A Beginner's Guide to Resort Season: Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein, Lanvin, and more.

I know most of you guys are here for the superheroes, but I gotta be what I gotta be, and sometimes that means posting about mediocre high-end fashion. Right now we're in the middle of Resort/Cruise season which, as you may have noticed from the name, is an imaginary season. In the world of Game Of Thrones, seasons take years to change, meaning that the characters get years to practise the best way to portentiously say "Winter. Is. Coming." In Fashion Land, Resort/Cruise season is the time between Spring and Summer when you swan around various luxury locations while wearing £3000 sunglasses and doing things that are way, way classier than watching Game Of Thrones. The purpose of Resort/Cruise season is to sell designer clothes to these rich people so they have something new to wear on their yacht. This year's Chanel show was pretty good, but by and large the attitude of most major fashion houses to Resort/Cruise season seems to be: "Someone's gonna buy this shit, so let's just print out some bikinis and knee-length skirts and go to the bar, YOLO."

Chris Benz. (All photos from Style.com.)

One of the A+ things about Resort season is the hilariously lacklustre photoshoots. Even during Couture season some designers choose to exhibit using photoshoots instead of live shows, but usually that's either for aesthetic reasons or because they can't afford decent placement at Fashion Week. During Resort season, however, pretty much everyone whose name isn't Lagerfeld exhibits solely via lookbooks. And those lookbooks, as you may be able to tell from the above photo, can be kind of... dodgy. For one thing, the monochrome photo of palm trees looks like something you'd see hanging up in a coffee shop, and it's held up by bullclips. Secondly, the lighting is edging dangerously close to "we shot this in my garage". 

Burberry Prorsum
Believe it or not, the idea of a blank backdrop used to be a weird concept (you can read a bit more about that and post-war fashion photographer Irving Penn here). Sometimes it can make the models look washed out and dull, but for brands like Burberry it's fine because the clothes are mostly in neutral tones.

So, yeah, did I give you enough warning yet that there's going to be a bunch of super-bland shit in this post? Because: BEHOLD.

This gown baffles me because a) there is literally no one in the world who has the correct body shape and boob-volume to correctly fit into this and make it look good, and b) Burberry is a really commercial brand so I really... don't know what they were thinking...?? Resort season mysteries.

Just Cavalli
It's the colour of a really gross-tasting soda drink, it's partially leopard-print, and it comes with a matching lime-green Justin Bieber hat. Teenagers of America, it's your duty to wear this outfit to prom!

Zero + Maria Cornejo
Despite the ~highly imaginative~ usage of backing boards, I give this outfit a grudging B+ because it doesn't look like a half-hearted Resort season attempt at summer fun, and it hits all the things about the irritating "1920s trend" that most mainstream designers miss. Instead of being a period-drama pastiche or Baz Luhrmann ripoff, it takes the drop-waist/long-beaded-necklace details and puts them together in an outfit that looks modern and interesting without being outrageous.

Calvin Klein
This suit may look dull to the untrained eye, but by Calvin Klein standards it's a Lady Gaga stage costume. Calvin Klein hates colours and patterns and loves to design hundreds and hundreds of outfits that essentially amount to beige bedsheets. Unfortunately CK streams a lot of their catwalk shows online, meaning that I've probably wasted/spent at least half an hour of my life heckling at my laptop screen as 37 blank-faced nymphs stride along a pale grey runway in near-identical pale grey smocks. So you can probably understand why this outfit made me fall off my horse.

That being said, there was still a whole bunch of CK outfits that looked like black or white curtains and would only ever look good on Gwyneth Paltrow. But this! Is progress!

DKNY
"LOL" -- direct quote from DKNY head designers after they "finished" "work" on this.  

Lanvin
I love this bathing suit because it just looks so ferociously uncomfortable. Nothing says "relaxing beachwear" like an angry-looking model wearing a bathing costume that looks like it may well be 100% rigid (and attempting to cut off all circulation to her vag), armed with 5-inch perspex heels and a leather shoulderbag.

BEDSHEET.

I feel like I've dissed Lanvin kind of unfairly here because these three photos aren't indicative of the whole show (which was rather stylish, if not particularly remarkable to me personally), but this microwavable tinfoil suit is just the shiznit. I hope someone wears this with the black bathing costume on underneath and uses it to go to the beach on Mars.

Organic by John Patrick.
"My junk feels great in this outfit," thought the John Patrick model, too distracted to button his fucking jacket properly.

Diesel Black Gold
I like this for realsies because it's so Blade Runner.

