Who is Mary Russell?? What is Entre Nous?

Well here’s some history about me and Mary Russell:  while I was cutting my teeth in the world of fashion being a textile designer, Mary Russell was a name or a face on a page. Her presence was ubiquitous in Paris and at the French Collections especially on the pages of WWD. If she wasn’t in Paris, she was in NYC. She was part of what made fashion exciting thrilling and ever so enviable to a newbie who was literally addicted to printed media and sort of pressing his nose up against the window.

click image to enlarge

It wasn’t until decades later that the name and face on the page was suddenly sitting across a table from me and let me tell you that I was at the cool kids’  table except I was no longer a kid and I have come to know that Mary  Russell helped mold fashion in ways I’d never imagined. With her camera in hand, she recorded the life and times of one of, if not the, most glorious, creative, and joyous times of fashion and its inhabitants. 

click image to enlarge

Of course, I was no longer a fawning drooling kid but I grew to understand this woman’s enormous contribution the longer I got to know her. I am forever humbled and grateful for her friendship and her inspiration as I continue to travel on my journey in fashion. If anyone had ever told me I would meet and know some of the people I now know and call friends, I’d say you’re full of shit; It can never happen and yet it has! 

click image to enlarge

So now, Mary Russell of Glamour, WWD and Vogue ... Protégé of Diana Vreeland and John Fairchild will tell us all something that maybe we never knew about Mary or for that matter who exactly is Mary Russell? She is about to tell us….

JEFFREY FELNER-Let’s talk about Entre Nous:  did you ever think you would write a book? What prompted you to finally expose that part of your illustrious life? Has the book provided any specific gratification and if so, what has it been?

MARY RUSSELL-No I never thought I would write a book. I saved the precious photographs, keeping them preciously preserved in boxes over the years, knowing they were valuable. With my sense of timing that I have always considered a weird gift in life, I became aware that it was time to write about those wonderfully carefree times. I was also prompted by good friends in the fashion world to do a book. They loved my photos and kept after me until the right people appeared as if by that magic which has always been part of my existence and so it was.

Yes, there is a certain gratification in the fact that I found the right people at the right time to actually understand and be willing to make the book happen. Through old friends I was introduced to the gallerist, antiquaire and editor Pierre Passebon who fell in love with the photos, understood the value of the story, and became enthusiastic about editing and producing the book and consequently with an exhibit in his gallery. He introduced me to the brilliant American publisher Suzanne Isore at Flammarion who immediately agreed to publish it!

click image to enlarge

click image to enlarge

 JF-In the 60’s and 70s, the Paris of The Beautiful Fall, you were unquestionably part of the “in crowd” … let’s talk about some of the most memorable moments and people … just a couple that really  have stayed with you over the course of time?

MR- Being part of the “in crowd” is what the title is all about… Entre Nous- a small group of a family we created for just us... kindred spirits who were very young and full of rebellion with talent and a wild carefree sense of delight and adventure! We had no idea of what the future might become nor were we at all interested in it. It is difficult to understand today in the wide world of the Internet and mass fashion hysteria and insta-photos how very small Paris was in the 60s and 70s.

click image to enlarge

click image to enlarge

 JF- If you could invite any 5 people to dinner who would they be and why?

MR- You ask if I could invite 5 people to dinner who would they be and why? Jeffrey, my answer is…  no one, except a few friends who knew us when and are still out there but so aware of how lucky we were to be there then. We do get together; many of the old St. Laurent world, artists, designers, writers, editors and artists… many unknown to the fashion world of today. Of course, also with my 3 grandsons who keep me aware of the trends of the moment.

I dined and had tea with some of the greats. Name dropped ad nauseum in the book …  add Dali, Chanel, Callas, lots of Kennedys (Jackie and Lee), Princess Diana, Charles de Gaulle, President and Madame Pompidou and Chirac ...  sports idols, Cary Grant, Sinatra and Ava and a few unmentionable “gangstas” so there aren’t many on my bucket list of dinner guests.

click image to enlarge

click image to enlarge

 JF- For those who DO know you, you often credit Diana Vreeland as mentor... is it possible to  summarize what it was like to be under her spell and maybe one  of your most  vivid memories of her and while we are at it would you do the same for John Fairchild.

MR- Vreeland was magic; her aura was divine. WE were her lucky acolytes. She listened and loved our ideas... she wrote to me when I worked for her in Paris: “ Tell me everything you see and think, who you see, send pictures... both she and John Fairchild were open to young up and comers, they gave us a chance. They threw us out there and reaped the benefits of our brand-new eyes on the world of fashion. I learned how to write and record which fashion“takes“and which does not under his tutelage.

click image to enlarge

 JF- We know that fashion is cyclical and yet we can see that the glory days of printed media and fashion design have more or less fallen  by the wayside; do you think it’s possible that we might ever experience those glorious days once again or are  we destined to a world of Instagram moments?

