↧
Space Age-Futurism Fashion (Mort Garson 60's)
↧
Andre Courreges timeline
↧
↧
The peculiar "Space Fashion" of the 60's ... From Couture to "Camp" ... From Courrèges to BARBARELLA ... and the "Space/Sport pyjamas" of STAR TREK ...
André Courrèges
'Where do his tennis dresses, his sailor dresses come from? Where did he find them? On the steps of Delphi. In the wardrobe of Electra. They are modern and they are antique.'
Violette Leduc 'Is Courrèges Wearable?' Vogue, 1965.
André Courrèges (born 1923) graduated in engineering before studying fashion and textile design. He worked for Balenciaga for ten years, which allowed him to develop great skill in cutting garments. In 1961 he established his own fashion house and began to develop a different look.
His Spring collection of 1964 showed radically different clothes. These designs included angular mini dresses and trouser suits. The look was created by using heavyweight fabrics like gabardine. Many of the outfits had cut-out midriffs and backs and were worn without a bra. These were matched with flat boots, goggles and helmets taken from the equipment worn by astronauts. The stark shapes and white and silver colour scheme immediately earned the name Space Age.
Courrèges' fashion shows were organised by his wife. These were lively presentations featuring athletic, partially nude models. Courrèges became interested in shorter skirts at the same time as Mary Quant was designing them and there has been some controversy over who 'invented' the miniskirt. He also promoted trousers for women. At the time, these were worn only on
informal occasions, but Courrèges introduced slim, tapering trousers for everyday and smart wear.
Courrèges wanted to produce affordable clothes. From 1965 he spent two years raising funds to make his clothing more accessible. However, his next collection was criticised for reproducing the same styles. Like the majority of big name couturiers, Courrèges now sells accessories, luggage and perfume in addition to his clothing ranges.
Andre Courreges
André Courrèges, the designer that created an ultra-modern style, forerunner of the space-age image of the Sixties
by Letizia Annamaria Dabramo / http://www.vogue.it/en/encyclo/designers/c/andre-courreges
Besides him, Pierre Cardin, Paco Rabanne, Emanuel Ungaro and Emilio Pucci were the great designers of the '60s, a decade crossed by lunar influences, a fascination with aliens and geometric revolutions. Some have defined Courrèges' creations "car-like", given the idea of momentum and sprint that they knew how to exude, and it is no coincidence, then, that his collections were particularly loved by Gianni Agnelli and his wife, the proud and elegant Marella . A pupil of Cristobal Balenciaga, he was able to outline his own style, leading women's fashion until the '70s. He is considered, in fact, the probable inventor of the miniskirt as a cult, whose paternity, to date, is still debated between Mary Quant and Courrèges himself.
The cuts of the French designer, basic and clean, aroused criticism from those who saw in this ultra-modern design a debasement of the female figure: the lines did not adapt to the sinuous shapes of the body, nor did they exalt its grace. Yet his designs had the ability to rejuvenate the shape of the woman, freeing her from overly structured bras and clothing. His style was openly inspired by the "Bright Side of the Moon", enhanced by innovations such as the go-go boots: boots with low heels, versatile, comfortable and able to slim legs. 1964 is the year of the "Moon Girl Collection" followed, in the following years, "Future Couture", "Hyperbole" and "Prototype". From that moment on, the Andre Courrèges items embody the myth of the future and the conquest of space: stylized stars and moons appear wherever. The use of the materials soon became refined and avant-garde, the crochet is inserted on delicate transparencies, the ethereal is contaminated by modernity, portholes appear on the little dresses. Even fashion shows bring a burst of innovation: no longer the usual catwalk set up in the studio for a selected, elite audience, but modern movies shot in the symbolic places of Paris, or innovative scenarios, stolen from films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick. All characterized by essential colors, bright nuances and lively new hues that leave all breathless. Courrèges' mannequins came out of the closet and assume plastics positions, putting a cat-like walks and provokative moves aside.
A special mention is also due to his "Lunettes Eskimo", launched in 1965: sunglasses with huge lenses that had a crack, almost like a slightly open lid. In the same year another event marked the career of Courrèges, adding another success to the ones collected by the designer and confirming, simultaneously, his reputation as a rising star, like Françoise Hardy. The singer, in fact, was in charge of co-hosting the program "Dim Dam Dom" - an acronym for des Dim(anches), de Dam(es), et D(h)om(mes) - and the couturier designs for her a simple yet innovative outfit in two colors: black and white. It is 1967 when, along with numerous designers of the time, Courrèges designed the versatile wardrobe for Audrey Hepburn in "Two for the Road", in which outfits in PVC, rugby-inspired dresses, accessories inspired by sport and important metal inlays reveal unpublished images of the queen of bon-ton. In 1972, for the Olympic Games in Monaco, the designer creates the 15,000 uniforms for a sports competition destined to be remembered for great victories and sanguinary chronicles. The Andre Courrèges woman is a charming creature with an iridescent appearance: austere as a crusader, graceful rider of the future, or provocative in skimpy metallic gladiator outfits, and even after forty years this woman remains very current, and always fascinating.
The men's uniforms in Star Trek Into Darkness' are reminiscent of moisture-wicking sportswear.
How sci-fi fashion has changed
Costume designers can only speculate on what coming intergalactic fashions will look like, but as Star Trek and After Earth demonstrate, the future is nearly always skintight
Posted by
Barbara Brownie
Friday 9 August 2013 / http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/costume-and-culture/2013/aug/09/how-sci-fi-fashion-changed
Recent sci-fi, such as JJ Abrams' Star Trek Into Darkness and After Earth (Shyamalan, 2013), are reminders of how film and TV so often depict future fashion as skimpy or skintight. The uniforms in Abrams' Star Trek revival have progressed from previous versions, but retain the hallmarks of the originals. The men's uniforms have a mesh outer layer, reminiscent of moisture-wicking sportswear. The female uniforms are more precise replicas of the originals, with miniskirts and knee-high boots. In After Earth, the stranded father and son are costumed in something reminiscent of an armoured wetsuit. These films are following a tradition established by films such as Logan's Run (1976), Buck Rogers (1979-1981) and Tron (1982), in which costume left little to the imagination.
Historically, fashion has tended towards being increasingly revealing. It has become progressively more acceptable to wear ever more form-fitting garments and to expose the skin. It therefore seems likely that sci-fi costumes such as these reflect the logical progression of fashion.
In science fiction, the costume designers can only speculate as to what the fashions of the future may be. In hindsight, many of these prove inaccurate. The "futuristic" visions of some 60s and 70s sci-fi now have a retro feel. The minidresses that have survived Star Trek reboots are a homage to the 60s – the decade of the original series. Costumes such as those worn by Jane Fonda in Barbarella (1969) featured fabrics that were perceived as futuristic at the time, including metallic fibres and plastics. When these materials were incorporated into fashion by designers including Mary Quant and Paco Rabanne, they represented the height of fabric technology. Perhaps as a result of this enthusiastic adoption by the fashion world, they have become more closely associated with the 60s and the space-race aesthetic than with the future.
Science-fiction films tend to fall into two categories. First, there are those that imagine the progression of society towards a brighter, technologically enabled future. Second, there are dystopian societies that have regressed to resemble a historical era. Sci-fi costume can be divided into the same two categories. It imagines a possible future that has progressed forward, following established rules of fashion evolution (as in Star Trek), or a vision that resembles a western or Victorian period drama (as in Joss Whedon's Serenity, 2005).
Both of these approaches are fair. Fashion is cyclical. It relies on revival and bricolage. It is therefore likely that, regardless of how technologically advanced we become, our clothes will directly appropriate from what has come before. In order to move forward, fashion reframes the past. Historical references are also useful in connoting social, political and cultural aspects of these imagined futures. The Nazi-like uniforms of Starship Troopers (1997), for example, help to establish the sense of a military dictatorship.
Though fashion tends to be cyclical, new technology creates exceptions. It allows clothes that have never existed before. Some of the most influential trends of the last 100 years of fashion have been inspired by new science. Access to new fabrics, such as PVC, allowed Quant to rebel against tradition. Arguably, it was social change (sexual liberation) that led to the adoption of skintight jeans and leggings, but this could never have happened without the introduction of lycra [1]. Similarly, no pre-existing moments in the fashion cycle would have enabled us to predict CuteCircuit's Twitter dress.
Science is also transforming the way we create clothes. Clothes have historically been produced by sewing flat shapes of fabric together, thereby transforming multiple flat shapes into a three-dimensional shape. New technologies are beginning to make sewing obsolete. Issey Miyake has established a research institute in Toyko with the aim of exploring new possibilities in fabric and garment creation. This research has yielded new bonding methods that may change our approach to garment manufacture. As in A-POC (a complete outfit that is manufactured at once, from a tube of fabric), the acts of weaving fabric and sewing pieces together are no longer separate processes. The weaving of the fabric and the bonding of the layers can be a single automatic process. There is no sewing, and therefore no seams.
A collaboration between Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art resulted in the invention of Fabrican, a spray-on fabric. Fabrican canisters contain wet fibres that may be sprayed directly on to the surface of the body. As the fibres dry, they bond, forming a single piece of flexible, shaped fabric [2]. Spray-on fabric has the potential to revolutionise the fashion industry. As it is sprayed directly on to the body, it removes the issue of sizing from the dressmaking process. It also changes the way that garments may be repaired. In order to fix a rip or tear, more fabric may be sprayed to invisibly seal the hole.
Fabrican is like a second skin: tight-fitting and seam-free [3]. This gives credence to the theory that skintight garments may become more common, and provides further evidence that future fashion is likely to be seam-free. As in the reinvented Man of Steel (2013) costume, and wetsuits in Star Trek Into Darkness, clothes may be moulded to fit our bodies perfectly.
Another factor to consider is that many of these costumes are uniforms. Uniform tends to fall outside of the usual fashion cycle. It is fixed, rather than modal. Uniforms tend to remain largely unchanged for many decades, and are therefore likely to be at least partly historical in design [4]. It is possible that the uniforms of the future would be very similar to those worn today, and would follow the same signifying systems for rank and situation.
BARBARELLA Costume designs are credited to Paco Rabane, though most were created by Jacques Fonteray, all influenced by Jean Claude Forest.
↧
Air France's love affair with designers - Air France : une histoire avec les grands couturiers.
At the crossroads of two different worlds which both evoke dreams, air travel and fashion, the Air France uniform is worn by 30,000 staff members in direct contact with our customers.
