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about scad<br />
The Savannah College of Art and Design is a private,<br />
nonprofit, accredited institution conferring bachelor’s and<br />
master’s degrees at distinctive locations to prepare talented<br />
students for professional careers. SCAD offers degrees in<br />
more than 40 majors, as well as minors in more than 60 disciplines.<br />
With 32,000 alumni worldwide, SCAD demonstrates<br />
an exceptional education and unparalleled career preparation.<br />
At locations in Savannah and Atlanta, Georgia; in Hong<br />
Kong; in Lacoste, France; and online through SCAD<br />
eLearning, the diverse student body consists of more than<br />
12,000 students, from across the United States and over<br />
100 countries. SCAD’s innovative curriculum is enhanced<br />
by advanced, professional-level technology, equipment and<br />
learning resources. Curricular collaborations with companies<br />
and organizations including Google and the National Council<br />
of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) affirm the<br />
professional currency SCAD champions in its programs.<br />
The university, students, faculty and alumni have garnered<br />
acclaim from respected organizations and publications<br />
worldwide including four consecutive years of No. 1 rankings<br />
for the undergraduate interior design program by DesignIntelligence,<br />
recognition as one of the 2014 Red Dot Design<br />
Rankings’ top 10 universities in the Americas and Europe, and<br />
the No. 1 graduate fashion program in the U.S. as determined<br />
by London-based Business of Fashion. For more information,<br />
visit the official SCAD blog.<br />
Photo courtesy of SCAD FASH.<br />
1
SCAD FASH celebrates fashion as a universal language, garments as important conduits<br />
of identity, and film as an immersive and memorable medium. Situated within the SCAD<br />
Atlanta campus at 1600 Peachtree St., SCAD FASH focuses on the future of fashion design,<br />
connecting conceptual to historical principles of dress — whether ceremonial, celebratory or<br />
casual — and welcomes visitors of all ages to engage with dynamic exhibitions, captivating<br />
films and educationally enriching events.<br />
Fortified by the university’s strong global presence and<br />
worldwide connections to renowned contemporary fashion<br />
designers, filmmakers and creative professionals all over<br />
the world, SCAD FASH is an integral part of the SCAD<br />
educational experience.<br />
Like the award-winning SCAD Museum of Art, SCAD FASH<br />
serves as a teaching museum and creative resource for students<br />
of all ages and a wellspring of inspiration for visitors. Through<br />
programming that engages the university’s broad array of<br />
academic disciplines — encompassing more than 40 majors<br />
and 60 minors — SCAD FASH offers a diverse, year-round<br />
program of exhibitions, films, installations, performances and<br />
events to enliven and inspire SCAD students and the greater<br />
community. Every program is designed to engage and appeal<br />
to visitors with varied backgrounds and interests, from textiles<br />
and jewelry to photography and film.<br />
Within nearly 10,000 square feet of elegant and adaptable<br />
exhibition space, SCAD FASH brings a dynamic and distinct<br />
schedule of fashion-focused exhibitions and compelling films<br />
to the heart of Midtown Atlanta. Beyond its extensive gallery<br />
space, SCAD FASH includes a fashion resource room for the<br />
presentation of techniques and materials, a state-of-the-art<br />
media lounge for educational film and digital presentations,<br />
collections storage, and a new grand entrance and lobby. An<br />
additional 27,000 square feet of academic and studio space<br />
also surrounds the perimeter of the museum, providing<br />
students immediate access to the museum and its resources.<br />
Throughout the year at each of its locations around the world,<br />
SCAD hosts a spectacular lineup of thought-provoking,<br />
sparkling, star-studded events that place art and design<br />
education front and center. SCAD FASH promotes valuable<br />
career-building connections and continues this rich tradition<br />
by affording students and professors across all disciplines the<br />
opportunity to celebrate works of wearable art and remarkable<br />
filmmaking, and to interact with the renowned and emerging<br />
creative professionals who create them.<br />
2
contents<br />
the designers<br />
Oscar De La Renta<br />
page eight<br />
Carolina Herrera<br />
page fourteen<br />
the photographers<br />
Bill Cunningham<br />
page twenty eight<br />
Jonathan Becker<br />
page thirty eight<br />
Leadership<br />
page forty four<br />
Visit<br />
page forty six<br />
Membership<br />
page forty eight<br />
Oscar De La Renta gown designed for Oprah Winfrey to wear at the Met Gala, 2010.<br />
Photo courtesy of Getty Dimitrios Kambouris/filmmagic, SCAD.
Backstage at Oscar De La Renta Winter 2015 Show.<br />
Photo courtesy of Harper's Bazaar.<br />
4
THE<br />
designers<br />
5
OSCAR DE LA RENTA<br />
6
CAROLINA HERRERA<br />
SCAD FASH presented “Oscar de la Renta,” the inaugural<br />
exhibition at the Savannah College of Art and Design’s<br />
new museum of fashion. “Oscar de la Renta” celebrates the<br />
illustrious life and designs of the storied couturier whose<br />
work set the standard for timeless elegance, and it also<br />
introduces the work of Peter Copping, the talented designer<br />
personally selected by de la Renta to lead the iconic brand<br />
into the future.<br />
The SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film and the<br />
SCAD Museum of Art present “Refined Irreverence,” a<br />
dual exhibition celebrating Carolina Herrera and the 35th<br />
anniversary of the House of Herrera. The exhibition marks<br />
the first museum showing of Herrera’s work. Featuring new<br />
and vintage designs from Herrera’s 1981 inaugural collection<br />
to the present, “Refined Irreverence” includes more than 75<br />
garments showcasing the designer’s modern, dynamic classics.<br />
Oscar De La Renta Spring/Summer 2013 Show. Photo courtesy of Harper's 7 Bazaar.<br />
Carolina Herrera Spring 2016 Show. Photo courtesy of Harper's Bazaar.
