10 posts tagged "Peter Jensen"
Fred Perry Celebrates Sixty
Fred Perry’s white polo shirt became an instant classic following its 1952 Wimbledon debut. (In fact, despite the success of his namesake clothing line, the late Perry would probably prefer to be remembered for his many tennis titles—in 1997, he was named one of the ten greatest players of all time.) This year, the U.K.-based label, which built a strong following among those in the underground punk scene, is celebrating its sixtieth anniversary. And to commemorate the milestone, they’re launching a collaborative project and exhibition at London’s Dover Street Market on January 26. For the occasion, Fred Perry brought in a sixty-strong assortment of personalities—including designers (Raf Simons, Peter Jensen, Sister by Sibling, and Christopher Raeburn, among others), artists (Inez and Vinoodh, Terry Hall), musicians (Blur frontman Damon Albarn, Anton Wirjono), athletes (cyclist Sir Bradley Wiggins), publications (i-D magazine), retailers (Colette), and other inspiring creatives—to personalize reproductions of Perry’s original ’52 shirt (see the full shirt gallery here). The results are just as unique and diverse as the pool of participants, and will be on display at Dover Street for three weeks, before traveling to Beijing and Ginza, China, next month. The shirts will eventually be auctioned, and all proceeds will go to the Amy Winehouse Foundation, which benefits struggling young people.
The team at New York-based advertising agency Mother got their hands messy while reinterpreting the classic polo. Keeping the brand’s tennis heritage in mind, Mother staffers Christian Cervantes and Christopher Rogers brushed off their rackets and launched sixty tennis balls, dripping with Technicolor paint, at the shirt. Mother shared a behind-the-scenes video of the process with Style.com, which debuts below.
For more information on the Fred Perry 60th Anniversary project, visit.
Pretty With A Punch In Copenhagen
Pink, mint, pumpkin, lemon, and mauve were the dominant colors at Copenhagen fashion week, but the underlying ethos was far from frivolous. Established illustrator and Denmark’s rising local design star Anne Sofie Madsen’s signature illustration on both her invite and a silk T-shirt (pictured) in her Spring 2013 collection sums up the Danish spirit. With a mixture of sweetness and bite, a girl’s face hovers over an ice cream cone. Her features are flanked by pitbulls and cobras as she is surrounded by a wash of pink with mint green and gold drips.
While Madsen is the right person to push Copenhagen’s spirit to artistic extremes, the same mixture of hard-core style with a candy-colored palette was everywhere during the week. Only Wood Wood took a decidedly darker turn from its previous British public school-inspired seasons, with a collection evoking Liverpudlian hooligans with plum tracksuits, scowls, and full blue Scouse brows. Overall, the catwalks were awash with sugary shades and earthy or edgy shapes.
The likely originator of this trend is Stine Goya, whose season after season success promoting a dessert-inspired pistachio, pumpkin, and berry palette now helps define the present moment in Danish design. Goya’s soft, pragmatic cuts counterbalance her smart and serious references. In past seasons, she channeled the Amish, haunted puppet theaters, and Victoriana. This season, she presented an elegant, relaxed white blouse paired with matching seventies-style trousers, both sporting a watercolor print of clowns from a Fellini film. Although Goya makes challenging artistic references and was introduced to Denmark’s fashion scene through her relationship with surrealist Henrik Visbov, her clothes are Copenhagen’s most realistic additions to real women’s lives.
This accessible mentality was also evident at Bruuns Bazaar, where Rebekka Bay, the former artistic director for Cos, presented clean, crisp clothes for women and men, with exciting dashes of yellow and blue against sage, mint, vanilla, and taupe. Peter Jensen’s menswear and womenswear employed brighter and bolder versions of the same ice cream colors. Even the reliably gothic Barbara í Gongini started her artful show of sculptural stiff pleats and Rick Owens-like ravished leather with a series of ghostly girls wearing only acid yellow shredded tights, dresses, and tops in thin cotton. With its harder forms and spectrum of dessert shades, Copenhagen was a treat.
An Enfant Terrible Turns Ten
Peter Jensen’s London-based label turns 10 this year. With the quirk and the mischief that still characterize each collection, that might comes as a bit of a surprise. In fashion years, after all, 10 sounds positively mature. But Jensen himself is as surprised as anyone else. “I can’t believe it’s been ten years already,” the Danish designer says. “It’s gone by so fast. Mostly, when I look back, it’s a blur—but it’s been fun!” To celebrate, Jensen launched a book earlier this year, Peter Jensen & Mary Miles Minter & Mildred & Emma & Olga & Nancy… (the list of his muses goes on), and today, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum will host a series of retrospective shows, styled by Lucy Ewing, looking back at the last decade.
