Sex and the Brits: An ode to irony
By Suzy Menkes International Herald Tribune
WEDNESDAY, MAY 3, 2006
NEW YORK Gathered in Manhattan to celebrate the essence of English- ness, fashion's Britpack proposed their own ideas.

"The garden, sweet peas, black tie and green Wellies," said Stella Tennant, the beanpole model descended from a duke.

"It's sex in the garden!" claimed the movie star Sienna Miller, looking round at the pansies and primulas on the rooftop terrace.

"Tomato ketchup," announced the soccer player's wife, Victoria Beckham, in a tomato red dress; while the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver went for the "roast beef and Yorkshire pudding" that he had cooked for the festive meal.

Tamara Mellon, queen of Jimmy Choo shoes, threw in "scruffy"; and the actor Rupert Everett said "nor washing too much or smelling of lip gloss."

The rock star Nick Rhodes summed up a general view.

"If there is a difference between the English and the Americans, it is irony," he said.

It takes a certain irony to envisage Anna Wintour, first lady of American Vogue, showing the Duke of Devonshire around the grand and glorious English period rooms of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where, among dark Jacobean furniture and an Elizabethan portrait, a Vivienne Westwood gown is accessorized with a necklace filled with sperm; or where a grand state bed has a Gothic scenario of Queen Victoria in her widow's weeds watching her Albert lying in a compromising position in a silver death mask and Alexander McQueen's taut tartan trousers.

And it was surely with a wicked wink that Andrew Bolton, the curator of the Costume Institute's new exhibition, placed the quill hat worn by Camilla Parker-Bowles on her wedding day, beside the tailcoat and top-hatted figure of the Duke of Windsor, the British royal family's ultimate transgressor.

With its powerful sexual charge and a scurrilous element under an elegant exterior, "AngloMania" (until Sept. 4) is a spectacular success: dramatic and exciting to look at, but also with a powerful undercurrent of intelligence.

There are subversive Punk pieces (think Queen Elizabeth printed on a T- shirt with a safety pin through her nose or an image of two gay cowboys on a 1976 Westwood T-shirt that caused a furor in its time.)

The historical base is the fine English furniture, the Gainsborough and Reynolds portraits and nostalgia, as in the now-forbidden fox hunt. In that scene, a trench coat flows down a life- size resin horse revealing bared female legs. It is an example of sly contrasts and a tribute to Burberry, celebrating its 150th birthday with this show.

"It is the clash of two different worlds that makes British-ness unique - we have an aristocratic, noble history, but it is always contrasted with something rebellious," claims Christopher Bailey, Burberry's creative director.

The show opens with a faded and distressed Union Jack and two figures juxtaposing a traditional frock coat and a Westwood 1976 Punk version. They represent Bolton's subtext: "Tradition and transgression in British fashion." Using those two competing elements in each non-chronological vignette, Bolton produces tension and drama, linking a dandy in a pinstriped suit and a bowler hat in a neo-Classical gentleman's club with the Punks. They are louche and menacing, as they loll across a dining table, their Mohican headgear made out of cigarettes, dolls legs or even tampons - all envisaged by the milliner Stephen Jones in his student years in the 1970s.

The origin of AngloMania was French: the 18th-century enthusiasm by Voltaire and Montesquieu for England as a land of reason, freedom and tolerance. Bolton sees that as a romantic construct and its force as an expression of style.

Wintour translates that as a free- flowing attitude to fashion. "You don't quite know what is going to happen or how people will behave," she says. "In the way the English dress, everyone looks different and has a personality, whereas so much of fashion is bland."

Inevitably, the exhibition focuses on fashion's great originals, especially Westwood and John Galliano, who compete in the hunt ball scene for the most extraordinary gowns infused with what Bolton calls "sardonic historicism." (The curator added a Galliano-clad man in newspaper print underclothes, stretched out on a marble mantelpiece, to represent another British phenomenon: the gutter press.)

Other major fashion roles are played by McQueen, whose distressed Union Jack frock coat, made for David Bowie in 1996, is shown, like many of the exhibits, as a portrait in a frame. Hussein Chalayan's topiary-trimmed tulle dress is part of an English country garden scene, where a video pours virtual rain down the windows and exquisite 18th-century dresses with exotic flower patterns are set off by Philip Treacy's erotic orchid hats, swelling up like Georgia O'Keeffe paintings.

In another powerful Upstairs/ Downstairs vignette, Chalayan's maids wear deconstructed dresses spilling out layers of the past in what Bolton calls "sartorial archaeology." Mounting the monumental carved staircase is a lavishly embroidered 19th-century dress and train by Charles Frederick Worth.

Honors go to the two British milliners Treacy and Jones, the latter offering a raven's feather headdress worn with Galliano's Dior gown, with crows cawing on the soundtrack.

