People Archives - Fabulorum

FASHION YES, FASHION NO

Clothing, the closest article to man’s skin, and the most perennial, has not ceased to evolve through time. Beyond its basic protective function, it has served to communicate social status, to establish hierarchy, to signify tribal adherence and to inspire beauty or attractiveness.

From this last impulse stemmed fashion, pushed in our giddy days to the status of cult and to manufacturer of totems.

Fashion revels in soft creativity for the elites or the masses. Prada or. Zara concoct their ornaments, cash millions, people applaud and everybody is happy. Is this predigested aesthetics? The collective. ATOPOS has turned such ideas and their operating principles on their head to display in a brilliant exhibition how the limits of trendy can be expanded till they dissolve, giving way to uncompromised inspiration. “Arrrgh! Monsters in fashion” at. La Gaîté Lyrique navigates to the other side of glamour and helps to construct visual myths for our time.

By exploring the margins of clothing design, the possibility emerges to manifest our. Instincts, to release our troubled or playful visions. Some of the exhibits have a kinship to Dadaism. Others invite us to conceive new identities. They all try to break the confines and the rules.

After all, ATOPOS is not shedding light onto a new trend. It invites us to enter the postmodern jungle where the digital and the real converge, where the self is deconstructed to be reconstructed again with a little help from our fashion friends. Terrifyingly or humorously.

LONGING AND BELONGING

Seine-et-Marne, a department located west of Paris, became a fashionable destination for the wealthy elites of the Second Empire and the Third Republic.

Country estates from pre-revolutionary years became an object of desire and, when those available did not match the high. Standards sought, a man of style and fortune thought nothing of embarking upon erection of a new one. Witness Ferrières, the work of the. English architect Joseph Paxton, commissioned in 1854 by Baron James de Rothschild.

Or his son Edmond‘s purchase of Armainvilliers in 1877, which he razed and rebuilt in the “style normand”. (Emile Pereire, who also vied for the estate, was unsuccessful in his bidding). The “goût Rothschild”, concocted in many of these estates, spawned from their inclination to mix heavy. Victorian interiors with exquisite objects, furniture and art.

Underlying these acquisitions, lay a passionate fad for the “chasse à courre”, an old hunting style consisting of riding with packs of dogs after the scent of any wild animals until their capture, close in style to the English fox-hunting. Such pastime required extensive landholdings that only the haut monde could afford.

Among the gems matching the aspirations of those families, stands Champs sur Marne, a first-rate destination with a historic pedigree. It was acquired in 1895 by the. Jewish banker Louis Cahen d’Anvers and his wife Louise de Morpurgo. It fulfilled all the essentials so fervently sought by these rich individuals. For this particular family, this purchase represented a way to further their integration as Jews into the haut monde.

Money was snubbed as the single entry ticket to these circles. Taste and a cosmopolitan spirit were employed as effective barriers to the arrivistes knocking at the door. In turn, those parvenus who were integrated into the “haut monde,” behaved ironically with the same disdain.

The site is an eloquent example of architectural symmetry showcasing the principles of 18 century design, both in the building and on the landscaping.

The distribution of the main salons on the axis of the garden is reminiscent of Vaux-le-Vicomte. The harmony that pervaded the site was intact, although in a deplorable state of maintenance. The Cahen d’Anvers proceeded to bring the chateau back to its former splendor aided by the architect. Walter-André Destailleur and the landscape designer Duchêne.

The refurbishment consecrated Champs sur Marne as a privileged destination for the chic and fashionable. Costumed balls, elegant dinners and hunting parties provided the social allure and glamour that the setting required.

This burst of magnificence turned out to be brief. Charles Cahen d’Anvers, the youngest son of Louis, sold the property to the French state in 1935, only 40 years after his parents fell in love with the place. Perhaps society sprinted dramatically through the 1914-1918. Great War and never caught its breath in the subsequent years. An air of melancholy and tiredness pervaded France and, just a few years before another war occurred, the family relinquished this masterwork.

After a period of relative neglect, the most recent restoration was concluded in June, this time, by the Centre of National Monuments. It is a place of nostalgia and immutable beauty, a reflection of past grandeurs and a lesson on the fleeting passage of fortunes.

