A breast man: Tom Ford on "becoming post-human" and "hard" beauty

steven klein for w/tfs

On Tuesday, Tom Ford’s directorial debut, A Single Man, was released on DVD. Although critically-acclaimed, the film made just US$9million at the domestic box office – and, seemed virtually impossible to find on download at the time of release, due to an apparent lack of geek interest. Miramax hopes it will now find its audience. To celebrate the DVD launch, yesterday NPR radio re-broadcast an interview Ford did with NPR’s Fresh Air host Terry Gross back on December 14 last year. Perhaps the original became subsumed by the deluge of publicity Ford did at the time of the film's theatrical release, because this iv does not appear to have travelled far afield. Below is an MP3 of the full 20 minute interview.

Another empowering image courtesy of the fashion industry

 dario salamone/the ones 2 watch

  

This one is by photographer Dario Salamone, from an editorial story published in The Ones To Watch. That's the emerging talent website operated by models.com, but which was founded and continues to be edited by Australian Rosie Daly (MDC's New Faces editor). The model is Russian Alonya Zubakina and according to the accompanying notes, the shoot – titled “Unholy Wood” - is “A story shot on film about the darkness of the sacred and the sublime of nature, inspired by the power of natural light, relics, votives and Alena’s [sic] beauty". Coincidentally, its publication comes at a time when the practice of stoning women once again finds itself under the western spotlight. 

Jean Paul Gaultier's Perla

Turbans were piled high, shoulder pads took on lives of their own – right down to the elbow - and Dita von Teese stripped down to a black beaded corset, thong and suspenders on the runway – all to promote, presumably, a new collaboration between Jean Paul Gaultier and Italian luxury lingerie brand La Perla. Call it Marlene Dietrich with multiple personality disorder, Gaultier’s haute couture offerings, just off the runway in Paris, were a mixed bag of Forties Hollywood glamour, Lido showgirl and Mortitia Addams. As with Dior’s floral extravaganza on Monday, colours were intense, from poison green to chartreuse, cobalt blue and orchid. It now remains to be seen which contemporary Hollywood icons have the chutzpah to pull these looks off on the red carpet. Head to Now Fashion to see the complete collection.

Seven years after it had three photographers jailed for posting runway images online, the Fédération Française de la couture has joined Twitter

In 1868, Paris-based, British-born couturier Charles Frederick Worth (above) established the world's oldest fashion week organising body, the Chambre syndicale de la confection et de la couture pour des dames et fillettes. It was the precursor to today's Chambre Syndicale de la haute couture Parisienne, the governing body of the haute couture industry. In 1973, with the advent of the ready to wear collections, the latter was integrated under a new peak fashion body: the Fédération Française de la couture, du prêt-à-porter des couturiers et des créateurs de mode. Well stop the press, the Fédération is now on Twitter. Although its Twitter feed appears to have been active since January (it boasts a mere 170 followers) with a Facebook page added around the same time (2000 friends), over the past 24 hours Twitter and Faceboook buttons have been added to the schedule section of the body's website. Fascinating to see this august body move into the 21st century.

Abbey Lee Kershaw walks Chanel (again), makes world number 6

chanel haute couture FW1011/getty via daylife

The haute couture shows roll on and overnight, to the best of frockwriter’s knowledge, Abbey Lee Kershaw was the first Australian model to pop up therein – at Chanel. This is no surprise, as Kershaw has spent the past eight months forging a powerful alliance with the iconic French couture house and its German creative director, Karl Lagerfeld. Kershaw closed Chanel’s Spring/Summer 2010 haute couture show in January, opened its Fall/Winter 2010/2011 ready to wear show in March and appears in both the Spring/Summer 2010 ad campaigns for Lagerfeld’s own collection and the Fall/Winter 2010/2011 Chanel campaign. Back in December, during an interview for Australian current affairs program Today Tonight (only a fraction of which made it to air) Kershaw told me that she was moving on from Italian luxury goods house Gucci, with which she had booked four campaigns – although in everything other than the Flora by Gucci campaign, as part of a group of bigger name models. But Kershaw’s star is definitely on the rise. Since December, beyond her Chanel coups, she has appeared on ten magazine covers. Today Tonight asked, could she make it to number 1? Well she's getting closer - models.com just upgraded her ranking to world number 6.