Three key figures behind the show are the creative consultants and set designers Patrick Kinmonth and Antonio Monfreda, who turn each tableau into an intriguing narrative; and the wig maker extraordinaire Julien D'Ys, whose disheveled hairpieces - stained with blood for the hunting scene, damp and deflated in the rain-soaked garden and woven into a Union Jack Mohican hair style - are mini-masterpieces of invention.

Bolton is modest about his exceptional vision, but the senior curator Harol Koda praises the exhibition's cultural gravitas, energized by the edginess of Punk pieces and the juxtaposition of ancient and modern.

"It makes everybody think," says the Duke of Devonshire. "There are resonances to and fro, so a lot seems to be impulsive, but you can go back and see where it comes from - either consciously or not. And having the wealth of the Met to support it, this is a great collection."

Dressing for success: The new paradigm
By Suzy Menkes International Herald Tribune
TUESDAY, MAY 2, 2006
PARIS The book that founded the image industry and changed perceptions about clothes in the workplace has just hit 30-something.

"Dress for Success" by John T. Molloy, published in 1975, was the bible for fashion followers of the feminist generation. Women more interested in making it to the boardroom than in burning their bras needed to find a neat and tidy uniform for the workplace. And it is no wonder that they decided to stand shoulder-to-padded-shoulder with men in smart jackets, with a preference for pants, rather than skirts.

As the girlie world has spun full circle, offering frills, frocks and sugar pink colors, most women with serious jobs have stuck with the pantsuit formula, making Giorgio Armani their patron saint and rejecting so-called options such as skirts and cardigans, which is what Miss Moneypenny wore when women were secretaries rather than executives.

Condoleezza Rice, in her role as U.S. secretary of state, offers a fine example of a streamlined figure always appropriately dressed for her high-profile role. She, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany all make the pantsuit the keystone of their wardrobes. It is a case of no fuss and no fancy effects in a world where the job itself is more significant than its image.

Yet as the fashion world swings further away from the pantsuit - and even Armani himself abandoned it entirely for his autumn/winter collection - is there an alternative?

Although various designers, including the user-friendly Nicole Farhi, proposed the tailored shorts suit as a putative alternative, it is safe to say that no woman in a serious job is going to turn up at bank, boardroom or conference in above-the- knee shorts, even under a jacket.

But with one-piece dressing increasingly the focus this spring, is it possible literally to wear a dress for success?

A trawl of the new collections that have arrived in the shops show that dresses are the No.1 category, not the separate sportswear items that have dominated closets for so long. In fact, the dress is the key item to update an existing wardrobe and make it look modern. While fashionable pants come in very few options - skinny jeans, calf-length crops and the occasional sailor-style wide trousers - there seems to be a dress for every occasion. But not necessarily for the office.

Ruling out all low-necked and skimpy dresses as inappropriate in the workplace (not least because of summer air conditioning), the choice is much narrower. You can go the Condi/mother-of-the-bride/royal-lady route with a smart dress and matching coat, although many women will feel uncomfortable in a coat in the office and awkward taking it off when arriving at meetings or restaurants.

A dress as a stand-alone garment should be substantial enough to give gravitas to the wearer without being uncomfortable or demanding. The most effective style of the season is the pleated shirt dress, and significantly the best come from female designers who understand the concept and are not trying to create sexy, celebrity looks.

The dress with sleeves (an essential ingredient), and mostly with inserts of pleats, was espoused by Farhi; Alberta Ferretti, the queen of dresses; and by Miuccia Prada, who always gets these things right. Prada's striped cotton dresses look trim, businesslike and womanly, which is the winning combo.

Donna Karan, who says that she is focused on the dress, brought out some effective dresses with jackets. And Marni's designer Consuelo Castiglione created a collection of dresses that worked with jackets or under coats that were quirky enough not to look too formal or dressy.

Male designers also came up with sophisticated versions of dresses. Christopher Bailey might favor the raised-waist empire-line dresses that are most suited to ingénues and pregnant starlets, but he also sent out the perfect work dress: a pared-down trench cut as a smart, short-sleeved dress. At Hermès, Jean Paul Gaultier's shirt-waisted dresses had that ineffable Gallic chic that comes from extremely expensive fabrics superbly cut.

Diane von Furstenberg's wrap dresses work well for women with a good figure and the style to carry them off, and they have the advantage of being in soft, easy-to-handle fabrics. At Bottega Veneta (where the classy lattice bags are favorites with high-level women executives), the designer Tomas Maier took an intelligent approach to the dress, making it tailored to the waist or in jersey, a winning fabric because it does not wrinkle, however drawn-out a meeting or however long a flight.

If the dress is still not enough to tempt a trouser wearer to change, is there any movement on the pantsuit front? Armani, the brand leader in this category, made shapely jackets to partner soft pants for spring, giving a fresh fluidity to what was once a mannish look.

But with the confidence of a generation of working women behind them, this could be the season for aspiring female executives to address the dress.