Ali Mahdavi -" Magician of light"

Diane Pernet- A Shaded View on Fashion

Diane Pernet 

Serge Lutens- Le Parfum

French photographer, perfume art- director, film maker, hair stylist, set designer , makeup artist and creator of extraordinary objects . 

Serge Lutens is an image -maker of genius.

We've met in the Les Salons du Palais Royal. A house of perfume designed by Monsieur Lutens. We've talked for almost two hours about everything, love, money, faith.  Marvelous meeting with the magician.

  Serge Lutens was born on 14 March 1942 in Lille, France.

He is most is most well known for his art direction and photography for Japanese cosmetics company Shiseido in the 1980s. 

  

Serge Lutens was fourteen when he was taken by a hair salon in Lille as an apprentice. Lutens started to experiment with makeup and photography using friends as models.

Lutens moved to Paris in 1962 where Vogue magazine hired him to create makeup, hair and jewelry.

He collaborated with photographers such as Richard Avedon, Irving Penn.

In 1967 Lutens created makeup line for Christian Dior.

  In 1973 series of photographs inspired by artists Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani was shown in New York , at the Guggenheim Museum. 

He directed two short art films " Les Stars" and " Suaire" which were shown at the Cannes Film Festival.

  Shiseido hired Lutens in 1980 to develop their product image and Lutens made each advertising piece of art.  Very mystical , inspiring.

  In the early 1990s Lutens conceived and designed the " Les Salons du Palais Royal" a house of perfume.

  In 2000, Serge Lutens launched his own brand " Parfume-Beaute Serge Lutens"

  Serge Lutens currently lives in Marrakech, Morocco.

Madame Carven- Legend

 The interview with legendary Madame Carven was recorded in her beautiful apartment on Avenue Foch surrounded by Dutch and Flemish paintings, and other artwork collected by Madame Carven and her late husband, Rene Grog and her fantastic collection of porcelain birds.

 French couturier Madame Carmen de Tommaso was born in 1909 . She first studied architecture and interior design at Ecole de Beaux Arts  , but changed to fashion design.

She established Carven in 1945 with an atelier on Champs-Elysees. Her clientele quickly grew.

Edith Piaf, Martin Carol, Leslie Caron all were dressed by Madame Carven including the future wife of president Valery Giscard d'Estaing, whose wedding dress she designed.

For half a century Carven was the favourite  designer of petite women.

    "  She was the first to dare to do ready-to wear, she was revolutionary" acknowledged Federation president Didier Grumbach, who once worked for her.

 Designers were making clothes for older women , not young women. Madame Carven took advantage of this and started designing pretty and fresh garments. Her favourite color was green and especially loved green and white stripes.

 Shortly afterwards, Madame Carven launched a fresh, floral scent " Ma Griffe" and in 1950 , very successful scent, Vetiver for men.

   In 1949 when Jacqueline Francois sang of " Les robes de chez Carven" in her immortal song " Mademoiselle de Paris", the clothes of Madame Carven embodied all the charm, gaiety, and beauty of the city of Paris and its women in the magical period after the war.

Gareth Pugh-about his childhood,inspiration,love.

 

Gareth Pugh is an English fashion designer born August 31, 1981.
At 14, Pugh began working as a costume designer for the English National Youth Theater. His fashion education he started at City of Sunderland College and finished his degree at Central Saint Martins.
He interned with Rick Owens in Paris.
Pugh's designs are about the struggle between lightness and darkness and are more autobiographical rather than referential.
He has partnered with Rick Owens and Michele Lamy, who hold a 49% interest in Gareth Pugh's firm.
The husband and wife team now fund all of Pugh's collection development, production and marketing.

Edmonde Charles-Roux

Edmonde Charles-Roux was born on 17 April, 1920.

Daughter of Francois Charles-Roux , Ambassador of France and the last president of the Suez Canal Company.

WAR TIME

During the Second World War, she was a volunteer nurse and was wounded at Verdun in rescuing a legionnaire.

Decorated with the Croix de Guerre, she was made Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur in 1945.

JOURNALIST. EDITOR. WRITER

In 1946 with Madame Lazareff , a weekly women's  magazine ELLE has been created, where Edmonde Charles-Roux spent two years. 

From 1948 she worked for the French edition of Vogue and soon became the editor-in-chief of  French Vogue. 

Vogue democratized luxury while giving access to the most innovative artists of the time. Photographers like Guy Bourdin, Henry Clarke, William Klein, Irving Penn or designers Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Emanuel Ungaro. 

