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Ivy Style Video Walk-through with Richard Press
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Remembering “These Are Our Failures” by Christian Chensvold and The Take Ivy Style Exhibition at the FIT (September 14, 2012 – January 5, 2013) TAKE IVY STYLE (improved audio)
SEE ALSO:
https://tweedlandthegentlemansclub.blogspot.com/2019/04/remembering-movie-tea-and-sympathy-1956.html
https://tweedlandthegentlemansclub.blogspot.com/2015/12/take-ivy-encore-english-version-2010-by.html
These Are Our Failures by Christian Chensvold
A Sartorial Black Comedy by Christian Chenvold
On a quiet Sunday, a disillusioned luxury lifestyle reporter receives a message from an Internet troll holding the scoop of a lifetime. What follows is an adventure halfway around the world to discover the fate of masculine elegance. In a frozen, desolate spot on the map, our hero finds himself facing a puzzling question: does the vanishing necktie signal the collapse of Western Civilization? In These Are Our Failures, an outrageous black comedy that blends James Bond tailoring with James Bond adventure, Christian Chensvold singlehandedly invents the genre of Apocalyptic Menswear Fiction for a polarized age.
Alan Flusser on Christian Chensvold’s tale of sartorial apocalypse, exclusively at Hanger Project.
"A bit slapstick, frequently thought-provoking, its roller-coaster story kept my eye on what promised to be a most unpredictable denouement. Riddled with remorse for menswear-as-once-known’s imminent demise, the author takes us on a madcap ride to a kind of frozen tundra of his Christmas past, where two self-appointed conservators of all things tweed and traditional are holed up in an imaginary edifice brimming over with sartorial treasures both bygone and about to be. "
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J. Crew nears bankruptcy, Brooks Brothers seeks buyer
Deals
Brooks Brothers Seeks Buyer as Wall Street Works From Home
By Lauren Coleman-Lochner and Eliza Ronalds-Hannon
1 May 2020, 00:17 CEST Updated on 1 May 2020, 18:18 CEST
Two-century year old retailer extending sale process
Many of its U.S. stores were struggling before Covid-19
Brooks Brothers Inc., the two-century-old menswear company that set the standard for aspiring Wall Street bankers, is seeking to sell itself.
The retailer has extended a sale process begun last year, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because it wasn’t public. Depending on how many stores a buyer wanted, a transaction could ultimately be part of a bankruptcy filing, they said. The company has about $600 million in debt.
“In the ordinary course of business, Brooks Brothers consistently explores various strategic options to position the company for growth and success,” a company representative said in an email. The company has “nothing to announce at this time.”
Even as some states start to ease lockdowns aimed at containing the coronavirus pandemic, it remains to be seen how quickly consumers will return to stores and how much they’ll spend. While even the affluent Brooks Bros. clientele has little need for new suits at the moment, the brand’s history and cache has elicited interest, the people said.
1818 Opening
Many of the company’s approximately 250 U.S. locations have struggled, some of the people said. It operates a similar number of stores in more than 40 other countries, according to its website.
On the one hand, Brooks Brothers customers are less affected by the millions of job losses that have roiled the country, because many can do their jobs remotely. But it will be months or even years before workplaces can fully reopen, and no one knows what routines and habits, including what people wear to work, will look like post-pandemic.
Henry Sands Brooks opened the first store in 1818 on the corner of Cherry and Catherine streets in lower Manhattan. The company, which calls itself the oldest U.S. clothing retailer, has dressed U.S. presidents including John F. Kennedy and now sells men’s, women’s and children’s clothing.
Its suits became the uniform of the Wall Street macher, but as it expanded, it opened more stores in malls and on Main Streets, some of which are dragging on its performance now. British merchant Marks & Spencer bought the company in 1988, then sold it to billionaire Claudio del Vecchio in a deal completed in 2002.
— With assistance by Boris Korby
J. Crew nears bankruptcy, Brooks Brothers seeks buyer
The companies are just the latest retailers facing financial difficulties
May 01, 2020 10:15 AM
J. Crew and Brooks Brothers are among the latest retailers on the brink of bankruptcy.
J. Crew, which has 322 stores, is seeking $400 million in financing to fund operations during bankruptcy, CNBC reported. And Brooks Brothers is seeking to sell itself, a deal that could potentially be part of a bankruptcy filing, according to Bloomberg.
J. Crew, whose holdings include retailer Madewell, was struggling before the coronavirus sent shoppers home in March. The company saw “meaningful improvement” in its 2019 business, according to Moody’s, compared with the prior year, but as of February it had $93 million in total liquidity as debts came due. TPG Capital and Leonard Green & Partners bought the company in 2011 for $3 billion.
Similarly, Brooks Brothers’ woes predate the health crisis. The Wall Street favorite has $600 million in debt and many of its 250 U.S. locations were also struggling before the pandemic, sources told Bloomberg. Its attempt at a sale began last year.
The pandemic has exacerbated retailers’ financial problems. High-end department store Neiman Marcus is also nearing bankruptcy, though a group of its investors are pushing for the firm to seek a sale. J.C. Penney, too, is in talks with its lenders for at least $800 million in bankruptcy financing. [CNBC, Bloomberg] — Georgia Kromrei
With a Glance Backward, Brooks Brothers Looks to the Future
After Claudio Del Vecchio bought Brooks Brothers in 2001, one of the first things he did was read stacks of letters from longtime customers who were unhappy with the changes made by the previous owners.
By Teri Agins
April 21, 2018
In early 2002, just a few months after he officially took over as the new owner and chief executive officer of Brooks Brothers, Claudio Del Vecchio confronted the reality that the classic American retailer had largely lost its way.
Mr. Del Vecchio knew that many of the clothing fabrics were no longer of high quality, that too many of its shirts were ill fitting and that there were often disconcerting irregularities, like a rack of navy blazers that weren’t the exact same shade of navy.
And longtime customers had noticed.
Among Mr. Del Vecchio’s first acts as owner was to read a stack of angry letters from Brooks Brothers loyalists who griped about how the merchandise quality had fallen under the previous owner, the British retailer Marks & Spencer. They also balked at the limited selection of classic blazers and suits in the stores.
Those letters confirmed much of what Mr. Del Vecchio, a wealthy Italian entrepreneur, had seen for himself and stiffened his resolve to return to the company’s roots. “I saw the business opportunity to increase sales,” he said. “I knew how to fix this.”
A new executive team shifted into crisis mode. Led by an experienced chief merchant, Eraldo Poletto, with whom Mr. Del Vecchio had worked at Casual Corner (a women’s wear retail chain that Mr. Del Vecchio sold in 2005), they began to corral the company’s best suppliers to revamp all the store’s merchandise. Hundreds of garment styles required new specifications, better fabrics and apparel factories. It took about six months for the first shipments of the improved garments to arrive in stores — swapping out the oversize khakis and shapeless polo shirts.
Among the upgraded versions were luxurious three-ply Italian cashmere sweaters, replacing the two-ply Mexican cashmeres, and three styles of blazers and khakis, instead of just one. By April 2003, the store had completely overhauled its merchandise — and its loyal fans started coming back.
By 2004, Mr. Del Vecchio said, the privately held Brooks Brothers was modestly in the black, reversing a series of money-losing years that had begun in the late 1990s.
The history of Brooks Brothers and the tenure of Mr. Del Vecchio — who has been wearing Brooks Brothers for more than half of his 61 years — will be celebrated on Wednesday evening, when the company will host a black-tie gala at Jazz at Lincoln Center for 1,000 of its best customers, friends and celebrity guests to mark its 200th anniversary. The all-American jazz program, produced by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra’s artistic director, Wynton Marsalis, befits the all-American clothier, which has been the group’s corporate sponsor and official clothier since the 1990s.
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Natalie Wood Investigation Vanity Fair
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Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind (2020) | Official Trailer | HBO
'A short but vibrant life': revisiting the life and death of Natalie Wood
Documentary films
In a new documentary, Natasha Gregson Wagner confronts speculation over her mother’s drowning death head on, but honors her life and career first
Adrian Horton
Mon 4 May 2020 09.10 BSTLast modified on Mon 4 May 2020 09.11 BST
Natasha Gregson Wagner was 11 years old when her mother, the actor Natalie Wood, drowned off Catalina Island on Thanksgiving weekend, 1981. Wagner’s recollection of hearing the news of her mother’s death that rainy morning is the first scene of Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind, a HBO documentary reflecting on Wood’s storied life and career. Wood’s death at 43 was a public spectacle – a vibrant, famous life cut short, compounded by mysterious circumstances ripe for speculation: a night-time drowning, no witnesses.
But the tragedy – and speculation on what, exactly, happened that night off Catalina – has “overshadowed her life’s work and who she was as a person”, says Wagner early in the film. And she did leave much behind: two biological children and extended families of stepchildren; her husband, the actor Robert Wagner, who was with her on their yacht, the Splendour, the night she died; numerous A-lister friends and beloved confidants; and a legacy as a titan of mid-century American film, a rare model of child stardom who muscled through the old studio system into mature success.
The film does address the elephant in the room – Natasha interviews her stepfather about renewed media and law enforcement interest into his role in her mother’s death – but is understandably wary of pulling too hard on that shadow. Instead, it delves deep into the archives, as well as interviews with friends like Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, to present evidence of a strikingly candid, trailblazing woman and mother in Hollywood, the star of such films as West Side Story and Miracle on 34th Street. “My goal was to cast the attention on her life, period,” Natasha told the Guardian. “Not the night she died.”
Wood, born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko to Russian immigrant parents in San Francisco in 1938, began acting at age five, after she stumbled upon a film shoot in Santa Rosa and was chosen for a bit part. Her enterprising, domineering mother, Maria, a classic mom-ager before there was such a term, soon moved the family to Los Angeles to pursue Natalie’s acting career. By her teens, Natalie was a studio child star, a doe-eyed well of emotion on screen and a seasoned professional off it. By 15, she had earned an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress as the repressed, flippant love interest to James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.
In old clips, it’s easy to see why Wood was a star. She wears emotion like a sheath – anxiety, sadness and resilience ripple along her skin and her pooled brown eyes. By 25, she had garnered two more nominations, for Splendor in the Grass and Love With a Proper Stranger. Her marriage to Robert Wagner in 1957, when she was 19 and he was 24, made her a fixture of Hollywood’s gossip press (the two divorced in 1962 and remarried a decade later, after her divorce from Richard Gregson).
Still, for all the glamour – and Wood, photographed often throughout her life, inhabited glamour easily – home videos capture a much looser yet still magnetic persona. “We weren’t raised by someone who seemed like a movie star at all,” Natasha says in the film. “All she just seemed was sort of larger than life, but not because she was famous. More because she was just her.” The film, along with Farrow and Redford, recalls a strong-willed woman behind the scenes who fought for higher pay, better film roles from the studios and provisions for actors to block off time for therapy.
Old photos capture Wood fresh-faced, seated at the head of a table of suited men, holding her own. “I always knew that she was the boss of her world. She was the boss of her movies, in a lot of ways, and the boss of our family,” said Natasha. “She believed in equal pay for men and women, she believed in equal rights for the LGBTQ community.” The film highlights Wood’s loyalty to her friends, such as the playwright Mart Crowley, whose 1968 play The Boys in the Band – a groundbreaking portrayal of gay life that was revived in 2018 – was made possible by Wood’s financial support. (Crowley, interviewed in the film, died in March 2020 at the age of 84). If Wood had lived, Natasha speculated, “she would have been on the forefront of all of those movements … She would have been really excited about the progress that’s been made.”
Natasha Gregson Wagner
Natasha Gregson Wagner. Photograph: REX/Shutterstock
Wood’s death, however, still looms over this glowing retrospective, especially in light of renewed media fascination and accusations of foul play. In 2011, 30 years after her death, the case was reopened by the Los Angeles county sheriff’s department because of “new information”; a year later, the cause on her death certificate was changed from “accidental drowning” to “drowning and other undetermined factors”. Natalie’s sister Lana Wood, estranged from the Wagner family and painted as untrustworthy by the film, has long called Natalie’s death a “murder” and called for Robert to “tell the truth once and for all”. In 2018, the LA sheriff’s office named Robert a “person of interest” after CBS News’s 48 Hours aired a special on the case. (He has always maintained Wood’s death was a tragic accident.)
The point of the film was not to rehash the cloud of accusations and explanations. “We knew we didn’t want to do an investigative type of reportage on the tragedy,” the director, Laurent Bouzereau, told the Guardian. “We’re not operating under the guise of finding out ‘what happened?’, because we know what happened.” Natasha and Robert, now 90, maintain a similar explanation to the one given at the time, in 1981, by the Los Angeles county medical examiner Thomas Noguchi, who described her death as a “tragic accident while slightly intoxicated”.
Asked directly to tell his side of the story by Natasha, Robert recalls a wine-fueled argument with the actor Christopher Walken, Wood’s co-star in the 1983 film Brainstorm. The couple had been struggling at the time with Natalie’s balance of work and motherhood. Robert says the argument with Walken was resolved (he calls Walken “a stand-up guy”) and that when he went to bed, Natalie was missing. Robert and Natasha assume that Natalie went out to tie the yacht’s dinghy – she was sensitive to noise, Natasha notes, and frequently complained about the dinghy bumping into the boat at night – and probably slipped and hit her head.
The interviews functions as a statement on behalf of the Wagners, thus precluding all interview or comment requests, of which there have been many over the years. “We included [the interview] because we knew that it was part of the story,” said Natasha. “But it’s more about the effect the toxic media can have on a family.” In the years since, the film notes, Wood’s descendants have grappled with the shadow of her fame and the sudden loss of a beloved family member, compounded by swarming cameras at her funeral and tabloid covers reigniting attention on Robert, with whom Wood’s daughters, Natasha and Courtney Wagner, remain close.
The documentary thus marks a reclamation of Wood’s narrative from tragic question mark to a tale of vivacity, a chance to show movie audiences that Wood had “incredible joy, that she was a devoted mother and wife, that she was a hugely wonderful friend to her friends, championing them and their careers and their mental health”, said Natasha.
“She had a short life, but she had a vibrant life.”
Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind premieres on HBO in the US on 5 May and in the UK at a later date
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The Great Realisation
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The American Sack Suit.
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| CLICK TO ENLARGE |
From: https://bespokeunit.com/suits/styles/american/#american
Here’s a brief hit list of the details that we typically see on American-style suits:
Center vent
3-button single-breasted stance
Dartless front
No shoulder padding
No waist suppression
Unpleated, uncuffed, low-slung trousers
It’s well-known negative stereotype that Americans aren’t the best-dressed people in the world. Anyone in any airport in the world can spot the comfort-above-all-else Americans.
American Suit Vs British Suit
If you take a British suit, remove its waist suppression, and lower its armholes, you get an American suit. Further, British suits are almost never made in three-button single-breasted stances, whereas this is relatively commonplace for American suits.
American Suit Vs Italian Suit
Traditional American suits and the ones you’ll find at the likes of Jos.A Bank and other such retailers are, in many ways, the polar opposites of Italian or Continental suits. American suits are known for looseness, lack of shape, and a general sense of being about a size too big.
Italian suits, on the other hand, are known for extreme cleanliness, slimness, and lack of bulk. They can get so slim, in fact, that their wearers can come off, as Flusser has said, “as walking phallic symbols.”
History Of The American Suit: Brooks Brothers, J.Press, & Sack Suits
On the positive stereotype front, America is known for a love of equality. Whether or not it lives up to that ideal is worthy of debate, but as it relates to suits, keeping this in mind makes the sack suit make sense, as it was a suit designed for anyone to wear.
Brooks Brothers’ “No. 1 Sack Suit” was released in 1901. A child of the Industrial Revolution, the Sack suit was the first-ever mass-produced tailored garment for men.
