3 posts tagged "Johnson Hartig"
LACMA Fuses Fashion and Art
After the success of its debut Wear LACMA range last fall—which featured designs by Gregory Parkinson and Libertine’s Johnson Hartig—the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is set to launch round two of the project. This time around, Juan Carlos Obando, NewbarK’s Maryam and Marjan Malakpour, and L’Oeil du Vert Fragrances’ Haley van Oosten have created limited-edition designs inspired by the museum’s permanent collection.
NewbarK’s designers were drawn to Félix Edouard Vallotton’s La Manifestation (1893) because of his use of black and white. “Black-and-white is my personal favorite, and a signature to NewbarK designs,” Malakpour told Style.com. The duo (whose Wear LACMA pouches are pictured, above) was also influenced by the exoticism and primitivism in Henri-Charles Guérard’s Monkey’s Hand (1888).
Obando, an L.A. native, pulled inspiration from Willem Danielsz van Tetrode’s sculpture Mercury for his bold bronze and gold jewelry, while van Oosten was moved by Antonio Montauti’s bronze relief The Triumph of Neptune and Europa. The perfumer created an exclusive new botanical fragrance, TONAE, which, of course, comes in a bronze bottle. “TONAE celebrates our yearning to be transported by divinity—as immortalized by Montauti’s Neptune conducting a swirl of coupling sea nymphs,” van Oosten said.
Wear LACMA is available, starting tomorrow, at LACMA and online at thelacmastore.org
Sustainable Design Gets A New Home
Steven Kolb was at breakfast this morning at the place he called “the best store in the city”: ABC Carpet and Home. As of now, the furniture and housewares landmark will offer a curated selection of sustainable pieces by CFDA designers, including those who have won the annual CFDA/Lexus Eco-Fashion Challenge, which awards $25,000 prizes to selected designers whose businesses are at least 30 percent sustainable. “Fashion is about change, and these designers are at the forefront of this idea that eco-fashion doesn’t have to be branded independently,” Kolb said today, toasting the 2011 and 2012 winners: Marcia Patmos, John Bartlett, Johnson Hartig of Libertine, Pamela Love, Melissa Joy Manning, and Victoria Bartlett of VPL. Their collections were on display alongside those of Diane von Furstenberg, Donna Karan, and Loomstate’s Rogan Gregory and Scott Mackinlay Hahn.
Sustainability tends to flow in and out of the fashion conversation—”People don’t realize that we manufacture in New York City with stones that are sourced ethically, because it’s not really part of our branding,” Love said, “but I started my jewelry line in my house in Brooklyn because I didn’t realize there was any other way to do things”—but the CFDA is hoping to bring it to the fore. For that, Patmos said, “The shop is really great because it makes the whole thing tangible.” She was so excited at winning the award, she added, that she’d wanted to jump up and down. “But I was at my desk when Steven called me with the news, so I had to contain myself.”
Orbs And Philosophers
Johnson Hartig lives in L.A., so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that something filmic would be part of his repertoire. All Angelenos seem to be somehow involved in the film industry (even the Pasadena-based Mulleavy sisters have an agent). In fact, the designer has been playing director in his house-cum-studio for years now, so making a video presentation, which will be shown only on Style.com, for his new collection was a natural next step, he says. Spring not only marks the first Libertine lineup designed by Hartig alone—after many years of collaboration, Cindy Greene decided to pursue other projects—but also a return to the line’s reworked vintage roots. “My heart was never in production,” Hartig admits. “It feels so good to be cutting things up again and printing and making discarded things covetable again.” The designer took inspiration from a book on the history of philosophers—hence the acid burnout name pieces—and also from a road trip to Death Valley with the Mulleavys, during which they stayed in a haunted hotel and Hartig became a believer in orbs. Talk about getting by with a little help from your friends: The video was shot by David Mushegain; the casting of Newport Beach surf kids was done by a teenager named Little Nate; Jane Adams happened to stop by during filming, resulting in a cameo; and two September Issue alums, Margaret Yen and Azin Samari, were responsible for the music and editing, respectively. As for the lyrics, credit those to Hartig, who made them up as he was singing.