The shock of the nude at Armani Privé

There was no sign of Lady GaGa, either in the flesh or spirit, at Giorgio Armani's Fall/Winter 2010/2011 haute couture presentation, which concluded a little over an hour ago. GaGa has become something of a walking endorsement for Armani's haute couture line, decked out in Armani Privé for various appearances (and undoubtedly paid a handsome fee to do so). But there were no one-shouldered unitards or globe dresses in Paris today. Instead, a suite of softly-draped, ladylike - and a little Versace-esque - suits and shifts in biscuit colours, sculptural duchess satin sack dresses and signature embellished sheaths. The latter, sure to turn up on another Armani acolyte, Cate Blanchett. Once again, as the highres shots roll in, here are a few of the real-time runway images captured by Now Fashion. Head to the website to see the rest of the collection.

Tiah Eckhardt ties the knot, confirms Eres, auditions for X Men

tim bret-day for agent provocateur

Frockwriter must admit that we did a double take when we saw the shots rolling in of last night's Christian Dior Fall/Winter 2009/2010 haute couture show in Paris, which was staged in the grounds of the Rodin Museum. One model appeared to be a dead ringer for Australia's Tiah Eckhardt. The model in question was, in fact, Sweden's Frida Gustavsson (number 24 in this Style.com pic gallery of the show). As it turns out, Eckhardt was otherwise occupied yesterday, and coincidentally in her own garden of earthly delights: marrying her babydaddy Patrick Delaney in front of a small group of friends in the Rose Garden at Centennial Park. The bride wore? Not Dior haute couture, but a vintage strapless white leather minidress. The happy couple may soon be about to celebrate some other very exciting news. No, not another baby - Eckhardt revealed to frockwriter that she has just auditioned for one of (numerous) upcoming instalments of the X Men film franchise.

Christian Dior's little shop of haute couture

Highres images have yet to go up on the main sites and the real-time images via Twitter were few and far between. But behold the Christian Dior Fall/Winter 2010/2011 haute couture collection which has just walked off the runway in Paris, via Now Fashion, a website which publishes runway images in real-time. Glorious colours, theatrical styling, the show was literally set in a garden in Paris (visible in some shots through a plastic tent structure behind the rows of seating) and appears to have been inspired by exotic hothouse flowers. For images of the complete collection head to Now Fashion.

Forever Young

 nicole bentley for vogue australia/viviens

Queensland continues to springboard stellar modelling talent. After Catherine McNeil, Alyssa Sutherland, Samantha Harris and Jordan Coulter, comes 17 year-old Sunshine Coast schoolgirl Codie Young. Modelling for just a few months and flown in as an exclusive for the Ellery show at Rosemount Australian Fashion Week in May, on Wednesday the first of three Vogue Australia editorials reportedly due to feature Young will be published. She appears in an only-girl story shot by Nicole Bentley in the August edition - part of a larger, 36-page fashion spread in the issue starring six Australian models, each with their own five-page section (Nicole Trunfio, Lauren Brown, Julia Nobis, Rosemary Smith and Samantha Harris). Young's Gold Coast mother agency, Busy Models, reports she has been signed to DNA in New York, Viva in Paris and London and will finish her HSC before embarking on her first international show season in February.  

Frockwriter turns two (and maybe, one day, pro)

rachel kara

Yesterday was American Independence Day, which means it was also frockwriter’s birthday – our second birthday. Just a quick word to say thanks, once again, for your interest, feedback, comments, links, slagoffs... Whatever your connection to this blog, thanks for noticing it. It's enormously appreciated, really. Because it's not like you don't have enough distractions out there competing for your attention. This time last year I mentioned that visitors had reached 200,000 and page impressions, 400,000. In twelve months, those figures have tripled, with frockwriter hitting the one millionth page impression mark on May 14. And this is in spite of the fact that half of the year, October through April, was almost spent on hiatus, while I was preoccupied with a freelance work stint which required a fulltime commitment. Much bigger blogs, of course, easily do one million page impressions a month. But at least it’s a gauge that this blog has managed to establish an audience. And that's motivating. If there wasn’t any interest, I wouldn't keep blogging.

