Fashion Was Super White in 2009. It Still Is. - The Cut |
- Fashion Was Super White in 2009. It Still Is. - The Cut
- YouTube Launches a Section Dedicated to Fashion - MakeUseOf
- Why Viral Fashion Designer Danielle Guizio Opts For Digital Immersion Over Runway - Forbes
- Chris March, Over-the-Top Fashion Designer, Dies at 56 - The New York Times
- Fashion Nova’s revealing lace-up top causes confusion: 'Is she wearing it backwards?' - Fox News
| Fashion Was Super White in 2009. It Still Is. - The Cut Posted: 10 Sep 2019 01:00 PM PDT  Can you spot the pattern? Photo-Illustration: by Stevie Remsberg; Photo: Getty In 2009, I was full of doubts about fashion. Not because of the trends (although one musn't forget about stacked platform pumps and peplum tops), but because my place within it was in flux. I had just graduated from graduate school at Columbia University, earning my masters in African American Studies. My mentor wanted me to pursue a Ph.D., but I was set on getting a job in "corporate fashion." I wanted a salary and a desk and I didn't want to stand on my feet all day the way I had working retail. True, I had just dedicated two years of my life to adding corrective, restorative, and prescriptive discourse to the canon of black studies. But fashion — a path I knew to be largely white, deeply insular, and often exploitative — had gotten hold of me years earlier. I was the only daughter in a house full of boys, and my mother treated me like a doll, dressing me up in designer pinafores purchased from the Bloomingdale's children's department. Bonnets, bows, matching play sets — my parents made an incredible fuss over what I wore, and I responded in kind. I loved the trappings of dress-up, especially on Sundays. "Sunday best" was an age-old tradition in Southern black Christian households. Churchgoers put on their best looks for styling and profiling in the sanctuary. Noticing I was developing a real fashion sense, my father began taking me to Plum Tree, a Dallas designer children's boutique, to pick out pieces for Sunday service. This is where my personal style blossomed. I loved how clothes made me feel mature and seen; I was young but an individual. I often skipped Saturday morning cartoons to watch Fashion Television and Videofashion Weekly!. At 13, I bought my first Vogue at the local Eckerds in my suburban Texan neighborhood, and soon my childhood bedroom was littered with copies. I read each magazine from front to back, decoding the hieroglyphics of fashion like an archaeologist. And as I came to understand its esoteric symbols, I also understood that fashion was racially exclusive. Luxury catered to a primarily affluent white audience and was made up of white players. From the editors who decided the season's biggest trends to the designers who emerged at the end of the catwalk to take their celebratory bow to the models who showcased their wares, the decision-makers in the business were all one-note. This was not to discount the tremendous careers of figures like André Leon Talley, Naomi Campbell, and Iman. But I knew that fashion's interest in black people was scant, selective, and short-lived. Still, I wanted in. Maybe it was naïve or masochistic, but I thought eventually the world of fashion would accept me. Or perhaps it's something like that Groucho Marx quote: "I would never belong to a club that would have me as a member" — the terrible trick of fashion being that you're drawn to its exclusivity. It makes people want the very inclusion and acceptance it will never give them. And somehow, I found an opening: a personal shopper gig at a tony luxury e-tailer. It offered me not just proximity to luxury fashion, but also enough disposable income to purchase it in the middle of a recession. In a sprawling office in New York, I sat perched each day in front of my computer screen, hawking pointy-shouldered Balmain blazers and Alexander McQueen armadillo platforms to the beau monde. Initially, I struggled with ambivalence toward my job. A years-long internal battle was nagging at me: mixed feelings that had me, at once, feeling plenty of shame around my interest in the exclusionary world of fashion, and yet still maintaining a vested interest in changing it. The struggle first started in college, where I wrote my undergraduate Gender Studies thesis on the commodification of black female beauty. Creating a historical arc that scaled from Saartjie Baartman (Hottentot Venus) to Josephine Baker to Naomi Campbell, I argued that the black female body has always been a source of appropriative fascination for a white audience. In graduate school a