NÉLIE

This is the story of a woman of extraordinary destiny. Cornelia Jacquemart, a girl of modest origins with a patrician name, had the good fortune of receiving a refined education from. Madame de Vatry, a noblewoman for whom her parents worked. Nélie’s artistic inclinations did the rest. In the first part of her life, she entered the studio of the painter.

Léon Cogniet and by 1868, she received a medal at the. Salon, the annual exhibition of contemporary art. Few had her self-assuredness and her contacts and good technique propelled her to become the darling portraitist of many political and famous men. She managed to successfully break the impasse between dilettantism and professionalism. Which many women painters attempted to navigate in the second part of the 19 century. Thiers, the President of the Republic, sat for her and in the stuffy world of. French male politics, a man of great wealth asked her in 1872 to do his portrait.

Édouard André was a “fils unique”, the single scion of a Protestant banking family. He was nearly forty when he met. Nélie, a man of the world with a reputation as a shrewd investor who had increased the family fortune speculating in the golden property development headed by. Haussman which resulted in the radical transformation of Paris. And true to the tasteful models of his time, he embarked upon the construction of a magnificent residence and assembled a first-rate. Collection of art, inspired on both accounts, by 18 century aesthetics. Pursuits which other enlightened magnates, such as. Isaac de Camondo turned into life passions to distance themselves from simply a rich man’s caprice.

When this blasé bachelor met Mlle. Jacquemart, she was already holding her own in a world where a. Single woman living off her painting was still an exception. No great sparks glowed out of that encounter, just a slow flame, a current of. Sympathy progressively strengthened. Nonetheless, nine years later Édouard asked Nélie for her hand in marriage. The Anglo-Saxon press commented on the event: “The fashionable world and the respected bourgeoisie think that M. André sets a deplorable example in taking Mlle. Jacquemart for his wife. The idea is that he should have looked out for another fortune, or have. Dedicated his millions to the daughter of some noble personage bearing an old title”.

And so, under that unkind auspice and the distrust of the beau monde began the second life of Nélie. The couple set about enlarging. André’s collection mostly revolving around 17 and 18 century masterpieces. Nélie abandoned her paintbrushes and became a collector as avid and engaged as her husband. A gilded life of traveling in search of new treasures took them abroad and often to. Italy where Nélie had stayed as a young woman at the Roman Villa Medici.

By the time Édouard died in 1894 the collection was almost completed, but not the unabated passion of Nélie for more. She journeyed to. India and Burma exploring other cultures’ artifacts, seeking a new aesthetic pleasure. The destiny of this romantic heroine had no match in the pen of any of her contemporaries. The couple. Bequeathed their collections to the Institute de France. And today, the Jacquemart-André museum is one of the jewels of the Parisian art crown.

JEAN AND JEAN

Jean Cocteau was not just an exceptional artist but a superb publicist. His work has been read, seen and examined to exhaustion. As a mercurial individual, his artistic range covered poetry, painting, filmmaking, drama and design. The scope and brilliance of his production is such that there will be.

Decades before he will be relegated to the pantheon of illustrious but predictable artists. France is known to worship. In the now of our daily lives, he still incarnates energy and fantasy, provocation and enlightenment.

Behind The Work

there is the man and in. Cocteau’s case, the other man, Jean Marais. He represented the love that transformed his life (“I was drowning and you did not hesitate to jump into the water”, he wrote). Half his age. Jean Marais spellbound at 24 the ageing Cocteau who at 48 was struggling with an addiction to opium, that artificial paradise where he thought he. Could recover his creative pulse. The tenuous beginning of the affair was not exempt from a certain cynicism on the part of Jean Marais, the cub playing with the consecrated idol. As in fairy tales, resistance and prejudice gave way to passionate love and a story of enchantment and rebirth ensued.

Cocteau began a new phase of his career and young Jean exultant in his physicality came to triumph as the matinee idol of postwar France. The young one chipped away at the conflictive and morbid soul of the old one and won.

