Leyendecker's artist brother F.X. Leyendecker also had an eye for masculine muscle, as with this barechested blacksmith, and for strategically placed missiles between shirtless swabbies (compare below). He became addicted to drugs and killed himself at 47.
The world's most famous makeup artist "married" his much younger boyfriend in an unofficial ceremony in Hawaii in July 2000 and after that Kevyn Aucoin referred to Jeremy Antunes as his husband. In less than two years, the man who easily earned $10,000 a session doing makeup for superstar celebrities' magazine cover shoots or Oscar appearances, the author of three #1 New York Times bestsellers about beauty, the only makeup professional ever honored by the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and the founder of a new line of beauty products bearing his name, was dead at forty, without a will. His husband was locked out of their two shared homes without any legal recourse. Aucoin's estate went to his adoptive parents back in Louisiana who embody more than their share of contradictions: Initially repelled by homosexuality, they started the first PFLAG chapter in Lafayette yet refuse to give their son-in-law even the bed he shared with Kevyn.
It's possible that Kevyn and Jeremy were on the verge of breaking up, or experiencing a typical rough patch in what might have been a long marriage. Jeremy had left a sick and hurting Kevyn to go to Paris for a week alone, which sounds selfish and indulgent but could be seen as a tough ultimatum to someone ruinously addicted to many kinds of pain killers and sleeping pills, who had in the preceding six months dropped out of two programs to overcome substance abuse, and who had screwed up his friend Cher's "Song for the Lonely" video shoot (needing to be hospitalized twice) so notoriously that not one star had asked him to do her makeup for the Oscars that spring. In any case, Jeremy's trip was cut short by Kevin's final hospitalization. Those pills were to relieve Kevyn's intense suffering from acromegaly, a pituitary gland disorder that causes excessive growth and had given him an ever enlarging brain tumor, undiagnosed since he was nine years old, at which time he had already discovered makeup.
From childhood, his ambition for glamor and success was matched by his generosity of spirit. Two ex-boyfriends continued to work closely with him and even after he had achieved his own fame, he took enormous pleasure and considerable time to do makeup for shopgirls, neighbors, and even the homeless teenage drag queens of the Hetrick-Martin Institute, of which he was a vociferous supporter. Topping the wildly devoted praise by Cher, Janet, Tina, Tori, Gwyneth, Liza, Courtney, and Celine, Mary Tyler Moore said, "There were three men in my life I met who had the ability to make you feel like you were the only person in the world just by looking at you, just with their eyes: One was Sinatra, the other was Pope John Paul II, and the third was Kevyn." Despite his instructions that his ashes be scattered in Hawaii where he was married, Kevyn's parents are keeping his cremated remains in Louisiana because they like to visit him.
"Arbiters of fashion generally agree that Balenciaga, the son of a Basque fisherman and a seamstress, was the greatest couturier of the last century. Dior considered him the primus inter pares, and Chanel conceded that Balenciaga alone could construct a perfect garment from start to finish with his own hands, whereas everyone else was merely 'a designer.'"
To comprehend his genius you could inspect the three hundred original designs he created each year from 1937 to 1968, but you'd still be lost about his legacy; or you could simply read Judith Thurman's New Yorker essay "The Absolutist," which includes the quote above and is a highlight of her brilliant Cleopatra's Nose [Kindle]. She discusses Balenciaga's business partner and greatest love, Vladzio Zawrorowski d'Attainville, as well as the benefits of being gay to Yves Saint Laurent and the recent Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière: "A sense of dislocation often hones the instincts of a gifted gay youth from the provinces... They are able to recognize a closeted seductress -- a Buñuel heroine, like Belle du Jour -- and help to realize her potential for transgression." The California native and current New Yorker Alexander Wang, 28, will replace Ghesquière as creative director, the company announced last month.
Despite his success and his peerless status as The Master, Balenciaga suffered a series of devastations: In 1947 Dior got credit for the New Look, when Balenciaga had been showing mid-calf skirts, full bust jackets, and small waists for years; in 1948 his partner died; and over the next two decades the world edged away from couture to ready to wear. Although he triumphed time and again with his tunic dresses in 1955, his sack dresses in 1956, his pairing of tall boots with harlequin tights and shorter hemlines, and his maverick use of special fabrics like plastics for rainwear, he decided to close his business in 1968 rather than lower himself to the faster, cheaper standards mandated by ready-to-wear. Four years later he died in his native Spain.
