 
 Dior Haute Couture Spring/Summer 2007 Jean Paul Gaultier's show was very pure in cut and design. Also notable this season was the Dior show for the workmanship instead of the usual Galliano spectacle, and Lacroix for the riot of color and emotion. From the younger designers, on aura tout vu won kudos from the press for their fusing of high tech communications draped onto Empress Josephine gowns.
 Raia de Goeye Raia de Goeye's fresh, tropical show made us want to drop everything and head to Brazil. See Fabrício Cardoso's images of this much anticipated fashion season.
 For Comme des Garçons, men of all ages walk the runway with grace and elegance.
 Renowned British fashion designer Dame Vivienne Westwood DBE will speak to fashion students at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and receive an Honorary Doctorate from University President Dr. Elisa Stephens on Sunday, March 4th, 2007. "We are very privileged to have Dame Vivienne Westwood visit the School of Fashion," said Gladys Perint Palmer, Executive Director of Fashion. "We strive to give our students every opportunity possible to learn and become more excited about the fashion world." Vivienne Westwood is one of the most influential and recognizable fashion designers who, some would say, epitomizes "cool" and virtually invented punk style having dressed the Sex Pistols. In 1970, she opened her first shop Let It Rock at 430 Kings Road, Chelsea in London with her then partner, Malcolm McLaren. Today, 30 years later, she is more concerned with haute couture than street style. Her first runway show in 1981 was presented at Olympia in London and put her on the map as no longer solely interested in youth and street culture but also in tradition and technique. She began her technical research into historical dress with this collection, adopting and reinterpreting original cutting principles into her patterns and making them modern. A firm believer that there are no new ideas and that one must research the past to be original in the present, she was quoted as saying in a 2004 interview that "you don't get ideas in a vacuum."
 Sandra Bennett, twelve year old, 20th-Anniversary Tour Ends at Cantor Arts Center, The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University announces the presentation of In the American West: Photographs by Richard Avedon, February 14-May 6, 2007. The Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, originally presented the exhibition in 1985, then again put a major portion of the original works on view September 2005 in a 21st-century reprise of the original show. In 2006, the 20th-anniversary exhibition goes on a national tour, which ends at the Cantor Arts Center. Richard Avedon was already world famous for elevating fashion photography to an art form and for his insightful portraits of men and women of accomplishment, when the Amon Carter Museum's first director, Mitchell A. Wilder, saw Avedon's 1978 portrait of a Montana ranch foreman. Wilder asked the artist to make portraits of others across the American West under the sponsorship of the Amon Carter Museum. From 1979 to 1984, Avedon traveled through 13 states and 189 towns from Texas to Idaho, exposing 17,000 sheets of film through his 8-by-10-inch Deardorff view camera. Focusing on the rural West, Avedon visited ranches and rodeos, but he also went to truck stops, oil fields, and slaughterhouses. Rather than playing to the western myths of grandeur and space, he sought out people whose appearance and life circumstances were the antithesis of mythical images of the ruggedly handsome cowboy, dashing outdoor adventurer, or beautiful pioneer wife. The subjects he chose for the portraits were ordinary people, coping daily with personal cycles of boom and bust. Instead of glamorizing these figures, he brought their various human frailties to the forefront. All his subjects are pictured against a seamless white backdrop that removes any reference to place, and many of the portraits are dramatically oversized, shocking in their stark detail. Visitors to the exhibition come face-to-face with images that shattered stereotypes of a glorified region. A majority of the photographs have not been seen in the United States since the initial tour. Most of the original 124 portraits will be on view in this exhibition, including all of the project's most important and best-known images. Amon Carter Museum Senior Curator of Photographs John Rohrbach began working with Avedon in early 2003 on image selection and installation design. Following Avedon's death in late 2004, Rohrbach continued to work on the exhibition with The Richard Avedon Foundation. Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, California
 Doo.Ri is all about New York fashion Fashion Week is coming up early this month and we anticipate a lot from the young designers we have come to love, such as Rodarte, Doo.Ri, Peter Som and Alice Ritter.
 Venus, a recognized leader in the women's swimwear industry, was the official swimwear brand of the 2007 Miss America Pageant. Venus' sophisticated swimwear collection was modeled by 52 contestants. Miss Oklahoma Lauren Nelson from Lawton, Oklahoma, crowned as the Miss America 2007, wore a bright yellow two-piece string bikini by Venus swimwear. For more information, please contact:
 photo by Bill Cunningham of the New York Times From New York Find NY Editor Marilyn Kirschner in the sea of leopard coats! |
