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D
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A an
in
Evolving World
Living
Fashion
The
Photography
of
Katrin Thomas
Danseur Etoile
The
Opera Ballet
of
Paris
Philippe
Starck
Design Phenom
features
design watch
Unexpected Surprises
This month features a history of cigarette package design
in pictures
Margaret Richardson
Brand & Rebrand
Sprite goes Sublymonal, Baltimore steps up their tourism
& Payless drops Cooper
Tatianan Natske
art update
Local Art
New Zone Artist Collective in Eugene, OR prepares for
their 15th year and counting
Liz Franczak
fashion
Fall Shoes
Michael Zimmerman
Versitility in Four Dresses
Laura Gibson
food
Culinary Infusions
Sarah Albers
Food for Thought
Raul Gold
Danseur Etoile
Reflecting on the Opera Ballet of Paris
Clive Barnes
Design Phenom
Internationally acclaimed designer, Phillipe Starck
shares his ideas on design
Claire Difazio
Living Fashion
Katrin Thomas discusses her work, and the growing
significance of fashion photography
Evan Walker
The Photography of Katrin Thomas
written by Evan Walker
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I’ve always been inspired by the
films of Godard, Antonioni and
Truffaut. They are very real, yet
they are not. Like the way all these
directors use simple but profound
language in an abstract, humorous, romantic way.
Getting Katrin Thomas to explain her
own photographs is a daunting task,
nonetheless, everything that she needs to
say about her work is deftly woven and
crisply realized. Asked how she would
describe her photography to the average
person, she answers, “I would have to say
that it is related to movies I’m creating at
that particular moment. I’ve always been
inspired by the films of Godard, Antonioni and Truffaut. They are very real, yet
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they are not. Like the way all these directors use simple but profound language in
an abstract, humorous, romantic way. In
my photography, I try to explore in a similar way.” Thomas’ photography re-enacts
slices of everyday life and trends, to create
a poetics of glamour, misery, ambivalence,
attitude, ennui, etc.
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A 1997 photograph that she shot in Los Angeles shows
two young girls – each barely twenty years old – exquisitely decked out in fetching single-brea-sted, Chanelinsipred plaid suits. Their bodies are criss-crossed with
lemon-yellow and ochre chalk-bands beside a gleaming
blue swimming pool, accentuated by the girls’ pale nude
legs partially immersed in the pool. The alluring saturation characteristic of the California sun is evident, with
its attendant aura of leisure, but the ironic subtext of chic
boredom underscored in this picture, and not least punctuated by one of the girls’ yawning, exemplifies the care
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that Thomas took in elucidating and, in effect, demystifying the everyday life of privileged Beverly Hills girls.
Fantasy and desire have a clear purpose in fashion: people
want to look through and not at, fashion photographs.
They want to be entertained, amused, comforted and,
hopefully, live vicariously through glossy photographs
of beautifully posed, manicured models. But in celebrating these iconic, spoiled girls, Thomas also betrays the
limitations of luxury that under-privileged girls – unaware – long for.
The edginess of Thomas’s photography
is derived not from its casualness, but
from its cinematic urgency, which stirs
the viewer while retaining a photographic stillness that invites contemplation. The urgency of the cinematic
style captures fleeting moments. Looking at (not through) Thomas’ sepiatoned portraits of impressionable
young boys and girls one by one, we
find that, a touch cruel, she catalogues
all the pretenses of “cutting-edge” finde-siecle: from punk grimace, homeboy-wannabe, Rastafarian anti-coif,
to Soho pseudo-downtown art scene.
Gone are the days when bohemia,
underground, cutting-edge or rudeboys meant something. Nowadays
faking it succeeds more than being it.
A pose, a look, an attitude or a style
can be bought or sold in a second. In
a five-minute makeover, a suburbanite
can be transformed from a pale young
thing into the rr girl of the moment.
“Escape from reality” is no longer necessary; reality has become an escape,
and perception the only reality. Our
life has become as real as cloning, testtube babies, breast implants, nose jobs,
face-lifts, sex-changes, race-changes,
spin doctors, clever lawyers or sexgate.
