"They could be pretty bitchy, those fashion-mad French girls"

Any regular readers of this blog will know that I ADORE Grace Coddington. My love affair with her started when she stole the limelight off Anna Wintour in The September Issue and I've been mildly obsessed ever since. Her memoir is being released by Random House in November. I'm hoping to grab a copy when I'm in New York at the end of next week. Simply entitled Grace, as well as being full of fabulous anecdotes, stories, gossip and advice, it also shows Coddington’s great talent for illustration (see here and here for previous posts on fashion illustration - I love it!).  

She is well-known for sketching looks as they come down the runway from her front-row perch during fashion week, but her drawings also take on a distinctly personal, and often humorous, tone. From childhood memories to her first day on the job as both a model and fashion editor to her big loves (including, of course, her cats), these remarkable, hand-drawn pictures reveal yet another dimension to an already famously fascinating woman.

Below is a small extract from Grace to give you a taste, Happy Friday!

I was astonished by how fashion could change so fast in a few days. You would go to the South of France one weekend and denim was in. The next weekend when you returned, everything was about little English florals. I used to get so worried that I hadn’t got it right. Catherine Deneuve and her sister Françoise Dorléac were the only ones I ever saw actually wearing the hard-edged space-age clothes of Courrèges and Paco Rabanne and looking completely at ease and relaxed. Except perhaps the evening when Catherine was sitting enjoying herself with Bailey, Albert, and me in the club Régine’s and the waiter spilled an entire bottle of red wine over her new white sculpted Courrèges couture shift that must have cost thousands of francs.

If you went to L’Esquinade wearing the wrong thing, it was critical. You would be laughed at. They could be pretty bitchy, those fashion-mad French girls. I would never dare talk back to them. For me, the French were always so superior in matters of style. England was cool but never chic. 

Sex on Legs - or Something to Do Whilst it Rains

I promised myself that I wasn't going to talk about the weather in this post..except to say that it is definitely the sort that encourages wandering aimlessly around museums and eating cake...which I delightfully did last week with one of my favourite people at the Natural History Museum.  I was utterly convinced that they had a stuffed dodo there and I suggest you go and see for yourselves whether this is in fact the case.

The Design Museum provides a different sort of fantasy at the moment, a staggering retrospective of Christian Louboutin's two decades in the business.

“I haven’t yet met a woman who wanted shorter legs,” the man himself said yesterday at the unveiling and the chap has a point.  As someone who lives in ballet pumps and loafers (I like the feeling I can run away if I need to) you might not think that the uber high heel would set my heart fluttering but I can tell you, that if I manage to get my next pay rise, this will be the treat I buy myself.

Mr Louboutin was making little apology for how painful the world’s most desirable shoes are to wear. As many of his female fans will attest (he sold more than 600,000 pairs last year), sometimes these shoes are so painful to walk in that there is little the wearer can do but mince.
However, in the designer’s view, the vertiginous height of his heels is worth all the pain. “Of course, I’m concerned about comfort and ensuring the construction of the shoe works,” he said. “But do I really want people to look at my shoes and think, ‘Ooh, how comfortable looking are those’? No, I want them to think how beautiful or how great they look.
“When I interned at the Folies Bergère many years ago, I would often be asked to buy the cabaret dancers carpaccio of veal from the market. I couldn’t understand why they ate so much veal. Until one day they laughed and said it was to cushion the pain of their incredibly high heels. Veal was chosen because it didn’t bleed into the shoes.”

WOW, I don't have that level of commitment and you can be sure that when I eventually purchase my pair, I'll be making darn sure I can walk in them but the point remains that women do buy them..by the thousands.  Part of the allure has got to be the red soles, which have seen him overtake Manolo Blahnik as aspirational shoe god.  There is no doubting the potency and allure of that flash of red; the naughty, knowing wink as you strut (maybe hobble) by. Every time a woman climbs a staircase or crosses her legs, she flashes a symbol — red with it's connotations of passion and blood, also a sign of the £800 that has been spent on the shoes.  There is no need for an obvious logo, because the no-logo flash of colour is enough.

Fashion lore has it that Louboutin invented the look in 1993 when he spotted a design assistant painting her nails a vivid red. Whipping the varnish from her hands, he covered the entire rubber sole of a prototype with it. But it wasn’t until 2007 that he patented the idea. Louboutin is currently in the midst of an intellectual property case with Yves Saint Laurent over the right to use his bright red lacquered sole.
Regardless, women all over the world continue to bankrupt themselves for his shoes and one day, I'll be one of them...I better start a taxi fund too.

