Hollywood Continues to Bore Me

Okay, here it is. Last night was the 80th Annual Academy Awards and we got to watch the traditional running of the bulls -- er... I mean, red carpet entrances. Once again, it was a big fat snooze. I'll spare you, just insert my usual lack-of-adventure-and-creativity rant here.

Let's start with one of my usual targets, the animatronic Nicole Kidman. Good god, even pregnancy hasn't made her look human. She consistently wears Balenciaga and she consistently makes it look boring. How does she do that? Say what you will about Ghesquiere's work, but it's almost never boring.

I will say, though, that this necklace was spectacular. It's L'Wren Scott, and reported to be something like 1400 carats total weight and it's just the sort of mad, over-the-top thing I adore. Why Ms. Kidman chose to wear it, however, over a dress with a competing neckline is beyond me. If ever a piece of jewelry called for a high neck, this is it. If you're going to work that piece, you need to give it what it needs and not fight it. Wasted opportunity. It could have been legendary. Instead, it's just confused.

Amy Adams in Proenza Schouler. Pretty. Green. Whatever. Please note the neckline of her dress. Apparently, if you get nominated for a Disney movie you're contractually obligated to work their iconography into your look somehow:

Am I the only one who noticed this?????

Here we come to what my friend Plumcake calls the "Oh, Honey, NO" portion of our entertainment, this year largely dominated by the men. I just... I don't...

sigh...

All I can do is throw up my hands in resignation. So, insert my usual how-hard-can-it-be-to-pick-out-a-tuxedo rant here. But I do have a new theory about men and their formalwear: the distance afield a man strays from a classic tuxedo look is directly proportional to how difficult a boyfriend he would be. These are obviously guys who cannot resist taking something easy and making it complicated and awful. If they can do that to a suit, imagine what they could do to a relationship.

Famously naked for a scene Eastern Promises, the film for which he was nominated this year, Viggo Mortensen overcompensates by wearing waaaaaaay too much jacket. Obviously this man should not be allowed to dress himself.

Daniel Day Lewis, once again carrying the eccentric British thing too far. And what's worse, he's taking his very gorgeous wife, Rebecca Miller, down with him. She's wearing Lacroix, which I would ordinarily applaud. Sadly, it is not the right Lacroix for her. It looks like she is wearing Christian Lacroix's sofa.

Dear god. He is wearing brown suede shoes. With a tuxedo. My head may explode. Perhaps he made them himself...

I don't understand why Javier Bardem couldn't shave for the Oscars. He couldn't have been running late -- think of all the time he saved by just zipping up his jacket instead of dealing with those troublesome buttons.

George Clooney is very, very reliable. He no doubt owns that tux and he no doubt wears it to every single awards show and I do not have one iota of problem with that because it looks smashing on him. Where did he go wrong tonight?

The vacant-eyed arm candy. When I saw these two chatting with RegisgodhelpusPhilbin on the red carpet, I was pretty sure this young woman didn't have a pulse. Seriously, George??? This is what you're going with? Surely you can come up with something a little more convincing.

Here's Forrest Whitaker, avoiding the Clooney Pitfall by escorting his absolutely stunning wife Keisha, who, unlike whosis above, actually looked as though she enjoys having her man's arm around her. Whitaker looks incredibly smart in his double-breasted tux (and he's a good-sized guy, so you know that jacket was expertly fitted to make him look so trim).

Here's Katherine Heigl. She looked very, very pretty.

She's here as a representative of about 403 other 20- and 30-something Hollywood starlets who looked very, very pretty. Hell, just throw a dart, they're all the same.


Oh, look. Here's Renee Zellweger in a skintight strapless Carolina Herrera dress. Quelle surprise.

My god, woman. Eat a taco or something.

This is Saoirse Ronan, from the film Atonement, in Alberta Ferretti. I really loved this on her. I loved it because it was a beautiful color (Ms. Ronan said she wanted to wear green because she's Irish, which is sweet) and I loved it because it is age-appropriate and still pretty.

Ms. Ronan is still only in her early teens, and I think whoever chose this dress for her did a lovely job of dressing her up without dressing her old. Very pretty.

Diablo Cody, who wrote the movie Juno, in Christian Dior.