T
hree years ago the world beyond a few gay fashion enclaves in New York, London, Paris, and Milan found out about Grace Coddington when she outshone her boss Anna Wintour in the documentary The September Issue. In an industry obsessed with youth and the new next thing, she has been Vogue's creative director for decades and this year turned 71. Even more rare: She is the only woman in the world who can say she lives in Chelsea with a straight male hairdresser who has been her boyfriend for thirty years. It has not all been a fairytale. Her dad died when she was 11; her modeling career [left] ended with a car crash; her two marriages were short mistakes; and her sister died leaving Grace an 8 year-old boy to raise. She recently gave an interview saying it wouldn't hurt young designers to have “a few things going wrong in their life... I mean, I hate to say it, but it teaches you a hell of a lot, you know.” The proof is in her book Grace: A Memoir [Kindle], on sale Tuesday. It's filled with her own drawings, like this one showing Anna getting pinned by Sarkozy, and greatest hits photos from the visionary shoots she dreams up, like this Norman Parkinson stunner from the 70s.
Are any three letters as elegant as YSL? When he was seventeen, Yves Saint Laurent began working for Christian Dior, who referred to him as his dauphin. When Dior died suddenly four years later, Saint Laurent was made head of the fashion house, but soon he was conscripted to serve in the Algerian war. Hazed by his rougher fellow soldiers, the fragile couture artiste lasted twenty days before he had a nervous breakdown. The army tried to cure him with electroshock therapy. When he returned to Dior, he found he had been replaced. He started his own house, giving rise to some of the most famous clothes in history: the Mondrian dress, "le Smoking," the tuxedo for women, the designer leather jacket, the sheath dress, the gold cape. For nearly twenty years he and his business manager Pierre Bergé were lovers, and, because they are French, after they broke up they
continued living together for another ten years. In 1983, Saint Laurent became the first living designer to be honored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a retrospective. In 1993, he and Bergé sold the company for $600 million. After his retirement in 2002, Saint Laurent spent much of his time in Marrakech, where he restored and opened to the public the vivid gardens originally designed by French expat Jacques Majorelle. He died in June 2008 (most newspapers degayed his obituary, calling Bergé, who announced his death, "a friend" or omitting him) and his ashes are interred in the garden. At his funeral in Paris, Catherine Deneuve read a poem by Walt Whitman. In 2009, Bergé sold most of their possessions at a record-shattering auction earning $484 million.
Although selling Jobriath as an "American Bowie" was wishful thinking, the story of openly "fairy" glam rocker Jobraith in 1973 and 1974 should make a fascinating documentary. Jim Farber, a talking head in the film, which screens Saturday night at Walter Reade, writes in today's Daily News:
"Jobriath (ne Bruce Wayne Campbell) recorded two albums in 1973 and ’74 that both benefited, and suffered, from historic hype. As you might expect from an aspiring rocker of the day, his albums sounded like David Bowie aping Mick Jagger, but with enough classical and theatrical flourishes to give it an original twist. Many New Yorkers of the era will remember the garish advertizing for Jobriath’s self-titled debut. Gigantic posters of the man not only adorned city buses, they occupied a looming billboard in Times Square, depicting him as an ancient Roman statue, dyed blue, and in the nude, no less.
"Suffice it to say, they were as discussed, and giggled over, as the muscled Marky Mark posters that appeared in that same space, courtesy of Calvin Klein, more than two decades later.
"Music fans may also remember the star’s famous self-description - “I’m rock’s truest fairy,” a banner meant to distinguish him from the rush of pseudo-gay, and faux-bisexual, stars who ruled the glam-rock trend of the early to mid-’70s.
"The original idea was to provide a more outrageous, U.S. answer to the sexually equivocating David Bowie, a notion advanced by Jobriath’s scheming manager, Jerry Brandt.