few years later, it was par for the course to get into a heated exchange around, say, how Beyoncé's "Sasha Fierce" alter ego bifurcated black female sexuality. Fists pounding the table, we'd argue about how the pop singer continued to exist within this dichotomous matrix that black women have historically occupied: at once hypersexualized and asexual. Sure, it could get jargon-y, but this was the type of critical engagement around fashion and culture I was used to. Now, my new co-workers were more than happy to fully discount the influence of black entertainers altogether. As they dissected the red-carpet appearances of their favorite cultural heroines, I recognized the women they chose were always white, tepid, and safe. That may have been a matter of taste, but I always picked up on the subtext: black women weren't to be followed or emulated. I floundered finding a way to relate. But one day something clicked — or rather I clicked with one of my clients, Selma, a Brazilian socialite who toured the world aboard her husband's yacht. She was exactly what you'd expect from the wife of a tycoon: loud, spirited, tasteful, with no budget. But she was also chatty and warm, opening up her world to me in a way that felt truly personal; I wasn't the faceless help, but someone whose opinion on fashion she respected and whose company she enjoyed. Constantly traveling, she would call me from far-flung locales, and in her thick accent, discuss her family life, health, and the $20,000 orders she was hoping to place. "Marjon, you'll come to Brazil to see me one day, yeah?" As she cruised through Croatia and the Amalfi Coast, we'd talk for hours, discussing everything from the joys of parenting to how I would be sending her the entire Lanvin collection to try. Now, I couldn't ignore the fact that Selma's glamorous lifestyle was an obvious result of class inequity, but our calls humanized her and helped me to find the joy in my job. Luxury personal shopping wasn't purely transactional; I was being paid to connect with interesting people and geek out on the pure, unadulterated love of clothes. Wasn't this what all those years spent studying Vogue had prepared me for? I wasn't just a bookworm, after all, but a fashion nerd — one who had accumulated a vast body of knowledge around cut, proportions, and fabric. Here I was finally putting it to good use, while still promoting human connection. Soon, I understood each client's taste and quirks, and they filled me in on their massively glamorous lives of multiple homes, businesses, and assistants. But while I was growing in my position, I also recognized almost immediately I was one of the few black women in the whole company with a senior role. Although the company was led by women, those women were very much all white — and there didn't seem to be a plan to change that. Thin and hawkish, they headed up each department — buying, styling, merchandising — filling the ranks with women who looked just like them. The only areas where black and brown women outnumbered white women were in the customer service call center and order fulfillment warehouse, jobs that were never public-facing. All menial and custodial grunt work lay in the hands of women of color. Black and brown women could assist, but were not decision makers — nor did we own equity in the business, unlike some of my white co-workers. Over drinks one evening, a tipsy colleague revealed that as soon as the company went public, she would see a windfall. I was infuriated and frustrated by that knowledge. To my white co-worker, talking about her stock gains and investments in the company probably seemed like innocent inner-office gossip, but for me, it was evidence of how the chips are stacked so differently for black and white women in this industry. Although she was senior to me and in a director role, she wasn't inherently better suited for her job in fashion; she simply had access to a career, unlike the majority of women of color manning the warehouse or phone switchboard. She knew the right people (namely the company's founder), had most likely been coached and encouraged from a young age, and been given opportunities that guaranteed her success. And moreover, she was educated on exactly how to become profitable in the business. I understand that most business practices, no matter the industry, are shrouded in secrecy; it's supposed to be difficult to penetrate the inner circle. But if black and brown women could barely enter the industry, how were we supposed to succeed in it? Well, we weren't: I remained the only black hire in my department until I left nearly two