The Japanese are getting a little soft.
Two avant-garde Japanese
designers, Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garcons and Yohji Yamamoto, veered from
their old tricks - asymmetrical hems, ragbag layers, somber colors and missing
sleeves - in their spring '91 collections Thursday.
Both showed a
kinder, gentler side: long layers of sheer chiffon, silk and lace; crocheted
capri-length catsuits under apron dresses; midcalf jersey sheaths and schoolgirl
smocked and gathered shorts suits.
Both collections ranged from the
predictable black, latex
pants,white and gray (dyed with sumi, a calligrapher's ink at Comme des
Garcons) to the glare of Yamamoto's bright blue and green mod kimono pantsuits
and crocheted jackets tossed over black capri catsuits.
Even the popular
print trend appeared in the Japanese shows. Comme des Garcons showed
stained-glass mosaic and gemstone prints on sheer chiffon and silk jersey;
Yamamoto stuck to brown and black polka-dotted silk.
''Because the times
are so difficult,'' explains Marion Greenberg of Comme des Garcons, ''Rei
decided to keep the collection very light, with a feeling of fantasy.''
Frivolous nonsense, you say? Perhaps.
But before you laugh off these
flights of fancy, remember: Both designers were doing work-ethic aprons and
overalls - seen in every Paris collection so far this week - two years ago.
ROCK beauty Shirley Manson is getting her claws out for a catfight over a
leading role in the next Batman movie.
The fiery Garbage singer wants
Hollywood bosses to give her the prized part of Catwoman in the blockbuster Dark
Knight sequel.
And the musician-turnedactress also showed her catty side by
getting her claws out for Michelle Pfeiffer and Halle Berry, who donned the
latex catsuit in earlier movies. The Edinburgh-born redhead said: "I'd love to
play Catwoman. I just think Catwoman hasn't really been fully realised
yet.
She is supposed to be difficult. I certainly haven't seen it.
"Halle
Berry wasn't quite right. And while I liked Michelle Pfeiffer to a certain
degree, I didn't think she was dangerous enough. She was more cute than fierce.
Not enough of the beast in her. If you are going to embody a cartoon character
like that you have to be a bit more inexplicable, intangible.
"Make it more
of a mystery. It would be good fun latex
gloves- I'm their girl." Shirley, 42, is earning rave reviews for her acting
debut in US TV Terminator spin-off The Sarah Connor Chronicles, in which she
plays a killer robot from the future.
Filming of the new Batman instalment,
provisionally called The Caped Crusader, is due to begin in Vancouver, Canada,
next year. But she faces an uphill struggle to upset early favourite for the
role 33-year-old Angelina Jolie.
Exposure: The Unusual Life And Violent Death Of Bob Carlos Clarke by Simon Garfi eld (Ebury Press, GBP18.99)
IT is just over three years now since the photographer Bob Carlos Clarke threw himself in front of a train.
He was 55, suffering from depression and had been threatening that he was going to do "something terrible" for months. When he checked himself out of the Priory Hospital in Barnes and embarked on the short walk to the railway track, he was merely bringing the darkness that had been swirling around him into sharp, decisive focus.
Before his death, he had feared that noone was interested in what he did any longer. He was getting older and his looks were going - or so he thought - pvc lingerie and maybe he feared that the twentysomething models he took pictures of in various states of dress and (more often) undress would no longer be attracted to him. His marriage was failing, he was still spooked by the death of his friends and fellow photographers Terence Donovan (who also took his own life) and Lord Lichfield, and he was worried about money. And maybe he knew his time had gone. "He was the last of the maverick kind of proper full-on production photographers, " his agent Ghislain Pascal tells Simon Garfield in Exposure. "With Bob you had the personality - it was always fun, he was such a big personality, he was always the star of the shoot - the celebrities just happened to be the people being photographed."
He had immortalised Marco Pierre White in the kitchen and Rachel Weisz in a latex catsuit.
He had trodden the thin - possibly nonexistent - line between erotica and pornography in his photography, and as a result was a favourite of both fetish fans and advertising executives. A home-grown Helmut Newton, some said (if we extend the notion of home to include County Cork, where he was raised).
His work was marked by a technical precision, verging on perfection, that contrasted sharply with the blurry mess of his private life. He was married twice, and cheated on both women. "His mother always used to say about him that he was like the boy from The Snow Queen, " says Sue Frame, his first wife. "She said a splinter of glass or ice went into his heart when he was born."
