Related #4: Made In Cork

This is a very belated related post (ooh, rhymes).
Adding on from last week's post on the Cork Fashion Week launch, here are a few pictures of the newly-refurbished Triskel Christchurch building, which will tentatively host the opening and closing nights.

The Christchurch building has been in Cork in some incarnation for around a thousand years or so. It's a former church (no big surprise there) and it is thought that the poet Spenser was married at the location.

The weight of history aside, it's a beautiful building that has been lovingly restored and is the lynchpin in Cork's cultural life, playing host to cult record shop Plugd and cafe Gulpd, art gallery The Black Mariah and as a music venue and arthouse cinema in the main building. They also have catacombs if you're of a morbid persuasion (like me).

A Fashion week event would look amazing here. Bet the last pastor never thought of that.










For more on the Triskel Arts Centre, click on their website.
For more about the building and refurbishment, click here.

Photos 1,4,5 from here.
Photos 2,3 from here.

Licentiate Column 02/06/11: Made In Cork

Cork Fashion Week is a bit of a misnomer. A fashion week is industry only. In Cork, shows are ticketed and open to all. The clothes you see on a runway are shown six months ahead of production. What you see in Milan in February, you won’t see in Brown Thomas until September. In Cork, what you see is already, or very soon to be manufactured. Fashion weeks are intense, fraught and cloaked in mystique, albeit a mystique that dissolves a little bit as each season passes.

In Cork, we take a much more leisurely pace. It’s both our idiosyncratic advantage and the perpetual pebble in our shoe.

It was with that in mind that I went to ‘Made in Cork: A Prequel to Cork Fashion Week’ in the Woodford Bar last Sunday. As I was waiting to go in, a possibly drunk, possibly homeless man tried to climb a tall, spiked, wrought-iron gate opposite the bar. He made a decent go of it, but impaled himself in the groin over two spikes and had to be lifted off the gate by a bartender and a slightly wobbly passer-by, who managed the whole procedure with a cigarette clamped between his teeth.

A Garda van pulled up, obscuring the view. Then, the sound of denim ripping and a very loud, sharp intake of breath. It was time to go inside. An inauspicious start in any circumstance.

I hoped that this wouldn’t be the marker for the event. Taking a seat inside the smoking area afforded the best views and elbow room, so that was where I sat myself, with a notebook, an unfortunate looking BIC pen and an endless supply of fizzy pop.

The crowd was a mix of models, photographers, fashion lovers and one small, very bored looking boy in Communion garb. Unlike London fashion week, where everyone is stressed beyond belief, the attendees looked genuinely happy. They were smiling, greeting each other with hugs, buying pints (of champagne), trading bon mots and making plans for the evening.

It was as if they were actually glad to be there (with the exception of Communion Boy, who had a pout that Andre Leon Talley would spontaneously combust with jealousy over). This is not the fashion week the world was used to. I was bamboozled. Pleasantly bamboozled.

The first half of the show was excellent. Trends were expertly curated. The preppy looks were a particular favourite - all white jeans and jumpers casually knotted over shoulders, ready for a game of tennis in the Hamptons. The vintage dress selection from Miss Daisy Blue was excellent as usual, with a mix of psychedelic print maxis, prom dress and LBDs that looked classically and contemporary.

It’s always good to see something grow and expand. I’m very proud to have been a witness of such growth from Cork Fashion Week’s inception. This September promises to be the most diverse and exciting Fashion Week yet.

Each year it gets a little bit bigger and, as Cork become even more creative and focused on fashion niches, the community at large adapts and rallies around it. Even if it’s something as ridiculous as lifting a stuck wino off a gate.

Fashion Film @ Style at Set

This Easter Weekend brings us chocolate binges and religious flagellation - but it also brings us the second ABSOLUT Style at Set, a weekend of fashion, fun, frolics and most importantly (for me anyway), FILM!

As a precursor to the stalls, workshops and talks, Friday is all about the fashion films. If you're in the area on Good Friday, I highly recommend you pop in and engage the stylish part of your brain. Plus, the pubs will be all be closed on Good Friday. And it's free. Now you have no excuse. Did I mention that it was free?