years later. Julia Sarr-Jamois, Shala Monroque, and Tamu McPherson, early street-style stars. Photo: Getty Images In 2019, words like "diversity" and "inclusion" are everywhere in fashion. (I'm not saying the concepts are actualized everywhere, but the words sure are.) In 2009, they were nowhere. But I saw small rumblings of an industry shift. Street-style photographers began narrowing their lenses upon the likes of Tamu McPherson, Shala Monroque, and Julia Sarr Jamois, while a handful of black celebrities began to receive equal attention from luxury brands. Rihanna, Kanye West, Ciara, and Beyoncé were being considered bankable enough that brands were willing to hang entire campaigns upon them. But while black folks and our style sizably influenced trends and designers, we did not own stakes within it — at least not in the ways that, say, a Bernard Arnault did. As my career in fashion progressed and I became a journalist, I found that I was often the only black woman in the room. By the time I got to Vogue in 2015, as a senior fashion writer, the temperature had changed drastically within the business, and my approach was sizably different from the beginnings of my career in fashion. Social media was helping democratize the industry — bloggers, influencers, and photographers of color were generating their own content independently of major publishers, and using their own platforms to become more vocal about fashion and popular culture. If, say, Black Twitter accused Valentino of cultural appropriation for braiding models' hair into cornrows, that conversation became headline news, rather than being siloed to the classroom like years before. This made it easier for myself and my black peers to move those conversations to fashion's center. While I was not expressly hired at Vogue to write about more inclusive topics, it felt natural and important to use my platform to underscore the black and brown celebrities and tastemakers that so often go ignored. I found it rewarding to feature my cultural heroes and heroines in one of the biggest institutions in fashion, and to broaden the idea of who exactly was deemed "stylish." This wasn't lost on my editors, who encouraged me to dig my heels in deeper. Simultaneously, a changing of the guard was unfolding in fashion. Words like "disruptor" were being used to describe a new breed of celebs, models, actors, designers, musicians, and photographers, and the industry was taking notice. Iconoclasts, thinkers, and activists, ran the gamut of race, size, age, and nationality. Fashion was gradually becoming more enlightened, and the results were impactful. There was the appointment of Edward Enninful as the editor-in-chief of British Vogue, Virgil Abloh as the creative director of Louis Vuitton menswear, Dapper Dan teaming up with Gucci to create an in-house brand (after a cultural-appropriation embarrassment), brands Telfar and Pyer Moss taking home the CFDA Fashion Fund back-to-back, Rihanna launching her own brand with LVMH, the September cover "black out" of last fall that saw a constellation of black models and stars splashed across the front of nearly every top fashion periodical. Runways, campaigns, and the Met Ball's red carpet runneth over with black luminaries, poised at the center of the industry's biggest moments and considered its lodestars. However, by and large, true leadership positions still elude black players. Far too often am I sitting across from white gatekeepers in meetings who remain tone-deaf, complacent with aligning themselves with black creatives but never investing fully in our futures. With rare exceptions, brands and periodicals want our ideas and cache, but aren't quite prepared to hand the keys over. The fashion industry is finally confronting some ugly truths about itself — the way its business model has grossly contributed to the planet's decay, the way it's tangled up with this current administration through shadowy investments — but it remains preoccupied with and stumped by race. While it changes steadily, it's evolving at far too slow a pace for my tastes, which is why I have one foot in and one foot out now as a freelancer. But then again maybe I have always operated this way? Even when I was working at fashion's most famous magazine, there were inner circles I wasn't able to penetrate. In a way, my ambivalence now reminds me of my former self, fresh out of grad school and unsure how to reconcile my interests. High style still excites me in the ways that it always has: I geek out over wearing a Christopher John Rogers original dress on occasion, and I spent all of Labor Day weekend watching stylist Jason Bolden and Adair Curtis's Netflix show, Styling Hollywood. Clothes remain an incredible tool for escape and expression for me, and they always will. But without real inclusion, the fashion world in 2019 — the kind practiced by the main gatekeepers — feels no more relevant than it did ten years ago. In fact, it feels less relevant than ever.  |