VPL
This model's name is Hannelore Knut. So: perfect model choice, really, for a lookbook that is so uncharacteristically focused around power rather than passivity.  There's always an unfortunate quantity of crappy, sports-themed fashion during an Olympics year, but this is sports-themed fashion done well. It doesn't look like workout gear but it does look strong and practical and simple, and has a few hints of "sporty" colours without going all-out Adidas.

Hannelore Knut can totally work it, am I right? Some models couldn't carry off low-heeled boots and dresses made from wetsuit material, but this whole photoshoot was like a gallery of badassery.

Marc Jacobs
This is an unexpected departure for Marc Jacobs, who is usually far closer to the the chic, vampy end of the Ladylike scale than the floral, Frida Kahlo/Miuccia Prada end. That being said, the sheer exuberant colours of this collection sucked me in, and I found myself really enjoying how summery and weird-looking it managed to be without ending up in Zooey Deschanel hipster quirk territory.

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Snow White & The Huntsman: The prince doesn't get the girl; the girl gets the kingdom.

Previously: Snow White & The Huntsman: How to tell a fairy story.

Thanks to last week's new releases, my Charlize Theron viewing history is now all the way up to three films total. (The first was Aeon Flux, which, yeah, ask me about that sometime. It's the worst.) I won't be posting a review of Prometheus until it's been out for a little longer, but the one thing I will say is that if you're planning on seeing it, you should read this (non-spoilery) warning first. Following the advice therein will, I think, improve your Prometheus experience.

I was very excited about Snow White & The Huntsman because the marketing was so gosh-darned appealing (surprisingly so, considering the content and audience) and I am of the opinion that Kristen Stewart and Charlize Theron should be the next Bogart and Bacall. Unfortunately, SWATH was nowhere near as good as I expected, dragging on longer than it should have done and including several completely superfluous characters. In some respects it succeeded (ie, visual effects and Awesome Ladies, both of which featured prominently in the trailer) but the end result was an action movie that could've done with more action, and a drama that needed tighter drama.

This movie may not have been very good but KRISTEN STEWART IS STILL MY KHALEESI.

I'm inclined to be biased in favour of SWATH because it's so clearly Bechdel-approved. It's a story about women and the problems they face because of the way women are socialised to think about their own power and beauty. The hero and the villain are both women, and neither of them resemble Kate Beaton's Strong Female Characters or the kind of emotionless kickboxing androids that appear in so many other genre movies. The prince doesn't get the girl; the girl gets the kingdom. 2012 has been a fantastic year for female-led sci-fi/fantasy movies, and my only serious issue with the feminist themes in SWATH is the way Ravenna's relationship with beauty and power was portrayed. While too much explanation will inevitably ruin any story that hinges on "magic", the complete lack of a coherent explanation regarding Ravenna and Snow White's various intangible powers meant that their ultimate standoff packed far less of a punch than it should have done. It's not often that I complain about there being not enough exposition in a blockbuster movie, but this was such an easily-solved problem that a minute or so of flashback montage might well have sorted it out.

screencap from here.

Ravenna's belief that a woman's youthful beauty is a direct source of power means that she ends up sucking the land dry, bathing in milk while peasants starve and faceless medieval Stormtroopers serve up supermodel Lily Cole as a royal snack. Kristen Stewart's Snow White, on the other hand, shows no signs of knowing or caring what she looks like, and is the avatar of some kind of Aslan-like power that causes flowers to blossom as soon as she comes near. But if her inherent goodness (or divine Queenship, passed down from Mum?) is so strong that it charms the fairies from the trees and Princess Mononoke's forest-spirit from the water, how come there was no evidence of this in the cell she was locked inside those years? Was she unable to photosynthesise?

I couldn't help but compare this aspect of the film unfavourably to Stardust, a movie that, while different in tone, stars a similarly image-obsessed witch as the villain. Another place where SWATH fell down in comparison to Stardust was the cast of cameo characters, headed up by Bob Hoskins as a blind dwarf soothsayer. Hoskins had the unenviable role of saying things like, "She is... the one," in portentious tones while making it abundantly clear that he was only there for the paycheque. While the ghostly princes in Stardust provided witty comic relief, the dwarves in SWATH (all of them famous character-actors, and all utterly wasted in the roles they were given) were embarrassing and could just as well have been cut from the film entirely. Not to mention how uncomfortable it was to realise that eight average-sized actors had been hired to play dwarves, something that seems dangerously similar to racebending.