Just on content, since I don’t (yet) have the functionality to show you which posts generate the most interest, I thought I would compile a snapshot of the most popular posts from the past two years.

Number one, by a long shot, is the last post I did on American teenage fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson. Quite ironically, the post was a year old when Gevinson hit the mainstream press at New York Fashion Week last September. It was the last of a series of posts I had done on her in 2008, but must have had a very high search engine rank under Gevinson's name. Once the world's media started writing about her, that's where a lot of people seemed to look for more information, helping generate record traffic that month (close to 100,000 page impressions).

That post proved almost twice as popular as the next most popular post: Abbey Lee Kershaw’s revelation, in December last year, that she, Natasha Poly and Sasha Pivovarova refused to walk in Alexander McQueen’s 'Armadillo' shoes for the Spring/Summer 2010 show in Paris. That story went around the world.

Here is the rest of frockwriter’s top ten most popular posts since launch, in order.

- Where's Abbey Lee? Full frontal and dogging for Terry
- Tiah Eckhardt to bare it all (again) for French Playboy?
- Carry on Pirelli: Kerr, Kershaw and McNeil rubber up for Terry Richardson
- Randy Johnston was not the only model who died last Saturday
- Where's Abbey Lee? Apparently in need of some TLC
- Out of Vogue: Nipple jewellery
- In Vogue: McBeha
- Tallulah Morton - apparently still partying with the Cobrasnake

Yes, four posts in the top ten focus on nudity and that's probably hardly surprising given the nature of the net. There is however a huge gap between the PIs of those posts and the two top posts mentioned above, which have got nothing to do with nudity. If I wanted higher traffic, I would deliberately aim to include more nudity. But that is not the reason it's there. Nudity is a part of the fashion business and it’s up for discussion and debate.

Just in terms of the past 12 months, I wanted to run through some of my favourite posts.

- The neverending adventures of Cassi van den Dungen, since she was crowned runnerup of Australia’s Next Top Model Cycle 5. There was the Facebook fracas with Alex Perry and Charlotte Dawson - in which even Dawson stopped by to comment. In February, van den Dungen found herself in yet another Facebook flap over comments made during a work trip to Paris. That story also whipped around.

- After twelve months of speculation – fuelled by numerous posts on this blog – Jenna Sauers finally outed herself as Tatiana, the anonymous model blogger of US womens superblog Jezebel.

- A bunch of Australian-born, New York-based fashion media heavyweights got together in the Big Apple to launch the Australians in New York Fashion Foundation and mentor young Australians. To mark the occasion, frockwriter picked the brains of a half dozen of them and ran a mini series of profiles.

- In September, Mark Fast hired some plus size models for his Spring/Summer 2010 runway show and his stylist quit. Broken on Twitter, then developed by frockwriter, the story travelled widely.

- Last week's Andrej Pejic series also seemed to generate quite some interest.

Lots of blogs and media outlets have picked stories up. I would just like to single out for special thanks a couple of the larger outlets that do so on a regular basis: various posters on The Fashion Spot (with a special shoutout to Bianca), Fashionologie, The Cut, Models.com, Pedestrian, The Sunday Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald.

Thanks are of course due to my partner Kent, who has been incredibly supportive over the past two years as I invested time and energy into establishing the blog.

I liaise with many different bloggers, journos and new media peeps both on- and off-line. Perhaps it’s no surprise that after blogging for four years, some of my best mates are now bloggers. Special thanks to Bryan, Sonny, Matt, Sam and Isaac.

Thanks again to all of frockwriter’s readers, who now include over 1000 RSS subscribers. I really do appreciate your interest and hope to continue bringing you more of whatever it is that keeps you coming back each day in a crowded media marketplace.

Feel free to either comment or drop me a line re suggestions for material you would like to see more of, or something that I haven’t covered at all.