For the past 6 years, cabin crew, ground staff and pilots have been wearing the elegant uniform designed for Air France by Christian Lacroix.
Dior, Balanciaga, Patou and Nina Ricci are some of the other top fashion designers who have stamped their prestigious mark on the Air France uniform.
A la croisée de deux mondes fortement associés au rêve, celui de l'aérien et celui de la mode, l'uniforme d'Air France habille les 30.000 personnels de la Compagnie en contact direct avec la clientèle.
Depuis 6 ans, hôtesses, stewards, agents commerciaux et pilotes portent avec élégance l'uniforme créé par Christian Lacroix pour Air France.
Dior, Balanciaga, Patou ou Nina Ricci font également partie des grands créateurs de mode qui ont associé leur griffe prestigieuse à l'uniforme de la compagnie.
↧
Airline fashion. Couture and Airline uniforms ...
Airline fashion: key moments of style in the skies
From stewardesses' designer uniforms to Air Jamaica's in-flight fashion shows, we look at the moments that have defined style in the skies.
By Mark C.O'Flaherty7:00AM GMT 25 Jan 2013 / http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/ultratravel/9797134/Airline-fashion-key-moments-of-style-in-the-skies.html
There was a time when flying was more about choosing which shoes to wear for boarding, and less about the eye-rolling inconvenience of taking them off at security. People dressed-up to travel – and the airlines reciprocated. The days of BOAC glamour and passengers dining at tables of four are long gone. Today’s airlines struggle with profit margins. Nevertheless, appearances must be kept up and – budget airlines and their rural airports aside – air travel continues to be marketed as a luxury, particularly to passengers in the nose of the plane. Consider the now iconic, richly patterned 1972 Pierre Balmain-designed “Singapore Girl” outfit, the Stephen Jones hats and Julian MacDonald navy tailoring of British Airways, or the fabulous mid-century modern Marimekko prints that have recently appeared on tableware (and on the sides of planes) at Finnair. Design defines an airline and airline design defines an era. We take a look at key moments of high style, old and new.
The Concorde era
Hardy Amies designed the crew’s uniforms, but it may be frequent flier Joan Collins who embodies the Concorde era (1976–2003) best. The fashion pack hopped on the service between Paris, London and New York as if it were a super fast taxi: a young Kate Moss could fit in extra modelling jobs while the late Stephen Sprouse, whose graphics are immortalised all over leopard- and graffiti-print Vuitton, once panicked when the Concorde hit turbulence and quickly scrawled his name on his arm, in his distinctive tag-style, so that his body could be identified if the worst happened.
The new smart casual look
In 2013, there are less Aunt Sally rouged cheeks, pelmets and high heels in the aisles, and more modern, relaxed looks. Cabin crew at Virgin America took receipt of a whole new wardrobe from the ultimate Casual Friday brand Banana Republic last August. Men’s shirts are slim fitting and short-sleeved, there are touches of Spandex, and the women’s trenches are the epitome of High Street chic. Over in Australasia, the new (weekend) uniforms at low-budget airline AirAsia combine red and white short-sleeved shirts, reminiscent of Formula One gear, with blue jeans.
Designer amenity kits
Avant-garde Dutch designers Viktor & Rolf currently put their name to the kits given to passengers who turn left on boarding KLM flights, while Qantas have started giving their Business class customers amenity bags designed by hip New York labels Kate Spade and Jack Spade. Regular British Airways passengers who travel in First will have amassed quite a collection of different Anya Hindmarch wash-bags.
Cabin as catwalk
Chanel spent a not-so-small fortune to recreate the inside of a jumbo jet for its couture show last January. Glasses of champagne were handed out by “stewards” from a trolley that made its way down the aisle, while models with mohawks emerged from the “emergency exit” in Lagerfeld’s latest. From the 1970s through to the 1990s, Air Jamaica did it for real – cabin crew turned into models mid-flight and paraded the aisles wearing new season Caribbean labels. Back in 2008 Air New Zealand hosted a mid-flight catwalk show on the Sydney to Auckland route, with designs by Karen Walker and Trelise Cooper. Model agency Elite had a show on an Air Asia flight from Bangkok to Phuket last year with 25 aspiring Thai models, competing in the Elite Model Look Thailand 2012 competition.
Gianfranco Ferré’s Korean Air scarf
This is the Kelly bag of the crew wardrobe – the most coveted, alluring accessory in the sky for trainee cabin staff. Designed by Gianfranco Ferré in 2005 as part of an off-white and duck-egg blue outfit, with an above-the-knee skirt hem length, the scarf is stiff, tied snugly, with one end styled to take flight away from the neck, as if on a wire. If this scarf were an airport, it would be Eero Saarinen’s 1960s sci-fi TWA terminal in New York.
The coolest airline of all time, bar none. This is the company that commissioned kinetic artist Alexander Calder to paint the outside of two of its planes, and whose TV commercials featured Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali. Braniff really made a name for itself by dressing its cabin crew in magenta, lime, lemon, and frequently psychedelic Pucci, from colour-blocked frocks with space helmets in 1965 to hot pants in the early 1970s. As Warhol said, to camera, in his advert: “When you got it, flaunt it!”
Air Force One and Michelle Obama
Every time the First Lady lands, it’s a photo opportunity that unfolds across countless fashion blog posts. “She’s wearing her favourite Alaïa belt!” “Oooh! Shorts!” In 2009, she arrived in Moscow, in salmon-pink Narciso Rodriguez, with her husband and children, who were wearing head to toe J Crew. The company seized on the opportunity and released a press release: "The Obama Girls Bring Some American Style to Moscow." They detailed each item, right down to the price. In case you’re wondering, Malia wore a buff-coloured, silk taffeta trench ($298) and black, satin ballet flats with contrast trim ($98).
Christian Lacroix’s new collection
Although the Paris couturier was forced to close his atelier due to financial disaster, he still dresses Air France cabin crew and First Class customers (who get Lacroix pyjamas). He’s also designed the new suits which CityJet staff began wearing in December – sober, chic, navy tailoring with taupe and red accents.
New dress codes
Everyone’s had the misfortune of flying next to someone who thinks that not-so-fresh-from-the-beach shorts and bare feet are okay attire for the air. Last June a passenger attempting to board a Southwest Airlines flight from Las Vegas to New York was given a stern lecture by staff for wearing a top that showed “too much cleavage”. In 2011, Green Day singer Billie Joe Armstrong was removed from a plane en route to Burbank for refusing to pull up his sagging trousers. Lucky Billie: a few months earlier a passenger had been arrested on a US Airways flight for the same thing. Police at the scene reported that his trousers were “below his buttocks but above his knees, and … much of his boxer shorts were exposed.”
Virgin Atlantic’s ruby slippers
It’s simple, memorable branding: British Airways is blue and Virgin Atlantic – which has also cornered the market in Swarovski crystal cabin decoration – is red. In 2011 Virgin issued female crew with vibrant, patent, ruby-coloured heels to go with their scarlet John Rocha suits – staff could choose from the “Dotty” (with a two inch heel) or the more daring “Dorothy” (three inches). For added chic (or indeed camp value), each comes in a yellow “brick” box.
Balenciaga for Oman Air
The turquoise-and-gold-trimmed pillbox hats are a strong statement, but it was Oman Air’s choice of Balenciaga for its uniforms in 2009 – when Nicolas Ghesquière was still at the helm of the legendary house – that puts it in a different league in the eyes of the cutting-edge cognoscenti. Oman Air won Best Business Class Airline Seat at the World Airline Awards in 2012 and gives their premium class customers products by Amouage, the Arabian perfumery that creates some of the most expensive fragrances in the world. This is an airline with a haute ticket.
![]()
![]()
↧
↧
Phil Haas's "Four Seasons" at the New York Botanical Garden
↧
Philip Haas.
Philip Haas (born 1954) is an American artist, screenwriter and filmmaker, perhaps best known for his 2012 sculpture exhibition "The Four Seasons" and his 1995 film Angels and Insects.
He began his career as a documentary film maker, directing ten profiles of unusual artists through early 1990s with the theme "Magicians of the Earth," commissioned by the Centre Georges Pompidou.
His feature films include Angels and Insects, set in Victorian England, which was nominated for an Academy Award and the Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or, Up at the Villa, an adaptation of the W. Somerset Maugham novella, starring Sean Penn, Anne Bancroft and Kristin Scott Thomas, The Situation, a political thriller set in Iraq, released in 2006, and the highly-regarded The Music of Chance (1993).
In 2008, the Sonnabend Gallery of New York featured a film installation called The Butcher's Shop, commissioned by the Kimbell Art Museum, in which Haas recreated the space depicted in Annibale Carracci’s 1582 painting of the same name. In 2010, he expanded this series to include works by Ensor and Tiepolo. His exhibition of film installations at the Kimbell Art Museum, "Butchers, Dragons, Gods and Skeletons," was listed by TIME magazine as one of the top ten museum shows of 2009
Retrospectives of his art films have been held at the Tate Gallery in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Lincoln Center in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for this body of work. He has taught in the Visual Arts Program at Princeton University. In 2008 and 2010, he had one-man shows of paintings and film installations at the Sonnabend Gallery. in New York City. Haas's monumental fiberglass sculpture Winter (after Arcimboldo) was unveiled in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in September, 2010, before traveling in 2011 to the Piazza del Duomo in Milan and the Garden of Versailles. In 2012, in a spectacular transformation that is typical of his work, Haas created a group of large-scale, fifteen-foot-high, fibre-glass sculptures, inspired by Giuseppe Arcimboldo's Renaissance paintings of the four seasons, comprising Spring, Summer, Autumn, and including Winter. The colossal size of Haas's sculpture accentuates the visual puzzle of natural forms—flowers, ivy, moss, fungi, vegetables, fruit, trees, bark, branches, twigs, leaves—as they are recycled to form four human portraits, each representing an individual season. The result is at once earthy, fanciful and exuberant—a commentary on Arcimboldo's style and a work of art in its own right. These sculptures were first seen in the garden of the Dulwich Picture Gallery in the United Kingdom in the summer of 2012, before embarking on a three-year tour of American museums and botanical gardens.