"The P.R. backfired spectacularly, not only because America wasn’t quite ready for such a creature, but also because of the hard sell behind it. Though Jobriath crafted his inventive music with esteemed classic rock producer Eddie Kramer, and while he got good reviews from Rolling Stone, Esquire spoke for many when it dubbed him “the hype of the year.”
(Hat tip and thanks to J "Ziggy" K.)
An abstract expressionist of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, Paul Wonner (1920-2008) maybe wasn't Diebenkorn but his early and middle works endure. Above are his Sarah Vaughn Singing (1963) and Woman with Flowers (1961). For more than fifty years he was partners with Theophilus Brown who, at 91, is said still to paint every day in San Francisco. In the 1960s they lived in Santa Monica and were friends with the locals, William Inge, Andre Previn, Isherwood and Bachardy, Eva Marie Saint and her husband. The Guggenheim, SFMoMA, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum are among the many institutions that collect Wonner's work.
You think you got a big diary? A.C. Benson’s was bigger. Humungous, in fact. His lifelong journals stretched beyond four million words (or, five times more than Shakespeare's collected works), until his death in 1925. He taught at Cambridge and wrote a bestselling collection of essays called From a College Window
Born in Des Moines, graduated from a high school in Evansville, Indiana, Roy Halston Frowick had shed the Midwest along with his first and last names by the time he designed Jackie Kennedy’s iconic inauguration pillbox hat when he was twenty-nine. Soon after, he began designing clothes, which were standouts for their elegance and simplicity. As famous for his perpetual partying at Studio 54 as he was for his fashions, Halston was the first designer to understand the power of licensing his brand. His name appeared on everything from scarves to eyeglasses to perfume to the uniforms for airlines and rental car companies, yet because he was a perfectionist unable to delegate any designing to his staff, he cracked under enormous pressure. The firm that bought his company asked him to design a clothing line for J.C. Penney, and when he did so, Bergdorf’s stopped carrying his clothes and many longstanding clients decamped to other designers. Ultimately he was fired from his own company and legally barred from designing under his name. He left New York for San Francisco and died of aids in 1990.
Who’s that playing his guitar with a bow like a cello? And who sings the end credits song "Sticks and Stones" in How to Train Your Dragon? Why, it’s Jónsi, of course, the lead singer of that other Icelandic musical sensation, Sigur Rós. They followed the worldwide success of their 1999 post-rock album Ágætis byrjun, with 2002’s album called ( ), which was sung entirely in Vonlenska, or Hopelandic, a made-up language of nonsense syllables. Because it sounds similar to Icelandic, it’s an open question whether people in other parts of the world could tell any difference, but those fans would at least have noticed that the accompanying lyrics booklet was left blank for listeners to write their own meaning of the words. Sigur Rós’s songs have been used in movies by Greg Araki, Cameron Crowe, and Wes Anderson, as well as on numerous tv shows, and they’ve sold more than two million albums. Jónsi is 100% supergay and in 2009 released an album called Riceboy Sleeps with his boyfriend under the moniker Jónsi and Alex [Somers, an American]. He released his first solo album Go in 2010. Last year he reteamed with Cameron Crowe, scoring his feel-good family film We Bought a Zoo starring Matt Damon.
Another off year for nominations [after the jump] from the American Society of Magazine Editors. Surely these were not the very best stories of 2011 nor were these five the finest photo features. Down from last year's nine noms, The New Yorker got six this year, but none in fiction. New York also earned six. One thing ASME did nail: David Grann's fantastic fact piece, "A Murder Foretold," already optioned by Hollywood. Strange that the press release lists only the magazine and title, omitting authors or photographers. I had to google each title to find the fiction writers.
FICTION
The Atlantic for “Scars,” by Sarah Turcotte, Summer 2011
McSweeney’s Quarterly for “Ambition,” by Jonathan Franzen, April
McSweeney’s Quarterly for “The Northeast Kingdom,” by Nathaniel Rich, August
Virginia Quarterly Review for “La Moretta,” by Maggie Shipstead, Fall
Zoetrope: All-Story for “The Hox River Window,” by Karen Russell, Fall
FEATURE PHOTOGRAPHY
National Geographic for “Taming the Wild,” March
The New York Times Magazine for “Touch of Evil,” December 11
TIME for “Portraits of Resilience,” September 19
Vogue for “Lady Be Good,” March [Amber & son, above by Steven Klein]
W for “Planet Tilda,” August [below by Tim Walker]
Such is the world that photographer Bruce Weber, 66, made "news" yesterday for releasing a series of Abercrombie videos featuring this man to man kiss. Weber is married to a woman but for four decades years his primary subject has been the eroticizing of men's bodies and male camaraderie. (One of his many books is a collaboration with Reynolds Price, Bear Pond
The internet wants you to watch Weber's videos here: shower kiss, wrestling duo, wrestling team, shirtless film shoot, Melville, and matador.
