URBAN BOOKS
Creative People
When Fashion Comes to Life BY STUART MITCHNER
Creative people are curious, flexible, persistent, and independent with tremendous spirit of adventure and a love of play. —Henri Matisse
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n my dissheveled outsider’s view, the fashion world is best approached when it relates to art or cinema or literature, or, as I’ve just learned, when it’s embodied by designers who live up to Matisse’s definition of creative people. After scanning some new fashion-oriented publications appropriate to the holiday season, I’ve found the virtues of curiosity, persistance, independence, a spirit of adventure and a love of play in people like fashion legend Loulou de la Falaise (1948-2011) and Alber Elbaz, the creative director of Lanvin. I have to say that I prefer a smiling Loulou to the somnolent, tranced-looking creature (or should I say creation) on the cover of Loulou de la Falaise (Rizzoli $65), written by Ariel de Ravenel and Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni and designed by Alexandre Wolkoff, with a foreword by Pierre Bergé, and afterword by Loulou’s husband Thadée Klossowski. Not that there’s anything not to like about the cover image, with its compelling evocation of the bohemian chic for which Loulou was famous (or infamous, some admirers say). Given my comfort level with literature, I find it hard to resist a face styled to suggest a romance of the demi-monde: a touch of Colette and Coco Chanel mixed with the earthy charisma of a courtesan out of Balzac, and Marlene Dietrich as a bored femme fatale who yawns as she sends men to their doom. The most bizarre touch is the cigarette, which is as much an ornament as the necklace and earrings, there not to be smoked but to be worn. The sly, outré humor of the cigarette reflects the “love of play” Matisse mentions, a characteristic of Loulou and Yves Saint-Laurent (1936-2008), for whom de la Falaise was both muse and co-author of an epic narrative of design that galvanized the fashion world. Jeffrey Felner’s review of Loulou de la Falaise in the New York Journal of Books refers to “a museum worthy showing of photographs that lays testament to who and what she was during her life. What comes through it all is the feeling that you would want to be friends with someone who was that creative, that free, that inclusive. She was indeed crazy about her husband, her family, and her extended family, and even those who wanted to dislike her fell under her thrall. She was truly creative and infused her being into the lives of those she adored and into a business where she was more likely to have been ostracized than loved.” To see why Loulou was loved you need only look at photographs of the Bois de Boulogne reception following her June 1977 wedding
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to Klossowski. Shown in one photograph with Bianca Jagger and SaintLaurent, the beaming Loulou is radiant in a star-strewn midnight blue chiffon sheath, an iridescent tiara shaped like a crescent moon in her hair, starlight flashing around her ears, an enchanted vision out of a Midsummer Nights Dream world that is equally worthy of her wish to appear “like a summer night sky in Marrakech.”
THE MATISSE LINES It’s refreshing to find that Saint-Laurent himself related to literature, Proust in particular (he sometimes signed hotel registers as Msr. Swann); in fact, it would be hard to imagine a more Proustian setting for a fashionable wedding than the Bois. Needless to say, Saint-Laurent also related to art. One of the featured works in MoMA’s current show, Henry Matisse: The Cut-Outs, is The Sheaf, also a feature in SaintLaurent’s fall/winter 1980 haute couture collection where it inspired a black velvet and moiré faille evening dress with multicolor satin appliqué leaves. The premier art event in New York this season, the Matisse exhibit was the “blockbuster summer exhibition” at the Tate Modern in London, which the June issue of Vogue observed that “the tumbling stream of Matisse’s memories... make for an ideal style cue.” Meanwhile an article on www.architecturaldigest.com features “ten creative talents” who have been inspired by Matisse. Blue Nudes, the cover image on the MoMA exhibit monograph, inspired the stainedglass window of fashion executive Carla Fendi’s Roman apartment, and a Matisse drawing was the model for interior designer Billy Baldwin’s creation of the fabric for a client’s Manhattan living room. And you don’t have to look far online to find Oscar de la Renta’s Matisse Embroidered Bell skirt, which at last sighting had been marked down to $399 from $2,650.
HOLIDAY 2014
11/14/14 10:53:42 AM