The New York Botanical Garden exhibits Philip Haas's monumental sculpture series Four Seasons
Internationally-renowned contemporary artist Philip Haas is the subject of a one person show, titled Four Seasons, at The New York Botanical Garden May 18–October 27, 2013. Haas’s work is distinguished by meticulously rendered tableaux seeking to illuminate the source of creativity, often through contemporary interpretations of masterworks from the history of art. In Four Seasons, Haas has created four monumental, 15-foot-tall, portrait busts that reference each of the seasons and are displayed in the round. In the artist’s exploration of the past, reinterpreted in the present, Haas references classical Italian Renaissance portraiture, with roots in the celebrated Four Seasons series created by Renaissance master Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Haas gives viewers a fresh perspective on the classical form by blowing up the scale to colossal proportions. What has formerly been a two-dimensional experience—the painted portrait—is given new context through this series as viewers are able to walk around the sculptures, to see the subjects from all sides, rather than simply in profile as with a painting. Further, as in Arcimboldo’s work from the 1500s, flesh, hair, and human features have been replaced with organic material native to each season. In Winter, for example, the skin of the subject is represented through oversized forms of bark and hair by gnarled tree limbs and ivy. Spring features a riot of flower forms in bright hues arranged to represent a human portrait. The placement of the four sculptures within the symmetrical courtyard of the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory has the busts facing one another in a square configuration, creating a dialog between not only the four “subjects,” but also the viewer who can walk around and in between the works, creating an involving and personal experience. Haas comments, “Whether I’m working in painting, sculpture, or film, what fascinates me is the idea of transformation. Through the Four Seasons, I am re-contextualizing the world of classical Renaissance portraiture using the transformative elements of scale, material, and dimensionality, thereby altering the viewer’s perspective.” The New York Botanical Garden Chief Executive Officer and The William C. Steere Sr. President Gregory Long states, “We are thrilled to present Philip Haas’s remarkable Four Seasons here at The New York Botanical Garden. This body of work is ideal for the garden as it speaks to the present, while reflecting on the past. The contemporary forms rooted in the history of art will resonate not only with our core audience but also those passionate about contemporary art.” Haas, in marrying sculpture, painting, film, and architecture, has created a contemporary visual vocabulary all his own. He describes his process as “sculpting by thinking.” Haas’s groundbreaking artwork has been featured by museums including the National Gallery of Art (Washington DC), the Kimbell Art Museum (Fort Worth, Texas), Dulwich Picture Gallery (United Kingdom), and Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris). In the public realm, his work has been exhibited in the Piazza del Duomo (Milan) and the Gardens of Versailles (France). He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as other awards. He has taught in the visual arts and creative writing programs at Princeton University. He lives and works in New York and London.
Philip Haas at Dulwich Picture Gallery: Seasonal vegetables and the sculpture renaissance
Sarah Crompton finds Philip Haas's installations at Dulwich Picture Gallery peculiar and impressive.
By Sarah Crompton 02 Jul 2012 / http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-news/9365749/Philip-Haas-at-Dulwich-Picture-Gallery-Seasonal-vegetables-and-the-sculpture-renaissance.html
As storms lashed the North of the country while London sweltered in a heatwave, it seemed a good moment to pop into the Dulwich Picture Gallery and take a look at four bizarre sculptures that have appeared in its grounds.
The American artist Philip Haas has taken it upon himself to make a quartet of towering, painted, fibreglass sculptures inspired by Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s Renaissance paintings of the four seasons, built from the pieces of fruit, flora and fauna that are appropriate to the time of year.
So Summer is all bright colours and healthy leaves; he has a rose for his chin and cheeks, and a garland of flowers in his hair. Winter shows his colours with locks of tumbling ivy, a crown of ragged branches and moss on his chin. Spring, on the other hand, features an artichoke for a buttonhole, and corn pokes out from his collar; with his marrow of a nose and aubergines hanging from his hair, he looks a bit like a sculptural dish of primavera pasta. Autumn is distinguished by caterpillars for eyebrows and blackberries for the pupils of his eyes.
At least I think that is right. Arcimboldo, and Haas in turn, seem to me to use a fair amount of artistic licence with their fruit and veg, which introduced an element of seasonal confusion in my mind: until I spotted the blackberries, I thought Autumn was Spring.
The whole thing is both peculiar and impressive to fall across in the garden of this elegant south London gallery. It seems to be part of a trend for putting big sculptures in public places. I don’t always like the work – Elmgreen and Dragset’s Boy on a Rocking Horse makes me shudder every time I walk through Trafalgar Square – but I do applaud the impulse to liven up our cities by putting it there.
↧
Just Love it ...
↧
The Newport Mansions
↧
↧
The American Obsession with "Frenchness" 3. Three Newport Mansions.
The Bellevue Avenue Historic District is located along and around Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, United States. Its property is almost exclusively residential, including many of the mansions built by affluent summer vacationers in the city around the turn of the 20th century, including the Vanderbilt family and Astor family. Many of the homes represent pioneering work in the architectural styles of the time by major American architects.
It was declared a National Historic Landmark (NHL) in 1976. Several of the mansions within the district had themselves attained NHL status as well, or have done so since then. It has become one of Newport's major tourist attractions.
The Preservation Society of Newport County
The Preservation Society of Newport County is a private, non-profit organization based in Newport, Rhode Island. It is Rhode Island's largest and most-visited cultural organization. The organization's mission is to preserve the architectural heritage of Newport County, Rhode Island, including those of the Bellevue Avenue Historic District. Its fourteen historic properties and landscapes—seven of which are National Historic Landmarks, and eleven of which are open to the public—form a complete essay of American historical development from the Colonial era through the Gilded Age.
The Preservation Society is led by CEO Trudy Coxe.
The Elms is a large mansion, or "summer cottage", located at 367 Bellevue Avenue, Newport, Rhode Island, in the United States. The Elms was designed by architect Horace Trumbauer for the coal baron Edward Julius Berwind, and was completed in 1901. Its design was copied from the Château d'Asnières in Asnières-sur-Seine, France. The gardens and landscaping were created by C. H. Miller and E. W. Bowditch, working closely with Trumbauer. The Elms has been designated a National Historic Landmark and today is open to the public.
The estate was constructed from 1899 to 1901 and cost approximately 1.5 million dollars to build. Like most Newport estates of the Gilded Age, The Elms is constructed with a steel frame with brick partitions and a limestone facade.
On the first floor the estate has a grand ballroom, a salon, a dining room, a breakfast room, a library, a conservatory, and a grand hallway with a marble floor. The second floor contains bedrooms for the family and guests as well as a private sitting room. The third floor contains bedrooms for the indoor servants.
In keeping with the French architecture of the house, the grounds of The Elms, among the best in Newport, were designed in French eighteenth-century taste and include a sunken garden. On the edge of the property a large carriage house and stables were built, over which lived the stable keepers and gardeners. When the Berwind family began using automobiles, the carriage house and stables were converted into a large garage. The head coachman, in order to keep his job, became the family driver, but he could never learn to back up, so a large turntable had to be installed in the garage.
In 1961 when Julia Berwind died, The Elms was one of the very last Newport cottages to be run in the fashion of the Gilded Age: forty servants were on staff, and Miss Berwind's social season remained at six weeks. Childless, Julia Berwind willed the estate to a nephew, who did not want it and fruitlessly tried to pass The Elms to someone else in the family. Finally the family auctioned off the contents of the estate and sold the property to a developer who wanted to tear it down. In 1962, just weeks before its date with the wrecking ball, The Elms was purchased by the Preservation Society of Newport County for $116,000. The price included the property along with adjacent guest houses. Since then, the house has been open to the public for tours. On June 19, 1996, it was designated a National Historic Landmark.
A tour of The Elms can include, at a cost, a behind-the-scenes tour which brings visitors to the basement to view the coal-fired furnaces and the tunnel from which the coal is brought into the basement from a nearby street. The tour shows the lengths to which Mr. Berwind went to keep the servants out of view from guests on all floors of the mansion. Visitors on the "downstairs" tour view the laundry room, steamer trunk storage area, the giant circuit breaker box, ice-makers, galley, and wine cellar below the main floor, and then ascend the three-story service staircase to the servants' quarters (spartan but comfortable) at roof level, which are furnished as they were at the turn of the twentieth century. The tour then proceeds out on the level tiled roof and a small aluminum platform, where visitors enjoy the view of the rear lawn, weeping beech tree—the American Elms having succumbed to Dutch elm disease—and gardens, and the breathtaking vista of Newport harbor in the distance.
Berwind was interested in technology, and The Elms was one of the first homes in America to be wired for electricity with no form of backup system. The house also included one of the first electrical ice makers. It was one of the most sophisticated houses of the time. When The Elms opened in 1901 the Berwinds held a huge party.
During the next 20 years, Berwind's wife, Sarah, would spend the summers there, the season being from the 4th of July to the end of August; Berwind would come out only on weekends, for his coal-mining interests kept him in New York during the week. Though the Berwinds had no children, their nephews and nieces would come out to visit on a regular basis.
On January 5, 1922 Mrs. Berwind died, and Edward asked his youngest sister Julia A. Berwind to move in and become the hostess of The Elms. In 1936 when he died, he willed the house to Julia, who, not being interested in technology, continued to run the house in the same way for the next twenty five years: washers and dryers were never installed at the Elms. Julia was well known in Newport. She would invite children from the nearby Fifth Ward (a working-class immigrant neighborhood) to the estate for milk and cookies. She had a love for cars and would drive around Newport every day in one of her luxury cars. This was somewhat shocking to the rest of Newport society where it was considered "unladylike" for women to drive themselves. It was rumored that her social secretary would perform the "white glove test" to make sure there was no dust on the steering wheel before Julia got into the driver's seat.
Rosecliff built 1898-1902
Rosecliff, built 1898-1902, is one of the Gilded Age mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, now open to the public as a historic house museum.
The house has also been known as the Herman Oelrichs House or the J. Edgar Monroe House.
It was built by Theresa Fair Oelrichs, a silver heiress from Nevada, whose father James Graham Fair was one of the four partners in the Comstock Lode. She was the wife of Hermann Oelrichs, American agent for Norddeutscher Lloyd steamship line. She and her husband, together with her sister, Virginia Fair, bought the land in 1891 from the estate of George Bancroft, and commissioned the architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White to design a summer home suitable for entertaining on a grand scale. With little opportunity to channel her considerable energy elsewhere, she "threw herself into the social scene with tremendous gusto, becoming, with Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish and Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont (of nearby Belcourt) one of the three great hostesses of Newport."