The shows will be live-streamed on the V&A’s Web site throughout the day, in which the designer will revisit each of the muses that have inspired his collections, from Meryl Streep (from Resort ’12) to Anna Karina (Fall ’11) to the Renaissance princess Christina of Denmark (Fall ’07), of whom the designer admits to being particularly fond. So how has looking back felt? “Mostly I’ve been amazed at how we managed to do so much with so few resources. Some pieces I remembered loving are a bit of a shock when you get them out! Doing the Spring ’05 show, with the ice skaters, was really emotional. I watched the video again recently; it still makes me a bit tearful.”
“This week I got asked to be in the Danish ‘Who’s Who,’ which made me really happy. It’s one of those things that I wanted as a child. I just need an Academy Award now and I can die happy!”
Peter Jensen’s Hollywood Moment
Danish designer Peter Jensen often looks to Hollywood, whether in the form of Shelley Duvall (the unlikely muse of his Spring 2011 collection) or nouvelle vague heroine Anna Karina (the divining spirit behind his Fall offering). So maybe it’s only a matter of time before Jensen actually got to the city in question. That’s where he went for his new lookbook. Instead of shooting models swanning against white walls, he imagined them as actors in a film; the final lookbook is a caught-on-location glimpse at that unmade flick. Doing the shooting honors is L.A.-based photographer and videographer Autumn de Wilde, who has an impressive resume in Tinseltown and elsewhere. In addition to shooting fashion editorials, entertainment features, and more than a few album covers (including ones for Beck, Elliott Smith, and the White Stripes), she’s lensed music videos for Spoon and Jenny Lewis. Who, come to think of it, would look pretty great in Jensen’s cutesy-cool wares.
Dolce And Gabbana Lend A Helping Hand
“Giving back” is a charitable principle that fashion designers usually apply to the outside world, rather than others of their kind. But Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana are playing fairy godfathers to a platoon of up-and-comers with their latest project, Spiga2. The name refers to the address of their accessories store in Milan, the top floor of which they’ve turned into a bazaar of new-ish design names that they personally curated, mostly by internet, from all over the world (Stefano can’t stop tweeting). Actually, the governing notion was a bottega, a store where everything is thrown together with minimal merchandising and maximal human touch. Spiga2 is a funkfest compared to the high-gloss emporia that rule Milan’s Golden Triangle. There’s a DJ spinning, and tables where you can hang out, log on (free wireless—plus old school reading matter too), or watch the designers’ videos.
The wildly eclectic mix spans the globe, and includes names familiar—Sophie Theallet, Kinder Aggugini, Martin Grant, Peter Jensen, Behnaz Sarafpour—and less so. For instance, Erkan Coruh won the “Who’s On Next?” fashion competition in Italy this year, and Spiga2 is his first distribution anywhere in the world. Domenico and Stefano were so keen to have him on board that they bought his samples.
Many of those who were chosen had the same kind of tale to tell. Brussels-based Marc Philippe Coudeyre launched his business a year ago. His first contact with Dolce and Gabbana was a message that went into his spam folder. He thought it was a joke. So did Gail Sorronda when she got her e-mail. She’s from Brisbane, Australia, and this is her third season. “When it happened, it felt like an out-of-body experience,” she says. “In high school, my mum bought me the ’10 Years of Dolce’ book and I used it as reference.”
“It’s huge,” agrees New Yorker Heather Williams, the only shoe designer in the bunch, who has had her own label for two years, after 11 years doing shoes for the likes of Calvin Klein. “Domenico and Stefano’s attitude is that ‘there’s room for everybody’, and not many people share that mentality. And it’s a nice sign that they didn’t do consignment.” Yep, first time ’round, Dolce and Gabbana asked their picks to select their own favorite pieces from their collections, then bought them, rather the more predictable goods-on-consignment route. That’s the kind of hardcore support that counts for a young business.
It’s not entirely philanthropic: Dolce & Gabbana accessories are subtly incorporated in the product mix. But in the context of notoriously parochial Italy, where fashion from anywhere else takes a backseat, the whole concept has a real kick. And the fashion week mobs who came to browse and stayed to buy were proof that Domenico and Stefano’s vision was paying genu-wine dividends for their proteges.