Imagine you are in Paris, in 1981, a fashion editor sitting in the front row. You are subjected to a sex, drugs, and rock and roll diet of Mugler and Gaultier on one side and the bourgeois propriety of Yves Saint-Laurent and Chanel on the other. Fashion is a luxury and looks it. But the clothes that you are seeing right now, by designers from Japan (where you’ve probably never been) Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo (whose names you probably can’t pronounce) are so radically different — black, tattered, oversized, pointedly inelegant — that you are subjected to a dose of cultural insta-shock. Fast-forward to today: walk into any chain store and you see the signs of these designers’ heritage, unfinished seams, holes, distressing. These are now as familiar, acceptable, and safe for mass consumption as Barney is for children.
    But you are no longer in 1981, Dorothy, and Japanese fashion has moved on. A new generation of fashion designers and fashion subcultures has sprung up, no less exciting than the legendary Yamamoto and Kawakubo. Japan Fashion Now, a new exhibit at the Museum at FIT explores the links between the old and new generations.
    The exhibition, featuring more than 100 garments, is organized in two parts. Upon entering you are greeted with a display of the work by the holy trinity of Japanese fashion — Miyake, Yamamoto, and Kawakubo — flanked by the less known names like Matsuda. These garments are from the ’70s and ’80s.
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It feels like everything has been said about Andy Warhol. Each year seems to produce another biography, another collaboration, another exhibition. Not that Warhol is turning in his grave — he would have loved the undying attention. But to say something fresh about him has become a challenge, one that Deborah Bell was more than happy to undertake with her new exhibition, Andy Warhol’s Street Diary.
    “This show is all about Andy’s eye for composition, light, for formal arrangements, for detail,” Bell said at the opening reception. “I always knew that Andy was interested in photography, but it was usually as a means to an end. These were the end product.”
    All the prints in the exhibition are unique, although their variants have been used for Warhol’s stitched photographs. The twenty-five black and white pictures depict him as a flaneur who loved wandering the streets of New York documenting its minutia. The photos carefully juxtapose the grand against the mundane, and this coexistence of diamonds and trash is what gives New York its character. Here is an Yves-Saint Laurent shop window, and here is the flea market, the garbage can and the Rockefeller center Christmas tree. In the catalogue that accompanies the exhibit Jonas Mekas rightly notes that Warhol did not pass judgment on his subjects, and the photos in the exhibition speak to that.

Andy Warhol’s Street Diary, Photographs 1981-1986 at Deborah Bell Photographs, 511 West 25th St., Suite 703, New York.
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It is no secret that Kate Moss is the most successful supermodel. The reason for her success maybe less obvious and hard to pin down, but the main is pretty simple — Moss is a blank canvas, and this is the supreme quality of a model. She adapts looks like Madonna adopts stage personalities. Upon this blankness, the designer, the make up artist, the photographer can layer whatever characters they choose.
Mario Testino is one of those photographers. To celebrate the model, he is releasing a book titled Kate Moss by Mario Testino (Taschen, $700) later this month. The book is appropriately swathed in luxury like Moss in designer clothes — the edition is limited to 1,500 copies, each numbered and signed by Testino himself. Half of them will be distributed through Taschen flagship stores, half some will go online.
    The silver tome, encased in pink plastic, is gorgeous. Its 230 pages contain 100 photos of Moss ranging from 1993 to 2010, which subtly lets you know that Moss just doesn’t age. Testino is not only a long time collaborator, but also Moss’s friend and the images reflect that. The pictures range from the most intimate — Kate’s shoe closet, who doesn’t want to see that?! — to the most glamorous. She is depicted, alternately, naked or holding her daughter, glammed up or in jeans, vulnerable or impenetrable. Many of the photos are being published for the first time, and the book certainly makes for a beautiful homage to a beautiful icon.