If this post seems overly negative, it's only because I had such high hopes for this film before I saw it. In fact there were many things that I did enjoy once I got past the clunky pacing and the inexplicable inclusion of terrible characters like Ravenna's ambiguously incest-y albino brother (ugh). Charlize Theron's intense/camp supervillain meltdowns were awesome, and I have a lot of admiration for Kristen Stewart's ability to work so well with what she was given. SWATH would have benefited hugely from a scene or two where Snow White either learns some more tangible skills or gives a Game Of Thrones-esque speech to her troops before battle, but Kristen Stewart still came across as an appealing and unusual hero. This film had many flaws, but casting wasn't one of them. I haven't seen Twilight, but I'm beginning to see why Stewart was chosen to be Bella Swan. I've heard that Bella is a character whose success hinges on the actor's ability to silently emote for five movies in a row while still retaining audience interest, and having seen Kristen Stewart's Snow White I'm inclined to believe that she can do it. I only wish that she'd been given more dialogue in this movie, for all that she managed to wring as much emotional truth from her running-and-fighting scenes as possible.

This was a Costume Movie. It's been out for less than a week and I've already had several people ask me if I'm going to review the costumes, but I honestly don't think there's much to say about them other than that they were stunning. The strongest aspect of SWATH was the visuals, from the supernatural forests to the hyper-real troll attack to the scene where a flock of ravens coalesce to form an oil-slick filthy Ravenna wearing a glistening raven-feather dress. For anyone with any interest in clothes, Ravenna's gowns are the standout costumes, and I suspect that the designer (Colleen Atwood) is a shoo-in for another Oscar nomination. Combining a Marie Antoinette-like opulence with spiky, venomous imagery, Ravenna's loosely medieval-inspired gowns are destined for fashion magazine photo spreads. This is the kind of costume design that works very well in a broad, "that looks awesome" sense because Ravenna's clothes are so obviously beautiful and intricately complex, even out of context. I don't mean to imply that this type of costume design is somehow less worthy than subtler, more character-specific costuming -- just that it's a good example of the kind of attention-grabbing work that gets nominated for awards year after year.

Detail shot of Ravenna's beetle-carapace dress.

All these ferociously uncomfortable-looking costumes fit well with Charlize's over-the-top, campy performance, and serve to highlight Ravenna's vanity and lack of care for the fate of the less fortunate. Thousands starve while Ravenna sits in her chambers wearing 30lbs of silk and reapplying her blood-of-virgins lipstick. I like to imagine that after she's drained a young woman of her life-force, her victim is then put to work in a sweatshop full of other young/old women sewing thousands of sequins and feathers onto Ravenna's next sartorial masterpiece. The white wedding dress she wears at the beginning of the film is almost "historical"-looking and comparatively soft in appearance, but once she becomes queen her own style takes over and it's sexy glam-rock Nazgul corsetry from there on in.

Fairytale by way of Gareth Pugh?

While Ravenna's gowns were beautiful examples of craftsmanship and design they were, in a way, the easy choice. The queen in Snow White has to look evil and sexy and rich, whereas Snow White herself is a far more difficult character to quantify. The dirty hand-me-down dress, though, looked great on Kristen Stewart, and handily transformed into a more practical tunic/leggings outfit with a bit of help from Thor's the Huntsman's knife. And her practical, flat-chested armour? Wonderful. I was actually disappointed when she finally reached her victorious coronation moment at the end and had to wear a Queen dress instead.

Kristen Stewart's Snow White and Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games are the only mainstream blockbuster heroines I can think of who really have no idea of personal vanity or prettiness, which is kind of marvellous. Now all we need to do is work on making more movies like this that don't implicitly demonise women who like to dress up and look pretty.

I have mixed feelings about the love-triangle situation. I find it refreshing to watch a movie like this and not feel that a romance subplot has been shoehorned in just for the sake of it, and I appreciated that the Huntsman didn't immediately abandon his drinking problem and the memory of his wife as soon as he began to have feelings for Snow White. However, the ending already seemed abrupt enough without some hint of a romantic resolution, especially since it might have balanced out the creepily non-participatory nature of Snow White's earlier kisses. Even though I suspect that those kisses were meant to be a cut-and-dried "true love's kiss" deal, I'd rather interpret them as being about trust. When Snow White first escapes, she wants to get to William because she has nowhere else to turn, and although she accepts the Huntsman's help she still keeps her cards close to the chest. Her trust in him grows organically, and is finally proven when he shows up by her side when her army attacks the castle. The reason why the Huntsman's kiss works while William's fails is because William's feelings for Snow White are mostly based on guilt and childhood obsession, whereas the Huntsman actually knows Snow White as an adult.

