Diane von Furstenberg, Michael Kors Reportedly Leaving Lincoln Center

      PULLING UP STAKES: Could more designers be vacating the New York Fashion Week tents at Lincoln Center in February?
      On the heels of Vera Wang and Carolina Herrera saying they plan to leave Lincoln Center to show at an off-site location in February came reports Friday that Diane von Furstenberg and Michael Kors — two big-name designers who show in The Theater at Lincoln Center — might also be headed off-site.
A spokeswoman for Kors had no comment, and a spokeswoman for DVF couldn’t be reached at press time.
      There will still be plenty of action at Lincoln Center, with designers such as Monique Lhuillier, Tory Burch, Jill Stuart, Lela Rose, Milly, Nanette Lepore, Nicole Miller and BCBG among those confirmed to show in various venues within Lincoln Center.
      After numerous complaints last season, IMG has outlined several steps it is taking to better control the event and crowds and make the shows more exclusive to fashion insiders. The moves include a redesign of some of the on-site venues and price reductions for some of the venues. IMG also laid off several production staffers and plans to outsource production of the event. A spokesman for IMG declined comment about who would be showing at Lincoln Center until everything’s confirmed next month.
Forstmann Little & Co. sold IMG Worldwide to William Morris Endeavor and Silver Lake Partners last week for more than $2.3 billion.

 

 

http://wwd.com/fashion-news/fashion-scoops/pulling-up-stakes-7323754/

Bonnie Cashin is a pioneer in the sportswear industry and first designer of Coach handbags!

            
             One of America’s foremost designers in the second half of the twentieth century, Bonnie Cashin (1908 – 2000) was a pioneer in the sportswear industry, specializing in modular wardrobes for the modern woman “on the go.” Her lifelong interest in clothing design, however, encompassed a number of careers on both American coasts. Growing up in California, Cashin worked as an apprentice in a series of dressmaking shops owned and operated by her mother, Eunice. In her teens she worked as a fashion illustrator and dance costume designer. Between 1943 and 1949 she costumed more than sixty films at Twentieth Century-Fox. It was not until midcentury, when she was over forty years old, that she began designing the ready-to-wear for which she became best known.
              Cashin favored timeless shapes from the history of clothing, such as ponchos, tunics, Noh coats, and kimonos, which allowed for ease of movement and manufacture. Approaching dress as a form of collage or kinetic art, she favored luxurious, organic materials that she could “sculpt” into shape, such as leather, suede, mohair, wool jersey, and cashmere, as well as nonfashion materials, including upholstery fabrics. Cashin’s aim was to create “simple art forms for living in, to be re-arranged as mood and activity dictates” (Interview 1999).

Early Years

                As a girl moving along the California coastline, Cashin developed a love for travel and a keen eye for the clothing of different cultures, which would underpin her later professional work. This interest in “why people looked the way they did” placed her in good stead to begin work in 1924, alongside Helen Rose, as a costume designer for the Los Angeles dance troupe Fanchon and Marco. In 1934 her producers took over performances at New York’s Roxy Theater and asked Cashin to join them as costumer for the Roxyette dance line, the precursors and rivals to the Rockettes.

Fashion and Film

                In 1937 the Harper’s Bazaar editor Carmel Snow, an admirer of Cashin’s costume designs, encouraged Bonnie to work in fashion and arranged for her to become the head designer for the prestigious coat and suit manufacturer Adler and Adler. Owing to the wartime focus on American fashion design, she became so well recognized that she was commissioned to design World War II civilian defense uniforms and was featured in a Coca-Cola advertisement. By 1942, however, Cashin felt boxed in by wartime restrictions. She returned to California to sign a six-year contract as a costume designer with Twentieth Century-Fox.
Cashin designed costumes for the female characters in more than sixty films. Her favorite projects, Laura (1944), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), and Anna and the King of Siam (1946), also became American cinematic classics. Designing for the lavish productions that typified Hollywood’s golden age, she was expected to make innovative use of the day’s finest materials to create historical, fantasy, and contemporary wardrobes. She used the resources at the Fox studios to experiment with designs for “real” clothing that she wore and made in custom versions for her leading ladies’ offscreen wardrobes.