Edmonde Charles-Roux connected fashion with any other form of creativity by combining ready-to-wear and Pop Art.

She was fired from Vogue in 1966, as she wanted to place a black model on the cover of the magazine.

Beautiful photo by Willian Klein.

Three months later her book " Oublier Palerme" was published and obtained the Prix Goncourt.

The novel was adapted to film as " Dimenticare Palermo" in 1990 by Francesco Rosi.

She also known for writing the only true story about Coco Chanel. She spent hours with Mademoiselle Chanel and wrote the book " Chanel and her world"

In 1983 Edmonde Charles-Roux became member of the Academie Goncourt and in 2002, president.

Edmonde Charles-Roux is awarded with the knighthood of Commandeur de la Legion d'Honneur.

Lillian Bassman

Lillian Bassman is a beloved figure in the pantheon of fashion photographers. Her signature style offers a sensuous and intimate vision of modern women. In New York in the 1950s and 1960s, where sophisticated women were expanding the scope of their lives while being forced into traditional feminine roles, Bassman sought as she put it " to photograph fashion with woman's eye for a woman's intimate feelings".

The women who appear in her photographs tend to be tall and attractive , and they have the kind of seductive expression that comes from keeping secrets.

Born in Brooklyn, on June 15, 1917, Bassman was the second daughter of Russian immigrants who had fled the pogroms.
Bassman's father earned his living as a painting contractor. Bassman later described him as a kind and dependable family man who slipped out the door every morning at dawn, working lond days.
Her mother, was less reconciled to her lot in life. " All my mother wanted was to have her hand kissed" She wanted to partake of the parties, with their jazz and bathtub gin.
In the summer of 1923 , when Lillian was six , her mother took her and her sister to Coney Island for an extended stay on the ocean. Clara, mother of Lillian worked as a waitress at a vegetarian restaurant that claimed to be the first one in America.
The place was owned by her friends Keeva and Sadie Himmel, and it was during this summer that Lillian first met her future husband. Paul Himmel was a nine year old bachelor. The next time they met she was fifteen and soon they were living together in Greenwich village.

She studied at the Textile High School, with Alexey Brodovitch, in Manhattan and graduated in 1933.
From the 1940s until the 1960s, Bassman worked as a fashion photographer for Junior Bazaar and later at Harper's Bazaar,where she promoted the careers of photographers such as Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, Louis Faurer and Arnold Newman.
Under the guidance of the Russian emigrant Alexey Brodovitch, she began to photograph her model subjects primarily in black and white. Her work was published for the most part in Harper’s Bazaar, between 1950-1965.
Disillusioned by the costuming of the late 1960s, she had had enough of fashion and expressed her disdain by destroying decades’ worth of negatives and placing others in a trash bag in the coal room of her Upper East Side carriage house. Her era of furtive eroticism was over, and there was no point in scrapbooking it.

The power of Ms. Bassman’s photographs is the power of a woman who is never moved to make a call.

Bassman is now one of the last great woman photographers in the world of fashion.

DOVIMA - "Last Aristocratic Beauty"

Dorothy Virginia Margaret Juba (December 11, 1927 – May 3, 1990), later known as Dorothy Horan, and best known as Dovima, was a model during the 1950s. 

Born in New York City, Dovima was discovered on a sidewalk in New York by an editor at Vogue, and had a photo shoot with Irving Penn the following day. She was an overnight success and soon was the highest paid model in the business. 

Jerry Ford of Ford Models said, "She was the super-sophisticated model in a sophisticated time, definitely not the girl next door."

She worked closely with Richard Avedon, whose photograph of her in a floor-length black evening gown with circus elephants—"Dovima with the Elephants"—taken at the Cirque d'hiver, Paris, in August 1955, has become an icon. 

The gown was the first evening dress designed for Christian Dior by his new assistant, Yves Saint-Laurent.

The half-Polish, half-Irish daughter of Stanley Juba, she was raised in Jackson Heights, Queens. 

She contracted rheumatic fever at age ten and was confined to bed. 

The standard treatment was a year in bed, but her overprotective mother kept her home for the next seven years. It was a lonely time for her. She took up painting and had an imaginary friend, whom she called Dovima- using the first two letters of each of her given names. Doe, as her family called her, only socialized by telephone with other invalid children that her tutor educated. 

