Couture « Manolo for the Big Girl

March 31, 2010

Prom Week: Big Question

Filed under: Couture,Dior!,Galliano!,The Big Question — Miss Plumcake @ 2:13 pm

On Monday I defended the flight-of-fancy prom dress and I stand by it. If we ever redo the Plumcake familial creed and for some unknown and hateful reason they DON’T go for “Psycho Killer: Qu’est-ce que c’est?” or a quote from To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything. Love, Julie Newmar (my two suggestions) I hope they might entertain the following:

There is no excess like wretched excess.

Most women don’t have many occasions where it’s socially acceptable to have a full on sartorial extravaganza. It’s pretty much costume balls and prom. Note how I DIDN’T say wedding? Although by all means keep wearing bad wedding dresses, it’s the only thing –except the open bar– that makes most weddings enjoyable. You just go ahead and marry your fourth husband while wearing a Cinderella gown. The gays and I will be in the back pew making knowing comments about the kind of girls –fairytale heroines included– who wear clear heels.

But the fact most of our lives –and most of our budgets– can’t support high octane fashion fantasies, shouldn’t stop us from occasionally indulging in a daydream or two.

Today Miss Plumcake wants to know:

If you had to do it all over again what would you wear to prom? Money, time, history and physics are of no matter. I just want to know your fantasy gown.

At first I thought I might want something by Poiret, but then decided my shape didn’t suit his ideas. Then I thought about putting Queen Elizabeth I’s dressmakers to the test. I AM awfully fond of that fabric with all the swampthings on it, but I just know I’d put it on and feel like an aquarium made sweet upholstered love to an overstuffed ottoman.

So then I went to the great couturiers. Cristobal Balenciaga: gorgeous and flawless but not exuberant enough. Coco Chanel: Nazi sympathizer. Christian Dior: now we’re getting somewhere.

I’ve always loved –and been flattered by– The New Look which took the fashion world by wasp-waisted, full-skirted storm in 1947.

It’s gotta be John Galliano.

I’d happily wear any of these from our Funky Little Fashion Troll for Dior’s 60th anniversary of the New Look. Heck, I’d wear pretty much any gown he’s done for Dior. Mostly I just want to wear a lyre on my head.

Of course, when I first asked myself the question, one dress did pop out and, surprisingly, it wasn’t from the mini maestro. It was the cream feather dress from Alexander McQueen’s Fall 2008 ready to wear.

Is it my favorite McQueen ever? No. It’s not even my favorite from that show, which literally made me weep it was so beautiful. But it’s up there and it’s haunted me for years, so in my made up life –the one where Stephen Fry is straight and MADLY in love with me and Hugh Laurie is just sick with jealousy– this is the dress I would wear to prom.

But I still want that damn lyre.

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March 9, 2010

Fashion Musing (Plus gratuitous Rankin Bass reference)

Filed under: Couture,Fashion Week,Galliano! — Miss Plumcake @ 12:30 pm

So I completely ignored Couture back in January and I know some of youse (listen to me talk like a Yankee!) have complained about it, so here’s a little bit of fashion musing over the past fashion week doings.

So I’ve got to say I haven’t been moved thusfar in Paris, and I’m especially disappointed in the Galliano show. We love John Galliano. He is our Funky Little Fashion Troll. He loves women, his models almost always have breasts and hips and other lady parts generally shunned by the fashion industry. I love him at Dior and I love the stuff he does for his own house. That being said:

HUH?

I just didn’t get it.

I mean, there are some amazing individual pieces like this coat.

I love this coat.

I want to LIVE in this coat.

I want to marry this coat and cook its dinner and emotionally blackmail it around the holidays.

(more…)

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January 8, 2010

Innnnteresting

Filed under: Couture,Culture,Fashion,Suck it,The Fat's in the Fire — Miss Plumcake @ 11:45 am

So I was clicking through Style.com’s “12 Reasons to be Cheerful in 2010” with a bit of fear and loathing. Conde Nast is not historically a friend of the fatly, so I was interested to see three of their reasons –that’s a full 25% in some quarters– had something to do with fashion beyond the double-zeros.

