Saturday, February 18, 2006
Becoming a stylist
If you thought being a stylist was all glamour, photo shoots and celebrity hobnobbing, read on. If you're going to make it in this cut-throat industry what you'll need is dedication and a love of hard work.
Getting started
A stylist is the person who creates a look for either an individual or a model with clothing and accessories to make a statement. Traditionally a stylist would work on a commercial, catwalk or magazine shoot but these days with image being key in so many worlds they often work for individual clients creating their own unique style.
Dedicated follower of fashion.
To succeed you need to have a real interest in fashion, trends and a keen eye for style. Experts argue you either have this or you don't although a course can sharpen some natural skills. Fashion degrees are not as essential as experience and contacts and most stylists say they "fell" into the job, which is not very helpful when it comes to specific advice.
Back to school.
Find your local fashion college and ask if they do short specialised stylist courses. Most of the London fashion colleges do and it's becoming more widespread.
Shop around.
Gain experience by working in a small boutique - smaller outlets give you real hands on experience of cultivating style.
Helping hands.
Call your local department store and see if they are having any fashion shows. Get some work experience helping out the stylists they use. They don't just work in London.
Aim high.
Call local photographers or local newspapers, send them your CV and offer your services as a runner on the next fashion shoot they may be doing.
There are three main areas for styling opportunities in fashion - although they're not rigid categories and many stylists these days have to be multi-talented.
Fashion stylist
Primarily working for magazines, newspapers, or advertising agencies on commercials. The job of the stylist is to work to a set brief, selecting clothes for photo or video shoots. A large part of the job is planning.
Stylists provide the creative aspect of the shoot, but also source the clothes and accessories needed, liaising with press offices, getting all the clothes, shoes and accessories to the studio or location and deciding on which looks for which model. When on a shoot the stylist must dress the models on set, pinning, clipping where necessary and take charge of portraying the look the brief requires.
Celebrity stylist
This involves more personal client work and many stylists have full time jobs styling their celebrity clients which can include television presenters, actors, singers - and also bands.
The role of the celebrity stylist involves attending catwalk shows and selecting clothes for each season, attending photo shoots and advising on the most appropriate look for anything from individual photographs to appearances on TV chat shows.
Some celebrities, especially the big name Hollywood stars, like to have their stylist on call; others only need advice intermittently.
Personal stylist
Sometimes called an image consultant, this type of styling involves working one-to-one with clients. Sometimes these are celebrities, but many clients these days who employ a personal stylist are high fliers in the world of business who know that their image needs an overhaul.
This aspect of styling involves working intimately with a client who must trust the stylist helping them to create their own personal style. This type of styling job is based on empowering the client to develop their own look rather than dressing them in the stylist's preferred style.
Reality check
Styling may sound very glamorous, but it's not all it seems. Most stylists work freelance and depend on agents or their own contacts to get jobs in an area where competition is fierce.
The demands of being at the disposal of high-profile celebrities make it hard to plan any social life or holidays. When working with celebs you have to work around their commitments.
When you're on a shoot the hours are very long and you're needed every second. You also need to scour every fashion magazine - not just the UK ones but European and USA editions too.
Fashion is constantly evolving and you must be up-to-date with every emerging trend. Finally, you need to look great every second of the day to gain people's trust in a world where image is everything!
via http://www.bbc.co.uk/relationships/singles_and_dating/techniques_becomestylist.shtml#fashion_stylist.
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Who Is the Modern Man? What Will He Wear?
Who Is the Modern Man? What Will He Wear?
By CATHY HORYN
http://www.nytimes.com/
Published: February 2, 2006
PARIS
IN an operatic collection that seemed to hold its audience at knife point, Hedi Slimane of Dior closed the French fall 2006 men's shows with svelte tailcoats, starched shirt fronts and one Count Dracula cape, leaving the air charged with an erotic formality as well as many questions.
Was the collection a calling card, a bid by Mr. Slimane to return to Yves Saint Laurent, where he designed men's wear before the house was sold to Gucci and where Stefano Pilati is now in charge? Judging from the couture-fit of the tuxedos, the superelongated line of trench coats and the floppy bow ties at the throats of the androgynous models, all elements in Mr. Saint Laurent's repertory, you might think so.
