Paris

Betty Catroux at Musée YSL

| Design & Culture by Ed

When walking down the streets of Paris, you just can’t miss the street posters promoting the current exhibition at Musée Yves Saint Laurent. A naked woman sits on a sofa, with her icy blonde hair and big sunglasses. It’s of course the iconic Betty Catroux. In 2020, the YSL museum is devoting a special exhibition to Catroux, the one and only Saint Laurent “female double.” The pieces displayed in the exhibition come from a major donation Betty Catroux has made to the Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent back in 2002. The museum gave Anthony Vaccarello (Saint Laurent’s creative director) carte blanche for curating this event. The designer approached Betty Catroux’s wardrobe from an aesthetic perspective by selecting the pieces that best reveal her unique personality and ongoing influence on the label’s signature style. “She lives and breathes Saint Laurent. An allure, a mystery, an almost nefarious aspect, an elusive yet desirable nature, all that underlies the house’s aura, and you understand the magnitude of it when you meet Betty.” That elusive aura is perceivable all over the space. Approximately fifty designs show the extent to which Betty Catroux embodied Yves Saint Laurent’s physical ideal and an attitude echoing the “masculine/feminine style” that he was developing when they first met at the nightclub The New Jimmy’s in 1967. Yves immediately fell in love with her androgynous look, which was radically different from the usual codes of femininity and seductiveness and remains the subject of ongoing fascination. Below are some photos I took during my visit. To read more about the museum, here’s the post I wrote about the place when I was here about a year ago.

All photos by Edward Kanarecki.

(P.S. If you are inspired by my Parisian coverage, I’m really happy about, but please have in mind that now isn’t a safe time for any sorts of travelling. Stay at home!)

Daniel Arsham at Galerie Perrotin

| Design & Culture by Ed

Although Daniel Arsham‘s exhibition “Paris, 3020” at Galerie Perrotin closed few days ago, I think it’s still worth writing about it. For his solo exhibition, the renowned, contemporary artist presented a new suite of large-scale sculptures based on iconic busts, friezes and sculptures in the round from classical antiquity. Over the past year, Arsham has been granted unprecedented access to the Réunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais (RMN), a 200-year-old French molding atelier that reproduces masterpieces for several of Europe’s major encyclopedic museums. Arsham was able to use molds and scans of some of the most iconic works from the collections of the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Acropolis Museum in Athens, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the San Pietro in Vincoli as source material for this new body of work. Interested in the way that objects move through time, the works selected by Arsham are so iconic that they have eclipsed their status as mere art object, and instead have embedded themselves into our collective memory and identity. Ranging from Michelangelo’s Moses to the Vénus de Milo, each item was cast in hydrostone to produce a perfect to scale replica of the original sculpture, a process that shares formal qualities with historic wax casting. Arsham utilizes natural pigments that are similar to those used by classical sculptors, such as volcanic ash, blue calcite, selenite, quartz, and rose quartz. From that, individual erosions are chiseled into the surface of the hydrostone, a nod to the sculpting techniques of the Renaissance sculptors. Finally, Arsham applies his signature tactic of crystallization (which has distinct, organic appearance). Making use of classical and ancient objects, this new body of work experiments with the timelessness of certain symbols, furthering Arsham’s previous investigations into “objecthood”.

76 rue de Turenne

All photos by Edward Kanarecki.

(P.S. If you are inspired by my Parisian coverage, I’m really happy about, but please have in mind that now isn’t a safe time for any sorts of travelling. Stay at home!)

Paris in Bloom

| Design & Culture by Ed

Paris is blooming! No other tune comes to my mind when I think of the beautiful, Parisian spring. “Heaven Scent” by Soulwax and Chloë Sevigny is the ultimate mood.

Send me your majestic rain of roses
So that I may share your grace
Bless me with blooms of lily
Blooms of violet
Blooms of buttercups
Blooms of lilac
Blooms of jasmine
Blooms of hyacinth
Blooms of honeysuckle
Blooms of magnolia
Blooms of gardenia
Blooms of tuberose
Let fall from Heaven, please,
The Shower of Flowers
Let me be anointed with the splendor of their perfumed essence
So that I may see the face of God
In all people, and in all experiences.

All photos by Edward Kanarecki.