| YouTube Launches a Section Dedicated to Fashion - MakeUseOf Posted: 10 Sep 2019 03:33 PM PDT  YouTube has launched a new vertical dedicated to fashion. So if you're a dedicated follower of fashion, you now have a section of YouTube just for you. Which should make it easier to find new fashion-related videos full of style and beauty tips. Organizing Content on YouTube(Almost) everything goes on YouTube. Whatever you search for on YouTube you're likely to find a video that fits the bill. You'll also find lots of random nonsense that doesn't belong to a particular genre. However, certain topics demand their own sections. At the moment the genres afforded their own sections are YouTube Premium Is YouTube Premium Worth the Cost? 7 Things You Need to Consider Is YouTube Premium Worth the Cost? 7 Things You Need to Consider Is YouTube Premium's cost worth it? We look into the pros and cons of YouTube's paid version. Read More , Movies and Shows, Gaming, and Live. However, these are now being joined by a section dedicated wholly to fashion. Which encompasses fashion, style, and beauty. YouTube Launches a Fashion VerticalYouTube announced the Fashion section on the Official YouTube Blog. The company says it aims to "create an ultimate destination for style content that bridges both our fabulous endemic creator community and the more traditional worlds of fashion and beauty." YouTube Fashion is where you'll find new fashions being modelled, makeup tutorials and tips, behind the scenes of the fashion industry, interviews with famous models, opinions on celebrities' styles, and videos from the best style and beauty vloggers. YouTube is putting the spotlight on the creators, mentioning YouTubers such as Camila Coelho and Safiya Nygaard. It also namechecks brands such as Louis Vuitton and Dior, and industry insiders including Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Alexa Chung. Videos Aplenty for FashionistasYouTube Fashion is live right now, and packed full of videos for fashionistas. It should grow over time too, as YouTube is promising to "bring more international voices to the page and to localize for global markets." Making it even bigger and better. If you're into your fashion then the new YouTube Fashion vertical should float your boat. However, YouTube is just one of the many ways to explore fashion online. And these men's fashion apps 5 Underrated Men's Fashion Apps and Sites for Style Dummies 5 Underrated Men's Fashion Apps and Sites for Style Dummies If you're a guy who would like to look good but doesn't know how, let technology be your personal stylist. Take to the web for the best fashion tips and advice. Read More and women's fashion apps 5 Women's Fashion and Style Apps to Find the Right Outfit 5 Women's Fashion and Style Apps to Find the Right Outfit Finding the right dress can be a world of pain. Here are some of the foolproof women-centric apps to find the right outfit. Read More are well worth a look. Explore more about: Fashion, YouTube.  |
| Why Viral Fashion Designer Danielle Guizio Opts For Digital Immersion Over Runway - Forbes Posted: 10 Sep 2019 01:50 PM PDT  It's Friday of New York Fashion Week and 800 fashion kids are wrapped around the block of 37th Street in the heart of corporate Manhattan, waiting to immerse themselves in 29-year-old Danielle Guizio's Spring/Summer 2020 collection at her New York Fashion Week experience. The collection is called "corporate deviance" and it's Guizio's fifth ready-to-wear namesake collection. She presents it tonight with multimedia wallpaper, an Instagram livestream, three DJs and the Fat Jewish's Babe Spirits and Ciroc at high-tech venue Lightbox. The presentation deviates from the traditional Fashion Week runway showing—models strutting the new collection by an invite-only crowd for 15 minutes—as anyone who RSVP'd to the Instagram post is on the guest list for the three-hour ordeal (though the venue only fits 300 people) and the entire space is designed for maximal Instagram content. "It makes the most sense to do a digital digital presentation," says Guizio, lounging on a white couch in the center of the exhibition with videos of runway models wearing the collection and facial features projected on the wall before