Was their encounter destined to be? When Marais saw some of the Jean Cocteau’s drawings he was struck by the resemblance to his own profile. When they finally met. Cocteau could not resist him. The bond was oddly strengthened by echoes of their own pasts. The poet’s father committed suicide when he was 10 and while he soon sought the affection of men, he became an emotional unit with his mother. Marais’ mother. Rosalie, left her husband and came to Paris with Jeannot, 4 at the time, and a younger brother. To the consternation of her sons she would disappear for long periods but these departures were a family secret: Rosalie was kleptomaniac and her. Time away was spent in prison. As the proverb goes, absence made the heart of Jean grow fonder.

When passion fades, it is a challenge to craft a new relationship from the cinders of strong physical magnetism. Yet, these two individuals while exploring desire for others, succeeded in preserving the. Height of their unique friendship. Cocteau went on to adopt another beautiful young man, Édouard Dermit, whom he fashioned to be a painter and an actor. He became his universal legatee at his death of a massive. Heart attack in 1963, curiously a few hours after the passing away of Édith Piaf.

Jean Marais fell in love with the brilliant dancer George Reich, who in turn abandoned him after nine years together. Fragile and lost, he sought to get closer to. Cocteau who had only a few years to live and who eschewed the idea. He had relapsed into his opium habits. Marais’ sadness lifted when a young man entered his life, Serge Ayala, whom following. The steps of his mentor, he adopted as a son. He enjoyed life with his protégé until his death in 1998, oddly of heart failure as his former lover. In 2012, Serge committed suicide.

CHARM AND ABSURDITY

Can any individual be one thing and its opposite? Can we harbor irreconcilable selves? The intriguing life of. Count Robert de Montesquiou –Fézensac may illustrate the dilemma.

He cut a wide swath in the precipitous period of fin-de-siècle. Paris, where he frequented and dazzled the élites while distancing himself from them with his extravagance and marginal behavior. He wrote poetry but would never fancy himself a writer. His vitriolic tongue was a barrier that his charm could not keep under control. But control was not his strong suit, rather the opposite, excess with taste. An aristocrat by birth, he spurned the lifestyle of his set, centered in hunting on gaming estates and lunches at the.

Jockey Club, and embraced a unique sense of aesthetics, decorating the upper floor apartment of his father’s hotel at. Quai d’Orsay with improbable materials and designs. Sarah Bernhardt counted him among her elitist friends, a bond that defined their mutual androgynous. Attraction but stopped short of carnal exchange.

His leanings to occultism and morbid spirituality contrasted with his worldliness. His vanity could not hold him back from. Organizing huge receptions and he amused himself by drawing lists of the “invited” and those “excluded”. Everybody considered him “absurd” at the very least, but his presence. Glamorized the gatherings of any hostess, who immediately rose in rank if Robert was in attendance.

And as a savvy self-promoter he immortalized his image in the hands of the most respected and fashionable painters:. Whistler, Boldini, Jacques-Émile Blanche and La Gándara for whom he posed in a Chinese robe with Mandarin nails and jewelry.

Posterity knows Robert de Montesquiou for having served as the model for the Proustian portrait of Baron de Charlus. Poor Marcel had to suffer the brutal mockery and indifference of his subject as he scampered in his wake. Flattering him to the point of ridicule (“Your mind is a garden filled with rare blooms”, he wrote in one of his letters to the Count).

Who was the man behind the mask?. Was there an enduring emotion of the heart behind his relentless façade? He certainly was the perfect pick for chroniclers of times past but his obsessive posing tired others who, unlike. Marcel Proust, were not his devoted admirers. When the latter wrote his eulogy so risibly entitled “ The simplicity of the. Count of Montesquiou” everyone in the French press refused to publish it.

CECIL’S SHANGRI-LA

He was seduced immediately. Ashcombe, a sleepy hollow on the boundaries of Dorset and Wiltshire, was an accident in the life of Cecil Beaton. Staying for a weekend with his friend. Edith Oliver in Wilton, he spoke of his longing for a small cottage in the country, a frequent remark uttered by city guests. Edith mentioned the casual discovery made by a friend of theirs, the sculptor. Stephen Tomlin, of a deserted house with a grotto in the downs. Uncertain of its exact location, the three of them decided to drive in its search.