(Alternatively, the kisses were just coincidental and Snow White woke up of her own damn accord because the Force is strong with her.)

The Huntsman has the Aragorn-esque look of a man who smells really intensely terrible but is handsome enough to get away with it (because we can't smell him). When we first see him he's swilling ale and being pushed into a trough full of dirty water, and for the rest of the movie he marinades gently in his no-doubt old and sweaty leather jerkin. The men of SWATH are very obviously second-tier to Charlize Theron in terms of costume design, most of them clad in the kind of dirty faux-medieval fare one would expect. William is more of a traditional knight-in-shining-armour than the more lower-class Huntsman, but both of their costumes fall into the nonspecific medieval fantasy category.

photo from here.

A friend pointed out to me that the romance in SWATH reads a lot like the first volume in a Young Adult trilogy. Both of the guys have been introduced, but while they both seem to have sorted out their own feelings for the heroine by the end of the story, she's still barely aware that she's in the middle of a potential love triangle. The implication is that the Huntsman is the favoured suitor, but William is no less heroic or appealing, leaving options open for a possible sequel. And, you know, even though this film was far from the high-quality Game Of Thrones drama I was hoping for, I would watch a sequel. But not to find out whether Snow White is Team William or Team Huntsman, because I'm still firmly in Team Snow White.

Links

Photo gallery of Colleen Atwood's costumes for Snow White & The Huntsman.
HuffPo: 'Snow White and the Huntsman' Is A New Twist On An Old Tale.
Early concept art for Ravenna. 

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Spring 2012 Haute Couture: Dior, Mabille, Valli, Givenchy, Versace, and Armani.

Christian Dior

It's rare for me to agree with anything the Guardian' Fashion Editor Jess Cartner-Morley writes, but today's "Has couture lost its edge?" article was pretty spot on. So far the shows at Couture Fashion Week have been lacklustre, when ordinarily they'd be the highlight of the fashion world's year. That's the danger of working in an art form that relies upon funding from retail business and work from hundreds of disparate corporate employees worldwide. In times of economic difficulty, imagination and creativity have to fall by the wayside in favour of saleability and broad appeal. The Dior show was a textbook  example of this: sumptuous quality combined with a back-to-basics approach to the classic New Look silhouette -- a collection that could have been released at any time in the last 60 years, and sold well in any of them.

I have less criticism for Dior than I do for many of the other designers who resorted to trotting out entire collections of tired gown clichés this season. The New Look is Dior's heritage and legacy, and the quality of their Couture is so high that I can excuse a season or two of relatively bland designs. Plus, when Dior stages a Couture show they really know how to go for full-on glamour and allow the models to work it for once, instead of making them strut and down like seething, expressionless droids.

All pics from Style.com

Alexis Mabille

Another example of beautifully-made gowns that are ultimately rather dull. This show had something of the designer's sketchbook about it -- colour-coded outfits wherein almost every model was wearing a relatively normal-looking dress such as one might find at any high-end store, plus matching facepaint and an enormous flower head-dress to spruce it up. It all seemed rather expected -- a sense of colourful richness but with very little thought behind it, and no theme outside the blindingly obvious statement of colour-coded formalwear and extravagant hats.

Giambattista Valli
I picked these two outfits since they so efficiently illustrate the many similiarities between the Giambattista Valli and Christian Dior collections. A largely monochromatic palette with a few hints of pastel colour thrown in, narrow-waisted hourglass figures, and a multitude of sheer skirts. Superficial similarities, but close enough that having looked at the Dior show first, Giambattista Valli left me feeling thoroughly bored. While Dior was very obviously Couture -- and quite married to the classic full-skirted New Look silhouette -- many of the Giambattista Valli designs could have come from a ready-to-wear show, since they were little more than classically feminine evening dresses or pencil skirt combos made with transluscent fabric to inject a little daring into the proceedings.

Givenchy
Thanks to the presence of the basketball, this immediately reminded me of Alien: Resurrection. Sigourney Weaver's brown leather costume wasn't a million miles away from some of Givenchy's scaly, bug-like designs this season, and the basketball scene is one of the most iconic scenes in that movie. Givenchy was the first departure from outright prettiness that I'd seen this season, and it was a welcome change.

The sci-fi comparisons aren't unfair. Like Versace, Givenchy's show was partially inspired by Fritz Lang's Metropolis, combining the the grim and practical with the floor-length glamour of 1930s evening gowns. I will express no surprise whatsoever if Rooney Mara ends up wearing something from this collection to the Oscars.

