Gravity, dignity, spirituality. These tonalities were alive in Balenciaga's design and were important to his cultured clientele: women of means, women of a certain age, women who understood that he was first among equals. (Coco Chanel and Christian Dior both bowed to his endless originality.) Balenciaga designed for the magisterial likes of Gloria Guinness, Pauline de Rothschild and Bunny Mellon, not for the Twiggies, groupies and hippies of the 1960s youthquake?those skinny girls wearing the brave new minis of Cardin and Andre Courreges. Yet no matter how brave and new the work of young designers, none of it was free of Balenciaga's elemental influence. After a pilgrimage to Getaria, Spain, the coastal village where Balenciaga was born and buried, Pauline de Rothschild wrote of how the Catholic church there loomed "too big for the town." The same could be said of Balenciaga's place in fashion history.
[snip]
The chapter on religious life comes at the center of the book, and it is the quick of Balenciaga's sensibility. He was the son of a fisherman, raised in the church and devout until death. His workrooms were silent and severe; the interiors black and white, like his ethics. "When he was thinking deeply," Mr. Bowles writes, "he would play unconsciously with a scrap of fabric in the same contemplative way that one caresses the beads of a rosary." Certainly no designer has draped silk with the ecclesiastical bravura of Balenciaga, who found la mode in the glinting folds of an archangel's satin, the glacial fall of a nun's veil, the flowing robes of a saint.
One of the master's endless searches was for fabrics that had inner life and light?paper taffeta, silk faille, organza?as well as a firm enough "hand" to hold volumetric shapes made with fewer seams. (He was working toward his own monumental Modernism.) In partnership with the eminent Swiss textile company Abraham Ltd., Balenciaga developed in the last years of his life a fabric called gazar?a crisp, open-mesh silk that seemed to be woven with air. Gazar billows like a full sail and creates shapes that float (Beene liked to use gazar in his later years). In the 1960s, while everyone else did the Twist, Balenciaga was walking on water.
Our friend and kindred soul-flame Dominique Browning has a sure-to-be-talked-about piece in today's Times Styles section on the Twilight Zone of unfamiliar faces on once-familiar friends:
THANK goodness it was drilled into me to greet people with the words, ?How do you do?? Because these days, the question that springs more frequently to mind is, ?Who are you?? Not because my memory is going, but because many of my acquaintances are erasing the traces of identity, if not life, from their faces.
Now, before anyone starts turning defensive, let me turn defensive. This is not an essay about why I am categorically against cosmetic surgeries. I am as supportive as the next gal if a certain someone feels so bad about her neck that she won?t leave home, or if another is so heavy-lidded that every time he blinks he misses half the picture. Plastic surgeons have done wondrous things.
[snap]
I?m not categorically against a helping hand, so long as it has finesse. My current rule of thumb, when confronted with an enhanced face, is that if I find myself vaguely wondering whether there was work, the alteration was well done. But these days, I?m wondering why ? why did you do it?
We?ve gone too far. I?m becoming very, very scared.
We?ve reached a stage where cosmetic surgery is so readily available that in certain circles it is expected of women and men to avail themselves of these age-deniers. (You cannot call them youth-enhancers when you are no longer young.) If you choose not to partake of the benefits of needle and knife, you are judged to be making a statement. You are taking a position against the current standards of beauty.
We have triggered a weird, collective, late-onset body dysmorphia. What?s worse is that our anxieties about aging have trickled into our children?s generation, so that the mantra about cosmetic procedures even among some 30-year-olds is ?intervention early and often.?
I began to worry about all this a year ago, when I was on a book tour. I love to read aloud and watch people?s faces as they listen. Within weeks, I was profoundly in touch with my inner ham. Sometimes, I found myself straining for a response. I would look out at the audience, hearing laughter and murmurs, but seeing only stern masks. Yet afterward, those same faces would be telling me how much they had loved my presentation. It took awhile to realize that people were having trouble expressing emotion in their features.
This is also when I began to develop the ?who are you?? problem.
[snip]
Extreme, but commonplace, alterations now raise a welter of tricky issues around personal interaction, not the least of which is that one cannot go around asking ?who are you?? to people one has spent hours with at dinner parties, or colleagues one has bumped into for years in company hallways.
Bigger problems are surfacing. How do you say to a friend, who secretly disappeared to have her face lifted, that she has made a mistake? You don?t, of course. It is too late. And what about the friend who started with a discreet tuck, or a few lines of filler, and then crossed over into the danger zone? You are watching a slow-motion wreck, but how do you warn her without offense? If her friends don?t, who will?
This is why I shy away from social occasions and intimate conversations--the hidden thorns of existential morality are more than I can handle.
That's why I seek the beautiful refuge of sister midnight Kim Morgan's new Tumblr album, where everyone from Anita Pallenberg to Porter Wagoner to Kim herself makes appearances.
Edie, too.
Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2011/05/laura-jacobs-fresh-from-her.html
William Mountbatten-Windsor Prince William Charles Mountbatten-Windsor Prince Charles Camilla Mountbatten-Windsor
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