Paris Warms To YSL's Art Show

CHRISTIE'S three-day auction of French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and businessman Pierre Berge's collection, which starts tonight in Paris, has been valued at $400-600 million.

It has been described as one of the most significant private collection sales in art-auction history. It is also becoming a political hot potato.

On Friday, a group of Chinese lawyers filed a motion in a French court to stop Christie's from auctioning off two antique bronze animal sculptures in the collection.

This follows recent comments by the Chinese Government that the Qing dynasty works had been stolen from Beijing's old imperial summer palace during the second Opium War with the French and British armies in 1860.

Christie's maintains Saint Laurent acquired the items legally. The court is expected to make its decision today, hours before the auction is due to start.

Saint Laurent died last June, aged 71. Berge, his long-time business and personal partner, decided to sell the contents of their Rue de Babylon apartment to fund the Pierre Berge-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation, established in 2002, to preserve 5000 YSL haute couture outfits and 15,000 accessories, sketches and other items.

Berge has said he will also donate money to several charities, including AIDS research.

Several Australian collectors are believed to be interested in certain lots,although the Australian dollar's performance against a strong euro may deter some.

According to Ronan Sulich, Christie's representative in Australia, a number have purchased the boxed set of five catalogues.

"Because this is such a milestone in auction history, it's understandable a number of people in Australia will be interested," Mr Sulich told The Australian yesterday.

This weekend, an estimated 30,000 people braved chilly weather to queue outside Paris's Grand Palais exhibition centre to view the collection.

It was the first time the works had been seen publicly and many visitors waited up to four hours for the chance to view them.

The collection reflects the eclectic tastes of its owners. It includes statues from ancient Rome, 16th- and 17th-century German silverware, 19th-century tapestries, Impressionist oil paintings and early 20th-century decorative arts.

Saint Laurent and Berge were passionate 20th-century art collectors with a particular interest in the late-Impressionist and Modernist movements. Paintings by Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne, Edvard Munch, Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse, Fernand Leger and Pablo Picasso will also go under the hammer over the next three days.

Berge was always considered the financial brain behind Saint Laurent's fashion genius. But he, too, was a man of exceptional taste. Their collection, built over more than 40 years, is a tribute to both men's connoisseurship.

When he announced the auction last November, Berge, who first met Saint Laurent in 1958, told journalists the collection had come to the end of its life.

"I wanted this sale," Berge, 78, told them. "This collection could only have two destinies - end up in a museum, which would have been too onerous, or on the auction block.

"I chose the sale because I felt the collection would not be truly complete until the hammer fell on the last lot."

He added: "This sale is like a separation. You can continue to love, even after the divorce is final.

Source: The Australian

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NY Fashion Week - George Chakra

After years indulging in high couture, Lebanese designer Georges Chakra has debuted his new line in New York in stunning fashion.

In marked contrast to the vibe at the New York Fashion Week enveloped in a cloud of economic austerity, Chakra -- who dressed British actress Helen Mirren at the Oscars awards last year -- kicked off his show Saturday with a bang.

"It's incredibly beautiful, over the top. This is a red carpet must have," according to hip celebrity fashion commentator Esther Nash.

Always respectful of the feminine silhouette, Chakra's skin-tight, glossy dresses in futuristic colors range from red to jet black and silver to hot pink.

"There was life to the garment. This is very young, something you would wear," commented Nash.

Throwing out the somber mood that was tangible at the show's start Friday, with designers toning down their events to fit the financial pinch, Chakra's line, with its taffeta coat dress and wildly over-the-top neon garb, caught everyone's attention.

The designer received a standing ovation for his show.

"I would buy the little black dress with the plastic butterflies if I could afford it," said Nash.

Just before Chakra, French fashion house Lacoste, which is very active on the American market where it is competing against Ralph Lauren, did not show significant new designs.

But its collection was marked by warmth and soft colors like periwinkle blue and yellow sand.

