“Lesage and all the maisons d’art are part of the future of fashion,” Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s president of fashion, wrote in an email, “and the contribution of each maison is key, not just at Chanel, but if you look at shows today, everyone wants to value the unique savoir-faire.”
This past summer I spent an afternoon in Lesage’s shimmering world, where sequins, beads, metallic threads and more come together with the skill of the petites mains (in English, tiny hands), as the skilled seamstresses of Parisian fashion houses are called.
At Lesage, the artisans are predominantly women from varied backgrounds. Some are graduates of École Lesage, the in-house embroidery school, although its training program, which can involve as much as 150 hours of instruction, is not a prerequisite for a job. One worker now on staff, for example, formerly taught history and geography.
“The most difficult part is to make,” Mr. Barrère said. “We’re talking about humans, not machines.”
Mr. Barrère said it takes at least 100 hours to make an embroidery for a simple ready-to-wear garment. “In haute couture, it’s 600, 800, 1,000 or 2,000 hours of work, it depends,” he continued. “Each time you multiply it with the price per hour and it becomes very, very expensive.”
The creative process at Lesage is both collaborative and intensely personal. Here is how it works:
Conveying a Theme
Fashion collections usually have themes, and Lesage artisans work with designers and their teams to turn those themes into embroidery.
“Each project is unique,” Mr. Barrère said — and to explain it, he described the work behind the Chanel Cruise collection, designed by Virginie Viard, Chanel’s creative director, and presented in May on the Paramount Studios lot in Los Angeles.
Fashion designers are the new painters, X’avier Alexander says. But it’s not the ‘80s anymore, where people flocked to see Warhol or Basquiat at an art gallery; it’s the moment for wearable art, he explains.
Alexander is a VCUarts fashion design student who won the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s 2023 CFDA Design Scholar award. He’s one of a dozen recipients to be awarded out of 340 students that applied. Alexander won $50,000 through CFDA, thanks to a donation made by clothing company Eddie Bauer. He is appreciative and sees it as a stepping stone.
His thesis “Who You Be” involves the theme of Black identity and what it means today. Under this large umbrella, there are collections with subtopics such as consumerism, or how a false sense of empowerment can come through the consumption of luxury goods. Another collection touches on challenging environments his own community faces, such as food deserts and a lack of resources that can lead to hardships and even crime. The artist is also trying to build a better future and show what that would look like.
“It’s taking the good, bad and the ugly about our culture and conceptualizing it into collections that speak on these real life things that go on within our community,” Alexander says.
The artist has a larger vision in mind. He wants a multi-sensory experience involving what you’re seeing, hearing, smelling and how the space feels, Alexander says, adding that he thinks he would need more than $50,000 to create his vision exactly.
“I’m just super big on that; how can you experience fashion in a different space or in a different way, and having it be longer than like a 10 to 15-minute show where models are just walking,” Alexander explains. “I want you to come here
Today’s blog post is incredibly special to me. It’s actually not written by me: It’s by Rachel Rowan, our Chief of Content and someone I’ve been lucky to call a friend and teammate for over 12 years.
I asked Rachel to share something with you that I think shows what it means to be a team and to create an environment of belonging and care. It is a beautiful, vulnerable, meaningful story that takes a lot of courage to share, and I’m so grateful that Rachel said yes.
I’ll let her take it from here . . .
“A few months into the pandemic, my partner of more than six years—the love of my life—began to question their gender identity. It had been just the two of us in our home for months, and the time away from society and all its rules and expectations had allowed them to look deeper into themselves than ever before. By late summer of 2020, my partner began to seriously consider transitioning from male to female.
I felt like my world was crumbling. I kept saying to myself that if it were anyone else in my life, I would accept and encourage this transition unequivocally, but this person’s—my person’s—identity affected me, too. We were engaged to be married, and now, when that happened, I would be married to a woman—instead of the man I met. It was a huge, uncontrollable, unexpected shift in my life, and I had no idea how to handle it.
At the time, my partner was not completely certain whether she wanted to transition. She was experimenting—wearing different clothes, painting her nails, wearing makeup—but she wasn’t “out” to anyone else yet. I was the only person she had confided in, and I wanted to respect her privacy. I didn’t
Dorset-based Gary Spratt explained: “The exhibition has come about after winning the Oxmarket Open Painting Prize. It will focus on my larger paintings made in the last couple of years. They are about our home, or anyone’s home, with tables, chairs, doorways and a variety of other items as their subject.