Mass-produced garments, to be economically viable to the companies making them, need to fit what we call the “largest common denominator.” In terms of suits, this translates to a boxy fit with large armholes (a small man can fit into large armholes, but a large man can’t fit into small ones). The ability to walk into a retail store and buy tailored clothing that was ready to wear was unheard of at the time.
It wasn’t until the 1920’s when Brooks’ invention became popular. Ivy Leaguers (students at elite Northeastern American universities such as Harvard or Yale) were the ones to fall in love with the suit and popularize it, wearing it with penny loafers.
Interestingly, the sack suit was considered fine for college kids at the time, but inappropriate for grown men. As college kids became adults, they were expected to dress with more sophistication. Baggy clothing has typically been the purview of the young, especially those of us who grew up in the sartorially dreadful 1990’s. That college kids seventy years prior were wearing baggy versions of their parents’ clothes serves as proof that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
After the Second World War, the sack suit’s popularity amongst middle-aged adults soared. In large part we can attribute this phenomenon to a common desire of postwar American men to blend into the background, desiring peace and quiet after years of violence and war. A suit that retained the wearer’s anonymity through shapelessness was the perfect uniform for that.
The Sack suit became the silhouette of choice for American men in the 1950’s. Though Brooks Brothers barely makes them anymore, J.Press, the last bastion of American sartorial conservatism, makes nearly all of their tailored clothing in this silhouette.
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| Old Brooks Brothers Sack Suit |
From: http://www.guarotti.com/joomla/index.php/homepage-3/fahion-advisor-2/menswear-3
In the 1920s, the target group encompassed a wide target group made of the dominant and wealthy business class. Companies, like Brooks Brothers for example – who are considered among the pioneers of the American suit, had to start reinventing the suit in order to make it suitable for mass production. And we see these elements loud and clear just by having a quick attentive look at the American suit.
The American Suit: The Jacket
The American jacket also goes by the name of “the sack”. Now, common practice associates the name to the look of the jacket itself. Which may or may not be the case, depending on whether you had to jacket custom fitted or just picked it off the rack.
“The sack” actually comes from the French “sacque”, which is a particular construction technique for coats and jackets. The jacket, in fact, is made out of only two straight fabric panels. A technique that would be perfect for large scale production of clothes.
The jacket also comes with almost no padding and a straight silhouette. It is usually single breasted, with two or three buttons. The canvas features no darts, which – in case you’re not familiar – are folds in the canvas layer that give it a more voluminous look.
It also has a single vent in the back, low armholes and flap pockets. The sleeves wear with a loose fit and feature three buttons only.
BOOKSTER TAILORING SACK SUIT
Bookster Tailoring
Was established from a background of a deep passion and interest in historic fine quality, in the main British clothing. But not exclusively. Classic and rare American leather jackets, Pioneer wear and US styles from the early part of the last century but with a particular focus and interest from the 20’s to the 60’s. We acquired and traded in some incredible pieces over the years.
Always knowing that genuine Vintage clothing was a finite resource, and most often found in quite small sizes led us to make our own and here we are. Being a relatively small but well established Tailoring House means we have the flexibility to indulge our long loved interests. We make quality rather than quantity. One offs for our loyal band of customers that is still growing.
As it is some of our existing models cross over nicely into Ivy Style, the most obvious being our made to order top notch Boating Blazers from a vast choice of colours and patterns. But our other separates such as Trousers and our Sack Suit or Jacket etc can be tweaked with a large range of detail options, again from a huge choice of cloths and fabrics.
We are ready and waiting to welcome new prospective customers to create one of a kind garments including Sack Suits, Overcoats, Trousers, Blazers ad Jackets in as good or better quality as the 50’s and 60’s originals.
Below is an example of our Sack Suit in English Cavalry Twill, inc. a snapshot of the happy US customer who has a penchant for iconic cloths from here in the UK, a great collaboration.
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Two times JEEVES (António Sérgio Rosa de Carvalho) practising social distance, while visiting friends during the corona lock down. Cheers, and stay safe and healthy.
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Twiggy: 'I don't think high fashion will ever move completely away from slimness' /Is the Fashion Industry creating new mental and physical slavery ? Actually Killing People ? /VIDEO:Twiggy Biography
Interview
Twiggy: 'I don't think high fashion will ever move completely away from slimness'
Emine Saner
As a model, she was the face of the 60s, and went on to have a busy acting career. She discusses her new podcast, and life in swinging London
Emine Saner
@eminesaner
Published onTue 12 May 2020 06.00 BST
So enduring is that image of Twiggy – side-swept hair, heavy eyes, delicate neck – that it’s strange to think she was a model for only four years.
But Twiggy is an expert at reinvention (or “branching out” as her joke goes). The schoolgirl known as Lesley Hornby became Twiggy, the face of the 1960s, recognised then and now by a single name. At 21, she became the all-singing, all-dancing star of Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Boy Friend, which won her two Golden Globes. She has performed on Broadway, recorded albums and been a TV presenter. In her 60s, she turned fashion designer, with several collections for Marks & Spencer. Last year, she was given a damehood.
What can be next? Podcasts, of course. At 70, she is about to launch Tea With Twiggy, in which she will interview famous friends including Joanna Lumley, Elaine Paige and Christopher Biggins “about their careers, their pasts, their childhoods, and things they’re doing at the moment”, she says. The lockdown has been an opportune moment to get started on it. “There are so many horrible stories on the news,” she says. “I wanted people who could tell lovely stories and be funny.”
I speak to Twiggy by phone; she’s in the flat she shares with her husband, the actor and director Leigh Lawson. She is missing her family the most during lockdown – her daughter had a baby in February, Twiggy’s fifth grandchild (her stepson has three). “I got to hold him the day he was born, then I got to visit about four days later,” she says. “And then by March …” We all know what happened next. She video calls her grandchildren, and sends them the recordings she and her husband make of them reading stories. “Apart from that, we’re lucky, we’ve got each other, Leigh and I,” she says.
She is a good talker and generous with her laughter – until a question displeases her. But you don’t, I suppose, survive for more than five decades in the public eye by being a pushover.
It’s remarkable she never lost the plot after all these years in the spotlight. “I was so straight it’s boring,” she says, and laughs. It was the late 60s when she was launched into international fame, but she insists she never took drugs. “The worst thing I did was smoke cigarettes.” She didn’t even drink wine until she was in her late 20s. “I didn’t like it. I grew up in Neasden, we drank tea.”
Twiggy was the youngest of three daughters. She remembers a happy childhood , although one where her mother, Nell, would occasionally be admitted, sometimes for months at a time, to a psychiatric hospital. “I think today [she would have been] diagnosed as bipolar,” says Twiggy. “I had the most amazing dad, Norman, who I loved and adored. He was from Lancashire, very sensible, very down to earth, very calm. So when Mum … I think anyone with bipolar, they’re not ill all the time, they can go months or even years being absolutely fine and then something happens that makes them plummet into depression. But my dad was there.” Her sister Shirley, who was 15 years older than her, would also step in, “so I was very protected really. It wasn’t until I grew up and looked back and thought it must have been really hard on Dad.”
Twiggy was close to her mother. “I wouldn’t go anywhere without my mum. It’s amazing what happened to me because I was so shy and insecure.” She says she “never even thought” of becoming a performer. But she loved fashion and had pictures of the model Jean Shrimpton on her bedroom walls “along with the Beatles”, so had vague ambitions to become a model or fashion designer.
Her sister, Vivien, was seven years older, “and I can still remember in detail clothes she made and really wanting to be like her”. Twiggy was a mod and was allowed out to a club in Harrow on Saturday nights as long as she was home by 10.30pm. “We’d look at all the other mods and see what they were wearing and then try to copy that. I used to make a lot of the stuff. That was the huge influence on me, fashion-wise. Then, by the mid-60s, just before I was discovered, people like Barbara Hulanicki gave us Biba.” The boutique for young women in Kensington “became my obsession. Because before that, you could either buy clothes from children’s shops or you could buy women’s clothes from department stores.”
Twiggy wasn’t allowed to wear makeup, but at the weekends she and her friends would practise doing their faces. She made her eyes look like the ones painted on her rag doll, just playing around, but it became her look. “It used to take me an hour and a half to do, I had three pairs of false eyelashes on the top. I’m amazed I could open my eyes.” She laughs. “Then I used to paint the lines underneath. So in 1966, when I was plucked from anonymity into the madness it became, that was my look.”
She was discovered when a newspaper fashion journalist came across some photographs of her modelling a new cropped hairstyle for a celebrity hairdressers’. “Within a month, I was all over the newspapers, I was getting offers to go to Paris. I can’t say I didn’t like it. I loved it, it was brilliant.” The following year she went to New York, and became even more famous. “Sonny and Cher gave me a party in Hollywood,” she recalls. She remembers being searched at the airport for drugs. “I think they figured that anyone from swinging London must be …” She doesn’t finish the sentence. “But you know, it’s probably why I survived, because I was so straight.”
The fashion world, like others, has been rocked by allegations of sexual assault in the wake of the #MeToo movement. Twiggy has said before that she never experienced any harassment, partly because she had a manager, Justin de Villeneuve (an art dealer and photographer who changed his name from Nigel), who travelled everywhere with her. ““My dad had worked in the film industry, so he obviously saw things that went on. And he said: ‘If you’re going to go to these studios and travel, you have to have somebody with you.’ So I was never ever hit upon.” A lot of the women who experienced the worst of it were trying to make their way into the industry and were more vulnerable, she points out – Twiggy had already very definitely made it.
De Villeneuve was also Twiggy’s boyfriend. They had met when she was 15 and he was 25. Does she look back and feel that was exploitative? “It’s not an area I cover so you can look it up in books if you want,” she says. “I don’t talk about that.” In her 1997 autobiography, she writes: “Looking back he should never have taken me out, I was far too young and he was far too old.”
She also writes that it has irritated her that over the years the story has been that “Justin was the Svengali and I was the dumb blond”. Instead of being the delicate, naive person her appearance back then would have you believe, she was steely. There is a clip of an interview with her from 1970. Responding to an inane question about a curvier shape being back in fashion, she replies, cool-eyed: “The bosom has never been out. That would mean that women have been out, which is ridiculous, isn’t it?” She also said she was “very bored” with modelling.
“I didn’t suddenly stop one day and think: ‘I’m not going to model any more,’” she says now. But by then she had met Ken Russell, the film director. She went along to lunch with him – it was an informal audition – and when she turned up, Paul McCartney was also sitting at the table. “Every teenage girl had a favourite Beatle and mine was Paul McCartney,” she says. “Three years before, I’d been one of the screaming girls at one of his concerts. I had to go and sit at this lunch, opposite the most famous film director in England and my idol and try and be normal and interesting.”
Russell, she says, “became like my mentor”. She would go to his house and watch old musicals with him and his wife, Shirley. He cast her as the star of The Boy Friend, an extravagant musical, for which Twiggy had singing and dancing lessons for a year. It’s an extraordinary first film to do. “I’d have been a bit of a fool to turn it down,” she says. She would win two Golden Globes for the part and later, one of her co-stars, Tommy Tune, would cast her in his 1983 Broadway production. “At least with a film, I was not frightened of cameras, I had worked in the modelling industry for four years. But to go out on a Broadway stage in front of 2,000 people every night and sing and dance, that’s scary.” It was, however, “the greatest professional thing I’ve ever done because it proved to me that I could do something that I thought I couldn’t.”
Did she have a plan for her career? “No. I don’t think you can. You can have a goal of what you want to do, but you can’t plan it because you’ve got to be offered parts.” Twiggy was certainly well-connected – there are great stories in her autobiography about meeting Fred Astaire, and running away from Phil Spector’s house. She worked with David Bowie and attended Hollywood parties with Elizabeth Taylor. Although she worked fairly steadily throughout the 80s and 90s, she never quite reached the heights of her early career. “I did a couple of films that were duds, everyone does. But I think I’ve had a brilliant career. And more importantly I’ve had a very happy life.”
The closest there has been to Twiggy, in terms of exposure and era-defining influence, has been Kate Moss (they are friends). Both have been blamed in their time for pushing an aesthetic of extreme thinness. It’s not fair to single out the model – it’s the industry in which they work that is at fault – but how does she feel about the conversations around body image now? Does the fashion industry still need to change and focus more on different shapes? “Well, it has, hasn’t it, there are so many more ads now,” she says. “It’s the same with older models, they’re using middle-aged and older women in commercials. I don’t think the high fashion industry will ever go completely away from slimness but I think other parts of the industry have started to use different shapes and sizes, and I think they should.” Her range for M&S, she points out, went from a size eight to a 22.
In 2009, an advert for an eye cream, featuring Twiggy, was banned by the Advertising Standards Authority for being misleading because it had been airbrushed. “That was nothing to do with me. I can’t stop people …” She trails off. “I go and do a job. If they take it away and do the stuff, it’s absolutely nothing to do with me.” There’s a growing number of younger women, I say – I’m thinking of the actor Jameela Jamil – who refuse on principle to be airbrushed, because of the unrealistic messages it sends women. “I have no idea, it’s up to them. I don’t have any control over that,” says Twiggy, sounding increasingly prickly. We go back and forth a bit. Does she mind that she is airbrushed? There is a pause. “I think we should get off this subject because you’re getting really boring,” she says.
So I ask her what she wants to do next, though the atmosphere doesn’t really recover. She was about to go into the studio to record a new album, which she wants to get back to at some point. She still loves fashion design and has been doing more knitting and sewing during these lockdown days, much like in her teenage years. “I wonder what she would say to her 16-year-old self now. “Oh, just go for it. And enjoy it. I think I did most of the time. I don’t look back and think ‘I wish I hadn’t done that’.”
• Twiggy’s podcast is Tea with Twiggy; she is on Instagram @TwiggyLawson
Is the Fashion Industry creating new mental and physical slavery ? Actually Killing People ?
The Vogue Factor, by Kirstie Clements, former editor of Australian Vogue
She was fired in May 2012 after 25 years at the magazine
Samantha Cameron watches painfully-thin Chloe Memisevic walk for Erdem at London Fashion Week Fall/Winter 2011, left, and former Australian Vogue editor Kirstie Clements, right
Clements says models eat tissues to stay full and starve themselves for days
JOAN SMITH Thursday 4 April 2013 in The Independent / http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-vogue-factor-fashion-really-isnt-worth-dying-for-8560194.html
The Vogue Factor: Fashion really isn’t worth dying for
The damage the industry inflicts on young women is paraded on the catwalk
Imagine a factory where the employees are regularly being starved.
Some are so desperate with hunger that they pick up tissues from the floor and stuff them into their mouths, while a few become so weak that they have to be admitted to hospital and put on a drip. Any industry which treated workers so badly would be targeted by undercover reporters. Photographs of emaciated workers would cause an outcry, questions would be asked in parliament and the factory would be closed down. This would happen anywhere in the developed world with one glaring exception, and that’s the fashion industry.
“You know how you read interviews where models insist that they eat a lot? Not true,” says Kirstie Clements, who edited Vogue Australia for 13 years. “The only way they can get that thin is to stop eating. They eat tissue paper to stave off the hunger pangs – literally ball it up and eat it.” It’s one of several startling claims in The Vogue Factor, a book that Clements has written about the industry she knows from the inside, and it’s not even the most shocking.
Clements lifts the lid on the existence of “fit” models, the women used to check the fit of clothes who are expected to be even thinner than the catwalk variety. “Fit” in this instance means just the opposite, as Clements discovered when she asked a top model how she was getting on with her flatmate. “Oh, it’s fine,” was the insouciant reply, “she’s a fit model so she is mostly in hospital on a drip.”
By any normal standards, someone whose job puts them in hospital most of the time is: (a) deluded; and (b) abused. But the fashion industry departed from normal standards years ago, not even bothering to hide the damage it inflicts mostly (but not exclusively) on young women. It’s paraded on catwalks and in fashion spreads for anyone to see, evident in models whose jutting hipbones and stick limbs suggest they’re suffering from malnutrition. When flipping through a glossy magazine a couple of days ago, I was mesmerised by a perfume ad featuring two models whose naked bodies were as skinny as saplings.
