind of crazy dress. But having fun with shoes? That never hurt anyone.