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a Princess, circa 1972

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when you've got it-
rarely do you lose it.
take Diane von Furstenberg. don't you already know her? she was a Princess, married her prince in 1969 wearing her own design- made for her by Dior- no less.
she was an overnight hit-just for her beauty &  her smarts in marrying well.
what more could a  girl want?-
well?

"I was 22 years old and had just gotten married to Prince Egon Von Furstenberg...I arrived in October, so it was New York at its best—that beautiful, blue crisp. Coming from Europe, I had expected the city would look modern, and actually, it didn’t.
 
I was a young princess, so I lived on Park Avenue and had some small children and blah blah blah. 

But we were a young couple, and fairly good looking with a nice title, so we were invited everywhere. We would see Andy Warhol, Halston, Diana Vreeland, Giorgio Sant’Angelo, and, of course, lots of Europeans." 

 DVF from NYM







it could have been the same old story-that could have been it-
But for DVF-
it was just the beginning.


"When Diane and Egon came here, they received an enormous amount of publicity; they were the 'it' couple - she was gorgeous, and they had titles- Paul Wilmot



& today- on it goes.
Now-an established since 2010- yearly DV Award, honoring inspiring women.
Now, 2011,  a home collection line. Expect- animal prints, geometrics, florals, butterflies & of course Success!
& of course there are bumps in the fairy tale-

but how did it all start?
The couple moved to New York & was ensconced in a Park Avenue apartment by the end of 1969. Prior to her move, Diane had apprenticed for Angelo Ferretti and found a genuine love for textiles and fashion. Once in New York -she decided to start designing simple dresses out of her apartment dining room-that was 1970.  By April of 1970 with encouragement from Bill Blass, Kenny Lane & Diana Vreeland , she had shown her first collection at the Gotham Hotel.


"Everybody expected her to do nothing, and then came the wrap dress and sold tons, so the wrap dress became the uniform of a certain type of woman in the early 70's: the spike heels, the wrap dress and the mink" Paul Wilmot


When these photographs of the von Furstenberg's smashing apartment were taken by Horst and published in Vogue 1972-her business was moving along; her marriage wasn't. Diane had it then- as far as interiors went-and she still does. Many subsequent photographs over the last three decades would reveal her taste  and design aesthetic- these by Horst in early 1972 are likely the first- and as I said-when you've got it-you always have it.

The photographs are beautiful & from all appearances- it was perfect.  At that point for Diane-it could not have been all what it seems from these images. Horst photographed the couple in their new up to the minute designed apartment- all Italian staffed & decorated with the assistance of interior designer Pierre Scapula.


All glamour aside, DVF's love for pattern and color can easily be seen in this Horst portrait. The  exotic mix of French Indiennes fabrics along with  pillows in a patchwork of the same fabric appear alongside her bold floral patterned dress.




the Princess posing for HORST in an alcove tented sitting area off the main living room



the Living Room

Resplendent  Luxury
Glamour
red vinyl walls are lacquered and filled with collected paintings
dark caramel velvet banquettes for seating
tortoise finished Parsons tables with pieces of silver, tortoise scattered about









Modern artists like Albers, Ernest Trova hang over a bold flamestitch covered sofa
Latour like lilacs stand by a French ormolu writing desk
Faberge designed bibelots dot a skirted table














the master bedroom
navy blue straw cloth walls, vicuna on the bed, hide covered director's chair
a Richard Anuszkiewicz   op art painting hangs over the bed










a mirrored alcove in the bedroom, Marilyn silk screen & a white leather "bag" chair 










 son Alexandre's room
a graphic apple wallpaper, brass bed, & a Richard Hird portrait of the couple






just recently Diane was interviewed in the Financial Times  & talked about her personal style:


"I wanted to be a certain kind of a woman. 
I became that kind of a woman." DVF
as I began-
when you've got it- You've got it.

(By 1975 the Princess was separated, it would be 1983 before the couple was divorced.)




all photographs of interiors from Vogue  January 15 1972 by HORST
DVF here
2THEWALLS on DVF's office c 1983 here

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Saint Laurent rive gauche interiorworthy

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 Paris 1966





Saint Laurent rive gauche

La révolution de la mode


“I want to be the Prisunic”(chain store)of fashion &  make clothes that everyone can wear, 
not just rich women”




YVES SAINT LAURENT




Saint Laurent with Betty Catroux &  Loulou de la Falaise


  the opening of the first Saint Laurent rive gauche boutique in London
New Bond Street -September 10 1969
© Wesley/Keystone/Getty Images











The Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent has recaptured the modern ambiance of  Yves Saint Laurent's 1966 Rive Gauche Boutique. designed by Isabelle Hebey for its 15th Exhibition this year. The shop holds sixty iconic ready-to-wear pieces by the designer

Loulou de la Falaise is artistic director of the Exhibition. She was the couturier’s muse for more than three decades, pulled together the designer's work from the era in order to mount the show:
"The tricky thing about doing this show was to find multiple editions of the same style and make themes,” de la Falaise


“The shop had to look real. If we’d combined lots of diverse pieces, it would have seemed like a sale.” de la Falaise



The boutique opened on the Left Bank’s rue de Tournon on September 26 of that year &  featured  bold firey Chinese red screen walls and carpet, of the moment Djinn benches by Olivier Mourgue ,Noguchi lamps and sculptures by Niki de Saint Phalle


A full-length portrait of the designer by painter Eduardo Arroyo hung in the Rive Gauche boutique keeping watch over his flock...