The principal architect, Stanford White, modeled the mansion after the Grand Trianon of Versailles, but smaller and reduced to a basic "H" shape, while keeping Mansart's scheme of a glazed arcade of arched windows and paired Ionic pilasters, which increase to columns across the central loggia. White's Rosecliff adds to the Grand Trianon a second storey with a balustraded roofline that conceals the set-back third storey, containing twenty small servants' rooms and the pressing room for the laundry.
he commission was given to McKim, Mead, and White in 1898, and the New York branch of Jules Allard and Sons were engaged as interior decorators. Construction started in 1899, but the sharp winter slowed construction; Mrs. Oelrichs' sister had married William K. Vanderbilt II that winter season, and the house was required for parties in the following Newport season; the eager Mrs. Oelrichs moved in July 1900, sending the workmen out in order to give a first party in August, a dinner for one hundred and twelve to outdo Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish's Harvest Festival Ball at Crossways. Ferns and floral arrangements concealed the unfinished areas. The house was not completed until 1902.
Rosecliff's brick construction is clad in white architectural terracotta tiles. Stanford White's sophisticated spatial planning offered unexpected views en filade through aligned doorways centered on handsome monumental fireplaces with projecting overmantels.
The central corps de logis is entirely taken up with the ballroom as it appeared on White's plans which, with the Louis XIV furniture removed, could serve as Newport's largest ballroom at 40 by 80 feet . Its scheme of single and paired Corinthian pilasters alternating with arch-headed windows and recessed doorways echoes the articulation of the exterior. This is reached through the French doors on either side, to a plain terrace dropping by broad stairs to the lawn facing the ocean, or to a planted terrace garden with a central fountain.
In the northernmost of the wings that project from both sides of the central block, is a dining room and a billiard room separated by a marble anteroom backed, on the service side, by a butler's pantry with two dumbwaiters. These communicate with the all-but-subterranean kitchens below which were lit, invisibly, from the sunken service yard on the north side of the house. The main entrance, on the opposite south wing, is through a vestibule where the exterior Ionic order is carried inside, now suitably enriched, under an emphatic cornice that divides the height 2:3.
The vestibule is separated, by a tripartite screen with an arched central opening flanked above the cornice by bull's-eye openings in which baroque vases stand, from a grand Stair Hall. The Stair Hall projects from the south block to accommodate a grand staircase that sweeps forward through a heart-shaped opening into the floor space. This divides at a landing to return in matched recurving flights to the upper floor.[
Beyond the Stair Hall is the Salon with the same proportions as the Dining Room (3:4, or 30 by 40 feet ) and like it, originally hung with tapestry. Its ceiling is coffered. Its overscaled Gothic fireplace of Caen stone is the one eclectic anomaly in Rosecliff's interiors.
Upstairs, three grand bedrooms of equal importance and guest bedrooms of graduated sizes may be linked by opened doors or isolated by locked ones, in a flexible arrangement of rooms or suites, all with baths, and all separated from the wide corridor by intervening dressing closets for hermetic privacy from the staff, who moved up and down stairs by means of two small service stairs contrived in spaces smaller than the master bedrooms' walk-in closets.
The most famous of Mrs. Oelrich's parties was the "Bal blanc" of 19 August 1904 to celebrate the Astor Cup Races, in which everything was white and silver.
Oelrichs family
Rosecliff stayed in the Oelrichs family until 1941, then went through several changes of ownership before being bought by Mr & Mrs J. Edgar Monroe of New Orleans in 1947. Mr. Monroe, a southern gentleman who had made his fortune in the ship building industry, came to Newport with his wife Louise every summer to escape the summer heat of the Deep South. The two became well known for the large parties they threw at Rosecliff; many of which had mardi gras theme, the Monroes loved dressing up in fancy costumes for these parties. Unlike Mrs. Oelrichs' parties, which were stiff and formal, the Monroes' parties were laid back and easy going. Because Hermann Oelrichs Jr had sold off all the furnishings in 1941, nearly all the furnishings visitors see at Rosecliff today are from the Monroe period of occupation. In 1971, Mr. and Mrs. Monroe donated the entire estate with its contents and a $2 million operating endowment to the Preservation Society of Newport County, who opened it to the public for tours. Mr Monroe often would come back to the estate for charity events up until his death in 1991.
The ballroom was used to film scenes for the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby, The Betsy, High Society, True Lies, and Amistad
Marble House builtbetween 1888 and 1892
Marble House is a Gilded Age mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, now open to the public as a museum run by the Newport Preservation Society. It was designed by the renowned society architect Richard Morris Hunt. For an American house, it was unparalleled in design and opulence when it was built. Its temple-front portico, which also serves as a porte-cochère, has been compared to that of the White House.
The mansion was built as a summer "cottage" retreat between 1888 and 1892 for Alva and William Kissam Vanderbilt. It was a social landmark that helped spark the transformation of Newport from a relatively relaxed summer colony of wooden houses to the now legendary resort of opulent stone palaces. The fifty-room mansion required a staff of 36 servants, including butlers, maids, coachmen, and footmen. The mansion cost $11 million ($260,000,000 in 2009 dollars) of which $7 million was spent on 500,000 cubic feet (14,000 m³ ) of marble. William Vanderbilt's older brother Cornelius Vanderbilt II subsequently built the largest of the Newport cottages, The Breakers, between 1893 and 1895.
When Alva Vanderbilt divorced William in 1895, she already owned Marble House outright, having received it as her 39th birthday present. She remarried to Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont in 1896, and then relocated down the street to Belcourt Castle. After his death, she reopened Marble House and added the Chinese Tea House on the seaside cliff, where she hosted rallies for women's suffrage.
Alva Belmont shuttered the mansion permanently in 1919, when she relocated to France to be closer to her daughter, Consuelo Balsan. There she divided her time between a Paris townhouse, a villa on the Riviera, and the Château d'Augerville, which she restored. She sold the house to Frederick H. Prince in 1932, less than a year before her death. In 1963 the Preservation Society of Newport County bought the house from the Prince Trust, with funding provided by Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, the Vanderbilt couple's youngest son. The Trust donated the furniture for the house directly to the Preservation Society.
The mansion was added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 10, 1971. The Department of the Interior designated it as a National Historic Landmark on February 17, 2006. The Bellevue Avenue Historic District, which includes Marble House and many other historic Newport mansions, was added to the Register on December 8, 1972 and subsequently designated as a National Historic Landmark District on May 11, 1976.
The interior features a number of notable rooms. Entrance into the mansion is through one of two French Baroque-style doors, each weighing a ton and a half. Both are embellished by the monogram "WV" set into an oval medallion. They were made at the John Williams Bronze Foundry in New York. The Stair Hall is a two-story room that features walls and a grand staircase of yellow Siena marble, with a wrought iron and gilt bronze staircase railing. The railing is based on models at Versailles. An 18th-century Venetian ceiling painting featuring gods and goddesses adorns the ceiling. The Grand Salon, designed by Allard and Sons, served as a ballroom and reception room. Designed in the Louis XIV style, it features green silk cut velvet upholstery and draperies. The originals were made by Prelle. The walls are carved wood and gold gilt panels representing scenes from classical mythology, inspired by the panels and trophies adorning the Galerie d'Apollon at the Louvre. The ceiling features an 18th-century French painting in the manner of Pietro da Cortona depicting Minerva, with a surround adapted from the ceiling of the Queen’s Bedroom at Versailles. The Gothic Room, in the Gothic Revival-style, was designed to display Alva Vanderbilt's collection of Medieval and Renaissance decorative objects. The stone fireplace in the room was copied by Allard and Sons from one in the Jacques Cœur House in Bourges. The furniture was by Gilbert Cuel. The Library is in the Rococo-style. It served as both a morning room and library. The doors and bookcases, in carved walnut, were a collaboration between Allard and Cuel. The Dining Room features pink Numidian marble and gilt bronze capitals and trophies. The fireplace is a replica of the one in the Salon d'Hercule at Versailles. The ceiling is decorated painted with a hunting and fishing motif, with an 18th-century French ceiling in the center. Mrs. Vanderbilt’s Bedroom, on the second floor, is in the Louis XIV style. The ceiling in this room is adorned with circular ceiling painting of Athena, painted circa 1721 by Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini. It was originally in the library of the Palazzo Pisani Moretta in Venice.
Marble House is one of the earliest examples of Beaux-Arts architecture in the United States, with design inspiration from the Petit Trianon at the Palace of Versailles. Jules Allard and Sons of Paris, first hired by the Vanderbilt's to design some of the interiors for their Petit Chateau on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, designed the French-inspired interiors of Marble House also. The grounds were designed by landscape architect Ernest W. Bowditch.
The mansion is a U-shaped building. Although it appears to be a two-story structure, it is actually spread over four levels. The kitchen and service areas are located on the basement level, reception rooms on the ground floor, bedrooms on the second floor, and servant quarters on the hidden, uppermost level. The load-bearing portion of the walls are brick, with the exterior faced in white Westchester marble. Here Hunt adapted French neoclassical architectural forms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to enliven the Beaux-Arts detailing.
The facade of the mansion features bays that are defined by two story Corinthian pilasters. These frame arched windows on the ground floor and rectangular ones on the second on most of the facade. A curved marble carriage ramp, fronted by a semi-circular fountain with grotesque masks, spans the entire western facade. The masks serve as water spouts. The center of this facade, facing Bellevue Avenue, features a monumental tetrastyle Corinthian portico. The north and south facades match the western in basic design. The eastern facade, facing the Atlantic Ocean, is divided into a wing on each side. These wings semi-enclose a marble terrace and are surrounded by a marble balustrade on the ground floor level. The inset central portion of this facade differs from the others, with four bays of ground floor doors topped by second floor arched windows.
The interiors of the mansion have appeared in several films or television series. Scenes appearing in the 1972–73 television series, America, the 1974 film, The Great Gatsby, the 1995 miniseries The Buccaneers, and the 2008 film 27 Dresses were shot here. More recently, Victoria's Secret filmed one of their 2012 holiday commercials here.
↧
Jeeves will be away for two weeks ... Greetings.
↧
Grace of Monaco.
Grace of Monaco is a forthcoming American-French biography film about the life of Grace Kelly, directed by Olivier Dahan and written by Arash Amel. The film stars Nicole Kidman in the titular role. It also features a supporting cast of Frank Langella, Parker Posey, Derek Jacobi, Paz Vega, Roger Ashton-Griffiths, Milo Ventimiglia and Tim Roth.
Grace of Monaco is scheduled for worldwide release starting November 27, 2013.
Grace of Monaco is focused on former Hollywood star Grace Kelly's crisis of marriage and identity, during a dispute between Monaco's Prince Rainier III and France's Charles De Gaulle and a looming French military invasion of the principality in the early 1960s.