Mr. Slimane, who is eager to do women's clothes, said the melancholia of the show reflected only his general mood, not a deeper unhappiness. His boss, Sidney Toledano, the chief executive of Dior, said Mr. Slimane wasn't leaving. "No way," Mr. Toledano said.
But was this show influenced by Raf Simons, who initiated the shift toward formality more than a year ago and who has since taken over Jil Sander? Until this season Mr. Slimane was mainly captivated by the rock music world. Certainly formality is the news of the Paris men's season, with a strong debut from Lanvin and its creative director, Alber Elbaz, who showed a delicate silhouette of grape velvet blazers, floppy ties, a long black dressing gown and tuxedos.
"I think people want something that looks like you had it made and didn't get it off the runway," said Tom Kalenderian, the men's fashion director at Barneys New York. "That's why all these designers are returning to the iconic symbols of men's wear — the morning coat, tails."
But with the fashion world in flux with the resignation Tuesday of Gucci's men's designer, John Ray, after mixed reviews for his romanticized fall collection, it's worth asking: Is this direction modern? That was the nagging thought with Mr. Slimane's collection, as engaging and well crafted as it was. What, exactly, are designers returning to retrieve? And what makes something modern?
A few minutes into Mr. Simons's show last week, Michael Roberts, the fashion editor of The New Yorker, whispered, "He's become what Azzedine is to women's clothes." He meant that, like Azzedine Alaïa, Mr. Simons is a modern pathfinder. His clothes have a rightness that is derived from an understanding of proportion and, in his case, an uncomplicated sense of masculinity.
The moment before Mr. Roberts spoke, a model passed by in a long charcoal coat, its sides notched like a tailcoat. Yet it was not a tailcoat; Mr. Simons had inserted panels in the front. It's fine to give men more formality, he seemed to be saying, but it's not progress if it just puts them in a costume.
Like Mr. Alaïa, Mr. Simons moves fashion forward in ways that are bracingly logical. Unhysterical. For instance, if you had gone to Mr. Alaïa's studio in the Marais over the weekend, you would have seen a series of long black skirts in jersey mousseline that had been ruched by hand, creating rippling pleats, and were inset with a band of white lace that had been dulled by a layer of black lace. Ruching has dominated Mr. Alaïa's thinking for a good three years, and each new effort seems to clear and refresh his mind for the next.
Mr. Simons also believes in staying with an idea. A year ago he introduced more volume in his clothes, cutting pants and coats fuller, and offering a new version of the Eisenhower jacket, which led him this season to the long charcoal coat.
At the same time he let go of the adolescent questions that had thrummed around his collections. He was nearing the end of his 30's. What was the point? Romantic, sweet-natured, boneheaded youth was behind him, and once he decided to focus on proportion and shape, grown-up thoughts, he could not go back to the other attitude without looking foolish or condescending.
Other designers don't seem to worry about this possibility. Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons brought out a collection of rockabilly suits, with crepe-soled shoes and bolo ties, oblivious that designers like John Galliano, Vivienne Westwood and Yohji Yamamoto had been over this ground. Ms. Kawakubo said backstage that she liked men who lead rich, full lives. O.K., but these dudes were held at such a remove in her show that you wondered how she could identify with them, and why anyone should want to dress like them.
One felt a like suspicion about Mr. Pilati's Saint Laurent show. Who were these drawing-room characters bundled in great coats and ladled into safari jackets with pants that foretold a flood? These were not flesh and blood men.
Mr. Pilati has no trouble displaying his knowledge of fabrics, his taste for color, but it winds up being a vitrine display, without any real connection to the sensual reckless superior life that Saint Laurent represented, and might still if Mr. Pilati could learn to look at things directly and simply and not through the prison of reference.
Men may be from Mars, but they are not stupid. They don't mind the frivolous, but the fraudulent seems to stick in their craw. At Louis Vuitton, where previous themes have included dissipated English lords, Marc Jacobs and his men's wear assistant, Keith Warren, made an effort to avoid references — or as Mr. Jacobs put it, "to trim away all the fat."
It was their best men's wear collection. Teddy bear coats in alpaca fleece conveyed the more open mood, and the swelling layers of chinchilla-and-nylon vests under nylon parkas, while undeniably expensive, wouldn't look out of place in an urban street or a skybox.