Photo courtesy of Fashion Sizzle.<br />
8
OSCAR<br />
DE LA<br />
RENTA<br />
THE LAVISH LEGACY LIVES ON<br />
9
DE LA RENTA<br />
“Oscar de la Renta,” the inaugural<br />
SCAD FASH exhibition, celebrated the<br />
illustrious life and designs of the storied<br />
couturier whose work set the standard<br />
for timeless elegance. The momentous<br />
exhibition featured more than 60<br />
garments, including those designed for<br />
Hollywood A-listers Oprah Winfrey,<br />
Nicole Kidman and Taylor Swift, as well<br />
as former first lady Laura Bush. “Oscar<br />
de la Renta” also introduced the work<br />
of Peter Copping, the talented designer<br />
personally selected by de la Renta to<br />
lead the iconic brand into the future.<br />
Additionally, “Ovation for Oscar,” a<br />
short documentary created by SCAD<br />
alumni and students that premiered at<br />
the Cannes Film Festival earlier this<br />
year, was part of the exhibition.<br />
Photo courtesy of SCAD FASH.<br />
10
Photo courtesy of Fashion Sizzle.<br />
“THE 21ST CENTURY IS THE CENTURY OF THE WOMAN,”<br />
said Oscar de la Renta in 2010. You can see this declaration<br />
manifested throughout his work, and throughout his current<br />
retrospective at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. His<br />
designs, known for their boldness, femininity and opulence,<br />
require a woman to be comfortable taking center stage,<br />
whether it’s in a full floral ballgown, vibrant kaftan or an<br />
embellished tunic.<br />
It’s no surprise then that powerful women from the realms of<br />
both politics and pop culture have continuously been loyal<br />
clients of the designer throughout his career, from presidential<br />
candidate Hillary Clinton to pop star Taylor Swift. At the<br />
end of the day, women — and how they felt in his clothes —<br />
were always what drove his vision.<br />
“I believe that my sole purpose as a designer is to create<br />
something that I think a woman would want to wear,” said de<br />
la Renta in 1972.<br />
Although there are more than 120 ensembles produced<br />
over five decades on display, every piece seems to make<br />
one unifying assertion: “Look at me.” His work embraces a<br />
singular expression of womanhood, reveling in its aspects of<br />
adornment, attention and drama. If all the world’s a stage, de<br />
la Renta’s clothes are what you’d want to be wearing for your<br />
moment in the spotlight.<br />
While the retrospective highlights his global influences, from<br />
East to West, it also conveys his overarching American attitude<br />
toward change. The Dominican Republic-born designer<br />
refined his craft in Paris but left for this reason: “I’d come<br />
to New York because I believed the future of fashion was in<br />
ready-to-wear.”<br />
“Over the course of his career, he mixed an incredible<br />
sensibility of ready-to-wear and haute couture, creating demi<br />
couture, an amazing synthesis of both,” Richard Benefield,<br />
the de Young’s Acting Director and Exhibition Organizer,<br />
11
DE LA RENTA<br />
“<br />
I believe that my sole<br />
purpose as a designer<br />
is to create something<br />
that I think a woman<br />
would want to wear.”<br />
−OSCAR DE LA RENTA<br />
explained to The Huffington Post. “Oscar could do it all —<br />
whatever was the most fashionable at the moment, he’d do it<br />
with his distinctive flair and eye for aesthetics.”<br />
Like a story out of a fashion fairy tale, on his very first night in<br />
Manhattan, de la Renta met cosmetics mogul Elizabeth Arden,<br />
who offered him a job the following morning designing<br />
haute couture gowns for her design house. Two years later, he<br />
started his own collection bearing his name.<br />
His legendary status doesn’t end there — in fact, it was just<br />
building. In 1973, he represented the United States as one of<br />
five designers at the notorious “Battle of Versailles” fashion<br />
show, a competition between French and American designers.<br />
De la Renta and the other Americans were a sensation, challenging<br />
old-world European haute couture with their readyto-wear<br />
designs.<br />
clothes during that time reflected American might and confidence.<br />
“In the eighties, it was back into rich, opulent clothes,<br />
which were my thing,” he’s said.<br />
After the 1980s, the designer was always forward-thinking<br />
though, especially when it came to looking to diverse cultures<br />
for inspiration, including Chinese embroideries, Indian<br />
textiles, Uzbek and Kazakh ikat-patterned cloths, Japanese<br />
woodblock prints,and traditional Russian fabrics and ornamentation.<br />
“Today, people — clothes — are international.<br />
Frontiers are non-existent,” de la Renta says.<br />
His sentiments, like his clothes, feel eternally modern yet<br />
timeless. “Oscar de la Renta: The Retrospective” presents the<br />
life and legacy of a man who loved life and encourages you<br />
to celebrate it, too. With the show’s lush exuberance, it’s an<br />
invitation that’s hard to resist.<br />
With a career-long retrospective, it’s easy to see that the 1980s<br />
were the designer’s spiritual and aesthetic home. His bold<br />
ARTICLE BY TRICIA TONGCO<br />
12
DE LA RENTA<br />
Photo courtesy of The Huffington Post.<br />
Amal Alamuddin at her final fitting with Oscar de la Renta, 2014. Photo courtesy of ABCNews.<br />
13
CAROLINA<br />
HERRERA’S<br />
14
quiet path to power<br />
The SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion<br />
+ Film and the SCAD Museum of Art<br />
present “Refined Irreverence,” a dual<br />
exhibition celebrating Carolina Herrera<br />
and the 35th anniversary of the House<br />
of Herrera. The exhibition marks<br />
the first museum showing of Herrera’s<br />
work. Featuring new and vintage<br />
designs from Herrera’s 1981 inaugural<br />
collection to the present, “Refined<br />
Irreverence” includes more than 75<br />
garments showcasing the designer’s<br />
modern, dynamic classics.<br />
Since launching her first collection in<br />
1981 at the behest of legendary Vogue<br />
editor Diana Vreeland, Venezuelan-born<br />
Herrera has become synonymous<br />
with effortless elegance and modern<br />
refinement. “I have a responsibility to<br />
the woman of today — to make her<br />
feel confident, modern and above all<br />
else beautiful,” Herrera said. Curated<br />
by Rafael Gomes, SCAD director of<br />
fashion exhibitions, “Refined Irreverence”<br />
includes runway looks, day wear,<br />
and bridal and red-carpet gowns worn<br />
by Michelle Obama, Taylor Swift, Lady<br />
Gaga, Tina Fey, Renée Zellweger and<br />
Lucy Liu, as well as ensembles from<br />
Herrera’s personal collection.<br />
15<br />
Carolina Herrera Spring/Summer 2016 Show, Carolina Herrera.<br />
Photo courtesy of Harper's Bazaar.
HERRERA<br />
HERRERA was drawn to the museum’s imposing beauty that goes against the grain of the ultracool, frenzied, downtown<br />
venue approach to shows that dominates the New York calendar. But if the Garden Court weren’t easy to enter<br />
and exit, she would have passed. “I don’t like elevators, all right?” Herrera says. “Everybody asked why did I stay at<br />
Lincoln Center [so long]? Because it’s convenient, people arrive and go directly to the show. Because it’s not fair with all of you<br />
going to the shows to be [delayed] at an elevator to go and sit for an hour and then run to another elevator.”<br />
When she had to depart Lincoln Center, Herrera mulled<br />
possibilities that would resonate as interesting yet keep the<br />
focus on the clothes. The Frick, long one of her favorite New<br />
York haunts, came to mind. “It’s not a huge spectacle. It’s a<br />
beautiful place and you don’t have to do a lot of [set] decorations<br />
or anything because everything is there. So that’s the<br />
way, that’s why we ended up there.”<br />
The lady is a pragmatist, a distinction worn with genuine<br />
patrician glamour. And she is a survivor. Along with Ralph<br />
Lauren, Herrera alone remains as a founding presence of the<br />
generation of designers that put American designer fashion<br />
on the map. Yet unlike Lauren, she is a royalty-collecting<br />
employee at the huge company — some would say surprisingly<br />
huge — that bears her name. Barcelona-based Puig<br />
launched Herrera’s first fragrance in 1988 and bought the<br />
company outright in 1995. In 2012, the last time for which the<br />
firm has released figures, Puig put 2011 consolidated global<br />
retail sales for Herrera’s fragrance and fashion at $1.3 billion.<br />
In this age of the designer carousel, the Herrera-Puig relationship<br />
presents as a rare ideal. “Puig is a family business.<br />
That gives you confidence,” Herrera says. “We understand<br />
each other very well. They’re very respectful of what I do,<br />
I’m in the creative side of this company. I’m not the business<br />