The script, written by Arash Amel, was listed in the 2011 Hollywood Black List of the most liked unproduced screenplays written in that year and sold to French-based producer Pierre-Ange Le Pogam in a competitive bid.
Production on the film began in September 2012, in Paris and Menton, France. In October 2012, the production moved to Italy, first to Grimaldi, the village near Ventimiglia, which bares the name of the royal house of Monaco, then in Mortola, near Ventimiglia at Villa Hanbury. The production was granted permission to close Monaco's main square for 24 hours between October 29–30, 2012, during this time, the cast were seen filming outside and around the Monte Carlo Casino. In November 2012, and again in January 2013, the production was in Genoa, Italy, on the housed set in the Royal Palace in Via Balbi, where the Hall of Mirrors replicate the residence of the royal court of Monaco
On January 16, 2013, shortly after filming ended, Prince Albert II, his sisters Princess Caroline and Princess Stéphanie (the children of Grace Kelly) criticized the subject matter of the approved script, describing it as "needlessly glamorised and historically inaccurate", and "numerous requests for changes" had been ignored, which "had caused much astonishment". The statement continued, "Therefore, the Royal Family wishes to stress that this film in no way constitutes a biopic. It recounts one rewritten, needlessly glamorised page in the history of Monaco, and its family with both major historical inaccuracies, and a series of purely fictional scenes."
In an interview with French newspaper Le Figaro in December 2012, the star of the film, Nicole Kidman hinted that the movie would be a character study, stating, "This is not a biopic or a fictionalized documentary of Grace Kelly, but only a small part of her life where she reveals her great humanity as well as her fears, and weaknesses."
The production had previously asserted that the movie does not purport to cover Grace Kelly's life, but a specific moment in her existence, and was filmed in Monaco with the support of the principality.
On January 19, 2013, director Olivier Dahan responded to the royal press release by stating "I am not a journalist or historian. I am an artist. I have not made a biopic. I hate biopics in general. I have done, in any subjectivity, a human portrait of a modern woman who wants to reconcile her family, her husband, her career. But who will give up her career and invent another role. And it will be painful." He also stated "I understand their point of view. After all, it is their mother. I do not want to provoke anyone. Only to say that it's cinema."
In 1962, Monaco's refusal to impose a tax on both its residents and international businesses caused problem in relations. However, it was resolved with an agreement that French citizens with less than five years of residence in Monaco and companies doing more than 25 percent of their business outside the country would be taxed at French rates. The crisis also led a new constitution and the restoration of the National Council. Amongst the edicts of the new constitution are the prince's nomination of a Council of Government that consists of a Minister of State who is a French citizen and selected for a three-year term from a group of senior French civil servants selected by the French government. He is the prince's representative and is in charge of foreign relations, directs executive services, the police and the Council of Government. He also chooses three council members: one to take care of the economy and finances; one for Home Affairs; and, one for social affairs. All ministers are accountable to Monaco's prince.
Monaco’s legal system is also modeled on the Napoleonic Code and similar to that of France.
Monaco has also agreed to exercise its sovereign rights in conformity with French interests.
Grace of Monaco: Nicole Kidman looks a princess
First official picture is released of the Australian actor as Grace Kelly in Olivier Dahan's forthcoming biopic
Ben Child
theguardian.com, Monday 25 February 2013 / http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/feb/25/grace-monaco-nicole-kidman-looks-part
Monaco's royal family may have denounced it as "pure fiction", but the first official picture of Nicole Kidman as Grace Kelly suggests the Australian actor looks the part in the forthcoming biopic Grace of Monaco.
Directed by La Vie En Rose's Olivier Dahan, the film reportedly tells the story of Grace's intervention between France and Monaco in 1962, when the two states were in dispute over tax laws in the principality and a coup was a genuine possibility. Kidman, 45, plays Kelly in her early 30s, but the princess's children are more concerned about what they perceive as a "pointlessly glamorised" depiction of their mother. Prince Albert, the current ruling monarch of Monaco, issued a joint statement with Princess Caroline and Princess Stephanie last month denouncing the project as historically inaccurate. "We have had absolutely no association with this project, which claims to be about the lives of our parents," the royal trio said.
Kidman, responding at a special screening of her new film Stoker in London last week, said she was determined to present a carefully crafted take on Alfred Hitchcock's best known muse. "I wanted to be respectful of her, her story and her essence so hopefully that will all come through," she said. "It's exciting but at first it was daunting. At the same time I had studied her and felt a kind of tenderness towards her."
Kelly became known as Princess Grace after the star of Dial M for Murder and Rear Window left Hollywood for a new life as the wife of Monaco's Prince Rainier III in 1956. She died in 1982 after suffering a stroke at the wheel of her car.
Grace of Monaco is due in cinemas for 2014.
↧
Grace of Monaco - Trailer
↧
↧
How Triumph motorbikes became cool again.
 |
Clint Eastwood (above with Tisha Sterling) in Coogan's Bluff |
 |
| Steve McQueen loved Triumph bikes |
 |
| Bob Dylan famously crashed his Triumph |
 |
Ann-Margaret in The Swinger |
 |
Marlon Brando straddled his own Thunderbird 650cc in The Wild One |
 |
Triumph is now going great guns again. Last year it posted record sales of more than 49,000 bikes, finally eclipsing the record set in the Steve McQueen era (above the modern Triumph Thunderbird) |
Brando, Dylan and Elvis made them cool - but Britain's Triumph motorbikes would have been consigned to the scrapheap if it hadn't been for a reclusive visionary, £200 million... and a little help from Tom Cruise.
By BEN OLIVER
UPDATED: 12:23 GMT, 17 August 2009 / http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1205710/Return-wild-How-Triumph-motorbikes-cool-again.html
Viewed from the road, it's an unassuming building on an industrial estate on the outskirts of a drab, grey Midlands manufacturing town. Hinckley lies halfway between Birmingham and Leicester; it's handy for the M69, but there isn't much else to recommend it.
Just a mile or so beyond the town centre, the factory is a sharp slice of metallic grey against the light-blue sky. If it weren't for the solitary dark-blue logo above the black-glass portico, I'd never make the link between this soulless slab and a venerable British motoring legend with an oil-stained pedigree as old as Rolls-Royce.
Inside though, it's like stepping back in time. Here 750 people design and build motorbikes using proper, old-fashioned engineering. The air is thick with the smell of oil and swarf as the engines' fundamental components are milled from solid blocks of steel and aluminium.
The bikes come down the production line seemingly at random; sharp-looking sports bikes follow gorgeous retro classics follow cruisers. But they don't hang around long. Each is built to order. Once finished, it's packed into a box and shipped to the customer. The factory isn't sexy. The location isn't glamorous. But the logo on the box tells a different story. These bikes are Triumphs.
Elvis Presley, Clint Eastwood and Bob Dylan rode Triumph Bonneville T120s. Marlon Brando straddled his own Thunderbird 650cc in The Wild One, while Evel Knievel flew a Bonneville over Caesar's Palace fountains. But it was Steve McQueen who really made the Triumph name, when in one of the most memorable moments of 1963's The Great Escape he guns through the German countryside trying to outrun Nazi soldiers on his TR6 Trophy.
McQueen loved Triumph bikes. Not only was he inextricably linked with them in films, but he also owned dozens, riding them through the dunes around his California home and in some of the most iconic photos of the era. In the Fifties and Sixties the Triumph motorcycle was the ultimate symbol of cool, outshining even Harley-Davidson as the postwar epitome of style, freedom and rebellion.
Triumph is now going great guns again. Last year it posted record sales of more than 49,000 bikes, finally eclipsing the record set in the McQueen era, and turning a £14.5 million profit. Hollywood loves Triumph once more; George Clooney, Nicolas Cage and Ewan McGregor are all customers. The contrast with Britain's ailing car industry couldn't be clearer.
Two years ago Triumph even overtook Ducati to become Europe's second-biggest bike maker. And this is only the start. With mad styling and engines that other makers just don't have the nerve to match, the British brand now has the all-powerful BMW in its sights as it gears up to try to become the continent's dominant motorcycle manufacturer.
But it has not been a smooth ride. In the Eighties Triumph came so close to joining every other famous British motorcycle brand - and most of its car brands - on the industrial scrapheap. Its best year had been 1967; helped by the perfect celebrity endorsement, Triumph made 46,500 motorcycles and sent 28,500 of them to America.
But its fall was rapid. What has happened to Triumph since then is a scarcely believable tale. Along the way there have been recessions, a disastrous fire and the worst industrial practices of Seventies Britain, while the cast of characters involved includes Tony Benn, Tom Cruise and a reclusive, self-made multi-millionaire who took a £200 million punt on a broken company and won. This is the story of a great British triumph over adversity.
As a trainee plasterer, John Bloor had travelled to sites around his native Derbyshire on a Triumph, carrying his tools in a sidecar. By 1983, aged just 39, he had built Bloor Homes into a multimillion-pound company and was keen to move on to something new.
That year Triumph finally went into receivership after struggling to compete with the big Japanese manufacturers: Bloor bought the name from the Offi‑cial Receiver and licensed it to a small factory in the West Country. For the next seven years he seemed to do nothing at all with his once-fabled marque, but he had a plan.
After its reign in the Fifties and Sixties, Triumph's problem in part was down to its success. Instead of developing its bikes, the company stuck with what it had.
'Triumph desperately needed new bikes and new engines,' says motorbike historian Roger Higgis.
'But like most of the rest of British industry at the time, Triumph was complacent. The technology that could have saved it had been around since the war; it was the same as that used in Spitfire engines. But they just didn't bother.
'Even the tools they used were 40 years old and couldn't make anything accurately, so the bikes leaked oil. Triumphs looked good and went fast but what really kept them going was that all their rivals, including Harley, were terrible too.'
That was true until the Japanese arrived, and showed everyone how bikes should be made. In 1972 the Government forced all the remaining British bike makers into a merger in an attempt to save them. The new firm attempted to close Triumph's Meriden plant in 1973; the unions staged an extraordinary two-year sit-in, which ended only when Tony Benn allowed a workers' co-operative to use the Triumph name and build the classic Bonneville. The company struggled on until 1983, when the recession and declining sales finally forced it into receivership.
The engine is a part of a bike's identity... You don't just see it; you feel connected to it
It was then that John Bloor stepped in, plotting one of the most audacious rebirths in British industrial history.
'Can you imagine a British company starting from scratch and deciding to challenge Japanese camera makers on price and quality, and building the product in the UK?' says Bruno Tagliaferri, who worked for Honda in the Eighties before joining Bloor's secret project. 'It's inconceivable, but that's what John decided to do with motorbikes.'