Very few stripes were displayed this season by the artistic director of the brand, Christophe Lemaire, who wanted to make his mark with a soft hooded duffel coat.

Without revealing many details, officials of Lacoste announced during lunch that they are finalizing a project with the World Bank aimed at preservation of crocodiles threatened with extinction.

Jason Wu, a 26-year-old New York designer of Taiwanese origin, acquired instant celebrity status when First Lady Michelle Obama wore one of his dresses at an inaugural ball, at which she appeared with her husband on January 20.

Crowds gathered to view his presentation, but photographers waited in vain for the appearance of the first lady.

New York's Fashion Week, which opened Friday amid an economic recession, will showcase the collections of some 75 designers and is considered one of the most important fashion shows in the world.

On Saturday, the habitual catwalk displays were accompanied by a tribute to Barbie, the doll that celebrates in 2009 its 50th year.

Source: AFP

Inside Report On Couture

"Cost is not an issue.” I am sitting in the Plaza Athénée hotel in Paris, talking to three South American couture customers in the hope that I might uncover some of the mysteries of the world of high fashion. Who buys? How much? Is the credit crunch biting? “You mean you pay whatever?” I ask. The ladies look at each other and smile. “You realise,” the youngest says, “buying couture is not like buying other clothes. You don’t buy, wear for a season, then throw away.”

“Oh, no,” her friend interjects. “At couture, you buy for life. Some seasons you buy a lot, others nothing.” “A lot?” I query. “Maybe three or four evening gowns, say from Lacroix or Elie Saab. A silk undercoat from Chanel. Couture is made to last. I send things back to be altered as the fashion moves and my figure changes.”

“So, how much do you pay?” Laughter. “You are an English gentleman. You cannot ask a lady that!” “Would your husband tell me?” More laughter. “He would hit you on the nose!” And that’s as far as I got. But there are ways of working out probable costs. When, for example, a couture evening dress is sent out to be photographed by a magazine, the insurance is usually about £100,000.

So, what about the customer base — and are more clothes being ordered? I asked Daphne Guinness, one of the few British women who regularly buys at this level. “It depends,” she says. “Last season, I bought nothing. This time, there are some things at Chanel that I like. I always look to fill holes in my wardrobe. I love Dior.” The Dior show cost £2m to put on. “Rich people haven’t all gone into hiding, you know.

W “Anyhow,” Guinness continues, “the big corporations have kept young designers like Gareth Pugh out for far too long. Maybe they can get a look-in now. And of course couture will survive. The world needs to be filled with romance and otherworldly dreams.”

So, who is buying? Chanel’s fashion president, Bruno Pavlovsky, tells me that, since 2007, demand for couture at Chanel has increased so much that a new atelier has opened; they now have 200 couture specialists. “We are putting a lot of resources behind this current collection,” he says. “We sense a great need for couture at this moment. We expect good sales worldwide.”

It’s important to remember, though, that sales of the showstoppers in any house are usually confined to no more than three per continent. The purpose of couture is publicity, which stimulates the market for less stratospherically priced clothes ranges, beauty and make-up, all bearing the company name.

Middle East sales are static. Surprisingly, all houses report keen interest from America. Russia is wobbling. Asian interest is not high. But it is the French who buy couture in serious numbers, often from the smaller couturiers such as Dominique Sirop, Stéphane Rolland and Franck Sorbier, who, along with Elie Saab, have healthy sales because they give sophisticated working women individual clothes at prices their high salaries can cope with, and which fit their lifestyles.

In terms of quality of fashion, it was a better couture week than most. The most dramatic statement was at Dior, where John Galliano continued along his tactful path of using Christian Dior’s thinking as the basis for his own statement. The mood was a continuation of 1950s Dior (though there was a spectacular new take on Bar, the iconic black-and-white suit in Dior’s first collection in 1947), all flouncy full skirts and needle-thin elegance. And, like the maestro, Galliano focused on corsets and the underpinnings of couture.

