New York Fashion Week: Fall 2011

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TThe Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli, c. 1486

Caroline Herrera

 with colors from Boticelli's "The Birth of Venus"

Is it just me? Or do you also see art as inspiration for fashion. It's time for the New York Fall 2011 Fashion Shows. A woman's beauty as muse and mannequin. It's been going on for a long time. Did you know that since classical times female nudes in painting and sculpture came to be called Venus'es? Painters in the Renaissance got away with painting nude women since they were Venuses and were supposed to be nude, since Venus is the goddess of love, desire, sexuality, and all that. 

But you can't get away with having Venuses walking all over the place. So artist-designers can cover them up with their imaginations. I had a little fun browsing the thumbnails of the Fall collections for inspiration from a few pieces of art. I could do this all day (well, I did), but my mouse finger started hurting all the way up my arm.

The names of the designers under the fashion photos have links to their Fall collections.

Four expressions of Jacqueline by Picasso;
Jacqueline was Picasso's second wife

These dresses remind me of Picasso's Jacquelines.

Clockwise from top left: Caroline Herrera, 

Adam Lippes, Jason Wu, Jill Stuart

This white Jason Wu dress with black lace embellishments reminds me

of Audrey Hepburn's dress in "Sabrina."

Jason Wu

Audrey Hepburn in Givenchy with William Holden, for "Sabrina"

Klimt and Betsey Johnson. Betsey Johnson and so many artists, really.

Gustave Klimt

Betsey Johnson

Degas and Carolina Herrera.

"The Rehearsal" by Edgar Degas

Caroline Herrera

Monet and Lela Rose. I see Monet's haystacks and Houses of Parliament whenever I go to the Art Institute in Chicago. I thought of them when I saw this Lela Rose dress, which is fantastic.

"Haystack Thaw" by Claude Monet

"Houses of Parliament" by Claude Monet

Lela Rose

Mark Rothko and Diane von Furstenberg.

Blues by Mark Rothko

Diane von Furstenberg

Paul Klee and Betsey Johnson. After doing this for a while -- looking at fashion thumbnails for artist inspiration, I wanted more color. How drab most of our fashion is, I thought.
Brava! to Betsey Johnson, offering vibrant colors and patterns year after year.

"Rose Wind" by Paul Klee

Betsey Johnson

But sometimes "drab" is good, very good.
Frederic Leighton and Donna Karan.

"Venus Disrobing for the Bath" 

by Frederic Leighton

Donna Karan

Prabal Gurung's collection was my favorite. Gurung was born in Singapore, raised in Kathmandu, Nepal, and began his career in design in New Delhi, India. He moved to NYC and worked with Donna Karan as an intern and then launched his first collection under his own name two years ago. He designed Michelle Obama's simply fantastic red dress for the White House Correspondents' Dinner last May. For his Fall collection he said ". . . he was dually inspired by John Singer Sargent’s "A Parisian Beggar Girl" and Miss Havisham from Great Expectations."

John Singer Sargent's "A Parisian Beggar Girl" 
and Marcus Stone's "Pip Waits on Miss Havisham"

Stone's image scanned by Philip V. Allingham

Prabal Gurung
I think she and her dress
are worthy of a painting.

I think fashion design is art, wearable art. 

Do you like fashion, or merely tolerate it?

All fashion photos found at Fashionologie.
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A focus on blue

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If you focus on one thing among the many, a deeper connection ensues. It’s like a research paper. You lug an underarm tower of books from the library to scour the one thing. You become consumed by blue whales, for instance (not literally, one hopes) and along the way you learn about plankton.

And the blue in the ocean.

I visited the cathedral at Chartres, like a ship in a field. Its thousand-year-old windows sang wet and saturated songs of blue. An ancient melody of a clear conscience. Guilt-free. How did they get the blue up there high in the holy arches so close to Heaven? And how did the man-dominated church manage to commission this freedom, clarity and hope from the makers of that glass? What contract with the sun to illumine the labyrinth -- so cold, so hard and mysterious, crawled by hopeful, prayerful knees?

Blue became a thesis. French blue.

