Isabel Toledo

(All of the images are from ISABEL TOLEDO: Fashion From the Inside Out, by Valerie Steele and Patricia Mears. I took snapshots of a few pages for the purposes of review; they by no means do the amazing photography in the book justice.)

So after all the blathering about construction and knowing fabrics, I wanted to show what I meant about Toledo's work. It's interesting and unusual, sure. It is also very technically sophisticated -- these garments are engineered by an exceptional mind and the shape and the draping reflect Toledo's unique ability for 3D thinking. Some of the photos contain the patterns, and you can appreciate the unique nature of those -- I don't know of anyone else who cuts the clothing in this way.

Then these clothes are beautiful. Not at all driven by trends, Toledo has been doing her stuff since mid-1980's, and yet she always remains cutting edge, classic and avant-garde all at once, but always graceful, always beautiful. And flattering. She knows the body and designs for it (unlike many designers who see an actual average body as an annoyance that interferes with their vision.) And the models are diverse -- there are different ethnicities and body types, even ages. And her clothes are flattering on everyone, because she designs for a body, not despite of it.

Anyway, enjoy!

Croissant blouses and tuning fork pants:


Pedestal dresses:


Intricately constructed dresses. Notice the patterns overlayed in some of the photos.


Jellyfish blouses, with patterns:


One of many infanta dresses, this one with handkerchief hem. The circles are skirts, that ack flat (yes, she thinks about how clothes pack.)


More flat packing dresses. Each is constructed from two circles of fabric -- one ivory, one black.


What Mears referred to as 'manipulated surface': intricate pleating dives these dresses and jackets an appearance of ornament, but these are actually tiny pleats on the fabric. Designed not to add bulk.


Lace!





The next two photos demonstrate the suspension technique, where the fabric is supported by twisting cords or thick seams of fabric. On the first picture -- jersey dresses.


On the second -- taffeta Hermaphrodite dresses.


Gorgeous structure.


Toledo's tube jackets.


A jacket (model -- Alek Wek) and a jacket pattern. Did I mention that no one cuts sleeves like Toledo?


A variety of people in Toledo's sculptural garments (from Toledo's Nordstrom campaign, photographed by Ruven Afanador.)




Alek Wek and Carmen Dell'Orefice


And these are from 2007, when Toledo briefly worked for Anne Klein. These are the shots from Anne Klein fashion show. It's both amazing yet not, because really, both Toledo and Anne Klein are so much about practical dressing for average people. Even if Toledo's garments seem like so much more.

Isabel Toledo and Bravo TV

So I've been reading about Isabel Toledo. I also read about her losing Vogue/CFDA Award to Trovata. The book, thankfully, doesn't shy away from saying about how biased fashion is against women -- which is especially tragic, since this is one of the very few industries that heterosexual men have, for the most part, left to women and gay men. And even here, we see women constantly devalued.

Kell on Earth, the new Bravo show with Kelly Cutrone (the owner of PR firm People's Revolution) is an interesting illustration of this. On one hand, Kelly is an epitome of a strong-headed, decisive business owner; on the other, consistently through the first episode when a female employee made a mistake, she was chewed out; when a man did, women covered for him. This article confirms this general impression: Kelly herself gushes about the men in the office, while presenting women as silly worriers. Interestingly, in this show as well as Bravo's Rachel Zoe Project, men are seen mostly preening and discussing their lives, while women are seen doing the actual work. I am curious to see if this pattern holds throughout the series.

Anyway, back to Toledo. In the interviews, she frequently refuses the label "designer" and calls herself a dressmaker or a seamstress; her rationale for that is that the dressmaker is the one who knows and understands fabrics, what they can and cannot do; the seamstress is the one who constructs clothes (Toledo herself is also somewhat of an engineer). Some of her jersey dresses are built from very soft, drapey fabric suspended from thick twisting seams -- very much like bridges. It takes KNOWING how to sew, to make stuff like that. The designers who just sketch and hand the sketch over to an atelier cannot do that.