I love this dress. It's interesting. It's animal print (I love someone who has the nerve to wear animal print to the Oscars). It moved beautifully because it was made of chiffon. Much has been made of Ms. Cody's past experience as a stripper (Yes, stripper. I refuse to buy into the "exotic dancer" or "burlesque artist" euphemism. You take your clothes off for money, you're a stripper. Period.) and even though I like the dress, the look on the whole is not doing much to dispel that image. There's a lot going on here, but ya know what? I actually prefer it to the yards and yards of tasteful humdrummery most everyone else subjected us to, so you go, girl.

Julie Christie, who is still so drop-dead gorgeous it hurts. This is the hair I have been longing for for many years now, and which my corkscrews do not want me to have. I don't know whose dress this is -- given Ms. Christie, it's very likely something from her own closet (she is famously un-Hollywood-y) -- but those sheer gloves look like something Marc Jacobs did for Vuitton. While I love the gloves, I do not love them with this dress. Still, A for effort.

French actress Marion Cotillard, in French designer Jean-Paul Gaultier. Conventional wisdom has it that this dress was "daring" and "risky." Eh, whatever. I wear riskier stuff than that to the grocery store.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Queen, in Georges Chakra.

There was a time when Helen Mirren could not be trusted to appear in public and not humiliate herself (we all remember that hat, right?). Those days apparently have passed. I don't know who her current stylist is or what she's paying her, but she's worth every pound. Many a skinny little Hollywood dolly could take some advice from Ms. Mirren on how to look beautiful and sexy without looking like a tart.

Tilda Swinton is going to be crucified for this dress and I think it's a damned shame, because I really dig it.

It's Lanvin, it's dramatic, it's absolutely stunning in motion, and it looked like nothing anyone else was wearing. I don't really know anything about Ms. Swinton (how refreshing, huh?) except that she's a fantastic actress (Have you ever seen Orlando? One of my favorites, and some great costumes there, too.) and judging from her acceptance speech she does not consider herself at home in the murky waters of the Los Angeles film swamp. She's rather an exotic creature by Hollywood standards, and she looks it in this dress. I think it was amazing, it was by far my favorite of the night. Most folks, no doubt, will disagree.

So that's my Oscar fashion reportage. What did you guys think? Who got it right? Who should be flogged? Who didn't bore you to zzzzzzzz's?


Photos: style.com, tvacres.com, eonline.com, wireimage, getty

Straight/Laced

This is Miuccia Prada, taking a bow after her Fall 2008 runway show earlier this week.

If you didn't know better would you ever in a million years guess that this woman was one of the most intelligent and downright subversive minds in fashion? My guess is you would not. She looks like a middle-school librarian, for crying out loud.

Also, apparently Miuccia Prada is a mind-reader. Yes! She can read minds! Well, mine, anyway.

I've been having a lace thing. Yes, I'm still having the feather thing, but I'm also begun having a little bit of a lace thing. I think the lace thing has been kicked off by looking at oodles and oodles of wedding dresses with my recently-betrothed friend Miss A. It's funny, but a goodly number of the dresses I've seen that made me go ooh (not that there were many of those) were made out of lace, usually entirely of lace. As a matter of fact, of the 934,603 wedding dresses I've perused in the last six weeks or so, I've found exactly one that I thought I might be interested in wearing myself if I ever tied the knot. This one:

Pretty, non? Lace. Completely simple, unadorned, just made of lace. It appeals. (Ideally, though, I'd get married in McQueen or Dior or Lanvin, and chances are slim it will be even remotely wedding-dress-like.)

But I digress.

All the lace I've been gazing on and running through my hands seems to have gotten under my skin, and I've been thinking I'd like to get a few good lace pieces into my wardrobe. I even did a crawl through my favorite vintage dealer's stock not long ago, but I came up empty-handed.

Happily, Miuccia has solved my problem.

::thud::

Look after look of this stuff poured down her runway and good googly-moogly, I want every single bit of it.

Oh, my word, that is so unbelievably gorgeous. I could just cry. What I love about this, and what I always love and find such a consistent element in Prada's design, are the rigorous, simple, austere shapes turned out in crazy-beautiful, sumptuous fabrics. Not a lot of bells & whistles here, no silhouettes we've never seen before. Skirt suit & button-front blouse -- check. Sheath dress -- check. A-line skirt and peplum-waist top -- check. And yet...

...not so simple.

