Style Icons: Style is not for sale
... Unfortunately, no. The heroine-addicted singer is just as little a style icon as Madonna "reinvents herself". All these women just change their clothes a lot. The term style icon is meanwhile abused in an inflationary way, because it ennobles taste and clothes can be marketed so extremely lucrative.
But unlike the fashion in which the clothes at best say, style is like a novel. He wants to be read and lived, is visible, a constant self-utterance. Like the man who invents him, style is an original, and when he becomes world famous, he makes his creator an icon. To the style icon. Fashion in women like Iris Apple, Zandra Rhodes, Mary Quant or Barbara Hulanicki Behind the faces and the external appearance, one can always sense an attitude: the idea that these women have of themselves, of the world, is palpable, enthusiastic, infected. They have inspired a generation and more with their creativity and courage to do and carry as they pleased.
Barbara Hulanicki: "My life is a movie."
Barbara Hulanicki invented the Biba brand, but in truth, the brand did not care. What really mattered was the trappings. The attitude. Biba was "lifestyle" long before this term even existed.
Born in Warsaw, Hulanicki founded Biba in London in 1964 as a mailorder dispatcher for very cheap fashion. With success. The shipping turned into a chain of boutiques, and at the height of its success, Biba was a multi-storey department store, adventure park with clients from the '70s rock' n 'roll and Hollywood elite. It was about staging.
At Biba the motto was: "Oscar Wilde goes Glamrock". Ostrich feathers were sold. Rose water. Scimitar. Leopard print blankets. Pants made of purple velvet. Floor-length elven dresses made of painted silk. Gold framed mirror. Bronze cherubs. Chinese lacquer furniture. In the shop window were features sofas for the customers, so that they could look at the passers-by. When Biba make-up lips were blue and brown. Nails violet and black. Women wore plateau suede boots, mini dresses, and maxi jackets. Everything from Biba. Biba was the grocery store of the Seventy. Everything was allowed. Epochs and disciplines: calligraphy and romantic literature, mysticism and mannerism. The only criterion: the total harmony. In this wonderland, Marc Bolan of T Rex, Jimi Hendrix and Marianne Faithfull felt just as at home as the storybook girl from Manchester who dreamed of Avalon and ate eco-cookies.
When Biba broke in 1975, Barbara Hulanicki moved from London to Brazil. Today she lives as an interior designer in Miami. "My life is a movie," she once said. Biba itself is long gone. Her lifestyle has remained.
Zandra Rhodes: "I can not stand being compared."
Shoe designer Manolo Blahnik once wondered about the Englishwoman Zandra Rhodes. He could not understand why she would put her and her work in the same limelight. Blahnik has a good talk. He does not walk around in his pumps. But Rhodes, who often looks like a picture of Wassily Kandinsky with legs, has always worn her couture. And it was so colorful that sometimes you could hear the colors before you saw them.
But Zandra, born in Kent in 1940, never learned tailoring. Instead, she studied textile design, and while her friends were swinging and celebrating in the sixties, Rhodes worked like a maniac. She is still busy from six in the morning until late at night. At that time, their patterns and colors were already radical, dynamic, new. Only nobody could or wanted to work with it. Out of necessity, Zandra designed her own clothes, opened her first store in 1969 with £ 1,000, a loan from actress Vanessa Redgrave. She designed jersey robes with open seams that asymmetrically released a chest. Her creations had holes and were decorated with silver chains. Long before Versace, she used safety pins as jewelry. She was also the first to put seams outward. Silk slashed. Hems shredded and feathered. Later this was called deconstructivism. Her makeup looked like a New Wave album cover: pale skin, brightly colored, precisely painted colors, three eyebrows zigzagging over each other or none at all.
When the American "Vogue" wrote in 1978 that Zandra Rhodes was the Queen of Punk, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren were rather annoyed because it was true. The grammar of colors and shapes was the code for their world of thought in which all abstracts became concrete. It could be a mundane thing, a gesture, such as cutting a hole in the dress in the right place.
