Jil Sander once noted that those who wear her clothes are not fashionable but modern. It’s a word too many have too little time for, but a word that we were once keen to be defined by. If we needed to be defined at all. For, as we are aware, and as Virginia Woolf knew, so much so that she made it the theme of an essay - words fail us. ‘Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new words,’ Woolf wrote, ‘they spring to the lips whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation – but we cannot use them because the English language is old.’  Modern was not the ideal description for the Jil Sander ethos that remains with the company long after she loosened her grip and left in 2013, any more than the word ‘minimalist’. (‘My eyes respond to a smart, modern style in dressing. I am alert to anything out of tune: the wrong colour, shape or proportion.’) Here is another word frequently applied to Sander as much as that trio of  designers (Yamamoto, Miyake, Kawakubo) who also made headway in the 1980s and scaled monumental heights from the 1990s onwards, decades after Sander established her eponymous label.

13 mins 14 secs read

___________________________________________________________________

Pablo Picasso once said that Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel had more sense than any woman in Europe. Among the many astute, sometimes absurd, quotes attributed to the designer during her 87 years was the line that the legend has a harder life than the subject itself.  'May my legend gain ground,' she mused. 'I wish it a long and happy life.'  Since her death in 1971, both the legend and the legacy have become a testament to longevity. Each is currently in reasonable shape despite the character of the age. Presently, the history that relates to the many is re-written to accommodate the fantasies of the few, with the past defined entirely by the crimes it committed.  The triumphs that have brought about progress are overlooked,  while the modish beneficiaries of these developments rail against the privileges they've inherited. Frequently they call out consumption and consumerism while being slaves to each. They pick their version of the past as easily as they choose a designer brand, a gender, a pronoun, or a condition that sets them up for victimhood. Yet despite this climate the revered House of Chanel survives and thrives.

11 mins 30 secs read

_____________________________________________________________________

The penis has come a long way since it was concealed behind the knee of a naked Yves Saint Laurent in the advertising campaign for his scent Pour Homme, in 1971. The designer wears nothing but his signature spectacles. He has silky, shoulder length hair and is remarkably androgynous, but perhaps more significantly - vulnerable. His lean frame is closer to that of progressive rock fans or British porn actors of the era - figures formed by copious cigarettes, tinned food, strong tea and instant mash. In hindsight the portrait by the photographer Jeanloup Sieff is distinct because it’s free of the machismo implicit in the male centrefolds that started a trend the following year. The American edition of Cosmopolitan was the forerunner with that infamous Burt Reynolds pin-up. Shortly before the release of Deliverance the actor was photographed by Francesco Scavullo, who’d previously captured Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro - the pert chest gracing the cover of The Smiths debut album - naked.

12 mins 33 secs read

_______________________________________________________________________________

Yohji Yamamoto crossed my mind for the first time in some time at the elegant dorm of the Grand Ferdinand hotel in Vienna. There were four of us in neighbouring beds encased in glossy teak, with starched white sheets, and a room lit by a starry Lobmeyr chandelier. Breakfast was 32 euros. A bed for the night was £28. We decamped each morning to the nearby McCafe, where my paltry McMuseli paled beside their hearty breakfast meal. My fellow travellers were as silent and unsocial here as back at the dorm. These three room mates were young. In their twenties. Japanese. Two men and one woman. What they had in common apart from their nationality was a particular wardrobe. Not the Westwood kit evident on the young Japanese scurrying through the high end shops on the Herrengasse, nor the heritage brands on Japanese elders, their raised iPhones capturing everything and nothing: McDonalds golden arches, the Ferris wheel from The Third Man, Goethe immortalised in stone on the Ringstrasse.

11 mins 6 secs read

_______________________________________________________________________________

London, 2017. At Phillips auction rooms in London’s Berkeley Square an image by Bruce Weber has just been bought for £87,000. It’s the most expensive auctioned work the photographer has ever sold: a sensuous black and white, full length shot of a toned, tanned man and woman up close and naked on a swing ( 'Ric and Natalie, Villa Tejas, Montecito, California’). The iconic photograph was used in an ad for Calvin Klein’s scent Obsession, in 1989. As fresh and provocative as the perfume campaign was it marked the culmination of a chapter in the evolution of Calvin Klein. The game-changer came six years earlier with the launch of his men’s underwear range. Weber's image of Olympic pole-vaulter Tom Hintnaus in a pair of briefs - the luminous white that Persil promised - against a spotless white-washed wall, beneath a cloudless Grecian sky. Emblazoned across a billboard in Times Square it halted traffic and attracted crowds. Not as newsworthy as images of the moon landings or the assassination of a president….but a contender, nevertheless. The following year, American Photographer magazine cited it as one of the ten pictures that changed America.

23 mins 6 secs read

_______________________________________________________________________________