MR- The world of fashion is still out there, more than ever but the way it is shared and perceived is completely different; it’s now in front of us all the time. Impressions from the street in Paris and New York - the young... not dictated by grand fashion dictators. There are still wonderful designers like Galliano, Sarah Burton, Gaultier and the media giants of style like Ralph Lauren, but I rarely want to spend the price for their retail offerings. I still love the odd Zara add on and love Nike, Tommy Perse, or Rag and Bone. Otherwise it’s a mix mash of adopted style, old faves still in the closets, a few vintage pieces and some great sneakers ... a new great bag, easy items bought online. Once in a while a splurge. In Paris I like St. Laurent, Celine, or Gerard Darel, some fab Wolford tights, always great boots.

Going to the big fashion shows, collections all over the world has been given a huge hit! The Coronavirus!! Perhaps it may bring their swan song. Imagine Giorgio Armani showing his collection in Milan to an empty room!

As far as print magazines are concerned: they better get their act together. I rarely look at them even for free on line. We can find WWD online and I check in with Instagram every morning for my morning stalk. Ideas galore. Visuals, photos, quick fashion takes.

As for “those glorious days” … They are over for me. Witness the tepid collections of Chanel après Karl at Le Grand Palais in Paris.

click image to enlarge

click image to enlarge

Bonjour tristesse.

Trends or lack thereof Fall 2014

today.. WWD lamented the lack of trend at the 2014 fall collections.. here is my reaction  to what they said ...

Now that the fashion dust has settled in New York, London, Milan and Paris and one at last begins to recover from the exhausting blur of thousands of garments, one can take stock. What is it all about? What does it all mean?

Let’s be frank (and, as you know, I am never anything but that), the word “trend” has had it. There are no trends. After viewing all the collections (I am a very diligent reporter), I have concluded that fashion today is a bouillabaisse of everything. It makes one understand that the word “elegant” is passé. So are all those other fashion words — chic, hot, smart, fashionable. Forget it. They are as passé as passé.

**If this is true then why is it that WWD produces supplements documenting the trends of the season..  Apparently there is good reading and then the truth.

Looking at all the collections from far-flung corners of the world (not just the four above, but also everywhere from Los Angeles to Tokyo), I noticed several things right away: The colors are weird, and the presentations are over the top, like a Ringling Bros. circus. Then there are the fashion magazines, which confuse one even more. It’s all manufactured dust. No one talks about workmanship, length or where the clothes on the runways can be worn.

**And yet reviews include extensive coverage of venue, front rows and and peripheral information that have zero to do with clothes. As for craft and tradition, that is totally ignored due to the ignorance of the writer or the dictum thjat features such as that are unimportant.. Reality has nothing to do with most collections nor  does the dirty word of salability.

(Ah, how it made me even more nostalgic for those days when I was a young liebchen at our schloss high in the Alps and I would lie on my bed eating chocolates and leafing through the pages of Carmel Snow’s Harper’s Bazaar or Diana Vreeland’s Vogue that my mother brought back from her visits to the ateliers of Paris.)
Why is the fashion world always trying to show off its intellectual power when fashion really has nothing to do with intellect? Why are designers still searching desperately for trends when there are no trends?

**Regurgitating the arcane and esoteric put forth by so called designers these days seems to be the M O. Reviewers offer no opinion and readers  needs a PhD in philosophy to understand what they have just seen a pile of ugly unwearable clothes.

Truth be told, women today make their own trends — and thanks to the Internet, anything they want is available to them no matter where they live. Long, short, fitted, loose, patterned, plain — name it, they can find it and buy it. What that means, my dear designer friends (and I still have a few), is that women are no longer loyal to you — or to stores. 

**In the good old days women flocked to stores clothing a photo of some piece of clothing that they had seen in a magazine. Alas, very hard to do when the clothes now require trust finds and the photos/editorials in so called fashion magazines are nothing more than art pieces rather than vehicles to tantalize the reader.

What designers — full of fashion pretense and ego — don’t understand is that shoppers are smarter than any of them. Snobbishness in fashion has gone away and Americans in particular, and many Europeans, don’t want to be told what to wear.

**as I have stated many many times.. clothes don’t come with romance cards that explain all the absurd inspirations of a particular collection. In essense those inspirations are worthless once the so called reviewer has spewed them back in their reviews. Those who review don’t seem to mind all the pretense or else why would they  repeat it and use that worthless verbiage in their reviews.