Clements recalls a fashion shoot which lasted for three days yet she didn’t see the model eat once, even when the girl got so weak that she could hardly stand or open her eyes. Everyone involved in the fashion industry is expected to buy into a fantasy in which there’s nothing unusual about being five foot nine and weighing 45 kilos. But the death toll on the international modelling circuit – Ana Carolina Reston, Luisel Ramos and her sister Eliana, Isabelle Caro – tells a different story. Fashion isn’t worth dying for, so let’s start applying the normal health and safety standards to this sick industry.
The Vogue Factor, by Kirstie Clements, former editor of Australian Vogue
Clements says models eat tissues to stay full and starve themselves for days
She was fired in May 2012 after 25 years at the magazine
By MARTHA DE LACEY in The Daily Mail.
PUBLISHED:, 2 April 2013 / http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2302957/The-Vogue-Factor-Sacked-Australian-Vogue-editor-Kirstie-Clements-writes-books-fashion-industry-claiming-models-starve-eat-tissues-stay-full.html
For those who puzzle over how supermodels stay so whippet thin, a former Vogue editor has lifted the lid on the horrific lengths some go to to maintain their wispy waistlines and cut-glass hipbones.
Kirstie Clements, sensationally fired from her role as editor of Australian Vogue last May, has written a tell-all book about the fashion industry, claiming some models eat tissue paper to feel full, starve themselves for days on end, spend frequent stints on hospital drips, and are often so weak with hunger they struggle to keep their eyes open.
As reported by Georgia Graham in the International Business Times, The Vogue Factor also explains that within the fashion world there is 'thin', and then there is 'Paris thin' - a term that describes the size of a model who has starved their already fragile body down two dress sizes in order to be cast in big oversea shows.
In her controversial tome, Clements says she once spent three days on a shoot with a model who didn't see her eat a single meal - and that on the final day she could barely stand or keep her eyes open.
She also reveals how an Russian model once told her that her flat mate was a 'fit' model - a model whose body is used by top designers for clothes-fittings - and therefore spent lots of time on a drip.
Clements spent 25 years at Australian Vogue - her book's subhead is 'from front desk to editor' - and steered the ship for 13 of them.
Her departure was sudden - she was called to a meeting and dismissed, forced to clean her office and leave without bidding farewell to her staff - and she was replaced quickly by Edwina McCann, editor of Harper's Bazaar.
Clements describes her sacking simply as a 'regime change' that was part and parcel of the dramatic Vogue narrative, but some critics believe the new book - her first - is her way of exacting revenge on the Rupert Murdoch-owned title.
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Kevin & Howlin / Dublin
About Kevin & Howlin
In 1936 Jim Kevin along with his partner Michael Howlin founded the Tailors and Outfitters known as, Kevin & Howlin Ltd, at 39 Nassau Street in Dublin, providing top quality clothing and tailoring while specializing in handwoven tweeds. The tweeds are Handwoven in Donegal especially for Kevin & Howlin
In 1973 due to the redevelopment of the premises – Jim’s son, Noel, who had taken over the family firm, o. 31 Nassau Street and decided to concentrate exclusively on Tweed becoming one of the premier purveyors of tweeds in Ireland.
Wed, Oct 31, 2001, 00:00
A brochure for Kevin & Howlin's, one of Nassau Street's oldest tenants, claims "show me a visitor who has not returned from Ireland with a tweed cap or jacket and I'll show you someone who has never set foot in Kevin & Howlin's". And it's a claim borne out by a regular stream of tourists tempted inside by window displays draped with the best of hand-woven Irish tweed.
The Kevin family has traded on Nassau Street since the 1930s, when James Kevin went into partnership with Michael Howlin at number 39, a few doors further up from the present premises. Next door was Johnston's umbrella shop. Jammets restaurant and Browne & Nolan were close neighbours.
The shop moved to its current address when number 39, along with its neighbours, was compulsarily purchased in the 1970s for redevelopment.
How Kevin & Howlin survived when those other legendary emporiums have long since gone has much to do with the fact that the business has become a family dynasty.
James Kevin became sole owner when his partner Michael Howlin died. James's son, Noel, took over the running of the shop when his father died in 1974, helped by his sisters Viva Freyne and Joan Anderson. Their mother, Sara, is still involved in the business. A bevy of nieces and nephews come in to help on Saturdays.
The smart matt black frontage and panelled windows have an up-to-the-minute look and Joan's displays are contemporary chic.
Once inside, the shop has all the appeal of a traditional Irish drapery store, with bales of tweed leaning against the counter and racks laden with Donegal's finest. There are rich-hued tweed jackets, overcoats, three-piece suits and every style of hat for the country and city gent. Glimpses of patchwork, crimson and canary yellow in the midst of a row of sombre-coloured waistcoats suggests the occasional extrovert customer.
The hats are top sellers, says Viva. Young women and men go for the Gatsbys, while flat caps and trilbys with feathers are popular with older customers. Crushable tweed hats that can be rolled up into a pocket are useful buys for any age group at £36.50 (€46.35).
Trading within a stone's throw of such formidable opposition as Kilkenny Design, Blarney Woollen Mills and Avoca Handweavers doesn't faze Noel Kevin, who insists that shops in the Nassau Street area complement each other.
"Kilkenny sends people down to us and we pass customers over to Kennedy & McSharry for shirts and ties. It's a very personal service and all part of selling Ireland. We're in the front line here."
While regular Irish customers are the backbone of sales at Kevin & Howlin, Europeans have overtaken Americans as the highest spending tourists, says Viva Freyne.
"The Italians are very big buyers of tweed by the metre. They have great women tailors in Italy and they love the subtle colours in our Donegal tweed. Ladies jackets are big too. We have a lot of English coming in because, with the value of sterling, prices are very cheap."
Like Noel, Viva has worked in the shop since her student days, apart from a break to rear her family. Their sister Joan dresses the windows and they have a regular assistant, David Hanly, who knows the business inside out.
Viva looks back with nostalgia to the time when the shop employed a tailor and seamstresses.
"Paddy Foley worked for us for almost 60 years and Miss Doyle did alterations downstairs. Cruise liners were a big part of the business in past times and we still have a big export trade. Nowadays, there's very little tailoring - all items are ready-mades, because people want things quickly."
Noel, who was always addressed as "Mister Noel" in the old days, attends to the more conservative male customers, who prefer their business to be conducted "man to man". With a core Irish customer base, regular export orders to the US and Europeans investing in hand-woven Irish tweeds, business at Kevin & Howlin is steady.
The only hope is to specialise, explains Noel. "We're not competing with the big department stores. We're catering for people who want good quality Irish goods.
"We get a lot of young Scandinavian and German customers into the shop because everything Irish is good now - the pubs and the craic and the clothes."
The only threat to Kevin & Howlin comes from a different source - rising rents and its increasing vulnerability to the financial muscle of the big UK-based multiples looking for a prime pitch in the city centre.
"Rents are getting higher all the time," says Noel. "There'll always be someone wanting this little spot because we're on the tourist street. My rent has gone up hugely in recent years.
"It was revised upwards in 2000, before the big bust. They seem to pull an amount out of thin air. The next increase is in 2005 and I might just go with it."
Donegal Tweed is a woven tweed manufactured in County Donegal, Ireland. Originally all handwoven, it is now mostly machine woven and has been since the introduction of mechanised looms in the 1950s/1960s. Donegal has for centuries been producing tweed from local materials in the making of caps, suits and vests. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, The Royal Linen Manufacturers of Ulster distributed approximately six thousand flax spinning wheels and sixty looms for weaving to various Donegal homesteads. These machines helped establish the homespun tweed industry in nineteenth-century Donegal.Although Donegal tweed has been manufactured for centuries it took on its modern form in the 1880s, largely due to the pioneering work of English philanthropist Alice Rowland Hart.
While the weavers in County Donegal produce a number of different tweed fabrics, including herringbone and check patterns, the area is best known for a plain-weave cloth of differently-coloured warp and weft, with small pieces of yarn in various colours woven in at irregular intervals to produce a heathered effect. Such fabric is often labelled as "donegal" (with a lowercase "d") regardless of its provenance.
Along with Harris Tweed manufactured in the Scottish Highlands, Donegal is the most famous tweed in the world. While tweed in Ireland is by no means exclusive to Donegal, Vawn Corrigan confirms Donegal as the heartland of Irish Tweed . It was used in several of the fashion designer Sybil Connolly's pieces.
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Hanna Hats / VIDEO:- John Hanna on first and last caps
HOME THE STORY OF HANNA HATS
The Story of Hanna Hats
David Snr welcoming vistiors to his Workshop. His grandchildren continue his tradition today. David Snr welcoming visitors to his Workshop. His grandchildren continue his tradition today.
In 1924 David Hanna Snr. started a small tailoring firm in the townland of Donegal on Ireland’s north-west coast. By the early 60’s David recognised that the demand for tailored suits was declining and the business needed to take a new direction. The Hanna Hat as we know it today was born in 1964. It took 4.5hrs to craft, and was given the name “Hanna Hat”. Style no. 84. And so the story of Hanna Hats began with the business now starting to specialise in the design and production of handcrafted hats and caps.
In 1974 David’s son John took over the management of Hanna Hat’s ensuring the tradition and quality of his father’s work was retained. Today, the business is run by a third generation of Hanna’s as John’s children Amanda Jane, Eleanor and John Patrick have the passion, drive & commitment to ensure Hanna Hats has a bright future ahead.
What has never changed is our great respect for the age-old tradition of bespoke tailoring. This has played a major role in the development of our modern range of handcrafted headwear. Holding any Hanna Hat or Cap you can clearly see that the quality tailoring of past craftsmen has been retained completel.
Hanna Hats of Donegal are unique in every way. All of our hats and caps are our own designs. We use the finest Donegal tweed (pure new wool) woven exclusively for us. These designs are assembled by our dedicated team at our factory in Donegal Town. Each Hat or Cap is a little piece of Donegal brought to life.
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BBC Four’s future is uncertain / BBC Four presenters rally to save channel amid closure rumours
BBC Four presenters rally to save channel amid closure rumours
Lucy Worsley and Waldemar Januszczak are among those to have taken to social media
Mark Sweney
@marksweney
Published onThu 14 May 2020 17.52 BST
BBC Four presenters are rallying to save the arts and culture channel which is rumoured to be facing closure as the corporation looks to cut costs and invest in younger audiences.
Presenters including Lucy Worsley, art historian Dr James Fox, Oxford historian Dr Janina Ramirez and Waldemar Januszczak have taken to social media to campaign against widespread rumours that it could be shut as a TV channel by the end of this year.
BBC Four, which has an annual budget of £44m, attracts a small, niche audience of mostly older viewers to its schedule of shows, although it was responsible for creating the hit comedy The Thick Of It.
Rumours that BBC Four could be under threat have been circulating for some time as the corporation has made it clear that its goal is to pursue younger audiences increasingly slipping away to rivals such as Netflix.
Speculation intensified earlier this month when it was announced that Cassian Harrison, BBC Four’s long-serving controller, is to move to BBC Studios, the corporation’s commercial arm, on a nine-month attachment.
“There are no plans to close BBC Four,” said a BBC spokesman.
However, there are several options available as an alternative to a full closure of the channel. One option, which has been floated a number of times over the years, is to merge BBC Four with BBC Two. Another is for BBC Four to follow sister channel BBC Three and cease to exist as a TV channel, instead becoming online-only.
Earlier this year it emerged that the corporation’s bosses have discussed a return to TV for BBC Three, which moved online-only in 2016 as the corporation pursued its youth audience, which could replace the slot held by BBC Four in electronic programming guides.
BBC Three has flourished during the coronavirus lockdown with youth drama Normal People fueling its best week ever.
The corporation is in the process of making major cost cuts to plug a huge hole in its finances, including hundreds of millions of pounds to pay for the end of free TV licences for the over-75s.
In addition, the BBC has said the coronavirus will cost it £125m as door-to-door enforcement activity stops and a call centre that handles payments shut down because of the lockdown and physical distancing rules.
A decade ago a vocal campaign saved radio channel BBC 6 Music from closure after the then director general Mark Thompson looked to shut it, and digital sister station BBC Asian Network, to cut costs. The campaign raised awareness of the music station, which recorded its biggest-ever weekly audience, 2.56 million listeners, in the first quarter this year.
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BBC Four’s future is uncertain, but we need arts channels like it now more than ever
The home of arts programming and innovative dramas like The Thick of It, BBC Four may now be under threat - and the impact would be devastating, says Flora Carr
By Flora Carr
Monday, 11th May 2020 at 4:39 pm
BBC Four first launched almost 20 years ago, back in 2002. At the time, controller Roly Keating claimed in Radio Times that the new channel would be able to achieve things that no other channel could – its slogan was “everybody needs a place to think”. It was, and is, ostensibly a place for culture, a free-to-air channel helping to democratise the arts.
It’s also ambitious when it comes to commissioning original British content. Such gems like political satire The Thick of It, Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe, the hilarious Olympics comedy Twenty Twelve, and the thinking-woman’s quiz game Only Connect, hosted by Victoria Coren Mitchell, all originated on BBC Four.
Which is why the new rumour that the BBC will soon be relegating BBC Four to online, as it previously did with BBC Three, came as such an unwelcome surprise. Last week Broadcast added oxygen to those industry rumours, revealing that BBC sources feared for the channel’s future following its editor Cassian Harrison’s move to BBC Studios.
Much has been said in the recent weeks and months about how in times of crises, we turn to the arts – but that in the case of this particular crisis, the coronavirus pandemic, the arts have never been more at risk. Following the news about BBC Four, it must be assumed that the same can now be said for arts programming.
At times frightening, at other times frustrating, lockdown is a stressful state to be in, and BBC Four represents everything that’s keeping us sane during this pandemic. We find refuge in the arts: escapism, a creative outlet, or else a place to disappear. Under lockdown, galleries, theatres and film sets are (rightly) closed. Concerts are cancelled, and booksellers struggling. But as we’ve discovered, the arts aren’t luxuries: they are a vital part of our own identities, of our culture and communities.
Through film and art and reading books, we travel to places we may never go, meet people we would never encounter otherwise; it’s a lifeline for those who are currently staring at the same four walls day in, day out, and particularly for those self-isolating alone.
For those stuck at home and looking for creative ways to fill their time, BBC Four has filled that gap. Tomorrow at 8pm, for example, BBC Four viewers are invited to pick up their pencils for a life drawing class – with real nude models – as the nation channels its artistic side.
It’s via BBC Four that we were first introduced to many foreign dramas, from Twin (the Scandi-noir, starring Game of Thrones’ Kristofer Hivju, that’s recently gripped the nation), The Killing and the original Wallander, to American imports like Mad Men and the gentle art series Painting with Bob Ross, which has enjoyed a resurgence of interest and achieved cult status among millennials and Generation Z viewers (it even featured in teen drama Euphoria).
Britain’s future music stars, like the royal wedding cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, are discovered on the contest BBC Young Musician, which has been televised solely for BBC Four since 2014.
If you go on BBC iPlayer, BBC Four’s channel page is chock-full of content for those in quarantine. For those missing visits to art galleries, you can check out their ‘Museums in Quarantine’ four-parter. Slowly realising you’ll probably miss that sold-out play you booked before the lockdown? You can watch the channel’s Culture In Quarantine: Shakespeare series. But of course, the great thing about BBC Four is that it’s also on-air, so older, less mobile and potentially less tech-savvy viewers can still experience culture from the comfort of their homes.
Music, literature, drama, comedy, theatre, art: it’s all there. And now more than ever, we need channels like BBC Four, to plug the gap that’s currently missing from our lives.