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Have you ever wondered why Japanese design is so damn good? Here is the answer – the Japanese do not differentiate between fine arts and design like we do in the West. They treat both the artist and the artisan equally. This is the way Tomoaki Okaniwa, the designer behind the young label The Viridi-Anne, thinks. Born in Nagano, he moved to Tokyo as a teenager to study oil painting, but then switched to fashion. He launched The Viridi-Anne in 2000. Clean tailoring prevails in Okaniwa’s work, but upon closer inspection subtle details like curved seams and seamlessly incorporated extra pockets give the clothes a sense of vitality that is not aggressive, but rather subdued. “The main concept of my work is based on the beauty of simplicity and the effects of time,” Okaniwa says. “I want to create garments with roots in the ideal of ‘wabi-sabi’ that incorporates the aesthetics of imperfection, incompleteness, and the effects of natural processes, but I want to mix it with a modern vision.“ Okaniwa’s clothes possess a good mix of European and Japanese cultures. His latest collection is based on Picasso’s Blue Period. We asked the designer to answer a few questions about his work.

How did you become a fashion designer?
I began my creative life as a painter. I was inspired by modern art in general, and one Japanese artist, Leonardo Fujita, in particular. He was an oil painter who lived and worked in Paris. His use of colors, fine sense of balance and choice of subjects were extremely beautiful.
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Rag & Bone, the hip American clothier, was founded in Kentucky in 2002, at the beginning of the premium denim craze. The idea was simple, to make great jeans. The business took off quickly and in several years the company went from a manufacturer of good denim to a full-fledged clothing company with fashion shows on the New York calendar. Fast-forward to today and the company is going back to basics — pun intended. Rag & Bone recently introduced three new women’s lines, JEAN, SHIRT, and KNIT, that, according the press release, are supposed to “constitute the foundation of every modern girl’s wardrobe”.
    Last Friday, the new duds got a New York home of their own. The prime real estate on the corner of E. Houston and Elizabeth used to house Café Colonial, somewhat of a neighborhood landmark. Rag & Bone paid homage to the former tenant both implicitly — by keeping the original tile floors — and explicitly — by writing a love note on the side of the building. Inside, the no-frills wood and metal décor is in tune with the no-nonsense offerings. The modern girl gets three types of jeans (made in the USA), seven different tops (from the oxford to the shirt-dress), and several t-shirts. There is also an adjacent shoe store that houses footwear and accessories from the main line.

Rag & Bone, 73 East Houston St. New York, NY.
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On a recent afternoon during the Paris menswear fashion week Stephan Schneider, the German fashion designer of the esteemed Antwerp school, was milling around his brightly lit showroom, talking to the buyers and eyeing over the models that were changing clothes like human jukeboxes. A soft-spoken man in his forties, Schneider has been working since the mid ’90s, gaining a loyal following among those who, although interested in fashion, would not be caught dead next to a fashionista. His clothes possess a quiet, quirky spirit that is easy to overlook, a spirit of a reflective kid who stands in the school hallway during the break watching other teenagers act out their lives. Acting is the last thing that comes to mind when looking at Schneider’s deceptively simple, almost preppy creations. “There is no drama in my clothes,” says Schneider.
     That is not to say that the clothes are not alive. The little details, such as different shades of color on the sleeves of a coat or a contrasting band peaking out from under the shirt’s collar, give Schneider’s garments their zest. “My customer is always a boy inside, even a man who is 70,” says Schneider. “The charm of my customer is that they can keep a boyish attitude inside, and that I want to keep in the clothes. There is always a bit of humor in them.”
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On a pleasant afternoon last, January Damir Doma, the young fashion designer who works in Paris, sat at a long table in his boutique-cum-showroom located in a tiny alley of Le Marais, Paris’s fashion district. He looked content. His men’s show that took place the night before was well received and the nail-biting, repeated-click anxiety that every designer goes through after the show, has passed.
    The showroom was swarming with buyers from all over the world, and Doma’s assistants, all young and lanky, were busy filling out orders, chatting in half-a-dozen languages — I discerned French, English, Italian, and Russian. The courtyard served as a smoke-break gathering place and sandwiches were laid out for the hungry.