And speaking of: Launch My Line had its finale Wednesday. This show highlighted for me that the 'designers' on it were of the sketching variety, with actual work done by someone else; people who can imagine a piece of clothing but not make it, who have no idea of the fabrics' capabilities. Those are the people who WANT to be called designers -- the artists, the visionaries, not seamstress or dressmakers (not to mention, the latter two terms are deeply gendered. The seamstresses are commonly devalued because they are female.) The result is somewhat bland, predictable, and what judges call "on trend" -- which is a generous term that describes the same stuff you see everywhere, from Tobi to Black Label to Target. Merle's convertible line was more interesting than the others, but she didn't win. The other two were mini dresses for the clubbing scene and the maxi and day dresses in simple shapes and bright colors. The latter won -- it's pretty good, but it's by no means unique. And really, how can you infuse a garment with personality if all you know about clothes is what you've seen on the runway or on celebrities?

This celebrity- and hype-driven fashion, the endless trends, is also something Toledo spoke out against. She doesn't do fashion shows; after seeing Kell on Earth, I can see why. The seating discussion was funny -- they cannot seat Vogue and Harper's Bazaar people next to each other because they're competitors; they cannot seat Us mag people behind celebrities because the tabloid reporters would eavesdrop. The seating chart is a great exercise in managing egos, and most of it has nothing to do with fashion. Isabel Toledo said that in the times where everyone shouts, she would remain silent; after watching Bravo, I can see why.

Plugs

The Mad Hatter's Bookshelf and Review is talking to several people (including myself) about the weirdest book they've ever read. Cool stuff!

Also, if any SFWA members would like e-copies of The Alchemy of Stone, drop me a note.

Isabel Toledo and Launch My Line musings are coming soon.

Fashiony things

What's on my dining room table right now? This:



An amazingly gorgeous book on Isabel Toledo (an awesome, awesome Christmas gift from an awesome friend), an Anthropologie catalog, and two Vogues -- the Russian and the UK versions. Here's a brief photo essay of the contents:

Anthropologie:

Circus!



Yes yes, they cater to the young and gamine, while I'm neither. I still like their stuff.

The UK Vogue -- from gamine to girly:





The Russian Vogue has a ton of really interesting spreads; I might post more soon, but for now here's some stuff from Demarchelier's shoot:



(Note Nina Ricci's heelless shoes!)




Finally, Isabel Toledo. I blogged before seeing her exhibit at F.I.T. museum with Genevieve, and what a revelation it was. The way her garments are constructed is incredibly beautiful and architecturally inventive. Here're some quick examples of the awesome:







Yes, I plan to spend many hours studying this. I might post additional images soon.

Project Runway -- finally, worth blogging again

OK, so Mila, whose design I liked in the first episode, is really good. Not a coat that I would wear, but well-made and awesomely tailored; Jonathan is better than I initially thought.




Maya and Jay also didn't disappoint:



Amy and Jesus' piece was fantastic. I am crediting Amy with the awesome.



Now, Jesse is a horrible person; I didn't particularly like his designs to begin with, but man, was he mean to Ping! Also, dear people everywhere: punching your own hand forcefully is threatening. Especially when doing it in front of someone as sweet and flighty as Ping. Also, Jesse rewarding the model who threw Ping under the bus and complimenting her for sticking up for him came across as smug and creepy. I hope both Jesse and Megan go home very soon.

Now, I understand why Ping got eliminated, I do:



Like Ari and Melvin in the previous season who too were eliminated early. Do they bring on avant-guard designers just to make them the butt of a joke? Sure looks that way. Oh, now I will dream of Project Runway without Heidi and Co and with avant-guard designers only. Say what you will about The Fashion Show, they at least let the talented, non-mainstream kid make it to the finals. Miss you, James-Paul!

Also, the preview for next week showed a designer saying 'this is the biggest challenge ever!' Gee, I wonder if it involves a not-a-model person.