It's not too surprising then that her first husband, Jack Golden, was an upstairs neighbor. He simply moved into Doe's bedroom in her family's home.

Photo Richard Avedon

She appeared on the covers of all the fashion magazines and worked with every major photographer of the day. She formed a particular bond with Richard Avedon who would take the most famous photos of Dovima.

After her death, Richard Avedon said, "She was the last of the great elegant, aristocratic beauties...the most remarkable and unconventional beauty of her time." 

On another occasion, Avedon said, "The ideal of beauty then was the opposite of what it is now. It stood for an extension of the aristocratic view of women as ideals, of women as dreams, of women as almost surreal objects. Dovima fit that in her proportions."

Richard Avedon , Dovima in Balenciaga

Dovima and Jack Golden divorced in the late fifties and she married Alan Murray. She let him handle all of their finances as Jack Golden had. They had a daughter, Alison. 

Alan Murray is remembered as a man with boundless anger. 

In Vanity Fair, Mimi Swartz wrote, "That at times her husband beat her so severely that she could not show up for work did not, at first, cut into her bookings." 

Carmen Dell'Orefice commented on Dovima's love life, "Sadly she could only be with men who beat her. I'd find her on my doorstep black and blue, and I'd take her in and she'd live with me." 

In 1960 she moved with Alison to Los Angeles to pursue acting work. Murray told the FBI that Dovima had kidnapped their daughter. The two divorced and she lost custody of Alison. 

Dovima never saw her again.

Dovima appeared in 1957's Funny Face with Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire. The musical was loosely based on Richard Avedon. In fact Avedon shot the fashion pictures that appear in the film, and the photographer that Astaire plays is named "Dick Avery". Dovima plays ditzy fashions model Marion. She has only a few scenes, but comes off very funny and glamorous.

Photo by Horst P.Horst

She announced her retirement from modeling in 1959, but actually posed until 1962. 

Of retiring, Dovima said, "I didn't want to wait until the camera turned cruel."

Unfortunately she hadn't saved any of her money.

When the TV appearances dried up, she spent the late sixties and early seventies working as a spokesperson for Qiana, a clothing line.

In 1974, she moved to Ft. Lauderdale to be near her parents and held various jobs like selling cosmetics and hosting at restaurants. 

She fell in love with a co-worker, bartender West Hollingsworth with whom she had twelve happy years. 

They married in 1983, but Hollingsworth died of cancer in 1986. It was a devastating blow to her and she never really recovered.

Dovima for Lanvin by Henry Clarke

In 1984 she went to work in Pizzeria as a hostess. 

She said she worked with nice people and was the mascot for their softball team. 

She enjoyed her status as kind of local celebrity. She commented in 1987, "The only 'has been' is one who has been. You have to Have Been in order to be a has been." 

She died of liver cancer on May 3, 1990. 

What she left behind are photographs that are a part of our culture. Images that speak of a time and a dream, that somehow speak volumes yet nothing at the same time.

"Beauty Icon and Muse" - Betty Catroux

Betty Catroux (born Betty Saint) is a former Chanel model and fashion icon who has been cited as a muse by both Yves Saint Laurent and Tom Ford.
Saint Laurent has called her his twin sister and referred to her as his female incarnation.
Tom Ford was so inspired by her that he dedicated his debut YSL Rive Gauche collection to her.
  Catroux is famed for her long white-blond hair, lanky body, gaunt features, and androgynous appearance.
Catroux and Saint Laurent met, according to her, in a "very, very gay" nightclub in Paris, Regine's in the 1960s and have had a friendly relationship ever since.

When Victor Hugo asked her in 1976 what she normally did in Paris, Catroux answered "nothing".

"Shocking Elsa" - Elsa Schiaparelli

Along with Coco Chanel, her greatest rival, she is regarded as one of the most prominent figures in fashion between the two World Wars.
 Starting with knitwear, Schiaparelli's designs were heavily influenced by Surrealists like her collaborators Salvador Dalí , Jean Cocteau and Alberto Giacometti.
Schiaparelli was born at the Palazzo Corsini in Rome.
Her mother was a Neopolitan aristocrat and her father a renowned scholar and curator of medieval manuscripts.
 Her father, Celestino, was Dean of the University of Rome and an authority on Sanskrit. She was a niece of astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who discovered the canali of Mars, and she spent hours with him studying the heavens.She studied philosophy at the University of Rome, during which she published a book of sensual poems that shocked her conservative family. Schiaparelli was sent to a convent until she went on hunger strike and at the age of 22 accepted a job in London as a nanny. Elsa led a refined life with a certain amount of luxury provided by her parents’ wealth and high social status. She believed, however, that this luxury was stifling to her art and creativity and so she removed herself from the “lap of luxury” as quickly as possible. Schiaparelli moved first to New York City and then to Paris, combining her love of art and design to become a surrealist couturier.

