Growing up in Los Angeles, I believed that New York would be the only place where I could get up close and personal with the types of fashion that I love. Thankfully this past year Los Angeles gave me some amazing opportunities to meet or stand merely inches away from such designers as Phillip Lim, Catherine Malandrino and the legendary Valentino; so I was excited to kick off 2010 with the Los Angeles appearance of one of fashion’s newest rock stars, Alexander Wang. Catapulting from Parsons The New School for Design to his brand selling internationally in over 200 boutiques and gracing the pages of top fashion magazines, the San Francisco native and New York based designer is famous for his signature model off duty look and downtown chic creations. This sexy tomboy look has inspired everyone from the frontrunners in fashion to teenage girls across the county.

Saturday, January 16, Opening Ceremony in Los Angeles invited admirers  to peruse and pre-purchase Alexander Wang’s spring/summer 2010 collection and meet the designer himself. The trunk show hosted by Humberto Leon, Carol Lim and Alexander Wang was also the debut of his Alexander Wang for Linda Farrow collection of sunglasses. The eponymous eyewear line—having formally collaborated with the likes of Dries Van Noten, Charles Anastase, Matthew Williamson, Luella, Sophia Kokosalaki, Jeremy Scott, Raf Simons and Bernhard Willhelm—and Wang announced their collaboration back in September 2009.

On this sunny day, the twenty-five year old designer’s “shop-in-shop” was filled with young women decked out in leggings, tights, leather jackets, short skirts and boyfriend blazers in a color scheme of black and white. Girls pulled through the racks of his current collection, both clothing and accessories evoke a great old American pastime…football, while ogling his silver-tipped, emblematic of the current exposed zipper trend and catlike Linda Farrow sunglasses. Wearing a white tee and black pants and shoes, Wang greeted each eager fan with a giggle and a smile, graciously posing for pictures. When the line of wide-eyed devotees began to settle down, Wang kindly took a moment to participate in my mini impromptu interview.

A Quickie Interview with Alexander Wang

What inspired your spring collection?

Classic American sportswear.

Where do you look to find inspiration?

The simple things in life. What other people usually take for granted.

What drew you to a career in fashion?

I always wanted to do it. I was naturally drawn to it.

What would you be if you were not a fashion designer?

I cannot really answer that. Fashion has always been my dream.

The previous night, Lim and Leon threw a private twelve course dinner, catered by Leon’s mother, for Wang with more than forty guests including Erin Wasson, M.I.A., Jason Schwartzman, Samantha Traina, Vogue’s Lawren Howell and Lisa Love, Dakota Johnson, Claire Danes, Riley Keough, Marie Claire’s Zanna Roberts, Spike Jonze and Chloe Sevigny.

Check out Opening Ceremony’s Los Angeles location. The former dance studio of silent film star Charlie Chaplin opened in 2007—with rooms that are both spacious and cozy nooks. In April 2009, Opening Ceremony opened the first and only concept boutique to focus solely on Alexander Wang’s runway brand of t-shirts, tanks, jackets, dresses and accessories.

Opening Ceremony Los Angeles

451 North La Cienega Boulevard

Los Angeles, CA 90048

Prism Gallery is a new West Hollywood stomping ground for the artsy crowd. The three story gallery is located right in the heart of the Sunset Strip, just a few inches away from the Sunset Plaza—the trendy dining and shopping destination. Prism opened with a series of celebratory events in mid November, including a private reception with such guests as Anthony Kiedis, Margherita Missoni, Gia Coppola, Dasha Zhukova, Theodora Richards, Carine Roitfeld, Heidi Mount, Stavros Niarchos, Rachel Zoe, Nicky Hilton, Atlanta de Cadenet Taylor and Liz Goldwyn; the Pop magazine’ star studded after party for The Museum of Contemporary Art’s 30th Anniversary Gala; and a crowded public reception complete with live entertainment.

Founded by PC Valmorbida, 23 year old Australian photographer, Prism serves to bridge the gap between high and low art while showcasing national and international artists. The inaugural exhibition “mindthegap,” on view until February 20th, curated by RVCA founder P.M Tenore visually articulates this mission by featuring the work of street artists Barry McGee, meticulous arrangements of blasting colors and cubic shapes, and Phil Frost, totemic inspired repetitious canvases. Shaking up the Los Angeles art scene—the gallery strives to disturb the traditional artistic canon by disputing perceptions about what types of art deserve a presence on the walls of a prestigious gallery.