side. You ask me what is my business, I don’t have the slightest<br />
idea.”On that point, Herrera indulges in a false modesty.<br />
Running the business side falls to chief executive officer<br />
Carolina Herrera Spring/Summer 2016 Ready-to-Wear Collection.<br />
Photo courtesy of The Style of the Case: Fashion Law.<br />
16
Carolina Herrera Spring 2015 Show.<br />
Photo courtesy of Harper's Bazaar.<br />
17
HERRERA<br />
“<br />
Fashion must be for<br />
today... You have to<br />
be run by your idea<br />
of what you want to<br />
show... design with<br />
your eyes open.”<br />
−CAROLINA HERRERA<br />
François Kress, who joined the firm last March after a tenure<br />
as global president of Stuart Weitzman LLC, and prior stints<br />
at The Row, Prada and LVMH. But Herrera understands one<br />
of its most essential commandments: Know thyself.<br />
The designer’s aesthetic has hardly remained static, evolving<br />
through the years from early flamboyance to a more measured<br />
take on decorative chic. Yet she has resisted the temptation to<br />
veer too dramatically from her elegant, adult perspective in<br />
pursuit of the elusive, some would say imaginary, young client<br />
that so many houses seek, often alienating their core constituencies<br />
in the process. As she approaches her brand’s 35th anniversary,<br />
a mark about which she’s not particularly emotional<br />
(she doesn’t like anniversaries and birthdays), a consistency<br />
of vision marks her work. “I don’t change the style of the<br />
company every six months,” Herrera says. “I think it’s the<br />
saddest thing when you see a fashion company that has been<br />
around for years and they try to be very young and change and<br />
do things they never did [before], trying to attract younger<br />
people. You have to do the right things for the [company]. It’s<br />
sad when you see” a company known for a more discreet take<br />
on fashion, suddenly go “very tight and cool and black leather<br />
like Saint Laurent.<br />
“Fashion must be for today,” she continues. “That doesn’t<br />
mean I’m going to go to an extreme, with black leather<br />
leggings, or all naked. You cannot be naked. You cannot be<br />
run by the red carpet. You cannot be run by Instagram. You<br />
have to be run by your idea of what you want to show…design<br />
with your eyes open. Make it contemporary but don’t confuse<br />
people.”Herrera’s spring collection, one of her loveliest ever,<br />
speaks to that position. A study in sophisticated delicacy, she<br />
worked airy pink fabrics with varying degrees of transparency,<br />
her goal a lineup that was “a little nude but not obvious,” that<br />
would play to the romanticism of the space, “like a fantasy. It<br />
had to move, it had to be light, it had to be like butterflies. I<br />
was very happy with it.”<br />
Recently, she has been very taken with techno foam fabrics,<br />
integrating them seamlessly into her elegant vision. Versions<br />
with various 3-D floral motifs will play prominently in her<br />
fall collection. One features graphic, raised embroideries of<br />
jasmine, Herrera’s favorite flower, its scent a note in her first<br />
fragrance. “I’m always investigating the new techniques to use<br />
in a feminine way, and making women look beautiful for now,<br />
for today. That is my job.”<br />
Fabrics aren’t the only way in which Herrera is embracing<br />
technology. Her upcoming show will be live-streamed with a<br />
360-degree feed on the brand’s Web site, and the company is<br />
growing its social media presence, primarily on Instagram.<br />
As for overall growth, patience has long driven the strategy,<br />
one proven savvy over time, the company’s overall sales<br />
ballooning almost under the radar. The fragrance alone has<br />
more than 25,000 points of sale around the world, and the<br />
CH brand is broadly distributed across North America, Iberia<br />
and the Middle East, including 129 freestanding stores. By<br />
18
HERRERA<br />
comparison, the signature Carolina Herrera is small and<br />
focused on wholesale as opposed to a dense network of brand<br />
stores. It has only three, in New York, Dallas and Los Angeles.<br />
Under Kress’ stewardship, the push is on to grow that business<br />
significantly, with the primary focus on Europe and<br />
North America.<br />
Carolina Herrera Spring 2015 Show.<br />
Photo courtesy of The Fashion Foot.<br />
“You have to analyze everything and have perseverance,”<br />
Herrera says. “Do you want to open stores in places where<br />
they don’t know you and you don’t know if things will sell, or<br />
are just going to open them because of your ego? The fashion<br />
world is a lot of egos. I don’t mind waiting. I want to do things<br />
right, when we are ready. This is the right time to have Carolina<br />
Herrera all over Europe.”<br />
At the same time, growth involves more intimate gestures<br />
as well, and the company is open to one-off or short-term<br />
collaborations. This week, a capsule exclusive to Jeffrey New<br />
York hit the selling floor; it features seven styles in graphic<br />
black-and-white dots that riff on the packaging of the brand’s<br />
first fragrance. A second such collaboration, with Mytheresa.<br />
com, is set for May. “They’re very focused; they know exactly<br />
what they need,” Herrera says. “It’s a joy to work with people<br />
like that.”<br />
Herrera took a gradual path to becoming a major fashion<br />
industry force. She grew up in a world of privilege in Caracas,<br />
one in which fashion was not viewed as particularly significant.<br />
Discipline defined the family ethos in which she and<br />
19
HERRERA<br />
her two sisters were raised. Though she soaked up knowledge<br />
subliminally while looking at her mother’s pretty clothes,<br />
Herrera’s conscious self was far more concerned with studying<br />
the pursuits of a well-bred young lady, both intellectual, such<br />
as art and history, and active — riding and tennis. For years,<br />
she quips, her tennis instructor was the most important person<br />
in her life. She also took cues from her governess, a refined<br />
Hungarian woman who taught her French and English. As<br />
a teenager, Herrera began to explore style as an interest and<br />
fodder for experimentation; she has often said that when she<br />
discovered American screen sirens, she wanted to be a vamp.<br />
All of that combined with good old-fashioned luck — she’s<br />
gorgeous — coalesced into Herrera’s signature glamour, worn<br />
with white-shirted control and impeccable carriage. And very<br />
naturally. Herrera seems, in every discernible way, devoid of<br />
artifice. As she and her second husband, Reinaldo Herrera,<br />
traveled, often to New York, they became regulars at haunts<br />
including Studio 54, and she, on the international society<br />
pages.<br />
“That was so much fun, New York in the Seventies,” she says.<br />
“You were mixed with a lot of creative people, talent, in the<br />
art world, in society, literature, in the movie business. Actors,<br />
actresses, musicians, they were all mixed. You used to go to<br />
dinners and find everybody together. It was fun. I loved it.”<br />
At some point during her enviable itinerant ways, Herrera<br />
decided she had something to offer women like herself in<br />
terms of fashion, chic women with tony lifestyles. She wanted<br />
to open a fashion house. Her friend Halston, who by then had<br />
experienced a series of woes, advised her otherwise. “What did<br />
you drink, are you mad? You can’t!” he admonished.<br />
Undeterred, Herrera forged on. Just past 40 and the mother<br />
of four daughters, she would forge an enviable life as a<br />
working woman, achieving what appears from the outside a<br />
near perfect work-life balance. In aggregate, her daughters<br />
Mercedes, Ana Luisa, Carolina and Patricia have made her<br />
a grandmother 12 times over (each has three children), and<br />
surely the most glamorous great-grandmother on Earth — a<br />
status about which Herrera makes no effort to hide. “Why<br />
should I?” she muses. “I don’t avoid it. I think every age has<br />
benefits and limitations. No? You should try to develop each<br />
one at the proper time.”<br />
About the time Herrera was mulling opening a business<br />
(counseled in the affirmative by none other than Diana<br />
Vreeland, a family friend), she attended a party. Someone<br />
pointed out Armando de Armas, the publishing magnate<br />
whose Miami-based portfolio included the Spanish language<br />
Harper’s Bazaar. A recent cover of the magazine had featured a<br />
paparazzi photo of Herrera. She went over to thank him, and<br />
before the conversation was over, he had offered to invest in<br />
her still nonexistent business. Herrera staged her first show at<br />
the Metropolitan Club for fall 1981, with a band playing Cole<br />