En route to London, Schiaparelli was invited to a ball in Paris. Having no ballgown, she bought some dark blue fabric, wrapped it around herself and pinned it in place.
When only 18, she married William de Wendt de Kerlor, a theosophist. She remained with him as he drifted around Europe, eventually reaching America, but he abandoned her when her daughter was born. She then returned to Paris, a young woman with a child to support. She tried to get a job with Paul Poiret  and Maggy Rouff, unsuccessfully. However in 1928, she had some luck. She had drawn a design of a black sweater with a white trompe l'oeil bow at the neck. Mainbocher admired it and had it shown in the French VOGUE.
Anita Loos purchased on, and a buyer for a New York store ordered 40 with skirts to go along with them. Elsa was surprised at the success of her sweater and recruited a group of Armenian women to knit them. She bought some good cheap material for the skirts, and rounded up another group of women to make these.
"Schiap" was in business.

She experimented with costume jewellery. The early 30's saw Schiaparelli consolidated techniques, bringing together expert craftsmen for couture. A skilled atelier meant a finished garment and excellent construction following her genius as a designer. She sniffed out unusual materials like glass-like cellophane giving an illusion of transparency.
Schiaparelli was the first to use shoulder pads, hot pink, calling it SHOCKING PINK ,in 1947, animal print fabrics, and zippers dyed the same colors as the fabrics. She is also well known for her surrealist designs of the 1930's, especially her hats, including one resembling a giant shoe and one a giant lamb chop, both which were famously worn by the Franco-American Singer sewing machine heiress Daisy Fellowes, who was one of Schiaparelli's best clients and who owned a pink gemstone that inspired the color shocking pink.

In 1934 Elsa Schiaparelli opened a shop in London and also moved her Paris salon to 21 place Vendome. In the window of her boutique she put Dali's handiwork along with other surrealist works, and it was a great attraction to people on their way to the Ritz Hotel nearby.
Her shocking clothes seldom offended any of her clients.
Mrs Reginald Fellowes, Wallis Simpson later Duchess of Windsor, Millicent Rogers and Lady Elsie Mendl were among her elegant clients. It was even said that Daisy Fellowes managed to carry the lamp chop hat off.
She dressed many movie stars both on and off the screen, including Marlene Dietrich, Gloria Swanson and Tallulah Bankhead.
Her frenzy with Mae West, led to the actress's hour-glass figure being used for Schiap's perfume bottle for "Shocking".
The 30's were "Schiap's" decade. Whatever she made, made headlines.

Schiaparelli was an innovative woman and fashion designer. She had a lot of "firsts" in the fashion industry. Her career began with her introduction of graphic knitwear to the world of fashion with knit patterns and emblems. These led to her fanciful prints of body parts, food, and many more unusual themes. She was the first to use brightly colored zippers, appearing first on her sportswear in 1930 and again five years later on her evening dresses.
Not only was she the first to use brightly colored zippers, but she was also the first to have them dyed to match the material used in her garments. She was the first to create and use fanciful buttons that looked more like brooches. They came in the shapes of peanuts, bees, and even ram’s heads.
In Parisian fashion, she invented culottes, introduced Arab breeches, embroidered shirts, wrapped turbans, pompom-rimmed hats, barbaric belts, the “wedge,” a soled shoe that would trend through the 20th century and into the next, and mix-and-match sportswear, the concept of which would not be fully recognized for another forty to fifty years.
While her innovations in fashion design were numerous, it was her creation of the runway show as we know it today that was most influential. Her modern idea of a fashion show included a runway with music and art, and the use of elongated, shapeless women as models. She believed that this boyish figure would best display the clothing.
Many people do not realize the true sum of her impact on fashion and the fashion industry.

