The 40s look is the hot look for Fall and Katherine's iconic look is easily introduced in a modern wardrobe to work the runway trend while keeping an eye to the past!
Rare 1940's Houndstooth Pant Ensemble from LISTITCAFE
Raspberry satin 40s dressing gown from VINTAGE MERCHANT
30s long lean floral satin day dress from POPPY'S VINTAGE
You can find more perfectly Katherine looks from more sellers at the VINTAGE FASHION GUILD FASHION PARADE!
Sweet mohair sweater jacket with the initial M, perfect for Michelle! From
DENISEBRAIN
Simple sheath dress in a patriotic color block with flattering neckline from DAMNGOODVINTAGE
60s Alfred Werber 2 piece set similar to her Inaugural Ensemble, in celadon green with lace accents and beaded button on nsemi-fitted jacket from DOROTHEA'S CLOSET VINTAGE
Find more First Lady-worthy vintage from more VFG members on the VINTAGE FASHION GUILD FASHION PARADE! and to keep up with Michelle Obama's White House Chic, check out the blog MRS. O for daily updates on what the First Lady is wearing!
"Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008" opens at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on October 26, 2008 and runs through March 1, 2oo9. Featured will be 150 of the magazine's iconic portraits from the past century. Included will be several photographs by Edward Steichen, who was Vanity Fair's chief photographer for 13 years. Don't miss your chance to see this original portrait of Gloria Swanson, photographed by Steichen in 1924 and published in VF in February 1928.
This 1950's dress, owned by Marilyn Monroe, sold recently at Bonham's for $11,000 plus premium. We note, with interest, the dress has some staining, fading, and tearing due to age. You can see all the lots from this recent sale at Bonham's website.
On a different note, this bullet proof vest was owned by Al Capone and sold for over $12,000 by Grey Flannel Auctions.. A dark wool bullet proof vest that was ostensibly worn by Capone in the 1920s. It is a dress suit style vest with four outer pockets and a row of five buttons, with hooks and straps on both sides to fasten the vest in place. Leather encased steel bars on the inside provided the protection Capone needed, considering that the 17-pound weight of this vest could become quite cumbersome under a suit jacket.
A bicycle built for who?"As the debate on global warming rages, Chanel has chosen a timely launch for its newest covetable accessory: an ergonomically designed, eight-speed bicycle. The bike has been created as part of Chanel's spring/summer 2008 offering to celebrate the heritage of the house, which is steeped in Coco Chanel's love of sport."
"...next season's hand-finished Chanel bike, which is accented with the house's signature quilted leather and double-C logo. Add it to your Christmas list now (and start being very good indeed) - it will be available in Chanel boutiques from December."
"Jacqueline Kennedy is one of history's great style icons," said Hamish Bowles, editor-at-large of European Vogue. "Her profound influence on the way an entire generation wanted to look, dress and behave cannot be overestimated." Show us some Jackie style!
The tiny European principality with an outsize reputation as a glamour destination commemorates its lost princess this fall with exhibits, a first-ever auction of her frocks, and book and magazine tributes. In keeping with her influence as a fashion icon, there will be window displays in New York and a new "Princess Grace Coral" lipstick by Estée Lauder.
"It seemed the right time to bring to the land of her birth some of the special things that made her such an iconic and memorable figure," says Maguy Maccario-Doyle, Consul General of Monaco in New York.
Americans under 40 might be forgiven for not knowing much about the former Grace Kelly — not even that she is the Kelly in the much-prized Hermès "Kelly bag." She went from Philadelphia Mainliner to Hollywood star to fairy-tale princess in the 1950s, when celebrity coverage was less pervasive, even polite compared with today. She went to her death, from a twisty corniche road in Monaco, just as celeb madness was about to explode.