Designed by London based architecture firm Pattern Architecture and inspired by 1960s car culture, the metallic gallery is spacious and complex. It also utilizes a sense of catering to a younger and edgier crowd; a departure from what one might expect to see in a gallery. Serving to better engage the patron, the space will soon open a bookstore in addition to offering screenings and lectures. Prism manages to create a titillating concoction of architectural intrigue, hipster chic and recognition from the art world elite.

Prism Gallery, 8746 West Sunset Boulevard, West Hollywood, CA, 90069

Images courtesy of Prism Gallery

“A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective.””- Irving Penn

Penn’s uncanny ability to make simplicity mesmerizing while glamorizing the “everyday,” transcended fashion photography into the realm of art. He revealed the importance of capturing life and emotion, using his trademark stark backgrounds and natural lighting rather than contrived props—his minimalist technique inherently ushering in a new era for commercial photography. With a career spanning more than half a century, Penn captivated admirers with evocative photographs of celebrities, Hell’s Angels, fashion models, still lives, the torsos voluptuous female nudes and places that seemed so distant to the mid-century American eye—New Guinea, Dahomey, Nepal and Cuzco. As one of the fathers of modern postwar fashion photography and portraiture, he is revered for his visual clarity, uncomplicated direction, use of light, attention to detail and an ability to give praise to commonly overlooked subjects.

Born on June 1, 1917 in Plainfield, New Jersey, Penn sought a career as a painter. He attended the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia where he studied painting, drawing, and graphic design. Mentored by his teacher Alexey Brodovitch, Art Director for Harper’s Bazaar, Penn began working as an unpaid assistant at the magazine during his summer vacations. Settling in New York after graduating in 1938, he freelanced as a designer before becoming Brodovitch’s assistant in the advertising department at Saks Fifth Avenue in 1940. Still wanting to be a painter, Penn left for Mexico and devoted a year to the artistry, returning in 1943 to the start of what would become a lifelong partnership with Vogue.

His Vogue career began at the age of 26 as an assistant art director —reporting to Art Director Alexander Liberman. Penn’s main responsibility was to supervise the design of Vogue’s covers. When staff members did not show interest in his designs, he began shooting them himself. On October 1, 1943, Vogue printed a cover featuring a still life – a brown leather bag and belt, scarf, gloves, an image of oranges and lemons, a jeweled ring and a note pinned to the wall – his first published work for the magazine. Still lives were not the usual realm for Vogue covers, but they were indicative of Penn’s training as a painter. He left to serve in World War II for a little less than year, returning to Vogue in1945 as a staff photographer. Always taking Vogue into new directions—the April 1950 cover of model Jean Patchett was the first black and white cover shot in years. His final cover for Vogue, May 2004, featured an elegant photograph of Nicole Kidman that revived his signature sense of timelessness and austere elegance. During his career, Penn shot more than 150 Vogue covers.

A man who preferred his own anonymity, Penn photographed some of the greatest talents of the time. He isolated his subjects by positioning them against an unadorned backdrop or in tight corners. His celebrity portraits included Miles Davis, James van deer Zee, John Osborne, S. J. Perelman, Jean Cocteau, Barnett Newman, Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso. Penn treated his subjects as equals rather than placing their fame on a pedestal, ultimately exposing the life behind the achievement. In 1947, while shooting “The Twelve Most Photographed Models of the Period,” he met Lisa Fonssagrives, the Swedish ballerina turned model who is frequently considered the world’s first supermodel. They married in 1950 and remained together until her passing in 1992. Penn’s continued penchant for still lives produced such subjects as cigarette butts and tattered abandoned clothing as well as recognition in the New York gallery scene. After traveling the globe photographing indigenous people, he published a series of pictures in 1950-1951 featuring tradesmen and women in New York City, Paris and London that are now on view as part of Irving Penn: Small Trades at The Getty Center in Los Angeles until January 10, 2010. Penn opened his studio in 1953 where he continued his unique approach to photography.

His calculated perfectionism comes through in all of his work. Ahead of his times, Penn broke rules and challenged the industry’s ideas about beauty, fame and glamour. Through his lens, he brought life to the unfamiliar, gave grace to banal subjects and made the garment the focus without accentuating the unnecessary. It was his unquestionable talent that makes Penn’s work fundamental in shaping the history of fashion photography.