After motoring blindly around, Tomlin recognized a rough path and the party charged down on foot to a distant cluster of trees. Among holy oaks, they caught a glimpse of the property. It was silent and neglected, long unlived in. As he later wrote in his memoir of the years at Ashcombe: “It was as if I had been touched on the head by some magic wand. Some people may grow to love their homes; my reaction was instantaneous. It was love at first sight, and from the moment that I stood under the archway, I knew this place was destined to be mine.”

Here, at play, is a moment of magic when a desire explodes in the heart at the sight of something or someone very special. All, then, appears possible. The longing creates a vision and. Cecil already saw in his mind what the house would look like.

At 26, still laboring a professional future and not financially strong, the idea sounded preposterous, especially to his family. He was already a budding manufacturer of worlds and a visionary magician. The cautionary advice did. Not prevent him from approaching the owner and agreeing a rent of £50 pounds per annum.

He proceeded to revamp the space and to bring in furniture acquired during his trips abroad. Succumbing to the decorative fashion of all white. The perfectly idyllic retreat, a resplendent paradise and a magnet to friends was thus created. Visitors came and went and as with so. Much of his oeuvre, it soon was wrapped in a certain mystique.

When the lease could not be renewed, he tore himself away from it with nostalgia and a sense of deep loss. Ashcombe became a literary memoir, a tribute to the love it gave him and his way of repaying it.

Did Madonna experience the same fascination when she decided to acquire the property in 2004? Perhaps she expected the enchantment of the place would be revealed to her.

It is unlikely she glimpsed any of it. Power and a large ego took her to the pages of Vogue magazine posing as a dignified chatelaine in the heavenly kingdom. Following her divorce from Guy Ritchie in 2008, the house passed to her ex-husband as part of the divorce settlement. I am quite certain. Ashcombe was not interested in repeating the love story it had with Cecil Beaton.

IN A LAND OF MILK AND HONEY

In many aspects, Lotusland gardens in Montecito, near Santa Barbara, embody much of the soul of California. The tenacity and drive of its founder and her adventurous life are mirrored over the impressively tended 15. Hectares of soil fashioned over 40 years. It was from scratch an ambitious project which only a mind bordering on obsessive tendencies could see through to completion.

Ganna Walska (1887-1984), a gutsy eastern European born in Belarus, then a section of a larger. Poland, chose opera as her passport to a life of glamour and travel. It took her some time to realize that her name would not pass to history as a singer but her theatricality.

Lotusland gardensCould take her to a world of adventure and triumph. So, she got husbands, money and a certain reputation by means. Rather secondary to her first consuming passion.

The divorce of the fifth husband and the marriage to the much younger sixth. Theos Casimir Bernard, a Buddhist with Hollywood looks, brought her to this amiable and exclusive corner of the Californian coastline. Then life changed forever for this rich bohemian.

Lotusland is her legacy, a botanical empire, a garden of sorts, where families of cacti of all formidable shapes and sizes live close to Walska’s interpretation of a. Japanese garden and to her more haphazard spots of classical landscaping. The spiny armors of the plants and their sheer accumulation (“if one is good a hundred is better. Was one of her more familiar expressions) leave the visitor with a sensation of having emerged from a strange and disquieting dream.

It is as if the place had been conceived by a visionary from an outer planet. She loved cycads, that rare and prehistoric family of plants to which nature gave two sexes. So, it is not a surprise that she also collected minerals and jewelry of astonishing shape and value.

The glamour that she pursued during her younger years gradually gave way to spiritual search and a communion with nature. But her self-identity as a singer was hard to forget, practicing. Regularly and into old age to an audience of perplexed Mexican laborers from the balcony of her cottage.

Her life crystalized in her garden: a relentless chase for more and for better, of high ambitions and constant change.

Her last volte-face, her enduring love was this unique production orchestrated over more than four decades.

Botanists will swoon over it and the rest of us will not help admiring the sheer drive of a woman of many passions that gave us this strange and dreamy Lotusland.

THE MAGNETIC PULL OF AN ISLAND

This may be a unique and strange phenomenon in the Mediterranean: an island that escaped the dreaded tourist masses and happily has entered the. XXI century untouched and unmoved by port expansions, shopping marinas and traffic gluts in her sinous and scarce roads.