Rhodes's old models are now traded like pictures, their vintage clothes can cost a few thousand pounds. The collectors: people like Kate Moss and Tom Ford. But Rhodes' style is not yesterday. It is the constant search for the present, for originality, for the now. "I look like that because I can not stand being compared to anyone," she once said to herself. Others claim that she is the "Elven Queen of the Gossen Boys," a "dragonfly," "a clown that looks like the Great Barrier Reef on a busy day." She once revealed how best to deal with such people: "Keep your eyes on infinite and wait until they stop staring."
Mary Quant: "Adults are awful, children are free."
In 1955 women were financially dependent in England. What they wore was meant to make their husbands happy. They finally paid it too. The silhouette of many women at that time resembled a squeezed in the middle balloon: bosom, wasp waist, pelvis. Maternal was sexy. Female was soft. Point. For teens, there was only one choice: to look like little parents - the sheer horror, the Welsh art student Mary Quant said: "Nothing was there for me, nothing was mine."
Mary wanted to be different. She started designing her own clothes and opened a boutique in London. Mary had no idea about the store, but she had fun. That infected the customers. Quants clothes were like Mary: childlike. Innocent. Carefree. It was a fashion for lanky girls who looked like Peter Pan, only the customers were not boys but real women, which made this new style so outrageously and outrageously sexy.
When Quant invented the miniskirt in the early sixties, people responded enthusiastically. And outraged. Men protested in front of their shop. In truth, a tired dwarven rebellion. The power over the wardrobe of their women had long since lost the men in 1961. The women now took the pill, earned their own money, and bought what they liked. They did not want a cake, they wanted to eat life. And Mary Quant was there to dress her. She herself looked like a skinny Bambi with owl eyes, was creative, efficient, smart, courageous and free. What the others thought was her fault. Like Mary, her models wore accurate Vidal Sassoon haircuts, as precise and modern as a Mondrian, and shakily stood on their thin legs like frightened flamingos. This X-legged pose became world famous.
"Adults are awful, children are free and healthy," Mary Quant said. Later she brought out sex-proof makeup, launched a cosmetics line and sold accessories with her logo, a daisy. A few years ago, the 74-year-old was asked by a journalist why she would still work at all. She looked at the woman as if she were a little foolish and replied, "But it's fun!"
Iris Apfel: "I like to carry everything over each other like the Navajo chiefs."
When a woman's style looks colorful, people call her "peacock," "parrot," or "bird of paradise." If he is special, they call her a rare bird. New Yorker's lady Iris Apfel is one of those who found the New York Metropolitan Museum in 2005, because the exhibition she dedicated to her named "Rara Avis", or "rare bird" in German.
The curator wanted to borrow only Iris apple costume jewelery collection. In conversation she had proposed a garment to him. One outfit turned into two, then three, and in the end, half of the 84-year-old wardrobe went to the masse - 82 models, 300 accessories bought, worn, and, above all, kept in 50 years. The exhibition was a triumph. Karl Lagerfeld came twice. Ralph Lauren offered her a job. Fendi and Armani claimed that there had not been such an ingenious style since Diana Vreeland, the former Vogue boss. The style of Iris Apfel is quite simple: she carries her life.
Owner of a rare materials company, Iris Apfel traveled the world in the 1950s to find fabrics, weavers and craftsmen. She had bought jewelry from coral, amber, silver and wood. Often the ethnic jewelry was oversized and chunky. "Discreet is not for me, I like to carry everything over each other like the Navajo chiefs," she once said. She bought at the Greenwich Village of the 30s, in the Paris of the 50s, in markets in Istanbul, Cairo and Marrakech, visited the jewelry designers who supplied Chanel, Givenchy and St. Laurent. She showed them drawings of old Indian jewelry and asked if they could copy it, as a fake.
"When someone says, 'Take a portion less'," says Iris Apfel, who sometimes wears over 20 bangles on one arm, "I say, 'Add one more.'" Iris Apfel mixes colors, epochs and country costumes as if there is no time, no boundaries between the worlds, the countries, the people. Some call this the Mix 'n' Match. Other paradox. But her style is not mixing, it's the mixer herself. That's why you can not just copy her.Every necklace has a story, every bangle comes from somewhere, every piece of cloth has ever told it something. "She looks at a piece of cloth and listens to the threads," her husband stated. Iris Apfel himself calls this "individual alchemy". Who finds who is thrown back on himself and has the courage to stay there as well. Even when people start talking about rare and strange birds.