Porter. Steve Rubell was turned away at the door for want of a<br />
necktie; he returned and was welcomed after a quick Bergdorf<br />
Goodman run. All of the big stores — Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf’s,<br />
Saks Fifth Avenue — came and wrote orders.<br />
Despite the seeming worldliness of her operation, as a businessperson,<br />
Herrera was green. She recalls of her first trunk<br />
show that she didn’t grasp the lingo: “I didn’t know it was<br />
called a trunk show because you transported the clothes in a<br />
trunk.” She also had to turn down an offer of windows from<br />
the legendary Park Avenue retailer Martha. Before the Metropolitan<br />
show, Herrera had worked up a small collection “with<br />
20
“It is a great privilege to fête 35<br />
years of Herrera’s timeless elegance,<br />
and to engage SCAD students with<br />
a designer par excellence,” said Paula<br />
Wallace. “Her artistry reflects a<br />
refined sensibility that is at once<br />
classic and modern. Every woman<br />
who wears her designs feels exactly as<br />
Carolina intends: beautiful.”<br />
HERRERA<br />
Illustration used with permission of David Downton.<br />
21
HERRERA<br />
Carolina Herrera Ready To Wear, Fall/Winter 2015 Show.<br />
Photo courtesy of The Who and What.<br />
22
HERRERA<br />
my French couturier in Venezuela.” Vreeland suggested she<br />
take it to Martha, who offered windows. Herrera was about<br />
to jump when a friend pointed out that she couldn’t; she had<br />
not a piece to sell beyond the sample line. Still, she notes,<br />
“Martha, queen of fashion at the moment, wanted to put some<br />
dresses in the window. That was good.”<br />
So, too, was her partnership with De Armas, through which<br />
the business got established for real. They remained together<br />
until he decided he wanted out of fashion. Together they sold<br />
the company outright to Puig.<br />
Simpler times, despite the learning curve. Now, like just about<br />
everyone else in fashion, Herrera thinks the industry machine<br />
has spun wantonly out of control. Too many shows, too many<br />
seasons. “The client, the woman that buys,” Herrera muses,<br />
“do you think they want to buy so much? Do you think they<br />
need all that? Do you think they have time to think, ‘I need<br />
something special that I don’t have?’ Or is it just more, ‘OK,<br />
whatever?'”<br />
She’s open to the rapidly trending concept of consumer-timed<br />
shows — “it’s a good idea if we can again create some mystery”<br />
— but sees potential creative pratfalls in having to make<br />
production commitments in advance of the major-season<br />
shows. “It’s very complicated,” she says, while acknowledging<br />
it’s the way of today’s fashion world. “We have to accept it and<br />
work it out in a way that works for everyone, for us, designers,<br />
people who are the clients and for women who want to look<br />
beautiful.” Despite the industry upheaval, Herrera still loves<br />
her work, particularly working with her two youngest daughters.<br />
“It’s fabulous,” she offers. “First of all, they don’t lie. A<br />
lot of people are afraid to tell the truth.” Carolina works in<br />
fragrance from her base in Madrid; Patricia, in the design<br />
studio. “She’s like a thermometer,” Herrera maintains.<br />
As the company grows, fragrance remains in the forefront of<br />
the strategy. It brought Herrera together with Puig in the first<br />
place, and remains highly successful. “Every designer should<br />
have a scent,” Herrera says. “If it’s successful, it’s amazing. It<br />
helps with everything. You are everywhere in a little bottle<br />
that people buy.”<br />
Another area close to her heart: bridal. The category has<br />
plenty of challenges — MOBs at the top of the list. Having<br />
been on both sides of that coin — mother to four brides and<br />
designer to countless others — Herrera offers advice sprung<br />
from that innate pragmatism. She urges bridal customers<br />
to do their initial scouting on their own, unburdened of the<br />
opinions of moms and other well-intentioned potential irritants.<br />
Yet in the end, pragmatism takes a backseat to all of the<br />
emotion concentrated in the symbolism of a wedding gown,<br />
even to this most worldly professional. “I love bridal, always,”<br />
Herrera says. “You know why I love it? Because it’s full of<br />
hope and love.”<br />
ARTICLE BY BRIDGET FOLEY<br />
23
Photograph courtesy of Witold Riedel.<br />
24
HERRERA<br />
my French couturier in Venezuela.” Vreeland suggested she<br />
take it to Martha, who offered windows. Herrera was about<br />
to jump when a friend pointed out that she couldn’t; she had<br />
not a piece to sell beyond the sample line. Still, she notes,<br />
“Martha, queen of fashion at the moment, wanted to put some<br />
dresses in the window. That was good.”<br />
So, too, was her partnership with De Armas, through which<br />
the business got established for real. They remained together<br />
until he decided he wanted out of fashion. Together they sold<br />
the company outright to Puig.<br />
Simpler times, despite the learning curve. Now, like just about<br />
everyone else in fashion, Herrera thinks the industry machine<br />
has spun wantonly out of control. Too many shows, too many<br />
seasons. “The client, the woman that buys,” Herrera muses,<br />
“do you think they want to buy so much? Do you think they<br />
need all that? Do you think they have time to think, ‘I need<br />
something special that I don’t have?’ Or is it just more, ‘OK,<br />
whatever?'”<br />
She’s open to the rapidly trending concept of consumer-timed<br />
shows — “it’s a good idea if we can again create some mystery”<br />
— but sees potential creative pratfalls in having to make<br />
production commitments in advance of the major-season<br />
shows. “It’s very complicated,” she says, while acknowledging<br />
it’s the way of today’s fashion world. “We have to accept it and<br />
work it out in a way that works for everyone, for us, designers,<br />
people who are the clients and for women who want to look<br />
beautiful.” Despite the industry upheaval, Herrera still loves<br />
her work, particularly working with her two youngest daughters.<br />
“It’s fabulous,” she offers. “First of all, they don’t lie. A<br />
lot of people are afraid to tell the truth.” Carolina works in<br />
fragrance from her base in Madrid; Patricia, in the design<br />
studio. “She’s like a thermometer,” Herrera maintains.<br />
As the company grows, fragrance remains in the forefront of<br />
the strategy. It brought Herrera together with Puig in the first<br />
place, and remains highly successful. “Every designer should<br />
have a scent,” Herrera says. “If it’s successful, it’s amazing. It<br />
helps with everything. You are everywhere in a little bottle<br />
that people buy.”<br />
Another area close to her heart: bridal. The category has<br />
plenty of challenges — MOBs at the top of the list. Having<br />
been on both sides of that coin — mother to four brides and<br />
designer to countless others — Herrera offers advice sprung<br />
from that innate pragmatism. She urges bridal customers<br />
to do their initial scouting on their own, unburdened of the<br />
opinions of moms and other well-intentioned potential irritants.<br />
Yet in the end, pragmatism takes a backseat to all of the<br />
emotion concentrated in the symbolism of a wedding gown,<br />
even to this most worldly professional. “I love bridal, always,”<br />
Herrera says. “You know why I love it? Because it’s full of<br />
hope and love.”<br />
ARTICLE BY BRIDGET FOLEY<br />
23
BILL CUNNINGHAM<br />
General Motors Building, ca. 1968-1976. Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society<br />
26
JONATHAN BECKER<br />
Zac Posen at home, New York, February 2008<br />
This inaugural showing of Cunningham’s 66 historic<br />
photographs and an original program, on loan to<br />
SCAD FASH from the private collection of Nancy<br />
North, a model who walked in the famed fashion<br />
show, illustrates the moment that American design<br />
houses became the international arbiters of style and<br />
celebrates the glamour and excitement of the day.<br />
The exhibition, Becker’s first museum retrospective<br />
in more than 30 years, was originally presented at<br />
the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah and included<br />
a selection of new photographs for SCAD FASH<br />
Museum of Fashion + Film..<br />
27
SCAD FASH is pleased to<br />
present “Grand Divertissement à<br />
Versailles, Vintage Photographs by<br />
Bill Cunningham,” an exhibition<br />
featuring exclusive, vintage images<br />
of the legendary 1973 fashion show,<br />
“The Battle of Versailles,” taken by<br />
acclaimed fashion photographer,<br />
Bill Cunningham. This exhibition<br />
showcases Cunningham’s unique<br />
perspective as a staff photographer<br />