Mercifully, there's no Devil Wears Prada or Sex and the City in the line-up. Instead, the one film and three documentaries shown seem to follow a fairly loose theme: that of the thoughts and processes behind the finished products of fashion fantasy: magazines, photography, designer clothing and subculture. Altogether, it's a carefully chosen edit with something for everyone. Here's the running order.

4PM: Funny Face



It wouldn't be a fashion film fest without a bit of Audrey, and this is the perfect Hepburn movie to kick it off. Hepburn films are always stylish, but this has the added advantage of being set in the fashion industry, albeit one that involves a lot more singing and dancing when discussing spring trends than usual. It's an unconvincing love match between Hepburn and the by-then very creaky Fred Astaire (he also starred in the original musical version... in 1927) but that doesn't really matter when it's set in New York and Paris, has an amazing opening sequence with photos by Richard Avedon and the combined costuming efforts of Edith Head and Hubert de Givenchy.

6pm: Annie Liebovitz: Life Through a Lens



If you don't know much about Annie Liebovitz, then this is a good place to start. This documentary was filmed by Liebovitz' younger sister, so there won't be any unpleasant revalations or smudges on her character or breaking down in floods of cathartic tears. This isn't about personality, it's about photography - so if you're a fan of Liebovitz' notoriously meticulous work and want to know more, or just want some inspiration of your own, watch this.

7.30 PM: Marc Jacobs and Louis Vuitton



This is the one film in the schedule that I don't know much about, so I'm afraid I'm going to have to give you a blurb instead. This documentary follows Marc Jacobs as he finishes a RTW collection for Louis Vuitton. In it, we see the mundanities of his everyday life, which contrast with the creative highs. There's also a wee bit of conflict - where does the line between creativity and being beholden to the chairman of the board lie?

9PM: Paris is Burning



Seminal drag documentary, Paris is Burning, was filmed in the recesses of Harlem dance halls before the area was gentrified. This isn't so much a fashion film as it is an ode to the transformative power of clothing (along with make up, some slick dance moves and the right 'tude). Equal parts funny, sad and fascinating, this is the one to watch.

Licentiate Column 24/03/11: Dress Codes

The unprecedented has happened. This month, I have not one, but two awards ceremonies to attend. This time last year, I was lucky to have not one, but two pub quizzes with which to grace my presence.

Awards ceremonies are tricky. Go long, or short? On-trend colour pops or classic monochrome? Stripes or spots? Hair - up or down? Bags - clutch or envelope? Consort - is he holding your bag or the drinks? It's one of the (very) few occasions when I wish that I was a man instead of a woman, accessory holding notwithstanding.

Black and white tie is strictly regulated - for the guys. You must wear black dress socks, you must have a black satin cummerbund, you must have the right coloured bow circling a stiff, starched collar in a brilliant shade of white. For women, it's slightly more difficult.

What then, if traditional dress codes go out the window? Black tie is now the stuffy formal mode of dressing - far too rigid for us hipsters and awards attendees. We have to have a different language; a new set of buzzwords for a new generation. We don't need your bourgeois, stinking dress codes, man!

We think that we've thrown off the shackles of sartorial suppression, but we've only made things worse. By opening up the remit in which we get dressed, we leave ourselves open to a whole new level of disaster. If you're going somewhere special and you want to look appropriate (an attribute that is severely underappreciated in modern existence), then dress codes are vital.

Imagine going to a wedding wearing jeans while your partner rocks up to the church in a bedazzled suit that the combined efforts of Versace and Liberace could not surpass in terms of extreme, overarching, gaudy glamour. Not a good image, now is it? Especially if your partner is a blocky, Beamish drinking, aggressively heterosexual nightclub bouncer named Craig.

Even if you don't have a Craig-esque partner, or even have a partner at all, the new series of dress codes are so utterly stumping that you can just about manage to worry only about yourself. Gone are the days of transparent codes, here to stay is Blank Chic, the code where the word 'chic' is preceded with something utterly meaningless, something that magicks up only a vague image that could be interpreted in a million different ways.