 

 "Laura"

 

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 

 Anna and the King of Siam

Return to Ready-to-Wear

               Cashin returned to New York, and to Adler and Adler, in 1949. She received the unprecedented honor of earning both the Neiman Marcus Award and the Coty Fashion Critic’s Award within the same year (1950). Displeased, however, with her manufacturer’s control over her creativity, she decided to challenge the setup of the fashion industry. Working with multiple manufacturers, she designed a range of clothing at different price points, thereby specializing in complete wardrobes for “my kind of a girl for a certain kind of living.”
                In 1953 Cashin teamed with the leather importer and craftsman Philip Sills and initiated the use of leather for high fashion. She made her name through her unconventional choices in materials as well as her inexhaustible variations on her favorite theme of adapting the flat, graphic patterns of Asian and South American clothing to contemporary global living. Through her work for Sills and Company, she is credited with introducing “layering” into the fashion lexicon. In turn, she credited the Chinese tradition of dressing for, and interpreting the weather as, a “one-shirt day” or a “seven-shirt day.” Her layered garments snugly nestled within one another and were easily converted to suit different temperatures and activities by donning or removing a layer. Cashin’s objective was to create a flexible wardrobe for her own globe-trotting lifestyle, wherein seasonal changes were only a plane trip away. Frustrated by the categorization of sportswear designer, she declared that travel was her “favorite sport.”

Coach and the Cashin Look

                In 1962 Cashin became the first designer of Coach handbags and initiated the use of hardware on clothing and accessories, including the brass toggle that became Coach’s hallmark. She revolutionized the handbag industry. Unlike contemporary rigid, hand-held bags, her vividly colored “Cashin-Carries” for Coach packed flat and had wide straps, attached coin purses, industrial zippers, and the famous sturdy brass toggles, the last inspired by the hardware used to secure the top on her convertible sports car.
Without licensing her name, Cashin designed cashmere separates, gloves, canvas totes, at-home gowns and robes, raincoats, umbrellas, and furs. She also ran the Knittery, a consortium of British mills that produced one-of-a-kind sweaters knit to shape, rather than cut and sewn. Among many other industry awards, she received the Coty award five times and entered their hall of fame in 1972; in 2001 was honored with a plaque on the Fashion Walk of Fame on Seventh Avenue in New York City.

                Cashin worked until 1985, when she decided to focus on painting and philanthropy. Among several scholarships and educational programs, she established the James Michelin Lecture Series at the California Institute of Technology. Cashin died in New York on 3 February 2000 from complications during heart surgery. In 2003 the Bonnie Cashin Collection, consisting of her entire design archive and endowments for design-related lecture series and symposia, was donated to the Department of Special Collections within the Charles E. Young Research Library at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Activewear. Flash back

 

Cindy Crawford By Photographer Irving Penn For Vogue US, 1989

 

           The clothing known as activewear in the early 2000s traces its origins back to the high-performance sportswear designed for mountaineering, sailing, and hiking that became popular among urban youth during the 1970s. By the 1980s, such utilitarian styles swept through college campuses in North America, and, subsequently, sneakers were worn with suits, backpacks replaced briefcases, anoraks were paired with deck shoes, and sweatshirts were combined with khaki trousers or jeans. As the style began to characterize the sporty chic of city dwellers and coed campus life, activewear became a staple of the modern wardrobe.

            While activewear is often regarded as a contemporary style, the combination of street clothes, travel accessories, and sportswear is nothing new. In the 1930s and 1940s, the American designers Bonnie Cashin, Claire McCardell, and Vera Maxwell updated garments produced for travel, leisure, and sport with vestiges of high fashion. The designers made functionality a statement of style by producing easy-fit, loosely constructed clothing in fabrics such as wool, denim, and calico. One of Cashin’s signature garments was an overcoat with an integral purse, while Maxwell designed a jacket with built-in bags rather than pockets. Such garments were conceived as urban tools that expanded into wearable luggage, widening the appeal of apparel that could maximize the performance of clothing as well as the body’s ability to transport necessities with ease.