By then, the 'Big Four' Japanese makers - Honda, Suzuki, Yamaha, Kawasaki - dominated every sector of the motorcycle market. Bloor planned to take them on.
As an insider on both sides, Tagliaferri had a unique perspective on the war Bloor was about to start.
'It was a fantastically well-kept secret. When I was at Honda we just hadn't heard of it. John gathered a small team of engineers around him and said absolutely nothing. The emphasis was on designing the bikes correctly, and properly equipping the new factory they were building in Hinckley. They even went to Japan to visit the factories there; the Japanese let them in because they had no idea what John was planning, and didn't even consider that these Brits could ever rival them.'
Bloor knew that although the Triumph brand still carried a certain cachet, buyers wouldn't tolerate anything less than the perfect reliability they'd grown used to from the Japanese. He also knew that the only way to guarantee quality was to invest - heavily. Most experts agree that Bloor wrote cheques for £100 million before anyone really knew that Triumph was coming back, and for a similar amount to finance its early years after it launched.
'It was a colossal gamble,' says Tagliaferri. 'But John was determined to make it work. When we launched not just one bike but a range of six new bikes in 1990, the motorcycle world was genuinely shaken. I just can't think of a parallel.'
But why did he do it?
'We don't know exactly how much he's put in, how much profit he's made and whether it stacks up as a business case,' says Professor Andrew Graves, from the School of Manufacturing at Bath University.
'But he has made it work, and for Bloor it isn't just about profit. He's a great believer in British manufacturing - he wanted to create highvalue jobs and he was reacting against the idea that you can create wealth without making something.'
The new Triumphs went on sale in the UK and Germany first. At the new factory, 100 staff built just 1,200 motorcycles. The next year it was 5,000, and after Triumph returned to America in 1994 it was 8,000. In 2000 Tom Cruise chose Triumphs for his motorbike duel scene with Dougray Scott in Mission Impossible II. It was world-class product placement, on a par with McQueen in The Great Escape, and all Triumph had to do was supply the bikes. The following year Triumph made 31,000 bikes: the company turned its first profit, and Bloor's 'colossal gamble' seemed to be paying off.
But there was a problem; in the rush to match Japanese quality, Bloor had copied their anonymity too.
'Those first bikes were very well engineered,' says Roger Higgis. 'But they were also very bland to ride, especially the big four-cylinders. The engines and the styling just didn't set the world alight.'
But in March 2002, as Triumph was preparing to celebrate its centenary, something set the factory alight. It took 100 firefighters five hours to get it under control; by the time they did the production lines had been destroyed.
'People thought, that's it, that's the end of Triumph,' says Tagliaferri. 'But before the fire was officially extinguished we were back in, processing parts orders.'
It would be six months before production could restart. Triumph slumped back to a loss again; Bloor had to cover a £4.5 million deficit that year but saw the chance to recast the marque yet again. He called in management consultants McKinsey, and they sent a team led by 27-year-old Dane Tue Mantoni. He told Bloor to drop the four-cylinder engines, focus instead on Triumph's charismatic twins and triples, and build more interesting, niche bikes.
'The engine is far more part of a bike's identity than a car's,' says Simon Warburton, Triumph's product chief. 'It's visible. But you don't just see it; you feel connected to it. It's two inches from your knees, after all. The triples have so much character. You can feel the power pulse as each cylinder fires but they also pull cleanly from idle and rev all the way out, with a great howl at the top end. The noise is unique. The educated ear can tell the difference.'
Bloor listened.
'Bloor is a very, very hard-headed businessman,' says Higgis. 'But he's also a bike enthusiast, and an enthusiast for British industry.'
He binned all the four-cylinder engines and instead gave the green light to an insane new model, the 2,300cc Rocket III, the largest capacity production bike in the world. The first bike from the new factory, it was a clear statement of intent from Triumph and had a waiting list 18 months long by the time it went on sale in 2004.
The other models were successes too. Its Daytona 675 competes in one of the toughest market sectors but regularly humbles the best Japanese machinery in magazine comparison tests. It shares its engine with the Street Triple, Triumph's best-seller: it looks like an angry insect and for less than six grand delivers performance that humbles supercars at 20 times the price.
The Thruxton is pure Sixties cafe racer; the Scrambler, with its full-length chrome pipes, looks just like the bikes McQueen rode through the dunes; and the reborn Bonneville looks just like it did in the Seventies, but with some very modern engineering.
Then there are the Easy Rider-style cruisers, the Speedmaster, the America and the new Thunderbird, which will lead Triumph's assault on the American market. And finally there's the Rocket III, which looks and sounds like nothing else on Earth.
Bloor's ability to make hard, fast decisions might have saved Triumph from the worst ravages of the recession. The global market for big bikes of the kind Triumph makes has collapsed by a quarter this year, and you'd expect Triumph to have followed kobal/ matrix/ getty Britain's luxury car-makers into a slump.
But Tue Mantoni, who last year, at just 33, was made CEO, saw the trouble coming and cut production by ten per cent and introduced new special editions to stimulate demand. Overall, Triumph's sales figures for this year will remain flat, but it will have increased its market share at the expense of its rivals and got closer to its next aim: overtaking BMW.
'We don't appeal to the super-rich,' says Mantoni. 'But our customers do have a higher than average income and they choose to devote a chunk of that to motorcycling. We're not that expensive compared to a Lamborghini, but at least as exciting. And crucially, these guys don't need finance. They pay cash.'
So having survived mismanagement in the Sixties, three major recessions, Tony Benn and a fire, is Triumph's future finally secure?
'As a British motorcycle manufacturer, Triumph is the last of its kind,' says Mantoni.
'In design-conscious countries like Japan and Italy they love British design; it's not too fussy, it's understated, it's cool, and we deliberately turn up the Britishness there. But the old British brands went out of business because they didn't pay attention to quality and innovation. We won't make the same mistakes.'
↧
Lewis Leathers
 |
Lewis Leathers shop, Whitfield Street, London in 2013 |
Lewis Leathers is the brand name of the oldest British motorcycle clothing company, D. Lewis Ltd, manufacturer of iconic leather jackets which was established in the late 19th century.
The company supplied early aviators, motorists and motorcyclists with protective clothing against the cold and damp British climate. In the mid-1950s, D. Lewis produced the Bronx leather jacket, a landmark garment and one of the first products aimed directly at the post-war teenage fashion market, which was widely adopted by the Ton-up Boys and Rockers of the 1960s, becoming closely associated with the 59 Club and sponsoring leading motorcycle and TT racers of the day.
It continues to manufacture and sell high quality, authentically styled classical motorcycle protective clothing worldwide to this day.
 |
D. Lewis of Great Portland Street |
 |
1960s Aviakit label |
 |
1930s Aviakit label |
D. Lewis
Originally a family business called D. Lewis, started in the 1892 as a gentlemen's outfitter or "wardobe company", At that time, the company produced Gents suiting and raincoats in the east end of London. D. Lewis became a Limited company in 1929 under the stewardship of brothers Nathan Jones, David and Lewis Isaacs on Great Portland Street in London's West End, they also had Birmingham, Sheffield and Liverpool which traded under the name of N Jones. It was during the 1910s that the company started making and retailing specialist clothing for what was then considered the "gentlemen's" auto sports of aviation and motoring producing their wares in Watford.
At the time, Great Portland Street was known as "Motor Row", the primary location for purchasing automobiles and related accessories in the early years of the 20th century. It had no less than 33 showrooms located along it, including companies such as: Benz Motor, Jaguar, Austin, Morgan Motor and the Indian Motorcycle Company., as well as being the center of the clothing trade.
Aviakit
Initially used as a Telegram address ("Aviakit Wesdo") in 1929, in 1930 the company introduced Aviakit (short for "aviation kit") as the brand name for its aviation clothing, which it had already been selling from the first quarter of the century and acting as contractors to numerous governments around the world including the Netherlands, India, Belgium,South Africa and Greece. It went on to produce clothing for the Royal Air Force during World War II including made to measure outfits for officers. The product line was also to include boots, goggles, and crash helmets identical to those made by Everoak.
Its garments were worn by Spitfire test pilot Sir Alex Henshaw and RAF fighter pilots during World War II.The name still appears in Lewis Leathers jackets, boots, gloves and other products to this day.
Following the end of hostilities, although handicapped by petrol rationing, D. Lewis started selling ex-RAFclothing to de-mobbed motorcyclists and then, in the early 1950s as rationing ended, started to develop more casual items into their ranges, expanding into shops in Sheffield, Birmingham and St Albans. By 1953, its advertising claims were that the company was already the largest motorcycle clothing and accessory company in the UK and abroad.
The company's products came to represent the high end of the market, out of reach of many individuals, also serving the circuit racing fraternity offering repair and replacement right hand boots which commonly wore out on England's clockwise racing circuits.
Lewis Leathers
In 1982, the company was sold to the Newbold Brothers; it was then sold to Richard Lyon in November 1986. In 1991 its classic designs were to be researched and re-created by Derek Harris. After trading from the same location for 101 years, the Great Portland Street shop closed in 1993. That same year saw the launch of a small 'Retro Range' of Lewis Leathers jackets with lining, labels and hardware all as found on the jackets seen during the 60s and 70s. The release of this range and its subsequent marketing in Japan, USA and the UK coincided with vintage Lewis Leathers jackets becoming increasingly sought after in Japan where they are promoted for their authentic connections to the rockers of the 60s, leading British Punks, Rock musicians and fashion icons, and are often highly customised.
Harris and Lyon continued to expand the range of authentic retro-styled jackets, their efforts leading to collaborations with leading fashion designers such as Comme des Garçons in 2002. In 2003 Lyon announced his retirement leading to Harris, whom, after 12 years researching and working on its designs, took over the company and established an office in Japan opened by 59 Club Japan leader, Koji Baba. The London branch was re-opened close to the original premises in Whitfield Street, part of London's Fitzrovia.
D. Lewis Ltd and Lewis Leathers garments were always produced in England, initially in Watford[ or St Albans, and from 1958 to 1982, in Copperfield Rd, East London. In the 1970s, a small factory in Sheffield was also utilised. In 1982 all production was moved to Northampton, returning to London in 1993 where it remains until the present date.
