Irving Penn: Centennial Exhibition @ Met

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened an impressive exhibition on Irving Penn, almost 200 photographs are on display until the 30th of July. In collaboration with the Irving Penn Foundation
it is the most comprehensive retrospective to date of the work of the great American photographer.

Irving Penn was among the most esteemed and influential photographers of the twentieth century.

This exhibition will mark the centennial of the artist's birth. Over the course of his nearly 70-year career, Penn (1917–2009) mastered a pared-down aesthetic of studio photography that is distinguished for its meticulous attention to composition, nuance, and detail. The exhibition follows the 2015 announcement of the landmark promised gift from The Irving Penn Foundation to The Met of more than 180 photographs by Penn, representing every period of the artist's dynamic career with the camera. The gift will form the core of the exhibition, which will feature more than 200 photographs by Penn, including iconic fashion studies of Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, the artist's wife; exquisite still lifes; Quechua children in Cuzco, Peru; portraits of urban laborers; female nudes; tribesmen in New Guinea; and color flower studies. The artist's beloved portraits of cultural figures from Truman Capote, Picasso, and Colette to Ingmar Bergman and Issey Miyake will also be featured.

Irving Penn: Centennial is essential for any fan of this artists work or of the history of twentieth-century photography. And even if you can't visit the exhibition you can obtain the indispensable book features one of the largest selections of Penn's photographs ever compiled—nearly 300 in all—including famous and beloved images as well as works that have never been published.

Inside the book Irving Penn - Centennial Man

For more information visit The Met Museum.

Katy Perry in Comme des Garçons by Mert & Marcus for Vogue

Katy Perry covers the May 2017 issue of the American Vogue. She looks super avant garde in a red design of the Comme des Garçons’ spring 2017 collection. She is lensed by the photographer's duo Mert & Marcus.

Inside the magazine, Katy wears eight looks from the Paris-based label by Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo which is the subject of Spring 2017 exhibition coming up at The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Gala.
Read more on the exhibition Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between in my previous post.

Fashion editor Grace Coddington selected bold shapes and colors from Comme des Garçons’ archive for the inspiring editorial in Vogue' May 2017 issue.

Hair artist Julien d’Ys did an amazing job with the hair styles of Katy Perry in this editorial. Like a chameleon Katy Perry transfers in every photo of Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott.

And the cover of the May 2017 issue of the American Vogue.

Can't wait to get the issue and see all the photos of the editorial and the interview with Katy Perry and Rei Kawakubo.

Source: Vogue.com

Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between @ The Met

Rei Kawakubo is known for her avant-garde designs and an inspiring exhibition is coming up.
The Met Fifth Avenue will host the exhibition Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garçons Art of the In-Between with approximately 120 examples of her work. Kicking of on the 4th of May until the 4th of September 2017.

Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons is widely recognized as among the most important and influential designers of the past 40 years. Since her Paris debut in 1981, she has blurred the divide between art and fashion and transformed customary notions of beauty, identity, and the body.

What I’ve only ever been interested in are clothes that one has never seen before, that are completely new, and how in what way they can be expressed. Is that called fashion? I don’t know the answer.

                                                                                                                                         Rei Kawakubo

Photo: Courtesy of Comme des Garçons. Photograph by © Paolo Roversi; Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Costume Institute's exhibition will examine the work of Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo. She is not only known for her avant-garde designs but also the ability to challenge conventional notions of beauty, good taste, and fashionability.

The thematic show will feature approximately 120 examples of Kawakubo's womenswear for Comme des Garçons dating from the early 1980s to her most recent collection. The galleries will illustrate the designer's revolutionary experiments in "in-betweenness"—the space between boundaries.
Objects will be organized into eight aesthetic expressions of interstitiality in Kawakubo's work: Fashion/Anti-Fashion, Design/Not Design, Model/Multiple, Then/Now, High/Low, Self/Other, Object/Subject, and Clothes/Not Clothes.
By situating her designs within and between dualities, Kawakubo not only challenges the rigidity and artificiality of such binaries, but also resolves and dissolves them. To reflect this, mannequins will be arranged at eye level with no physical barriers, thereby dissolving the usual distance between objects on display and museum visitors.

Photo: Courtesy of Comme des Garçons. Photograph by © Paolo Roversi; Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The exhibition will be curated by Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute, who will collaborate on the exhibition design with Rei Kawakubo. Nathan Crowley will serve as exhibition production designer for the fifth time, working in collaboration with The Met’s Design Department. Raul Avila will produce the gala décor, which he has done since 2007.

The exhibition is made possible with the support of Apple, Condé Nast, Farfetch, H&M, and Maison Valentino.

Listen to Andrew Bolton on Rei Kawakubo and see a glimpse of the exhibition.