On view through January 9, 2010 at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, Jeff Koons: New Paintings challenges viewers to confront preconceived notions and look beyond abstraction. Stepping out of the realm of his kitschy sculptural interpretations of everyday objects – balloon animals and vacuums – the paintings ignite a dialogue between a fascination with wanton desire and the tradition of figurative and nude paintings. In the technical style of Roy Lichtenstein, Koons uses photorealism to create initially indiscernible subjects. At first glance, one might dismiss these works as a bunch of colorful dots and haphazard brushstrokes. Up close, the dots look like a myriad of catastrophic collisions. Using circular shapes the size of spare change – shades of turquoise, yellow, and pink overlap to create cobalt blue, green and black – they come together to reveal female forms layered with brash brushstrokes of silver, brown, mustard, and blue. Evoking pointillism, the large-scale paintings look like a modern take on Seurat’s Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte (1884-6). Many divulging an erotic content, the works are captivating to analyze as some may leave you with a perplexed gaze.

Gagosian Gallery, 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90210

The end of August marked the last days of the enchanting, revealing, endearing, and unprecedented exhibition, Barack Obama: The Freshman, at M+B gallery in West Hollywood. Now a psychology professor and therapist, in 1980 Lisa jack was an aspiring photographer at Occidental College in Los Angeles and was in desperate need of a model. It was recommended that she take photographs of a young freshman, who later transferred to Columbia University in New York, by the name of Barry. He posed willingly,  his legendary future as the first multiracial African-American President of the United States unbeknownst to all. After a brief afternoon photography session, these images remained hidden from the public for twenty-eight years, until Jack decided to search for them as a result of a dare. This exhibition made it possible for these images to be printed and displayed for the first time.

Beginning in May, twenty black and white photographs and an enlargement of the original contact sheet lined the walls of the small square gallery space. Each photo depicted young Barry in various poses, including a partly unbuttoned Oxford shirt, a banded Panama hat, flared jeans, an occasionally smoking cigarette, and a leather bomber jacket with a fur collar as props. Jack chose her subject based on her own personal agenda, the honest fact that she found him to be attractive. The photos were taken in a small apartment in Los Angeles, many of them with a 20 year old Obama sitting on a couch with a blank wall behind him. The near vacant setting draws the viewer towards the subject. The photos suggest a sense of precarious self-consciousness and a charismatic attempt to be the personification of cool. He maintains an obvious awareness of the camera lens throughout this simple study of portraiture.  

The photos are evocative of youth and uncertainty. Simple, uncomplicated, and unpretentious, they convey the innocence of the photographer and her subject. The photos are suggestive of that familiar sense of magnetism and humanity that helped him to become the 44th President. Walking into the gallery space gave one a sudden feeling of a rare closeness to the subject. The photos, making him even more relatable than his speeches and ideas, could instantly transport you back to your freshman year, bringing to light a nostalgic feeling towards college. These images managed to capture the purity of youth and the feeling of not knowing what life may have in store. Each image is the epitome of voyeurism, allowing one’s gaze to peer into a world before campaigns, media frenzies, scrutiny, praise, and global recognition. Just a glimpse of the Barry we could never know, before he became President Barack Obama of the United States of America. When I left the exhibit for the last time, after numerous previous visits, a woman approached me to make a very honest claim, “This is not him. Not as we know him.”

Models like Adrienne Fidelin, Dorothea Towles Church and Donyale Luna may have paved the way, but Halston called her the first black supermodel. She posed with Andy Warhol for an iconic cover of Interview in 1972 and was the first female model of African descent featured on the covers of Ladies Home Journal in November 1968 and Life in 1969. She broke the color barrier at mainstream women’s magazines and went on to grace the covers of Cosmopolitan and McCall’s while she was featured in the likes of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. She personified perseverance and her role in fashion opened doors for the legendary African-American models to come.

Naomi Ruth Sims was born on March 30, 1948, in Oxford, Mississippi, to John and Elizabeth Sims. She was the youngest of three daughters. She endured a tumultuous childhood in which her parents divorced shortly after she was born, her mother became ill, she was placed in foster care, and she endured living in neighborhoods consumed with immense poverty. Peeking at her statuesque height of 5’10 during early adolescent, Sims garnered a tremendous amount of taunting from classmates. She stated that her childhood experiences were the driving force behind her fortitude to succeed. Sims remained close to her sisters throughout her unstable upbringing and later followed her sister, Betty, to New York. Her modeling career began in the mid 1960s when she needed to find a way to financially support her studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

The major modeling agencies were less than enthused by Sims’ look, often calling her skin “too dark.” After being turned down by numerous agencies, she decided to take matters into her own hands by approaching photographers herself. Gosta Peterson was the first to capture her, placing her on the cover of The New York Times Magazine entitled “Fashions of the Times” in 1967. Determined to find representation, Sims told Wilhelmina Cooper, a former model turned agent, she would send out copies of “Fashions of the Times” with Cooper’s contact information offering her commission if anyone called back. Her ambitious nature made her among the first to be represented by Wilhelmina Models. Suddenly, she was in high demand by such designers as Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, Halston, Teal Traina, Fernando Sánchez and Bill Blass, and was also hired for national television and print advertising campaigns. As her rise to fame took place during the 1960s, a pivotal time filled with changing views towards race and politics, she became an icon of the “Black is Beautiful” movement. After five years, Sims quit modeling in 1973, disheartened by the industry’s incessant racial stereotyping; becoming a businesswoman and writer focusing on the subjects of health and beauty. Although the presence of woman of African descent in fashion was still very limited, her presence confronted Western society’s perception on how to view women of color.

