Triggonometry

iris van herpen haute couture FW1112/style.it

Adelaide is emerging as quite the model springboard. This time last year frockwriter popped over to the Adelaide Fashion Festival and stumbled upon a new face just-signed to local agency Finesse Models, Melissa Johannsen. Johannsen has since emerged as a key member of the new Australian modelling A Team on the international circuit. Tomorrow we are heading back for the 2011 Adelaide Fashion Festival - once again, as a guest of the organisers - and a quick ring-around unearthed a few more hidden SA gems. Case in point, Tori Trigg. This 18 year-old champion horsewoman was, according to Adelaide's Pride Models, overlooked by Sydney agencies earlier this year when Pride first introduced her. After coming to the attention of the world's biggest modelling agency, IMG, Trigg was whisked off to the Paris haute couture shows in July. She booked three shows, walking alongside the much higher profile Australians Julia Nobis, Codie Young and Ajak Deng, unbeknown to most. Here is Trigg at Iris van Herpen (above) and in this video, where she appears at 58', immediately following Young:

 



And here she is again, below, at Maxime Simeons. 

Just about to wrap up her Year 12 SACE exams, Trigg is putting her studies - and horses - on hold to pursue modelling fulltime.   

maxime simeons haute couture FW1112/getty via daylife

maxime simeons HC FW1112 backstage/supplied by pride models

Meet the new girl, Emilia Skuza

elie saab haute couture SS11/getty via daylife

In spite of the deluge of global publicity following Jean Paul Gaultier's decision to cast Serbian Australian male model Andrej Pejic as the bride of his haute couture show in Paris on Wednesday, Pejic was of course not the only Australian on the haute couture runways. Abbey Lee Kershaw, a recent Chanel advertising face and runway regular, turned up at Chanel for yet another exclusive, no surprises there. Also scoring Chanel: Julia Nobis, who had a busy haute couture season, also walking at the Elie Saab, Georges Hobeika and Bouchra Jarrar shows. Ajak Deng walked at Alexandre Vauthier. According to Priscillas, Lauren Brown, who has appeared in several Chanel ready-to-wear shows, was in town for the haute couture castings but as far as frockwriter can tell, did not turn up on a single catwalk. One Australian who has slipped completely under the radar until now walked at Elie Saab and Bouchra Jarrar, alongside Nobis, as well as the show of new haute couture name Maxime Simoens - Emilia Skuza.

And three haute couture shows were not the sum total of Skuza’s catwalk appearances in Paris over the past fortnight. 

On Thursday 20th January, the 18 year-old, Adelaide-based Polish Australian was one of several women cast for Smalto’s menswear show (see below) on day one of the Paris Fall/Winter 2011/2012 menswear season and she also appeared in the Etam parade at the Grand Palais on Monday 24th. 
 
Etam is a French mass market lingerie and swimwear retailer. The company’s big bucks, Victoria’s Secret-style extravaganza featured performances from entertainers such as Beth Ditto, The Kills and Boy George and high profile modelling names such as Karolina Kurkova and Australia’s Nicole Trunfio. Although it’s a little difficult to tell from the video, below, that looks like Skuza at 9.58. Trunfio appears at 6.24 and 13.21.  

Skuza, who has just scored a TER of 99.7 in her HSC, is repped by Finesse Models in her home state, Chadwick in Sydney and IMG's Development division in New York and Paris.

Her experience in Australia consists of a few local parades, including shows at the Adelaide and Sydney Fashion Festivals and some low-profile beauty and fashion shoots.  

A dead ringer for a young Gisele Bündchen, Skuza is one of several new Australian models who are poised to make their marks on the Fall/Winter 2011/2012 womens runways, which kick off in New York on February 10.

smalto fw1112/enmodefashion

 

Andrej Pejic celebrated Australia Day on a Paris haute couture runway in a wedding dress

now fashion

While many Australians were celebrating our national day with a bbq, minutes ago Andrej Pejic just did something a little different: he walked in Jean Paul Gaultier's Spring/Summer 2011 haute couture show in Paris. Closed it in fact, as the traditional bride. Yes, a day after the designer finally unveiled his much-anticipated Spring/Summer 2011 ready-to-wear advertising campaign starring Pejic and Czech supermodel Karolina Kurkova and almost a week after Pejic closed Gaultier's mens Fall/Winter 2011/2012 show dressed as a woman, Gaultier and Pejic just made a little more gender-bending music together. And they may have just made fashion history together to boot. Givenchy deployed its muse and advertising face Lea T, a transsexual (and technically a pre-op transsexual) in the brand's most recent haute couture presentation. That was, however, a static display only, not a show. Frockwriter is not sure that any couturier/couturière has ever previously sent a man down his/her runway in womens' clothing. And certainly never in a wedding dress. The collection was inspired by British punks and French showgirls, with the models sporting mohawks and Pejic trailed by a highkicking cancan girl. There was no soundtrack, just the soft drawl of no less than French screen legend Catherine Deneuve reading out the names of the garments, one by one, with the models each carrying a corresponding number - the way they used to do it half a century ago, in the golden days of the couture. Below are what appear to be three recent backstage shots of Pejic taken by a French photographer - and possibly before this show. They were posted at the same time he was in hair and makeup. Vive la Liberté.  