At Chanel, Lagerfeld gave us refinement, delicacy and a monochrome palette. It was very Chanel, personifying her comment that “as a woman advances in years, she should wear white . . . White smooths out everything”. At Gaultier, things looked up after a few lacklustre seasons. This was high-camp high fashion of the sort Paris does best. Razor-sharp tailoring, straight-cut shoulders and Gaultier’s trademark lingerie looks — very 1980s. More delicate but just as consummate, Christian Lacroix referenced the theatre, circus, corrida and a whore’s parlour in a gloriously colourful collection.

Of the others, Versace Atelier was a virtuoso performance of brilliant cutting and fabulous colour; Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy presented a beautifully feminine parade of brilliant shapes and cutting in a preponderance of beige tones. The same soft shades were clearly up the street of the customers at Elie Saab, which is why it is the only fashion house in Paris with seriously substantial sales at this level.

To quote Chanel from the 1920s: “The poetry of couture was responsible for cocktails, balls, dinner parties. The champagne flowed . . . we walked on a floor strewn with orchids.” Let’s hope couture can pull it off again to brighten these cash-strapped times.

CAN LUXURY SURVIVE THE CREDIT CRUNCH?

In his new book, The Luxury Strategy (Kogan Page £30), the marketing expert Jean-Noël Kapferer says brands such as Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Cartier, whose core profits come from their high-end goods, should come through the credit crunch unscathed. Those who rely heavily on sales of handbags, make-up and cheaper accessories will be harder hit.

“The luxury brand is the ordinary of extraordinary people and the extraordinary of ordinary people. Slashing prices makes you more for ordinary people. And that’s the beginning of the end.” Eek. “Luxury is about timelessness,” he goes on, saying it’s no coincidence that some of the most successful brands are family-run. “Cartier will tell you they’ve been through two world wars, one economic depression, three slumps . . . They take the long-term view.”

His advice: don’t panic. And employ counterintuitive strategies. “Raise your prices. Don’t pander to your customers’ wishes. Make it more difficult for your clients to buy. And don’t compare yourself with others. Gauguin did not compare himself with Renoir.”

Then he quotes a high-up executive at Mercedes-Benz: “ ’Our job is to make people dream of new products. As soon as they have money, they will buy. Life goes on.’ ”

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Fashion Style - Austerity Age

If the world's leading designers are to be believed, we now seem to inhabit an Elysian underworld, an earthly paradise where financial concerns are as far from our minds as, say, a desire for anything as obviously user-friendly as a classic, black jacket.

And so, what British Vogue described only months ago as "the new austere" – read play-safe (if beautiful) fashion that strives to be socially responsible and exudes a certain sobriety – has given way to less obviously pragmatic designs.

The new season decrees it is the job of fashion to provide an escape, to let unbridled fantasy and creativity run riot, safe in the knowledge that, with the economy on its knees, it is romance, opulence and individuality which will prevail.

We may not all be able to afford these clothes but we have the ability to dream about wearing them. Moreover, what is the point of a woman investing in a tailored trouser suit when work-wear is becoming increasingly irrelevant because, put bluntly, less people have a workplace to go to?

It would be misguided to draw any conclusions concerning fashion's future from the haute couture collections paraded in Paris this week. The jewel in the French fashion crown, Paris Haute Couture Week is aimed at no more than a few hundred women who have the inclination to part with thousands of pounds for a one-off, hand-made garment fitted to their every curve. This is the preserve of the super-rich and stylists of Hollywood A-listers in search of a grand statement for the Oscars. More significant is the recession's effect on the ready-to-wear collections: it may be cold outside but spring/summer's designs are making their way into stores. "If people are going to invest in fashion now, they need to know it's worth it," says Alexander McQueen. "They're not going to want to buy a cashmere coat they can wear any season, they are looking for something more individual, and from a more individual designer. Fashion is about fantasy as well as being commercial and sometimes people lose sight of that."