for The New York Times and as an<br />
icon of New York and international<br />
fashion, having contributed significantly<br />
to fashion journalism with his<br />
writing and photography for over<br />
half a century.<br />
Bill Cunningham, 57th and 5th Avenue, 2011.<br />
Photo courtesy of Lenzartis.<br />
28
ill cunningham takes manhattan<br />
Afew summers ago, on upper Fifth Avenue, Bill<br />
Cunningham spied a remarkable creature: a woman,<br />
in her seventies, with a corona of blue hair— not<br />
the muzzy pastel hue associated with bad dye jobs but the<br />
irradiant one of Slurpees and laundry detergent. The woman<br />
gave Cunningham an idea. Every day for a month, whenever<br />
he saw something cerulean (a batik shawl) or aqua (a Hawaiian-print<br />
sarong) or azure (a Japanese parasol) coming down<br />
the sidewalk, he snapped a picture of it. One morning, he<br />
spotted a worker balancing, on his shoulder, a stuffed blue<br />
marlin. “I thought, That’s it, kid!” he recently recalled. The<br />
following Sunday, “On the Street,” the street-fashion column<br />
that Cunningham has maintained in the Times for more than<br />
a decade, was populated entirely with New Yorkers dressed in<br />
various shades of the color—a parade of human paint chips.<br />
“Mediterranean shades of blue are not yet the new pink, but<br />
they are a favorite this summer,” he wrote. “The cooling<br />
watery tones, worn as an accent with white and browns,<br />
appear in turquoise-color jewelry and blue hair, but it is rare<br />
to see a man crossing the Avenue of the Americas with a<br />
trophy sailfish.”<br />
Cunningham’s job is not so different from a fisherman’s: it<br />
requires a keen knowledge, honed over years, of the local<br />
ecosystem and infinite patience in all manner of weather<br />
conditions. His first big catch was an accident. It was 1978,<br />
and a woman wearing a nutria coat had caught his eye. “I<br />
thought: ‘Look at the cut of that shoulder. It’s so beautiful,’<br />
“ he later wrote. “And it was a plain coat, too. You’d look at<br />
it and think: ‘Oh, are you crazy? It’s nothing.’ “ Cunningham<br />
shot frame after frame of the coat, eventually noticing that<br />
other people on the sidewalk were paying attention to its<br />
wearer. It was Greta Garbo. Cunningham showed the pictures,<br />
along with some shots of Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney<br />
(whom he recognized), Farrah Fawcett (whom he didn’t, not<br />
owning<br />
“On the Street”—along with Cunningham’s society column,<br />
“Evening Hours”—is New York’s high-school yearbook, an<br />
exuberant, sometimes retroactively embarrassing chronicle of<br />
the way we looked. Class of 1992: velvet neck ribbons, leopard<br />
prints, black jeans, catsuits, knotted shirts, tote bags, berets<br />
(will they ever come back, after Monica?). Class of 2000: clamdiggers,<br />
beaded fringe, postcard prints, jean jackets, fish-net<br />
stockings, flower brooches (this was the height of “Sex and<br />
the City”). The column, in its way, is as much a portrait of<br />
New York at a given moment in time as any sociological tract<br />
or census—a snapshot of the city. On September 16, 2001,<br />
Cunningham ran a collage of signs (“OUR FINEST HOUR,”<br />
“WE ARE STRONGER NOW”) and flags (on bandannas, on<br />
buildings, on bikes) that makes one as sad and proud, looking<br />
at it now, as it did when it was published. So far this year, he<br />
has identified vogues for picture- frame collars, microminis,<br />
peg-legged pants, and the color gray (“often with a dash of<br />
sapphire or violet,” in the manner of the Edwardians). His<br />
columns are frequently playful —he once featured a woman,<br />
near the Plaza, walking three standard poodles, “an unmatched<br />
set in pink, turquoise, and white”—but they also convey an<br />
29
CUNNINGHAM<br />
elegiac respect for the anonymous promenade of life in a big<br />
city, and a dead-serious desire to get it all down.<br />
For two groups of New Yorkers—the fashionable people,<br />
whose style changes more rapidly than that of the masses, and<br />
the truly creative ones, whose style, while outré, in its theatricality<br />
never really changes at all—“On the Street” is also a<br />
family album. The magazine editors Anna Wintour, Cecilia<br />
Dean, and Carine Roitfeld and the society dermatologist Lisa<br />
Airan are regulars on the page, as are Tziporah Salamon (her<br />
Web site showcases her eight appearances in Cunningham’s<br />
column, including one—a Capri- pants montage—in which<br />
only her legs are visible), and Louise Doktor, a midtown<br />
executive secretary, whose experimental outfits Cunningham<br />
has been documenting from afar for twenty-five years. “She<br />
once bought a coat with four sleeves!” he told me. At a party<br />
thrown last season at Bergdorf Goodman to celebrate the<br />
decoration of the store’s windows in Cunningham’s honor,<br />
guests included not only the police commissioner, Ray<br />
Kelly, and Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher of the Times<br />
(“You’re great! This is a really big thing,” he said, grabbing<br />
Cunningham, who had shown up at his behest, by the shoulders),<br />
but a woman wearing, on her head, what looked like<br />
one of those blue pompoms from a car wash, and a man with a<br />
Swiss-dot veil drawn in ink on his forehead.<br />
Cunningham, who turns eighty this month, is an annual presence<br />
at certain society events: the Fifth Avenue Easter Parade,<br />
the Central Park Conservancy luncheon, the Hampton Classic<br />
Horse Show. This winter, at the ice-skating rink in Central<br />
Park, he took pictures of the children of the children whose<br />
parents he once shot outside Maxim’s took pictures of the<br />
children of the children whose parents he once shot outside<br />
Maxim’s and at the Hotel Pierre (where, at a dinner dance<br />
in 1984, he captured thirty-three women in similar Fabrice<br />
beaded gowns). His vocabulary (“Cheers, child!”) and his<br />
diction (“Mrs. Oh-nah-sis”) are those of a more genteel era—<br />
the weekly audio slideshow he does for the Times offers many<br />
of the pleasures of a Lomax recording—but he rarely goes for<br />
the easy grip-and-grin shot. His sensibility is exhilaratingly<br />
democratic. He takes wonder, or whimsy, where he finds it,<br />
chronicling the Obama Inauguration, the Puerto Rican Day<br />
Parade, Wigstock, and the snowman sweatshirts and reindeer<br />
turtlenecks of tourists; the do-rag and the way that, at one<br />
point in 2000, many young hip-hop fans spontaneously took<br />
to wearing their sweatshirts abstractly, with the neck hole on<br />
the shoulder, or with the sleeves dangling down the back. (He<br />
related the phenomenon to both the Japanese deconstructionists<br />
and the sideways baseball cap.)<br />
The four corners of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street<br />
are some of Cunningham’s favorite shoals. One bright afternoon,<br />
he was there, as he has been for countless hours, casting<br />
about for inspiration. “I have an idea what I’m going to do this<br />
week,” he said. (What that was he refused to say.) “I’ve got to<br />
face the bullet very quickly. If it doesn’t have enough depth, I<br />
should wait.” It was a crackerjack day. “Look at the style you<br />
have here!” Cunningham said. “Stay here on Fifth Avenue and<br />
you see the whole world. Summertime—the vacationers and<br />
the Europeans. The holidays—everyone from the Midwest,<br />
the West, Japan. They’re all here, the whole world!”<br />
Cunningham lives alone in the Carnegie Hall Tower, one of<br />
the last tenants in a formerly vast complex of artists’ studios,<br />
without a private bathroom or cooking facilities. His bed<br />
consists of a piece of foam, a wooden board, and several milk<br />
crates. Nearby is a metal file cabinet crammed with decades’<br />
worth of negatives. (Trip Gabriel, the editor of the Times’<br />
30
CUNNINGHAM<br />
Photograph courtesy of Richard Press, 2011.<br />
Sunday Styles section, where Cunningham’s column appears,<br />
told me that when Cunningham goes to the Paris collections<br />
“our reporters are staying right in the First Arrondissement,<br />
sometimes at the Ritz, and Bill insists on staying at a cheapo<br />
hotel that has no phones in the rooms.” To make a reservation,<br />
he sends a postcard.) “When I fall out of bed in the<br />
morning, I can come over here and get up my adrenaline,”<br />
Cunningham said, blowing his nose into a deli napkin that he<br />
produced from a pocket of the blue workman’s smock that he<br />
customarily wears, as if to say, in solidarity with the hot-dog<br />
venders and delivery boys amid whom he spends his days, that<br />
his office is the street. Around his neck was a battered Nikon.<br />
Its strap was held together with duct tape. Cunningham has<br />