She was exceptionally prolific because while beauty barriers were traditionally broken by women of lighter skin including Josephine Baker, Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge, she was the first darker skinned African-American woman to enjoy such mainstream success. While at a time other models of African descent were working alongside Sims, she was the one to have the most profound impact. Her revolutionary role in fashion extended beyond the industry’s own walls, altering the ways in which black Americans were viewed in visual and popular culture. She helped illustrate the beauty of all skin colors. Sims’ ground-breaking imagery was recently given recognition when two photographs of her were featured in the The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion, a New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition on iconic models of the 20th century — one from the career starting “Fashions of the Times” and the other from a 1969 issue of Life. Sims was a luminary in an industry that was just beginning to accept racial difference in a world that was struggling to accept it as well.

Her career in the modeling industry was short-lived, yet undoubtedly remarkable. Sims’ contoured face with its chiseled cheekbones, captivating eyes, svelte and exquisite form, striking uniqueness, and smooth yet darker complexion permeated the exclusionary world of fashion and its periodicals, challenging how America defined the standards of beauty. In the words of Halston, “When she put on a garment, something just marvelous happened… Naomi was the first… She was the great ambassador for all black people. She broke down all the social barriers.”

This month the CFDA award-wining designer celebrated the one-year anniversary of his West Hollywood store. Located on the infamous Robertson Blvd., just a few blocks up from the sidewalks lined with numerous high fashion driven storefronts and paparazzi awaiting a glimpse of someone camera worthy, stands 3.1 Phillip Lim, provoking intrigue with its both luminous and minimalistic façade. On Saturday, July 18th, shoppers, fans, friends, and family were invited to peruse racks of stunning detail paired with immaculate simplicity while sipping wine, benefiting a cause, and receiving styling advice from Lim himself. A Los Angeles native, the West Hollywood location is the third on Lim’s list of store openings following the first in SoHo and the second in Tokyo.

The PARA Project & Giancarlo Valle designed boutique is set back from the sidewalk by a small parking lot, providing an air of mystique that proves to be alluring to an inquisitive eye. Upon walking into the former auto-body shop, one is introduced to a flowing interior of nooks, undulating walls, and bamboo-lined shelves. Tiny protruding pyramids made of soft, white foam pad the walls, a far cry from alluding any comparison to a padded cell, but rather creating a sense of architectural geometry, space, and lightness. The store unfolds into an idyllic and serene setting transitioning the customer into an imaginative yet understated world of elegance, in a manner similar to Lim’s own creations.

Lim moved around the store offering warm welcomes, indulging in conversations, and graciously accepting awestruck whispers of praise. His unobtrusive charm and calm demeanor is indicative of his aesthetic. The store displayed the Fall 2009 looks while offering samples of the available-by-order Resort and Holiday collections. His fall collection evokes the spirit of the 1960s British rock scene paired with the modern woman meets the strength and sex appeal of such 1930s actresses as Dietrich, Crawford, West, and Garbo, undefined by men and gallivanting in the gender bending garments of the Pre-Code film era. His Resort 2010 collection is beautiful to the eye and delicate to the touch while encapsulating an edgy femininity. The event benefited The Art of Elysium, the Los Angeles non-profit that brings the arts to children fighting various illnesses.

Lim’s loyal fans of fashion world elite and Hollywood starlets have a fervent affinity for his complementary to the female silhouette construction of trousers, blouses, blazers, and flowing dresses made from golden, lace, and sequin fabrics. Earlier that week, Vogue and Rachel Bilson hosted a private anniversary party at the store. Guests including Rachel Zoe, Molly Sims, Eve, Shenae Grimes, Kristen Bell, and Leona Lewis joined Vogue’s Lisa Love and Lawren Howell to honor the designer’s burgeoning success. The British band The Duke Spirit provided the evening’s entertainment. Congratulations Phillip Lim.

Looks from the Fall 2009 Ready-to-Wear Collection

Looks from the Resort 2010 Collection

STORE LOCATION
3.1 Phillip Lim
631 N Robertson Blvd
West Hollywood, CA 90069