(P.S. If you are inspired by my Parisian coverage, I’m really happy about, but please have in mind that now isn’t a safe time for any sorts of travelling. Stay at home!)

Dries Van Noten x Christian Lacroix in Paris

| Design & Culture by Ed

Three weeks ago I’ve been to my beloved Paris – the pre-coronavirus-outbreak times… – and now is the moment to share some of my highlights. A trip to the Dries Van Noten store on the Left Bank is a ritual, but this time, it was even more important because of the very special collection that is there. I mean spring-summer 2020, the one where Dries collaborated with the legendary designer Christian Lacroix. You might have already observed that I really fell in love with this one-of-a-kind collaboration. Or better, say match; dialogue; meeting. When this bacame a fact during the last Paris fashion week, in that very moment the planets moved or maybe the time stopped. This collection is something you never thought you needed in your life. I’m still in absolute awe, while going through the looks over and over again. “The idea is to bring fun ideas, nothing too serious, things that I think perhaps we have lost a little in fashion”, Van Noten told the press back then. “I wanted to do something joyful”. Dries and Christian weren’t acquainted before their collab (it came up spontaneously), but their contrasts became actual similitaries once they started working together. They fulfilled each other. Lacroix’s iconic legacy of ‘never too much’ combined with Van Noten’s mastership of colour-and-print balance. Looking at the final result, all the Lacroix signatures are in place, filtered through Van Noten’s sensibility: polka dots, broad stripes, animal prints, ruffles, matador jackets, gigot sleeves, silks woven with scaled up, bright flowers, pouf skirts, duchesse satin and grosgrain. The vocabulary of Dries Van Noten is fused with that of Mr. Christian Lacroix throughout: said jacquards have been scanned and appear as prints across cotton and organza; lightweight polyesters, made out of recycled plastic bottles and coated papers rustle alongside precious French silks; basic white tops are decorated with a single overblown embroidered sleeve here, jeans with an appliquéd feather or feather print on one leg there. If Mr. Lacroix was among the most feted couturiers of the latter part of the 20th century (in his own words, he “failed with ready-to-wear”), Dries Van Noten is one of the pret-a-porter leaders of today. It’s a match made in heaven. Such fashion wonders happen very, very rarely, so seeing them IRL, in the charming Van Noten boutique, was an ecstatic experience. Below are photos I took there, mixed with my new collages feauturing the collection photographed by Tommy Ton. As most of us are staying at home now, here‘s a link to the interview where both designers talk about their work – and even if you’ve seen it, it’s worth rewatching!

7 Quai Malaquais – Paris

(The place is temporarily closed. If you are inspired by my Parisian coverage, I’m really happy about, but please have in mind that now isn’t a safe time for any sorts of travelling. Stay at home!)

Photos and collages by Edward Kanarecki, photos of the collection photographed by Tommy Ton for Dries Van Noten.

Good Times Will Come. Rosie Assoulin AW20

| Design & Culture by Ed

The spread of coronavirus affected everyone in the fashion industry this season, from Milan to Paris. In the first days of March, Rosie Assoulin planned to present her autumn-winter 2020 collection in Paris. I was so happy: we would finally meet in person after years of our Instagram chats. In the end, the event didn’t take place and the designer stayed in New York for safety reasons (which was a right thing to do). When the look-book went live on-line, I was even sadder we all didn’t get a chance to see the clothes in real life, because this collection is GORGEOUS. It’s probably my favourite line-up coming from Rosie. The collection consists of three stories, “almost like capsule collections,” the designer told Vogue, with each speaking to a different theme. The first story emphasized knitwear and outerwear. Her new season hit, “Thousand-In-One-Ways” wool sweater, is a highlight – you can wear it multiple ways, sometimes revealingly, sometimes concealingly. Jumbo plaids, blanket shapes, and heavy wools were cut into fitted coats that blurred the line between jacket and dress. The next story was florals – literally. The designer used silk-petal daisies with velvet buttons to turn the skirt of a lemon dress into a 3D garden. Same happened to a going-out bra and one of the white shirts. The last part was Assoulin’s all-time signature: eveningwear. Couture-ish volumes in exuberant colours and rich satins were contrasted with simpler, yet equally convincing pieces like the white column dress with matching flowers on the straps or a parachute mini-dress in lemon-zest-yellow. Good times will come. Celebrate them in one of those beauties.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.