And so the research project that was really just a recognition, an attention-paying, a consciousness, tucked itself into the soft heart’s cortex.

Two years later and it’s the Van Gogh gallery at the Orsay. You know how it goes. You are being attentive to the Degas ballet bronze. The train station converted to a creamy dreamy galley-dome. The special exhibit of smoke rising like alive ribbons. The wall-size clock window framing the distant Sacré-Cœur on the Montmartre butte (embraced by a blue sky), a white counter-point to the Orsay’s arc. You are beyond emotion already, in a state of above, of afloat. You walk into the room of Van Goghs, which is just a white cube with two doorways like so many museum rooms. White sand. Or wheat. And there is the water of blue that has lapped itself in your psyche like an unstoppable tide that comes back over and over to your shore.

Paintings on the white walls: the mid-afternoon silky blue sky above siesta sleepers against a haystack; an indigo dome asterisked with stars that declares: I exist; calm sky-blue walls of a bedroom neatly stocked with a blonde wood bed, dresser and chair. Everything else recedes -- all colors, all paints, all frames, even stars -- and only blue steps forward, like waves. Where do you turn when you reunite with blue?

Only around and around.

Tears.

Guilt, or bitterness, runs out to another room where a color like Delacroix red turns it into desire.

How does color tell our hearts what to feel?

If you pay attention to one thing on your way through the many, your heart will connect. (This can be beautifully pleasant, and also painfully difficult, depending on the point of focus.)

Hand-stitched wool crewel blue peacocks on my Indian bag.

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House of Straw

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Almost six years since moving to the farm in November 2003 we had driven by an RV sitting on a pretty plot of land on Meridian Road that had a sign reading "Green & White Acres." (This would be a reference to the TV show "Green Acres," which entertained my father-in-law to no end.) We passed it every day - winter, spring, summer and fall - going to work "in town" - about a 30-minute ride. I could see that people lived in the RV, and I admired their houselessness in some ambiguous environmentally conscious part of my brain. They had a little rectangular garden bed of tomatoes next to the road, and even a clothesline near the RV. Suddenly last summer a house started going up on that land, and then there were straw bales piled up for the insulation. How exciting!

The first little pig built his house out of straw because it was the easiest thing to do.

While chicory appeared like blue stars along the green firmament of farm fields, the straw house grew. The owners must be building it themselves. It doesn't look easy to me, and it certainly isn't quick. That "Green & White Acres" sign makes me think the owners work at my university or are alums, because MSUs colors are green and white. Our school tries to be green in more than just school spirit, with a good recycling program, and energy conserving incentives, but a lot could still be improved. Sadly, Monsanto develops seeds at my agricultural university, including genetically modified ones, like insect-resistant potatoes. (Here and here are brief articles listing some pros and cons of Genetically Modified Organisms - GMOs.)

One night the big bad wolf, who dearly loved to eat fat little piggies, came along and saw the first little pig in his house of straw. He said "Let me in, Let me in, little pig or I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house in!"

"Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin", said the little pig.

But of course the wolf did blow the house in and ate the first little pig.

I took the pictures above one year ago. Here is the straw house this week, still not done, but the straw has been covered with stucco. I waited until the blue chicory bloomed again to take new photos. One of the color blue's characteristics in color therapy is that it is calming. It certainly does soothe me on my drive coming and going. Another trait of blue is that it promotes growth. Who knew? Slowly, slowly, country blue chicory is helping a little green house grow.

House of Straw 

It's a blue star bi-way,

a green house bouquet,

hay rolls, straw bales,

wolves fly, pigs prevail.

 ~ me

When the Big Bad Wolf comes to huff and puff and blow this house down, the owners can relax, because the bales make good load bearing walls and are extra sturdy - besides being three [little pig] times more efficient than conventionally built houses, for insulating against the cold and heat. Who needs expensive bricks? And will the owners of Green & White Acres be afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin!

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"They've messed with the wrong one now!"

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To read more about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, go here.
To read more about Rosa Parks, go here, or read her autobiography, Rosa Parks, My Story.
To see the story of the restoration of the bus, go here.
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