Drawing Inspiration

As the manic Fashion Weeks advance (New York well under way, London approaching followed inexorably by the others) most of us are starting to accept that it's cold outside, rapidly getting dark earlier, Christmas is yonks away and so the urge to nest kicks in.  Nesting can take many forms, for me it involves pottering around at home, cooking something comforting with the radio on in the background, watching a classic movie in bed with cashmere bed socks and, of course, curling up with a good book and a huge hot chocolate or amaretto depending on my mood.  Now I am well aware that I won't be able to have a nesting day for quite some time but it's good to have something to look forward to and know that you can have a bit of me time, even if you have to squint at it on the horizon.

So while the riotous snaps and flashes of the zoom lenses are starting all over again in NYC, let's enjoy something from a gentler era.  The fashion pack's current favourite coffee-table book 'Fashion Designers' Sketchbooks' (Laurence King, £28) by Hywel Davies features artwork from Yohji Yamamoto, Karl Lagerfeld and Vivienne Westwood, and offers a glimpse into the workings of some of the world's most famous labels, with designers discussing their toiles and fabric choices. Quite the relief from the pap shots and blaaah of the Fashion Weeks.

Wak Kishimoto of Eley Kishimoto
Drawings for print inspiration
"I can’t explain in words what triggers ideas each time. As I still work most of the time in an analogue way, I have many tools and implements that I rely on, from paintbrushes to silk screens. But, if I have to nominate the essentials, it would be the pen and paper nearest to me" 

 

Amy Molyneaux from PPQ
Design drawings with fabric indication
"Our design process starts with points of reference, ranging from fabrics, works of art, general objects, people or whatever we feel is relevant to the theme we are working towards. It can even be a statement from a friend that suddenly fits into the thought process in our minds. We have a large space for displaying inspiration, and make it new and fresh each season or for each project we are working on."

Peter Jensen
Design drawings
"I like to draw using a black fine-liner and white copier paper. I always like there to be to be a bit of a story to each collection and I always have this idea of the muse, so I am always thinking about that. 

 

Here's what the bods at Lawrence King have to say about the book...

"Fashion Designers' Sketchbooks explores many major names working in the fashion industry today. Photographs, sketches, mood boards, line-ups, toiles, fabric swatches and more all contribute to the creation of ideas for fashion designs, and here they are brought together for the first time to show how the final work is conceived and developed.

Juxtaposing the garments on the catwalk and in look books with the original research material and with finished illustrations allows for a new perspective on the working methods of leading international designers and on the role of different media in the creation of their work, making the book a fascinating resource for both students and designers."

Antonio Marras for Kenzo
Fabric inspiration and silhouette roughs
“I need many things to nourish my inspiration: objects, images, stories and pieces of cloth. Everything that can make my mind travel and work, I continuously need to see new things, new places, to meet new people to listen to. At the same time, I need to be sure I can still count on old, steady things, things with a past and that already belonged to someone else, often things that have outlived time."

 

Chris Brooke from Basso & Brooke 3D toile for basket weave dress
"Depending on the piece I’m working on, it may be more important to begin experimenting on the mannequin, as ideas can come about through simply pinning and stitching shapes together, ideas that wouldn’t necessarily come from drawn work. And, then, the results are photographed so I can decide which parts are working and which aren’t. I then mark the fabric and lie it flat to create the flat pattern.”

Margaret Howell
Mood sketch for rain coat
"I always used to draw my ideas for clothes. The drawings were more about creating a mood or a feeling rather than being a specific technical drawing. My drawings are very loose and are more about a style than an exact representation of a garment."

John Galliano
Research books showing fabric ideas and inspiration
"I start with research and from there I build the muse, the idea, tell a story and develop a character, a look and then a collection."

 Another book of sketches that gets my heart a beating is by the inimitable Manolo Blahnik.  His beautiful sketches are often the sole advertisements for his creations when you flick through the pages of the glossies and his tome features an introductory essay by Nuclear Wintour herself...

I adore all of these shoes, I've no idea when I could wear any of them but I could sit and gaze at them for hours if they were on display in my huge Carrie-like walk-in wardrobe (imaginary at the moment)

Pink AND sparkly AND dangly AND Manolo's...My style is not particularly girly but could make an exception..

I can imagine these on a fairy godmother in a very stylish pantomime!

Finally, a satirical self-portrait of the man himself

 N.B. Whilst we're talking about shoes, a trip to Selfridges Show room is definitely in order, apparently it's bigger than the ground floor of the Tate Modern.  Designed by architect Jamie Forbert and with exclusive designs on sale from a host of labels including Givenchy, Chloe, Stella McCartney, Rodarte and Alejandro Ingelmo, the area will house no less than six different salons and 10 brand boutiques.  It sounds LETHAL.  Opens this month!X