What are we left with but our true pic-
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ture, a silhouette whose true color is
greenback? Hardcore capitalism commodifies everything and anything. In
Puff Daddy’s words, “It’s all about the
Benjamins”.
As the popularity of fashion as a worthy cultural phenomenon grows in
learned circles, so the role of fashion
photography will progress from a
mere decorative medium to a demanding one with critical framework that
can enable us to see beyond our glamorized decorum. Fashion is not only
contagious, it is also worth catching,
regardless of cultural, religious or gender homogeneity. Perhaps playing, for
instance, with the homogeneous trope
and stereotype of what it means to
be Asian, female, and probably Buddhist, Thomas photographed a young
Asian girl in two frames. In one frame,
dressed in a Maoesque revolutionary
white suit against a background horizontally banded in green, white and
black, this young girl sits leaning on
a white table, her back slightly bent
with anxiety, peering in enigmatic contemplation at her white plate of food.
Clearly Kate Moss, not the Buddha, is
the icon of faith and salvation in the
picture: faith and self-starvation, salvation in thinness. The charged symbolic
analogies of sanitation and purity,
anorexia and thinness, bulimia and
ambivalence, fashion and body, culture and nature bear witness to the
collective psychological damage we
are suffering from. As if to drive her
point home, Thomas’ second frame
freezes her subject’s evident expression of mea culpa.
Those who glibly dismiss fashion
as harmless and irrelevant should
think again. The pervasive tyranny
imposed by waif-chic, epitomized
by Kate Moss’ well-orchestrated
fashion campaigns, is omni-present, day and night, throughout the
world; whether Buddhist, Christian
or Mohammedan, none can escape
the contagion of fashion. The
dilemma between feeding one’s self
and possibly getting fat on the one
hand, or starving herself to desirable
thinness on the other. This tragic
depiction of the ambivalence of fashion and beauty
is one you will not see soon in Vogue or Harper’s
Bazaar: it is too real.
At times, the acute transparency encountered in
Thomas’ work is every bit as damning as it is intense.
In a “bathroom” the photographer depicts an uninvolved blonde wearing tights, her left hand partially
clasped over her mouth and nose, her right forearm
resting on a glass shelf for support and balance. A
second girl, a brunette, is standing in the middle facing away from the viewer, her left arm bent at the
elbow with the palm of her hand cupped, and her
head bowed. Her unseen right hand could be touching the middle of her face. Half-emerging from the
toilet and half standing, the third, also a brunette,
is leaning against the door with both arms raised,
her left hand at an angle, that once again, covers her
mouth, her nose, and an eye. All three girls are, to a
greater of lesser degree, preoccupied with their noses.
This picture entertains multiple readings, including
the recreational use of cocaine by these three girls,
who look as if they may be dancers or something
similar. It should be borne in the mind that cocaine
is reputed to undermine the appetite for food– a necessary evil for dancers.
By realizing this “bathroom” picture without any suggestion that her subjects are posing, Thomas succeeds
in capturing an emblematic moment of decadence,
guilt, shame, and the all-too-familiar insatiable consumption that characterizes the so-called Generation
X. This is not a rehashed, trendy photograph of, say,
heroin-chic, designed to affect a cutting-edge gesture in order to shock the bourgeoisie. Like Edouard
Manet, who insisted that “We must accept our own
times and paint what we see,” Thomas fully embraces
her own time and photographs what she sees.
The eldest of three children, Katrin Thomas was born in
Bonn, Germany on January 5th 1963, at the start of a
decade that was marked by anti-bourgeois values, sexual
promiscuity, “free love” and unashamed drug-abuse; hence,
in many ways, it created a template for the continuing
moral decay of today’s Generation X. At the age of seven,
she left Bonn for Frankenthal, where she spent the rest of
her childhood. Later she studied Visual Communications
and Graphic Design at Darmstadt. In 1991 – 1992, she
attended the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena
California, on a Fulbright-scholarship. For as long as she
can remember, she has been a child of the arts: she was an
actress for a while, and from the age of fifteen to twentyfive, she sang and studied opera. Throughout these formative years, she also studied modern dance, which explains
her evident agility. Faced with her competing talents, she
increasingly turned to still and motion pictures.