From the late 1950s Lewis Leathers advertised to motorcyclists and also in popular musical publications such as the NME and Melody Maker. Lewis Leathers were also official suppliers to police motorcyclists in the UK.
 |
Vintage Lewis Leathers Aviakit Super Bronx Twin Track Jacket |
 |
1950s Lewis Leathers Bronx label |
 |
Vintage style Lewis Leathers Universal Racer mk2 jacket |
 |
Lewis Leathers Aviakit Wax Cotton Jacket |
 |
Customised Bronx jacket with Ace Cafe detail |
↧
Ace Cafe London
The Ace Cafe London is a former transport cafe in Stonebridge, north west London, England which has been extensively redeveloped becoming a functions and entertaiment venue. It is historically a notable venue in motorcycle culture which originally operated from 1938 until 1969, then re-opened on the original site in 1997.
Ace Cafe opened in 1938 to accommodate traffic on the new North Circular Road. Because the cafe was open 24 hours a day, it started to attract motorcyclists. It became popular with the Ton Up Boys in the 1950s and the Rockers in the 1960s and was where the motorcycling priest Bill Shergold came to invite them to the 59 Club.
The cafe was rebuilt in 1949 after being destroyed in a World War II air raid. The building is close to the Willesden railway marshalling yard, target of the raid.
Events in the post-war environment made the Ace a success: the emergence of the teenager; increase in traffic; and the British motorcycle industry at its peak. Many young people started to meet at the cafe with their motorcycles and listen to rock'n'roll. Many bands and motorcycle enthusiast groups formed there.
The cafe closed in 1969 and part of the building became a tyre sales and fitting shop (Beresford Road end). The other end was occupied by a vehicle delivery company.
Following the success of the Rocker Reunion movement and discussions with its founder and original 59 Club member Len Paterson, the first Ace Cafe Reunion was organised by Mark Wilsmore and held in 1994. As with the Rocker Reunion Runs, it attracted as many as 12,000 revivalists and the cafe was reopened in 1997, with complete refurbishment completed by 2001. Rockers and motorcyclists from all over the world go to the Ace to share stories, fix bikes and see the legend. It is no longer open 24-hours but the cafe now has an extensive calendar of events for both motorbike and car owners. It also puts on live music and DJ's, and is approved for weddings and civil partnerships.
The Ace Cafe was immortalised as a location of the 1964 film The Leather Boys, Sidney J. Furie's notable British gay interest 'kitchen sink' drama, starring Rita Tushingham.
In the past it has been used for the Channel 5 TV programme Fifth Gear in the seasons 10 to 13 (September 2006 until March 2008), and for ITV programme Used Car Roadshow. It has also featured in the BBC television series By Any Means with Charley Boorman; mentioned as a favourite for Ewan McGregor by his wife in the documentary, Long Way Down; and the 2008 film Freebird.
In Episode 6 of Top Gear (series 3) Jeremy Clarkson interviewed clients about their love of customising the Citroën Saxo.
Ace Cafe also featured in an edition of 'Car SOS' – Season 1, Episode 9, presented by Tim Shaw, filmed during 2012 and shown in the UK on at least one TV channel – National Geographic.
The episode depicted the secret restoration of a decaying Ford Zodiac Mk1, which was then unveiled and presented to the unsupecting owner in the car park, close to the building entrance.
↧
How traditional espadrilles are hand sewn in la Rioja, Spain ( alpargata...
↧
↧
The Return of the Espadrilles / Alpargatas ...
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-espadrilles.htm
Espadrilles are sandals made of canvas, with soles of varying heights decorated with rope. The sandals were first made over 600 years ago in Catalonia, but the name itself is French. It can get confusing, though, if you look for espadrilles in Canada, since this is the normal Quebec term for running or jogging shoes. The French name for the sandal comes from the Catalan word, espardenya, which referred to a tough grass used for weaving the ropes that form the bottom of the shoes. Today’s espadrilles may no longer use espardenya, and rope styling on the bottom may be glued to wooden, plastic, or rubber soles.
The early espadrilles were peasant made and worn by peasants. A small amount of canvas combined with a rope-work bottom was much cheaper than leather. Many featured a lace up component to keep the sandals firmly attached to the feet.
If we jump forward to modern days, espadrilles are popular summer sandals, mostly made for women in many countries. They’re particularly associated with casual summer wear, clothing for cruise ships, and for women who want a dressier but still comfortable sandal look in hot weather. Designers make a number of styles, which can get uncomfortable if the heel is very high, but there are many non-brand name espadrilles that are cheaply made and purchased.
The soles of modern espadrilles are usually wedges, with a gradual incline of the heel. You can find flat espadrilles or platform styles, too. Many are slip on or slide versions, but still others may feature ankle straps to keep the foot more secure. Though many of the variants, especially of less expensive brands, feature synthetic roping around the heels, a popular feature is the use of jute, a natural fiber, to make the roping. Jute espadrilles with cotton canvas tops are made in great number in Bangladesh where they may be exported to Europe and the US.
When jute is used, gluing the jute rope to the shoe sole can actually be a laborious process. They may be not only glued but also stitched, and many feature extra designs in the rope weave to provide a fancier shoe. Despite the more labor-intensive work required in the manufacture of espadrilles, they are often less expensive than other summer sandals, unless you want espadrilles with a designer name. Then, expense is approximately equal to other designer sandals.
Espadrilles / Alpargatas are normally casual flat, but sometimes high heeled shoes originating from the Pyrenees. They usually have a canvas or cotton fabric upper and a flexible sole made of rope or rubber material moulded to look like rope. The jute rope sole is the defining characteristic of an espadrille; the uppers vary widely in style. In Quebec, however, espadrille is the usual term for running shoes or sneakers.
The term espadrille is French and derives from the word in Occitan language, which comes from espardenya, in Catalan or espardeña in Spanish. In Catalan it meant a type of shoes made with espart, the Catalan name for esparto, a tough, wiry Mediterranean grass used in making rope
Espadrilles have been made in Pyrennean Catalonia and Occitania since the 14th century at least, and there are shops in the Basque country still in existence that have been making espadrilles for over a century. The oldest, most primitive form of espadrilles go as far back as 4000 years ago. Traditional espadrilles have a canvas upper with the toe and vamp cut in one piece, and seamed to the rope sole at the sides. Often they would have laces at the throat that would be wrapped around the ankle to hold the shoes securely in place. Traditional espadrilles are worn by both men and women.
Once peasant footwear, espadrilles have grown in popularity, especially in Catalonia and the Basque Country, where many men and women wear them during the spring and summer months. Designer espadrilles are now widely available. They are usually manufactured in Spain and South Asia. Modern espadrilles are predominantly for women, though some men's shoes are made in this style.
The soles of espadrilles may be flat, platform or wedge shaped, and can be made of natural fiber or synthetic fiber rope, or flexible synthetic materials cast to resemble rope. Uppers may be made from nearly any substance, and may have open or closed toes, open or closed backs, and can be slip-on or tied to the ankle with laces. Thousands of varieties of espadrilles can be found, from inexpensive bargain brands to high priced designer brands.
Espadrilles became fashionable in USA in the 1940s. Lauren Bacall's character in the 1948 movie Key Largo wore ankle-laced espadrilles. The style was revived in the 1980s, due to the success of Miami Vice—the shoe was worn by Sonny Crockett (Don Johnson). In 2013 at luxury shoe stores in New York City, a pair of espadrilles can cost nearly $500.
Only second to cotton in favor as a natural fiber, jute is increasingly used in the manufacture of espadrilles. The soles of espadrilles are now commonly made with jute rope or braid, which is favored because of its eco-friendliness compared to synthetic substances. The natural bright white color of jute is a major design feature of modern espadrilles.
Bangladesh is the producer of high quality jute, and has become a manufacturing centre for premium quality jute soles and complete espadrilles. Ninety percent of the world's total production of complete espadrilles, as well as jute soles, is now manufactured in Bangladesh, although some manufacturers in Spain, France, and Italy import jute soles from Bangladesh to finish espadrilles in those countries. Complete espadrilles are also manufactured in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay and Venezuela.
Jute soles typically include fully or partially vulcanized rubber beneath the jute fibre for long-lasting espadrille shoes. Sometimes crepe soles are used as out-soles. Jute braid soles might include heels made of wood or EVA foam.
The manufacture of espadrilles is generally more complex than that of sandals. The jute soles are the most critical part. The jute twines are first machine-braided. These braids are then manually formed into the shape of the sole and hydraulically pressed with heat to form the final shape, and completed with vertical stitching. These basic soles are then vulcanized underneath. EVA foam or wooden heels are glued in place and more jute braids are wrapped around it to complete the soles. Uppers of different styles are then built on the jute soles to complete the espadrille. Most traditional espadrilles made by hand come from La Rioja, Spain. They are widely distributed in France and Canada.
Assembling of a jute sole
↧
Breathless Trailer, ITV
↧
Breathless ITV
Secrets, lies and passion smoulder beneath the glamorous and stylish world of the early 1960s, in the brand new drama Breathless.
 |
Is that Don Draper? - No, it's Jack Davenport as Dr Otto Powell in Breathless. Photograph: ITV |
Breathless; Trust Me I'm a Doctor – TV review
Yes, it's the 60s, and there's smoking, sex and even a Don Draper type – but don't call it the British Mad Men
Sam Wollaston
The Guardian, Friday 11 October 2013 / http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/oct/11/breathless-tv-review
I saw the WikiLeaks movie, The Fifth Estate, the other night. Benedict Cumberbatch is fantastic but the film isn't, for several reasons, one of which is that it doesn't really work visually. It's a problem with a lot of drama about the 21st century. People now spend their entire lives staring into screens and communicating via text. Looking at a screen of people looking into screens isn't a very fulfilling experience. You have to go back to the 20th century to find people actually talking to each other, having old-fashioned touchy sex not Skype sex, expressing emotions not emoticons, and anger in a way that isn't snapping shut a laptop. It's maybe why there's so much period drama about.
In Breathless, ITV's latest period piece, we're in London in 1961. Of course, being about the 60s it's already been called the British Mad Men (as The Hour was, and that wasn't even set in the 60s). Med Men might be better, given it's a hospital drama. And Dr Otto Powell (Jack Davenport) is the Don Draper character – you know, suave, smoking (in every sense), Brylcreemed etc. He just has to walk into a room, and women spread their legs. Well, he is a gynaecologist.
Not just a devilish cad though, Dr Otto is also an unlikely champion of choice and performs abortions (still illegal) on the sly. "Otto, is that you, I've been such a silly muffin," he's greeted by a silly aristocratic muffin (scone?) with a extra unwanted bun you know where. He's kinda Don Draper meets Vera Drake, then.