doors open. "I was discovered on Instagram. When you're immersed in this digital experience, you see the numbers on Instagram—the comments, the likes—actually translate into real life." Guizio's hoodies, suits, bathing suits have been worn frequently by the likes of Kylie Jenner, Bella Hadid and Hailey Bieber. In 2018 she brought in millions in revenue. She has amassed nearly half a million followers on Instagram and in 2019 was named to the Forbes Under 30 list in Art & Style. Guizio's decision to present her collection with both an Instagram livestream and open invitation reflects a larger trend in shelving traditional runway for immersive experiences that maximize digital longevity, impressing the brand on as many people as possible. This lifts the tastemaker crown from media outlets to fashionable people with smartphones who've amassed loyal followings by wearing the right thing at the right place with the right crowd. Non-traditional showings can also narrow runway production expenses, which cost brands around $200,000, while widening profit margins. It comes as no surprise that Guizio's brand is profitable. For an emerging designer like Guizio, there's also the optical return—and the currency is hype. With hundreds of ornately dressed people waiting to enter, it posits her collection like Yeezy or Supreme, whose product launches lead fashion fans to wait in line for hours to purchase the latest sneaker or hat. It makes sense: Guizio's SS20 collection retails from $148 to $630–accessible luxury. As a designer, Guizio has never walked the fashion institution walk. When Guizio dropped out of LIM College, a fashion business school nine years ago, she was almost certain she was abandoning her dream of designing her own clothes. "I was having a hard time fitting in. Fashion school gave me a bad perception of the fashion industry," she says, wearing an aqua long-sleeve dress from her SS20 collection. She moved back in with her parents in Fairfield, New Jersey, opting to continue her education by studying psychology at Essex County Community College. On the side she worked in retail at The Huntress and a jewelry store, scouring the Jersey suburbs for vintage pieces to sell on her website, posting everything to Twitter. That year she dedicated her tax return—$400—to screen printing a line of graphic tees. They sold out within a day. "I've always been on the internet. I had a knack from the MySpace days of looking at how to turn my followers into sales," says Guizio. With money from the t-shirts, she moved her merch into a doctors office and began sewing, posting every piece to social. Celebrity stylists reached out—Hailey Bieber became her first celebrity fan and asked to come see her collection in-person while she still worked from the New Jersey doctor's office. Five years later she has six employees and three interns. And with this, her collection takes on corporate sexism: "There's a lot of dominant feminism, but that's not reflected in the workplace. I want to highlight the empowerment women should feel in the workplace and at night."  |
| Chris March, Over-the-Top Fashion Designer, Dies at 56 - The New York Times Posted: 10 Sep 2019 01:12 PM PDT  Chris March, a fashion and costume designer whose outrageous outfits caught the eye of audiences on Bravo's hit reality show "Project Runway," and who went on to create striking clothes for Lady Gaga, Beyoncé and other stars, died on Thursday at a care facility in Stockton, Calif. He was 56. The cause was a heart attack, his brother Douglas said. Mr. March's career as a designer began in earnest during a decade with "Beach Blanket Babylon," a long-running musical revue in San Francisco known for its elaborate costumes. Mr. March's contributions included a towering Martha Stewart-themed headpiece complete with a pie, a lobster, a pot of sunflowers and a copy of Martha Stewart Living. That over-the-top drag show aesthetic characterized much of Mr. March's work. He dressed Lady Gaga in a studded ankle-length motorcycle jacket with jutting shoulder pads for a concert in Las Vegas in 2011. He helped realize Thierry Mugler's superhero designs for Beyoncé's 2009-10 world tour, including a golden outfit that resembled a futuristic one-piece bathing suit. But those costumes, eye-catching as they were, were almost pedestrian by Mr. March's standards. His other designs included "a Mr. Potato Head, a palm tree, a lobster and a 10-foot martini," The New York Times reported in 2006. The occasion for the Times article was a commission that Mr. March had accepted from Wish-Bone, the salad dressing maker, to construct outfits