On Sept. 13, 1982, Grace, then 52, was driving to her family's palace from their country home when she had a stroke, lost control of her car and plunged down the mountainside. She died the next day; her younger daughter, Princess Stéphanie, suffered minor injuries. Grace's royal funeral in Monaco's St. Nicholas Cathedral (where she married Prince Rainier in 1956 and where his funeral was held in 2005) was watched by an estimated 100 million people around the world.
Before Diana, there was Grace — just as beautiful, just as fabled a wedding, just as fashionable, just as much a royal philanthropist, just as tragic a death.
Except Grace had the added cachet of Hollywood glamour —she had an Oscar. And she was well-mannered in an era in which stars never appeared in public without underwear and princesses never blabbed to the media. Grace helped shift the international perception of Monaco as a "sunny place for shady people" to the financially successful tourist mecca it is today.
"What came through was her kind, good soul," says Jamie Niven, 61, vice chairman of Sotheby's. The son of actor David Niven, he knew Grace when he was growing up.
Tributes to Grace include:
•Exhibits.The Grace Kelly Years has drawn tourists in Monaco all summer and wraps up Sept. 23. A free exhibit, Grace, Princess of Monaco: A Tribute to the Life and Legacy of Grace Kelly, will be at Sotheby's in New York Oct. 15- 26. Items include dresses, jewelry, letters and photos.
•Auctions. On Oct. 25, at the annual Princess Grace Awards gala in New York, Sotheby's will auction two outfits. Proceeds will go to her foundation.
On Oct. 24, Sotheby's and Wynn Resorts will co-host a silent auction for six one-of-a-kind outfits created by American designers "inspired" by Princess Grace; they'll be on display in the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue in New York Oct. 22-26.
•Publishing. Available now: Remembering Grace: 25 Years Later (LIFE Books, $10.99), a selection of intimate photographs from the archive of Grace's favored photographer, LIFE magazine photojournalist Howell Conant. Upcoming: The Grace Kelly Years (Skira/Rizzoli, $55) and Grace Kelly: A Life in Pictures (Pavilion; $27.95).
•Media.Town & Country magazine will feature rare photographs in its November issue. WQXR radio in New York will broadcast a special edition of Making Music in Monaco, with music by her favorite musicians and her poetry readings Oct. 15-26.
•Awards. At the gala, trophies will go to emerging artists in theater, dance and film.
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| Valentino and Giametti at Valentino headquarters in Paris |
Cameron Silver has been selling vintage clothes to such celebrities as Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Lopez and Angelina Jolie for more than ten years. His boutique Decades, which sells one-off vintage dresses, is located on Melrose Place in Los Angeles. He also has a concession in Dover Street market, Central London (020-7518 0680). His shops have become a sourcing ground for many of today’s top fashion designers. Silver is also a creative consultant at Azzaro, the French fashion house.
I used to be a German cabaret singer; it’s what got me into the fashion industry. My favourite composer was Friedrich Hollaender, who made music for Marlene Dietrich. While I was touring I found old Yves Saint Laurent suits and cool Pucci ties. This was 11 years ago, and vintage wasn’t on the fashion barometer. Instead of a star being born, a store was born.
I am very selective about what I buy for the shop. The best clothes come from the closets of the original owners. I don’t have to hunt them down any more, they find me because there is a certain cachet to having your dress sold in Decades. When I first opened the store I spent time with a recent widow. I bought a dress from her and she said: “Cameron, this is the dress that I met my husband in.” Clothes hold memories.
Celebrities today borrow too much, they are losing their own legacy. I remember spending three days in a Washington suburb that certainly wasn’t the fashion capital of the world, but one woman had 3,000 pieces to sell. These women like to sell to me because I enjoy hearing their stories. I look for vintage that doesn’t look vintage. When I buy something for the shop I ask myself: “Does this look modern?” But when I buy clothes for myself I ask: “Would Cary Grant have worn this?”
We are very democratic at Decades; people think that every customer of ours is a Lindsay Lohan or a Paris Hilton, but our bread-and-butter clients are a little more sophisticated. And no, they aren’t all size zero. I don’t care if you’re a housewife from New Jersey or an Oscar nominee – everyone is a VIP in the store.