Occasionally, fate or providence dictates that an impresario will discover a great and lasting talent. Carmen
dell’ Orefice, the ageless American beauty who is still
working as a fashion model at the age of sixty-seven, was
discovered one day in a Manhattan crosstown bus. Iman, the enduring Somalian
beauty, was discovered as a fashion model
while attending college in the United
States. Likewise, Katrin Thomas was
“discovered” – a thorny term – as a photographer by Thomas N. Stemmle, President and Publisher of Edition Stemmle,
in Photo News, a German photography
magazine, when one of her photographs
adorned the cover. His curiosity aroused,
Stemmle determined to meet Thomas and
see more of her work; impressed by what
she showed him, he offered to publish
her photographs – a decision based on the
strength of her work rather than on her
apparent lack of celebrity. But of course,
Thomas had been working for at least the
past ten years; and like all “discovered”
heroines and heroes, her discovery owed as
much to the eye of the discoverer as to her
untapped talent.
Where Thomas delves squarely into fashion
photography, the obviousness with which
she does so suggest deliberate parody. She
portrays girls in black wigs, seated back to
back against a burgundy wall; they are sep54
arated by two shoulder-high couch backs,
with fake-looking bouquet – a tawdry
attempt at flower arrangement – wedged
exactly into the center, where the curved
arms of the two couches join in an
embrace. At first glance, the atmosphere
of this lounge suggest sheer abandonment
and luxury, but the underlying hypocrisy
of glamour that Thomas captures in this
photography betrays the “escape from reality” epitomized in the cult of supermodels
and their wannabes. Trapped in contradictions, these girls also mirror the malaise of
fashion-victimhood, suffered by millions
of girls the worlds over. “I do not rely on
or need beautiful models, or a photo studio, in order to create a strong picture. In
fact, although I’m not against the use of
beautiful models, I’m confident that my
vision and artistry can always suffice. I’m
more interested in taking an interesting
picture from a seemingly uninteresting
situation. It’s always important for me to
not only realize beauty but also its attendant consequences.”
For most leading fashion photographers, Gallagher Paper – a New York
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City Zspecializing in second-hand
and sought-after out-of-print fashion magazines – has become a sort
of Harvard. Boasting an inexhaustible collection of magazines – Vogue,
Harper’s Bazaar, Vu, Look, and some
dating as far back as the 1900s – Gallagher Paper inspires “fresh” ideas in
as many fashion photographers, who
only have to look at and copy the past
work of Cecil Beaton, Erwin Blumenfeld and others. Take Cecil Beaton and
Horst, for instance: there can be no
doubt as to their exceptional mastery
of lighting effects, costumes, props,
and celebrity subjects, a synergy that
yielded superbly lasting photographs.
But there is an undeniable coldness in
their work. Edge and surprise in photography today can only be realized
with a certain spontaneity, or at least
a smartly wrought casualness. The
cold, august aura of erstwhile masters
like Beaton or Horst is – today, when
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“anything goes” – generally irrelevant
and too quaint. Yet, ironically there
is a great insight embodied in the
ancient Chinese belief that the amateur is the true artist; un burdened by
the weight of reputation, he is open
to chance, willing to take risks with
nothing to lose, and hence free to
constantly explore and chart new territory. True to post-modernism, with
its attendant parody, irony, metafiction, ambiguity, open-ended or notyet future, Thomas confidently seeks
to imbue her photographs with an
ineffable freshness that is immediate,
and deceptively unrehearsed.
Katrin Thomas’ debt to motion pictures is manifest in a picture of six
young women, scantily-clad in swimsuits with their backs to the camera,
walking away from the viewer in single file towards what appears to be a
freight elevator or loading dock. The
girl in the foreground has her arms
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wrapped around her in an apparent attempt to
ward off an uncomfortable draft; the second girl,
a considerable distance behind, is walking with a
defiant poise, while the remaining four girls seem
to be in varying stages of psychological preparation for their exit.