Celebrate Grant Wood's 121st birthday by reading Tripp Evans' breakthrough biography exploring how his coded work was influenced by being closeted in Iowa in unfriendly times. Evans reprints in color many of his paintings that are more interesting and more beautiful than his more famous American Gothic. The book's revelations extend beyond Wood's life and times; it may change the way you look at paintings.
The world's most famous makeup artist "married" his much younger boyfriend in an unofficial ceremony in Hawaii in July 2000 and after that Kevyn Aucoin referred to Jeremy Antunes as his husband. In less than two years, the man who easily earned $10,000 a session doing makeup for superstar celebrities' magazine cover shoots or Oscar appearances, the author of three #1 New York Times bestsellers about beauty, the only makeup professional ever honored by the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and the founder of a new line of beauty products bearing his name, was dead at forty, without a will. His husband was locked out of their two shared homes without any legal recourse. Aucoin's estate went to his adoptive parents back in Louisiana who embody more than their share of contradictions: Initially repelled by homosexuality, they started the first PFLAG chapter in Lafayette yet refuse to give their son-in-law even the bed he shared with Kevyn.
It's possible that Kevyn and Jeremy were on the verge of breaking up, or experiencing a typical rough patch in what might have been a long marriage. Jeremy had left a sick and hurting Kevyn to go to Paris for a week alone, which sounds selfish and indulgent but could be seen as a tough ultimatum to someone ruinously addicted to many kinds of pain killers and sleeping pills, who had in the preceding six months dropped out of two programs to overcome substance abuse, and who had screwed up his friend Cher's "Song for the Lonely" video shoot (needing to be hospitalized twice) so notoriously that not one star had asked him to do her makeup for the Oscars that spring. In any case, Jeremy's trip was cut short by Kevin's final hospitalization. Those pills were to relieve Kevyn's intense suffering from acromegaly, a pituitary gland disorder that causes excessive growth and had given him an ever enlarging brain tumor, undiagnosed since he was nine years old, at which time he had already discovered makeup.
From childhood, his ambition for glamor and success was matched by his generosity of spirit. Two ex-boyfriends continued to work closely with him and even after he had achieved his own fame, he took enormous pleasure and considerable time to do makeup for shopgirls, neighbors, and even the homeless teenage drag queens of the Hetrick-Martin Institute, of which he was a vociferous supporter. Topping the wildly devoted praise by Cher, Janet, Tina, Tori, Gwyneth, Liza, Courtney, and Celine, Mary Tyler Moore said, "There were three men in my life I met who had the ability to make you feel like you were the only person in the world just by looking at you, just with their eyes: One was Sinatra, the other was [John Paul II] and the third was Kevyn." Despite his instructions that his ashes be scattered in Hawaii where he was married, Kevyn's parents are keeping his cremated remains in Louisiana because they like to visit him.
To comprehend his genius you could inspect the three hundred original designs he created each year from 1937 to 1968, but you'd still be lost about his legacy; or you could simply read Judith Thurman's New Yorker essay "The Absolutist," which includes the quote above and is a highlight of her brilliant Cleopatra's Nose [Kindle]. She discusses Balenciaga's business partner and greatest love, Vladzio Zawrorowski d'Attainville, as well as the benefits of being gay to Yves Saint Laurent and the current Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière: "A sense of dislocation often hones the instincts of a gifted gay youth from the provinces... They are able to recognize a closeted seductress -- a Buñuel heroine, like Belle du Jour -- and help to realize her potential for transgression."
