5 posts tagged "Paolo Roversi"
Mihara’s Muse
Emerging Japanese designer Mihara Yasuhiro first learned of Ophelia, an 1851 painting of a red-haired Victorian maiden dead in a babbling stream, by John Everett Millais, when he was 13 years old. “I remember falling for her pink cheeks and hollow gaze,” recalls Mihara, lamenting that he has yet to see the piece in person.
Ophelia has been on the designer’s mind since first sight and served as the inspiration for his SS12 collection. To champion his muse, Mihara collaborated with renowned photographer Paolo Roversi on an ethereal film, titled Ophelia Has a Dream, which juxtaposes life and death. The short (above) depicts the painting’s heroine surrounded by darting butterflies and spring flowers while she wears Mihara’s SS12 kimono gown in her watery grave.
On Friday, December 7, Ophelia Has a Dream will be shown at Tate Britain’s ongoing series Late at Tate, during which the museum is open until 10 p.m. The film will play alongside the museum’s ongoing exhibition Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde. And, surprise, surprise! Millais’ original painting features in the show. Perhaps Mihara will meet his muse at last.
Stella’s Choice: AGL
For the third season running, upscale Italian footwear label Attilio Giusti Leombruni (AGL) has snagged supermodel Stella Tennant as its Spring campaign girl. Of the supe, who most recently appeared on the catwalk at Chanel and has fronted ad campaigns for labels including Givenchy, Vivienne Westwood, and Céline, the label’s creative director, Vera Giusti, tells Style.com, “Stella is such a perfect spokeswoman for us—she is so modern, but a little punk too.” And for the 5′ 11” Scottish beauty, the line’s flat shoes are a perfect fit. “No, you won’t see us do a high heel,” says Giusti. “When my grandpa started the line in 1958, he did comfortable shoes, and my father was a doctor so that anatomy is important to us. But we have since added something a little fresher because we are three Italian girls who love fashion,” she says of the line, which she runs with her sisters Sara and Marianna. For Spring, they’ve built upon the metallics they started working with last season, doing bright green, pink, and blue metallic brogues, new iterations of their top-selling ballet flat, and two-tone oxfords. At this morning’s preview in New York, editors were especially raving about the new raffia flats and boots. Here, we debut the new Paolo Reversi-lensed ad campaign and accompanying video exclusively on Style.com.
Designer’s Best Friend
If man’s (and woman’s) most loyal companion is the dog, designers are no exception. The latest issue of the menswear biannual Man About Town pays homage to a few that know more than most about the inner workings of fashion. For the canine-themed 10th issue—featuring shoots not only by the usual fashion suspects like Paolo Roversi and Willy Vanderperre, but this time, by famed Weimaraner enthusiast William Wegman, too—the magazine sought out the pups of the fashion elite, who are photographed by Erwan Frotin.
The dog’s life: Not bad, if you’re a designer’s pet. Azzedine Alaïa has eleven animals (including one owl), but it’s his St. Bernard, Didine, who gets the close-up. “Animals make people better,” the designer says. That may explain the care Alaïa lavishes on his creatures, like the mastiff, Shamsi, he used to carry in a baby’s sling. “I took him on the Concorde,” Alaïa remembers, “where I said to the stewardess, ‘this is my son, he’s traveling with me.’ She didn’t spot him so she just said, ‘Oh, of course, sir.’” Dries Van Noten’s Airedale, Harry, is treated to fashion heirlooms: Van Noten and his partner, Patrick Vangheluwe, bought him a cushion that originally belonged to Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé’s French bulldog, Moujik, at the Christie’s auction of items from the couple’s country estate. (The original Moujik has long since passed away, but his successor, also called Moujik, appears in the issue alongside an interview with Bergé.) And in her interview with Jo-Ann Furniss, Donatella Versace reveals that her Jack Russell, Audrey, is a full-on diva. “She is the top, the toppest model of all,” Versace says. Has she as big an ego as Kristen McMenamy? Furniss asks. “Bigger.” What about Linda Evangelista? “Hmmm. Well, not on that level, no.”
Man About Town 10 launches next week at Colette.
A Look Inside The Louis Vuitton/Marc Jacobs Book, Freja’s Cross-Stitch Campaign, Fashion Fringe On Tour, And More…
The new Louis Vuitton/Marc Jacobs book is not due out until April (in conjunction with the exhibit opening at Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris), but Hintmag.com got a sneak peak at some of the images in the tome. The book also includes essays by fashion historians and editors. [Hint]
Freja Beha Erichsen is now available in cross-stitch. The model is the star of Scandinavian jeweler Georg Jensen’s new ad campaign, which Jensen commissioned cross-stitch artist Inge Jacobsen to make. The eight images took an estimated 2,000 hours to produce. [Telegraph]
Fashion photographer Paolo Roversi, who has photographed for the likes of Valentino, Christian Dior, and Cerruti, has a new exhibition debuting in London this month. The show, opening at The Wrapping Project-Bankside, includes images from his “Nudi” and “Studio” series. [Dazed Digital]
In an effort to “connect the U.K. regions with the London fashion scene,” Fashion Fringe founder and creative director Colin McDowell has announced he’s launching a tour in March, making appearances with designers at various U.K. fashion schools. The group of designers includes Christopher Kane, Giles Deacon, Julien Macdonald, and Erdem Moralioglu. [WWD]
The Photographers Of Tomorrow Come Together Chez Alaïa
It’s been a while since Azzedine Alaïa hosted a bash, so no surprise that he had a full house on the Rue de la Verrière last night. The draw: the Paris opening of the second edition of reGENERATION2, a once-every-five-years exhibition dedicated to the great photographers of tomorrow, culled from photography schools the world over. In between greeting guests including 10 Corso Como’s Carla Sozzani, Paolo Roversi, and Rupert Everett, co-curator William Ewing noted that times have a-changed even since the last edition of the show, in 2005: “We’ve come a long way from the hunter-photographer who roams the streets looking for shots,” he said. “Theirs is a highly stylized fictional world, even when the subject matter comes from hard reality. It’s not about ‘new’ subject matter, it’s about individual visions.”
Take, for example, the dream world of Chinese student Liu XiaoFang, who Photoshops her subjects into the clouds (as in The Cloud, above), or the work of Thibault Brunet, whose shots appear lifted from a desolate Iraqi desert scape. The back story: Brunet did those without ever leaving home. “I was spending a lot of time on Grand Theft Auto when it occurred to me that I could use a virtual camera to invent a landscape,” Brunet explained.
Surveying the scene, Alaïa conceded that he had a particular preference for a few of the artists, “but it’s so hard for young photographers, I won’t say who,” he said before disappearing back into his atelier.