Frederic Zaary... a life cut short

 https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/stardust-work-fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric-zaavy

THIS MAKES 2000 POSTS

VERSACE PRE FALL 2021

Donatellamamamia says “The collection is dedicated to all those men and women who are self-confident, aware of who they are, authentic. It’s a celebration of individual identity and personality.” She left out have a big closet  museum!

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Id prefer to say that this highly referenced mediocre and rather pedestrian collection is wearable and nothing to set off any fireworks in celebration of as it’s just clothes. Yes, it does speak to the times in the case of being pretty much wearable for no particular reason other than to get dressed but hell, when you reference everyone and everything from Rick Owens to Brooks Brothers to Thierry Mugler, I say why is there a cause for any kind of party!?

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She shops for a new client every season these days and when things get a bit too banal, she slaps a logo on it and believes it’s original and individual. It is neither ...it’s just plain tired, boring and lazy.

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There is absolutely nothing here that says Versace; Gianni must be spinning in his grave with a collection that looks like this and has his name attached to it!

Saint Laurent summer 2021

 WOW! I’m not one who is big on watching these film presentations but I am compelled to say  that this was a tour de  force  as well as an incredible  example of a designer growing into  his place as designer for a heritage brand. Vaccarello has demonstrated he knows much more of the brand’s DNA than a smoking!

I won’t go on and on and but I’m thrilled to see the respect, the grandeur, the presentation that can proudly stand up to the legacy of Yves St Laurent.

Just watch the  film….   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qCLjjGkBrw

GIVENCHY PRE FALL 2021

 Matthew M. Williams evaded questions of the specific visual references and focused on nerdy things like cuts and fabric…. mood boards and sketches for the old guard. I’m more on the body, touching materials… it’s very instinctual

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Williams is emblematic of a new wave of designers for whom fashion is often less about producing the flashy statement piece than about perfecting the unassuming wardrobe staple—focusing on themselves as target audience. “What I find exciting is often things I would wear myself,”

Millennial designers have grown up in the digital age of fashion fandom, spent their twenties saving up for $800 cult-brand hoodies, and learned to obsess about trouser hems. They’re also well-versed in the grammar of icons— whether that’s a varsity jacket or a Hermès anything—and, crucially, in the art of subversion. You could apply all those teachings to Williams’s new collection for Givenchy, which proposed a series of wardrobe staples subverted through his soft-versus-aggressive lens.

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“For me, it’s really finding that tension between my real world—how I wear clothes on a daily basis—with this magical dream world of the Maison,” he said. More often than not, that implied a bellicose level of fabric treatment, leatherwork, or embellishment. But next to his rigid materiality, Williams also made a case for the comfort-wear of the post-pandemic shopping landscape. Interestingly, Williams’s take on Givenchy isn’t very sporty at all, something you might expect from a designer his age. “I do wear suits,” he reiterated. “It feels more like me.”

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 “I’m doing the logos through construction and materials as much as possible,” he said, presenting a leather jacket with Givenchy embossed across the lower back as an example. “Sometimes when there’s branding, it’ll be more subtle.”

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Those are the pretentious words (of a Vogue reviewer who is apparently uneducated and grandiloquent and his chat with a designer lost in his own bullshit designing clothes for himself and not his client.

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If anything, this is a derivative souk of a collection with a wimpy weak take on McQueen and with no direction. Again lost at sea. Afterall a silver puffer in 2 lengths that we have seen a jillion times but perhaps not in the same collection as a slinky knit tank dress.

As for the logo schtick, that’s something that the Euros are finding as the magnet for their Asian clients as that is what makes the piece identifiable and recognizable which is and has always has been a part of the conspicuous consumption of fashion … as it were in the far east.

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 I’m willing to say   that Mr. Williams may have even less of a vision for the maison than his predecessor and that is not an easy achievement. Other than logo there is no signature to the brand just clothes and not very good ones at that…so good luck with finding 1000s of Matthews who want what you want and not what the brand demands!

PS I  can’t even begin to discuss the unexceptional and absurd footwear!

Contemporary Chinese Jewelry Design

 for  full review  click on the link below 

https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/chinese-contemporary-jewelry-design

Dior pre-fall 2021

 In response to the current times when designers and clients speak of buying” comfort clothes,” quite literally and figuratively the meatball decided that these are her take on comfort clothes. Well, I’d like to see her, actually no I wouldn’t, in that silver skirt or sprayed on second skin jeans and tell me that she feels comfort in reliving her past thru those clothes!!

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Maria Grazia Chiuri says “I want a leopard coat!” The Christian Dior designer was in high spirits, illustrating the objective she set herself with her most animated collection to date. “Now, we desire something that gives us energy. Something completely different,” as she put it.  EXCEPT IT’S NOT DIFFERENT!

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I would like to come back to the fashion that started my career: the playfulness that attracted me and my generation to fashion, and transform the Dior codes through this attitude.” For Chiuri—a child of the 1970s—those roads had to lead to Elio Fiorucci. I guess the logo is the code!

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And these images tell you one thing... she has gone back to her roots without the slightest concept that Fiorucci was for the young at a price that the young could afford so here we have the absolute worst iteration of that by showing teeny bopper clothes that retail in the thousands of dollars produced under the auspices of one of the greatest heritage brands of fashion.

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 The woman is clearly in possession of a faulty thought process and as you can see hasn’t had an original idea in her entire life other than maybe at Fiorucci 40 odd years ago except what worked for Fiorucci does NOT work at Dior. These are clothes that make you cringe that they carry the same name as the designer of the Bar jacket or the elegance that sustained the brand with the designs of Marc Bohan or the brilliance of John Galliano and then there is this pile of rehashed junk with the old logo

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This is “Goodwill Hunting” in the truest sense of the word! I find it offensive to the viewer and frankly embarrassing for the brand! It’s rather pathetic when a designer gets lost in their own bullshit.