Here's a close-up of the boot shown with this dress:

I'm honestly not quite sure how I feel about this boot, but I do love the contrast of this sort of Mad Max deconstructed fierceness paired with that delicate lace.

It seems to me that Miuccia Prada quite a while ago came to terms with the idea that there really isn't anything new left under the sun, and made it her mission in life to re-define what we already have. It seems like with every collection she does, there are one or two gestures that render the whole thing extraordinary; one or two small twists without which the clothes could be utterly unmemorable. A fabric treatment, a pleat, a texture, a color, a lengthening or a cropping of a familiar silhouette... details and extremely deliberate choices that register as huge, dramatic statements. Examined from the big-picture point of view, however, you begin to see how the drama ripples out from a small, very deft stirring of the waters. A little here, a little there, and by the end it's as though she's recreated the whole ocean.

And also, often, blah-blah-fashionphilosophyfishcakes-blah -- it's just freakin' gorgeous.

Here's where I maybe for the first and last time ever tell you to go ahead and succumb to your matchy-matchy impulses:

If a lace handbag, however breathtaking, feels a bit impractical, go with leather:

I really don't feel that would be much of a sacrifice, do you?

The lace for this collection was custom-made for Prada. "We've had all Switzerland working on couture lace. They're in shock," Miuccia Prada said. There were several different lace "themes" within the collection, ranging from extremely heavy, re-embroidered point de Venise to chiffon-sheers.

Forgive the quasi-pornographic aspect of this photo, I just wanted to show the detail and variety of these fabrics. I can only assume that these clothes in production will come with some sort of lining. If they don't, Style Spy must insist on a your investing in a good slip or other modesty-enhancing underpinnings. You can look just as wonderful in these clothes without the world being able to see that ill-advised tattoo of a single red rose, the one you got one long, soggy, smoky night during grad school in a location normally exhibited to only the most... er... intimate of friends.

So lovely, and not at all obscene.

But there is no getting around lace as a signifier for the erotic in our culture -- it's what we make our lingerie from, after all. Sheerness and laciness are part of our vocabulary of sex and seduction, which is what makes it such an interesting choice here. The contrast of the severe shapes of these clothes, shapes that are determinedly un-sexy, paired with the inherent eroticism of fabric you can (almost) see through sounds almost trite when described in words,

but turns out to be dark and thrilling in practice.

Now that is a dress I could get married in...

There was a lot more to this collection, including some truly marvelous shoes, but I'll save that for next week. Have a good weekend, everyone!

Photos: MoniqueLhuillier.com, Style.com

Literature for Sniffers -- February 20

I just finished reading this book:

The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York

and I must say, I really enjoyed it. I liked it more than I thought I would, based upon my prior feelings about Chandler Burr's writing. Burr is the perfume critic for the New York Times Magazine, and the author of The Emperor of Scent, a book about fragrance genius Luca Turin and his explorations into the science of scent. The Perfect Scent is a combination of articles Burr wrote for two different magazines about the development of two very different perfumes, UN JARDIN SUR LE NIL by Hermes andLOVELY SARAH JESSICA PARKER .

I found Burr's writing in The Emperor of Scent a little breathless and fan-mag, and his adoration for Turin often came off like a schoolboy crush. There's slightly less of that here, and the stories he's relating are very compelling, especially if, like me, you really love perfume. The inside peek into what goes on during the development of these two products is fascinating. There's just enough science and industry arcana to make perfumistas feel like we're really getting some good scoop, but it's presented in a way that I don't think would be at all confusing to the random consumer of fashion & beauty industry news. If you're a fan of Jean-Claude Ellena, the composer of Jardin Sur le Nil (and I most definitely am -- he's created a few of my very favorite fragrances and I admire his work immensely), your opinion will be cemented by this book. The same goes for Sarah Jessica Parker, who comes across as a genuinely decent young woman subject to none of the common Hollywood star foibles. The book is relatively short and very easy to read, it only took me a few days to go through it.