The catalogue accompanying the exhibition, in which archival pieces are photographed on models rather than mannequins, a practice usually forbidden to museums because of custodial and conservation issues, but in this case  was given the green light by Comme des Garçons archive, which provided the pieces.

Ten photographers were invited to contribute: Nicholas Alan Cope, Inez and Vinoodh, Katerina Jebb, Kazumi Kurigami, Ari Marcopoulos, Craig McDean, Brigitte March Niedermair, Paolo Roversi, and Collier Schorr. All of whom have created stunning new images for the exhibition catalogue.

This lavishly illustrated publication features text by Andrew Bolton who interviews the normally reticent designer about her work and process.
The catalogue weaves an illuminating narrative around Kawakubo’s experiments in oppositions and the spaces between boundaries. Brilliant new photographs of more than 120 examples of Kawakubo’s womenswear for Comme des Garçons accompanied by Kawakubo’s commentary on her designs and process, reveal her conceptual and challenging aesthetic as never before.
A chronology of Kawakubo’s career provides additional context, and an insightful conversation with the author offers a fascinating glimpse into the mind of this fashion visionary.

Good news, you can pre-order this catalogue on The Met store!
The catalogue is a must-have for every fashion lover!

Source: The Met Museum/Vogue

Prints in Paris 1990: From Elite to the Street @ Van Gogh Museum

Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is devoting itself to 'Prints in Paris 1900: From Elite to the Street', a major exhibition of work from its own fin-de-siècle print collection until the 11th of June 2017.

Poster for the Café-concert Le Divan Japonais  Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1893

Over 250 prints will be on display, including iconic works by Bonnard, Chéret, Steinlen and Toulouse-Lautrec, and world-famous posters like Le Chat Noir and Le Moulin Rouge. They will be shown alongside paintings, historical photographs and decorative objects.
In this way, the exhibition will offer visitors a glimpse of the cosmopolitan life of fin-de-siècle Paris, the ‘artistic capital of the world’ at the time.

Le Chat Noir - Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, 1896

Moulin Rouge, La Goulue, poster for the Dance Hall Le Moulin Rouge  Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1891

Heyday
At first, printmaking was primarily used in France to reproduce artworks as accurately as possible for a broad public. This changed radically in the second half of the nineteenth century, when each print began to be viewed as an artwork in its own right. The fin de siècle (1890–1905) was the heyday of printmaking: virtually the entire avant-garde experimented intensively with the different techniques, resulting in marvellous and innovative works of art. Prints, posters and even illustrations for cheap magazines reached every layer of Parisian society. Prints served not only as autonomous artworks in elite circles, they could also be admired in the French capital’s streets and boulevards.

Darkness and decadence
The presentation opens on the lower floor of the exhibition wing with the sophisticated artistic circles of the fin de siècle, in which the prints were kept and viewed in the intimacy of richly decorated interiors. Four such interiors have been recreated specially for the exhibition, based on fin-de-siècle examples.
A particularly imposing exhibit is the rarely loaned Bibliothèque designed by François-Rupert Carabin in 1890 (Musée d’Orsay): an exuberantly decorated bookcase several metres tall with carvings of nude women, in which valuable books and prints belonging to a private collector were stored.
The private existence of such prints meant that artists felt freer to explore darker or more titillating themes.
On the upper floor, visitors enter a completely different world: the darkness and decadence of the beau monde interior gives way to the fleeting impressions and visual spectacle of modern street life, in which artistic posters, sheet music and magazine illustrations with their bright colours, large letters and powerful silhouettes, vie for the passer-by’s attention.
Posters are displayed on walls set in historic Paris street scenes.
The highlight is Steinlen’s poster The Street, which, with an area of 7.5m2, is a genuine ‘fresco for the masses’. Other life-sized posters with the likenesses of enigmatic celebrities tempt passers-by into the city’s nightlife.
The journey is rounded off by a final interior in which visitors can see how the same fashionable collectors took the more public kind of printmaking, intended for the streets of Paris, back into the interior, where it was stored in specially made cabinets or hung on the wall as decoration.

A variety of printing techniques, lastly, are presented in a separate technical room, with the original lithography press of the artistic master printer Auguste Clot (1858–1936) as the main attraction.
The exhibition design is by Maarten Spruyt and Tsur Reshef.

At La Bodinière (A la Bodinière)  Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, 1894

Artists' Book Des chats, dessins sans paroles  Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, 1898

Richly illustrated catalogue
The exhibition Prints in Paris 1900: From Elite to the Street is accompanied by a richly illustrated, large-format catalogue written by Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho, the museum’s Curator of Prints and Drawings. The publication is based on years of intensive research into the worlds of printmaking during the French fin de siècle.
The book is available in Dutch, English, French and German and will be distributed worldwide.
A separate print of Félix Vallotton’s 1896 woodcut Laziness (La paresse), 25 x 33 cm, is included as a special gift for readers.
192 pages, 38 x 25.3 cm, 185 illustration, € 45.00.
Publisher: Mercatorfonds, Brussels.
Also available online at Van Gogh Museum Shop

Source: Van Gogh Museum

MANGO Spring 2017 - Tailoring rules

MANGO presented its spring 2017 ad campaign for men. Four men and four dogs are starring in the new looks where tailoring rules.

