Richard Nicoll AW09

Richard Nicoll has presented us with a novel concept for Autumn/Winter 2009/2010: no black. Can you imagine?

Certainly, if we go by what we've seen in many other collections this season, it is a surprise Richard Nicoll has decided to make black exempt. That said, he isn't one to follow trends, so maybe it's not such a surprise.

And that is the beauty of this collection: it doesn't seem to come from a predictable or obvious source. Nor does it seem merely to be a rejigging of pieces from the SS09 offering. There is new thoughts, new modes, new shapes. And he has used unconventional fabrics; PVC, bone-corsetry and toile canvas all in the same collection.

Plus there is his collaboration with visual artist Linder Sterling, who created beautiful collages of women and flowers for the prints you see on Hanne's dress. These images become abstracted and ironically subverted by Nicoll's use of them for flowing dresses and tight corsets.

Overall, we get the impression Nicoll is experimenting, seeing where the ideas take him. I'm very much liking this direction, and I'm excited to see where he takes us next.

Sara Hanne Karlie Dorothea Amanda Liu Alana Egle Alyona Jessica Pics: Style.com

RIGHT NOW three

This is a photocopy of a contact sheet. I took these photos in London sometime towards the end of 2008. Some of the people in these photos contributed to RIGHT NOW.

Ohne Titel FW09

Ohne titel, untitled, sans titre ... designers Alexa Adams and Flora Gill apparently don't want to label themselves. I'm not so into labels either, but I'd like to acknowledge Ohne Titel for giving us this beautiful Fall/Winter 2009/10 collection.

I feel - right now - that I can't write about fashion collections without embodying the cliche I already represent, that everything I say will be inherently meaningless, so I will just leave you with a few of my favourite looks from a collection which I am incredibly partial to.

This feeling exists right now and may not have reason to exist in the future. This feeling is certainly not a comment on fashion commentary, rather a comment on commentary in general. After all, should it matter why I like this?:

Hanne Agnete Ali Karlie Pics: Style.com

Quote of the day, yay!

"I am on a lonely road and I am
traveling, traveling, traveling,
traveling
Looking for something, what
can it be?

...

I wanna be strong I wanna laugh
along I wanna belong to the living"

-Joni Mitchell, All I Want, Blue (1971)

Vogue love

We love Anna and Annie!

Lately, due to some research I have been doing, I have developed a much deeper insight into Vogue (USA, that is) and have consequently acquired a high level of respect for the magazine I once deemed too commercial. I have realised how important American Vogue is in terms of photography, history (fashion and otherwise), art, and society as a whole.

For over a hundred years, Vogue has been a chart of our times. The world's most celebrated faces, talents and personalities have appeared on its pages, and it remains a marker for the world around us in a way no comparably-aged newspaper or journal could possibly be: a world seen (to a major extent) through the eyes of women.

I am not going to enter the debate about whether it is unjust women are probably most thoroughly represented, historically, by a fashion magazine. I will say, that if you think about what women's roles have been for most of recent history, it is hardly surprising. [Waiver: I am speaking in terms of the West, which is all I know.]

Therefore, when I spotted this cover on James Tinnelly's fabulous Women Blog, my first thought was "Anna is brilliant." There has been much conjecture of late about Ms. Wintour's possible departure from Vogue and who will replace her. All I will say is that I really don't know if anyone else is up for it, especially in the current pessimistic climate. Wintour has proved her aptitude for the job time and time again, this killer cover being her most recent whammy to the naysayers.

Michelle Obama photographed by Annie Leibovitz:


Anna Wintour is the last of a generation of Vogue Editor-In-Chiefs (all women), who embodied exactly what women of their era could achieve, who made Vogue into what it stands for today. No matter how much one criticises the machine that is Vogue and, more broadly, the fashion industry, one must own that no other industry has permitted women so much power for so long (Vogue was founded in 1892). Female bosses has been Vogue's policy from the very beginning. Yet I am the first to point out the irony of this situation.

I don't want anyone to assume I'm on a 'feminist rant' (God forbid), but I wanted to emphasise how much I have grown to appreciate American Vogue, despite its commercialism (or because of it), and to understand what Vogue really means for fashion, for women and for the world.

This March 2009 cover of Michelle Obama is testament to Vogue, to Annie Leibovitz, to Michelle Obama and to Anna Wintour. Is it not a sign of our times, does it not say something for women, will it not be relevant in fifty years time, that Michelle Obama is on the cover of Vogue?

Since Forever Is Gone

Are you in New York City?

If you are in New York, you are the Atlantic Ocean closer than me to seeing photographer Ruvan Wijesooriya's newest show, Since Forever Is Gone. So ... could you go check it out for me?

The opening is TONIGHT (11 February) at The Gallery at Soho Grand Hotel, 310 West Broadway between Canal and Grand, from 7:00pm. I believe the show runs until 31 March so, if you can't make tonight on such short notice, there is still time!

Ruvan's work is beautiful, sexy and exciting. He shoots film (big respect), mainly on compact cameras with inbuilt flashes, so there is this feeling of speed and momentariness to his work. He has this uncanny ability of showing us the moments we didn't know we really needed to see, capturing an emotion that wouldn't otherwise exist in our memories. Ultimately, Ruvan's images reveal a lot of his subjects, but even more of Ruvan himself.

See the show.

RIGHT NOW two

Markn Ogue is a London-based photographer. This is one of his first ever photographs. It is a picture of his brother which exists as a print in his family home. The photograph was taken on film.