Through channels like BBC Four, we can all access the arts. It doesn’t matter if we couldn’t attend that famous play at The Globe Theatre, or couldn’t visit the Tate Modern; and it certainly doesn’t matter if we’d normally be too shy to attend a real-life life drawing class.
But taking BBC Four off-air, and limiting its resources, would make it that little bit harder for people to experience world-class culture – whether we’re in lockdown or not.
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Brooks Brothers Plant In Garland To Close July 20 / It was one of NC's best-kept shopping secrets. Now, sadly, it is no more.
Brooks Brothers Plant In Garland To Close July 20
BY BLADENONLINE.COM ON 05/16/2020
Brooks Brothers announced Friday that it will permanently closing the Garland Shirt Factory on July 20 because of “unforeseen business circumstances resulting from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The company said in a warning notice to the N.C. Department of Commerce dated Wednesday that the closure would affect 146 employees.
“We apologize that we were unable to provide you more advance notice of this action,” the letter addressed to NC Works Rapid Response Team Manager Russell K. Doles reads. “The speed and vast reach of the COVID-19 outbreak, as well as the different declarations of a state of emergency and directives at the federal, state and local level … was unforeseeable and caused, and will continue to cause, among other things, a drastic impact on the Company’s business.”
Garland was one of three Brooks Brothers factories in the United States. The others are in Havermill, Massachusetts and Long Island City, New York. The Garland plant made button-down Oxford shirts.
Garland Mayor Winifred Hill Murphy told The News & Observer of Raleigh that the closing is a “devastating loss” for the Sampson County town that borders Bladen County off U.S. 701.
“We have been known for Brooks Brothers,” Murphy told the newspaper. “Before the retail store closed people would travel here from hours away. It has given employment to a great number of people.”
Brooks Brothers began selling clothing in 1818. The company has been for sale since last year.
It was one of NC's best-kept shopping secrets. Now, sadly, it is no more.
BY ZACHERY EANES
APRIL 24, 2018 08:19 PM , UPDATED APRIL 25, 2018 07:55 AM
The Brooks Brothers factory outlet store in Garland brought folks from out of state and all around the state to the small town.
The Brooks Brothers factory clearance store in Garland — where you could buy an American-made silk tie for as little as $10 — is closing its doors, according to Winifred Hill Murphy, the mayor of Garland, who posted the news on the town's Facebook page.
Brooks Brothers confirmed the news in an email Tuesday evening, saying in a statement: "We are closing our small clearance store as we believe our customers are better served by our regular Brooks Brothers Factory Stores which are able to offer a broader assortment of products at exceptional value. Our shirt factory is not impacted by this decision."
The store is an offshoot of Garland’s biggest employer, the Brooks Brothers Shirt Factory. Garland, about 80 miles southeast of Raleigh, is home to one of only three Brooks Brothers factories in the U.S. The others are in Haverhill, Mass., and Long Island City, New York.
In a town of a little more than 600 people, around 250 of them work in the Garland factory, Murphy said. Workers there earn roughly $10 to $14 an hour and produce as many as 5,500 shirts a week, according to a recent article by the magazine Business NC. It's the only U.S. factory making the classic button-down Oxford shirts.
Brooks Brothers has owned the plant since 1982. Oxford shirts made there can retail for $140.
The deals at the store were legendary — a News & Observer story in 2006 noted that a shirt could go for $15, a wool jacket for $39, three khaki pants for $10 — but Brooks Brothers never advertised the outlet's existence.
“It is sad. It really is,” said Matthew Register, owner of Southern Smoke BBQ in Garland. “They have been such an amazing asset to our town, bringing people in from all of the state or other states, who would make detours or Saturday road trips to Garland.”
Register — who only owns Brooks Brothers ties — said visitors to the store were a huge economic boost to the town. Visitors would often make their way to other businesses in Garland, including Register's barbeque restaurant, which he says is only a hedgerow away from the store.
“It is going to have a financial impact on our local businesses,” he said. But “it is one of those things where … we can’t have hard feelings. We don't want them to close — but I am thankful for the years they spent here and thankful for the jobs they have kept around all these years.”
Murphy, the mayor, said in an interview Tuesday that she is worried the closing of the store might portend the demise of the factory as well.
The factory “has had some early retirements recently in the past month,” she said, adding that she hasn’t spoken to anyone at Brooks Brothers. “We are concerned.”
Brooks Brothers CEO Claudio Del Vecchio, who bought the company in 2001, told the New York Times earlier this month that the Garland factory was the only domestic plant that operates at a loss.
“Part of the Brooks Brothers institution are its factories and what it means from a social standpoint to put things together,” Del Vecchio told the Times. “Not every consumer can afford to buy ‘Made in America.’ But we have a brand that can justify that cost, and there are enough customers who understand this.”
But despite the fact the factory is operating at a loss, Del Vecchio told the Times he doesn't want to close it, saying he knows doing so would erase the livelihoods of half the town.
“Many of the decisions we make are with that in mind as well,” he said. “We keep saying every year this is the year we aren’t going to lose money, so that’s the reason to keep trying to improve. But until the day I can’t afford it, we won’t close it.”
Zachery Eanes: 919-419-6684
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Not a Golden Future for the Fleece. Something very serious is going on concerning the future of Brooks Brothers
Not a Golden Future for the Fleece
Something very serious is going on concerning the future of Brooks Brothers
“Brooks Brothers is closing all three of their domestic factories by the end of July. Southwick and Long Island City are still being negotiated with the unions. Garland is a non-union factory. That’s why the closure can be announced first. The plan is to close them all at this point unless something drastic happens.”
Brooks Brothers plans for hundreds of layoffs at Haverhill plant
By Gintautas Dumcius – Digital Editor, Boston Business Journal
May 17, 2020, 7:55am EDT
The company pivoted to producing masks and gowns at the factory in March as the pandemic caused shutdowns of its retail locations and its customer base began to work from home. Now it's warning employees that it may be shutting it down altogether.
Brooks Brothers converts suit factory into medical supply producer
By Gintautas Dumcius – Digital Editor, Boston Business Journal
Mar 31, 2020, 6:05am EDT
Brooks Brothers, which bills itself as the oldest retailer in the U.S., is converting three factories, including one in Massachusetts, into a producer of medical supplies.
The Southwick suit factory in Haverhill is slated to join factories in New York and North Carolina in turning to the production of medical masks and gowns instead of ties, shirts and suits.
Health care workers have been clamoring for the medical supplies as they brace for a surge in COVID-19 patients in the coming weeks.
The Brooks Brothers facilities are expected to produce up to 150,000 masks a day, the company said, adding that executives have been in touch with federal and state officials, hospital systems and others about stopping the spread of the coronavirus.
The company said factory workers making the masks are returning to their workstations this week, after a two-week “precautionary self-quarantine.” The company plans to enforce federal guidelines for “social distancing” at all facilities.
Southwick served as a Brooks Brothers contractor before the company acquired it in 2008.
The company noted that Brooks Brothers has previously produced U.S. military uniforms, starting with the Civil War.
“We consider this a duty, and part of our DNA at Brooks Brothers,” said Claudio Del Vecchio, CEO, said in a statement.
Del Vecchio added that the New York–based company, which first launched in 1818, is “deeply grateful to the medical personnel at the frontlines who are fighting the pandemic, and we are honored to do our part and join our peers in retail to provide protective masks that our health care system critically needs.”
The company has 250 stores in North America. Retail locations in Massachusetts, which are all temporarily closed due to the pandemic, include stores on Boston’s Newbury Street and State Street, as well as in malls in Peabody and Wrentham.
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Astrid Kirchherr (20 May 1938 – 12 May 2020) / VIDEO: An Interview With Astrid Kirchherr
Beatles photographer Astrid Kirchherr dies aged 81
Obituary by Spencer Leigh
Sean O’Hagan
Tue 19 May 2020 08.29 BSTLast modified on Tue 19 May 2020 09.21 BST
As the various obituaries that marked her passing testify, Astrid Kirchherr’s fate was to be forever associated with the Beatles, a group she met almost by accident and whose image she remade so audaciously.
It was Kirchherr’s boyfriend, Klaus Voormann, who insisted that she and their friend, Jürgen Vollmer, came with him to the spectacularly seedy Kaiserkeller in Hamburg’s red-light district on an October evening in 1960. The previous night Voormann, a jazz fan who had never attended a rock’n’roll gig before, had been mesmerised by the Beatles’ raw on-stage energy as they performed to a motley crew of drunks, sailors and prostitutes. Kirchherr, though, immediately saw something else in them. “I was amazed at how beautiful they looked,” she said, later. “It was a photographer’s dream, my dream.”
Kirchherr had just completed a photography course at the College of Design and Fashion in Hamburg, where her tutor had been Reinhart Wolf, who would later become an acclaimed photographer of architectural facades. On graduating, she worked as his assistant for a further three years, but her abiding interest was the architecture of the human face.
As a photographer, Kirchherr was a quietly confident woman in a predominantly male world. A modernist at heart, she shot her subjects in stark monochrome, insisting that serious photography was essentially a black and white medium. “She always worked with a tripod,” Voormann recalled years later, “and always positioned the people, giving them directions.”
That meticulous approach is evident in her famous early portrait of the Beatles in an empty, neglected Hamburg funfair, which was made just days after she first met them. The Beatles were living a hand-to-mouth life at the time, playing several sets a night, drinking hard and sharing dingy rooms in an unsavoury neighbourhood. She thought the “slight grubbiness” of the location suited the way they looked. She was correct.
Lined up against a dilapidated fairground structure, they look like a bunch of street toughs with guitars. Their studied insouciance is undercut by their stern gazes, which are directed at the camera or off into the distance. On that early shoot, working without an assistant, she instructed them how to look and where to look, despite having only a rudimentary grasp of English. She later said, “I took their heads in my hands and arranged them as I wanted them.”
In her early photographs of the group, it is Stuart Sutcliffe, who looks the coolest and the most mysterious, his black clothes, upright quiff and shades a timeless style that echoes through punk, post-punk and beyond. (Lennon instinctively understood his friend’s star quality, insisting in the face of the other’s complaints that he remain in the group despite his rudimentary musical skills: “It doesn’t matter, he looks good.”)
Lennon dubbed Kirchherr and her friends “the exies” – scouse shorthand for existentialists – and may have initially been slightly threatened by their studied cool, sophistication and style. Sutcliffe had no such reservations, connecting with the young Germans immediately and referring to them as “real bohemians”.
It was with Sutcliffe, the artiest Beatle, that Kirchherr connected most deeply: the two soon became lovers and moved into a loft space in her mother’s house. She undoubtedly shifted his perspective away from pop music and back to art. To Lennon’s consternation, he soon left the group to concentrate on his first love, painting. Before that, though, he was her template for all that followed in terms of the Beatles’ change of image. She styled him to a degree in her own mould: the bobbed hair, the more tailored leather jackets, the black polo necks. It was a radical shift away from the influence of recent pop past – 1950s rock’n’roll – to the modernist present: French New Wave cinema, art school bohemianism, a hint of androgyny.
Sutcliffe was the first Beatle to change his hairstyle having seen and been impressed by Voormann’s longer tresses, which had been sculpted by Kirchherr to help conceal his prominent ears. Harrison soon followed suit. Intriguingly, Lennon and McCartney were the most reluctant to give up their quiffs. On a visit to Paris, they were finally convinced by Vollmer, who was then working as an assistant to the American photographer, William Klein – which gives us some idea of the circles these young German bohos were moving in.
In applying her bobbed-hairstyle, borrowed from Juliet Gréco, to the working class lads from Liverpool, Kirchherr feminised them in a way, softening their street-tough image. It was a bold move that announced the impending pop future, the group’s longer hair later becoming an obsession to the mainstream media, who christened them, not altogether flatteringly “the Mop-tops.”
Much deeper cultural shifts were under way, though, and the Beatles came to represent a wave of meritocratic creativity in music, art, film and photography that, for a brief moment, made the mid-60s seem genuinely utopian. As pop historian Jon Savage has noted, the Beatles, in their irreverent attitude and modernist style almost as much as their early music, signalled “the end of the Victorian age” in Britain. Ironically, it was a young German woman with an emphatically European aesthetic who shaped their image.
Kirchherr’s relationship with Sutcliffe was intense and short-lived. Soon after they began living together, he began attending art school in Hamburg and painted with a renewed energy despite being dogged by debilitating headaches. It is hard now to grasp how tumultuous his sudden death, aged 21, was for her at a time that promised so much.
Lennon, too, was devastated at the loss of his close friend. When he and Harrison visited the loft studio, he asked Kirchherr to photograph him standing in the same spot that Sutcliffe had stood in for a previous portrait by her. There is a palpable sadness that emanates from her image of a shell-shocked Lennon standing in the ghostly half-light, but she much preferred another portrait she made in the same session. In it, John is sitting in a chair and George is standing behind him, his hand resting on his friend’s shoulder. “Every time I see that photo, I see the immense sadness in John’s face and the strength in George,” she later said.
As time has gone by, it is other less well-known portraits by Kirchherr that seem more striking, including an almost deadpan self-portrait, in which she stares straight ahead, holding the camera’s shutter release, beneath thin branches that hang down from somewhere above her head. Writer and art critic Michael Bracewell has pointed out that her androgynous look and cerebral approach harked back to “the young German modernists of 1929”, while a later snapshot of her then husband, George Kemp, at the Star Club in Hamburg, could be mistaken for “a photograph of Nico and Sterling Morrison” hanging out at Andy Warhol’s Factory.
In many ways, the young Kirchherr was an outlier, a stylish bohemian who understood the ways in which art could impact on popular culture, and vice versa. In a dingy, disreputable Hamburg bar, amid the noise and the squalor, she detected something beautiful. She was in the right place at exactly the right time. And so, more to the point, were they.
Astrid Kirchherr (20 May 1938 – 12 May 2020) was a German photographer and artist known for her association with the Beatles (along with her friends Klaus Voormann and Jürgen Vollmer) and her photographs of the band's original members – John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best – during their early days in Hamburg.
Kirchherr met artist Stuart Sutcliffe in the Kaiserkeller bar in Hamburg in 1960, where Sutcliffe was playing bass with the Beatles, and was later engaged to him, before his death in 1962. Although Kirchherr shot very few photographs after 1967, her early work has been exhibited in Hamburg, Bremen, London, Liverpool, New York City, Washington, D.C., Tokyo, Vienna and at the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. She published three limited-edition books of photographs.
Kirchherr was born in 1938 in Hamburg, Germany, and was the daughter of a former executive of the German branch of the Ford Motor Company. During World War II, she was evacuated to the safety of the Baltic Sea where she remembered seeing dead bodies on the shore (after the ships Cap Arcona and the SS Deutschland had been bombed and sunk) and the destruction in Hamburg when she returned.
After her graduation, Kirchherr enrolled in the Meisterschule für Mode, Textil, Grafik und Werbung in Hamburg, as she wanted to study fashion design but demonstrated a talent for black-and-white photography. Reinhard Wolf, the school's main photographic tutor, convinced her to switch courses and promised that he would hire her as his assistant when she graduated.[1] Kirchherr worked for Wolf as his assistant from 1959 until 1963.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kirchherr and her art school friends were involved in the European existentialist movement whose followers were later nicknamed "Exis" by Lennon. In 1995, she told BBC Radio Merseyside: "Our philosophy then, because we were only little kids, was wearing black clothes and going around looking moody. Of course, we had a clue who Jean-Paul Sartre was.We got inspired by all the French artists and writers, because that was the closest we could get. England was so far away, and America was out of the question. So France was the nearest. So we got all the information from France, and we tried to dress like the French existentialists... We wanted to be free, we wanted to be different, and tried to be cool, as we call it now.”