I love the photo of Mr. Tidiou and Mr. Franki!

Enjoy watching Mr. Tidiou with Mr. Franki, Mr. Tommy with Mr. Tico, Mr. David with Mr. Bravo and Mr. Paul with Mr. Charles.

For more information visit MANGO.

Mary Katrantzou meets the Greek Goddess for Spring 2017

Minoan goddesses are the inspiration for Mary Katrantzou's spring-summer 2017 dresses.

The London-based designer always keeps close to her greek roots, this time she found inspiration from ancient greek pottery of the Minoan civilization. Representing the goddesses Pandora, Chimera and Eirene. The pottery is known for its black painting on the ceramic base representing scenes and characters of greek mythology.

Framed by delicate laster cut scallops of silk organza and lace the dresses are looking amazing. The dresses can be worn with a great top of a stretch viscose jersey, creating a unique Katrantzou look.

The first dress Eirene, is my favourite but I would love to wear them all!

For more information on the dresses and top visit Mary Katrantzou.

Source: Mary Katrantzou

Meet the Masters by Jeff Koons for Louis Vuitton

Jeff Koons remixed iconic artworks of the old masters and created pieces of art and must-have handbags. In collaboration with Louis Vuitton he presented them in a way that every fashionable woman would like to have one of them.

Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Rubens, Fragonard and Titian lined up for the new handbag collection of Louis Vuitton x Jeff Koons.

Each bag in the Masters collection is decorated with the name of the original artist spelled out in gold letters, along with some of Louis Vuitton's signature flower symbols. The bags also feature Louis Vuitton's Monogram logo and use the artist's initials. The final addition is a tag in the silhouette of one of Koons' best-known artworks, the inflatable Rabbit sculpture

The Mona Lisa, the Wheat Field With Cypresses, the Tiger Hunt, the Girl With a Dog and the Mars, Venus, and Cupid all recreated by Jeff Koons for Louis Vuitton.

And my favourite is...

"...sophisticated and feminine, the Montaigne bag. It is twisted with this exclusive collaboration: gold Monogram serti, reflective metallic letters and colored trimmings. An exclusive leather lining embossed, printed and filled with gold tells you more about this unexpected/surprising collaboration."

The handbags are up to 4.000 euros, but you will have your own piece of art which you can carry with you every day!

Source: Louis Vuitton

Tseklenis Tribute @ i-D Concept Store in Athens

Three greek designers joined forces for a tribute to one of Greece well known designers, Yiannis Tseklenis.

Inspired by the 70's drawings of Yiannis Tseklenis, Dolly Boucoyannis, Angelos Bratis and Sophia Kokosalaki created designs for the i-D concept store in Kolonaki, the fashion quarter in the city center of Athens.

The i-D concept store at Kanari 12 in Kolonaki will host Tseklenis tribute until the 29th of April. With drawings and prints by the greek designer and new creations inspired by Tseklenis.

Yiannis Tseklenis is considered as the fashion designer that put Greece on the contemporary fashion map. His creations have been carried by leading stores in more than 20 countries and Tseklenis has won a niche in the wardrobe of thousands of well-dressed women, men and children. It started in 1965 until the nineties.
Since 1991 he works as a designer and art director in collaboration with companies. The decoration of the yellow-blue busses in Athens is by this talented designer.
In 1997, Tseklenis donated his archive of 600 ensembles, photographs, patterns and drawings to the Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation.

I had the pleasure to visit to tribute and meet the designers, photos are taken with my smartphone...but you can have a look at the tribute yourself until the 29th of April!



Sophia Kokosalaki, inspired by the drawings of Tseklenis, presents her dress.

Sophia Kokosalaki

Angelos Bratis with his dress, inspired by Tseklenis drawings.

Angelos Bratis and Yiannis Tseklenis

Tassos Mitropoulos @ 21st AXDW

Tassos Mitropoulos presented his spring-summer 2017 collection during the 21st edition of Athens Xclusive Designers Week at Zappeion in the center of Athens.

The greek designer's show started with airy spring and summer looks, inspired by greek folklore with embroidery and tassels. Continuing to evening wear and some amazing bridal wear.

Recently Tassos Mitropoulos launched over the knee boots in several colours.

Mitropoulos' passion for innovation is visible from his expertise in combining unconventional and controversial materials in an unique feminine style.

Hairstyling is by Vassilis Diamantopoulos and his team. Make up by Yiannis Marketakis and his team  for Max Factor.