often been described as a fashion monk, but he is closer to<br />
an oblate—a layperson who has dedicated his life to the tribe<br />
without becoming a part of it. A friend of Cunningham’s<br />
told Artforum in 1996, “One of Bill’s favorite sayings, when<br />
anyone starts taking the fashion scene too seriously, is ‘Oops,<br />
you’re falling into the traps of the rich.’ “ In a recent column,<br />
examining the way New Yorkers dress for wet weather,<br />
31
CUNNINGHAM<br />
Cunningham poked fun at “the snobs,” who “are so above it<br />
all, they think the waters will part for them even as they sink<br />
to their ankles.”<br />
Behind Cunningham, the windows of Bergdorf ’s were<br />
festooned with blow-ups of his columns. Linda Fargo, the<br />
store’s vice-president of visual merchandising, said it had<br />
taken ten years to persuade Cunningham to agree to the<br />
exhibit. “Bill is not somebody you can ever press yourself on,”<br />
Fargo said. “I once, to thank him for something, gave him a<br />
very small box of chocolates, and he personally delivered it<br />
back to my office two days later.” There was confetti made<br />
from shredded newspapers. “I’m delighted, but also a little<br />
embarrassed, because you try to be invisible, and this blows<br />
your cover!” Cunningham said, hoisting the Nikon to his eye<br />
and darting off, mid- sentence, in pursuit of a woman with a<br />
fetching fur-lined handbag.<br />
“Luckily, you can slip back into being anonymous very<br />
quickly,” he continued, once he’d returned. “I don’t really see<br />
people—I see clothes. People say everybody’s a slob. Ridiculous!<br />
There are marvellously”—it came out, in a wonderful<br />
archaic honk, as “maah- vah-lously”—“dressed women you<br />
see at a quarter to eight, going to business. When people say<br />
fashion is no more, they’re ridiculous! It’s as good as it ever<br />
was.” I asked if he ever photographed people who didn’t look<br />
so great, the sidewalk’s blooper reel.<br />
He seemed almost offended. “I’m not drawn to something<br />
awful,” he said. “I wouldn’t even see that. I’m looking for<br />
something that has beauty. Do’s and don’ts? I don’t think<br />
there are any don’ts! What right does one have? It’s like the<br />
Queen of England, when she appears, and people have nasty<br />
things to say. My God, she’s dressing for her station and her<br />
office!” A burly man dressed in a flannel shirt and steel-toed<br />
boots approached. “Hi! I’d like to shake the hand of the kid!”<br />
he said, boomingly, offering his palm to Cunningham, who<br />
smiled. The two men began shadowboxing.<br />
“Congrats, Billy. Can’t believe they even got a bicycle in the<br />
window!”The man headed off down the sidewalk, and, as<br />
he faded from view, I asked who he was. “You get to know<br />
people,” Cunningham said, explaining that it was an undercover<br />
cop.<br />
Cunningham was born and brought up in Boston, the<br />
second of four children in an Irish Catholic family. There<br />
remains about him a distinct New Englishness. “One of our<br />
colleagues says that his voice sounds like that of an elderly<br />
hardware-store owner in Vermont,” Trip Gabriel said. At the<br />
Times, Cunningham doesn’t use a computer; he recently got<br />
a desk, and voice mail, which he has never checked. The paper<br />
got rid of its film-processing lab a few years ago, when it went<br />
digital, so Cunningham has his film developed at a one-hour<br />
photo center, on Forty-third Street. Each week, he brings a<br />
batch of his negatives to the office, where a member of the art<br />
department helps him create a layout. “He has browbeaten<br />
and exhausted and worn out the patience of generations of<br />
assistants in that process,” Gabriel said, with affection.<br />
“It was difficult around the turn of this century,” Cunningham<br />
said, “because I had older art directors and they had other<br />
ideas of how things should be laid out. No one could stand<br />
me. Too much trouble! Five pictures, and that’s it. I said, ‘You<br />
can’t do that. You’ve got to tell a story to the reader.’ I’m<br />
writing with pictures—that’s what I always tell them. You go<br />
and tell Maureen Dowd she can only use fifteen words, and<br />
no changes. That’s ridiculous!” He continued, “Young kids,<br />
32
CUNNINGHAM<br />
All photographs taken by Bill Cunningham and provided by The New York Times.<br />
33
CUNNINGHAM<br />
Photograph courtesy of Esenta Tare.<br />
aren’t they wonderful? Not because I push them around—I<br />
would never do that—but because they’re more open to new<br />
thought.” According to “Bill on Bill”—an autobiographical<br />
article, published in the Times in 2002, that for those with<br />
an interest in Cunningham has taken on the authority of a<br />
holy text —Cunningham got his start in fashion as a stockboy<br />
at Bonwit Teller, where an executive, noticing his habit of<br />
watching the lunchtime passersby (“I said, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s<br />
my hobby’ “), encouraged him to revamp their outfits in his<br />
mind’s eye. In 1948, after a few months of classes at Harvard,<br />
Cunningham arrived in New York, where he lived with an<br />
aunt and uncle and worked at Bonwit’s, again, in advertising,<br />
his uncle’s profession. “That’s why my family allowed me<br />
to come here and encouraged me to go into the business,”<br />
he wrote in “Bill on Bill.” “I think they were worried I was<br />
becoming too interested in women’s dresses.”<br />
Actually, hats. After a year, Cunningham rented a top-floor<br />
room in a walkup on East Fifty-second Street. In exchange for<br />
the apartment, he agreed to clean for the men who owned the<br />
building. He worked at a drugstore, and at Howard Johnson,<br />
as a counterman. (“Both jobs provided my meals,” he wrote,<br />
“and the dimes and nickels of my tips paid for millinery<br />
supplies.”) He sold his creations to a carriage-trade clientele<br />
under the name William J. “My family would have been too<br />
embarrassed,” he recalled. “They were very shy people.”<br />
During the Korean War, Cunningham was drafted into the<br />
Army; when he returned to New York he resumed the hat<br />
trade from a shop on West Fifty-fourth Street. In 1963, John<br />
Fairchild hired him as a writer at Women’s Wear Daily. (Eventually,<br />
he went on to cover fashion for the Chicago Tribune<br />
and for Details.) For a time in the late fifties, he owned a<br />
hat shop on Jobs Lane, in Southampton. He is said to have<br />
slept on a cot, hanging his wardrobe—khakis, a shirt, a pair<br />
of underwear—over the closet door. In 1966, a photographer<br />
Cunningham knew gave him an Olympus Pen D half-frame<br />
camera. “It cost about thirty-five dollars,” Cunningham wrote.<br />
“He said, ‘Here, use it like a notebook.’ And that was the real<br />
beginning.”<br />
The best ensembles Cunningham ever saw were in the sixties.<br />
“I was at a fashion show on Seventh Avenue one day, and I<br />
heard commotion out on the street,” he said. “I said, ‘Huh,<br />
what’s that?’ and got up and left the show and saw all these<br />
flower children protesting the Vietnam War. I suddenly realized<br />
that I had always liked the street. I should have known all<br />
along.” Other scenes that have stuck with him: the “incredible<br />
34
“<br />
The problem is I'm not a<br />
good photographer. To be<br />
perfectly honest, I'm too<br />
shy. ot aggressive enough.<br />
Well, I'm not aggressive<br />
at all. I just loved to<br />
see wonderfully dressed<br />
women, and I still do.”<br />
CUNNINGHAM<br />
−BILL CUNNINGHAM<br />
things” from “those marvellous concerts in Tompkins Square<br />
Park”; a woman, walking up things” from “those marvellous<br />
concerts in Tompkins Square Park”; a woman, walking up<br />
Madison Avenue, in a beige-and-black knitted suit from Sonia<br />
Rykiel, accompanied by two beige-and-black pug dogs on<br />
Venetian-red leashes with gold bells.<br />
Cunningham stepped up to one of the Bergdorf windows and<br />
peered at the exhibit inside. “Oh, this is a Doktor,” he said,<br />
referring to a shot of Mrs. Doktor, the secretary, with the<br />
hushed reverence accorded a Renoir or a van Gogh, as if she,<br />
not he, were the artist. “One of the most fascinating. That’s a<br />
wooden gold picture frame that she’s wearing as a necklace. I<br />
got up close, and saw that it had been cut and it was on hinges,<br />
so that it conformed to her body.” A few seconds earlier, a<br />
young Japanese woman had pressed her nose to the glass.<br />
“See, that’s a Margiela sweater,” Cunningham said, indicating<br />
what appeared to be a few stray white yarns on the back of the<br />
woman’s cardigan. “It’s his label. He just uses stitches.”<br />
Haute couture, of which Cunningham has rabbinical knowledge,<br />