Despite his success and his unmatched status as The Master, Balenciaga suffered a series of devastations: In 1947 Dior got credit for the New Look, when Balenciaga had been showing mid-calf skirts, full bust jackets, and small waists for years; in 1948 his partner died; and over the next two decades the world edged away from couture to ready to wear. Although he triumphed time and again with his tunic dresses in 1955, his sack dresses in 1956, his pairing of tall boots with harlequin tights and shorter hemlines, and his maverick use of special fabrics like plastics for rainwear, he decided to close his business in 1968 rather than lower himself to the faster, cheaper standards mandated by ready-to-wear. Four years later he died in his native Spain.
Avoiding sports as a child, Cecil Beaton learned photography from his nanny on her Kodak 3A, and avoiding academics at Cambridge, which he left without a degree in 1925, he took his first published photo, printed in Vogue, of one of England's leading Shakespearean scholars in drag: To be exact, George "Dadie" Rylands, a Cambridge Fellow for 72 years, was costumed as the Duchess of Malfi. From there Beaton had to go work for his father's timber company, which he suffered for eight miserable days. After that he returned to his rightful place in the world of design, creating book jackets and studying photography until Vogue hired him fulltime in 1927. Although his style is flowery and theatrical, many of his most enduring images are serious people captured at critical times: a tense Churchill in 1940, Queen Elizabeth II's coronation portrait, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's wedding portrait. During the war, he volunteered and was posted to the Ministry of Information, capturing images of the Blitz, its young injured on the cover of Life, and RAF pilots in their cockpit.
Versatile in his talents, Beaton also designed the lighting, sets, and costumes for many Broadway musicals, winning four Tony Awards, and for several Hollywood extravaganzas, winning the Oscar for best costumes twice, for Gigi and most famously for his high camp creations in My Fair Lady. Although he never consummated his long unrequited love for Peter Watson, a gay art collector whose interests lay elsewhere, Beaton did enjoy possibly the greatest consolation prize of the twentieth century, an affair with Gary Cooper. For his entire life, he kept his childhood diary in which he first realized he was a "terrible, terrible homosexualist" and that shame never fully disappeared, driving him to a few misguided affairs with women later in his life, including one with Greta Garbo, who dumped him and went back to women. When he was seventy he suffered a major stroke that left him partially paralyzed, and though he adapted to drawing and photographing with his left hand, he never recovered his earlier ease. He died six years later, in 1980.
Click here, to re-read Sandy Leonard's immortal Beaton/Coral Browne memory.
In 1958, when native Texan Morris Kight arrived in Los Angeles, he was almost forty and ready to fight for gay rights, but he considered the Mattachine Society elitist. In reaction, he co-founded the third outpost of the Gay Liberation Front, after New York and Berkeley. One of their earliest battles was against a West Hollywood diner called Barney's Beanery which had a painted sign and printed matchbooks with the misspelled warning Fagots Stay Out. After three months of protests, sit-ins, and media glare, the owner removed the original sign, but as soon as the attention subsided, he remounted an identical sign and kept it on display until 1984. In June 1970 to celebrate the first anniversary of Stonewall, Kight helped organize Christopher Street West, which was only permitted after he, Troy Perry, and the ACLU sued reluctant city officials and the hostile police department for the right to have a parade.
Kight's proudest moment came in October 1971, when he and two other activists opened the nation's first gay and lesbian community center. With his sometimes abrasive strategies and leftist politics, Kight had many detractors within the movement. One of those was David Goodstein who transformed the Advocate from a newspaper to a magazine and prohibited his reporters from writing about Kight and other people he thought hurt the image of gay rights. Kight's protest of anti-gay Coors created a public disaster for Outfest, which had finally convinced the brewery to sponsor their film festival. He was also a vocal critic of 1978's proposed amendment to ban gay teachers from public schools. In January 2003, Kight donated his 3,000-item collection of art, papers, and memorabilia to the ONE Institute. Three days later he died, at eighty-three, survived by his partner of twenty-five years, Roy Zucheran.
I met him backstage at the Stonewall 25 rally in New York. He was awesome and very, very cranky when the announcer called him Morris Knight.
