fashion
Kieron Tyler
“I tell myself that I have created the modern woman's wardrobe,” declares Yves Saint Laurent during the press conference that opens L’amour fou. Hubris, but the trouser suits, safari jackets and Mondrian dresses he created did – in other manufacturers' hands - become day-to-day wear. The gathering was called in 2002 so the designer could announce his retirement. Despite his death in 2008, the YSL brand lives on. The hagiographic L’amour fou won’t undermine that.Like the Simon and Garfunkel documentary reviewed last week on theartsdesk, L’amour fou is intimately entangled with parties linked Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As artificial spaces, clubs struggle to embrace the organic environment. The music and arts collective Noise of Art are bridging the gap by working with the charity Trees for Cities, with DJs donating their time to raise funds for planting trees in London. On 17 September, Noise of Art is working with Trees for Cities at Battersea Park and taking over the Village Underground for a fundraising event.The events are supported by the Cultural Programme of the European Union and are part of the pan-European Metiss’age street art festival. During the day (between 10am and 3pm), Battersea Park will Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Hands on! Power of Making has it all: one of the most surprising and exciting collections of contemporary stuff on view for many a while. Some is functional, from coffins to bicycles, wine caskets, guns, bespoke shoes. Some would not be out of place in a contemporary sculpture show: life-size predatory creatures include David Mach’s King Silver Gorilla made out of silver wire hangers, Shauna Richardson’s life-size crocheted brown Crochetdermy Bear (pictured below), while Ji Yonf Ho’s shark made out of tyres swims in the air above us.Hands on! Power of Making has it all: one of the Read more ...
fisun.guner
The Eighties, the decade that fed us the creed of “greed is good”, spawned the fashion “glamazon”. She had supergloss looks and a full décolletage, and, naturally, she wouldn’t get out of bed for less than 10K. In the Nineties, the decade that ushered in grunge and Cool Britannia, an entirely different creature emerged. She was very young, very skinny, and had a look that somehow combined the exquisitely ethereal and the very ordinary. She came in the gamine shape of Kate Moss. Corinne Day is credited with creating her look and of changing the face of fashion. Day, who sadly died of a Read more ...
josh.spero
Why were any of us watching Lily Allen: From Riches to Rags last night, about the pop star's move from selling millions of tracks to stacks of vintage clothes? It was not because we need a lesson in the hardships of starting up a business - Allen bought all the stock out of her musical profits and her office was thick with roses. No, it was because the real intruded into a reality show: this was not car-crash TV - it was miscarriage TV.Any rubberneckers waiting to be entertained would have been disappointed by last night's first episode: we had a promise of tragedy at the start, and the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Now nearing the end of its sixth series, Wild at Heart has quietly parked itself in the middle of the Sunday-evening schedules, where it goes about its task of hoovering up ratings with single-minded efficiency. Last week's debut of South Riding on BBC One was considered a triumph with 6.6 million viewers, but Wild at Heart pipped it with 6.8 million. The week before it scored over seven million.How does it keep doing this? Evidently Stephen Tompkinson, playing Bristol vet Danny Trevanion who has transplanted himself to the Leopard's Den game reserve in South Africa, has a loyal legion of Read more ...
howard.male
Why on earth did I volunteer to review this? I suppose it was because it would show me a world I had little knowledge of and therefore would be able to offer a fresh, objective perspective on. But 15 minutes in and I’m feeling like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange being subjected to images of sex and violence, his eyes clamped open and his head held fast so there’s no escape. Except of course that would be loads more fun than this new reality TV show set in a London modelling agency, which unfortunately is more like watching nail varnish dry.And the Clockwork Orange comparison isn’t as Read more ...
judith.flanders
It is perfectly true that, as Arthur Marshall once said of Ibsen, I am Not a Fun One. A party really is a party without me there. And Shoes, now transferred from Sadler’s Wells, is not much of a party, whether I’m there or not. Conceived in cynicism by its composer/writer Richard Thomas (he admits, no, boasts, that he knew nothing about the subject until after he was commissioned to write the show); acquired in cynicism by Sadler’s Wells (it took a 15-minute pitch from an author who knew nothing about the subject) – what is there to admire, much less like?Not a lot, as it turns out, and what Read more ...
graeme.thomson
When it comes to the Seven Ages of popular music we are now well into the post-retro era. In 2011 every artist is a magpie and every song sails out beneath a pirate flag, greedily plundering where it pleases. When everything that has gone before is up for grabs, it’s now simply a question of how you want your yesterdays delivered: rare, medium or well done?Imelda May might reheat the past but at least she serves it up red hot. A performer since her early teens, her career has crept forward by increments. Now in her mid-thirties, May's third album Mayhem, released late last year, has provided Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Two Roxy Musics took to the stage at the O2. One the art-rock retro-futurist outfit that redefined Seventies pop from 1971 to 1976, the other the airbrushed high-sheen machine of 1979 to 1982. They weren’t a comfortable fit, but this by turns perplexing and wonderful show offered more than enough evidence for what a weird, inspirational and wilful band Roxy Music were and are.The final concert on the seven-date For Your Pleasure tour, this first jaunt round the UK in over 10 years coincided with the band’s 40th anniversary. Taking its billing from the band’s second album was telling – it was Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
She’s back: the retail guru and style icon, with her sharp red bob, sharper tongue and enviable sense of style. In two series of Mary, Queen of Shops on BBC Two, she whipped ailing businesses into shape and established herself as one of television’s most striking and engaging personalities. If online message boards are to be believed, she also – thanks to her much-discussed mid-life divorce, relationship with Grazia fashion editor Melanie Rickey and sexy combination of attitude, intelligence and eye-catching elegance – inspired happily married women up and down the land to fantasise about Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Classical music does not get any cooler than mezzo Vesselina Kasarova. She jived. She grooved. She shuffled. She shimmied. She possessed the Barbican stage last night, an awesome black jumpsuit hanging off her rangy, kinetic figure, her neck sliding about like an Indian dancer's, her feet (in kitten heels) spinning like a jazzer's, her bullying arms posturing and prodding, her mouth flashing its whites like a primate's. Her voice? Extraordinarily weird, moving, honest, explosive. Her Sta nell'Ircana was a theatrical moment of the year. It wasn't all about Kasarova's Ruggiero, Read more ...