So, the Emmys happened! I didn’t watch (there’s no point, plus since Cate Blanchett lost the Oscar to Gwyneth Paltrow there’s no justice etc.), but I hear that overall, things went well. Plus, Downton Abbey won some things! That’s great news! That damn show and what it does to my blood pressure is something we shall speak of another time. Or, if you follow my Tumblr, I have already spoken of it multiple times and we’re all set.
(From left: Elizabeth McGovern in a lovely dress, Joanne Froggatt in one of those dresses that you know makes you feel like a princess right until the photos roll in and you realize your costars are Amazons and you have made a mistake about proportions, and Michelle Dockery, who is wearing a really great dress to which someone has inexplicably added one of those cutouts the vampire queens always have in their armor so the hero can get the stake through it.)
Thank the ladies of Downton Abbey, who are demonstrating several of the red carpet trends this year: lots of red, textured neutrals (and black!), some purple, and one really awkward thing in every picture.
In fact, let’s get right to the incomplete but completely nerdy Red Carpet Rundown, shall we?
This is, for me, a short post. That means only ONE bajillion pictures. Continue reading
Miss Universe! Yes, it’s that time again, when hopeful young ladies gather from all around the world to grin their beautiful hostage grins into the camera, and to be dressed like fools in “National Dress” by horrible pageant planners secretly trying to test what young ladies are willing to wear on camera.
That answer came back: Practically anything.
I have tried to look at this and understand what happened. In the past, this category has been spectacularly awesome (Thailand!) or hilariously fun (the national costume of Iceland is dignity!). This year is what I can only term a Hot Mess, with Intermittent Laughter.
This year also seems to be the year that the always-fantastical undercurrent of this whole glittery mess went from subtext to text:
Tanzania, auditioning for a role in the inevitable Metropolis remake, and/or putting mortal fear into her enemy contestants. Either way, SUCCESS.
However, she had some serious competition in the Science Fiction and Fantasy category.
I have an article in the latest issue of Weird Tales! “A Sweet Disorder in the Dress” talks about Alexander McQueen and the surreal, subversive narratives he made with fashion throughout his career.
Fashion is a remarkable, flawed, Byzantine industry that sometimes seems like a group of really well-dressed wizards locked in a tower trying to decide what bizarre trend they can start next. There are innumerable political underpinnings, and the ethics and economics of it have vast and pervasive consequences. As someone whose main criteria for clothes is, “How close to pajamas is this?”, I tend to look on it with costume-appreciative bemusement.
However, sometimes, fashion is also the platform for a true artist.
The Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute is currently paying tribute to McQueen, and it’s seriously beautiful stuff.
McQueen’s dual passions – tailoring and narrative – meant both stunning and dramatic design:
And some amazing runway shows. For a fairy-tale inspired collection, “The Girl Who Lived in the Tree,” he presented a series of costumes for his imagined cast – the feral, witchy young girl, the prince’s retinue, the royal court.
He also had a macabre side, which emerged in his use of unusual materials and prints: a dress made of blood-red microscope slides, dresses made of game-bird feathers and headdresses of antler (for a collection grimly titled “The Widows of Culloden”), and a dress sewn through with live flowers that McQueen intended to be ruined by the wear down the catwalk.
The expansive exhibit at the Met does a gorgeous job of collecting his work by theme, with room-specific soundtracks, display cases fit for taxidermy, and the occasional wind machine (that highwaywoman costume is not going to gust itself!). It was truly astounding to see his work up close; from both a technical and artistic standpoint, he was outstanding.
One of the rooms is dedicated to his runway shows, which I appreciated, since it’s one of the best ways to understand the impact McQueen wanted his clothes to have. The article uses McQueen’s 2009 “Plato’s Atlantis” collection as its touchstone, but my inner movie nerd will always have a soft spot for his Spring/Summer 2004 runway collection, inspired in part by “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” and staged in a Paris dance hall. The first half is glitzy eveningwear with models and male dancers paired up like ballroom champs, but the second half of the show stages a 1930s dance marathon, as a series of disheveled models stagger across the floor – or, in some cases, are dragged by their partners.
It’s visually arresting, and it’s unsettling, and the models inhabit the clothes as they do in few other runway shows I’ve ever seen. As fashion goes, it’s genius staging; as art goes, mission accomplished.
The magazine is out now, in print or digital editions. The exhibit runs only through the weekend, sadly, but if you have the time, it’s something worth standing in line for.
So last night, after returning from grocery shopping for Friday’s launch party (more on this later!), I watched the Met’s Costume Institute Gala red carpet.
This is probably my favorite gown-y event of the year, mostly because I’ve worked it twice, so I get to look at pictures and smile, knowing that for every celebrity posing smoothly on the red carpet there are two people running flat-out through the Temple of Dendur screaming “I NEED THAT FOLIAGE” into a walkie-talkie.
This year is an especially good year for the Gala, because it’s celebrating Alexander McQueen, a designer I admire so much I wrote an article about him for Weird Tales (more on that soon!). He was a true artist, and I looked forward to seeing how celebrities would dress to celebrate that.
Turns out they did it by wearing the dullest prom dresses they could find.
I don’t have the energy to review the whole thing (on Kerry Washington: plain, vaguely-unflattering dress. On Maggie Q: fussy, vaguely-unflattering dress. On Lea Michele: red, vaguely-unflattering dress. On Noami Watts: you get it.)
However, there are a few so great, and a few so questionable, that we should take a look at them.
What I have to say about Kate Middleton’s dress: lovely, and she couldn’t have asked for a better house than McQueen to help her cosplay as Grace Kelly.
(Not that I’m dissing her dress, by the way. I really do think it’s lovely; this silhouette is a classic for a reason. I just think that princesses on their wedding days are under so much political, social, and familial pressure that there’s no way to get out from under those ingrained head-of-state expectations when it comes to the dress. I mean, she was never going to show up in a vintage flapper dress and some kicky red wedges, you know?)
But in terms of royal wedding dresses, it’s far from my favorite.
My actual favorite belongs to a pretty boss monarch of the 16th century – Mary of Hungary, who was so awesome that she ended up governing Hungary and the Netherlands all by herself.
This dress is not her actual wedding dress, since she was married when she was ten (paging Catherine Cookson!). The dress, which is dated sometime in the 1520mumbles, might have been a dress she wore at some point during her “marriage blessing”/coronation/anointment hoopla that took up half of 1522. Or a court dress during her time as the queen of Louis II. Or maybe she wore it a few years after that, when she was a widow and a regent just chilling around the palace governing two countries. Whatever! It’s never the wrong time to wear a dress with a skirt circumference of more than 25 feet.
This dress really is a stunner; the seaming is unusual and ingenious, the skirt is a full circle (25 feeeet), the blouse is worked in silver on the eensy smocking up top, and the gold collar and cuffs are gold fabric embroidered with gold thread to mimic the damask fabric of the dress. Also, I am pretty sure it weighs a hundred and thirty pounds. Just eyeballing.
I really love this dress, for some reason, even though I am not a fan of green, or even of smocking. If I ever write that epic fantasy trilogy, someone’s showing up in this dress for a major ass-kicking occasion, is all I’m saying.
A wealth of information can be found about this dress at A Flight of Fancy (source of photo 1 above), the Frazzled Frau (source of photo 2), and this article by Julia Palotay Szent-Györgyi, which also has a handy cutting diagram, in case you wanted to wear a full-circle floor-length damask skirt anywhere.