Pantelleria

Is not a recognizable beauty spot and does not compete in glamour with any of her more popular siblings of Southern Italy. This may She stands alone, volcanic and abrupt in the middle of the. Straits of Sicily and equidistant from the Tunisian and the Sicilian coastlines.

A throwback to a nostalgic past or a harbinger of new. Gaia philosophies? In the latter case, the miracle occurred without too much ideological baggage. Culture here is too old and the present inhabitants may not have heard of a militant love for the soil.

There is an insolent beauty, an old and majestic. Glimmer in her waters and a serene aura in any of her corners.

The terraced fields of tomatoes and capers, the rustic architecture of the damuso and the dark and rocky shores subjugate the chance visitor. Panteleria enters the soul and stays there.

Giorgio Armani, Ricardo Mutti, the photographer. Fabrizio Ferri and his ballerina wife. Alessandra, are among the famed residents of this singular place. Carole Bouquet , the French actress, produces the local passito wine and olive oil.

The austere topography of the island enshrines much of that raw beauty that does not belong to the post card kind.

It also hides other precious things. Like an evening at the moorish patio of Zubebi, a discreet resort, sipping a glass of. Sicilian Maurigi wine and tasting their luscious “fritto misto”. Then, you realize a share of paradise can drop on your lap during your earthly existence.

A LARDER OF WONDERS

Culinary arts have acquired a mythic status in our hedonistic culture. TV cooking shows, newspaper sections on food and wine, unrelenting publications of cookbooks and internet blogs have reinforced the paramount importance of fine food and drink in our leisure time.

Chefs and cooks effortlessly rocket to stardom becoming celebrities overnight. Then, there is one more best-seller from the new chef. Or a new street market offering organic products. San Francisco, the foodie city par excellence, knows more than any other on this subject. The gourmet industry shines here with uncommon vividness.

Yet, in spite of all the experiments in gastronomical currents and the success of many of them, there is an elusive quality missing in most of the current trends. Food as emotion, surpassing the qualities of taste and smell.

Food magically and simply prepared. Boulette’s Larder in the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero in San Francisco is such a place. Chef Amaryl Schwertner and partner Lori Regis have infused their cooking with an elegant and uncluttered touch. The rare attribute of their dishes is that they all seem to have something of an alchemical spirit in them.

Not so much for any tampering with the ingredients but because they elevate the experience of the meal to a higher level. The large industrial cookers and ovens, the gourmet products, the cash counter and food displays, the kitchen and customer traffic all mingle fluidly without any physical separation in one single space as a metaphor for the joy of their food.

My last lunch there of leek and cauliflower soup with a pistachio pesto followed by a burrata with pumpkin seeds and almonds infused me with spontaneous cheerfulness and warmth. If Amaryl and Lori did not exist, the city would be forced to invent them.

HELMUT NEWTON: HE IS A CAMERA

Last friday Paris flocked to the opening at the Grand Palais for a retrospective of 250 pictures from the celebrated Helmut Newton. A city that savors and manufactures fashion and. Creativity could not resist the Olympian call of one of the beacons of XX century photography.

Few artists have received such an impressive show so shortly after death. In January 2004, his life ended when he lost control of his. Cadillac as he was leaving the parking area of the Château Marmont Hotel on Sunset Boulevard.

A romantic ending to a glittering life. His seductive images, all carefully composed and meticulously. Provocative have entered the mainstream of fashion photography. Newton illustrates the confluence of marketing and art in the hands of Vogue, Marie-Claire and Elle. The editors consented to the visual representations of his erotic fantasies, on the borderline of. Perversity and chic, confident that the thousands of magazine copies sold would cause a stir but not a loss of readers. The beast was tamed.

The rest is history. Cultural anthropologists and other pundits will deconstruct his images and claim he is a pioneer of female liberation while others will revile his manipulation of the feminine

Representation. It is hard to believe that the pivotal themes of his oeuvre, power, class and money incorporate an ode to a free woman. A strong woman certainly. A loved one, I doubt it. My personal impression in front of his most iconic work “Elles Arrivent”, published in. Vogue France in 1981, is of advancing glaciers. No one I know, in their wildest fantasies, would wish for such chilly temperatures.