1930

 

Vogue June 1 1940, Lisa Fonssagrives

         For several decades, activewear was characterized by bulky, loose-fitting garments. As the body-conscious styles of the 1990s took hold, activewear gradually became more tailored and form-fitting, yet continued to suit the active leisure interests of urban dwellers. Dress codes became more fluid as Rollerbladers, inner-city cyclists, and speed-walking pedestrians dressed in smart basics that moved easily and provided protection from adverse weather. Mobility and versatility became key considerations for professionals, who started commuting to work in sneakers and multifunctional outer garments. Many were made with detachable hoods that transformed overcoats into raincoats as they were buttoned or zipped into place, or designed with removable collars and detachable sleeves that could be adapted to weather changes.

The hoods, zip-front seams, windproof jackets, pouch pockets, Velcro, and magnetic fastenings of activewear have become part of the everyday fashion vocabulary, along with drawstrings fitted at the neck, sleeve, and waist to make zippers and buttons redundant. Maharishi popularized these tailoring details on the catwalk as the 1990s drew to a close, updating them with elements of occupational uniforms to create a signature militaristic style. The rise of activewear’s popularity throughout the 1990s indicated that the traditional compartmentalized wardrobe no longer sustained shifting social and cultural needs. As the style formed an essential part of the modern wardrobe, it encouraged the movement of materials and technologies across disciplines, moving high-tech fabrics into the collections of forward-thinking fashion designers. Activewear’s multifunctional, dynamic features seemed to herald the dawn of twenty-first century fashion in garments that fused fashion with high-performance sportswear.

              Labels such as CP Company, Mandarina Duck, Issey Miyake, Vexed Generation, and Final Home were among the first to use advanced textile technology to create an edgy, urban aesthetic in designs as durable as they were chic. CP Company led the pack with designs that transcended fashion altogether; their overcoats transformed into one-person tents or inflated into air mattresses, and their parkas puffed up into armchairs. The garments are transformed by the wearers themselves, introducing a notion of technical skill required beyond the point of purchase. Likewise, the “Jackpack,” designed by Mandarina Duck in Italy, integrated a backpack’s straps, fastenings, and compartments within the fabric of the jacket’s back panel. By taking the jacket off, turning it inside out, and folding the sleeves, lapels, and fabric panels into an internal pouch, the structure of the garment was completely transformed. The pouch contains other zippered compartments for stowing away shopping or other items of clothing. Issey Miyake, for his “Transformer” series, also designed cotton jackets that concealed a nylon raincoat within.

Mandarina Duck

            The British fashion duo Vexed Generation countered the problems of modern life with clothing crafted from bullet-proof and slash-proof materials. Their designs combined high-performance fabrics with cutting-edge street style in garments incorporating many of the functions associated with protective clothing. Temperature-regulating materials manufactured for sportswear were incorporated into their winter coats, ending the need for bulky layering. By lining jackets and overcoats with phase-change materials such as Outlast, Vexed Generation created outer garments that could function as personal thermostats. Tiny paraffin capsules in the phase-change fabrics expand when body temperature climbs, absorbing the heat. Once body temperature drops below 98.6° F (37° C), they contract, releasing the heat they have stored. By maintaining a mean temperature within changing climatic environments, Vexed Generation created a comfort zone for the wearer.

The Vexed Parka created in 1994 a very popular design by Vexed.

               The Japanese designer Kosuke Tsumura’s signature garment, the Final Home jacket, expands the mobility of activewear into an expression of architecture as he claims that clothing constitutes the ultimate shelter. The multifunctional, transparent jacket is a nylon sheath equipped with forty-four zippered pockets that can be lined with warm materials for extra insulation, or cushion the wearer when sitting or reclining. Tsumura sees the jacket as a protective shell that enables the wearer to withstand harsh weather conditions. Along with personal items and accessories, Tsumura suggests that some of the pockets be filled with survival rations and practical supplies, eliminating the need for backpacks, shopping bags, luggage, and even tool kits.