I think the Primark, Target fast fashion trend is tired. I’m over it. When you are buying a dress for $18, there is a reason why it is $18, just like there is a reason why your hamburger is $1! Modern fashion is ubiquitous. You can get anything, anywhere, at any price; there’s the couture version and the Topshop version, but it is very difficult to find clothes that are truly unique. Even haute couture isn’t sacred. You aren’t going to want to spend $150,000 on a Chanel couture dress, only to see Jennifer Aniston wearing the same one to the Golden Globes.
I am very influenced by London. I spent summers there as a child. It sounds clichéd, but I remember going to Portobello and Camden markets. Later, in my teens, when I was formulating my interest in fashion, it was Katharine Hamnett and John Richmond who inspired me.
Some celebrities don’t want to be fashion darlings. Not everybody wants to be in People magazine; a lot want to be known as just actresses first and foremost. I don’t think Meryl Streep is worried about being a fashion icon, for example. But at the end of the day, all women want their boobs and butts to look good, and I hope I can be a vehicle for making that happen.
I’d like to take a fashion house that has great DNA and put it in the washing machine – spin it around a bit, the way that Tom Ford did at Gucci. Successful designers will always be stars in their own right. Look at Ossie Clark: he lived the lifestyle that he designed for. Paul Poiret was a rock star designer, and Coco Chanel was the public’s darling.
It’s not often that I see something on the catwalk I’ve never seen before. Most current fashion trends look rehashed. Every season there is going to be a Studio 54 moment, there is going to be a goddess moment, there will be a Sixties Mod moment. All of these “moments” are just resuscitated vintage trends. When we look back at fashion history the first half of the 21st century will be known as “the vintage years” because it’s the one really identifiable trend to have happened. The black dress that Audrey Hepburn wore in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is so iconic. I’m not saying that every piece you buy from Decades is going to increase in value a million-fold, but it does prove that collecting 20th-century fashion is like collecting 20th-century art.
NEW YORK: When she breezed into Manhattan last week, Zandra Rhodes had shed some elements of her operatic style. Her fuchsia hair, which she tends to wear upswept in a chopstick-anchored bun, was straight and fastidiously groomed. Her eyebrows, crazy semaphores that she sometimes pencils in like arrows, were conventionally shaped. And her eye shadow, which she applies in a rainbow-colored medley, was confined to two or three tints of blue. "The first thing I said to her," recalled Ed Burstell, an executive at Bergdorf Goodman, where Rhodes had paid a sales call, "was, 'Zandra, you've calmed it down.' "
If so, it is just as well. At 66, Rhodes, the doyenne of British haute punk, has surfaced in yet another incarnation - not a tame one for sure, but surprisingly accessible. A style-world rara avis as famous for her personal eccentricity as for the clashing colors and vividly exotic prints she has shown on the runway since the 1970s, she is emerging as a commercial force, with several new projects in the works.
Rhodes is aware of the irony, having once confided, "Whenever I've tried to make myself a bit more mass, it never worked." Now it seems she has reversed herself. She has introduced a flamboyant makeup collection for M.A.C., furs for Pologeorgis and a jewelry line. In New York last week she fluttered about in a squiggle-patterned jumpsuit with butterfly sleeves, a look from her spring collection for Topshop, the fast-fashion chain based in London. She was here to talk up her latest venture: a line of lambskin handbags patterned with her exuberant prints.
They represent a distillation of Rhodes's design identity, a zany fusion of the ethereal and the raw. Her chiffons have unfinished seams. They are typically embellished with motifs inspired by Native American, Egyptian or Chinese culture. Some are incongruously festooned with chains. Safety pins, a hallmark of her punk collection of the late '70s, have resurfaced on her bags, a brash emblem of Rhodesian chic.
Rhodes is the first to acknowledge that she is riding the crest of "a Zandra moment."