    Doma is a hot new name among the young fashion cognoscenti and his ethereal, monochromatic menswear has already been copied high and low. Last fall, as I was chatting with Susie Bubble, the famous English fashion blogger, one of her entourage broke in asking if my coat was by Doma (it wasn’t).
    Doma’s show, held at a parking garage, was a mob scene with hangers-on of all stripes trying to get inside to see what the designer cooked up this time.
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Christian Boltanski, the French artist who works in various media, has always resisted all but the most abstract interpretations of his work. His new exhibit, titled No Man’s Land, on view at the Park Avenue Armory deals with “human identity, memory, and loss”, according to the press release. Still, I couldn’t avoid the overwhelming feeling that this impressive and grandiose installation, with its 60,000 pieces of discarded clothing, is about the Holocaust.
    The exhibition was held earlier this year in Paris, in the Grand Palais. But the glass ceiling and the Art Noveau cuteness of the space negated the poignant effect of the exhibit. The Armory’s vast Wade Thomson Drill Hall, with its industrially grim ceiling, is cold and uninviting, which suits No Man’s Land well. Boltanski is much more famous in Europe than in the US, and while I had to wait in the ticket line in Paris, at the Armory I had the entire exhibition just about all to myself, which added to the experience.
    Upon entering the hall the viewer is greeted by a tall, wide wall of rusted tin boxes, each randomly numbered and illuminated from above. This unwelcoming structure invokes the systematic nature of the Holocaust, where Jews were exterminated with machine-like efficiency.
    Rounding the wall, the visitor is surprised by the spaciousness of the gigantic hall, successfully juxtaposed against the claustrophobia of the tin box wall. Thirty tons of discarded clothing lay on the wooden floor in a grid.
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Susan Sontag once said that an off-putting contemporary cultural phenomenon may become endearing with the passage of time. And while the ’50s Americana, conservative and conventional, has disconcerted many a person of liberal views, today its trappings have been adopted by a growing army of hipsters who would not touch suits and dress shirts, traditionally reserved for the gray Wall Street drones, with a ten foot pole just a decade ago. Freemans Sporting Club, the men’s Lower East Side store — pardon, a haberdashery! — has been instrumental in pushing this style, along with the nostalgic “hand-made-in-the-USA” tag.
    Nostalgia notwithstanding, we live in modern times, and so Freemans recently launched their website. Staying true to the brand image, the website is a carefully executed time-machine that transports you from today’s Williamsburg to the Suburb, USA of the yesteryear. The website features cheeky images of suburban pastoral in the Norman Rockwell style — here are a couple of Dads sipping beer around a lawnmower while a younger guy is working on his trusted motorcycle and there is another Dad taking his son fishing.
    The merchandise matches the image — three-piece suits hand made in Brooklyn, oxford shirts made in New Jersey (albeit from Japanese cotton) — all are timeless, as the website assures. And do not forget the jeans — raw indigo selvage denim, of course! All fine and dandy, but what would Allen Ginsberg say about flannel suits and the best minds of his generation?

Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the French director best known for his film Amelie is many things: the pride of the French cinema, the darling of film connoisseurs, a man with a clear and unique creative vision. What he is not, contrary to what many film buffs may think, is a highfalutin artist that lives in a parallel universe where low-grade pop-culture is not allowed to enter.
     At 56 Jeunet has enjoyed both artistic and popular success. His first two features, Delicatessen (1991) and The City of Lost Children (1995), produced with his collaborator, Marc Caro, were well-received by film critics and went on to become cult hits. The eccentricity of both pictures, the off-kilter characters, the unique cinematographic style, and incredible attention to detail quickly became Jeunet’s signature.
     On a recent afternoon in New York I sat down with Jeunet to talk about his career, his most recent film, Micmacs, and Rambo. The Tribeca Film Festival, where Micmacs premiered, just ended and Jeunet looked a bit tired, but his inquisitive blue eyes were sharp and alert. Naturally, our conversation turned to his unique aesthetic vision. The hallmark of Jeunet’s talent is his ability to create a world that is distinctly his own. In this world, the strange freely interacts with the familiar, turning the viewer into an Alice tumbling down a rabbit-hole.
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