Final Home Jacket

            As fashion consumers continue looking to activewear to reconcile the demands of the modern lifestyle, the boundaries between street clothes, office attire, and sportswear are blurring even further. High-performance designs and technologically advanced textiles are common to all three, as comfort, flexibility, and protection become central to all parts of the modern wardrobe. As the garments are updated with innovations that transcend conventional clothing, activewear is proving to be one of the fastest moving areas of fashion in the early 2000s. New tailoring techniques radically streamline the designs each season, and future styles of activewear portend such sophistication that the gym is probably the last place one can expect to see them.

 

1970

 

1980s 'Red Robin' Active Leisure Wear, (Australian brand) photo Bruno Bernini

 

80s 90s Neon Glow Green and Black Bikini Top // by VelvetWillows

THE INFLUENCE OF FASHION MAGAZINES

By the 1860s, stylish American women could see original designs by Charles Frederick Worth, the first true fashion designer, in the popular publication Harper’s Bazaar. As other designers appeared on the scene, their creations could also be seen in new fashion magazines. By the turn of the twentieth century, this was the primary method of spreading news of fashion trends from Paris, the seat of fashion.      At first, the gowns were illustrated with drawings, but as photography became more sophisticated in the early twentieth century, the fashion press used more and more photographs of new designs. At the same time, fashion and art were merging in the eyes of the artists, who dabbled in many of the arts. These artists not only painted, but also created textile designs and fashion illustrations. Some journals of the day printed both fashion illustrations and photographs, along with short articles on fashion by modern writers. Until the Second World War, even mainstream fashion journals like Vogue and Vanity Fair continued to publish fashion illustration by modern artists, encouraging the connections between fashion designers and visual artists.      Vogue functioned in America not only to provide sketches and patterns of fashions derived from Paris models, but also to promote French couture. One of France’s premier designers, Paul Poiret, wrote in a special thirtieth-anniversary edition of Vogue that the magazine "is today one of the best methods of communication with a distinguished clientele," revealing the importance for him of reaching the American clientele.          In America, wearing Paris fashion ensured that others would recognize the wearer’s status as a cultivated and wealthy person, perhaps able to travel to Paris, certainly able to afford the best her own locality could provide, be it local cultural life or the best dressmaker in town. For the Tirocchi clientele, nothing less would do to proclaim their status as wives and daughters of newly wealthy industrialists, a new elite of active and intelligent women in a vibrant city with a long history and a monied elite.      The Tirocchis subscribed to both Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. No doubt many of their clients also subscribed to these magazines at home, but they were able in the shop to consult the magazines and could order a dress made from one of the sketches they saw illustrated. Vogue illustrated as many as 33 models from Paris in each issue, and about twice as many American dresses. Advertisements provided many more images.      As a result of their familiarity with fashion magazines, by 1920 clients were asking for couturiers by name instead of favoring designs sewn and trimmed by Madame Tirocchi herself. The sisters turned this development to their advantage by embracing it and offering their customers copies of Paris couture from supply houses in New York that had paid for the right to copy them in the same materials as the original, then stitch up copies to order for retailers like A. & L. Tirocchi.      Custom dressmaking declined for many reasons in the early twentieth century, but the increasing popularity of the fashion press, which championed couture and a worldwide fashion industry, was a major factor hastening its demise. Women saw what they liked in the pages of fashion magazines and were no longer satisfied with dresses that were not identified with the style of a particular fashion designer. http://tirocchi.stg.brown.edu/514/story/fashion_magazines.html

