Photography exhibit: Water on the Lens at The Movieum of London

It's Friday, so what better than some truly extraordinary photography to take you away from the quotidian grind?





These astonishing underwater images are all taken from Water on the Lens, a collection of behind-the-scenes photographs taken during shoots for various films, TV shows, commercials and pop videos at Pinewood Studios. (Umpteen Bond movies, Slumdog Millionaire and Jake Gyllenhaal's new movie The Prince of Persia have all been shot there.)

I have enough difficulty staying afloat, so I can't begin to imagine how underwater photographer (and commercial diver) Phoebe Rudomino manoeuvres her equipment around the extraordinary Underwater Stage (U Stage) at Pinewood. It houses a vast permanently filled water tank (holding 1.2 million litres of water), and stars including Keira Knightley, Jared Leto, Sharon Stone, Matt Lucas and James Blunt are amongst those she captured whilst they performed underwater, alongside sets from Casino Royale, The Da Vinci Code, EastEnders, Elizabeth: The Golden Age and Dr. Who.

Hunter Boot*, the quintessential British waterproof rubber boot manufacturer who are rather aptly sponsoring Water on the Lens, have very kindly offered LLG readers a pair of tickets to the exhibition (details below). First person to leave a comment (asking for them) gets the tickets!

*Like all good country girls at heart, I love my Hunter wellies. Click here to see my pair.

Credits:
Top photograph: ‘Imagine’ Total Hydration body wash TV commercial 21 July 2006
A recreated Parisian apartment becomes a watery, hydrated version of real life and the model ‘floats away’ at the end of the advert.
Middle: Keira Knightley photographic campaign for Fresh 2O 3 December 2005
The photographer Candice shot Keira Knightley submerged in haute couture dresses and jewellery for a photoshoot to promote water charity Fresh 2O.
Bottom: Olay's Spa Exfoliating Ribbons TV commercial 28 June 2007

Water on the Lens, sponsored by Hunter Boot, forms part of The Movieum of London in the Riverside Rooms, County Hall, Southbank, London SE1 open now until 28 October 2009.
Tickets £12 adults, £10 concessions, £8 children available from Ticketmaster.

Maelstrom by Roxy Paine at The Met

Sunday afternoons are for The Met. Ambling around The Temple of Dendur, peering at the models from the Tomb of Meketre, admiring the Robert Adam Dining Room from Lansdowne House and, especially, checking out the installations up on the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden.

Each year, under the unwavering stare of Rodin's Les Trois Ombres, a different sculptor's work is showcased up there: in 2007 an installation of recent work by Frank Stella, in 08 three pieces of previously unseen work by Jeff Koons, including Balloon Dog (Yellow) which reflected my distorted image back at me like a fairground sideshow.

This year it's Maelstrom by Roxy Paine, a site specific piece from his Dendroid series, which explore systems such as vascular networks, tree roots, industrial piping, and fungal mycelia.

I first saw his work in Madison Square Park in 2007, when Conjoined, two oversized silver trees, reached branches towards the skies, fingering their way through the real trees.


Image: Madison Square Park
This year he has gone a whole lot bigger: Maelstrom is a site specific 130-foot-long by 45-foot-wide stainless-steel sculpture. Intended to give the feeling of being caught in a cataclysmic force of nature, against the background of Central Park and the New York skyline, it succeeds in both being alien and natural.



The tree limbs were made elsewhere, and craned over the roof of The Met to be welded together on site. Do watch this fascinating video of its construction:



There are great flashes of humour up there too:



Due to end on October 25th, the installation's public viewing schedule has been extended through November 29th.
Roxy Paine on the Roof: Maelstrom
April 28, 2009–November 29, 2009 (weather permitting)
The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden

ps Can you spot where I shot my blog header now?!

Art lovers at San Francisco's MoMA

blog.mode:addressing fashion

It was a Bank Holiday here in Manhattan (President's Day. No? Me neither.) yesterday, so I nipped up to the UES to visit The Metropolitan Museum's blog.mode:addressing fashion exhibition at The Costume Insitute.

