Voice Files

Instant one-sentence-interviews recording the commentary of people that matter.


Alexander McQueen Fall/Winter 2014

"Love the black skirts and long double-breasted coats. Clothes suitable for formal funereal fetes or cold-night dark back alley trysts."

/BRUCE LABRUCE, film-maker

"The stiff, square shoulders are the default here so the militant exits of five or so tailored jackets serve as perfect backdrop for the sporadic appearance of rounded shoulders on cozy cardigans, turtlenecks, and sweaters. 2014 is about hugging yourself. Even the menacing leather coat is lined with plush shearling. Little goth boy has a sweet side, just check his pink plaid."
/IRIS & DANIEL, fashion editors We Have No Style

"I found McQueen to be refreshingly dark."

/MATTHEW ATTARD NAVARRO, founder Platinum Love Magazine

"Stop, isn't that Oliver Bernard? What the fuck. He's the type that would get into drunken fistfights over le mot juste, but at least he'd recite Apollinaire to you in bed after."
/RUDY KATOCH, writer via twitter

"Bleak House. Less posh & polite than McQueen has been for a while. It reminds me of their pre-2000, pre-Gucci menswear; a bit messier, and a bit rawer. McComme?"

/JOHN-MICHAEL O'SULLIVAN, writer 1972projects

"Something has happened and something is happening. Bacon, Freud, McQueen? Intellectual, tailored goth transformations with a subliminal message: teenage angst is back in stock and it comes with a hand-written price tag."
/HORST

The Real Winner Of Paris Fashion Week, An Afterthought

Gareth Pugh Fall/Winter 2013

Poetry aside, comparisons forgotten - I will now speak my word and thought, as it is.

The best collection for Fall/Winter 2013, presented during Paris Fashion Week, was - by far - presented by Gareth Pugh. It was a romantic, psychologic and deeply emotional exercise in womenswear, respectively its recurrent icon: the dress.

A balance act of soft and hard, cut and dimension. It felt massive and out of proportion, out of sight with the 'real' world. Women disappeared in grey pyramids of crispy textiles - just to be resurrected again as superhuman goddesses. Similar ideas have been proposed by Junya Watanabe and Thom Browne, and lately also by Maison Martin Margiela or Giles but it never felt as 'right' and logical. The transformation of each look happened so meticulously, one had to look twice to feel the 'difference' - just to arrive at the total other end, in the end.
/HORST

Post Paris XXIX

A 'False Encyclopaedia' double feature with John-Michael O'Sullivan, discussing:
Saint Laurent Fall/Winter 2013

I don't like Saint Laurent. 

I don't like the new stores with their funeral-parlour marble and virtual-reality grids. I don't like the website's lifeless grid of tiny, flattened clothes-icons lost in acres of whiteness. I don't like or understand the disconnect between the flailing, messy energy of the shows and the slick, obvious luxury of the 'real' clothes that come out of the shadows and onto the shop floor. And most of all, i don't like it when fairytales go wrong; when the lost boy (the one you always hoped might return) comes home from a faraway wilderness to inherit his father's kingdom - but who, once he gets on the throne, reveals he doesn't want to play anymore.

But that's enough about me.

Hedi Slimane is doing his own thing at Saint Laurent, like it or not. Obstinately, obsessively, imperviously imposing what a Project Runway judge might call a 'point of view'. That viewpoint is one filled with the idea of clothing as something that's damaged, and second-hand, and to be consumed by the young; and it's one that seems diametrically opposed to everyone else in Paris - a city consumed by the idea of mature couture.

You have to admire the sheer bloody-mindedness of someone who could seemingly so easily get it 'right' - but who seems intent on forging his way brutally into 'wrong'. But what's fascinating is how, in the middle of all that pile-up of sequins and plaid and wispy vintage florals, your eye grasps for the tiniest shred of a connection to something that might have once been 'Yves Saint Laurent' - polka-dotted sheers, and chiffon ruffles, and a slinky black Belle de Jour trench. Because that's what 'right' is, here; familiarity filtered, and played by the rules. I imagine Slimane would say that's our problem, not his.

/JOHN-MICHAEL

Hedi Slimane never was modern. Even the skinny suit was a romantic ideal, often accompanied by short embellished military jackets, bows or velvet. And when transferring his polished black and white photography into womenswear, the eye for texture, pattern and surface is being revealed as a dishevelled vision. His femme seems to have sprung from the mean girl cast of The Craft, Gossip Girl or Easy A, creating: heroin heroines.
/HORST








1. Saint Laurent Fall/Winter 2013
2. Hedi Slimane Yves Saint Laurent Intime, November 2008
3. Steven Meisel Grunge and Glory, December 2002
4. Steven Meisel Tom Ford for Yves Saint Laurent, Winter 2002
5. The Craft Andrew Fleming, 1996
6. Hedi Slimane Diary, 2006-2013
7. Winona Ryder 1990s
8. Saint Laurent Fall/Winter 2013

More reviews by John-Michael O'Sullivan 1972 Projects