First there was the downer we discussed yesterday, which was all about how Prada refused to design for non-model extras as the costume designer of the Met’s production of Attila. Bah and humbug and, as you may recall, suck it.

Then there was the bit about Mark Fast scoring a line with Topshop. Fast, if you’ll recall, was the young buck who used to make his clothes only in one size but who sent down three plus-sized models the runway for Spring 2010, causing two of his stylists to quit.

I very much Do Not Love his clothes, but I love Mr Fast for using plus size models as models, not as tokens in his ultra-shredded sexpot show.

Then there was a note –and this is the most hopeful of all– about how models like Lara Stone (a size 4 sometimes 6) and Catherine McNeil –who has been getting a lot of flack for gaining weight and now looks to be a size 4– are getting tons and tons of work as the trend swings away from stick-thin and back to merely very slim.

According to style.com:

“If McNeil, Stone, and Gemma Ward—another reemerging catwalker dealing with negative body-image hype—were the new prototypes for healthier-looking models, we’d be much relieved. For now, there’s always Crystal Renn.”

This is exciting. This is REALLY exciting. Because one size 12 model in a lineup of thirty double-naughts is a gimmick, this is CHANGE. If we can get back to where a size 6 is model-normal, then maybe a size 12 model won’t seem so out of the ordinary. Maybe young girls won’t be so likely to develop eating disorders to starve themselves into a shape they’ll never EVER naturally be. We’ve been in Waif World for about 15 years now –remember when Kate Moss was the thinnest model on the runway?– and there’s a change in the air. Whee!

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November 23, 2009

Monday Hotness: Zac Posen

Filed under: Couture,The Monday Hotness — Miss Plumcake @ 12:00 pm

Gosh Zac Posen is cute.

I mean, this kid has been on my radar since we were both in our early 20’s (he’s a year younger than I am) and I never really thought much about his hotness until recently. When you think of hot guy designers usually you think of Tom Ford or maybe Marc Jacobs –because seriously, is there an editorial he hasn’t stripped for?— but Zac Posen is relatively unassuming which is why I was all breathless when I did some googling and discovered, wow, he is REALLY good looking.

I think I’ve got a soft spot for the 29 year-old designer because he reminds me a bit of Andre, had Andre been hit with the Marlon Brando stick instead of the Overly Sensitive French Chef Who STILL Doesn’t Understand the Concept of International Time Zones stick (he’s back in Lyon at the moment and making me insane with his ill-timed calls.. “Hi Baby! Do you meeses me? I meese you. Do you meeses me now? I am still meesing you”).

And the things I find attractive about Zac are also what make me forgive Andre for all his Gallic goofiness. Great nose, beautiful lips, lovely curls and those sort of eyes that usually end morning-after trips to church or Planned Parenthood.

I think I like him best with a little stubble, he’s so clean cut here in his Clark Kent get up.

I get the blue suit because it looks great with the yellow dress, but what’s the deal, Superman?

Or maybe he really IS a superhero and he’s just going UNDERCOVER as a brilliant young designer so he can infiltrate their world. But no, that’s crazy. It’s not like the fashion world is being preyed upon by some evil genius with a weird costume and some sort of crazy German accen…

oh. Never mind.

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November 20, 2009

Friday Fierceness: Isabella Blow

Filed under: Absolutely Fabulous,Accessories,Advanced Fashion,Couture,Fashion History,Friday Fierceness — Miss Plumcake @ 5:44 pm

Isabella Blow was a genius, and she got screwed.

La Blow, former Tatler editor, muse, star-finder and influence-wielder would have turned 51 yesterday, and her tragic story was fashion legend even before it ended with her death-by-weed-killer in March, 2007.

She was not a pretty girl.

No true fashion visionaries are traditionally beautiful (Miuccia Prada, Diana Vreeland, Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, etc), she had a weak chin, droopy eyes and perhaps the most painfully British set of teeth to be found outside the Royal Family.

But she had an eye.

BOY did she have an eye and she decided to follow Oscar Wilde’s commandment: if she could not BE a work of art, then at least she would wear them.

Thus created was the woman Lady Gaga wishes she could be.