Versace
This was Versace's first Couture show since 2004, and it might have been a wise idea to leave the public showings for another year. The cheap backdrop and garish lighting gave the whole thing something of a gameshow feel, and the designs themselves -- supposedly themed around the movie Metropolis, which was decidedly not known for its bright colour scheme -- mostly looked like B-grade Lady Gaga costumes. And Lady Gaga doesn't do B-grade. 

Outfits like this almost smacked of degree shows and trainee designers -- it's nothing more than an extremely simple evening dress, plus wire contouring on one side to give it that space-age look. A watered-down version of mid-90s Thierry Mugler's brightly-coloured, structural extremism. Several of the designs almost looked (dare I say it) cheap, which is the ultimate no-no for Couture.

Armani Prive
Snakeskin and business-casual: not a combination you hope or expect to see outside of garish '90s TV. But this time I think it worked, partly because there was no serious suggestion that this was real officewear, and partly because the snake theme was so evident throughout the show. Evident, but unlike the aimlessly colour-coded outfits at Alexis Mabille, not without substance.

Every single outfit had some aspect of the snake to it. All were sleek and coloured around green jewel tones and glossy black, but the fabrics ranged from literal (fake snakeskin) to more experimental (snake print, fishnet that from afar gave the impression of mottled scale patterns, overlapping sequins, and interlocking slats of fabric that resembled an extreme close-up of scales).

The only actual snakes present were in tiny details. If any of the models had actually been dressed as snakes instead of merely holding a couple of snakelike characteristics, the show would have tipped over into the realm of obviousness.

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Pre-Fall 2012: Alexandre Herchcovitch, Giles, Lanvin, Alexander Wang, and more.

Alexandre Herchcovitch
Sorry to be the one to tell you this, but next season we're all going to be wearing high-waisted tapered tartan trousers and double-breasted crop-tops made from faux sheepskin. Why? Because Alexandre Herchcovitch says so. Little known fact: he does things like this to get back at people for mispronouncing his name.

Oh, definitely.

And for the cold-weather version of this outfit, we have this sheepskin (probably?) jacket that looks like it may or may not decapitate the model whenever she bends over. And a double-breasted (double-crotched?) tartan skirt, that old... favourite...

All pics from Style.com.

Giles
This show was quite stylishly shot, but the photos are so overexposed that the lighter-skinned model (pictured here) practically vanished into the background. I don't know if this was on purpose, but in my opinion any fiddling around with lighting/aftereffects -- unless it's to make the clothes MORE visible -- tends to be detrimental to the collection. Why don't you want me to see your designs properly, Giles?

LOVE the sunglasses.

Lanvin
Here we have the other side of lighting problems: too dark. Lanvin's collection was largely dark in colour, and they inexiplicably decided to shoot it in a room with black walls and minimal light-sources. I picked this outfit because I enjoyed the Zorro-like combination of leather gloves, trousers tucked into boots and hat covering the eyes, but most of the rest of the collection was just those weirdly-tailored wool coats that make everyone look like they have the shoulders of the turtle-aliens from The Fifth Element.

Nanette Lepore
A+ to this photoshoot for being pleasant to look at. None of that monochrome background + knock-kneed, frozen-looking model malarkey for Nanette Lepore -- instead they went for a warm, inviting sunflower yellow background and a model who posed casually and seemed full of personality. The clothes themselves were appealing although not particularly interesting, but I particularly liked shots such as this:

T by Alexander Wang
This type of outfit is forever a Murdersmock to me. And Alexander Wang has helpfully included some nice two-tone murdersmock leggings to go with it! For when you want to look like set-dressing on Dexter.

Murdersmock.

Murdersmockmurdersmock.

Alexander Wang
WHY is this woman being forcibly bisected like that? This isn't a cinched-waist/hourglass-figure type situation -- this is an woman needlessly being given the proportions of a Christmas cracker. The sweater/dress thing underneath looks quite interesting, but -- KABOOM! Skirt. The skirt. Is there. Because of reasons.

Please let this not become a trend.

Alexander Wang is one of the designers I can tolerate being this aggressively grey, since that's his thing. Alexander Wang is sort of the Muji of mainstream fashion design. He makes clothes for people who never come into contact with dirt, and probably live in studio apartments full of cuboid monochrome furniture with iPad docks all over it.

See what I meant about Muji?

Wayne
Ordinarily I'm not that keen on womenswear that uses faux shirt-tails, but I think this is different enough from a real suit that it strikes that rare balance with the detestable "suit-inspired outfit".

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