Rico Lebrun's Costume Art

 I knew the artist Rico Lebrun (1900-1961) as a student at UCLA.  Articulate, he learned English by reading and re-reading Moby Dick, and Melville's urgency and grandeur was in Rico's talk and imagery.   To my surprise I find currently on Ebay a drawing of the costumes he designed for Camelita Maracci's ballet Circo di Espagna, New York 1951.   Clearly form does not follow function, for these drawing do nothing to let the body convey suppressed feeling or achieve meaningful shapes.   There is no music here.  Instead, the fashions of the pretty senoritas have taken on the raw emotions of the bull-ring: fear; anger; the need for protection; defiance of vulnerability with decorative patterns; doom, for in the bull-ring there must be a death.

Women for Bull Ring Scene

Designer at Sea

Harken Performance Wear

Dawn Moore enjoying being here

Dawn Moore designs clothes for one of the world's largest sailing and yachting hardware companies, Harken.  Her team performance technical  gear is worn by athletes who are expected to defy the forces of watery nature, compete, and look good. This means clothes must be waterproof yet breathable and fit to accommodate spontaneous and rapid movement while remaining comfortable.  And for good measure all designs have to be confined to four colors: red, navy, khaki, and charcoal.   But limitations focus the creative mind by uncompromisingly pointing to what must be resolved.  Educated in London, "I've traveled and surfed the world. I love putting a slightly contemporary spin on my work while keeping true to the beauty of the ancient island cultures."  She spent over an hour with us exploring.

Pilgrims and Pilgrimage

Jacob Zakaria, Designer

 
Boccaccio (1313-1375) in Italy and Chaucer (1343-1400) in England advanced our literature by creating tales from common life about people traveling to inspirational, holy places.  They wrote stories about  pilgrims "on the road" to somewhere special.  Jacob Zakaria, fashion designer, was asked: What do you do when you need inspiration, when the juices are dry?  "Every year I go to Art Basel in Miami Beach Florida."  Is it to find shapes from new art, or glean from snippets of conversation phrases that ignite inner poetry?  Reminding us that fashion is a down-to-earth activity [the word comes from the Italian facere=to make], Jacob states: "I want to see who is wearing what."

Parenting

Mikayla Shaffer came into the bookstore with her dad Edward to find a book for the holidays.  Appropriately shy and yet curious, she said: "I love drawing."  When asked what do you like drawing, what inspires you she explained: "one day dad was working with cartoon characters and a figure caught my eye and I drew a dress. "  As it happened, dad had a picture of the dress in his phone which he proudly sends us.  Mikayla is 7 years old.

Daughter and Dad

"I love drawing"

What it Takes

For six years Eric Puestow has been with Joe's Black Book, a recruitment and consulting firm that has helped Tommy Hilfiger and Karl Lagerfeld. A graduate from Florida State University, I asked him what's the most important skill necessary to succeed.  He answered with easy certainty: "Fire in the belly, tyrannically going after everything you don't know, and keeping hungry to learn."  Here he is buying Fashion for Profit to help him further understand the apparel industry's distinctive way of thinking as suggested by this book's ability to explain procedures and the language of fashion.

Fashion Statements

"The amazing aspect of fashion is that it is more beautiful than the beautiful: it is fascinating.  Its seductive capacity is independent of all judgments."

Jean Baudrillard

Body Language

Mosaccio, Before and After

Why the current fascination with clothes, with dressing-up, and fashion?  Imagine a time when we had no clothes.  In the Old Testament our nakedness was appropriate for the garden of Eden, but in one bite of an apple shame descended with clothing, as Adam and Eve left their first home and joined worldly existence.  Garments as sewn fig leaves became the necessary adornment for "going out."

In the most famous painting of the expulsion from paradise, Mosaccio captured the emotions of guilt, loss, and pain.
The church authorities of the Carmelite Order in Florence not satisfied with the artist's use of hands to cover nakedness, ordered fig leaves [symbols of femininity and abundance ].

Throughout the history of fashion a charming dialogue has taken place between naked freedom and clothed civility, both positive virtues-perfect in our "no fault age".