+ + +
Two global icons of the Glass Closet were born exactly 20 years apart, and both are maybe or maybe not inching their way out: Jodie Foster, 49, publicly thanked her partner "my beautiful Cydney" when she accepted the Sherry Lansing Leadership Award, but that was way back in 2007. And they broke up in 2008, when Jodie left Cydney B. for Cindy Mort, who in turn dumped Jodie to return to her former girlfriend Amanda Demme. This year Jodie had an epic failure with The Beaver, in which she directed and defended her longtime pal, homophobe, sexist, racist, anti-Semite Mel Gibson. Shown on 168 theaters, Gibson's big comeback movie grossed under one million dollars. Jodie can now be seen opposite Kate Winslet in Carnage and next in Elysium the follow-up from the director of District 9.
Calvin Klein is 69 today with his boyfriend of more than a year, model Nick Gruber, who graduated from high school in 2009. In January, Calvin rented Indochine to throw Nick a 21st birthday party with Anna Wintour, Donna Karan, Vera Wang, Daphne Guinness, Ian Schrager, and "100 male models." That doesn't sound so private. They broke up in July, and got back together within three weeks, when they were seen holding hands on the street and kissing in broad daylight in Manhattan. They were still together as recently as October 31 but who can say if these are costumes or their everyday look at home.
A favorite Spain-watcher tipped me to the grand opening of the Balenciaga Museum in the designer's tiny hometown of Getaria, a seaside village near the French border. The massive 54,000 square foot museum displays (only?) 90 dresses, including gowns worn by Princess Grace and Belgium's Queen Fabiola. A gala preview with Queen Sofia and Givenchy preceded the public opening on Friday. Worldly readers may be unsurprised to learn the museum's foundation is beset with financial irregularities and the original budget of 6 million euros somehow ballooned to 30 million euros. Difficult to imagine the master of the uninterrupted line loving this awkward mash-up building, but his art inside will more than compensate. Spanish Vogue offers some highlights of a magnificent career.
In Madrid on Wednesday the Galeria Elvira Gonzalez opened a show of twenty-eight Robert Mapplethorpe photographs curated by Pedro Almodóvar. It appears to be a cavalcade of strong men, delicate flowers, a kitten, and a young naked Patti Smith.
I wasn't kidding when I said the new, degayed Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Met is mandatory -- I went back to see it again during my six minutes in the city between Sicily and Alaska -- and Judith Thurman agrees. In her New Yorker review she says:
Even if you never bother with fashion shows, go to this one. It has more in common with “Sleep No More,” the “immersive” performance of “Macbeth” currently playing in Chelsea, than it does with a conventional display of couture in a gallery, tent, or shop window. Andrew Bolton, the curator of the Met’s Costume Institute, has assembled a hundred ensembles and seventy accessories, mostly from the runway, with a few pieces of couture that McQueen designed at Givenchy, and he gives their history and psychology an astute reading. McQueen was an omnivore (literally so; he always struggled with his weight), and the richness of his work reflects a voracious consumption of high and low culture. He felt an affinity with the Flemish masters, Gospel singing, Elizabethan theatre and its cross-dressing heroines (a line from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was tattooed on his right biceps), contemporary performance art, punk, Surrealism, Japan, the ancient Yoruba, and fin-de-siècle aestheticism. In most particulars, however—including his death—he was an archetypal Romantic.
You will really regret missing it. (The show is such an event it has a wait line of about 15 minutes, and has been extended through August 7.) If you're too far away buy a plane ticket watch this two minute slideshow narrated by Thurman and read the exquisite catalog. To get to the McQueen exhibit you'll pass this newly displayed engraving which reproduces Reverdin's drawing of a 1795 painting (now lost) by Gerard depicting the sixth century Roman general Belisarius, blinded and carrying his young male guide suffering a snake bite.
The fine film L'Amour Fou made in 2009 but just released yesterday in the U.S. is very French, so it's less a hard documentary and more a personal essay, an elegant and melancholy love letter from Pierre Bergé looking back on his fifty years with Yves Saint Laurent. Their early romance, Saint Laurent's replacing Christian Dior at age 21, being fired after his breakdown during military service in the Algerian War, their joint establishment of YSL's own couture house and subsequent triumphs are nicely sketched with archival clips. The film is framed around the dissembling and selling of their magnificent collection of art and objets, allowing Bergé in a series of interviews to reminisce about key moments in their lives, not omitting Saint Laurent's drinking, drugs, and depression. He says he saw Yves happy only two times a year, at the end of each couture collection, and it lasted not more than 24 hours.