It's surprising that no designer (as far as I know) has thought to base a collection on Travis Bickle, if only to be able run Robert DeNiro's famous monologue from "Taxi Driver," as Junya Watanabe did. It was fun. People giggled. You talking to me?
After the models were done showing camouflage pants and nylon parkas with tapered waists and spreading fake fur collars, Mr. Watanabe, a man himself of few words, explained through an interpreter that he wanted to explore "positive motivation." That he chose a man whose motives were actually psychopathic didn't seem a problem to him. He giggled.
But although the clothes looked realistic enough to appeal to many guys, Mr. Watanabe risks losing credibility with a style you can find for a fraction of the price on Canal Street. And if having your army pants from the Travis Bickle collection means that much to you, you may be as nutty as your friends think you are.
Less comprehensible was how Jean Paul Gaultier could reach into his archives of 80's men's wear triumphs — the kilt, the sailor pants — and reissue them in sizes to fit women as well as men. There is one boundary that cannot be crossed in fashion, and that is the boundary of time. Cross the sexual divides, sail over the social barriers, but repeat yourself and you slowly kill the initiative to move forward.
As it was, the men in this show seemed reduced to retainers. Their mascara clumped. Their bottoms looked fat. It was depressing, like reading an old copy of The Face in the doctor's office.
Whatever makes a cowboy a cowboy — or a man a man — has been explored by writers like J. Frank Dobie and Annie Proulx. So Paul Smith's embroidered Western shirts and cotton canvas coats looked perfectly at ease in their English library setting. Mr. Galliano's show had a "Metropolis" gloom, with models in tight print jeans, rough-cut coats and greasy faces. Dries Van Noten, in a fine show trained on casual elegance and volume, sent out some of the best coats of the season: ample rain mackintoshes and chesterfields with wide lapels and clean lines.
Inevitably, though, one comes back to Mr. Simons, as one must to Mr. Alaïa too. For the lesson of Mr. Alaïa is that though he possesses one of the largest archives in Paris, he never looks back; though he is not called a couturier, he is the best kind of one. To go into his studio after the haute couture shows is to feel that you have not seen anything genuinely modern until that moment. You have been blinded by gauds.
In Mr. Simons's ultramasculine suits, in his ability to state formality with a white shirt and the sheen of a black puffer jacket, you sense the same purposefulness. Last Saturday Tom Kalenderian told Mr. Simons, half jokingly, that he had better hold down the racks in his showroom because the Barneys buyers were coming through.
Chuck Close
The remarkable career of artist Chuck Close extends beyond his completed works of art. More than just a painter, photographer, and printmaker, Close is a builder who, in his words, builds "painting experiences for the viewer." Highly renowned as a painter, Close is also a master printmaker, who has, over the course of more than 30 years, pushed the boundaries of traditional printmaking in remarkable ways.
Almost all of Close’s work is based on the use of a grid as an underlying basis for the representation of an image. This simple but surprisingly versatile structure provides the means for "a creative process that could be interrupted repeatedly without…damaging the final product, in which the segmented structure was never intended to be disguised." It is important to note that none of Close's images are created digitally or photo-mechanically. While it is tempting to read his gridded details as digital integers, all his work is made the old-fashioned way—by hand.
Close’s paintings are labor intensive and time consuming, and his prints are more so. While a painting can occupy Close for many months, it is not unusual for one print to take upward of two years to complete. Close has complete respect for, and trust in, the technical processes—and the collaboration with master printers—essential to the creation of his prints. The creative process is as important to Close as the finished product. "Process and collaboration" are two words that are essential to any conversation about Close’s prints.
from http://www.chuckclose.coe.uh.edu/life/index.html.
Kenneth Wong
Kenneth Wong graduated with a Bachelor in Fine Arts (Photography) from University of Illnois at Urbana-Champaign. During his stay in the United States, Kenneth was also a freelance assistant to top photographers and studios in Chicago.
Upon his return to Singapore in 1997, Kenneth explored the possibilities in the creative industry as a journalist and advertising agency art director. But his love for photography brought him back to his calling and set up his own studio in late 2000.
http://kennethwongphotography.com/.