The Beatles
Kirchherr, Voormann and Vollmer were friends who had all attended the Meisterschule, and shared the same ideas about fashion, culture and music. Voormann became Astrid's boyfriend, and moved into the Kirchherr home, where he had his own room.In 1960, after Kirchherr and Vollmer had had an argument with Voormann, he wandered down the Reeperbahn (in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg) and heard music coming from the Kaiserkeller club. Voormann walked in and watched a performance by a group called the Beatles: Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, Sutcliffe and Best, their drummer at the time. Voormann asked Kirchherr and Vollmer to listen to this new music, and after being persuaded to visit the Kaiserkeller (which was in the rough area of the Reeperbahn),Kirchherr decided that all she wanted to do was to be as close to the Beatles as she could. The trio of friends had never heard rock n' roll before, having previously listened to only trad jazz, with some Nat King Cole and The Platters mixed in. The trio then visited the Kaiserkeller almost every night, arriving at 9 o'clock and sitting by the front of the stage. Kirchherr later said: "It was like a merry-go-round in my head, they looked absolutely astonishing... My whole life changed in a couple of minutes. All I wanted was to be with them and to know them."
Kirchherr later said that she, Voormann and Vollmer felt guilty about being German, and about Germany's recent history. Meeting the Beatles was something very special for her, although she knew that English people would think that she ate sauerkraut, and would comment on her heavy German accent, but they made jokes about it together. Lennon would make sarcastic remarks from the stage, saying "You Krauts, we won the war", knowing that very few Germans in the audience spoke English, but any English sailors present would roar with laughter.
Sutcliffe was fascinated by the trio, but especially Kirchherr, and thought they looked like "real bohemians". Bill Harry later said that when Kirchherr walked in, every head would immediately turn her way, and that she always captivated the whole room. Sutcliffe wrote to a friend that he could hardly take his eyes off her and had tried to talk to Kirchherr during the next break, but she had already left the club. Sutcliffe managed to meet them eventually, and learned that all three had attended the Meisterschule, which was the same type of art college that Lennon and Sutcliffe had attended in Liverpool (Note: Meisterschule für Mode, Textil, Grafik und Werbung [Master Craftspeople College for Fashion, Textile, Graphics, and Advertising], although it is now called the University of Applied Sciences).
Photographs
Kirchherr asked the Beatles if they would mind letting her take photographs of them in a photo session, which impressed them, as other groups had only snapshots that were taken by friends. The next morning Kirchherr took photographs with a Rolleicord camera, at a fairground in a municipal park called Hamburger Dom which was close to the Reeperbahn, and in the afternoon she took them all (minus Best, who decided not to go) to her mother's house in Altona. Kirchherr's bedroom (which was all in black, including the furniture, with silver foil on the walls and a large tree branch suspended from the ceiling), was decorated especially for Voormann, with whom she had a relationship, although after the visits to the Kaiserkeller their relationship became purely platonic. Kirchherr started dating Sutcliffe, although she always remained a close friend of Voormann.
Kirchherr later supplied Sutcliffe and the other Beatles with Preludin, which, when taken with beer, made them feel euphoric and helped to keep them awake until the early hours of the morning. The Beatles had taken Preludin before, but it was only possible at the time to obtain Preludin with a doctor's prescription note. Kirchherr's mother received them from a local chemist, who supplied them without asking questions. After meeting Kirchherr, Lennon filled his letters to Cynthia Powell (his girlfriend at the time) with "Astrid said this, Astrid did that", which made Powell jealous, until she read that Sutcliffe was in a relationship with Kirchherr.When Powell visited Hamburg with Dot Rhone (McCartney's girlfriend at the time) in April 1961, they stayed at Kirchherr's house. In August 1963, Kirchherr met Lennon and Cynthia in Paris while they were both there for a belated honeymoon, as Kirchherr was there with a girlfriend for a few days' holiday. The four of them went from wine bar to wine bar and finally ended up back at Kirchherr's lodgings, where all four fell asleep on Kirchherr's single bed.
The Beatles met Kirchherr again in Hamburg in 1966 when they were touring Germany, and Kirchherr gave Lennon the letters he had written to Sutcliffe in 1961 and 1962. Lennon said it was "the best present I've had in years". All of the Beatles wrote many letters to Kirchherr: "I only have a couple from George [Harrison], which I'll never show anyone, but he wrote so many. So did the others. I probably threw them away. You do that when you're young – you don't think of the future." Harrison later asked Kirchherr to arrange the cover of his Wonderwall Music album in 1968.
The Beatles haircut and clothes
Kirchherr is credited with inventing the Beatles' moptop haircut although she disagreed, saying: "All that rubbish people said, that I created their hairstyle, that's rubbish! Lots of German boys had that hairstyle. Stuart [Sutcliffe] had it for a long while and the others copied it. I suppose the most important thing I contributed to them was friendship."In 1995, Kirchherr told BBC Radio Merseyside: "All my friends in art school used to run around with this sort of what you call Beatles haircut. And my boyfriend then, Klaus Voormann, had this hairstyle, and Stuart liked it very very much. He was the first one who really got the nerve to get the Brylcreem out of his hair and asking me to cut his hair for him. Pete [Best] has really curly hair and it wouldn't work." Kirchherr says that after she cut Sutcliffe's hair, Harrison asked her to do the same when she was visiting Liverpool, and Lennon and McCartney had their hair cut in the same style while they were in Paris, by Kirchherr's friend, Vollmer, who was living there at the time as an assistant to photographer William Klein.
After moving into the Kirchherr family's house, Sutcliffe used to borrow her clothes, as he was the same height as Kirchherr. He wore her leather pants and jackets, collarless jackets, oversized shirts, and long scarves. He also borrowed a corduroy suit with no lapels that he wore on stage, which prompted Lennon to sarcastically ask if his mother had lent him the suit.
Stuart Sutcliffe
Sutcliffe wrote to friends that he was infatuated with Kirchherr, and asked her friends which colours, films, books and painters she liked, and whom she fancied. Best later commented that the beginning of their relationship was, "like one of those fairy stories". Kirchherr says that she immediately fell in love with Sutcliffe, and referred to him as "the love of my life". Kirchherr and Sutcliffe got engaged in November 1960, and exchanged rings, as is the German custom. Sutcliffe later wrote to his parents that he was engaged to Kirchherr, which they were shocked to learn, as they thought he would give up his career as an artist, although he told Kirchherr that he would like to be an art teacher in London or Germany in the future.
Kirchherr and Sutcliffe went to Liverpool in the summer of 1961, as Kirchherr wanted to meet Sutcliffe's family (and to see Liverpool) before their marriage. Everybody was expecting a strange beatnik artist from Hamburg, but Kirchherr turned up at the Sutcliffes' house at 37 Aigburth Drive, Liverpool, bearing a single long-stemmed orchid in her hand as a present, and dressed in a round-necked cashmere sweater and tailored skirt.
In 1962, Sutcliffe collapsed in the middle of an art class in Hamburg. He was suffering from intense headaches, and Kirchherr's mother had German doctors perform checks on him, although they were unable to determine the cause of his headaches. While living at the Kirchherrs' house in Hamburg, his condition deteriorated. On 10 April 1962, Kirchherr's mother phoned her daughter at work and told her Sutcliffe was not feeling well, had been brought back to the house, and an ambulance had been called for. Kirchherr rushed home and rode with Sutcliffe in the ambulance, but he died in her arms before it reached the hospital.
Three days later Kirchherr met Lennon, McCartney and Best at the Hamburg airport (they were returning to Hamburg to perform) and told them Sutcliffe had died of a brain haemorrhage. Harrison and manager Brian Epstein arrived on another plane sometime later with Sutcliffe's mother, who had been informed by telegram. Harrison and Lennon were helpful towards the distraught Kirchherr, with Lennon telling her one day that she definitely had to decide if she wanted to "Live or die, there is no other question."
Freelance photographer
In 1964, Kirchherr became a freelance photographer, and with her colleague Max Scheler she took "behind the scenes" photographs of the Beatles during the filming of A Hard Day's Night, as an assignment for the German Stern magazine. Epstein had forbidden any publicity photographs to be taken without his permission, but Kirchherr phoned Harrison, who said he would arrange it, but added, "Only if they pay you."
Stern phoned Bill Harry at his Mersey Beat newspaper and asked if he could arrange a photograph of all the groups in Liverpool, so Harry suggested Kirchherr be the photographer, although Kirchherr later said she placed an advertisement in the Liverpool Echo newspaper. Kirchherr and Scheler said that any group who wanted their photograph taken in front of St. George's Hall would be paid per musician, but over 200 groups turned up on the day, which meant Kirchherr and Scheler soon ran out of money. Kirchherr didn't publish the photographs until 1995, in a book called Liverpool Days, which is a limited-edition collection of black-and-white photographs. In 1999, a companion book called Hamburg Days was published (a two-volume limited edition), containing a set of photographs by Kirchherr and "memory drawings" by Voormann. The drawings are recollections of places and situations that Voormann clearly remembers, but Kirchherr had never photographed, or had lost the photographs.
Kirchherr described how difficult it was to be accepted as a female photographer in the 1960s: "Every magazine and newspaper wanted me to photograph the Beatles again. Or they wanted my old stuff, even if it was out of focus, whether they were nice or not. They wouldn't look at my other work. It was very hard for a girl photographer in the 60s to be accepted. In the end I gave up. I've hardly taken a photo since 1967."Kirchherr was quoted as saying that When We Was Fab (Genesis Publications 2007), would be her last book of photographs: "I have decided it is time to create one book in which I am totally involved so that it contains the pictures I like most, printed the way I would print them, even down to the text and design.... This book is me and that is why it will be the last one. The very last one."
Kirchherr expressed respect for other photographers, such as Annie Leibovitz (because of the humour in her work), Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Jim Rakete and Reinhard Wolf (German Wikipedia), and French film-makers François Truffaut, and Jean Cocteau. Kirchherr said that her favourite photos are the ones she took of Sutcliffe by the Baltic sea, and of Lennon and Harrison in her attic room at 45a Eimsbütteler Strasse. She expressed reservations about digital photography, saying that a photographer should concentrate on the art of photography and not on the technical results, although admitting that she knew nothing about computers and was "afraid of the internet".
Kirchherr admitted she was not good at business because of insufficient organisation, and had never really looked after the negatives of her photographs to prove ownership. Her business partner Ulf Krüger—a songwriter and record producer—successfully found many of Astrid's negatives and photographs and had them copyrighted, although he believes that Kirchherr lost over the years because of people using her photographs without permission. In July 2001, Kirchherr visited Liverpool to open an exhibition of her work at the Mathew Street art gallery, which is close to the former site of The Cavern Club. She appeared as a guest at the city's Beatles Week Festival during the August Bank Holiday. Kirchherr's work has been exhibited internationally in places, such as Hamburg, Bremen, London, Liverpool, New York City, Washington D.C., Tokyo, Vienna, and at the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.
Later life
In 1967, Kirchherr married English drummer Gibson Kemp (born Gibson Stewart Kemp, 1945, Liverpool, Lancashire), who had replaced Ringo Starr in Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. The marriage ended in divorce after seven years. She then worked as a barmaid, as an interior designer, and then for a music publishing firm, getting married for a second time to a German businessman.Kirchherr worked as an advisor in 1994 on the film Backbeat, which portrayed Kirchherr, Sutcliffe and the Beatles during their early days in Hamburg. She was impressed with Stephen Dorff (who played Sutcliffe in the film), commenting that he was the right age (19 years old at the time), and his gestures, the way he smoked, and talked were so like Sutcliffe's that she had goose pimples. Kirchherr was portrayed in the film by Sheryl Lee.
Starting in the mid-1990s, Kirchherr and business partner Krüger operated the K&K photography shop in Hamburg, offering custom vintage prints, books and artwork for sale. K&K periodically helps arrange Beatles' conventions and other Beatles' events in the Hamburg area.She had no children, and lived alone. She commented in 1995: "My [second] marriage ended in 1985... I regretted I had no children. I just couldn't see me have any. But now I am pleased when I see the situation the world is in. I live alone and am very happy."
Kirchherr died on 12 May 2020 in Hamburg, following "a short, serious illness", a week prior to her 82nd birthday. News of her death was first announced by Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn via Twitter. He praised her involvement with the band as "immeasurable", and credited her as an "intelligent, inspirational, innovative, daring, artistic, awake, aware, beautiful, smart, loving and uplifting friend to many".
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Fine & Dandy shop NYC / VIDEO;Fine and Dandy 360
360 tour 'panopticum' on Fine & Dandy shop NYC
Fine & Dandy Shop
Created in the fall of 2008 by Matt Fox and Enrique Crame III, Fine And Dandy is a line of dandy-inspired men’s accessories made in the USA: ties, bow ties, cummerbunds, handkerchiefs, scarves, neckerchiefs, hats, tie bars, lapel pins, cufflinks, collar bars, watch straps, money clips, key rings, suspenders, sock and shirt garters, belts, spats, dog collars and leashes, and more.
Following several successful pop-up shops and on the 4th year anniversary of launching their online store, Fine And Dandy opened its first permanent retail shop in November 2012 at 445 West 49th Street in Hell’s Kitchen, in the heart of New York City. Shortly after opening, Fine And Dandy received a rave review in The New York Times.
In the spring of 2014, Fine And Dandy officially launched their Archives Division. Working together with costume designers and wardrobe departments, interior designers and fashion stylists, showrooms and private clients, Fine And Dandy Archives source and pull together vintage memorabilia from their own personal collection.
In the fall of 2015, Fine And Dandy launched its custom shirt program, proudly made in the USA. In addition to their online store and NYC brick and mortar, Fine And Dandy products are also available in select boutique shops worldwide. Pop-up shops have been held at the Blind Barber, Onassis, Chelsea Market, the Jazz Age Lawn Party, Brooklyn Flea, the National Arts Club and 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
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The‘massacre’ of Paris mythic garden of famous cinema La Pagode / VIDEO: CINEMA LA PAGODE (la pagode de babylone)
Parisians angry as trees in famous cinema's Japanese garden cut down
Property magnate Charles Cohen’s €8m renovation of La Pagode branded a ‘massacre’
Kim Willsher
Published onFri 22 May 2020 05.00 BST
When the property magnate Charles Cohen bought the La Pagode cinema in Paris, complete with its celebrated Japanese garden, three years ago, he announced that as an American in Paris he wanted “everyone to be happy”.
The cinema-loving Francophile promised to “restore and preserve” the magnificent listed building and pledged he would “not disappoint” with his €8m facelift.
But locals in the 7th arrondissement near the celebrated cinema are far from happy, claiming the historic site has been partly destroyed. They describe the sawing down of a ginkgo biloba tree, a large horse chestnut and a weeping beech – unexpectedly razed on the day France’s strict lockdown ended – as a chainsaw “massacre”.
“We had hoped to be rejoicing in a new life for La Pagode, in the belief that its purchaser had at heart the idea of refining this exceptional site and protecting its spirit,” the organisation France Nature Environment wrote in an open letter to Cohen.
The letter said the organisation was “stunned by this unimaginable massacre”, adding: “Reading the plans for this project reveals it shows the opposite of respect for the site, that we thought was a given.”.
It said that the plans which included developing a neighbouring building to create a “cinema city” were “interesting … but will destroy the magical and miraculous character of the site”.
The organisation pointed out that the building, garden and surrounding walls were all protected by heritage listing: “This project undermines the system of protection of French monuments. The supposed restoration hides a real distortion.”
Outside La Pagode on Thursday a message had been written on the planning notice which read: “Shame on you for chopping down the gingko and the weeping beech. This garden was magnificent; you have turned it into a wasteland.”
When it closed in 2015 after a bitter dispute between the owner and the tenants, then a small independent cinema chain, it appeared the curtain had come down on La Pagode for good. The building with its peaceful Japanese tea garden and Salle Japonaise needed extensive renovation.