It was not what I expected. It's certainly not an exhibit that has anything whatsoever to do with fashion blogging, rather a chronological display of some iconic pieces from the archives.

The darkened galleries have some truly exquisite pieces on display, from two 18thC panniered silk dresses to a Madame Gres goddess dress, through Galliano's deconstructed dress for Dior and a Theyskens frilled confection for Nina Ricci. Beautifully curated, the notes included direct quotes from some of the designers.

There is no open access standing collection at The Costume Institute as there is at London's V&A museum, so this is a rare chance to see a very small sample of what is held by The Met. This in itself would have sufficed as a reason to open up the galleries to the public but, in an attempt to appear all post-modern, they have centred the show around the idea of visitor comment, installing a bank of computers so that visitors can engage in a debate upon the merits of individual items in the show, with a new image posted daily. The blog is here.

Surely museums should be doing this anyway, regardless of the exhibit? Using this as the focal point of the show seems like a pretty spurious reason for getting out some glorious, but unconnected pieces from the archives.

I was also unamused to discover that no merchandising had been produced in conjunction with the show, which does rather prove my point.

There are currently over 80 million blogs in existence, and quite a few discuss fashion. You'd have thought that someone might have gone, hmm, I bet plenty of those fashion bloggers would like a poster of the show's publicity shot?

But no.

An American museum missing out on a revenue opportunity? That's news in itself.

Calatrava: An architect for the 21st Century

I’ve written already about the National Design Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt in Manhattan, which brings together the experimental designs and emerging ideas—including animation, new media, fashion, robotics, architecture, product, medical, and graphic design—at the centre of American culture from 2003 to 2006.

The plentiful exhibits run the gamut from computer games: The Sims, and SnowWorld. a three-dimensional virtual-reality game designed for to lessen pain in severely wounded burn victims through to fashion: Thom Browne’s new vision for menswear and Mara Cornejo/Zero’s experiments with clothing the female form, passing by, for example, a Ron Arad lamp and an James Bond-esque underwater motorcycle.

But, easy as it is to spend an entire day working through the two floors of exhibits, the installation that holds me transfixed each time I visit (& I’ve been four times already) is the 3D video rendering of bridge architect Santiago Calatrava’s World Trade Center Transportation Hub.


It would be easy to write this off as yet another self indulgent architectural carbuncle, especially when one considers that, although Calatrava visualised the structure as a bird being released from a child's hand, safety concerns have limited the initial scope, it looks more like the offspring between a dinosaur and an enraged porcupine from the exterior. Costing $2 billion it’s due to finally open in 2009.

There is a widespread belief that the rebuilding of the Ground Zero site must aspire to include a spiritual dimension, and it could be argued that a structure that resembles a stegosaurus wouldn’t necessarily fulfil this idea, yet Calatrava has conceived an interior beautiful in its clarity and in its towering vision, which transcends its exterior, with a roof span which opens to the sky both in good weather and every year on September 11th.


The soaring spaces in subway stations are the cathedral-like spaces of the Nineties and the Noughties: Norman Foster’s cavernous spaces in his system for Bilbao, and his Canary Wharf vast ticket hall filled with refracted light for the Jubilee Line extension in London represent the Nineties; Calavatra’s WTC Subway the Noughties. The essential difference: Foster’s spaces are underground, Calatrava’s station concourse is flooded with natural light.


But, unlike Foster, Calatrava is both an architect & an engineer, who started primarily as a bridge and train station designer. With the WTC hub he marries both disciplines in a purity of design that combines both the banally functional and the quietly beautiful in a building that is an ambitious, and ultimately successful, memorial to the events of September 2001.

Design Life Now: National Design Triennial 2006
On view December 8, 2006–July 29, 2007

Guggenheim Abu Dhabi

This is the latest model for Frank Gehry's proposed Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, part of the new Saadiyat Island Cultural District in Abu Dhabi. When looked at in context with Guggenheim Bilbao it looks extraordinarily ambitious. I guess this is what happens when you have Middle Eastern oil money behind an arts project.


And, if that building didn't smack you right in the face, there is also a performing arts centre by Zaha Hadid (above) which should be vulgar but is strangely beautiful, Jean Nouvel's Classical Museum, and Tadao Ando's Maritime Museum. All are scheduled to open in 2012.