My problem with Burr's writing stems from his inability to keep from making himself central to the action of what he is reporting. Perhaps this is inevitable (and a bit hypocritical on my part, given the writing I do here) due to the extremely subjective nature of something like the sense of smell, but I do wish for a bit more journalistic distance in his writing. He still comes off as a bit star-struck. He doesn't just report an interview with a subject, he details his experience of and feelings about the interview with a subject. Some might find that a great way of connecting with the reader, but I find it obtrusive. I'm also extremely annoyed by any writer's attribution of motive or subtext to a subject when they do not actually have any proof other than their own gut instinct about it: at one point Parker pays an offhand compliment to Kate Winslet and Burr spends the next third of a page explaining that this is a "tiny bit of management, the line she was supposed to say because she's a careful professional." Well, perhaps that is true. Or perhaps Parker just happens to think Kate Winslet is gorgeous. I mean, most of us do, after all.

Still, the book is worth reading for the information you get. As a lover of fragrance, I was sent running to my perfume collection to sniff bottles and samples several times to reference different scents Burr mentions. I also strongly recommend having samples of the two central fragrances to sniff while you read. (They should package two little sample vials with the book -- wouldn't that be fun? Since they don't, click on these links if you want to get a sample or decant of Jardin Sur le Nil or Lovely from the good folks at The Perfumed Court.) I had some Nil at my disposal, but Lovely is a perfume I don't know and I was kicking myself all through the book for not planning ahead and getting some before I started reading.

For the record, Jardin Sur le Nil is a fragrance I really love, and yet for some reason have never purchased. I'm still trying to work out why that is. The perfume is based on Ellena's experience of the scent of green mangoes in Egypt, and I think at base that is what stops me from wearing it. In my heart I prefer "perfumey" perfumes; I'm not a big fan of what sniffers call "gourmand" accords, basically, fragrances that echo foods. (All the chocolates and vanillas and berries and cotton candies on the perfume market the last few years mostly just turn my stomach.) This is not to say that Nil will make you smell like a bowl of fruit salad -- it's much deeper and more sophisticated than that. Just a comment on my personal taste.

Now. The perfume book that I am really waiting for, eagerly rubbing my hands together like Snidely Whiplash plotting something particularly dastardly, is this one:

Perfumes: The Guide

which is being released April 10. This book is written by Luca Turin, the subject of The Emperor of Scent and the author of The Secret of Scent(confused yet?), a book I loved and have talked about here, and Tania Sanchez. I'll do a little celebrity name-dropping and mention that I'm acquainted with Tania via the Perfumista Interwebs. She's a very bright, funny, perceptive person who writes incredibly well, so the combination of these two authors bodes happily for this book and I can't wait to get my hands on it. (Yes, I'll pre-order. 'Cuz I'm geeky that way.)

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go hit myself with a nice spritz of one of my favorite Ellena perfumes, Angeliques Sous la Pluie. How about you? What did you spritz today?

Second Kors

There was a thunderously positive response to the post I did about Michael Kors' Fall 2008 show last week, which was gratifying (you all have such good taste!) and at the same time a little frustrating -- these clothes won't be in stores for months & months, and, being Michael Kors, they won't be exactly budget-friendly. So I did some surfing and after an exhaustive search (well, I was exhausted), here are some things I came up with (click photos for links).

Trim wool coats to throw casually over your shoulders, hopefully placed there by a man wearing a beautifully-tailored suit.

Under the coat -- shimmery blouses and trim skirts

Great price.

Another bargain!

Such a beautiful neckline.

Basic black pencil skirt -- an essential.

Love the lace peeking out from under the hem here.

Gorgeous fabric!

More beautiful fabric -- click on the link to examine this close-up.

Super-sexy, and I love black watch plaid.

Boxy cropped jackets to balance out your pencil skirts:

Not too voluminous but still the right shape -- great for petites.

I love this -- it would also be great over some skinny slacks.

So adorable, and an unbeatable price.

This is actually a cardigan with a nice structured shape. So cute.

Curvy dresses...

A good basic sheath dress is something worth spending a little money on, because you'll have it forever and it can be dressed up or down as the occasion calls for.

Very dressy, but just lovely.

From myboyfriendAlexanderMcQueen.

Also pretty from the back!

So gorgeous!

Note the detailing at the neck. I adore this.

Above three are great shapes at fantastic prices.

More beautiful fabric, and a more forgiving skirt shape that still reads as nice and hourglass-y.

And this doesn't even dip into the accessories -- the perfect little reptile pumps and the beautiful thin belts and lovely ladylike framed handbags -- but I hope it's enough to inspire you and get you started.

So, go! Shop!


Photos: Style.com