all three images: mathieu berthemy

Jean Paul Gaultier's Perla

Turbans were piled high, shoulder pads took on lives of their own – right down to the elbow - and Dita von Teese stripped down to a black beaded corset, thong and suspenders on the runway – all to promote, presumably, a new collaboration between Jean Paul Gaultier and Italian luxury lingerie brand La Perla. Call it Marlene Dietrich with multiple personality disorder, Gaultier’s haute couture offerings, just off the runway in Paris, were a mixed bag of Forties Hollywood glamour, Lido showgirl and Mortitia Addams. As with Dior’s floral extravaganza on Monday, colours were intense, from poison green to chartreuse, cobalt blue and orchid. It now remains to be seen which contemporary Hollywood icons have the chutzpah to pull these looks off on the red carpet. Head to Now Fashion to see the complete collection.

Seven years after it had three photographers jailed for posting runway images online, the Fédération Française de la couture has joined Twitter

In 1868, Paris-based, British-born couturier Charles Frederick Worth (above) established the world's oldest fashion week organising body, the Chambre syndicale de la confection et de la couture pour des dames et fillettes. It was the precursor to today's Chambre Syndicale de la haute couture Parisienne, the governing body of the haute couture industry. In 1973, with the advent of the ready to wear collections, the latter was integrated under a new peak fashion body: the Fédération Française de la couture, du prêt-à-porter des couturiers et des créateurs de mode. Well stop the press, the Fédération is now on Twitter. Although its Twitter feed appears to have been active since January (it boasts a mere 170 followers) with a Facebook page added around the same time (2000 friends), over the past 24 hours Twitter and Faceboook buttons have been added to the schedule section of the body's website. Fascinating to see this august body move into the 21st century.

One of Worth's primary objectives in organising Parisian couturiers was to counteract copying. More than one of the Fédération's members have, over the years, banned journalists from their shows, fearing the leaking of intel.

Until as recently as the 1990s, moreover, the organisation imposed a three month embargo on the publication of all colour images of the Paris collections, in a bid to allow the fashion houses time to make their collections before the copies arrived in store.

And who could forget the copyright brouhaha of 2003? In March 2003, in the middle of the Fall/Winter 2003/2004 Paris show season, photographers Don Ashby, Marcio Madeira and Olivier Claisse were arrested, jailed and subsequently prosecuted for what the Fédération described as the “illicit traffic” of runway imagery on their pioneering Firstview.com website.

The case was led by the Fédération in collaboration with several houses, notably Chanel, which had taken exception to Firstview posting its own images of a Chanel collection on the Firstview site. In France, picture rights belong by default to the designers, not photographers.

Incarcerated for two days in a Parisian prison, the trio was eventually cleared of the charges in 2005.

Even in 2007, things still seemed a little twitchy in Paris. I found myself without Paris show accreditations for two seasons, after shifting my accreditation from The Sydney Morning Herald print edition to its online arm, smh.com.au and then again six months later, when I moved to News Limited's news.com.au.

The last three years has of course witnessed an avalanche of social media. Trying to keep a lid on things with Twitter, Facebook and live streaming now in full force at every fashion week, would be like trying to shut the proverbial stable door after the horse has bolted. That said, without individual invitations from designers, it remains to be seen how many independent bloggers would be accorded official Paris accreditations.

In terms of speed to market with show images, Condé Net's Style.com used to be first up with runway images - the day after each show. 

Now, in a bid to keep up with the rapacious appetite for runway information, Style.com has taken to putting up images before its show reviews are even posted. 

But even Style.com and co can't keep up with new players such as Now Fashion, which is publishing lowres runway images in (almost) real-time from the end of the runway, providing a far better vantage point than that of most show attendees who are uploading images on Twitter.

If Now Fashion can get images up that quickly, you have to ask, why can't the mainstream crew? 

Abbey Lee Kershaw walks Chanel (again), makes world number 6

chanel haute couture FW1011/getty via daylife

The haute couture shows roll on and overnight, to the best of frockwriter’s knowledge, Abbey Lee Kershaw was the first Australian model to pop up therein – at Chanel. This is no surprise, as Kershaw has spent the past eight months forging a powerful alliance with the iconic French couture house and its German creative director, Karl Lagerfeld. Kershaw closed Chanel’s Spring/Summer 2010 haute couture show in January, opened its Fall/Winter 2010/2011 ready to wear show in March and appears in both the Spring/Summer 2010 ad campaigns for Lagerfeld’s own collection and the Fall/Winter 2010/2011 Chanel campaign. Back in December, during an interview for Australian current affairs program Today Tonight (only a fraction of which made it to air) Kershaw told me that she was moving on from Italian luxury goods house Gucci, with which she had booked four campaigns – although in everything other than the Flora by Gucci campaign, as part of a group of bigger name models. But Kershaw’s star is definitely on the rise. Since December, beyond her Chanel coups, she has appeared on ten magazine covers. Today Tonight asked, could she make it to number 1? Well she's getting closer - models.com just upgraded her ranking to world number 6.

