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| Richard Mortimer’s online magazine Ponystep launched in style—and in association with MAC—at West End wonderbar Sketch. Cool London trotted out in force, with mohawked club kids mingling with Pop’s Katie Grand, Gareth Pugh, Henry Holland, Fashion East’s Lulu Kennedy, set designer Gary Card, model Olivia Inge, accessories magician Judy Blame, artist Matthew Stone, singer Siobhan Donaghy and London legend Princess Julia. The one-and-only Hanna Hanra had her multitasking down to a tee—or double Hs?—mixing up a storm on the decks and on the Ponystep site as a contributing writer. One reveler confessed he actually thought the launch was for Mortimer's next BoomBox club. In a way, he’s right. It is a club, just not the steamy, boozy, hair-in-the-air kind of club that BoomBox was. Ponystep is a selective, curated version of London’s fashion/art/music zeitgeist, joining the dots of the city's creative scene and celebrating an interplay of disciplines and ideas—only this time, you don’t have to inhale glitter. —Dean Mayo Davies
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| Jan 08: It's no surprise that Calvin Klein, the ultimate modern American fashion house, has a solid website. After all, we're talking about a colossal enterprise that reached its first billion-dollar mark way back when the Internet became a household reality in the beige Nineties. The unexpected, and very gratifying, discovery is that the domain is a stylish visual treat that doesn't feel too corporate-y. That's especially good news because, increasingly for several seasons now, we've been unhealthily excited about Calvin Klein under the creative direction of Francisco Costa and Italo Zucchelli, head designers of the signature Collection lines for women and men, respectively. But back to the site. Naturally it's white and clean, expertly designed by the gurus at Createthe agency; but it's also loaded with content, a lot of it on the prosaic side, intended to showcase the brand's myriad lines. The fun is found in the Experience section, which contains frothy photos from parties, backstage and casting calls, as well as stills from current ad campaigns, while a quick link jumps you over to calvinklein.tv, a separate site with sexy publicity and runway videos. Still more candy is hidden in some easily-overlooked sections of the main site; fail to find it and you might miss Natalia Vodianova romping in her skivvies. If you think her pics resemble a better version of those ubiquitous American Apparel billboards, remember who invented the art of in-your-face sexual marketing.
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| Nov 07: Half the time it seems like there's a penis requirement for an Antwerp designer to reach any kind of success, but in reality the once-drab Flemish town isn't a boy's club. It's been producing women designers just as talented, and with surnames just as unpronounceable, as their male counterparts all along. Foremost among these stands Ann Demeulemeester. Often, and lazily, described as quintessentially rock or goth, her work is much more nuanced and even romantic than one might think. It is true, however, that her brooding, asymmetric and monochromatic proclivities paved the way for such later priests of the dark and droopy as Rick Owens. Not that she would know; on principle, Demeulemeester ignores what goes on in the rest of the fashion world, preferring to remain trend-impervious. Art and music are more important to her, and their subtle influence is evident in her clothes, particularly her collaborations with artist Jim Dine and poet-legend Patti Smith. The designer also lives in the only Le Corbusier house on Belgian soil. With her universe of minimalist art, it's no surprise to find her recently remade website spare and understated. Still, the domain delivers a satisfying taste of the Demeulemeester aesthetic, along with all the essential information for the ardent Ann fan: a timeline of her career, collection photos reaching back to her debut in 1987 and numerous interviews and articles.
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| Oct 07: Loyal readers of this column will know that we normally abstain from endorsing overtly commercial domains, websites that are little more than bigger-screen ads adapted to fit monitor and mouse. And yet at this moment, we are slavishly engrossed by a site that's just that, a glitzy shameless product plug, namely Coco Mademoiselle, the youthful fragrance from the house of Chanel. What made us so easy, you ask? Maybe it's L-O-V-E (the viciously catchy Nat King Cole ditty that the URL plays on loop). Perhaps it's the gangly comeliness of Keira Knightley, who stars in the lavish video at the center of it. Or possibly the blame falls on our affinity for haute French home decor, the sort that teeters dangerously close to kitsch. It certainly has to do with the fact that Chanel continues to be one of the most Internet-friendly and -savvy fashion firms around. (To wit, in an unprecedented and commendable move, the company recently invited a group of 15 bloggers from around the world on an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris to explore its ateliers, labs and other inner sanctums.) Since the scent's campaign was inspired by the Right Bank apartment of Coco Chanel herself, the website's winning conceit is to take the viewer on a tour of its sumptuous rooms, moving from salon to salon, stopping along the way to zoom in on odd details that give clues to the unique sensibility of the iconic designer—baroque mirrors, precious "objets" and gilded tchotchkes at every turn. As with everything Chanel, the site's strength lies in the subtle details. The Study, for example, features a little feat of flash design in the boats that gently rock back and forth on the famous oriental lacquer screens. It all culminates with the campaign's showpiece, a mini-film that's sure to join the brand's productions with Vanessa Paradis and Nicole Kidman as an advertising classic: Miss Knightley, looking (and smelling) exquisite in red satin (and a spritz of Coco), exits the elegant apartment into the sparkle of Paris at night and the arms of a predictably handsome prince. Still not convinced such a cloyingly superficial pleasure is worthy of our praises? Then take it from Coco herself, who—in one of her eccentric bon mot—pronounced that "A woman who doesn't wear perfume has no future." And that's a scary prospect.
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 Hint Shop
Have we ever told you about our problem with authority? Oh, it's a big one. Bosses barking orders, shophands pushing pastels—we don't think so. So until we plan that underground resistance, we're just going to let these Obesity and Speed spring tees do the resisting for us.
Shoptart
No one would judge you too harshly for thinking, upon entering Alexander McQueen's new store in Los Angeles, that you'd stumbled onto the set of the next Terminator film. But no, the boutique's centerpiece is not a cyborg levitating through the skylight. Also this month: Stella McCartney, Aloharag.... Message Boards
"Madonna starves herself on a raw macrobiotic kosher vegan kaballah diet and works out three hours a day to maintain the physique of a 12-year-old gymnast boy, and then has the cheeks of a 300-pound woman implanted into her face. And her forehead is like a plastic baby's bottom. It's like Nicole Kidman's forehead at the height of her botox addiction, and we all remember how unfortunate that era was." |
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