is appealing to him insofar as it attracts the most fluent<br />
speakers of fashion, which he, and his admirers, consider a sort<br />
of social language. “He is able to show us who we are before<br />
we’re able to see it,” Linda Fargo said, when we spoke last fall.<br />
“No sooner does Bill call it a trend— observe it, organize it,<br />
and publish it—than it’s a trend. The real news of the week<br />
was the aggressive footwear. I’m kind of bubbling and aerating<br />
it with our team, and boom!”— Cunningham’s column the<br />
following Sunday featured a montage of mostly black high<br />
heels and boots, studded and strapped like those of a stampede<br />
of dominatrices. In October, a few years ago, Cunningham<br />
noticed, on his daily rounds, that an unusual number of<br />
women were carrying enormous—practically Hefty-size—tote<br />
bags embellished with geometric patterns. “I thought, My<br />
God, what’s going on?” he recalled. “You see, the story was<br />
the handbags were becoming more elaborate and heavier and<br />
heavier, and apparently Goyard, a hundred-year-old French<br />
firm, was able to develop a canvas coated with lacquer that was<br />
durable, lightweight, and could hold lots of stuff. There’s got<br />
to be a reason when a lot of people buy things.”<br />
Cunningham is as attuned to the bourgeois as he is to the<br />
avant-garde, and the mundane accessories of day-to-day life<br />
are as exalted in his photographs as any platform shoe or<br />
deconstructed bustle. Balaclavas, shown in collage, hint at the<br />
martial aspect of New York street life. An umbrella, flipped<br />
inside out by the wind, becomes an abstract sculpture; a snow<br />
35
CUNNINGHAM<br />
Photograph courtesy of Perfect Channel.<br />
36
CUNNINGHAM<br />
Photograph courtesy of Anna McDonald, 2009<br />
poncho, wrapped around its wearer’s head, is a plastic exoskeleton<br />
that will eventually be shed. He is drawn to anything<br />
natural: children, gardens, parks, animals. (His column has<br />
featured a parrot, a duck, a python, a monkey, a tortoise, and<br />
many dogs; not long ago, he took a train all the way back<br />
to Long Island when he realized that some black irises he<br />
had just seen at Old Westbury Gardens perfectly echoed the<br />
filigreed lines of both a 1900 cut-velvet Worth gown and<br />
some nearby wrought-iron gates.) He has a thing for curbside<br />
puddles. “It’s a little ridiculous, but a fierce snowstorm is<br />
wonderful!” he said. “Oh, it’s marvellous—it just rearranges<br />
the whole fashion scene when the wind blows down from<br />
the top of the Avenue. Six-, seven-hundred-dollar shoes, and<br />
they’re all in the slush—hey, it’s pretty peculiar!” He went on,<br />
“Nothing like a good blizzard, kid, and you got pictures!”<br />
Among the sort of people who know they are wearing noteworthy<br />
outfits it is considered poor form—and, moreover,<br />
bad luck—to acknowledge that Cunningham is taking one’s<br />
picture, to blow his pose of invisibility. “If you see him,<br />
proper etiquette is just be yourself, but keep moving forward,”<br />
Linda Fargo said. For a civilian, though, opening the Sunday<br />
paper and finding that the way she looked, on the way to a<br />
dental appointment, or to the grocery store, was pleasing to<br />
Cunningham can be a thrilling experience, like opening the<br />
mailbox to find a love letter from a suitor she didn’t know<br />
existed.<br />
Cunningham nodded politely, but said little. As soon as he<br />
could, he scampered off down the sidewalk to snap a picture<br />
of a matron, on her husband’s elbow, in a yellow-and-black<br />
checkerboard suit.<br />
“The season is changing, but it’s more than change of season,”<br />
he said, when he returned. “It’s how fashion will reflect the<br />
financial changes. Fashion, the people wearing it, will do it<br />
before they even know what they’re doing. You don’t know<br />
yet, it’s just starting to gel, but there will be a style. You watch,<br />
you’ll see something. There’s the old saw about hemlines.<br />
Who knows? It’s only in the future you can know. You just<br />
have to stay out on the street and get it. It’s all here.”<br />
ARTICLE BY LAUREN COLLINS<br />
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a fashionable mind:<br />
JONATHAN<br />
BECKER<br />
Jonathan Becker grew up in New York and lived in Paris<br />
in the 1970s. A protégé of iconic photographer Brassaï<br />
while in France, he began his career as a portraitist at<br />
Interview magazine. As New York exhibitions of Becker's<br />
work garnered critical acclaim and visibility, he expanded<br />
his work as a documentarian in the 1980s with Slim<br />
Aarons and Frank Zachary at Town & Country magazine.<br />
Becker began contributing to Vanity Fair under<br />
the tutelage of its founding design director Bea Feitler.<br />
His portraits of filmmaker Louis Malle and of Becker's<br />
mentor and friend Brassaï featured largely in the pages<br />
of the prototype for the magazine's relaunch in 1982.<br />
Becker's specialty in portraits, photographed by and large<br />
on location, soon became a Vanity Fair staple: Robert<br />
Mapplethorpe, Jack Kevorkian, Jocelyn Wildenstein and<br />
Martha Graham, as well as countless socialites, artists<br />
and heads of state. Assignments have dispatched Becker<br />
far and wide — from the Amazon rain forest for first-encounter<br />
photographs of members of the Yanomami tribe<br />
to Buckingham Palace for the first photographs showing<br />
the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles together.<br />
Becker is also known for his close collaboration with<br />
Bob Colacello, Alex Shoumatoff and other Vanity Fair<br />
writers on stories about the denizens of worldly watering<br />
holes, the Adirondacks and Aspen, Palm Beach and Palm<br />
Springs, Capri and others. Over the course of three years'<br />
work for The Rockefeller Foundation, Becker documented<br />
its funded projects on five continents. Four books<br />
of his work have been published: "Bright Young Things,"<br />
"Studios by the Sea, Artists of Long Island's East End,"<br />
"Bright Young Things: London" and "Jonathan Becker:<br />
30 Years at Vanity Fair."<br />
38<br />
Lauren Davis at home, Park Avenue, 2005, Vogue.
39
BECKER<br />
Nicole Kidman, Hollywood, 2000<br />
Designer Tom Ford and agent Massimo Redaelli,<br />
Cannes, for Vanity Fair, 2004<br />
First lady of France Carla Bruni Sarkoz, for Vogue<br />
Magazine at the at Elysee Palace on January 7,<br />
2009 in Paris, France<br />
The work of master photographer Jonathan Becker<br />
is—quite simply—sublime, offering private glimpses inside<br />
the remarkable lives of royalty, celebrities, artists, writers,<br />
activists, and scores of fascinating people around the globe. In<br />
capturing their pain, their ennui, their anguish, and their joy,<br />
Becker humanizes his subjects, revealing the curiously ordinary<br />
side of the extraordinary. Becker’s inclusive eye frames<br />
cultural history. His portraits for Vanity Fair—a magazine<br />
he has contributed to for more than three decades—tell the<br />
40
BECKER<br />
haunting, personal stories of loss, memory, and contemplation.<br />
The expansive breadth of Becker’s photography chronicles a<br />
world in transition, a view of society that is seldom seen. His<br />
ability to seize the authenticity of a moment is reflected by<br />
his life spent delivering unforgettable, lasting images. The<br />
Savannah College of Art and Design is honored to share the<br />
world of Becker in A Fashionable Mind: Photographs by Jonathan<br />
Becker—the first museum retrospective of his work in<br />
more than 30 years—at SCAD FASH, the Savannah College<br />
of Art and Design’s museum celebrating fashion and film.<br />
ARTICLE BY PAULA WALLACE<br />
41
BECKER<br />
Andy Warhol and his corsets at the fourth factory, New York, 1986.<br />
Mapplethorpe at his Whitney Retrospective, 1988.<br />
Madonna, Martha Graham, Calvin Klein at City Center, 1990.<br />
42
BECKER<br />
“<br />
My goal is to always<br />
make one good<br />
picture, even it it's<br />
one good picture a<br />
year. It's a picture<br />
of a rapport. There's<br />
something there<br />
a twinkle.”<br />
−JONATHAN BECKER<br />
43
leadership<br />
“This museum focuses on<br />
the past, present and future<br />
of fashion design, connecting<br />
conceptual to historical<br />
principles of dress, whether<br />
ceremonial, celebratory or<br />
casual, and welcomes visitors<br />
of all ages to engage with<br />
cutting-edge exhibitions,<br />
educationally enriching events,<br />
films and forums, guided by<br />
curricula for K-12 students<br />
and resources for graduate<br />
scholars.”<br />
−SCAD President & Founder, Paula Wallace<br />
Photos courtesy of SCAD FASH.<br />
44
PAULA WALLACE<br />
Paula Wallace is the president and<br />