FASHION AND ART

Art and design were more closely tied at the turn of the twentieth century than they are today. Artists did not see the difference between creating an original work of art, such as a painting, and designing a textile pattern that would be reproduced many times over. Each was a valid creative act in their eyes.   Paul Poiret        The famed French couturier Paul Poiret moved in artistic circles, employed Parisian artists, and collected their work. He went to art galleries and showed his artistic sensibilities by preferring Impressionist paintings at a time when they were new and unappreciated by the public at large. Poiret became very interested in modern art and said, "I have always liked painters. It seems to me that we are in the same trade and that they are my colleagues."    Francis Picabia       The Fauvist painter Francis Picabia was his friend, and they shared a love of bright color with other painters Maurice Vlaminck and Andre Derain, whom he knew from sailing excursions on the Seine in Chatou. Among other artists whose work he collected were Picasso, Matisse, Dufy, Rouault, and Utrillo.       Poiret also loved the theater and throughout his career designed costumes for the theater that served as a springboard for his couture designs. He was famous for his parties, elaborate costume dramas with decorations by modern artists.      Poiret’s theatrical background explains his great interest in the Ballet Russes, whose first appearance in Paris in 1909 impressed Poiret so much. With their colorful designs by Leon Bakst, echoing Russian peasant art, the costumes and sets expressed for Poiret not only the exoticism celebrated by painters like Picasso, but the appeal of spontaneity, a concept at the heart of much modern art. Immediately he began including "oriental" motifs in his dress designs.   les Robes de Paul Poiret; racontées par Paul Iribe       The fashion press employed fine artists to illustrate the designs of the day. A new technique in printing–pochoir–allowed fashion illustrators to show broad, abstract expanses of bright color and a simple line. Poiret realized its potential from the beginning and employed printmaker Paul Iribe to illustrate his radically simplified gowns. In 1908 Iribe illustrated ten Poiret gowns in a limited edition titled les Robes de Paul Poiret; racontées par Paul Iribe.      Poiret was only the best known and best documented of couturiers with connections to the art world. Many other couturiers in the first half of the twentieth century were not only collectors, but also friends of artists. Some collaborated with modern artists in the design of couture or in other artistic projects, especially for ballet and the stage. Charles Worth       The interest of artists in fashion was not restricted to France. From the artists of the Glasgow School in the nineteenth century, to the Russian Constructivists, Bakst, the Wiener Werkstatte, many participated in other aspects of art and design–including illustration, theater design, decorative arts, and even advertising art. Couturiers traditionally participated in events that showcased the decorative arts, taking part in international expositions since the first appearance of the designer Charles Worth at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in 1851. Poiret belonged to the Société des Artistes Décorateurs, founded in 1901 for the promotion and display of modern French art.      Through the first half of the twentieth century, fashion design tracked and echoed trends in modern art. The developing aesthetic of modernism can be followed in the progression of fashion design from the heavily corseted S-curved silhouettes that reflected Art Nouveau interpretation of the female form early in the century to the first uncorseted, tubular, simplified silhouette that arrived before the First World War and continued into the 1920s, to the streamlined, body-hugging dresses of the 1930s.      Designers in the early years of the century could choose fabrics with designs from the stylized organic motifs of Art Nouveau or the flat, abstract designs of the Vienna Secession movement–both styles having originated in the 1890s. Cubist painters, whose canvases presented greatly abstracted objects to a shocked world, influenced fashion silhouettes. Tubular dresses and rounded cloche hats turned women’s bodies into geometric shapes that echoed those found in modern paintings.      The chemise dresses of the early 20s were a perfect foil for surface design. Taking advantage of the plain tubular shape as a painter’s canvas, each garment could be highly decorated with beading and ornamentation. Underlying this would be a textile pattern based on Japanese, Egyptian, Persian, or Viennese design. In the late 1920s, a new streamlined design aesthetic dubbed Moderne (now known as Art Deco) combined Cubism’s geometric base with sinuous embellishments. Once again, textile patterns and fashion design echoed the trend. Shiny fabrics only enhanced the connection with the "speed" of modern life–and art.      The dresses, coats, bathing suits, and evening wraps found in the Tirocchi shop, when placed chronologically, chart for the observer not only the changing silhouette of fashion, but reflect the fact that fashion was part of an aesthetic that was part and parcel of its time. From the chemise and cloche of the 1920s, echoing Cubist concerns, to the evening dresses of the 1930s, with the body-skimming silhouettes and reflective surfaces, each garment has a particular relationship to the art of its time. Anna and Laura Tirocchi      The designers of these garments–and by extension Anna and Laura Tirocchi and their clientele–were reflecting the developing aesthetic of the early twentieth century and asking the question, "What does it mean to be modern?" The Twentieth Century felt "new" to people. Advances in technology increased the speed of life and the speed of change. Artists and designers responded to this new age with their work. The Tirocchis and their customers watched modern trends with interest, and did their best to wrap themselves in clothes of a new age. http://tirocchi.stg.brown.edu/514/story/fashion_art.html