Shelf Life
by Suleman Anaya share this page
Where the Underthings Are
Some people were shocked when Olivier Theyskens told me, after last year's Met Ball, that he sometimes likes to pee into the Seine. What would they say if they knew the Belgian designer has donned women's underthings? In her intro to the new book The Other Side of the Picture (Assouline, $150), Vogue's Sally Singer informs us that, in an early photo shoot, Theyskens wore lingerie belonging to the girlfriend of the man taking the pictures: Julien Claessens. So while the whole world knows of Theyskens' genius for weirdly romantic clothes, in the tome it's Claessens on display.
Claessens is not your average backstage shutterbug. His images are the product of a friendship with Theyskens going back to their school days in Brussels, when the two discovered that they shared a dreamy yet morbid sensibility, seen here in the awkwardly stunning images covering 12 collections (for Rochas, Nina Ricci and Theyskens' own short-lived label). In some, the models look like rare, skinny birds, limbs flailing and bones protruding—Hana Soukupová's shoulder blades are downright creepy. Yet sadly, because we can't think of anything hotter that young Olivier in a lacy brassiere, images from that early shoot don't appear in the book.
Open Dior Policy
Sure, he’s all about his finale outfits now, but John Galliano's magic for Dior started a long time ago with the crafting of those extravagant gowns and the orchestration of those epic productions. Let's review: an haute-couture Pocahontas arriving on a moving train (a real one), Japanese acrobats tumbling down the runway alongside models, paper butterflies filling the Opera Garnier—it’s mind-bending both in scope and ambition. Photographer Roxanne Lowit's hefty new tome, Backstage Dior (teNeues, $125), captures all the backstage frenzy and fuss leading up to those indelible spectacles of the last decade. We'd say the book, with a foreword by Suzy Menkes and essays by Simon Doonan and Valerie Steele, makes a great stocking stuffer, but you'd need a magnum stocking.
Reading Thoughts
Since starting his line in 1988, Martin Margiela has achieved anti-stardom and a cultish clientele with collections defined by intelligence, humor and superb craftsmanship—and with an almost pathological preoccupation with his own anonymity (the designer, famously, has never agreed to be photographed). While recent rumors of his retirement seem corroborated by less-than-stellar show reviews earlier this month, a handsome new book celebrates the previous twenty years of fashion magic from the gifted Belgian and his team.
Maison Martin Margiela (Rizzoli, $100) captures the designer's two-decade career through 400 photos (runway, backstage, exhibits, magazine/newspaper stories) culled from Margiela's personal archive. The images illustrate Margiela's signature themes, many of which are so oft-copied that they've become cliche: exposed seams, deconstructed and reassembled garments, intentional imperfection, pervasive white, an economy of means, an obsession with numbers and systematization—i.e. the cryptic labeling of the various Margiela lines—and a penchant for sartorial pranks that recalls Rei Kawakubo, with whom Margiela has collaborated.
Adding substance to the visual surfeit, a dozen texts are peppered throughout, including a fond introduction by Jean Paul Gaultier (Margiela's first boss, fresh out of school) and a pithy note from Carine Roitfeld. An academic essay by Susannah Frankel—on the mis-notion of so-called conceptual fashion—is particularly enlightening, while Chris Dercon draws some interesting parallels between Margiela's creative vocabulary and that of the Surrealists, pointing out that Margiela's brand of wit is as quintessentially Belgian as chocolate. But it's Vincent Wierink's piece about 40 seasons' worth of show invitations—from a telegram and a bar of dark chocolate to fake calendars and rock-concert tickets—that thoroughly captures the simplicity and clever originality of Margiela's best work.
Show and Teller
Marc Jacobs' advertisements and the strange worlds they depict, with their ample negative space and kooky people doing mundane things, have been essential imagery in fashion magazines for ten years and counting. This unique longevity is the result of the friendship between the New York designer and Bavarian-born photographer Juergen Teller, a creative collaboration now compiled in the 576 pages of "Marc Jacobs Advertising 1998-2009" (Steidl).
That the campaigns remain fresh after a decade has to do with a growing clique of subjects culled from the NY-Paris-London-LA circuit of privileged hipsterdom: Michael Stipe, Sofia Coppola, Jarvis Cocker, Winona Ryder, Rufus Wainwright, etc. Beyond that, to most people, the ads and situations in them are a little baffling, which of course is a hallmark of the Jacobs mystique: you either "get it" or you totally don't. A gifted provocateur who has creative carte blanche from Jacobs, Teller is somehow able to make these sophisticates do almost anything he wants for his camera—rarely flattering and often explicit, ridiculous or puerile. Take, for example, Victoria Beckham's spread legs coming out of an oversized Marc Jacobs shopping bag, a clever commentary on her obsession with designer clothes.
To the high-minded, the book justifies its existence as a record of bizarre early 21st-century avant-garde tastes, sure to come in handy when, a hundred years from now, scholars of aesthetic anthropology uncover the images and ponder why a pair of pudgy twins in disguise (Cindy Sherman and Teller himself) seemed like the height of chic in 2005. Without a foreword or essays, the book makes no attempt to answer such questions.
Porn Again
Ten years ago Taschen introduced The Art of Pleasure, an influential tome about the work of Tom of Finland, born Touko Laaksonen, whose explicit sexual drawings of ultra-masculine men who love men are among the most collected—and, for some, indispensable—queer images of the 70s and 80s, even gracing the hallowed walls of MoMA. Since bigger is usually better, the follow-up is Tom of Finland XXL ($200), a 14-pound chunk of hunk containing nearly 1000 drawings and paintings culled from collections around the world.
Straddling the tightrope between art and porn, the massive monograph proves that Laaksonen, who died in 1991, hasn't lost his power to shock, blush and arouse. Every image is ripe with swelling muscles, growing bulges and puckering orifices, not to mention a cornucopia of gourd-sized erections. But underneath all the exaggerated anatomies, the drawings are sweet celebrations of idealized love, and it's this tension between the obscene and the innocent that continues to fascinate.
Put together by Dian Hanson, Taschen's "Sexy Book" editor, XXL includes essays by John Waters, Camille Paglia and a charming ode to "Tom's Tits" by Armistead Maupin. Yet, unnecessarily, the book strains to justify Laaksonen's place in the canon of art history greats—parallels to Michelangelo are inevitable, but comparing a drawing of two men engaged in 69 to a Henry Moore sculpture seems a stretch. Few would question Laaksonen's standing as a legit artist, but more importantly, the book is a testament to Laaksonen's enormous impact on gay and non-gay culture, helping make the fetishization of beefcake acceptable and thus paving the way for everything from Diet Coke commercials to Tom Ford's marketing fantasies.
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