founder of the Savannah College of<br />
Art and Design, a private, nonprofit,<br />
accredited university for creative<br />
careers. Established in 1978, SCAD<br />
is the largest, most comprehensive art<br />
and design university in the U.S. Since<br />
her appointment as president in 2000,<br />
Wallace has more than doubled the<br />
university's enrollment from less than<br />
5,000 students to more than 12,000<br />
students hailing from more than 100<br />
countries. Wallace has created several<br />
signature SCAD events, including the<br />
Savannah Film Festival, SCAD deFINE<br />
ART, SCADstyle, Sidewalk Arts Festival<br />
and SCAD aTVfest. Under her leadership,<br />
SCAD was named one of the<br />
2014 Red Dot Design Rankings top 10<br />
universities in the Americas and Europe.<br />
Further, the SCAD undergraduate interior<br />
design program earned DesignIntelligence's<br />
top ranking for four consecutive<br />
years.<br />
Wallace earned a Bachelor of Arts<br />
degree from Furman University and<br />
Master of Education and Education<br />
Specialist degrees from Georgia State<br />
University; she also was awarded an<br />
honorary Doctor of Laws from Gonzaga<br />
University. Wallace was appointed a<br />
Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes<br />
Academiques by the French Embassy<br />
in the United States of America, and<br />
the Georgia Historical Society named<br />
her a 2015 Georgia Trustee. She serves<br />
on the National Advisory Board of the<br />
National Museum of Women in the Arts<br />
in Washington, D.C.<br />
ALEXANDRA SACHS<br />
Alexandra Sachs is the executive director<br />
of SCAD FASH and the university's<br />
Atlanta galleries and exhibitions. Prior<br />
to joining SCAD, she directed Solomon<br />
Projects, a gallery of contemporary art<br />
in Atlanta, for a decade. Additionally,<br />
Sachs has worked for the Baltimore<br />
Museum of Art and the British Council<br />
at the Venice Biennale. She serves as the<br />
vice president for board of directors of<br />
Art Papers and is an active volunteer for<br />
arts and civic organizations in Atlanta.<br />
RAFAEL GOMES<br />
Rafael Gomes is a fashion exhibitions<br />
consultant for the Savannah College of<br />
Art and Design. Before joining SCAD,<br />
he was an archivist and exhibition coordinator<br />
at Vivienne Westwood, where he<br />
oversaw the coordination and styling of<br />
global fashion shoots, videos and fashion<br />
shows. Gomes also designed, planned<br />
and executed large-scale exhibitions at<br />
numerous world-renowned museums<br />
and galleries, including the Victoria and<br />
Albert Museum, the Palace of Versailles,<br />
the New York Metropolitan Museum of<br />
Art, and the SCAD Museum of Art.<br />
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GROUP VISITS<br />
SCAD FASH welcomes groups by appointment, extending its exhibition and<br />
educational resources through guided tours and access to scheduled film screenings,<br />
lectures and gallery talks.<br />
Group visits are available at reduced rates for a minimum of 10 people.<br />
Reservations should be secured by phone or email at least two weeks in advance.<br />
For more information or to make a reservation, email at scadfash@scad.edu or call<br />
404.253.3132.<br />
The benefits of group reservations include:<br />
• Discounted rates for parties of 10 visitors or more<br />
• Expedited check-in<br />
• A dedicated tour guide for your group, if desired<br />
TOUR INFORMATION<br />
Guided tours of the museum provide visitors with an introduction to museum collections<br />
and special exhibitions on display. Group tours can be arranged in advance<br />
by email at scadfash@scad.edu or by calling 404.253.3132.<br />
VISITOR GUIDELINES<br />
CHECKROOM<br />
The museum requires visitors to check<br />
umbrellas, backpacks and bags before<br />
entering the galleries. The museum<br />
reserves the right to refuse other items<br />
and is not responsible for items held by<br />
the checkroom.<br />
MOBILITY ACCESS<br />
All galleries and facilities are wheelchair<br />
accessible. Wheelchair accessible and<br />
handicapped-accessible parking is<br />
available on the fourth level of the<br />
adjacent SCAD Atlanta parking deck.<br />
The museum has a wheelchair available<br />
for guest use.<br />
CAMERAS<br />
Still photography or videography for<br />
personal use is permitted in the museum<br />
lobby and some exhibitions. No flash<br />
or tripods allowed. No photographs<br />
or videotapes may be reproduced,<br />
distributed or sold without permission<br />
from the museum.<br />
SMOKING<br />
Smoking is prohibited inside the<br />
museum and the SCAD Atlanta facility.<br />
CELLULAR PHONES<br />
The use of cellular phones in the<br />
museum galleries is not permitted.<br />
FOOD AND DRINKS<br />
Food and drinks are not permitted in<br />
the museum.<br />
SKETCHING<br />
Sketching, in pencil only, is permitted in<br />
galleries. Use of any medium other than<br />
pencil must be approved and supervised.<br />
While sketching, please do not block<br />
gallery traffic flow.<br />
STROLLERS<br />
Strollers are permitted in the galleries,<br />
but oversize strollers are prohibited.<br />
46
visit scad fash<br />
SCAD FASH<br />
1600 Peachtree St. NW<br />
Atlanta, GA 30309<br />
404. 253. 3132<br />
scadfash@scad.edu<br />
Photo courtesy of SCAD FASH.<br />
HOURS<br />
Sunday: Noon to 5 p.m.<br />
Monday: Closed<br />
Tuesday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.<br />
Wednesday: 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.<br />
Thursday: 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.<br />
Friday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.<br />
Saturday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.<br />
Closed Holidays: New Year’s Day, Martin Luther King Jr.<br />
Day, Easter, July 4th, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and following<br />
day, Christmas Day<br />
ADMISSION<br />
Tickets are available at the museum front desk or online<br />
General Admission: $10<br />
Discounted (senior/military): $8<br />
Family (three or more): $20<br />
College students with ID: $5<br />
SCAD alumni: $5<br />
Children under 14: $ FREE<br />
SCAD student/faculty/staff: FREE<br />
Any scheduled special exhibitions, films, lectures and gallery<br />
talks are included in the price of admission.<br />
47
membership<br />
SCAD FASH members receive exclusive benefits and privileges and also advance<br />
the SCAD FASH mission, providing crucial support for community outreach, educational<br />
programs, exhibitions and art conservation. In addition, the benefits of supporting<br />
SCAD FASH are honored at the SCAD Museum of Art, providing access to<br />
two world-class institutions with one membership. You may purchase memberships<br />
online, by calling 912.525.7191 or in person at the museum admission desk.<br />
SCAD FASH Museum, Oscar de la Renta Exhibition, 2015.<br />
Photo courtesy of SCAD FASH.<br />
48
BENEFITS<br />
» Free admission<br />
» Invitations to members-only exhibition receptions<br />
» Museum newsletter<br />
» 10 percent discount on admission for member guests<br />
» 10 percent museum shop discount<br />
FRIEND: Up to $150<br />
» All general membership benefits<br />
» Unlimited free admission for two adults<br />
» Two free guest passes annually<br />
» Invitation to exclusive exhibition previews<br />
» Private, curator-led museum tour for two adults<br />
» Invitations to special events<br />
DONOR: Up to $500<br />
» All FRIEND level benefits<br />
» Five free guest passes annually<br />
» Choice of two copies of SCAD-published exhibition<br />
catalog or book<br />
PATRON: Up to $1,500<br />
» All DONOR level benefits<br />
» Invitation to private patron tours<br />
» Ten free guest passes annually<br />
» Reserved seating at special events and lectures such as<br />
SCAD deFINE ART and SCADstyle<br />
SUPPORTING PATRON: Up to $3,000<br />
» All PATRON level benefits<br />
» Two general admission tickets to the SCAD Fashion<br />
Show or one aTVfest festival pass<br />
» Advance purchasing for Savannah Film Festival passes<br />
PRESIDENT’S CIRCLE: Up to $6,000<br />
» All SUPPORTING PATRON level benefits<br />
» Two Savannah Film Festival Gold passes or four<br />
aTVfest platinum passes<br />
» Private, curator-led museum tour for up to 10 adults<br />
(upon request)<br />
» Four VIP tickets to the SCAD Fashion Show or two<br />
aTVfest festival passes<br />
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credits<br />
Publication design by Torey Thrash<br />
Spring 2016<br />
Typefaces used:<br />
Janson Test LT Std (55 Roman, 56<br />
Italic, 75 Bold, 75 Bold Italic)<br />
Photos courtesy of:<br />
scadfash.com<br />
(unless otherwise noted)<br />
Content courtesy of:<br />
scadfash.com<br />
(unless otherwise noted)<br />
Photo courtesy of SCAD FASH.<br />
50