He cheated on Frame with Lindsey Carlos Clarke, who would become wife number two. He cheated on her too, as she was all too aware. "In a way it would have been much simpler if, on the odd occasion, he'd gone and bonked the odd model in the studio.
That almost would have had a normality to it. It was much more to do with ownership, he wanted adoration, he wanted love and he wanted to own them." And yet he was also loved. By friends, by family, by both the women he married.
Simon Garfield tells Clarke's story in the first person, perhaps because those he speaks to are so expressive. And candid. At times jaw-droppingly so. The book he has written is inevitably partial and fractured.
But it's fascinating.
You can take issue with some of its claims for Carlos Clarke's photography There are powerful images reproduced in the book, mostly of intertwined cutlery, found objects that Garfi eld and his interviewees claim carry an equivalent erotic charge to Mapplethorpe's flowers. Then again there are a lot of his glossy images of glossy models in which it is hard to see beyond the shine.
But in the end none of that matters. What matters is that this is no gloss on Carlos Clarke's life. It cracks the sheen and fi nds a raw, painful reality. Love and death. What else is there worth framing?
Are you one of those people who have been thinking about Halloween since around last Christmas? Have you been planning your costume for months, sparing no effort or expense to track down an assortment of 100 percent human-hair wigs, professional-grade Latex Catsuits noses and only the most realistic fake teeth for you and your family? Do you keep an old cardboard box in the basement filled with vintage Latex Clothing, clown-white greasepaint, spirit gum, stage blood and collodion scarring material, just in case -- and you don't work for the CIA?
Does this sound about right? Then this article is not for you. This article is for everyone who woke up this morning, only to realize suddenly that it's Halloween and you still don't have anything to wear. Or any idea of where to come up with anything to wear on such short notice.
Well, now you do. You're holding it in your hand. That's right. We at the Weekend section want to help. Or at least to inspire you to do better than we did one year when, out of desperation, we decided to stand inside a 32-gallon Rubbermaid trash can at a Halloween party, wearing nothing but a Hefty bag for a poncho. Okay, so we won honorable mention for that last-minute bit of inspiration. That's not the point.
Or maybe it is the point. The point is that anything can be a costume. That economy-size bag of Smarties candy you bought to hand out to the kids? Tape several rolls of the candy to your legs and, voilà, you're a smarty-pants. That roll of aluminum foil in the kitchen? As actor and host Russell Brand, almost never take off his piece of Latex Clothing Legging Wrap it around your torso and, poof, you're a baked potato. You don't need an expensive glue-on mustache or a George W. Bush mask. And your kid definitely doesn't need one of those store-bought, flame-retardant, child-size jumpsuits with the hospital-gown closure in the back modeled after a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle or some other mass-media superhero. Okay, maybe he does.
For this demonstration, though, we enlisted professional stylist and Martha-Stewart-to-the-in-crowd Lisa Cherkasky to construct a handful of clever, handmade costumes -- a simple G.I. Joe or Jane, for instance, and a Hawaiian hula beauty -- using only the pages of the Weekend section and her imagination . For those of you requiring even further inspiration Latex Stockings jackboot, highlighting the advantages of their own height leg length, we also enlisted the aide of artist, illustrator, designer and fabulous found-object fabricator Gene Hoffman to make something scary out of Weekend . Kids, do try this at home.
Take a page from us -- literally. Help yourself to one or more of our ideas, or, better yet, come up with your own. At 35 cents, it's good for your budget, it's good for the environment , but, most importantly, it's good for a laugh. Orange suede trainer-style Kickers for men, £54.95 at Shellys, Argyle Street, Glasgow; Schuh branches including Argyle Street, Glasgow and Frederick Street, Edinburgh.Don't you find that footwear unlocks the most extraordinary emotions? Normally level-headed women will actually endure physical torture just to wear the shoe of their dreams. And grown men can be reduced to gibbering wrecks at the sight of well-turned ankles elevated on perilous stilettos.
Indeed, shoes provoke a level of fetishistic interest rivalled only by Latex Catsuits undergarments. Strange, then, that men's footwear has traditionally been such a dull area of design.
Until, that is, men's fashion embraced sport . . . and trainers replaced all alternatives as the No.1 choice in leisure-time footwear.The floodgates have been opened and men's footwear may never seem so dull again. The newest ranges of Hush Puppy casuals and the trainer-style Kickers featured here are now available in a range of vibrant colours.
Soon, only the squarest of dancers may resist the temptation to indulge in some pretty fancy footwork.