To cheer themselves they had their art, their dog, their house and dazzling public gardens in Marrakech, and a newer chateau in Normandy where Saint Laurent decided to theme each room around a character from Proust. (When traveling, he always used the nom de hotel Swann.) The filmmakers shy away from saying what the men did for amour after their romantic relationship ended, but it does include Bergé's early and enduring work against aids. A high point is seeing footage of ACT-UP Paris staging a die-in on the streets and unrolling a pink condom over the obelisk in Place de la Concorde. Discussing them as a visible gay couple, former Minister of Culture Jack Lang said Saint Laurent and Bergé were symbols "of courage and power, of nobility and love." Fashionistas are forewarned, ultimately viewers will learn more about how Christie's mounts an epic auction -- with gala previews in New York and London before the Olympic-sized event itself in Paris's Grand Palais -- than they will about how a designer creates couture. The movie captures the primal, adrenaline thrill of bidding wars, as when this Brancusi sculpture goes for $26 million Euros, but the filmmakers are too sophisticated to tell you the overall results, or to explain that the proceeds were split between their existing foundation and a new non-profit to fund scientific research to battle aids. In fact, their auction shattered records as the highest-grossing personal collection in history. Guess the total -- no, higher -- posted after the jump.
Continue reading "L'Amour Fou: Gay Courage, Power, Nobility, and Love" »
Jackie Kennedy’s wedding dress when she married Onassis? Valentino. Elizabeth Taylor’s gown for Guy de Rothschild’s Bal Proust? Valentino. Sophia Loren's dress the night she won her Oscar? Valentino. Jane Fonda's dress the night she won her Oscar? Valentino. Julia Roberts’ vintage gown the night she won her Oscar? Valentino. Cate Blanchett’s pale yellow, burgundy-sashed gown the night she won her Oscar? Valentino. The most-worn designer at the 2007 Oscars? Valentino. Fabulousness becomes monotonous, but style is forever. Valentino Garavani has been a top designer since he started, and, come July, Rome will host a three-day extravaganza to celebrate his forty-five years in fashion. For twelve years he and the company’s financial manager, Giancarlo Giammetti, were lovers; they remain business partners, and, says Valentino, they continue to have "a relationship with nothing sexual in it. Yet a great love remains, ancient, surviving." In 1990 they formed an Italian charity to help people living with aids. Since 1982, Valentino has been partners with Bruce Hoeksema, a very handsome American who is sometimes described as his assistant, other times as a jewelry and handbag designer. Embracing opulence, Valentino owns two homes in Rome, one of the largest houses in the Holland Park section of London, an apartment on Fifth Avenue, a chalet in Gstaad, and a castle in France; sold his villa in Capri, but kept his 152' yacht. He retired in 2008; the "must-see" (NYT) "flawless" (Time) "amazing" (NY) film about his life and work, Valentino: The Last Emperor,
The perfectionist in Alexander McQueen would find much to admire in the stunning show of his work, Savage Beauty, which opened today at the Met, while the rebel in him would detest the way he has been softened, defanged, and degayed for rich, conservative fashion matrons/museum patrons. Andrew Bolton's curatorial notes often mention McQueen's "politics" and his complicated relationship growing up in England with Scottish roots yet the discussion of his work completely erases the outsider queer energy that fueled his visionary genius.
Trained as a tailor in Savile Row, McQueen's craftsmanship and obsession with detail (and his vast stable of couture workers, largely ignored in the exhibit) made his clothes technical masterpieces. His shattering originality, always engaging the past to destroy it and reinvent it, raised his work to art. Aiming higher still, he presented each collection in elaborately staged performances reinforcing the season's theme, with the models moving as pieces on a giant chess board, or robotic nozzles spray-painting colors onto a spinning woman's white dress on the runway, or an enormous two-way mirror-box alternately reflecting the audience and revealing his creations. I saw a private preview earlier and was wowed. Brave the stampedes and see it twice before July 31. The show's catalog from Yale Press is already in Amazon's Top 100 bestsellers. Click to enlarge.