The ornate replica of a pagoda was commissioned in 1895 by François-Émile Morin as a wedding gift to his wife at a time when Japanese style was à la mode in Europe. Morin, the owner of the nearby department store Le Bon Marché, had some of the building’s most lavish parts, including delicately sculpted wooden beams and panels, brought over from Japan.
Despite his grand gesture, the marriage did not last. Before La Pagode was finished, his wife had fallen in love with his best friend.
La Pagode was first used to host high-class Parisian soirées and receptions but was closed in 1927. Four years later it was turned into a cinema and immediately forged a reputation for screening avant garde films. The premiere of Jean Cocteau’s last film, Testament d’Orphée, was held at La Pagode in 1960 and during the decade it became a place of high cinematic art, promoting the classics of the New Wave generation including François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Éric Rohmer.
Despite housing only two relatively small cinemas, it attracted more than 100,000 film-goers a year before its closure in 2015, and hosted movie masterclasses, festivals and evenings with visiting directors in the original Salle Japonaise, which featured red velvet seats and oriental snake light fittings.
Cohen, president of the Cohen Media Group, an independent distribution and production company, was hailed as a saviour when he bought the cinema in 2017 and announced his grand plans. These included adding two extra screening halls underground as well as a bar and restaurant. Earlier this year, he acquired the lease on a large neighbouring building, previously the seat of the regional council, and obtained permission to develop the site into a centre for the “creation, training, research and innovation” in cinema. La Pagode was due to reopen this year.
Matthew Fraser, a professor at the American University of Paris, said locals were “outraged” by the felling of La Pagode’s trees. “It’s a mythical place whose history goes back to the Belle Epoch. I used to go there back in the 1980s and I remember it was a cool place where you often met actors. Now the trees are completely gone. Did Charles Cohen even know about this? Maybe it was the architects who oversee work on historic buildings who said they had to come down. We just don’t know,” he said.
Paris Pagodas: The Remarkable Story of La Pagode in the 7th
By Dorothy Garabedian - Apr 9, 2019 7249 3 Print Print Email Email
Paris has two remarkable and unusual pagodas. Curiously, neither was built as a sanctuary or shrine. On the outside, one is bold and conspicuous while the other is discreet and hidden in a thick bamboo and gingko garden. A closer look reveals that both have unconventional architecture and sumptuous interior design. Their histories are engrossing, sprinkled with a little mystery.
In the first installment of a two-article series, I will share the story of La Pagode, a delicate, Japanese-style pagoda situated in the prestigious 7th arrondissement. It was built in 1896 by a prominent man as a birthday gift for his wife. Later, it became a fabled cinema. The exquisite architectural jewel and enchanting bamboo garden are historical monuments. Today, La Pagode’s situation is in a state of… suspense.
The second article will tell the tale of the Pagoda Paris (or the Red Pagoda), an imposing, Chinese-style pagoda located in the upper-class 8th arrondissement.
The year is 1896 – the height of the flamboyant Belle Epoque era – and François Emil Morin, a director of the grand department store Le Bon Marché, is trying to think of a unique birthday present to give his wife, Suzanne Kelson – a woman with an impulsive personality. She is known as “Amandine,” meaning “much loved,” and Monsieur Morin is wholly infatuated with her. He is so eager to please her that every evening he brings a little gift from the store to coax squeals of pleasure from her. This birthday present should be something that really takes her breath away; something that would be the envy of tout Paris.
Japonisme is all the rage and he finds inspiration in that. He would build her a beautiful pagoda!
Monsieur Morin sets out to buy the property at 57, rue de Babylone (a short walk from Le Bon Marché). He hires top architect, Alexandre Marcel, who coincidentally is also fascinated with Japonisme. Monsieur Marcel orders panels, paints, frescos and statuary directly from Japan. He incorporates these and adds special French touches, non-existent in Japan at the time, like art nouveau stained glass windows and, for the interior, lots of gold-leaf Asian baroque ornamentation, fanciful furnishings and a lovely stage. Despite delivery delays and workers not showing up for work, the pagoda is completed on the day of Madame Morin’s birthday.
A crowd on the street watches as Amandine, escorted by her ebullient husband, arrives at the pagoda in a carriage, her eyes covered with a silk scarf. He dramatically whisks the scarf away and for a long moment Amandine is indeed frozen breathless. When she recovers, she shrieks enthusiastically, showers kisses on her husband, then runs toward the Pagoda to discover and take charge of her new playhouse. Monsieur Morin couldn’t be happier.
From then on Amandine plunges into organizing lavish banquets, balls, thematic evenings, concerts, and plays. One after the other. La Pagode becomes the focal point of Paris’ upper class, crazy social life and Amandine reigns over these extravaganzas dressed in elaborate Japanese costume as Empress of the Rising Sun.
One day, only a few months later, a dark cloud appears over Monsieur Morin. At one of her festivities Madame is introduced to a good-looking, suave young man named Joseph Plassard. Amandine, falls madly in love with him right away.
Poor Monsieur Morin. He not only loses his beloved Amandine to a much younger man but he happens to be the son of his co-director at Le Bon Marché, Jules Plassard. Quelle humiliation!
They divorce; the goodhearted M. Morin gives her La Pagode; and Amandine and her new, 15 years-younger husband sail off for the New World. A saddened but resigned Monsieur Morin is left to his reveries of happier times. Apparently, however, the lavish parties continued with Amandine’s best friend assuming the role of Empress of the Rising Sun.
Amandine dies in 1917 and La Pagode becomes part of the estate of Joseph Plassard. He remarries. With his new wife, Antoinette Mougel, they buy up the mansions surrounding La Pagode. The parties continued. In a short documentary on La Pagode, a woman recalls attending one of these famous parties. “Stepping through the gate into the garden was like entering a fairyland with candles flickering everywhere,” she said. The orchestra was in black tie and she danced the night away in the opulent hall. “It was unforgettable.”
This extraordinary era in La Pagode’s history continued until 1927 when the hosts could no longer carry on. The property was put up for sale. However, due to the unusual architecture, offers were not pouring in. For a few years La Pagode languished idly… until… a Chinese diplomatic delegation showed up. They were in search of a building for their embassy. They thought La Pagode’s architecture was perfectly suitable.
Who could have dreamt of anything better?
Everything was going smoothly until the diplomats decided to have a closer inspection of the building. They didn’t like what they saw and promptly terminated the lease.
What happened?
The panels and frescos the architect had ordered from Japan depicted battle scenes of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 where the Japanese were the valiant victors.
La Pagode closed. Then, in 1931, its doors reopened and voila! La Pagode had reincarnated into a cinema! The only cinema ever in the distinguished 7th arrondissement. The program catered to serious cinéphiles showing quality avant-garde films.
During World War II when Paris was under Nazi occupation, the theater closed again; yet the place still buzzed with activity. Secret activity. French Resistance members were using the underground passages that connected La Pagode to neighboring mansions to move people around.
After the war La Pagode showed mostly American films before going back to being a pantheon for art and independent films. A new group of filmmakers had emerged forming a movement called New Wave (Nouvelle Vague). These included Ingmar Bergman, Sergey Eisenstein, Louis Malle, Agnès Varda, Francois Truffaut and others. It was director Louis Malle who, in 1972, took charge of La Pagode. He transformed the theater, brought the bamboo garden back to life and set up the tea concession in the garden. (In 1983 the bamboo garden was declared a historic monument.)
The highpoint of La Pagode’s cinematic life was during the 1960-70s. During this era it became a preeminent magnet for the city’s artistic and intellectual community. So many people have connections to the place, with stories, memories and experiences. One projectionist, for example, recalls a particularly slow day running the scheduled 2pm showing. Only one person showed up. She sat alone in the hall watching a Louis Malle film. It was Jackie Kennedy.
In 1985 the (Gibault-Plassard) family put the property up for sale again. It was purchased by a prominent real estate developer, Èlisabeth Dauchy, head of Compagnie Rembrandt Investments. That didn’t stop peculiar offers from coming in. One reported proposal was to turn the lower level of La Pagode into a car park.
In 1990 the beautiful pagoda was further spared an excruciating degradation. The American fast food chain with the golden arches and a philosophy of “location, location, location” was eyeing La Pagode as a place to set up business. This horrified so many people that Jack Lang, then Minister of Culture, pushed to have the delicate architectural gem classified as a historic monument.
From 1997 to 2000 La Pagode was closed so that some renovations could be made. At some point the management of the cinema changed from Gaumont Cinémas to Ètoile Cinémas, a company operating several other successful cinemas in the city. Some renovations were made again, but it was clear that a major overhaul was going to be necessary. The elaborate ceiling had to be removed for fear of ceiling collapse and the walls needed scaffolding to keep them up.
Ètoile operated La Pagode for 15 years bringing the attendance to over 100,000 per year. Cinema-oriented events enhanced the cinephile experience. A few years ago the relationship between the owner and the management company began to sour and continued to deteriorate from tense to caustic.
In the final outcome, the case was adjudicated in favor of the owner and Ètoile had to vacate. La Pagode closed its doors in November 2015 “for renovations.”
Friends, fans and devotees of La Pagode have been devastated ever since and not very optimistic about its future due to the indefinite term of the closure. Will it open again as a cinema? Will it ever reopen? If so, as what?
On February 23, 2016 La Pagode opened for one more day – a sad one – when the non-historical furnishings and equipment, like the red velvet chairs and projection equipment, were stripped away and sold off in an auction. Some items went for practically nothing. A cinema company in the south of France took possession of most of the inventory.
La Pagode looks sad and forlorn these days. More than three years have passed since its closure. It seems like we’ve seen this movie before. But La Pagode is a mythical place and seems to have a mysterious hand guiding its destiny because…
La Pagode has a new owner now.
In 2017 a New York billionaire real estate developer heard about La Pagode. Without having seen it personally, he tracked down the owner and convinced her to sell it to him. She sold. Before you think, uh oh, this doesn’t look good; it may be the most perfect match ever.
What made Madame Dauchy decide to sell off La Pagode to a New York real estate developer?
Charles S. Cohen, La Pagode’s new owner, heads one of America’s leading commercial and private real estate companies. He has worked on many grand projects with top architects and designers. His other interests include wine, fashion, design and much more. Three years ago be bought an award-winning winery in Provence. He’s a kind of renaissance man. His reputation is excellent, his taste impeccable and he is deeply involved in the arts, especially the art of cinema. And that is what makes him so interesting for La Pagode.
Cohen, in his words, is a “born cinéphile” and has been since the age of 14. Parallel to his real estate business he produces and distributes independent and arthouse films throughout North America. His Cohen Media Group is today the largest American distributor of French films in the U.S. Besides producing films he is sometimes a director. His first attempt at that was at 16 and his film won a Kodak prize. Some of the films his company has produced received Academy Award nominations or awards. One is the 2017 Academy Award winning film, The Salesman, for Best Foreign Language Film. His accomplishments are too numerous to list in a few words.
For a passionate cinéphile like Charles Cohen, restoring a cinema that is an exquisite cultural landmark for Paris is a dream project.
Working with the French government’s Office of Historic Monuments on plans for the restoration, however, can be a tortuous process. He most certainly will encounter bumpy roads, and sharp twists and turns as he navigates the thorny mine field of tight restrictions on what can and cannot be done to historic structures. One should not count the chickens before they’ve hatched. Anything can happen. But Mr. Cohen seems optimistic and certainly has a lot of experience behind him to see the project through. According to the chief architect of historic monuments, Benjamin Mouton, he visualizes “a renovated venue that could also play host to a wealth of events and gatherings while remaining true to its heritage.”
It is clear now why Madame Dauchy chose to turn over La Pagode to Monsieur Cohen. She notes that he is a passionate cinéphile, loves French wine, loves French cinema, has the means and the will.
“Who could have dreamt of anything better?”
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'What’s the point?' Luxury stores open in Paris that’s empty of tourists
'What’s the point?': Paris fashion faces up to life after lockdown
Socially distanced shopping proves a hard sell in the French capital with few places open to show off
Alice Pfeiffer in Paris
Published onFri 22 May 2020 22.35 BST
Since shops reopened in France last week, luxury fashion boutiques in the French capital have been revamping their security measures to create a transformed high-end experience.
In one of the first countries in Europe to open for consumers to such an extent, luxury destinations are becoming self-aware pioneers in inventing a new shopping environment. The challenge is “to make people today feel charmed as much as safe”, says Jennifer Cuvillier, the head of style at the department store Le Bon Marché – no small challenge in the context of global luxury sales projected to drop by 50% this year, according to a recent report by Baines.
Shoppers are welcomed to Le Bon Marché by an eerily masked and gloved army of staff – 150 to be precise, one for each visitor at the store’s maximum capacity in these post-confinement days. A shop assistant privately chaperones visitors through the almost invariably glass-shielded displays.
In an ambience lodged between a museum visit and a dystopian sci-fi movie, they follow the mandatory curated route so as to avoid any potential physical contact. The tills are shielded by acrylic screens, such as at Chanel on Rue Cambon.
The majority of the shops disinfect and quarantine any item that has been touched, for 48 to 72 hours. And, of course, the changing rooms are sanitised after every use. To counter these rather daunting measures, brands seem to be focusing on offering personalised and upgraded services: luxury labels including Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior have begun offering private shopping sessions.
All the efforts notwithstanding, a week after doors reopened, the initial rush seems to have faded. While on 11 May, crowds flocked to the boutiques on the Champs Élysées and Avenue Montaigne – a seemingly endless line of luxury-hungry shoppers awaiting the opening of Louis Vuitton – the situation has radically changed: Chanel, Céline and Yves Saint Laurent are all queue-less a week later, and the boutiques almost empty. Sales assistants at Galeries Lafayette Champs Élysées and Loewe both confirmed traffic had fallen significantly.
“There was an initial craze that didn’t last,” notes Rémy Faure, a hair colourist. “One of my clients went straight out on the 11th to buy an electric-blue Kelly bag at Hermès. But a lot of people have started thinking more critically about their life choices and needs during the confinement.”
Serge Carreira, a fashion lecturer at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, says: “With the absence of tourists, who make up the large majority of luxury sales, boutiques are empty.”
Shopping is not going away, he says, but it is changing: “Those who shop will do it differently, more determinately; it won’t be a heat of the moment decision but something thought out.”
Coming out of Galeries Lafayettes Champs Élysées, Samantha, 34, and Elena, 33, suggest that the slump in shopping is down to the fact that there is nowhere to show off any new outfits. “À quoi bon?” (What’s the point?) grumbles Samantha. Theatres, cinemas, restaurants, cafes and bars are closed. “The only places to visit are shops,” adds Elena, for whom lèche-vitrine (literally “window licking”, as the French call browsing) is one of the few outdoor activities available in the city now.
According to Carreira, the slowness could be due to habits gained in the lockdown: “Shopping addicts shopped as much as they could during the confinement, many people have adopted the habit and, one can assume, don’t see the point of going out to a city still with a ghost-like feeling.”
Luxury stores open in Paris that’s empty of tourists as France eases coronavirus lockdown restrictions
Luxury Parisian shops are testing customers’ appetite for splashing out on goods again, though the dearth of international tourists remains a major drag
Brands used new hygiene routines, with Louis Vuitton steaming clothes tried on and quarantining handbags; Christian Dior erected Plexiglas shields at tills
Reuters
Published: 4:30pm, 13 May, 2020
Shoppers, using social distancing, wait in line to enter a Louis Vuitton shop in Paris, France. The French began leaving their homes and apartments for the first time in two months as the country cautiously lifted its lockdown restrictions. Photo: APShoppers, using social distancing, wait in line to enter a Louis Vuitton shop in Paris, France. The French began leaving their homes and apartments for the first time in two months as the country cautiously lifted its lockdown restrictions. Photo: AP
Shoppers, using social distancing, wait in line to enter a Louis Vuitton shop in Paris, France. The French began leaving their homes and apartments for the first time in two months as the country cautiously lifted its lockdown restrictions. Photo: AP
At an Hermes store on one of Paris’s swankiest streets, shop assistants greeted customers through face masks with sanitiser gels and a polite refrain: “May I refresh your hands?”