A darker tone was set when France declared war on Germany in 1939. Schiaparelli's Spring 1940 collection featured "trench" brown and camouflage print taffetas. Soon after the fall of Paris on 14 June 1940, Schiaparelli sailed to New York for a lecture tour apart from a few months in Paris in early 1941, she remained in New York City until the end of the war.
 On her return she found that fashions had changed, with Christian Dior's "New Look" marking a rejection of pre-war fashion. The house of Schiaparelli struggled in the austerity of the post-war period, and Elsa finally closed it down in December 1954,the same year that her great rival Chanel returned to the business.
Aged 64, she wrote her autobiography and then lived out a comfortable retirement between her apartment in Paris and house in Tunisia.
She died on 13 November 1973.
Elsa Schiaparelli's daughter, Countess Maria Luisa Yvonne Radha de Wendt de Kerlor, better known as Gogo Schiaparelli, married shipping executive Robert L. Berenson.
Their children were model Marisa Berenson and photographer Berry Berenson.
Both sisters appeared regularly in Vogue in the early 1970s. Berry was married Anthony Perkins, who died of AIDS on September 12, 1992.
Almost 9 years later, on September 11, 2001, Berry perished tragically on American Airlines Flight 11 when it crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center during the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Richard Avedon-"The Eye of Fashion" Master of portraits

Richard Avedon (May 15, 1923 – October 1, 2004) was an American photographer whose fashion and portrait photographs helped define America's image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century.
Avedon was born in New York City to a Jewish Russian family.
After briefly attending Columbia University, he started as a photographer for the Merchant Marines in 1942, taking identification pictures of the crewmen with the camera given to him by his father as a going-away present.
In 1944, he began working as an advertising photographer for a department store, but was quickly discovered by Alexey Brodovitch, the art director for the fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar.
In 1946, Avedon had set up his own studio and began providing images for magazines including Vogue and Life.
He soon became the chief photographer for Harper's Bazaar.
Avedon did not conform to the standard technique of taking fashion photographs, where models stood emotionless and seemingly indifferent to the camera. Instead, Avedon showed models full of emotion, smiling, laughing, and, many times, in action.

During the early years, Avedon made his living primarily through work in advertising. His real passion, however, was the portrait and its ability to express the essence of its subject.
Avedon’s ability to present personal views of public figures, who were otherwise distant and inaccessible, was immediately recognized by the public and the celebrities themselves.
In 1966, Avedon left Harper's Bazaar to work as a staff photographer for Vogue magazine. He proceeded to become the lead photographer of Vogue and photographed most of the covers from 1973 until Anna Wintour became editor in chief in late 1988.
 When he was working , Avedon was so acutely creative, so sensitive. And he didn't like it if anyone else was around or speaking. There was a mutual vulnerability, and a moment of fusion when he was clicking the shutter. Avedon was always interested in how portraiture captures the personality and soul of its subject.

In addition to his continuing fashion work, Avedon began to branch out and photographed patients of mental hospitals.The brutal reality of the lives of the insane was a bold contrast to his other work. Years later he would again drift from his celebrity portraits with a series of studio images of drifters, carnival workers, and working class Americans.

Hollywood presented a fictional account of his early career in the 1957 musical Funny Face, starring Fred Astaire as the fashion photographer "Dick Avery."
Avedon supplied some of the still photographs used in the production, including its most famous single image: an intentionally overexposed close-up of Audrey Hepburn's face in which only her famous features - her eyes, her eyebrows, and her mouth - are visible.
Hepburn was Avedon's muse in the 1950s and 1960s, and he went so far as to say
"I am, and forever will be, devastated by the gift of Audrey Hepburn before my camera. I cannot lift her to greater heights. She is already there. I can only record. I cannot interpret her. There is no going further than who she is. She has achieved in herself her ultimate portrait."
Throughout the 1960s Avedon continued to work for Harper’s Bazaar and in 1974 he collaborated with James Baldwin on the book Nothing Personal.
Having met in New York in 1943, Baldwin and Avedon were friends and collaborators for more than thirty years.
For all of the 1970s and 1980s Avedon continued working for Vogue magazine, where he would take some of the most famous portraits of the decades.
In 1992 he became the first staff photographer for The New Yorker, and two years later the Whitney Museum brought together fifty years of his work in the retrospective, “Richard Avedon: Evidence”.

In 1944, Avedon married Dorcas Nowell, who later became a model and was known professionally as Doe Avedon. Nowell and Avedon divorced after five years of marriage.

 In 1951, he married Evelyn Franklin, she died on March 13, 2004

On October 1, 2004, Avedon died of a brain hemorrhage in San Antonio, Texas, while shooting an assignment for The New Yorker.