As a contribution to RIGHT NOW, Markn photographed the print with a digital camera and downloaded it to my computer. I then printed that photograph on A4 paper and photocopied it for the zine. I really love the multiple processes this image has been through, and that the final phase of the process is the photocopy being scanned and uploaded as a digital file for this blog.

I think this is a truly special photograph. You can see the rip across the boy's nose. This is something which exists in the print itself, a testament to the age of the photograph and it's place in the family home; unframed, I assume, and thus touched (physically and psychologically) with emotion possibly every day.

I love that the rip has remained throughout the whole reproduction process and is still visible in this last blog-stage: as a digital file of a photocopy of a digitally photographed print. Markn says the print was one of his first, and was made when he first began taking photographs and falling in love with photography. There is a certain pertinence to the fact that this very early work remains all these years later the photo which is most important to him. It is equally significant that the subject of such a portrait is his brother.

For me, the complex - yet self-imposed - process this image has gone through fits perfectly with my feelings about process in general and the intrinsic role it plays in this zine.

This beautiful and apt addition to RIGHT NOW was the second contribution I received.

Fondation Cartier: Terre Natale

Raymond Depardon and Paul Virilio's Terre Natale at Paris' Cartier Foundation is comprised entirely of film works. [What is the correct terminology for this? I am sure they are not made on real film but will continue with this term to describe moving image.] Being as I am very unfamiliar with film as a medium for art and also being uncertain and ever so slightly skeptical about its role and meaning in a gallery context, I experienced one of the most interesting and innovative exhibitions in a long time.

Innovative is a word that is thrown around too much these days, but the thing for me that makes Terre Natale truly innovative is that it was extremely beautiful, presented film in new modes and was in all ways highly informative; I was pleased visually and mentally and I learnt something.

Raymond Depardon presents two stunning examples of humanity. Both shown on a large screens, highly defined and in brilliant colours; they give a glimpse of ourselves at remove. The first, Hear Them Speak, is a series of interviews with people from cultures threatened by extinction or globalisation.

People from Chile, Bolivia, Ethiopia, France and Brazil speak in their own languages about the cultures, land and traditions which are falling apart around them. One certainly feels a tinge of remorse, yet this is not the dominant emotion as in many documentary-like explorations of obscure cultures. The overriding feeling is empathy: we are all scared of losing family, home, stability, this is an inter-world fear.

Depardon further highlights our unity in his second work, "Around the world in 14 days", where he shows us silent shots of Washington, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Tokyo, Ho Chi Minh City, Singapore and Cape Town. These almost voyeuristic glimpses of city life are poignant in that they are so familiar; waiting at traffic lights, smoking a cigarette outside a shop, parking a car. We've all done it before, probably with seemingly as little thought as Depardon's subjects, who appear blissfully unaware of the camera. It is comforting yet somehow unnerving.

Paul Virilio's contribution to the exhibition is equally compelling. He employs one of the cleverest modes of depicting film I've ever seen by suspending forty-two wide-screen Macintosh computers upside-down from the ceiling like bats. They hang in a grid and the footage is choreographed in such a way that it seems to fly across the screens, simultaneously, systematically on all or none or a mixture, and then suddenly at different times, irregularly. The effect is mesmerising and slightly bewildering, somewhat like the news, photographs and documentaries about migration which are screened.

Paul Virilio's GALLERY 1:
Virilio's second part is an amazing visualisation of global migration in graph- and stat- form. It's so clever and surprisingly easy to follow, plus it's actually kind of funny. Virilio has recruited Diller Scofidio + Renfro, a studio that fuses architecture with the visual and performing arts, to create an almost 360-degree visual experience of migration, economy and climate change records and projections. Sounds kind of dull and done but it's one of the coolest things I've seen since An Inconvenient Truth, and possibly more effective. It is an astounding piece of work to experience in a gallery context. [We need to get this out there, Paul!]

An exhibiton containing solely film: a balanced, varied, beautiful, intriguing, informative exhibiton. It felt so new, so exciting, so relevant, so needed, and I felt quite buoyant coming out of it. I'm not sure exactly why. It may have been the fresh winter air outside the beautiful Cartier Foundation building on boulevard Raspail, or it may have been the feeling that even though I hadn't heard all good for the world and its inhabitants' future, I'd heard something. I learnt something. And it was beautiful.

Outside Fondation Cartier:
The exhibition runs until March 15, 2009. First image from fondation.cartier.com, others by Eleanor Weber.

Models worth mentioning

Shows are coming soon! It's time for me to get my fashion cap on.

There hasn't been much of it in a while 'round this neck of the woods, so here's a big dose of models to re-inject RRN with some fash. I have high expectations for this season, Fashion better live up to them.

New York: 13-20 February
London: 20-25 February
Milano: 25 Febbraio-4 Marzo
Paris: 4-12 Mars

Ali/EliteAmanda/SupremeAnastasija/New YorkChanel/FordDaiane/SupremeDree/EliteFreja/IMGHollis/New YorkJennifer/FordJourdan/WomenKarlie/NextKatrin/WomenKinee/New YorkSophie/IMGStephanie/EliteSuvi/SupremeVanessa/IMGAnd more to come! All images from Models.com

RIGHT NOW one

This is the first page of RIGHT NOW.

It is a photocopy of a little French fortune-cookie paper which was the very first contribution I received. It is the first installation of performance artist Owen Glyndwr Parry's contribution.

The paper contains a quote by writer Honoré de Balzac which basically says: "There is nothing sadder than a life lived without chance."

I felt this was a fortuitous start to RIGHT NOW. Maybe it is a fortuitous start to anything.