All photos of the recreated boutique © Luc Castel, Courtesy of the Fondation YSL-Pierre Bergé












Eduardo Arroyo,  Spanish realist, painted the 30 year old Yves in his realistic pop art style.



 Velazquez, mi padre 1964 by Arroyo at r.





Olivier Mourgue  designed the now classic Djinn chairs in 1965 and Stanley Kubrick gave them their iconic fame in  his  own masterpiece '2001: A Space Odyssey.'  The chair, a wave-like, low-slung silhouette- was in fact- sculpture. Named from Muslim folklore, the Djinn was a spirit  that assumed human &  animal form and possessed supernatural powers of persuasion. 



Djinn from architonic




scene from Kubrick's 2001movie





Noguchi's "AKARI" paper-lamp designs were used throughout the space. The designer Noguchi was commissioned by the mayor of Gifu, Japan, to revive the town's lantern industry that, says Noguchi, had become "reduced to cheap party decorations and painted silk."  The Noguchi  lanterns were made of a mulberry paper, beautifully made and modern.











St Phalle with  day glo  vinyl silk screen NANAS
Vogue 1968


Inspired by Larry Rivers wife Clarice's pregnancy, artist Niki de Saint Phalle created her first Nanas made of paper maché and wool in 1965 and by September 1965, St Phalle exhibited the Nanas in her solo exhibition at the Galerie Alexandre Iolas, Paris. The surreal sculptures  explored the position of women in society- the Nanas represented every woman- clearly something the boutiques echoed.




a Saint Phalle Nana in the courtyard of the boutique
St Phalle Nana, 1968





YSL as seen in the Exhibition Boutique






Today- over four decades after the Boutique opened- the interior looks as fresh as it did on its first day. With that idea in mind, some of best of modern design-now classics- are held within the shop space. Yves Saint Laurent had the consummate EYE.

One sees it in the manifestation of the design of this everywoman boutique, his ready to wear and couture designs, his connoisseur's  collection of art, antiques and in his private homes. No surprise that this boutique withstands to test of time. To that end, his successor Stefano Pilati has in his tenure at YSL  published a seasonal Manifesto that brings 'the brand back to the streets'.  This echos Yves Saint Laurents own vision in making  it New.


the Spring 2011 video & Pilati quote below from Laura Bradley at another thing here
see the Manifesto here photographed by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin,


Stefano Pilati:
"I fell in love with the idea of manifestos and with the term itself, because the word 'manifesto' implied a sense of breaking through something while still being connected to and aware of how things are today. In terms of the format, I didn't really relate to any historical manifestos I've seen because my medium is fashion… There is fashion photography in the manifesto so even the idea of showing the pictures larger than they appear in normal magazines was part of the act of manifesting. First of all you need to question whether it's interesting or not to be political about fashion, or instead you wish to reinforce a message to people that is simply about looking good and projecting a positive energy about yourself. I was no longer interested in thinking of fashion in an elitist way. Everything I picked up from the manifestos in the past suggested that they were trying to create energy around an ideology that was considered, in its time, underground. So I thought for today I would offer another perspective of a luxury brand to a broad demographic that doesn't necessarily relate to fashion in the way that a more privileged layer of people do. I wanted to create a wider influence for the message that was being sent from the catwalk, by taking imagery of a collection and giving it to people on environmentally friendly paper in the street without targeting a specific demographic. One of my visions for Saint Laurent is about giving back, so that even if you can't afford it, you can still pick up the essence of the message, the elements of fashion that might be considered increasingly irrelevant but remain for me its main aspects: the silhouette, the way the clothes are cut, the fabrics, a special pattern. It's to say – "These are my thoughts and this is my message – you can pick up something from this and do it yourself. The Yves Saint Laurent manifestos are against aggressively, against exclusivity, against classification, against isolation, against introversion, against always looking at oneself. This is what it comes to in the end. Fashion can give rise to all of these things and it shouldn't, especially today."




“I want to be the Prisunic”(chain store)of fashion &  make clothes that everyone can wear, not just rich women” YSL
and that he did- becoming the first  French couturier with a ready to wear line- this recreation of his boutique reminds us...
and it was just the beginning.



Photos of the recreated boutique © Luc Castel, Courtesy of the Fondation YSL-Pierre Bergé
















from 5 March to 17 July 2011


 Links:

YSL here
more at Vogue.com here
Shop Noguchi 
Niki Saint Phalle blog here
de la Falaise quotes from universal excuses by Rebecca Voight here

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Maira's World

Edith Sitwell

As if you really need me to tell you to go see the Maira Kalman show that’s now up at the Jewish Museum in New York.


