Pens poised, recorders blinking, pants tightening, the Voxfrock team ploughed valiantly through a week and a bit of lush lunches, multi-course dinners, canape-‘n-cocktail functions and morning-teas-with-cupcakes to assemble this buffet of frocky snackettes especially for you, Dear Reader.
Before we repair to the (tightly edited) feast, however, the Voxfrock team would like to make the ground-breaking observation that, although media launches, conferences and news events can proceed just as efficiently without a sit-down dinner or circulating fleet of platter-laden waiters, we are chuffed to the chops that so many these days, don’t. We are plumper this week – yes indeedydoody – but wonderfully well informed and feel this recently ramped-up perk of journalism, can’t be an all-bad thing if we just keep our myfitnesspal apps on high alert. As you do.
(Scroll-down: Hugo Boss, ACMI Hollywood Costume, Bulgari.)
COLOUR THE NEW BLACK AT BOSS
Hugo Boss headquarters, a glossy outpost in the Melbourne suburb of Preston, is bristling with sample racks of its multiple and highly varied women’s, men’s and accessories collections due for retail delivery in September and October. The vast stable of Boss labels generates thousands of samples every year. Too many to review here, but with a flying overview and closer look into one teensy corner, you get the gist.
[nggallery id=3]A small posse of charming BOSS lieutenants salted our media breeze-through with Bossy facts, such as, for example, fast-swelling numbers of men are incorporating colour in their combos. Among their favorites are green, liver red and, coming up for the racing season around spring, a yellow rather like a soft, chemical banana. Plummy colours are coming through in fall tailored and casual jackets, proper trousers and flipped up chinos. And, yes, this news would be of no consequence in menswear’s middle-down fashion markets where colour is ordinary, but up here in premium class, such an uptake means hitheto conservative blokes are loosening up, getting a tad more adventurous and, that can only be a marvellous thing. The flip-side of the phenomenon is also thrilling: fashion-savvy chaps are also, increasingly besotted with traditional, British-style impeccability and Boss is obliging with fabrications, styling and cut of waistcoats and shirts, sports jackets and suiting, (including the fast-rising double-breasted) and layers of tailoring inaccessories.
[nggallery id=5]Boss Women, Fall 2013 is also an uber-chic standout, inspired by 20th century artist Man Ray. It includes a complex mottled pattern jacquard fabric developed for Boss and fashioned into a shapely sleeveless sheath dress with ombre fade-up from hem to neckline. Another design from the same collection, an arrestingly glamourous black evening gown, features a stepped deco detail embroidered with bugle beads into its waistline. Both looks link back to envelope clutch purses, elegant patent pumps and over-the-knee boots with dainty graphic gold hardware details.
Hugo Boss was taken over in recent years by a private equity company and since the appointment of former Louis Vuitton general manager Claus-Dietrich Lahrs – renowned as a visionery – to the post of CEO, has tightened control of its image and strengthened the handwriting of its designs. It’s still the largest suit manufacturer in the world, but also produces looser, sportswear collections and the tinglingly high fashion HUGO collections for both men and women. www.hugoboss.com
NOT YOUR AVERAGE FROCK SHOW
The Hollywood Costume exhibition at Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) whipped up enough hype this week to float easily through every day of its long, four month season. Interstaters pondering if the schlepp south is worth it; book flights immediately. It is a bona fide mind-blower for anyone remotely enamoured of the arts of couture and/or entranced by the prospect of standing a sigh away from Dorothy’s pinny and sparkly red shoes from “The Wizard of Oz”, or Scarlett’s magnificent ensemble (and hat) fashioned from Tara’s tasselled emerald velvet drapes in “Gone with the Wind”, or the muscled body armour of Bruce Wayne’s alter ego from “Batman”.
Professor Deborah Nadoolman Landis is curator of the exhibition, fresh from a blockbuster season at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. She took pains to point out its unique moment in history: “Many have never been seen in public or displayed or seen beyond the walls of studio archives,” she said earnestly. “And they will never be together again after this show.”
More heartstoppers than can be listed here are dressed on standing, seated, reclining, and even the odd flying mannequin. The inherent and poignant problem of the wearer’s absence – the plague of every clothing exhibition – is quite cleverly addressed by tilted panels inserted into each costume’s neckline and featuring a filmed projection of the original actor’s head: Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Keira Knightley, Judi Dench, Audrey Hepburn…
Life-sized film projections of actors and costume designers including Robert de Niro, Meryl Streep and the legendary Edith Head, discussing the extraordinary psycho-aesthetic aspects of their respective arts, are also nestled between costumes, animating the exhibition and beautifully subverting the classic tendancy of these eventsto feel like a mausoleum of headless figures.
Professor Landis is a very tall, very elegant American in classic black trouser suit, with lush steel-grey bob flicked out to her shoulders. She delighted media with her relentlessly bouncy enthusiasm for the project that has consumed her for several years. Her own costume design pedigree is long and venerable and includes “The Blues Brothers” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark”. She was also canny enough to commission a musical score especially for the exhibition so the typical hush isn’t an issue and, as a viewer, you are richly engaged on more than the usual sensory levels.
www.ACMI.com.au
BULGARI PHILANTHROPY: LOW-KEY, HIGH-FASHION
Bless Bulgari. The 129 year old Italian jewellery house, a philanthropic Godsend to needy children (it generously supports Save The Children) and fashion connoisseurs, hosted yet another lavish fund raising dinner in the National Gallery of Victoria’s Great Hall to announce its latest initiative. The Bulgari Funding Program – NGV International Fashion Acquisitions will acquire significant works, particularly dating from the 1950s to the 1990s, to swell the gallery’s permanent collection.
That span of fashion history resonates with Bulgari’s, according to its managing director, UK and Australia, Julie Ann Morrison. “We feel a special affinity,” she explains. “This period was a very creative period in the history of Bulgari design when the third generation of the Bulgari family took over the company with a youthful exuberance which challenged traditional forms of jewellery design and making and transformed the very idea of what constituted fine jewellery.”
Bulgari’s largesse has already plumped out the NGV collection by one remarkable coat, coutured by Mariano Fortuny in 1920. Three more blips of fashion history, by Pierre Cardin, Claude Montana and Thierry Mugler, were next on the shopping list and added to celebrate the Bulgari Funding Program’s launch this week. “The NGV will be conducting a world-wide search for exceptional examples of works by high fashion designers of the 1960s through to the contemporary,” said gallery director, Tony Ellwood. “We will be focussing on key pieces by key designers. The acquisitions will later be revealed in various displays that are destined to reflect the glamorous, audacious, unconventional and ground-breaking spirit of this period.”
Compiled with Morgan Devitt, Candice Burke, Terry Carruthers and Janice Breen Burns; info@voxfrock.com.au