Poll after poll has shown that the average young
woman’s dream job is to be a fashion model. With
religion in rapid decline, faith lost with one
hand is regained by the other. Today, the fashion
magazine is the young woman’s bible, the fashion designer, her god, and the fashion model, her
supreme goddess. Using the fleeting nature of
fashion as a trope, Katrin Thomas has summarily
articulated the vernacular and pernicious ideals of
beauty of today’s young girl.
Throughout Katrin Tomas’ work, there abound
the aura and fetching beauty epitomized by the
breeziness of Francoise Hardy’s voice, the disarming dissonance of Billy Holiday’s phrasing, the
Dionysian wantonness of Prince or Madonna, or
the savory melancholy of Tricky, say, infused with
the pop irreverence of Bjork. Thomas’ grasp of
her photographic composition always manages to
delineate the complex and quotidian with such
rare musical breadth, such artistic restraint and
poetic immediacy that it is able to surprise the
jaded retina of even the most hardened cognoscenti. Whilst any definition of what constitutes a
masterpiece is relative, work like Thomas’, which
unfailingly engenders a sensation of passion, holds
eternal sway. The fuel of passion that fires and
lovingly stirs Katrin Thomas’ photography will
always reward us with its warmth.
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Opera Ballet Paris
The
of
60
written by
Clive Barnes
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W
hen nearly forty years ago I switched (overnight and a subsequent lifetime) from being
a native Londoner to become an immigrant New
Yorker, I knew that one of the things I would miss
most about London would be Paris, and what is nowadays their tunnel-blessed proximity. What I didn’t
know was that one of the things I would miss most
about Paris was the Paris Opera Ballet. And this is
not simply because I am a Francophile, although I
am; it’s more a reflection of the important place the
Paris Opera Ballet occupies in world classic dance.
No, the repertoire is not as fascinating as New
York City Ballet’s, or even as individual as The
Royal Ballet’s – for one thing, the Paris Opera
Ballet has for centuries not had a major choreographer to call its own. Its traditions are not as
securely preserved as the Royal Danes’, nor are
its male dancers as strong as those of American
Ballet Theatre or its women as strong as the
Kirov’s. But the Paris Opera Ballet is a fantastic
company. It was not always so.
I first encountered the company on my first trip
to Paris, in 1949. I was already not young – well,
not that young. And I was already a sophisticated dance aficionado (actually, over-sophisticated) and emerging dance critic (although,
armed with industrial-strength binoculars, I
was still paying for my own tickets in the farthest, cheapest reaches of theaters). The company did not impress me overmuch – it seemed
infinitely less interesting than the various
independent troupes of Roland Petit and Boris
Kochno. In fact, apart from my first sight of
Symphony in C (with the original Paris east
minus Tamara Toumanova) under its French
nom de guerre of Le Palais de cristal, and with
those fancy Leonor Fini designs, I was totally
underwhelmed. I stubbornly remained so on
many later occasions.
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Even a two-week immersion season by the company at
Covent Garden in 1954 (my diaries note that I saw eighteen ballets, mostly by Serge Lifar, spread over fourteen
performances) did nothing to make me a fan, despite the
presence of both the wondrous Yvette Chauvire and the
lustrous Nina Vyroubova, two of my most beloved ballerinas of the twentieth century. Subsequently, when in
Paris I would go to the company as a mild evening relaxation. Journalistically I at least made copy out of, say,
John Cranko’s 1955 La Belle Helene (underrated, by the
way) or Gene Kelly’s 1960 Gershwin piece Pas de Dieux
(Claude Bessy was divine, but Jerry Lewis could have done
better choreography) or Pierre Lacotte’s 1972 adequate
reconstruction of La Sylphide (not as good, I thought, as
Victor Gsovsky’s earlier attempt for Petit), but my rating
of the company among the majors was pretty much the
lowest of the low.