using real and artificial vegetables — lettuce, cabbage, tomatoes, green onions — for a promotional fashion show of sorts at Grand Central Terminal. "They said, 'You know, we don't really know anyone who could do this, but do you think you could make a line of clothing made out of salad and food?' '' Mr. March was quoted as saying in the article. "I said, sure, it's one of the easier things I've done. I once made a giant six-foot can of Crisco that a person had to dance in, and that had an Elvis wig on top." Mr. March's designs for "Project Runway," during the show's 2007-8 season, its fourth, incorporated human hair in some cases; another entry was a strappy leopard-print halter top with matching hood and sleeves for the WWE wrestler Maria Kanellis. He became a fan favorite, even though, under the show's competition format, he finished in fourth place at the season's end. Image  Mr. March was not afraid to model his more extreme designs himself, proudly appearing beneath colossal wigs as drag versions of Princess Leia or Wonder Woman. Christopher Andrew March was born on Feb. 25, 1963, in Alameda, Calif., to Carl Allen and Dolores March. He grew up mostly in Northern California, where he liked to design elaborate Halloween costumes before graduating from high school. A biography on his website said that he had lived in San Francisco for years before settling in New York City. In addition to his brother Douglas, he is survived by three other brothers, David, Steven and Michael, and his mother. In 2018, Mr. March said in a statement to his fans that he had been put into a medically induced coma after falling and hitting his head in 2017 and emerged partly paralyzed, necessitating physical therapy. Mr. March designed costumes for Cirque du Soleil and spectacular drag outfits for "Christmas With the Crawfords," a 2001 show at the Chelsea Playhouse in Manhattan in which he appeared onstage as Shirley Temple. He created, designed, produced and starred in another holiday show, "Chris March's The Butt-Cracker Suite!," a rethinking of Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker," which ran for a month in 2009 at the Lower Manhattan arts center Here. It was billed as a "trailer park ballet." In 2011 he hosted his own short-lived reality show on Bravo, "Mad Fashion," on which he dressed celebrities like Jennifer Coolidge and Chrissy Teigen. He designed a series of Halloween wigs for Target in 2013. Though his designs were often studies in overstatement, Mr. March could also make elegant clothing, like a slouchy, belted black evening gown that Meryl Streep wore to the Golden Globes ceremony in 2010, and a sleek white one she wore to the Academy Awards the same year. Anne Bratskeir, a fashion reporter for Newsday, wrote that Ms. Streep "looked good, fresh and crisp" in the Oscars gown. Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.  |
| Posted: 11 Sep 2019 02:00 AM PDT Fashion Nova is continuing to confound the internet with yet another interesting clothing item. The online retailer, already known for styles which have been likened to "front thong" bodysuits and see-through chaps, is now pushing a "Party Starter Long Sleeve Top" that's leaving some fans scratching their heads. ASOS TIE-DYE JOGGERS MOCKED FOR PATTERN ON PANTS "Is she wearing it backwards?" one Instagram user said of the item, which features a lace-up front that only appears to connect above the bust. "So, a cardigan with only the top button done up?" another surmised. "Why would u wear this other [than] the bedroom?" someone else asked. "Hysterical." CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR OUR LIFESTYLE NEWSLETTER Others on Instagram were all too happy to make their own jokes about the revealing top, with one saying she'd be too "scared to move" once she got it on. "Totally going to wear this to church," another sarcastically joked. "So y'all want us to get pneumonia out here," a separate user said.  The "Party Starter Long Sleeve Top," which sells for $24.99, is described as a cropped tank with a rhinestone lace-up. (FashionNova.com) Surprisingly, despite all the jokes and critiques, the majority of commenters appeared to love the look. However, whether they planned on actually purchasing it was another story altogether. "I need this," one simply said. "Do you have the top in black?" another asked. "I want this shirt!!! But I know better," someone else commented. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP "I love this shirt," another Instagram user admitted. "I'd just tie it at the bottom."  |
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