The models & plans for the project are currently on display at The Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi.

Top image: Guggenheim by Frank Gehry, Abu Dhabi
Bottom image: Performing Arts Centre by Zaha Hadid, Abu Dhabi

THE GOLDEN AGE OF COUTURE: PARIS AND LONDON 1947-1957

‘A golden age seemed to have come again’. Christian Dior, 1948
The V&A’s autumn exhibition, The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947-1957, is set to be one of the most beautiful exhibitions in London this year. It will also host London's answer to The Met's Costume Institute Gala. It's always been surprising that the V&A didn't exploit for fundraising its truly world class fashion and costume archive in the same manner that The Met has for years.

The London Gala, chaired by Alex Shulman, editor of British Vogue, has a commitee derived from the usual fashion world suspects: magazine editors: Anna Wintour, Carine Roitfeld; designers: Karl Lagerfeld, Valentino, Donatella Versace, Comte Hubert de Givenchy; socialites: Lady Helen Taylor, Jemima Khan; entertainment: Kylie Minogue & Sienna Miller, and a few wild cards including Becca Cason Thrash, the Texan oil billionaire’s wife, whose support has no doubt been elicited to attract international fiscal support.

The exhibition itself will explore one of the most glamorous and remarkable decades in fashion history. Starting with the impact of Christian Dior’s New Look after the Second World War, it will look at the work of Dior and his contemporaries during the period when haute couture was at its height.

Coinciding with the 60th anniversary of the launch of the New Look in 1947, it will examine the world of couture, highlighting the work of Dior, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Hubert de Givenchy and Pierre Balmain in Paris and their London counterparts Norman Hartnell and Hardy Amies. Other successful designers of the time - such as Fath, Griffe, Stiebel, and Michael of London - will feature in a broad survey of the decade.


More than 100 dresses will be on display alongside photographs by Cecil Beaton and Richard Avedon and original Hollywood and documentary film. More than 95 per cent of the dresses are from the V&A’s own fashion collections. A section will focus on handcraft and techniques, with undergarments and the insides of dresses on display.

The exhibition will finish with a small selection of pieces of contemporary haute couture taken from the Autumn/Winter 2005/06 collection of designer John Galliano for Christian Dior in Paris.

The exhibition runs from 22 September 2007 – 6 January 2008

Dress by Balenciaga. Dress by Givenchy.
Both dresses from the V&A archive. Images reproduced from the V&A.

Casa Mono: A perfect take on modern tapas in New York

After a pah! at the Gordon Matta-Clark retrospective at the Whitney, H & I trundled over to Gramercy to find a place to eat before The Kooks. Having rejected Pete's Tavern and its serving platter size plates of fried food, we took a cancelled reservation at Casa Mono, owned by Mario Batali, & billed as a modern tapas restaurant. The tiny space, with tables & chairs rammed up against each other speaks of an operation which care more about revenue than an eater's comfort.

Still pleasant, rapid service always helps, and the menu reads well. H ordered fried sardines, & we shared utterly scrumptious steamed asparagus with fried shitake & a truffle butter reduction, a new take on patatas bravas with chilli spiked oil and spring onions, very good bread and olives, and clever tiny croquetas of pumpkin with a melted goats cheese centre, which could have done with a shot of chilli, tomato or perhaps something citrus-y.

The wine list is comprehensive & wholly Spanish, but seems designed, like the space, to squeeze the diner. There are no wines available by the glass, bar cava & sherry, although a few wines can be ordered in cuartos, baby carafes which are about a couple of glasses. Was also somewhat surprised to discover bottles of Manzanilla & Amontillado on the list. Who in their right mind orders an entire bottle of sherry?

My current theory is that tapas are wholly unsuited to the American belief that restaurant food must be served in ginormous portions. Casa Mono gets around this problem by calling the dishes tapas, but actually serving raciones, the larger plates of food desgned to be shared by a group of people, and priced accordingly.

