Fleur's Dress

So today, I caught up with the rest of the world and saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part 1). And being me, what really stood out to me?



Totally looks like it came from the Alexander McQueen Winter 2008 collection.



I gotta wonder: is that a modified version of the dress, did costume designer Jany Temime get permission to use the look, or did she plagiarise it? Now there would be some drama.

Images from rockthetrend.

Leg of mutton

The next time someone tells me they like Victorian fashion, I'm bringing this out.

Image from the Chateau.

Black Swan

I'm shallow enough to admit that my interest in this movie is mostly because of Rodarte's hand in designing the costumes. Sort of like how I'm desperately searching for Le silence est d'or because, well, Victorian costumes designed by Christian Dior himself.

Dior Fall 2000 Couture

It's almost impossible for me to find anything about this show except for a few scattered images, reports, and one short clip. And it pains me so much because this show is almost made for me. Galliano took his inspiration from Freud, Jung, fetishism, and sadomasochism, the clothes reflecting the sexual secrets, fantasies, and childhood nightmares of an Edwardian, probably Austrian, family.

Some lovely images here and there.

Miuccia Prada and the Mulleavy Sisters

I think of these ladies as my heroes and icons (as creepy as that sounds). The Mulleavy sisters, the founders of the Rodarte fashion brand, are both graduates of UC Berkeley. Kate studied art history and Laura studied English literature.

Sometimes I wish I could be like them. They studied artsy stuff (like I am) and they started a successful and quickly growing fashion company (I'd rather go into costuming, but the similarities are there).

But then I remember that I don't have creative talent.

Miuccia Prada I have grown fond of because she's just a little weird. She took over the company in 1979, has a degree in political science, apparently studied to be a mime, was a former member of the Communist Party (according to her, every rich young person back then was), kinda feminist (I'm not quite sure what's going on here, but let's bring this conversation back from the brink of politicking), and, of course, designs for a high fashion company.

But the main reason I like her so much is the way she views sexuality. Prada "has an eye for the perverse. Her work is about inversion and parody, making otherwise dowdy garments desirable, while simultaneously taking the sex out of sexy." One needs only to look at her Fall 2008 collection: what ought to be little-girl fare becomes severe, funereal, church-like sexiness. Fetishistic chastity. Decadent virginity, if you will.

And I'm all about the teasing and not about the pleasing.

Fan Bingbing

On anyone else, this dress would look ridiculous. But when genetically blessed, one can rock even something that a Magikarp would wear.

Ye Olde Fashion

If you haven't checked out Ye Olde Fashion, you need to fill that void in your soul right now. After all, anything that regularly features this:

...can't be all bad, can it?

Oscar De La Renta Resort 2011

If I were a skinny 5'10'' woman, I would totally wear this to the beach. It's from a resort season collection, so that means it's viable sand-water-and-sun wear.

Givenchy Autumn-Winter 1997 Haute Couture

I'm a relatively new fan of the late Alexander McQueen, not having noticed him until his Autumn-Winter 2009 collection. As a result, I don't know very much about McQueen before the 2000s, when the internet made storing and recording images and videos that much easier. So it was a real treat for me to find a full (barring some skips) recording of one of his early shows with Givenchy, and an haute couture show at that!

The show and its history very clearly appeal to my sensibilities:

"...combined the late Victorian costumes... with a series of animated skeletons and muscle men from the sixteenth-century anatomical plates of Andrea Vesalius... the cut of some of the dresses in the collection was influenced by the figures from these anatomical plates in which the skeletons appear to 'vogue' or model their own bodies. The concept behind the show... a fin-de-siècle surgeon and collector who travelled the world collecting exotic objects, textiles, and women, whom he subsequently cut up and reassembled in his laboratory. The 'scenario' of the catwalk show staged the return of these gruesomely murdered women who came back to haunt the living" (Fashion at the edge: spectacle, modernity and deathliness 154).

The show undoubtedly has a late 19th-Century Decadent bent, with its references to prostitution, conflation of death and sexuality, the rampant exoticism and Orientalism, the styling of the women as the dangerously confident and sexual femme fatale. But most of all, it's just pretty. Not so sure about the drag queen hair, though.