Her vintage designs - origami-folded coats and elaborately layered caftans that fetch $1,200 to $6,000 - are catnip to collectors, and have turned up at red-carpet events on personalities as disparate as Helen Mirren and Kate Moss.
In recent seasons, interpretations of Rhodes' prints have surfaced on the runways of Dior, Miu Miu, Louis Vuitton and Fendi. This month interpretations of her looks found their way into Fashion Rocks, the fashion and music magazine from the publishers of Vogue.
"Someone congratulated me," she said diffidently, "but those clothes weren't mine."
Seeing her designs routinely knocked off appears not to faze her.
"I quite like people talking to me and saying, 'Your look is coming round again,' " she declared, her working-class accent intact. "It's like the Beatles coming round again."
In an era of pallid conformity, her periodic resurrections seem to feed a gnawing hunger. "Her influence returns in cycles, but when it comes back, its essence comes back clearly," said Burstell, who commissioned a collection of zestfully patterned shawls and patchwork designs for Bergdorf. "It's original. It had a clear identity from the start."
Cesar Padilla, an owner of Cherry, an influential vintage clothing boutique in New York, carries a selection of her designs. "In America she is still a bit under the radar," Padilla said. "But in the fashion crowd, even the youngest people know what she's about."
For all her resurgent popularity, Rhodes has not lounged on the sideline, letting others cash in on her past hits. A gypsy in more ways than one, she shuttles between her studio and home near San Diego (she lives with Salah Hassanein, a retired Warner Brothers executive) and London, where she also has an apartment and work space. Last year she showed a runway collection, her first in 20 years.
In 2003 she opened the Fashion and Textile Museum, a hot-pink and orange rectangle in South London that houses her archive as well as the works of her own fashion heroes, including Giorgio Armani, Issey Miyake and Thierry Mugler, and those of influential textile designers.
"The textile people never seem to get enough credit," said Rhodes, who began her career designing fabrics. Today the museum, disparaged at first as a vanity project, is part of Newham College of Further Education, housing textile and fashion designs from the 1950s onward.
In New York she still turns heads. "Looking at me, people think, 'Oh, she must be somebody.' " They do, indeed, sometimes addressing her as Ms. Johnson (as in Betsey) or Ms. Westwood (as in Vivienne), madcaps who have likewise sustained famously long-running careers. "I don't correct them," she said with a shrug.
Her own trajectory, which peaked in the mid-'80s, hit something of a low point in 2000, when Rhodes was issued a standing-room ticket to a Matthew Williamson fashion show. Even the ticket-taker, a fellow Londoner, did not recognize her.
But then, Rhodes has never lived for the spotlight, having mostly sidestepped the London club scene of her high-profile contemporaries, designers like Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell. "I tended to end up working," she said.
She rises before dawn to send faxes around the world, then withdraws to her studio. Her stringent work ethic leaves little room for frivolity. She has said she sleeps in her makeup, because, "to put it on every day would simply take too much time." Her nails, lacquered in a searing pink, were peeling at the edges.
"When I'm busy I find they get chipped," she said. "But I'm learning to move my hands quickly, so you won't see."
Shop for original Zandra Rhodes designs with VFG members Couture Allure's 80's silvery purple print velvet dress and Vintage-a-Peel's gorgeous and rare early piece dress from 1971 (pictured).
Until his death, Versace's sexy and daring style had made him a favorite of rock singers, Hollywood stars and other celebrities.
Tautou will channel Coco Chanel
The woman who invented French chic was born into poverty as Gabrielle Chanel, the illegitimate daughter of a traveling salesman, in 1883. After the death of her mother and abandonment by her father she spent seven years in a Catholic orphanage, where she learned to sew. But fashion wasn't her first career choice. As a young woman, Chanel had ambitions to be a singer and it was while warbling "Who's Seen Coco in the Trocadero" in a cabaret that she acquired the nickname Coco.