She was an Evelyn Waugh character come to life: high born, brilliant and hopelessly self-destructive. Blow left England in 1979 and wound up in New York, working as Anna Wintour’s assistant (the Devil may wear Prada, but the Assistant discovered McQueen) and then for André Leon Talley.

She returned to London to work for Tatler, which is like American Vogue but smart and interesting, first as an assistant and then as its Fashion Director. She also bounced around the rest of Conde Nast and did a stint as the Sunday Times Style section (London, not New York).

During that time she developed her relationship with boy-genius milliner Philip Treacy and became his muse, constantly daring him to create a hat she would not wear (as noted above, lobsters were not a barrier to millinery).

She discovered straight-then plus-then straight-sized model Sophie Dahl (Granddaughter of Roald, which explains why the heroine of The BFG was named Sophie), Stella Tennant and perhaps most legendarily, discovered Alexander McQueen when she bought young Lee”s entire student collection for ₤5,000 –paid for in ₤100/wk allotments as she couldn’t afford it all in one go– in 1992.

Her personal life was not a happy one.

Disinherited by her father in the early 90’s she was married briefly in the 80’s and then joined her lot with Detmar Blow in 1989. Their marriage was not a success as Isabella battled with depression and could not conceive a child. Detmar, needing to carry on the family name in order not to lose the familial manse designed by his muckety muck architect ancestor (also a Detmar Blow) temporarily left Isabella when her I.V.F. didn’t work so he could knock up some girl. Charming, no?

As Isabella continued to suffer from depression and a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, the people she discovered and nurtured –particularly McQueen– were moving onwards and upwards.

Her friend Daphne Guinness said “She was upset that McQueen didn’t take her along when he sold his brand to Gucci. Once the deals started happening, she fell by the wayside. Everybody else got contracts, and she got a free dress” which was especially hurtful as Blow was cripplingly low on cash and was rumored to have personally negotiated the Gucci deal.

Blow tried several creative attempts at suicide, finally succeeding by drinking Paraquat in the bathroom of the family manse her husband had left her to save.

Blow’s memorial service was, as you’d imagine, well-attended and there has been a great deal of guilt –both public and private– about her treatment by her fashion friends and colleagues. Read Simon Doonan’s self-punishing recollection –published shortly after her death– here.

As a personal note, I wept when I saw Alexander McQueen’s S/S 2008 show, an homage to Isabella chock-full of Philip Treacy confections (including a quivering mob of feather butterflies which I came up with for a Halloween costume in 2001. I have proof.)

Isabella Blow did not have a happy ending, nor indeed a happy middle or beginning, but she was one of the few great characters of the post-couture era and her eccentricity has inspired a new generation of fashion daredevils. Have a great weekend, and wherever you’re going, put on a hat. Do it for La Blow.

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October 9, 2009

All Walks (kinda)

Filed under: Couture,Fashion,Petite and Plus-Size,Plumcake's Home Truths — Miss Plumcake @ 11:25 am

I shamelessly stole this from Style Spy because

a) it’s awesome

b) I’m about to go on vacation so I’m not even trying to come up with my own material.

All Walks Beyond the Catwalk from ALL WALKS BEYOND THE CATWALK on Vimeo.

On one hand, YAY! On the other, uh, not to look a gift cat in the mouth, but is this really all walks?

Because it kinda looks to me like it’s “mostly the same walk, but some have bigger shoes and oh there’s a black girl too“.

It’s like you can have ONE thing working “against” you: you can be plus-size if you’re tall and young and gorgeous. You can be black as long as you’ve got processed hair and fit all other standard model requirements. You can be old as long as you’ve got the bone structure of a patrician flamingo. And you can be tall if you’re…well, you kinda have to be tall.

Don’t get me wrong, I still really like this video and the concept behind it.

Maybe they didn’t include women who are more than just a hair out of the mainstream because they didn’t want to seem like it was a gimmick.

I mean Jackie Robinson was a great ball player, but he wasn’t the best the Negro Leagues had to offer by a long shot, but the reason you know Jackie Robinson instead of Ray Dandridge –widely considered one of the best ever to have played the game– is that Mr Robinson was far more palatable to white working class America than Mr Dandridge. Maybe they wanted to make sure the women were still palatable enough for fashion consumption: thus the being tall and beautiful and mostly slender.