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By now the troupe was involved in a
succession of directors. There were fine
dancers, but no company. I caught the
occasional “event” – Helgi Tomasson’s
guest debut as Albrecht in Giselle, for
example, or the revival of Yuri Grigorovich’s Ivan the Terrible, with the marvelous Jean Guizerix (a great Robbins
interpreter, by the way), Dominique
Khalfouni and, also a favorite at ABT,
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Michael Denard. Yet I still didn’t take
Paris’s dancers as seriously as its cooking until I had an awakening in October 1977.
Every year the Paris Opera holds promotion examinations for its dancers – apart from the etoiles and the
senior soloists – with a jury consisting
of the Paris Opera administration, a
delegation of dancers, and a few for69
eign outsiders, who in 1977 consisted
of Kenneth MacMillan, Asaf Messerer,
and myself. I realized that since Bessy
had taken control of the ballet school
some five years earlier, the standard of
the younger dancers had risen. But seeing them en masse was an extraordinary experience. Bessy and her teachers
had formed a troupe to reckon with – an
instrument for dance.
It is Rudolf Nureyev who, rightly so, is
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given the credit for pushing the POB
into the first rank. His inspiration, with
his prescient promotions and his inculcation ora sense of style but even more
aspiration, was vital. But the dancers
were there before Nureyev took command of the company in 1983, and
they remained after his resignation in
1989. And they are there today, even
though the school, to judge from its
appearance in New York last year, is
not currently producing dancers of the
quality of Bessy’s earlier years.
No real matter – the students will
improve again. And the company, as
I saw in Paris at the beginning of the
year, catching two performances of
Lacotte’s pallid restaging of Paquita
at the Palais Gamier, and at the Opera
Bastille a strike-struck, virtually scen-
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ery-less, revival of John Neumeier’s imaginative
Sylvia (but bring back the Ashton and give it to the
French!), is still that same marvelous instrument.
I’ve never been much enamored of Agnes Letestu
and Jose Martinez, but their alternates in the leading roles in Paquita, the glistening Clairemarie
Osta and the elegant Jean-Guillaume Bart, were
superb. In Sylvia, Eleonora Abbagnato, Delphine
Moussin, Nicolas Le Riche, and Manuel Legris
showed just that style, spirit, and sheer technique
that has made today’s Paris Opera Ballet one of
the wonders of the dance world. I miss Paris – and
nowadays the dancers as much as the city.
Senior Consulting Editor Clive Barnes, who covers dance
and theater for the New York Post, has contributed to Dance
Magazine since 1956.
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Design Phenom
Claire Difazio
Starck recalls spending his childhood underneath his father’s drawing boards; hours spent sawing, cutting, gluing, sanding, dismantling
bikes, motor cycles and other objects. Endless hours, a whole lifetime
spent taking apart and putting back together whatever comes to hand,
remaking the world around him.
Several years and several prototypes later, the Italians have made him
responsible for their furniture, President Mitterand asked him to change
life at the Elysées Palace, the Café Costes has become Le Café, he has
turned the Royalton and Paramount in New York into the new classics
of the hotel world and scattered Japan with architectural tours de force
that have made him the leading exponent of expressionist architecture.
His respect for the environment and for humankind has also been recognized in France, where he was commissioned to design the Ecole
Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the control tower at
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Bordeaux airport, and a waste recycling plant in
Paris metropolitan area.
Abroad, he continues to shake up both the traditions and cultures of the major cities around
the world, with the decoration of the Peninsula
Hotel restaurant in Hong Kong, the Teatron in
Mexico, the Hotel Delano in Miami, the Mondrian in Los Angeles, the Asia de Cuba restaurant in New York, and a whole clutch of projects
under way in London and elsewhere. His gift is
to turn the object of his commission instantly
into a place of charm, pleasure and encounters.
An honest and enthusiastic citizen of today’s
world, he considers it his duty to share with us
his subversive vision of a better world which
is his alone and yet which fits up like a glove.