Running with the Pack Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
WILD RIDE, Carrie Vaughn
SIDE-EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE, Steve Duffy
COMPARISON OF EFFICACY RATES FOR SEVEN ANTIPATHETICS AS EMPLOYED AGAINST LYCANTHROPES, Marie Brennan
THE BEAUTIFUL GELREESH, Jeffrey Ford
SKIN IN THE GAME, Samantha Henderson
BLENDED, C.E. Murphy
LOCKED DOORS, Stephanie Burgis
WERELOVE, Laura Anne Gilman
IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING, Molly Tanzer
ROYAL BLOODLINES, Mike Resnick
THE DIRE WOLF, Genevieve Valentine
TAKE BACK THE NIGHT, Lawrence Schimel
MONGREL, Maria Snyder
DEADFALL, Karen Everson
RED RIDING HOOD'S CHILD, N.K. Jemisin
ARE YOU A VAMPIRE OR A GOBLIN? Geoffrey Goodwin
THE PACK AND THE PICKUP ARTIST, Mike Brotherton
THE GARDEN, THE MOON, THE WALL, Amanda Downum
BLAMED FOR TRYING TO LIVE, Jesse Bullington
THE BARONY AT RODAL, Peter Bell
INSIDE OUT, Erzbet Yellowboy
GESTELLA, Susan Palwick

Pre-order at Amazon

On exoticism of language

James McAvoy is being very clever here; one of the things he's especially clever about is accents. I won't belabor the point of why it wouldn't make sense to act out an entire movie in a foreign language -- the point of translation is making foreign books/movies accessible to audiences in other language environments. Unfortunately, in the US translation there's often a tendency to make a movie or text seem foreign by using actor accents or broken grammar respectively.

This convention seems to create an additional barrier between the audience and the work, by constantly reminding the audience that the work if foreign, by intentionally othering and alienating the characters. I find it supremely annoying, for example, when Russian characters in stories by American authors occasionally use Russian words a la Clockwork Orange -- because they are speaking Russian the entire time, they sound NORMAL to each other, and an occasional foreign word serves no other purpose than to exoticize. (I, of course, am not talking about words that have no obvious English equivalents, but perfectly normal ones -- babushka being a very weird favorite for some reason).

I don't get it. A couple of years back I was on a panel that compared several translations of Zamyatin's We, and both the audience and the panel participants seemed to prefer the translations that sounded the most broken, the most alien. I alone liked the one which translated Zamyatin's text into normal English (with a few quirks of the original preserved), and I still remember the vertiginous sense of trying to explain how alienating that broken English felt while realizing that my own accent, in turn, is rendering my point useless (after the panel, several people saw it fit to compliment me on my accent; just FYI.)

So all of this is probably tangentially related to the issue of world SF, or rather lack of translated SF in the US. Sure, some of it is cost and opportunity; but much of it, I suspect, lies in that culture of othering, while failing to admit that much of the SF audience is not looking for a truly alien experience. We like our aliens to be just like us, or at least shown through the eyes of people just like us. Foreign books, written for a foreign audience, assume different frames of reference, and a reader has to do a bit of work decoding them, and, most of all, relating not to him/herself, but a person with different life experience. It is much easier to create a faux difference by inserting an occasional foreign word/broken sentence than to cope with a real difference. This is the main explanation I can come up with for the dearth of translated books but an abundance of books by Americans (and for Americans) writing about other cultures. There's interest in the other, but only presented through a certain lens, and dotted with frequent markers of the otherness -- rather than a genuine desire of much of the audience to understand people coming from other backgrounds. And by defining them in our terms rather than allowing for self-definition and self-representation, the culture of Western-centric entertainment McAvoy is talking about continues. But hey, they are making Tolstoy in translation and with no silly accents. That's good, right?

Retail spaces

And to conclude the series of my picture posts, here're some retail spaces. Much of the shopping is done in the open air markets, which has an excellent variety of food, especially fish and vegetables:









(Yes, there are supermarkets, but those are not nearly as fun to photograph)

Clothes can be found in the markets:


As well as more Western-style stores:


Living up to its title as the most expensive city in Europe, Moscow's downtown is crawling with high-end stores and boutiques. It looks like most of downtown houses have been converting into retail spaces. Ah, gentrification of an entire city. The mind boggles.

Picture Post -- Winter Landscapes

This is what we did today, the first day of the new year. And not just us -- the park was quite full of people, dogs, and children. It was a beautiful day.