Faye Dunaway, 1987

Dear friends and readers,

I regret to inform you that this will be the very last post of Nueve Musas. But, alas, it is not the end. The blog will be moving on to its new incarnation as Garmento, an online blog and bi-annual printed zine.  So, it’s not so much a farewell as it is “see you later”

or right now…

Rumors, rumors. Hintmag.com has speculated Stefano Pilati will make his way to Armani upon the legend’s retirement. Who’s to say whether this is accurate or valid, but, when looking at Pialti’s Spring 2011 menswear collection that seemed to interpret St. Laurent’s Moroccan fascinations as a palette of beige and greige and into modern, sleek, and global silhouettes with just a hint of retro flair – you can’t say it’s a bad idea.

Spring looks by Oliviero Toscani

Esprit’s Susie Tompkins started the company out of San Francisco when she felt dissatisfied with American fashions after a trip to Europe.  Their ad campaigns shot by Toscani (who is also known for his United Colors of Benneton campaigns) embolden the clothes with a carefree ease and optimistic reality that perhaps could only come from Northern California.

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Photographer Sybille Walter and stylist Samuel Drira contextualize Matthew Ames’ fall 2010 collection in an exclusively urban locale – highlighting the clothes’ profound ease and appropriateness for city dwelling.

And for your interweb social butterflies, do check out Matthew’s new
facebook page.

Hermes’ next womens’ design director, Christophe Lemaire, presents his Spring 2011 RTW collection during the Haute Couture presentations in Paris providing a provocative if not compelling preview of what’s to come.

In 2002 Kaisik Wong was rescued from the pits of obscurity that almost all California based American designers find themselves in at the end of or beyond their careers. Balenciaga’s Nicholas Ghesquire used the San Franciscan’s work as a key reference for his spring 2002 collection.  Wong’s ornate use of patchwork and collage was  so inspiring the esteemed wunderkind was even suggested to have copied the late designer.

Wong’s designs have come to embody a fiercely avant-garde strain of American fashion that has for the most part kept to the west coast.  If American fashion is continuously mocked for producing drab and and boring sportswear it is a lack of demand and not supply that is to blame. Wong worked strictly in his own fantastic realm, reimagining the lives of Atlanteans, Lemurians, and other mythic civilizations, all through the lens of the pacific rim and its multi-cultural synergy with the far east (which is ironically occidental to California). His unusual shapes were just as odd as his colors and materials:  alien, ancient, and artificial all at once.  Most notable however is his use of extremely detailed and laborious handwork, developing a framework for couture that is not dependent on Paris, but on the crafts and traditions of China, India, Korea, Japan, etc.

Spring 2011 collections by Prada, Jil Sander, Calvin Klein, and Gianfranco Ferre

The recent seasons’ pairing down and nod to minimalism has taken on a new and invigorating direction. More than a matter of reducing the clothes to its simplest elements, the body itself is obscured, flattened, blocked, and abstracted; rendered into mere lines, shape, and color.

Photographs by Aldo Fallai

For spring 1988, Armani injects his brand of finessed masculinity with late 80s youth and sex.

The first thing that came to mind when I saw the Celine resort collection was 1970′s Kraut Rock and its aspirations of simplicity, abstraction, and a look towards the future. The second was this old collection by Raf Simons. Hesitant to call out any spiritual motivations, but definitely it’s a whole new outlook we have here…

Ingenious solutions to summertime follies