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He is tireless in changing the realities of our
daily life, sublimating our roots and the deepest
wellsprings of our being into his changes. He
captures the essential spirit of the sea for Béneteau, turns the toothbrush into a noble object,
squeezes lemons but the “wrong“ way, and even
makes our tv sets more fun to be with when
he brings his “emotional style“ into Thomson’s
electronic world.
He also takes time out to change our pasta, our
ash-trays, lamps, toothbrushes, door handles,
cutlery, candlesticks, kettles, knives, vases,
clocks, scooters, motorcycles, desks, beds, taps,
baths, toilets…in short, our whole life. A life
that he finds increasingly fascinating, which
has brought him now closer to the human body
with clothes, underwear, shoes, glasses, watches,
food, toiletries et al., still determined that his
designs shall, as ever, respect the nature and the
future of mankind.
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Q A
what is the best moment of the day?
where do you get news from?
when you make love to the person that you love.
I live like a monk, so there is no news. I read only the scientific
magazines.
what kind of music do you listen to at the moment?
everything is good.
do you have any preferences on how women dress?
ehh... yes. I like the dress that is like a double skin.
do you listen to the radio?
bollywood radio.
what kind of clothes do you avoid wearing?
cannot say.
what books do you have on your bedside table?
so many... I read 12 books at a time...
‘europeana’ by patrik ourednik (a brief history of the twentieth
century). it is very important to read.
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do you have any pets?
no.
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and you have designed hotels, clubs and restaurants...again, a different approach?
among the most recent work is ‘collection guns’ lamps for flos.
when you were a child, what did you want to be?
the guns collection is nothing but a sign of the times. we get the symbols
we deserve.
P.S.: light, functional, affordable and elegant, with over 100 million copies officially produced to date, the kalachnikov is one of the industrial
design success-stories of our age. mr kalachnikov has never received any
royalties for this design. he often complains about it. thus, I intend to pay
him a commission for the sales of the model that replicates his invention.
poor guy. the remainder will be donated to ‘medicins sans frontieres’,...
nothing.
can you describe an evolution in your work from your first projects
where do you work on your projects?
to the present day?
anywhere in front of the sea.
more honest.
who would you like to design something for?
do you design for the masses?
nobody. there are already thousands of really, really
good chairs. there are thousands of good lamps. there
are thousands of everything.
I have been trying for 20 years now. how I make life better for my tribe.
it is the same thing. just the scale is different.
is there any architect or designer from past you appreciate a lot?
I am not interested in architects or designers. I no longer wish to talk
about design.
any advice for the young?
advice? make a job useful.
what are you afraid of regarding the future?
the loss of civilisation.
you once said that it is your dream to make the world a better
place...is it beauty you are looking for?
do you discuss your work with other designers?
never. I am not interested in designers.
no, not for beauty. we have to replace beauty, which is a cultural concept,
with goodness, which is a humanist concept.
the beauty of intelligence?
describe your ‘style’, like a good friend of yours
would describe it.
yes. of intelligence. the elegance of intelligence and the beauty of happiness.
freedom.
you design shoes, eyeglasses,...is your approach to fashion design
which of your works has given you the most satis-
different to that of industrial design?
faction?
I have no reason with fashion but am interested to make clothes for my
friends.
the next.
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The world’s museums are unerring. Paris,
New York, Munich, London, Chicago,
Kyoto, Barcelona – all exhibit his work
as that of a master. Prizes and awards are
showered on him: des-igner of the year,
Grand Prix for Industrial Design, the
Oscar for Design, Officier des Arts et des
Lettres, and many more.
Always and everywhere, he seems to
understand better than any other our
dreams, our desires, our needs, and our
responsibility to the future, as well the
overriding need to respect his fellow
citizens by making his work a political
and a civic act. Crazy, warm yet terribly
lucid, he draws without respite, out of
necessity, driven by a sense of urgency,
for himself and for others. He touches
us through his work, which is fine
and intelligent indeed, but most of all
touches us because he puts his heart into
that work, creating objects that are good
even before they are beautiful.
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