Last week a friend of mine told me about a party she attended - the dress code was 'safari chic'. What does that even mean? Did she need a pith helmets and and elephant gun to go with her Breakfast at Tiffany's cocktail dresses? Perhaps a scad of malaria to give that perfect touch of je ne sais qois to an LBD?

People generally don't like rules and regulations; it's a sign of suppression and bureaucratic measures, it limits creativity and personal freedoms and lest we forget, people don't really like doing things against their will.

But we're not talking about totalitarian government, nor are we really talking about awards ceremonies. We're talking about weddings and graduations, christenings and office parties - any formal occasion.
It's nice to be free and loose, but sometimes it's better to do what is right and proper - this includes a dress code.

Decades Festival Inspiration

This weekends marks the second year of the Decades Festival, a massive dress-up weekend that is centred around the many pubs and clubs in Cork City.  The premise is simple - pick a decade in the 20th century, dress according to that decade and see which pubs are putting events to which decade.  Events include 80's raves, dignified dos with flappers and cocktails and (my favourite) a 50's bowling event with milkshake cocktails.  Mmm, cloying...

I've been fantasising about what I might dress up as and, as usual, I've picked the two decades most unforgiving to a real body type, the 60's and the 20's.  Here are some shots from some great magazine editorials.  The first is Face Of '66 for September's L'Officiel Singapore, which is all lithe limbs, Vidal Sassoon hair and meticulously outlined eyes.










Here are a few pages from a much larger spread in TEST.  Shot by Nicholas Lawn using vintage photo effects, it's atypical of the 20's styling we'd usually see (like OTT almost baroque Galliano homages to the Bright Young Things) but it's a good source for inspiration for those who want to do the twenties a little bit differently.








Images via Fashion Gone Rogue

The shoe must go on*

I'm currently sitting through my fourth football match in twenty-four hours (Japan v Cameroon at the moment, the score is zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.....) and as a form of creative punishment I may force the boyfriend to accompany me to London in September to watch a dance revue all about shoes (!!!) in Sadler's Wells.

I'm not that much of a fashionophile to go to a po-faced examination of shoes but this is a different creature altogether.  The revue is written by Jerry Springer - The Opera composer Richard Thomas and choreographed by a series of talented people from all facets of dance.

The shoe, sorry that was a Freudian typo, the show isn't a glorification or a fetishisation of shoes (although I think that there is a shoe-fetish song...) but rather an humour-laced examination of the role footwear plays in our lives.  If you're lucky enough to have a subscription to the Times Online you can view behind the scenes preparation footage of the show and read the double page feature in yesterday's Culture supplement.

Subjects that will be touched on includes Imelda Marcos, Sex and the City, Ferragamos, Uggs, Flip-flops, an insidious man in Hush Puppies and best of all:

A song about how utterly shit Crocs are.  Enough said.

PS - The show is called Shoes by the way.  Did you guess that?

*Excuse the pun.  I'm so, so sorry.

SubbaCouture - will you be there?

Spawned from the mind of Ms Blau von T of Blaubushka, SubbaCouture will be the first Freakscene club night to celebrate street style and subculture (so much so that I thought it was called 'SubbaCULTure'...  derp).  Here's the blurb.

"Every movement has had its own fashion associated with it; burlesque, MOD, punk, rave, grunge and the theatrical harajuku. Today we can see how all these previous identities are becoming more and more infused in the emergence of a modern street style. Inspired by this, Blaubushka hopes to throw the doors open to all the fashion lovers; be your fashion beginner, intermediate or advanced this is your chance to earn your stripes and join a new Cork fashion army.

Any look that's inspired you or any outfit that you thought Cork wasn't ready for, the time is NOW!"

Freakscene is Ireland's longest running club night with DJs over two floors and major drink deals.  I've been going there every so often for more years than I would like to admit and, in the interests of disclosure, actually used to work in the club.

It's nothing if not all inclusive so don't worry if mod or burlesque or harajuku isn't your cup of tea.   I would imagine that what's important is originality and balls-out enthusiasm so, if you want to dress like Lady Gaga or Adam Ant - 'any look that inspires you'.  If anything this event is about self expression and outrageousness in the midst of one of the most non-judgemental nightclub crowds I've ever experienced.