As France began to exit its strict coronavirus lockdown, many of its luxury brands also opened their doors, giving sanitary protocols a makeover and testing people’s appetite for splurging after a shutdown that has rocked economies worldwide.
At Louis Vuitton’s store on Paris’s grand Place Vendome square, which sells everything from €645 (US$700) cocktail shakers to jewellery worth hundreds of thousands, a few local clients kept business ticking over.
“It’s a friend’s birthday and we’re buying her a wallet,” said Paris resident Hajar. “It’ll be the first time we’ve seen each other in two months.”
At the Hermes shop on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, there was even a semblance of business as usual. A shop assistant discreetly kept count of the number of people milling around at any one time – around 50 at one point in early afternoon, across two floors. And one shopper said she had been told to make an appointment if she wanted to discuss buying a pricey “Kelly” handbag.
“They always make things difficult at Hermes,” said Blessing Williams, a 23-year-old model from Nigeria who lives in Paris. She still came away with a pair of sandals.
But travel restrictions and the resulting dearth of international tourists will remain a major drag for months to come on luxury shopping capitals such as Paris, or Milan, where fashion firms are set to reopen stores on May 18.
Depending on the brand, foreign tourists usually make up between 35 and 55 per cent of luxury labels’ revenue in Europe, according to Jefferies analyst Flavio Cereda.
In Germany, where small stores have been open for three weeks, well-heeled shoppers looking for luxury are still few and far between, suit maker Hugo Boss said last week. The plush changing cabins at Vuitton’s Vendome shop, now regularly disinfected, were a lot less busy than usual, assistants say.
A nearby Chanel store was quieter than before the crisis too, staff say. Hermes boss Axel Dumas, mingling with employees at the Faubourg Saint-Honore shop, declined to comment on how the first few hours of trade had gone.
Despite signs of recovery in China, the industry’s biggest market, global sales of luxury goods are expected to slump by up to 50 per cent this year, the consultancy Bain forecast last week.
For now, brands are focused on easing into new hygiene routines, including making the use of face masks compulsory.
At Vuitton in Paris, owned by the LVMH conglomerate, clothes that are tried on are set aside to be steamed, and handbags are put in a 48-hour quarantine.
Cleaning protocols for other items vary, depending on how close they come to people’s faces or the materials involved. Christian Dior, another LVMH label, and Chanel, a privately owned group, have also erected Plexiglas shields by the tills.
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“The Chiffon Trenches by André Leon Talley: / VIDEO:Everything You Need to Know | E! News
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From the pages of Vogue to the runways of Paris, this deeply revealing memoir by a legendary style icon captures the fashion world from the inside out, in its most glamorous and most cutthroat moments.
“The Chiffon Trenches honestly and candidly captures fifty sublime years of fashion.”—Manolo Blahnik
During André Leon Talley’s first magazine job, alongside Andy Warhol at Interview, a fateful meeting with Karl Lagerfeld began a decades-long friendship with the enigmatic, often caustic designer. Propelled into the upper echelons by his knowledge and adoration of fashion, André moved to Paris as bureau chief of John Fairchild’s Women’s Wear Daily, befriending fashion's most important designers (Halston, Yves Saint Laurent, Oscar de la Renta). But as André made friends, he also made enemies. A racially tinged encounter with a member of the house of Yves Saint Laurent sent him back to New York and into the offices of Vogue under Grace Mirabella.
There, he eventually became creative director, developing an unlikely but intimate friendship with Anna Wintour. As she rose to the top of Vogue’s masthead, André also ascended, and soon became the most influential man in fashion.
The Chiffon Trenches offers a candid look at the who’s who of the last fifty years of fashion. At once ruthless and empathetic, this engaging memoir tells with raw honesty the story of how André not only survived the brutal style landscape but thrived—despite racism, illicit rumors, and all the other challenges of this notoriously cutthroat industry—to become one of the most renowned voices and faces in fashion.
Woven throughout the book are also André’s own personal struggles that have impacted him over the decades, along with intimate stories of those he has turned to for inspiration (Diana Vreeland, Diane von Fürstenberg, Lee Radziwill, to name a few), and of course his Southern roots and ongoing faith, which have guided him since childhood.
The result is a highly compelling read that captures the essence of a world few of us will ever have real access to, but one that we all want to know oh so much more about.
André Leon Talley on Anna Wintour: 'If she asks me to attend her couture fittings after this book, I will be surprised'
In this extract from his explosive new memoir, the former editor-at-large of US Vogue talks frankly about its legendary editor-in-chief
André Leon Talley
Published onSat 23 May 2020 10.00 BST
Vogue started a podcast in 2016 and Anna Wintour announced me as the host. It began with a successful roar and a roster of huge guests: Tom Ford, Kim Kardashian, Marc Jacobs, Alexander Wang. Anna quietly directed the whole thing from her office. She did not approve of all the interviews I wanted to do, like Missy Elliott or Maya Rudolph. We instead stuck to insider fashion. Anna came down and participated if she found my guest interesting enough.
Then, like a morning fog that suddenly lets up, the podcast no longer existed. No explanation or compensation. Just sphinx-like silence from Anna. She decimated me with this silent treatment so many times; it is just the way she resolves any issue.
I knew I mattered in our earlier days together. Today, I would love for Anna to say something human and sincere to me. I have huge psychological scars from my relationship with this towering woman, who can sit by the queen of England, on the front row of a fashion show, in her dark glasses and perfect Louise Brooks clipped coiffure, framing her Mona Lisa mystery face. Who is she? She loves her two children and I am sure she will be the best grandmother. But so many people who have worked for her have suffered huge emotional scarring.
I had suddenly become too old, too overweight and too uncool. I bottled up how hurt I was, as always
In spring of 2018, I realised I hadn’t received any emails from Vogue about my red carpet interviews for the forthcoming Met Gala. For five years, I was assigned to chat to celebrities on livestream video for Vogue; it was something I looked forward to all year. I called and asked what was happening.
“Oh, this is beneath you now,” I was told.
I took the call in my stride, but it was a terrible way to find out. What truly perplexed me was that the previous year, Anna had loved my interviews. She told me they were “great”, which I distinctly remember because she rarely complimented me.
This was clearly a stone-cold business decision. I had suddenly become too old, too overweight and too uncool. After decades of loyalty and friendship, Anna should have had the decency to call or send an email saying, “André, we have had a wonderful run with your interviews, but we are going to try something new.” Simple human kindness. No, she is not capable. I bottled up how hurt I was, as always, but our friendship had just hit a huge iceberg.
My friends told me just to accept it and take my seat at the gala. And I did, in a resplendent bespoke Tom Ford double-faced faille cape and cardinal-like coat with a sash. But for the first time, I didn’t go to Anna’s hotel suite to see her final touches of hair, makeup, shoes and jewels selection. I took my seat like any other guest, at a table with Vera Wang, Zac Posen, John Galliano, Rihanna, Cardi B and Jeremy Scott. A fake smile stretched across my big black lips, my hands clenched in silent disgust. I didn’t want to create a scene, but I couldn’t help but think: This is beneath me, to sit here pretending I am OK with Generalissimo Wintour.
Benny Medina, a major talent agent, interrupted my internal combusting: “Why weren’t you on the steps doing your thing? Jennifer [Lopez] was looking for you; when she didn’t see you, she kept walking.”
“I’m glad to know that,” I said.
Annette de la Renta, a long-time friend, entered, in her black guipure lace-flounced Velázquez evening dress (it was Oscar’s favourite dress he ever made for his wife). On the way to her table, she gave me a warm hug and I felt the love. I realised then that, in all my years of knowing Anna Wintour, we had never shared this feeling.
Anna now treats me as a former employee. Like any ruthless individual, she maintains her sang-froid at all times
I felt suddenly, refreshingly, resolute. I stood up. Vera Wang asked where I was going; I told her the men’s room, but instead I swept and swirled down the back corridors of the Met to my waiting car. On the way home, I swore to myself: I will never attend another Anna Wintour Met Gala for the rest of my life.
You might think I see myself as the victim. I do not. When we began our united trajectories at Vogue, Anna treated me with respect and the concern of a friend. I’ve shared the great moments of her rise to becoming the most powerful woman in fashion. What drives Anna is a sense of her own ability to survive as a powerbroker, with sheer brute force, and to sustain an extraordinary level of success. She has held her position as Vogue’s editor longer than anyone in history, 30 years.
I was never officially let go. I remain on the masthead even now, as a contributing editor, though I rarely go to the office. However, I attend every fitting of Anna’s Met Gala dress, right down to the Manolo Blahniks. Anna considers it her duty to be at her best at the Gala. And, despite my wounded ego and insecurity, I have continued to advise her out of loyalty, no matter if she remains silent. But if she asks me to attend her couture fittings after my book is published, I will be surprised.
Anna now treats me as a former employee. Like any ruthless individual, she maintains her sang-froid at all times. I believe she is immune to anyone other than the powerful and famous people who populate the pages of Vogue. She has mercilessly made her best friends the people highest in their fields: Serena Williams, Roger Federer, Mr and Mrs George Clooney. I am no longer of value to her.
My hope is that she will find a way to apologise before I die, or that if I linger on incapacitated before I pass, she will show up at my bedside, with a hand clasped into mine, and say, “I love you. You have no idea how much you have meant to me.”
Interview
André Leon Talley: 'My story is a fairytale, and in every fairytale there is evil and darkness'
Hadley Freeman
Fashion
As US Vogue’s editor-at-large, he was Anna Wintour’s right-hand man. But then, he reveals in our exclusive interview, he was ‘thrown under the bus’
Hadley Freeman @HadleyFreeman
Sat 23 May 2020 10.00 BST
André Leon Talley – legendary fashion editor, prince of excess – has taken a fair few luxury holidays in his time. First-class flights to Biarritz, private jets, shopping trips to Florence by Concorde. But sometimes he keeps it simple and spends a quiet weekend with his friend, the shoe designer Manolo Blahnik, in Bath “at his residence on the Crescent”.
“Manolo will be in the kitchen cooking his wonderful cuisine, and I’ll be in the larder, lacquering my Louis Vuitton cases with yacht varnish, bringing them to a high shine,” he tells me.
Wait, did he say “yacht varnish”?
“Yes, yacht. Y-A-C-H-T. It’s nothing esoteric. I was inspired by Mrs Vreeland, who told me her suitcases were lacquered in yacht varnish,” he says, referring to the late Diana Vreeland, a former editor of US Vogue and Talley’s first mentor.
Talley has more than 50 pieces of Vuitton hand luggage, currently residing unused in his second home in North Carolina, “because there’s no one at the airports to carry them now”. So he gets through a lot of lacquer, in pursuit of “this refined, dandy lifestyle: it’s not about glamour – it’s self-respect, a standard”. Nor is it about snobbery: “I may have had moments of hauteur. H-A-U-T-E-U-R. But I was never a snob. You can ask [Princess] Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, or [Lady] Amanda Harlech!”
The fashion shows are never short of over-the-top characters, but Talley was always the first to grab everyone’s attention, whatever room he was in. How could he not? He was a 6ft 7in African American in a sweeping kaftan, surrounded by thin white women in cocktail dresses. Next to him would be the thinnest of all, Anna Wintour, his boss at American Vogue.
Talley was her creative director and later editor-at-large, and it was said he was the only person who could tell Wintour if she looked bad in a dress. (“I would never be so rude as to say, ‘You look bad,’” Talley corrects me. “I would say, ‘Oh, who made that?’ and my eyebrows would raise to the ceiling, and there would be a silence.”) While other fashion journalists tend to speak in a tone of elegant boredom, Talley’s voice rang out at every show and party, swinging between a boom and a shriek.
Many people who work in fashion come from a relatively privileged background. When I was 21, I was offered a job at US Vogue, and when I balked at the low salary, I was told, “Most people who work at Vogue have a private income.” Talley did not. Raised by his grandmother, a maid, in Durham, North Carolina, under Jim Crow laws, he could barely afford food when he started as a journalist. For decades he was the only black person on the front row, joined later by the great fashion illustrator and Vanity Fair’s style director Michael Roberts, and the Washington Post’s Robin Givhan, the only fashion writer ever to win a Pulitzer. This gives you an idea of just how talented a person of colour has to be to break into this still extremely white world.
During his four decades at the magazine publishing house Condé Nast, Talley wrote landmark features (including Michelle Obama’s Vogue interview after becoming first lady) and oversaw some of its most extraordinary shoots, including Naomi Campbell as Scarlett O’Hara for Vanity Fair, inverting Gone With The Wind’s racial dynamics. His profiles could be overly chummy – he often interviewed friends – but they were soaked in his outsized personality, and his shoots were joyful. For a long time, he was the most powerful black man in fashion, now overtaken only by Edward Enninful, editor of British Vogue. When Enninful got that job, he wrote to Talley to tell him: “You paved the way.”
Or, as Talley puts it: “I scorched the earth with my talent and I let my light shine.” Now he has written a memoir that blows it all up, like a glorious firecracker shooting into the sky.
***
“This is the Guardian, yes?” he says, pronouncing it the French way (“Gwardian”?). Talley is talking on the phone “from my library/kitchen/laundry room” in his home in a New York suburb. He has a courtly way of speaking, mixing southern good manners with faintly European pronunciations; friends are always referred to as if he were introducing them to an ambassador at a party: “Annette de la Renta and Oscar de la Renta, very close and dear friends of mine” and “the late Lee Radziwill, the sister of Jackie Kennedy, who was one of my greatest friends in my life, and it was not a known fact we were that close”.
“The first thing I want to say about my book is this,” he begins. “This work, my epistle, is about not only my contribution to the world, but how did my presence change that world? And how was my work regarded and disregarded by Anna Wintour? I am 71 years old and I take my story with me wherever I go. The past is always in the present.”
I read his new memoir, The Chiffon Trenches, in one hot weekend, barely able to put it down. The writing is deliciously good and, as a narrator, Talley is both incisive and dizzyingly unreliable, which adds to the fun. A previous memoir, ALT, published in 2003, often felt hamstrung by professional loyalties: “I had to bite my tongue about certain people, for fear of reprisals,” he writes. There is no tongue-biting here. “This is not a bitchy tell-all,” he says, although some may disagree. Karl Lagerfeld, who died last year, was Talley’s close friend for 40 years and showered him with gifts, including $50,000 for his 50th birthday, because that’s how dandies roll. But in the book, he is depicted as brilliant yet monstrous, capriciously dropping close friends for no reason (including, you won’t be surprised to learn, Talley).
“I would never have talked about this while Karl was alive, out of respect for him and fear of his reprisals,” he says.
What would Lagerfeld have done? “He could have decimated my reputation in fashion.” So instead, Talley has decimated his.
Meanwhile pre-publication coverage of the book has focused on Talley’s very personal attack on Wintour, whom he says has inflicted “huge emotional scarring” on many (including, you again won’t be surprised to learn, Talley) and – worse! – “was never really passionate about clothes”, caring only about power. Wintour, more than anyone in the world, can still make or destroy a designer’s career. She is also a celebrity, recognisable to even the most fashion-phobic. Surely Talley anticipated the fuss he would cause?
“I did not anticipate that at all! One of my editors said to me, ‘Do you think Anna Wintour will talk to you after this comes out?’ I said, ‘Yes, of course! Why not?’”
Maybe because you write that she is not capable of “simple human kindness”?
There is the briefest of pauses. “Well, there’s always hope!” he says.
Talley and Wintour fell out in 2018, after he discovered he was no longer doing the red carpet interviews at the annual Met Gala, or those for Vogue’s podcast. He was replaced at the Met Gala by Liza Koshy, a young YouTube star. “What could this talented YouTuber offer? Surely she didn’t know what a martingale back is to a Balenciaga one-seamed coat,” Talley writes.