In a way, it's a shame, because the combination of portion size and high pricing restricts a thorough roam around the menu. Still, as I generally want to eat my way through most menus, I applaud any restaurant where I can eat more than two dishes in any one sitting without doing a Mr Creosote. Jason Atherton at Maze and Gordon Ramsey's The London Bar at The London Hotel in Manhattan (spot the connection) are speaheading this grazing approach to fine dining, and I wholly approve.

The Met's Costume Institute Benefit Gala - Christopher Kane & Givenchy

I've avoided commenting on The Met's Costume Ball as I am sure any fashion minded person is thoroughly sick of the pics by now. However, whilst I was on the 'phone last night, I did scroll through the 156, yes you read that right, 156 pics on style.com to see what all the non A list were wearing too, and the two following pics struck me as worthy of comment.

First up: Christopher Kane's work partner & sister Tammy, looking utterly splendid in Christopher Kane AW07. And proving that you don't need to be a teeny tiny stick to wear his designs, just sexy, grown up and glamorous.



And then this:




I've been thinking hard how best to describe this. A classic case of the dress wearing her, rather than the other way around. It's reminiscent of my grandmother's old loo roll cover, but then there's also a hint of those ruched curtains that everyone had back in the '80's. Most of all it reminds me of those balls of fur around a shaved French poodle's legs.

The woman wearing this Givenchy Haute Couture frock is a celebutard* called Fabiola Beracasa who is known here in NY for being rich and social. Beyond that I have failed to discover a reason for her existence. I am at a loss as to why Givenchy could have possibly thought putting this dress on a woman who is not the shape for which it was designed was a good idea. I am sure she could have looked charming in something a little less frou frou. Bottom line: this is a runway look, designed to show off the talent of both the designer & les petits mains, not a real life look. It was borderline ludicrous on Natasha Poly (see below), it does not work on Fabiola who, bless her, will not be gracing a runway any time soon (unless at some celebutard benefit).



* Celebutard: Celebrity/debutante=celebritante. Celebrity/debutante/very stupid person = celebutard

Photos via style.com

The Met's Costume Institute Benefit Gala

Oh my goodness. Take your sunglasses if you are one of the lucky few to have stumped up £100k for a table or are a designer/model/actress in La Wintour's pocket. The American wing of The Met is closed whilst they decorate the large hall for Monday's party. We peeked through the windows to see the most horrific neon/black/primary splashy/squiggly hangings being prepped: kind of like the bastard art love children of African/Tribal & Keith Haring. Added to which the centre of the hall has what looks like raised squares edged with troughs of pale pink rose bushes. Nice combo. A colour blind interior designer perchance?

The gala may be celebrating the opening of the Paul Poiret exhibit and, as any fule kno, Poiret was known for introducing the vivid colors of the Fauvists and the exotic references of the Ballets Russes to the haute couture but, really, these hangings are VILE. Less of an homage and more of an insult, I'd say.

Kulchur

Yesterday we dragged ourselves away from House (JD) & Sex & The City (me)* and up to the rarified air of the Upper East Side. East 96th no less (consider that we live on East 6th). Several of the major museums are on Fifth which borders Central Park, allowing the dilatory museum goer to get through them all in a relatively short period of time - think South Kensington. The Met loomed ahead but we couldn't face it, our cultural leanings satiated (for the time being) by the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, The Guggenheim & The Frick.

To my utter, utter shame I had never visited Cooper Hewitt before. The current show, Design Life Now: National Design Triennial is a window into the experimental designs and emerging ideas at the centre of American culture now. It's beautifully curated and, above all, enormously enjoyable. Go, go, go if you are in New York. Take the relatives, hell, take the kids. (There's Pixar & penguins, KidRobots & The Sims - fun, fun, fun for all the family.)

The rest of the day.
Supper: Vietnamese (sauteed pea shoots, chili spiked long beans & beancurd) at Tigerland on 1st at 6th with JD & T. (She's planning a PhD on Jewish mysticism in 14th C Italy. As you do.)
Party: Tre's housewarming in Alphabet City, in an apt filled with models & beer. I lasted an hour, exhausted by culture.

Oh, & I have orange nails now.

*I have an excuse, yes I do. Interviewing Pat Field on Wednesday. This is research, oh yes it is.