“What they mean is up to the viewer. However what they are to me is a way into making a painting. Its formal or abstract nature is in tension with a figurative idea, both of which come about during the making. But the things or objects in the images often carry personal meaning. For instance, the kitchen table my father made or my grandfather’s chairs feature prominently. There’s an idea about inheritance in that, in the things that we may bring forward.
“Sometimes I think that because I’m making images of the interior of my own house, that I’m painting my own safety net, as we are lucky to live in social housing.
“There are a lot of connections. I’m interested in animism, that things have stories and lodge themselves in our lives. Through the work I am both asking and answering my own questions, but in a way that opens up more questions. So it goes on.
“I stick to fairly basic materials, mostly oil on canvas or charcoal on paper. Although I favour oil paint, I don’t think that it really matters all that much with regard to the painting itself. Painting is slow, oil paint is slow to dry, so it works for me.
“I have been exhibiting my work for the last eight years.
“Particular highlights have been making it onto the short list for the Contemport British Painting Prize 2021, showing in London and Huddersfield.
“The more you shoot, the more it’ll make sense over time.”
You typically reserve your kits to vintage shirts, such as those from the 1980s to mid 2000s. Why so?
Because they make me feel nostalgic. My dad grew up with football in the ’80s and ’90s, so that era of football surrounded me. I’m 28, so I grew up around football in the late ’90s and early ’00s. These are all kits that remind me of my childhood. Also, the older kits just look great when being shot. Many shapes and colors resemble clothes in paintings that I have used in my work.
If you could, how would you define your approach to visual storytelling?
It’s important to be stubborn with the identity in your work. If you enjoy stamp collecting and have metal, then try and connect it. If you have two interests and find a way to make a project out of it, you’ll constantly want to work on it. I tend just to shoot because I enjoy the process of photography and having to wait for an image that I got an excellent gut feeling about.
When you’re following trends and you shoot things that Instagram thinks is cool, you’ll quickly get bored of it. This results in you not taking pictures as it feels like a chore rather than something that makes you feel good. With the storytelling, I’m wondering what I can say there; however, there will likely be a reason for doing it over time. I always feel that the more you shoot, the more it’ll make sense over time. Please just be sure to be patient.
Are there any upcoming projects you’d like to share, such as exhibitions or client work?
No exhibitions, I’d love to do one for ‘Flat 92’.
Can we please take a moment to admire Nicole Kidman‘s 2023 Met Gala look?
Accompanied by husband Keith Urban, the movie star arrived on the carpeted steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art wearing a majestic blush pink ball gown, which she previously wore from 2004 Chanel No. 5 ad. The piece featured silver sequins, a center high-leg slit, a sweeping train dusted with boa feathers, and a delicate one-shoulder tulle cape.
Urban, who wore a classic black tux with a white dress shirt, was photographed admiring his wife on the steps. The two weren’t afraid to flaunt some PDA, with the couple holding hands and exchanging a quick peck as they ascended the stairs.
Tonight’s theme, “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty,” pays homage to the life and legacy of the late Chanel creative director.
The Costume Institute describes the spring 2023 exhibition as an exploration of “the work of Karl Lagerfeld. Focusing on the designer’s stylistic vocabulary as expressed in aesthetic themes that appear time and again in his fashions from the 1950s to his final collection in 2019, the show will spotlight the German-born designer’s unique working methodology.”
The exhibition will additionally showcase about 150 of Lagerfeld’s designs, as well as some of his sketches, both of which “underscore his complex creative process and the collaborative relationships with his premières, or head seamstresses. Lagerfeld’s fluid lines united his designs for Balmain, Patou, Chloé, Fendi, Chanel, and his eponymous label, Karl Lagerfeld, creating a diverse and prolific body of work unparalleled in the history of fashion.”
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A local group of artists debuted their first exhibit while bouncing bass and percussion echoed, glasses were filled with wine and glowing black lights lit up the SL8 gallery Friday.
When the gallery, located at 10 E University Ave., opened its doors at 7 p.m., a constant stream of people filed through the hall and the miniature cinema to see the art made by friends, classmates and strangers.
Local artist 444 IDK chose the artists who would be featured in the show.
The 23-year-old Gainesville resident began the collective to bring creatives together to help each other achieve their individual goals.
Nobody can do it alone, he said.
And he didn’t. One local artist, ZZZ Zawacki, runs her own art business and even helped him create the flier for the opening.
The 24-year-old’s work mostly focuses on clothing, tapestries and acrylic paintings.
While sipping a 2020 Cabernet, she said it took her 1,800 days to complete the pieces in this show and feels proud to have it displayed.
“It’s finally being viewed by other people, and it feels wonderful being able to share my other side to my creativity within my business,” she said.
