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Top Runway Faux Pas
3. Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo insisted that she was innocent of any nightmarish connotations evoked by her 1995 Comme des Garçons menswear collection featuring models with shaved heads, stripped pajamas, and woolly sweaters with numbers and boot-mark-like prints. The collection, which Kawakubo titled Sleep, got a rude awakening after fashion critic Suzy Menkes pointed out that somnambulist insensitivity on the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps meant getting the collection from the catwalks into stores would remain a dream for Kawakubo.
Don Iron / Sipa
4. The Orthodox Jewish community was far from pleased when Jean-Paul Gaultier dressed Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, and bald lesbian model Ève Salvail as Hasidic Yeshiva students for his1993 collection. However, many Jewish fashionistas were flattered by the homage and Gaultier's good-natured admiration for the Orthodox aesthetic.
5. For his Spring 2000 Dior collection, John Galliano was inspired by Diane Arbus’ photographs of the mentally ill and by the rough elegance of homeless people he spotted on his daily jog by the Seine. So with some success he dressed models in tattered layers marked with cigarette burns, tangles, and tears topped with straitjackets set askew. Suzy Menkes reported for The New York Times that, "beneath the street bum's survival kit of dangling trash and (empty) miniature liquor bottles, there were flashes of Galliano's fashion genius."
Pierre Verdy, AFP / Newscom
6. South Korean designer Ha Sang Beg is a real pop polymath who is a celebrity of the highest order in Seoul. He presents a hugely popular style program on Mnet and is a star DJ; he’s also a former top model and learned tailoring in London. For Spring 2010, the figurehead of fun in Korean fashion presented a show packed with powerful antiwar imagery pivoting around survivalist jackets, army gear in ghostly white, and gory pink patterns on the sharp navy mens' suits intended to resemble raw open flesh torn apart by a hollow-point shot. Yet Sang Beg backed away from the symbolic strength of his message, claiming to "just have a bit of a fuck-up attraction to violence."
John Talks Joe
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
Obama, the Un-decider
Lee Siegel has written about culture and politics and is the author of three books: Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination; Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television; and, most recently, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. In 2002, he received a National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism.
The Art of the Wall
Ana Finel Honigman is a New York-born and Berlin-based art and fashion critic, curator and PhD candidate at Oxford University.
Will Cotton's Candy-Coated Dreams
Ana Finel Honigman is a New York-born and Berlin-based art and fashion critic, curator and PhD candidate at Oxford University.
Dash Snow: Death of an Art Star
Ana Finel Honigman is a New York-born and Berlin-based art and fashion critic, curator and PhD candidate at Oxford University.
The number one faux pas? The fact these heartless designers (except, of course, Stella McCartney) are using real, not faux, fur. That is--or should be--criminal.
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