From McQueen we can expect impossibly elaborate, highly engineered clothing intended to make its wearer stand out: wood grain-printed all-in-ones, crystal, enamelled flowers in tulle and more.

McQueen is not alone. At Prada, home to ribbed socks, A-line skirts and round-necked sweaters, we find lightweight sweet nothings cut from what looks like gold leaf and trimmed with ribbons and bows.

At Louis Vuitton, it is maribou feathers in tropical colours and the most over-wroughtly high sandals imaginable. For Dolce & Gabbana, never a label aimed at the understated, shoulder pads just became even larger (and circular), embroideries more intricate and accessories more ornate. Then there are polyvinyl dresses that look like deflated footballs (Comme des Garcons) and others that appear to have been made out of high-end tablecloths (Vivienne Westwood, God love her), a "fur" coat of platinum blonde wigs (Maison Martin Margiela) and Elizabethan-style ruffs the size of car wheels (Gareth Pugh).

Fashion has historically flourished amid adversity, creatively if not financially. As with any cultural pursuit, when the going gets tough, the frontrunners rise to the challenge. The most celebrated work of Botticelli, which followed the Medici Bank crash in 1494, through to the Golden Age of Hollywood, the fruit of the worst financial crisis in Western history, have roots in adversity. Fashion, perhaps the most visible symbol of capitalist excess, is no exception.

It is no coincidence then that John Galliano, the creative director of Christian Dior, chose to revisit the most famous creation of the house's namesake: The New Look. Unveiled in February 1947, the New Look was possibly the most potent example of fashion excess alleviating hard times. It wasn't new at all but romantically retrogressive. As a reaction to wartime austerity and fabric rationing, Dior harked back to the Belle Epoque by sending out round-shouldered, wasp-waisted jackets and skirts so voluminous they caused an outrage. But if politicians – including Harold Wilson, then the president of the Board of Trade – criticised the frivolity and "let them eat cake"-type disregard for reality, women the world over sought out the New Look. Then, as now, only a handful would wear the originals but copies spread fast, like wildfire.

In the 1970s, the floral-printed, Edwardian-inspired designs of Laura Ashley were a quaintly British take on bucolic life in better times. More importantly, the three-day week and the winter of discontent spawned first punk and then new romanticism, both of which dictated that mainstream attire was for the middle-aged and out of touch. These were clothes for anarchists and were notable for their over-turning of convention and the fact that even the main protagonists – Westwood and her then partner Malcolm McLaren – were advocating a DIY approach that suggested style need not be bought.

Anyone courageous enough could, and did, rustle up an approximation of the look, customising second-hand finds from Oxfam and cutting up black bin-liners in a manner which makes today's slavish attachment to budget high-street fashion seem unimaginative to the point of banal.

When recession hit at the end of the 1980s, power-dressing Dynasty-style gave way to deconstruction – conceptual fashion was born. Japanese designers Comme des Garcons and Yohji Yamamoto introduced an oversized, dark and distressed aesthetic that undermined our preconceived idea of status to the point where some of their most memorable early work came peppered with holes. The bourgeois fashion establishment was, quite simply, lost for words and it was left to critics of art and architecture to wear and write about this look. Later, the Belgian designer Martin Margiela turned clothes inside out, literally sewing the shoulder pads that had come to represent the brash dress codes of the era on to the outside of clothes.

Fast-forward 20 years and, with the value of hindsight, fashion offers up a dazzling amalgamation of all these things and more, united only in an apparent disregard for convention and what is widely assumed to be the strictures of "wearable" clothing.

"We don't all want to dress like soldiers, in the same uniform, for the same price," says McQueen. "There is a viewpoint that people should play safe because they can't afford to frighten their customers but, in fact, the opposite is true. You have to push forward and realise the power of fantasy and escapism if you want to survive."

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