The main purpose of her work is informing people about psychedelics as alternative medicine. The collective gave her that platform.
“To have an open conversation about harm reduction and drug policies as well as what we can do to expand our consciousness and be more in tune with nature, that’s why I’m here,” she said.
Carly Klingbiel, a 22-year-old Gainesville resident, also joined the collective. She’s grateful to have a space for her art, she said.
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Klingbiel’s work focuses on the exclusion of women throughout history and the divide
Mosaic artist Mitzi Hall of Irwin turned down what probably would have been the biggest commission of her career in favor of keeping her creative freedom.
A restaurateur in Arizona had seen an image of one of Hall’s mosaic-inlaid guitars online and asked if she could make one for him.
“He started sending sketches of what he wanted me to do,” said Hall, a lifelong Irwin resident. “He’s sending pictures of butterflies and bees, and I’m saying,’ ick.’ Then he said he had 57 restaurants and he wanted one for every restaurant.
“I thought about it for a skinny minute, and then said I can’t do that.”
Her first objection was the untold hours it would take to crank out the 57 time-consuming mosaics.
“I’m only one person. I can’t do production work,” she said.
Then, she didn’t want to dedicate untold hours to working without a break on one project — and being told what to do in the process.
“I always have multiple projects going on. I work on what I want to work on,” she said. “If I don’t have the energy to work on something, I just don’t do it. I do something else.
“I like to give 110% of myself to my work, and I think it’s only fair to my consumer that I give them my absolute best.”
Hall has been making her one-of-a-kind mosaics for about 15 years. She had some prior experience in making stained glass pieces, but trained herself by trial and error in the art of crafting mosaics.
She’ll turn just about anything into a mosaic — a musical instrument, a mannequin, shoes, a picture frame, a flat board cut into the shape of a heart or a hand.
Three of her glass-shard-covered violins are showing in “Chasing the Sun,”
I first came across one of Eunnam Hong’s oil paintings on Instagram: two female figures standing inside an empty room, dressed in matching polos tucked into pleated khakis with easy leather pumps on their feet, one in all black and the other in all white. Their hair is blonde—almost white. Their skin is also white but not exactly skin-color white. It’s marble-statue white. Canvas white. An empty-page white. The figures are incredibly stylish but mysterious. I immediately needed to fill in the space between them—they felt both familiar and alien at once. More importantly I need to know who created them.
“I was really into this idea of doing a fictional thing that blends with some of my realities,” Hong told me on a recent morning in the Park Slope apartment that doubles as her studio. “I wanted to counterfeit an Asian American woman character.” We were sitting in her bedroom, the nine oil paintings that would comprise her upcoming show at Lubov—her first solo show in New York City—placed on the walls and the floor around us.
A former art director who worked in fashion magazines and ad campaigns in her native Korea, Hong studied at the prestigious Seoul Institute of the Arts. “As a child I really wanted to be an artist, but my parents didn’t like the idea,” she recalls. “At the same time, the idea of going to art school was scary—like, you learn art through this academic course, and then what happens after that? It was a question that nobody really answered. So I studied graphic design.” After graduation she found work with a small agency that allowed her to travel around the world and collaborate with some of the biggest names in the fashion industry, including Edward Enninful. “I spent all
Hailing from Maryland, Iamyungp is a budding artist with a passion for music that transcends his talent. With eight years of experience under his belt, Iamyungp is quickly making a name for himself in the music industry, and his hard work is paying off. He has worked with many different artists and producers, and his versatility as a musician is evident in the diverse array of musical styles he has explored.
Iamyungp is not just a musician, but also a successful entrepreneur. For the past seven years, he has been managing a clothing line called Stonaville, which has been doing well and adding to his growing list of accomplishments. This young artist has a drive for success and a work ethic that is second to none, making him an inspiration for up-and-coming musicians and entrepreneurs alike.
One of the key motivators for Iamyungp’s success is his mother, who is his biggest fan and the reason he works so hard. He is dedicated to giving her a better life, and his musical and entrepreneurial pursuits are a testament to his unwavering determination.
Iamyungp’s musical style is a unique blend of hip hop, R&B, and pop, and his sound is attracting fans from all over the world. His music is a reflection of his life experiences, and he infuses his tracks with meaningful lyrics and a strong sense of purpose. He is a rising star in the music industry, and his music is sure to resonate with listeners of all ages.
“My name is Iamyungp, I am an up & coming artist from Maryland. Music always been my passion, I love making music, I also have a clothing line called Stonavillellc been doing that for about like 7 years now & it is going pretty well. I been doing music for