Heidi klum Wallpaper: Stella Tennant

Saturday, September 17, 2011

Marie Antoinette style

Yesterday I watched the final of Project Runway Australia and despite my recent obsession wth bright bold colours, was very inspired by Dylan & Johnny's pastel palettes. The soft lavenders, cupcake pinks and mint greens reminded me of Ladree Macarons and Dion Lee's show at Fashion week last year). Then the 3rd finalist Johny explained that his collection of scarlet reds and shattered mirrors was inspired by Marie Antoinette's end, when Versailles was trashed and she was beheaded.

Johnny Shembri

Craig Braybook

Dylan Cooper

Naturally, I had to watch Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette immediately. I can't believe it took me so long to watch this amazing film.

It is beautifully shot and the sets and costumes are so decadent, set to a rockin Indie soundtrack. Marie (Kirsten Dunst) and her cohorts traipse about Versailles, swilling champagne and popping petit fours into their rouged mouths. As lower classes worked outdoors causing tanned skin, complexions had to be pale and were painted with noxious white lead called ceruse mixed with egg-white. Veins were even traced with blue powder to encourage a translucent look. Lips and cheeks were stained in red ochre. Black silk or felt was used to make beauty spots, initially to hide small pox scars but later grew in popularity, and in size! Hair and wigs were powdered, mainly to absorb oil but gave wigs an ethereal candy-floss type look. Finely ground flour was used and sometimes coloured blue, grey, pink or red.

Married off to frigid man at 15, Marie grows increasingly bored of being a bird in a gilded cage, where she is not expected to so much as lift a finger as rigid protocol dictates her life. She is dressed and told what to wear. She is given the cold shoulder by her hubby, leaving her curled up in her huge satin swathed 4 poster alone.

As boredom ensued, she amused herself by indulging in copious amounts of champagne, decadant food and gambling. One gambling session (during her 21st birthday celebrations) went for 3 days straight.

Her clothes were housed in 3 rooms. She tried to create some semblance of control over her life by immersing herself in fashion, designing custom luxurious silk gowns adorned in tassles & ribbons, feathers & bows and accompanying the look with increasingly intricate towering pouf hairstyles.

In 1775, Queen Maria Theresa of Austria-Hungary wrote to her daughter Marie-Antoinette: “I cannot help but touch upon a point that many of the papers repeat to me too often: it is the hairstyle that you wear. They say that from the roots it measures 36 pouces high and with all the feathers and ribbons that hold all of that up! You know that I have always been of the opinion that one should follow fashion moderately, but never carry it to excess. A pretty young queen full of charms has no need of all these follies. Quite the contrary. A simple hairstyle suits her better and is more appropriate for a queen. She must set the tone, and everyone will hurry to follow even your smallest errors…". Marie-Antoinette responded, “It is true that I am a bit occupied by my hairstyle, and as for the feathers, everyone wears them, and it would look extraordinarily out of place not to”

"These intricate forms of dress were designed to showcase the power (and unfortunately for them later, the wealth) of the French monarchy...through her dress, Marie Antoinette “identified fashion as a key weapon in her struggle for personal prestige, authority, and sometimes mere survival." Source. These Marie Antoinette inspired shots by Annie Leibowitz (including Kristen Dunst and Drew Barrymore) are gorgeous.

Galliano has long been inspired by the French Revolution, resulting in some stunningly opulent gowns, as below.

This Marie Anotinette inspired soot by Wildfox is particularly cute. Love the macaron coloured hair...

I also love these shoots by Ellen Von Unwerth, starring a young Rosie-Huntington Whitely.

More Marie Antoinette shoots I love follow...here is Kristen McMenamy in a shoot from November 2010 for Vogue Italia by Paolo Roversi.

More editorials...

Emily Blunt for Vanity Fair 2009

Vanessa Paradis by Karl Lagerfeld at Versailles for Tatler Russia, July 20

Stella Tennant for Paolo Roversi, Vogue Italia March 2011

Sunday, July 31, 2011

Girls who are Boys who like Boys to be Girls

Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander in W Magazine

I'm loving the androgynous trend this Winter. There's something sexy about a woman in a man-style suit - a fitted black suit with a white shirt and skinny black tie. The girls dressing as boys trend seemed to start with Marlene Dietrich shocking the world with her man style suits in the 1930's, and then gathered momentum in 1966 with YSL launching his Le Smoking jacket (below, shot by Helmut Newton).

Just look at Bianca Jagger (below) when she married Mick Jagger in that amazing white YSL fitted suit, sans shirt. Diane Keaton launched a massive trend with her Annie Hall look in the 70's and model and Chanel muse Inès de la Fressange.

Inès (below) has mastered boyish yet sexy gamine look. One of her style icons is Katherine Hepburn " or simply somebody that looks comfortable. Anyone who wears men's clothes and looks feminine is also very stylish."

I also loved k.d Land & Cindy Crawford's 1993 Vanity Fair cover. Sexy androgynous cool.

I have long been a fan of Karen Walkers' black trousers, particularly after Madonna rocked them out at the 1998 MTV Awards (below). Karen's masculine-feminine aesthetic is a recurring theme and she works it to perfection.

Madonna in Helmut Lang tank & Karen Walker wool trousers

There seem to be many a 'Lisbeth Salander' type look on the catwalk and in editorials, plus a wave of celebs are rocking the showcasing man-style look, from boy style like Evan Rachel Wood and Brit-packers Keira Knightly, Alice Dellal & Coco Sumner (aka Sting's model musician daughter), total androgyny like Tilda Swinton, Stella Tennant and Kristen McMenamy, to smouldering sexy looks like Victoria Beckham, Lake Bell and Helena Christensen. And tehn there's Alexa Chung, who experiments with both gamine and sexy suity looks. Here are some latest boy/man style looks below from celebs on the street plus some of the latest collections and editorials.