There's no such complexity from Dr Powell's doctor colleagues. All male, of course, and all randy as Jack Russells; after a brisk, rude group round of the wards, they're all off doing their damnedest to hop on and off the nurses like they're the Routemasters plying Piccadilly. I say, are you headed for Eros, room for one more on top, eh?
So 1961 doesn't look very jolly for a woman. The music may be getting a little better, the dresses too. And this so-called sexual revolution is gaining some momentum. Who's it for, though? Maybe the pill, which was around then, I believe, wasn't in general circulation yet. Because if you join in the revolution, chances are you're going to get knocked up by some twit. And if you don't get to Dr Otto (who's the one you really want to be with) in time, you're going to have to spend the rest of your life in the twit's kitchen. Quite a cool, 60s kitchen, admittedly, possibly even with a few new electric appliances about the place depending on the salary of your twit – but he's still a twit, and his kitchen's still a kitchen.
Breathless is good at that; the 60s kitchens, the dresses, the Brylcreem and the buses, the Austins and the Morrises, the drink-driving. Also at the paradoxes of the age – the looking both forwards and backwards, the rampant sex and rampant sexism, the shiny new NHS and the lingering stuffiness etc. It looks great, and it captures an age, a fascinating one – key elements in any period drama. Plus there are no screens or texting. You can forget the modern world for an hour (except that you're probably tweeting along).
But then Downton Abbey does all that too, and Downton is posh froth. What's beneath the gloss of Breathless? I'm talking about the drama part of period drama – its ability to get a hold of you so you become emotionally tangled up, go on thinking about it and the characters, new people in your life, after the credits roll. And I'm not getting that. Perhaps it doesn't matter – you can admire the shine, without worrying about what is – or isn't – underneath. Just don't go calling it the British Mad Men.
Trust Me I'm a Doctor (BBC2) is brilliant; I learned so many interesting things. Like BMI – the fat thing not the regional airline – is rubbish. OK, not rubbish, but it can be misleading, as an indicator of health; you can be fat and fit. I can be fat and fit. I also don't need to drink two litres of water a day. Yay, water's boring.
I'm a bit confused about whether I should take a quarter of an aspirin a day: it seems to depend on which distinguished expert you listen to. I'm certainly going to wash my hands a lot more often and a lot more thoroughly because a third of us have faeces on them … NO! I don't, you do, go away. And I'm going to bed early, because sleep deprivation is linked to all sorts of horrible and life-shortening ailments. Put another way, Newsnight gives you cancer.
Breathless is so much more than a Mad Men rip-off
EVERYONE has been banging on – well, OK, not everyone, but quite a few people – about ITV’s new 60s drama Breathless, and how it’s allegedly ripping off the cult US series Mad Men.
By Mike Ward
Published 10th October 2013 / http://www.dailystar.co.uk/columnists/mike-ward/344281/Breathless-is-so-much-more-than-a-Mad-Men-rip-off
Take it from me, these people are all idiots. And it's OK for me to say that because I was initially one of them.
Being quite a shallow human being, I took one look at the distinctive 60s style of the whole thing – the fashions, the cars, the home furnishings, the music, the opening titles, the fact that everyone was smoking their tar-caked little lungs out – and thought, yeah, d’you know what, I’m going to slag this series off as a Mad Men rip-off, I bet no other TV critic will think of that, aren’t I jolly clever and original and perceptive, huh?
But now that I’ve watched episode one again, properly this time – followed by previews of episodes two, three and four – I realise just what an ignorant ninny I was being. Breathless is, in fact, superb.
All right, so the influences from that American series are fairly transparent, but is that really such a big deal? Pretty much every show on television borrows ideas from other programmes, a huge proportion of them from America (Ricky Gervais’ comedies, for example, and Jonathan Ross’s chat shows, are massively influenced by their US counterparts).
Sod originality. What really matters is the substance. If superficial 60s snazziness were all Breathless had to offer us, the whole thing would have disintegrated within the first 20 minutes of episode one, like one of those tragic Bake Off trifles where the custard refuses to set.
Instead, it had me hooked. Britain was such a different place in 1961, the year the story gets underway, that the characters in Breathless, working in the gynaecological department of a leading London hospital, are having to deal with situations that seem fascinatingly alien to us.
Women weren’t allowed the new contraceptive pill, for example, unless they were married. And only then with their husband’s permission. Also, abortion was still illegal, which meant reluctantly pregnant women would resort to terrifying backstreet terminations, carrying all sorts of appalling risks.
The abortion thing is key here, because Jack Davenport’s character, charismatic surgeon Otto Powell, offers these desperate women a better alternative – still wholly illegal, and enough to get him struck off and banged up if word ever got out, but carried out safely, sensitively and responsibly.
It was when he defended his actions in episode one to nurse Angela Wilson (Catherine Steadman), who’d unwittingly found herself in attendance at one of these so-called “specials” of his – that we sensed there may be more to this guy than we’d initially given him credit for.
He insisted he was helping these people out of a nightmare they shouldn’t be forced to suffer – and he sounded very much as though he meant it.
“The law,” he told her, rejecting her protests “makes miserable lives and miserable women.”
So, OK, maybe he’s not just a rich, suave, self-satisfied womaniser after all. Otto may be smitten by nurse Angela (so am I, but that’s another story). And the more she rejects his advances – possibly because Otto sounds like a name better suited to a Labrador – the more he relishes the chase. In that sense, he seems just your average adulterous slimeball.
But the marriage that Otto is putting at risk, we’ll come to realise, isn’t quite right. Not so much in the sense that it’s a miserable one, more that it’s an act of some sort, an arrangement he and his wife Elizabeth have both agreed to, for reasons we’ve yet to figure out. And beneath their trappings of wealth and suburban respectability, they’re nursing a significant secret.
Elsewhere, we’ve just witnessed ninnyish junior consultant Dr Richard Truscott (Oliver Chris) marry pregnant ex-nurse Jean Meecher (Zoe Boyle). Jean has actually lost the baby on the morning of the wedding, but has insisted on going ahead with the ceremony – and not telling the groom about the miscarriage, terrified he’ll call the whole thing off. Will he eventually find out in any case? If so, will he go ballistic?
Richard and Jean’s is a relationship already weighed down with a whole heap of 60s issues. A working-class lass wedding a posh chap. A bride walking down the aisle when she’s supposedly up the duff. A nurse being forced to quit work because that’s what the rules used to demand if you got hitched to a doctor. All wrapped up in one merry little marital package.
Not so much another age as another planet. I shan’t go into any more detail about Breathless for now, just in case I give away some vital plot twist (you know, like I stupidly did when I mentioned the Martian invasion in next week’s Downton).
Suffice to say this is another cracking ITV drama – as gritty as it is stylish. And rest assured, the best is yet to come.
Review: Breathless – Series 1 Episode 2 – ITV
By Lina Talbot
Arts
Last updated: Wednesday, 16 October 2013 / http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/10/17/review-breathless-%E2%80%93-series-1-episode-2-itv/
Spoiler Alert: This review assumes you have already watched episode 2 of ‘Breathless’.
Female viewers must be feeling relieved after every episode of Breathless because things are different now. The control exerted by social codes and above all, by male authority over women, tied them down to being little more than kitchen maids and baby makers. Male viewers I hope will agree with Mr Powell, the debonair doctor with a dark past, that to keep women this miserable makes no sense.
For women to become properly liberated after the Second World War took a strangely long time. Men must have been very afraid, perhaps more so in the upper echelons where a certain family life needed to be on display. As the Powells’ marriage with one sprog and one housemaid demonstrates – concealing beneath it some terrible truth.
Natasha Little gives the most plausible performance as the fearful yet restrained Mrs Powell, whether supporting her husband and son or confronting Iain Glen’s sinister Chief Inspector Mulligan. It’s enjoyable stuff, so I am not going to “Wiki” what British commandos were doing in Cyprus in ’53 and spoil the mystery.
The other main characters have a touch of caricature about them. Even Jack Davenport as Powell overdoes the jolly father role. He also overplays his perplexity in the presence of Nurse Wilson (Catherine Steadman) after some very minor encounters. Perhaps she represents the future and the challenge facing these Sixties social paragons, but I may be over-interpreting.
The Enderbys (Shaun Dingwall and Joanna Page) are most watchable in their struggle to achieve higher status, though sadly they have a sexual problem to solve too. Baby making in these days is certainly fraught with difficulties. Happily, pills for some women’s problems are now available if you know the right chap, which former Nurse Meecher, now Mrs Jean Truscott (Zoe Boyle), does. As a modern girl struggling with Sixties society, she is not telling her husband and - clap on the back for the man – neither is Powell. Or is he being all things to all people?
So the sexual charade of the Sixties continues, this time with Pippa Haywood popping up as the cheated on wife whom her husband wishes to quieten with a dose of Librium. He warns Mr Truscott (Oliver Chris), who hesitates to prescribe this: “We can go and see the top man.” Later his wife holds a scalpel over his mistress’s head as a different sort of warning – presumably the only justice available for the wronged woman. Of course her mention of Holloway immediately recalls Haywood’s recent outing in Prisoners’ Wives.
Then there is the romantic subplot. Mmm. It is silly… but despite that charming, as the nervous Powell waits amongst the plebs in a street cafe for the object of his desire. He is now aware of Wilson’s background and her actions in helping Miss Mulligan (Holli Dempsey) escape marriage. He doesn’t yet know that she is Jean’s sister, nor that Mulligan has him by the goolies.
Once again the scenes are lovely to behold. In the Truscotts’ new flat, for example, the camera beautifully presents both its décor and its metaphorical meaning as the cage for the new wife. Indeed the formidable exterior has the look of Wormwood Scrubs. The Sixties’ hospital ward rounds become comic parades, the private consultation almost an assignation.
I bet the writer and director Paul Unwin is having a ball. He has built up considerable expertise with medical drama, having co-created Casualty and worked on Holby City. Most recently he was lead director on the US network series Combat Hospital. No doubt he realised that people who watch medical drama are more interested in the social milieu of the protagonists, and this time he focuses on the milieu.
Though the dialogue still bothers me. It’s too unnatural – comic book even – I presume Unwin intends to mimic Sixties TV shows in the mould of Danger Man and The Avengers. With such a visual feast, a terse dialogue may be a blessing, providing the bon mots keep coming. This week Matron (Diane Fletcher) offers her reactionary guideline for women: “we need to be tamed.” OK, the blame does not lie entirely with the men then.
↧