Click here to see more of Chanel's sumptuous haute couture collection on Style.com. And here is a video shot by Bryanboy from his front row seat:




WWD appears not to have included the couture shows as part of its regular free runway show coverage, so see Style.com also for highres of Armani Privé, Christian Dior and Givenchy. The Givenchy collection (that was inspired by Frida Kahlo and Mexico's Day of the Dead) is particularly beautiful: a tightly-edited presentation of heavily-embellished, mermaid-like sheaths in white, ecru and gold.

So which other Australians are in town for the haute couture?

Stephanie Carta has been Tweeting from fittings, although it’s not clear which shows she is up for.

Last weekend, Carta mentioned she was at the Elie Saab studio and several weeks ago, made reference to Karl Lagerfeld’s “black bride”, although whether this was second-hand info from someone who did attend a fitting or something sighted in the Chanel atelier for either the show or a private client is also unclear. Perhaps Lagerfeld changed his mind - his FW1011 bride overnight was in traditional white.

Priscillas reports that its white hot new faces Julia Nobis and Emily Wake are both confirmed for today’s Valentino show.

The shock of the nude at Armani Privé

There was no sign of Lady GaGa, either in the flesh or spirit, at Giorgio Armani's Fall/Winter 2010/2011 haute couture presentation, which concluded a little over an hour ago. GaGa has become something of a walking endorsement for Armani's haute couture line, decked out in Armani Privé for various appearances (and undoubtedly paid a handsome fee to do so). But there were no one-shouldered unitards or globe dresses in Paris today. Instead, a suite of softly-draped, ladylike - and a little Versace-esque - suits and shifts in biscuit colours, sculptural duchess satin sack dresses and signature embellished sheaths. The latter, sure to turn up on another Armani acolyte, Cate Blanchett. Once again, as the highres shots roll in, here are a few of the real-time runway images captured by Now Fashion. Head to the website to see the rest of the collection.

Christian Dior's little shop of haute couture

Highres images have yet to go up on the main sites and the real-time images via Twitter were few and far between. But behold the Christian Dior Fall/Winter 2010/2011 haute couture collection which has just walked off the runway in Paris, via Now Fashion, a website which publishes runway images in real-time. Glorious colours, theatrical styling, the show was literally set in a garden in Paris (visible in some shots through a plastic tent structure behind the rows of seating) and appears to have been inspired by exotic hothouse flowers. For images of the complete collection head to Now Fashion.

Galliano saddles up for Christian Dior SS10 haute couture

If you missed the shots coming in overnight, here are some excerpts from Christian Dior's magnificent Spring/Summer 2010 haute couture show in Paris, via UK Telegraph fashion editor, Hilary Alexander. Frockwriter does not have the benefit of the show notes to hand, but the equestrienne and Gibson Girl influences seem fairly self evident. Given that American couturier Charles James was however not born until 1906, Alexander's suggestion that James was active at the "turn of the century" should be taken with a grain of salt. Judging by the two-tone hair, one might assume that contemporary Irish aristo Daphne Guiness may also have been a muse.

Bonne année

Seasons greetings and a Happy New Year to all frockwriter’s readers. I’m working through summer and have not had much of a chance to blog this very busy past week and a bit. But I just wanted to say thanks once again for your interest and feedback over the past twelve months. I hope that wherever you may be, 2010 brings good things. The fashion countdown is on to the mens Fall/Winter 2010/2011 shows, the Golden Globes, the Spring/Summer 2010 haute couture season and the Fall/Winter 2010/2011 womens RTW marathon, which kicks off in New York on February 11th. The following day, in Vancouver, sees the launch of the winter Olympics, which are sure to produce some eye-popping sport ensembles, at the very least in the ice skating arena. On the graphic design side, frockwriter is already smitten with the event’s mascots. They are:

Miga, a snowboarding sea bear who is part killer whale, part bear; Quatchi, a wannabe hockeyplayer Sasquatch and Sumi, a chimera who is part whale, part Thunderbird, part black bear. Not forgetting Mukmuk, a relatively prosaic marmot.

The mascots were created by Vicki Wong and Michael Murphye of Meomi Design.

Makes you wish (once again) that the Sydney 2000 Olympics powerbrokers had given free rein to a local artist like Jeremy Andrew to produce our mascots, instead of greenlighting Matthew Hatton’s all-too-literal Syd, Ollie and Millie. Who wound up being upstaged by Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat anyway.