Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week at Lincoln Center | Academy of Art University...

Today, I just want to share a video of the graduate student collections from the Academy of Art University.  The students show each season during fashion week in New York.  I think most of these collections have something very unique to show.  My favorites, of course, are the knitwear collections of my friends Stephanie Gelot (layers and layers of knit "prints" with big chunky scarfs) and Jonathan Baker (chunky knits with fur trims).  Both Stephanie and Jonathan are incredibly talented.  Stephanie is a master at getting amazing textures out of a simple flat bed or double bed knitting machine.  Jonathon does amazing chunky hand knits but brings in unusual textures by knitting with strips of chiffon or fur or other non-traditional knitting materials.

Couture Beadwork

As I mentioned previously, along with creating my own designs, I also do custom embroidery and beadwork for other designers.  One of my favorite classes in school was a couture embroidery class where I learned to do tambour embroidery.  Tambour embroidery is done using a tiny crochet hook called a Luneville hook to create a chain stitch. The technique can be used with various types of thread or it can be used to attach beads to a background fabric.  It's faster than embroidery with a needle and is used by couture artisans in various studios in Paris and India to create couture embroideries for the haute couture houses in Paris, Milan and New York.  The most famous studio to practice this technique is L'Atelier Lesage in Paris which is owned by Chanel but does couture work for many other couture houses besides Chanel.

Last summer, I worked for designer Maria Korovilas creating amazing metallic encrusted pieces for her Spring/Summer 2011 collection that showed in New York in September 2010.  Here are some pictures of the work in progress as well as the finished pieces.

  

This was the first piece I worked on.  It's the front hem of the dress below and this one piece took me two weeks to finish.  The "beads" include everything from washers and various tiny plumbing and hardware pieces as well as metallic and metallized plastic beads and sequins.  The easy part was getting all the big beads in place.  The not so fun part was the hours upon hours we spent, filling in all the holes in between the large beads so that the whole piece was completely covered.  The dress is made from Battenburg lace tablecloths that were cut apart and pieced into the dress below.  Maria's whole collection consisted of Battenburg pieces layered over and under chiffon with beaded accents.  

These are little cap sleeves and since they were very small, they only took about a week to finish.  

This was the front hem of the dress below.  The piece was very large and took about a month to finish.  This one piece probably weighed about twenty pounds and there was a similar though smaller piece for the back hem on this dress.

The final garment was featured in Women's Wear Daily!

The video of the fashion show.  

NEW YORK FASHION WEEK

Since NYFW begins this week, I thought I'd share this short video.  My alma mater, The Academy of Art University in San Francisco, is one of the few, or only fashion schools in the U.S. to show during NYFW.  I can't wait to see the work of this season's MFA students on Friday, February 11.  This video is only a highlight of a few of the looks shown during the Spring/Summer 2011 shows which were held in September 2010.

For those of you not in the fashion biz, the shows are generally held several months before the actual season to allow buyers to get a look at various collections and decide which lines they want to carry in their stores.  The designers then have a few short months to get the clothes produced and into stores.

Along with creating my own designs, I also do custom embroidery and beadwork for other designers.  At around 1:40 in the video, you'll see a couple of looks that are encrusted with metal beadwork.  These were designed by Maria Korovilas and I did some of the beadwork for her.  Maria's collection was very haute couture and simply amazing.  I loved working on it.  It was a huge endeavor involving a team of people, three to do the vast majority of the embroidery and another team of people to construct it all.  Most of the work was done by hand in the true haute couture sense.  The long vest you can see in the video was originally about three feet longer and dragged on the floor.  It took about two months to bead.  Unfortunately, none of the models were strong enough to walk in it since it weighed over 100 pounds, so Maria was forced to chop off the bottom of the vest, causing a few beads to fall off on the runway.  It was still beautiful though.  Tomorrow, I'll post more pictures of the collection along with some of the pictures I took as I went along with the embroidery.

Pet Peeve of the day

I have a major pet peeve when it comes to blogs and fashion magazines.  I realize that in order to stand out from the crowd, it's necessary to make your images look unique and to show the clothing in a new and interesting way.  When you read as many magazines and blogs as I do, you start to see the same clothes over and over again.  Even so, there are journalists and bloggers who still make their images and the accompanying information fresh.  Then, there are those photojournalists and bloggers who show barely discernible pictures that may or may not be of a model wearing clothing.  I fail to grasp why it is so important to hire a famous fashion photographer if said photographer can't be bothered to photograph actual fashion.

Case in point, these images were part of the WhoWhatWear blog post for today.  The images are of the Vanessa Bruno Spring Summer 2011 collection and feature "models" Lou Doillon and Jessica Joffe.    Lou Doillon is a hot model of the moment because her mother was a British pop singer and actress in the 60's who's main claim to fame is that she was a muse to another 60's pop singer and had an Hermes handbag named after her.  There is a whole crew of models who currently have jobs solely because they are the offspring of a rock star and their model wife/girlfriend/random acquaintance.  Some people are just born lucky, but I digress...

As an artist, I fully understand and appreciate the need for artistic license when photographing one's collection for publicity and marketing purposes.  You want to grab people's attention and  make them love your work.  Otherwise, they'll just move on and buy someone else's.  My problem is when you spend a fortune hiring photographers, models, stylists, and people to do make-up and hair to showcase your work, only to end up with a final result that doesn't actually show the clothing it took you nine months to design and create.

Example #1:  I think this girl below is dead.  Maybe she's just passed out after a hard night of night-clubbing.  I can see that she's wearing a dress but that's only in the vaguest sense.  I can't really tell what color it is or whether the fabric is supposed to be wrinkled or if that happened when she fell down into that pit.

This woman doesn't seem to be wearing clothes.  I'm not sure what the point of this picture is.  The girl could be a mermaid floating underwater or a fairy in a windstorm. Whatever she is, she's not showing off any clothing and it looks like someone spilled chemicals all over the image when it was being printed. I think a five year old shot this picture.

You can barely see that there is a female in this picture.  I'm assuming that she is wearing clothing but without a microscope, it's difficult to tell.  I wonder why she's playing the drums in the middle of a smokey forest.  If you play the drums in the forest but no one cares, does it even matter?


I'm not sure why WhoWhatWear felt this photoshoot was so amazing that they featured it.  Maybe it was a slow day because they just posted the photos without any comment.  Usually, they're full of helpful information.

So you don't think I've just singled them out, I do have to admit that I've been a fan of Who What Wear for several years.  They send out daily emails that  show stylish models and celebrities of the moment.  They track down what these fashionable ladies are wearing in the photos and frequently offer suggestions for similar but lower-cost alternatives for those of us who don't have access to daddy's rock star millions.  While most of these fashion ingenues are size 0, there are the occasional sightings of actual human being sized women who still manage to look fashionable or even, gasp, GLAMOUROUS.  I love their concept of making fashion accessible whether you're an admin in Los Angeles, a student in Bismark or an executive in a large city like New York.  Too much of the fashion world focuses on wealthy young New Yorkers while ignoring anyone who isn't 19 and a size 0 (aka, the rest of the world).

So what is the point of all this ranting?  It's this.  If I'm going to look at a fashion spread, I want to be able to see the clothes.  (Are you listening W Magazine????)  How else will I know whether I can't live without those shoes or that handbag or that jacket?  A girl's gotta have something to dream about.