Clothes as they’re designed now look better on tall women and on thin women.

They just do. Being tall means you can carry off a lot of stuff short chicks can’t, and that’s just the way it is (you pocket people get all the men, so let the tall girls have this one) but just because tall girls have an easier time of things doesn’t mean designers should be expected to design only for tall women. But they do.

I believe the average fit model is about 5’9″ which is fine for me, I’m just an inch taller, but the average American woman is just under 5’4″ oh, and petite models? Generally between 5’6″ – 5’8″.

So should we be glad that in an industry so totally skewed and screwed that designers are getting and embracing SOME change and take what we can get or do the All Walks people get a “close, but no style cigar”?

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September 29, 2009

What Miss Plumcake is…

Filed under: Books,Couture,Fashion,Fashion Week,Food,Music,Perfume — Tags: What Miss Plumcake is — Miss Plumcake @ 1:27 pm

It’s Tuesday, it’s rainy and I still cannot find the bottle of ten year-old Talisker I last set on the organ console at church. That being said, let’s find out What Miss Plumcake is…

Reading: Fishing for Amber. A dreamy, phantasmagorical alphabet of short intertwining stories full of Celtic fairy tales, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Jack the Lad, the Dutch Golden Age, esoteric saints, curious historical incidents and a sentimental nod to his storytelling father. Last night was D for Delphinium –retelling the tulipomania in Delft during the 17th century– and E for Ergot, the rye fungus related to LSD which was believed to cause St Anthony’s Dance, better known as Sydenham’s chorea, where scriveners tell of people literally dancing themselves to death.

Best consumed on rainy evenings next to a fire (p.s. you have to open the flue EVERY time. Whoops) with the single malt of your choice comfortably within reach of yourself, but out of reach of your surprisingly dipsomaniacal dog. You can pick it up at Amazon for essentially the cost of shipping, so get to it.

Watching: Green Wing. The second season is finally available on Hulu. Brilliant, howlingly obscene and very possibly the funniest show I’ve ever seen. Plus it features my secret ginger boyfriend, Julian Rhind-Tutt. Not for the easily scandalized.

Hearing: Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). What? Can’t a fat white Episcopalian chick with an enviable collection of millinery occasionally bring the ruckus?

Smelling: Shalimar by Guerlain. Sable coat luxury in perfume form but less likely to get you splashed with red paint. A big scent –especially the glorious original parfum version– this is one I apply liberally before hitting the hay so it’s not overpowering for day. Get the parfum if you can, but the edt is nothing to sniff at (get it? get it?!) either.

Loving: Mentoring. Not only do you get to be completely insufferable when people ask you what your lunch plans are “Oh me? I’m mentoring an at-risk youth. But no, you have fun getting your mani-pedi. I’ll just be here saving the world.” but it’s fun too. Plus you can totally rip off their one-liners at cocktail parties because they’re too young to drink and can’t bust you on it. NOT THAT I WOULD EVER DO THAT.

Hating: DSquared2’s stupid redneck-themed show in Milan.

Wanting: Greenling Local Organic Delivery. One of the things about wearing high-end shoes is knowing I could probably meet the person who cobbled my shoes, look around and not feel bad about myself. I can’t say the same thing about my groceries.

So when I discovered Greenling — a service delivering local, organic food and produce to your door (in super fuel-efficient vans, of course) once a week– I thought, “I’m having that!” At $50 for both the local produce basket and the Farmstead basket of dairy/meat/bread goodies a week, it’s about the same as I’d regularly spend on groceries, plus I know if I really wanted to, I could get in my car and drive down to see where my food is produced.

Buying: The Breton Shirt. Shockingly versatile, always chic and improves with age. Sound familiar (notice how I kept out the part about “found on top of French sailors?” That’s because I’m a LADY.) Accept no substitutes. It’s gotta come straight outta Brittany. This company has the best prices and offers free worldwide airmail delivery.

So what’s turning your pages this week?

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