He believes he was dropped because “I had suddenly become too old, too overweight and too uncool”. Yet other Vogue staffers of his generation – stylist Grace Coddington, writer Hamish Bowles – have resisted dodo status by embracing social media and other shifts in the weather. Talley is on Instagram, but his page largely consists of references to the past: photos of Radziwill, Vreeland, Princess Gloria. The Vogue of the 80s, 90s and early 00s that he describes in his book, when editors expensed their dry cleaning, is like reading about the last days of the Raj. But you don’t get to be the longest-serving editor of Vogue without knowing when something is passé, and Wintour is ruthless: “So much of it has to do with… having talent that’s right for the moment,” she said in an interview last year, referring to the way she casts her staff.
But Talley says he had accepted the world was changing: “If Anna had called and said, ‘André, we’re thinking of going in a different direction [for the Met ball], it’s important for our brand,’ I would have said, ‘Fine. That’s great.’ And I’d have come in my Tom Ford cape – I always wear Tom Ford – and enjoyed my dinner.” But she didn’t; his former confidante had moved on and, he writes, he never “felt the love” from her.
The estrangement was a shock because the pair had been allies since they first met at Vogue in 1983. When she was appointed editor in 1987, Wintour made Talley creative director. He is very funny about the unspoken rules of working with her: no meeting must last more than eight minutes; food is not an essential part of lunch. Once they took a taxi to a restaurant, ordered their meals, and after 20 minutes Wintour announced they were leaving, before the first courses had come out.
“Food is not important to her, so I learned to deal with that,” Talley says. (I can vouch for this: I was once summoned to a “breakfast meeting” with Wintour at the Ritz in London. It lasted precisely 25 minutes and we didn’t even get to coffee.)
But Talley insists his book is “a love letter to Anna Wintour”, in which case I’d hate to see what counts as hate mail. He has, he says, “been wrapped in neglect”, yet the book often suggests the opposite. Over the years, Wintour invited him to her first wedding (and gave him her bouquet); arranged an interest-free loan from Condé Nast, so he could buy his grandmother’s house; hired him back after he briefly left Vogue in the 90s due to a previous, unexplained falling out; invited him to her children’s weddings.
“Yes, and she did the intervention and Condé Nast paid for that,” he says, referring to the many times Wintour packed him off to a health spa and instructed him to lose weight. (He did, but put it straight back on.)
Didn’t he feel bullied when she was constantly telling him he was too fat?
“No! I felt it showed great concern,” he says.
Talley’s weight has been a problem since his grandmother died in 1989, and he binged on foods that reminded him of her. “Beautiful pineapple and coconut cakes, pies, Virginia ham with cloves,” he says, with the same relish as when listing famous friends or describing designer outfits. “I still have that crutch, eating, and it’s an addiction.”
I ask if, in an industry in which the one crime is to be fat, maybe it was also a rebellion against his lunch-averse boss?
“I never thought about that, but I’m sure people were looking at me and thinking, ‘How disgusting!’ She was always sitting next to me, but I wasn’t deliberately making myself bigger next to these small white women in power,” he says.
Things reached a head after Talley stormed out of the 2018 Met ball. “It felt like I was just thrown under the bus. It hurt!” he says now.
But maybe she thinks he dropped her? He was the one who walked out.
He ponders this, briefly. “Well, if that were the case, she could call me to say, ‘André, what’s wrong?’ That’s what I would expect,” he retorts.
Despite all this, Talley’s name still appears on Vogue’s masthead, as a contributing editor. “I hope I’m still part of the Vogue family – I haven’t been officially told I’m not,” he says, horrified at the thought. And he probably is – after all, Wintour gave him the go-ahead to publish this book. She read an early draft and asked only that he remove some private details about her children. She knows being denounced as a she-devil is good for her brand (she turned up to the premiere of The Devil Wears Prada in, yes, Prada). While outsiders have long been transfixed by what Talley calls Wintour’s “sphinx-like looks”, the funniest moments in his book come when we see just how much her staff also bought into the mythology. In perhaps the weirdest scene, Wintour scribbles a thank you note to Talley and he sends it to his framer so he can treasure it for ever. (Alas, the framer failed to appreciate its significance and chucked it away, much to Talley’s fury.)
Isn’t it unusual to frame a casual note from someone you’ve worked with for decades, I ask.
“It was not an original idea! [US Vogue fashion editor] Tonne Goodman had a letter from Anna framed,” Talley says.
I suddenly feel rather sorry for Wintour, trying to get on with her job but surrounded by people frantically framing every Post-it she discards.
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Talley’s book tells the story of his life, which is often the story of the women who have supported him: his grandmother, Vreeland, Annette de la Renta, Carolina Herrera, Radziwill and, most of all, Wintour.
I tell him it sounds as if he spent his life looking for mother figures; maybe he forgot that Wintour was his boss, not his mother.
“I have always looked for mother and father figures. I had to look up to something to go forward,” he says.
A day later, he sends an email to clarify: “My mother figure to this day is my grandmother. She gave me unconditional love and her home, her values, were my arc of safety.”
Talley was raised by his grandmother, Bennie Frances Davis, while his parents worked in a different state. As a child, he was bullied by other kids, but adored by Bennie, although he says she hugged him only twice in his childhood (“too busy”). Yet she unblinkingly supported this little boy whose idea of a perfect day was to watch Julia Child cook on TV, then wallpaper his room with pages torn from Vogue.
His mother was a different matter: “She never abandoned me, but she didn’t understand me.” She could be cruel and would mock his experiments with fashion, which became analogous with escape.
“Every Sunday I would walk across the railroad tracks into the affluent part of Durham and buy Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and go back to my grandmother’s house, read my magazines. I was allowed to retreat from the bullying and the sexual abuse into a beautiful world,” he says.
Talley never told anyone he was sexually abused as a child – not the therapists he has seen, not even his beloved pastor. But he felt, with this book, that it was time to explain himself.
“It began when I was nine years of age, and it was serial. My whole life has been determined by this trauma. I can say this now,” he says.
His first abuser was a man who lived on his street, who would tell him, “This is our secret game.” Later, there were older brothers of friends. He didn’t tell his grandmother because “it wasn’t something that could be discussed at the dinner table. And I was afraid I might be considered the perpetrator and sent away to detention.”
Because of the abuse, Talley says he has never really had an intimate relationship. In the late 70s, he writes, he attempted to go to bed with a French journalist: “It was hopeless, useless. This idea of mounting an individual and causing what I had only known as deep discomfort... He gave up and we got dressed.” He has, he says, had romances with men and women as an adult. “But I’ve not had them successfully. I don’t know how to be intimate and in a relationship, and I regret that. It comes from this childhood trauma.”
As a young man in New York, he fled from gay bars, horrified at the overt sexuality and preferring instead the chaste fun of dancing with Diana Ross at Studio 54. Instead of looking for sexual connection, he would look for approval from people he admired. And if he felt any emotional lack, he “filled my life with luxury and the pursuit of education”.
Talley studied at North Carolina Central University, then, on a scholarship to the prestigious Brown University, got a master’s in French Literature. He is still rightly proud of this, taking care to mention that he has “better degrees than Anna Wintour”. It was at Brown that he first met people connected to fashion, and after graduating was taken under Vreeland’s wing in New York. From that point, it was a dizzying upward rise: working with Andy Warhol at Interview magazine, reporting from Paris for Women’s Wear Daily and then, at last, Vogue.
I never thought about being a man of colour in my career until recently. Now this is always in my mind
He felt “at home” in this over-the-top world, where “there were no victims, only high octane egos”. Any insecurities could be hidden beneath another custom-made suit. During his first eight months in Paris, every time he got his weekly paycheck, he marched straight to the Vuitton store and bought another suitcase. Surround yourself with enough beauty and you’ll no longer think about ugliness – that’s the theory, anyway. Talley instantly fell in love with the fashion set, with their clearly defined rules: you go to these nightclubs, talk about those subjects, use this lacquer on your suitcases.
He didn’t think about being a black man in the white world of fashion: “I earned my position not because I was a beautiful, skinny – you can look at the pictures – articulate black man. But because I had done my homework and my degrees. I never thought about being a man of colour in my career until recently.”
Others were more conscious of it. In the book Talley reflects that, in the 70s, one fashion PR referred to him as “Queen Kong”. Around that same time, a colleague accused him of being what he describes as “a black buck” and sleeping with every designer in Paris, in order to humiliate him out of his job. It worked, and Talley, mortified and furious, returned to New York. These days, he says he feels a different responsibility as a man of colour: “I’m a descendant of enslaved people, and this is always in my mind. Whatever I articulate must in some way reflect who I am as a black man and what I can impart to the history of fashion, as this black person who was able to be in the front row.”
Since he’s taken a step back, he says, his eyes have been opened to who his real friends are. Some – Ford, Herrera – have stayed true. Others have not. “I do think I’ve been dropped by Miuccia Prada. That is a big surprise. I have eight crocodile coats custom-made for me by her, but she has not kept in touch. And that hurts me.”
Talley is not the first person to have confused possessions with love, or a career with life. “I don’t need any more stuff, I have too much in my houses,” he says, then lists his favourite stuff, including photos of himself with Oprah Winfrey, a Warhol silkscreen of Vreeland, “Truman Capote’s sofa”. He couldn’t afford more stuff now anyway; instead of being chauffeured everywhere as he was in his pomp, a friend called Chad gives him lifts to the supermarket.
For Talley, elegance is what he learned from Vreeland and the beloved matriarchs of his past, but fashion is about being heartlessly modern. He says he doesn’t miss the status he had in his heyday, but rather “the human fellowship of being on the front row”. But the front row is a powerful signifier of status: being there means you are one of the most important people in fashion, and this kind of validation still matters to him. To show love to his “dear friends”, Talley includes them in his list of best-dressed people. Wintour comes in at number one – but only when wearing Chanel haute couture.
Talley and I have been talking for two hours and I would be happy to talk for 10 more. Fashion will be a blander place if it no longer has space for characters like him; the expense accounts will probably be smaller, but it will be a less exciting world. Despite his obsession with luxury and the fashion industry, Talley remains interested in everything. Non-fashion topics we touch on include the career of Barbara Stanwyck, the songs of Nina Simone, Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk, Anne Glenconner’s bestselling memoir, Lady In Waiting (“Exceptional: I come from the opposite spectrum of the world, but I compare my life to hers, the gilded cage and the reality”). Does he ever think he would have been happier had he stayed in North Carolina and worked as a teacher, as Vreeland once worried he’d do?
“Never. NEVER!” he gasps. “My story is a fairytale of excess, and in every fairytale there is evil and darkness, but you overcome it with light. I want every person I come across – the stranger on the street, the church member in the pew next to me – to feel love. I have not been privy to love in my life, but I want them to feel that they have received some love from engaging with me, André Leon Talley.”
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HISTORY OF THE LOAFER
HISTORY OF THE PENNY LOAFER DESIGN
Did you know the style dates back to Norway in the early 1930s?
After learning his shoemaking skills in America, Norwegian Nils Gregoriusson Tveranger designed a new slip-on shoe. Called the Aurland moccasin is was also knows as the Aurland shoe.
Nils Gregoriussen Tveranger
Taking inspiration from the moccasin shoes worn by native Indians in North America, and the simple slip-ons on the feet of Norwegian fishermen, the first design was born.
Popularity grew and export orders were sent across Europe and America. Esquire magazine even featured an article with photographs of Norwegian farmers wearing the shoe in cattle loafing sheds.
Soon after, the Spaulding family of New Hampshire, USA, began manufacturing a similar shoe, called The Loafer. This name later became a generic term used to describe a slip-on, moccasin shoe.
In 1934, G. H. Bass made his first version of the loafer which he called Weejuns. This appears to be a play on words on the origin of the original designer - Norwegian. A distinctive feature of this new design was a strip of leather stitched across the saddle of the shoe, featuring a shaped cutout.
In 1950s America before trainers were invented, the Weejun became the shoe of choice for young men and students. It became fashionable to keep a dime in the half moon cut out slot of the leather strip. This eventually gave the shoes their colloquial name of Penny Loafer, which is still used today.
A bespoke shoe company based in London that was established in 1847 developed the first loafer as a country house shoe for the landed gentry and the royal family. The "Wildsmith Loafer" made by Raymond Lewis Wildsmith of Wildsmith Shoes, was designed for King George VI as a casual house shoe. The shoe has subsequently been marketed and sold by other London shoe firms and dubbed "the Harrow".
Shoemaker Nils Gregoriusson Tveranger (1874–1953) in Aurland, Norway, introduced his first design around 1908. Tveranger obtained protection for the design. N. Tveranger obtained a diploma at the Bergen exhibition in 1910 for his "Aurland shoe".The first Aurland shoes were also made with laces and a decorative upper side similar to the brogue shoe. Colors were initially natural until approximately 1960 when they were also painted black. At age 13 Tveranger went to North America where he learned the craft of shoemaking and returned to Norway age 20. Around 1930, Tveranger introduced a new design called the "Aurland moccasin", later renamed the "Aurland shoe". This design resembles the moccasins used by the Iroquois as well as the design of moccasin-like shoes traditionally worn by locals in Aurland. These traditional shoes resembled slippers and were useful outdoor in fine weather. In 1936 the local shoe handcraft in Aurland was described as a "very old industry" and shoes were sold in large numbers to foreign visitors.[A 1953 catalogue listed about 10 shoe factories in the small village of Aurland.When exported the USA the Aurland shoes were called "Norwegian Moccasins". The Norwegians began exporting them to the rest of Europe, where they were taken up by visiting Americans, and championed by the American Esquire magazine. Some photographs included with the Esquire feature were of Norwegian farmers in a cattle loafing area.The Spaulding family in New Hampshire started making shoes based on this design in the early 1930s, naming them loafers, a general term for slip-on shoes which is still in use in America. In 1934, G.H. Bass (a bootmaker in Wilton, Maine) started making loafers under the name Weejuns (sounding like Norwegians).The distinctive addition was a strip of leather across the saddle with a diamond cut-out. Initially only worn in the summer at home, the shoe grew in popularity in America to become a significant part of men's casual shoe wardrobe; in Europe the style has never reached the same degree of ubiquity.
The term penny loafer has uncertain beginnings. One explanation is when American prep school students in the 1950s, wishing to make a fashion statement, took to inserting a penny into the diamond-shaped slit on their Weejuns. Another theory is that two pennies could be slipped into the slit, enough money to make an emergency phone call in the 1930s. This, however, is an urban legend, as pay phone calls in the USA have never been less than five cents, nor have the pay phones ever accepted pennies. Either way, the name penny loafer came to be applied to this style of slip-on and has since stuck. The practice continues, especially among those who remain committed to a classic and refined but still scholarly appearance, such as lawyers.
In the mid-1950s, further continental influences brought a more elegant image to light, lower-cut slip-ons, which moved from purely casual use to being paired with suits in the 1960s (but still only in America). In 1966, Italian designer Gucci made the further step of adding a metal strap across the front in the shape of a horse's snaffle bit. These Gucci loafers (now a general term referring to shoes of this style by any manufacturer) also spread over the Atlantic and were worn by 1970s businessmen, becoming almost a Wall Street uniform, reaching widespread use by the 1980s.
At the start of the twenty-first century, a revival of penny loafers, whose popularity had peaked during the mid to late 1960s and again during the early 1980s to early 1990s,[citation needed] occurred, with the shoe appearing in a more rugged version, closer to the original concept, as either moccasins, or espadrilles, both of these styles being very low or flat without heels. This resurgence was most noticeable at college campuses across America.
Another variation on the basic style is the tassel loafer, which emerged in the 1950s. Again, though casual, their gradual acceptance among the American East Coast prep school culture as equivalent to brogues (wingtips), has led to them being worn there with suits, where they gained an association with business and legal classes.
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