Don’t misunderstand me: Fashion still retains its inexplicable magic. Just look through the coffee-table book “Dior Glamour: 1952-1962”; the photos gave me tingles because the clothes by Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent and Marc Bohan are as right for today as they were then. And there are designers who have piqued my interest just as those three did long ago: Christopher Kane in London, Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCullough of Proenza Schouler in New York, Bouchra Jarrar in Paris and the new team at Valentino, Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli, who are carrying on that house’s traditions in a 21st century way.

**It is sheer hubris to even use the latter designers in comparison to the former.. the latter has not a clue about wearing and life in general. The likes of YSL and Dior, no matter the designer of record offered glamour and artistry and clothes that befit the lifestyle of the client. Today’s designers are clueless for the most part.

Face it, women still love a sense of discovery. The newly independent woman will, when she sees something she loves, buy it immediately — even climbing over racks of merch to find that one isolated dress. They buy what they like and what makes them feel comfortable in their own skin.  

**Face it !! women are like sheep ..just as the general consumer is and just as we have been raised to think that fitting in is much better than standing uot. This may also influence all the me too collections we see on runways all over the world. Designer have no trademark style they churn out clothes of indeterminable origin.. Yes, the “me toos” are lauded by those who ask for newness. One more time, apparently purpose and sales are rarely considered.

And why shouldn’t women (and the increasingly fashionable man) be picky? Who wants to be just like the rest of the fashion herd? How do consumers react today to the opinions of fashion directors of stores like Bergdorf Goodman or Harrods or editors like Anna Wintour or Glenda Bailey? In the old days, it used to be the big designers in Paris, Milan or New York showed their collections on the runways and then Seventh Avenue manufacturers would copy that for the masses, who would flock to snap them up. Well, at least sometimes they would. A very close friend of this old countess once urged retailers to push a midcalf length he dubbed the Longuette. So they did — and women ran for the hills.

**Anna and Glenda are chasing ad dollars not dreams nor the aspirational customer and not the consumer for if they were in fact “advising” their readers they surely would reject most of what they propose. The fashion calendar was re arranged to offset the long standing gripe that if NYC was last, they were accused of copying the Euros and so the calendar was changed and alas now that NY is first they have shown us they have no direction, no innovation and least of all any great clothes.. just hype and inspirations and clothes which insult those who might be able to afford them and mostly designed by designers who smirk at a camera and have no clue how to drape or draw.

Perhaps that was the first sign that times were changing. Now the whole fashion engine as we knew it needs to be rebuilt. And it will be because, in truth, the customer is always right (well, almost always).

**The system is indeed broken but apparently no one has the starch to change to change for fear of reprisals by the Popessa.. now who’s’ the sheep? How utterly sad that no one speaks out and sadder than a business that once thrived and produced some of the world’s greatest design talents has been allowed to devolve with designers of maybe mediocre talents but have HUGE ad dollars and HUGE PR machines and MEGA conglomerates behind them. There is so much talent that has not been recognized!!!

The really stylish — and I’m not talking about the costumed women today’s street photographers follow like sheep — aren’t really influenced by the fashion elite, and never have been. The ladies of the past — Babe Paley, Gloria Guinness, C.Z. Guest — were personalities in their day because they created their own style. And clothes were only part of it.

**And yet, magazine focus on the fashion circus rather than the rality of fashion. Fashion icons or women of great personal style still exist all over the world but they are ignored as they do not fit the mold of one person’s myopic and fiduciary vision of fashion. There are still women who have their clothes and rely on designers, but apparently they are not relying o the “pets” who are of no talent, style or allure.

These women weren’t fashionistas — a word I hate. I prefer the word “passionista.” Freedom is the heart and soul of fashion and style. First, to dare and, second, because clothes are part of what makes us all feel better about ourselves.

**And the point is that the consumer hjas a sheep mentality for the most part and all the publications paly into it otherwise what could be the reason for that the same 15 resources inhabit the pages of all the so called fashion publications out there. The magazines push conformity not individuality

So go for it ladies. Challenge the Establishment. The Fashion Machine needs your help.

 Is that WWD was originally pointed or directed to the creators and purveyors of fashion and yet here they address the consumer. So, the assumption would be that WWD is no longer a trade paper  but is in the same bed with the other fashion rags that promote fitting in.

HERE IS A THOUGHT….PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH.. PHYSICIAN  HEAL THEYSELF AND MAYBE SOMEWHERE BURIED IN THE SAMENESS IS ONE INDEPENDENT THINKER WHO CAN BEGINN THE RESCUE OPERATION OF A VERY AD AND AILILNG FASHION BUSINESS.