The world's most famous makeup artist "married" his much younger boyfriend in an unofficial ceremony in Hawaii in July 2000 and after that Kevyn Aucion referred to Jeremy Antunes as his husband. In less than two years, the man who easily earned $10,000 a session doing makeup for superstar celebrities' magazine cover shoots or Oscar appearances, the author of three #1 New York Times bestsellers about beauty, the only makeup professional ever honored by the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and the founder of a new line of beauty products bearing his name, was dead at forty, without a will. His husband was locked out of their two shared homes without any legal recourse. Aucoin's estate went to his adoptive parents back in Louisiana who embody more than their share of contradictions: Initially repelled by homosexuality, they started the first PFLAG chapter in Lafayette yet refuse to give their son-in-law even the bed he shared with Kevyn.
It's possible that Kevyn and Jeremy were on the verge of breaking up, or experiencing a typical rough patch in what might have been a long marriage. Jeremy had left a sick and hurting Kevyn to go to Paris for a week alone, which sounds selfish and indulgent but could be seen as a tough ultimatum to someone ruinously addicted to many kinds of pain killers and sleeping pills, who had in the preceding six months dropped out of two programs to overcome substance abuse, and who had screwed up his friend Cher's "Song for the Lonely" video shoot (needing to be hospitalized twice) so notoriously that not one star had asked him to do her makeup for the Oscars that spring. In any case, Jeremy's trip was cut short by Kevin's final hospitalization. Those pills were to relieve Kevyn's intense suffering from acromegaly, a pituitary gland disorder that causes excessive growth and had given him an ever enlarging brain tumor, undiagnosed since he was nine years old, at which time he had already discovered makeup.
From childhood, his ambition for glamor and success was matched by his generosity of spirit. Two ex-boyfriends continued to work closely with him and even after he had achieved his own fame, he took enormous pleasure and considerable time to do makeup for shopgirls, neighbors, and even the homeless teenage drag queens of the Hetrick-Martin Institute, of which he was a vociferous supporter. Topping the wildly devoted praise by Cher, Janet, Tina, Tori, Gwyneth, Liza, Courtney, and Celine, Mary Tyler Moore said, "There were three men in my life I met who had the ability to make you feel like you were the only person in the world just by looking at you, just with their eyes: One was Sinatra, the other was [John Paul II] and the third was Kevyn." Despite his instructions that his ashes be scattered in Hawaii where he was married, Kevyn's parents are keeping his cremated remains in Louisiana because they like to visit him.
"Arbiters of fashion generally agree that Balenciaga, the son of a Basque fisherman and a seamstress, was the greatest couturier of the last century. Dior considered him the primus inter pares, and Chanel conceded that Balenciaga alone could construct a perfect garment from start to finish with his own hands, whereas everyone else was merely 'a designer.'"
To comprehend his genius you could inspect the three hundred original designs he created each year from 1937 to 1968, but you'd still be lost about his legacy; or you could simply read Judith Thurman's New Yorker essay "The Absolutist," which includes the quote above and is a highlight of her brilliant Cleopatra's Nose. She discusses Balenciaga's business partner and greatest love, Vladzio Zawrorowski d'Attainville, as well as the benefits of being gay to Yves Saint Laurent and the current Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière: "A sense of dislocation often hones the instincts of a gifted gay youth from the provinces... They are able to recognize a closeted seductress -- a Buñuel heroine, like Belle du Jour -- and help to realize her potential for transgression."
Despite his success and his unmatched status as The Master, Balenciaga suffered a series of devastations: In 1947 Dior got credit for the New Look, when Balenciaga had been showing mid-calf skirts, full bust jackets, and small waists for years; in 1948 his partner died; and over the next two decades the world edged away from couture to ready to wear. Although he triumphed time and again with his tunic dresses in 1955, his sack dresses in 1956, his pairing of tall boots with harlequin tights and shorter hemlines, and his maverick use of special fabrics like plastics for rainwear, he decided to close his business in 1968 rather than lower himself to the faster, cheaper standards mandated by ready-to-wear. Four years later he died in his native Spain.