New Yorkistan

There will be work you know (whether you know it or not).


Pina Bausch

And work you’ll wonder why you’ve never seen before.


But the paintings are only part of the story. The show of some 100 artworks is part retrospective, part installation.


Herring and Philosophy Club

So not only do we get to see the lovely color and brushiness of Kalman’s gouaches in the flesh ...


we get to view treasured objects from her personal cabinet of curiosities.


Like the famous onion ring collection she assembled with her late husband, Tibor Kalman, along with other objects by the design duo.


MoMA Moves to Queens

Philippe

Kalman’s influences—Steinberg, Matisse, Hockney, even Duchamp—waft through the airy galleries. You will meet her many literary and historic inspirations as well.





Kalman savors the perfection of
things as they are.

Be it a map of the U.S. drawn by
her immigrant mother …

A package tied with string …

Or a shoebox (size 7½ B) of mosses.


Lady Birley

Kalman uses fashion almost as a language, and with it, she communicates volumes. She is absolutely fluent in hats. Many wonderful hats appear throughout her work, along with shoes, stoles, lace collars and lingerie.


Pink Dress

And for goodness’ sake, where else will you find a pale salmon summer dress, embroidered with the first lines of Dante’s Inferno?



Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World)
The Jewish Museum, 1109 5th Ave at 92nd St., New York
Through July 31, 2011

Have you read Ken Johnsons’s sexist review of the show in the New York Times? I’d be interested in hearing what others thought about it.

Judging Books by Covers...Or Not




Can you guess where this smiling Brown Girl is from

or what languages she speaks by looking at her?
As culturally adept as I think I am, I will admit that I was surprised the first time I heard a Japanese woman speaking French while I was in Paris over 15 years ago. After the first 10 seconds of surprise, however, I smiled to myself and thought “Duh. Why wouldn’t she?”





Marie Louise
Likewise, my father-in-law - a big 6'5" burly deep-voiced African-American man from Virginia/DC – spoke French with a delightful accent that surprised everyone he met (including many French). His wife, a blue-eyed Belgian beauty from France, spoke English with a thick French accent that often had a Southern twang to it having relocated to the United States in her early 30s. How I loved listening to her speak. #ImissyouMarieLouise!  Their son, born in France, came to the US speaking very little English and had, of course, a delightful French accent. He was teased mercilessly for it as a child and now sounds as American as any American I have ever met.


Since I think I have dated just about every ethnicity under the cultural rainbow (pre-husband, of course) and after having an African-American boyfriend bust out his Thai language skills at a Thai restaurant one night shocking the wait staff and earning us a free meal, I find that I am rarely surprised anymore. I have always said that you can’t tell very much about a person simply by looking at him/her, but on some levels, I think it’s normal for human beings to make these type of inaccurate judgments. Exposure to different cultures and travel does help some people amend these inaccuracies, but only for those with an open mind.





Keiko Fujimori
A few days ago, I was chatting with a Facebook friend who hails from Peru. She was pleasantly surprised to learn that I knew about Keiko Fujimori, a candidate in the current (and very close) race for President of Peru. A Japanese Peruvian, Keiko is (of course) fluent in Spanish, Japanese AND English. You can see and hear Keiko here.


I think it would be fair to say that there are many people who never considered that there might be Peruvians (or Latin Americans) of Asian descent let alone the fact that a person of Asian descent might speak languages other than just, for example, Japanese or English. “Japanese Peruvians comprise the second largest ethnic Japanese population in Latin America after Brazil….” [Wiki] Evidently, Peru established diplomatic relations with Japan as far back as 1873 and Japanese immigration began in 1899.





Fabiana Chiu
And then there are the Chinese Peruvians, who make up approximately 5% of the population in Peru. Most Chinese Peruvians (also known as tusán) - many of whom came to Peru as contract laborers in the 19th century - are multi-lingual as well. “In addition to Spanish or Quechua, many of them speak one or more Chinese dialects that may include Cantonese, Hakka, Mandarin, and Minnan. Since the first Chinese immigrants came from Macau, some of them also speak Portuguese.” [Wiki]  #verycool  Please also check out the story of Fabiana Chiu, a Peruvian of Chinese descent, on PBS.org by clicking here.


As a culture lover and multi-lingual wannabe, I enjoy pointing out cultural facts that many of us may or may not be aware of. After asking around for the past few days, I find that many people didn’t ever consider that there might be Latin Americans of Asian descent (yes, really), let alone the fact that an Asian person’s first language might be Spanish or French or Arabic or...whatever. After all, being Asian and speaking Spanish are not mutually exclusive. #canIgetanamen?


If you have ever looked at someone and then heard him/her speak, only to become surprised by the language or accent you hear (or don't hear for that matter), then you are not alone. I know I have. Just not anymore.  #saynotojudgingbooks