4 posts tagged "Libertine"
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.”
At Target, GO Comes Back
Hard to imagine it now, but there was a time before fast fashion/designer collaborations. (It was a mythical year called…2003.) The meeting of high-end designer and mass retailer has changed the way we shop, and none more than Target, whose designer collab series, GO International, celebrates its fifth year in 2011. To celebrate, it’s digging back through the archive and re-releasing dresses from its now-unavailable collections gone by; the 34-piece collection will draw on GO lines by Proenza Schouler, Luella Bartley, Libertine, Rogan, Richard Chai, Rodarte, and more. The company’s remaining tight-lipped about what will be produced until February 2011, but if we’ve got any powers to persuade, we have a few suggestions for dresses we’d be happy to see—and even wait on line for!—a second time around.
Above: Rogan for Target; Rodarte for Target; Thakoon for Target.
blasblog: a pretty gilded evening
As I am a sucker for anything resembling an English country club, it was a very sad day when I missed last week’s opening party for the new Libertine restaurant in the Gild Hall hotel. Not only did it have the rarest host committee I’ve seen in a while—no girls at all (sorry Tinsley) and chock-full of New York’s coolest guys, both married (Andres Santo Domingo and Jon Ylvisaker) and eligible (Diego Garcia and Alex von Furstenberg)—but I’m a sucker for a free meal. So last night, when the Thompson’s Jason Pomeranc said he was having a few friends down to the Financial District restaurant for a tasting and second look, I jumped at the chance. Tara Subkoff, Jen Brill, Mathew Mellon, Dori Kooperman, Rachel Zoe’s husband Roger Berman and her assistant Taylor, Fabiola Beracasa, and Rebekah McCabe filed in for the Potato Smashies (salmon under potatoes beaten to death with caviar), mini cheeseburgers, mini lobster rolls, and the oh-so-English mushy peas. Regardless of the menu, however, in this now rather dark, vacant part of the city, conversation couldn’t help but veer toward last week’s hullabaloo in the stock market. “We’re doing OK here, because we’re new and we have an ambience and we do a great lunch,” Pomeranc told me. “But after reading that New York Times piece this weekend, part of me thinks that I should just take the restaurant out and make the whole thing a bar.” Following the meal, a few of the guests ventured to a private studio in the West Village to see an extended version of Subkoff’s film noir short Fame Fatale, starring her collection for mall giant Bebe, Lydia Hearst, and Aubrey O’Day in a lesbian makeout session outside nightclub Butter. With a special thanks that read like an Oscar telecast (Spike Jonze, Carrie Fisher, etc.), actress/designer Subkoff seemed proud to show off her finished product, and proud that she may be adding another slash to her business card: director. “That was two and a half months in the editing room,” she sighed. “But I loved every minute of it.”