FTV Review

Chanel Spring Collection

Karl Lagerfeld's Spring collection for Chanel in Paris flaunted everything from lingerie and swimwear to evening dresses. The reactions to the show ranged from "unwearable" to "unbeatable".
Judy McDonald-Clin D'Oeil: "I loved the show. I thought he was being realistic this time. Girls aren't wearing everything but the kitchen sink. The jewelry was simple. For me it was one of the best shows this season. And the clothes are very wearable."
Lotte Fredj Danish Journalist : "Some things were really awful. They were there for shock value - for the sake of the show. There were things that were wearable and they're going to sell like hot cakes."

Kal Ruttenstein Bloomingdales : "The underpants seen under the dresses isn't going to catch on, on the streets of New York. But Karl always has a little joke in his collections."
Karl Lagerfeld: "It is underwear. Chanel became famous because she made dresses out of jersey. Jersey was mens underwear material and it was much more shocking in those days because women weren't supposed to know that men wore underwear. And Chanel made dresses from them. Today everyone knows that we have tights, bathing suits and strings under our clothes it's a part of our everyday life."
SSuzy Menkes International Herald Tribune : "It was a great Chanel show. It was so full of energy and it was so well done. I suppose people who had come to a Chanel show for the first time would think, "My God, G-strings in a Chanel collection! Is this the end of fashion as we know it?" But you have to remember that under all this disco mania that is on the runways, there's some wearable fashion underneath."

Chrystelle - The Flavour of the Moment

Judging by the amount of designers that are using Chrystelle in their Spring collections, it's obvious that more than just a few believe that she has top model potential. And nobody is more surprised than 21 year old Chrystelle - a newcomer to the modeling world.
Chrystelle St. Louis Augustine: "To me, it's a job. I've thought about it a long time, since I was a kid. I was always the tallest in class. Everybody always said "You should be a model". When I look at other models, and I think "How am I going to walk? How do I turn at the end of the runway?", I get really stressed.

Chrystelle was booked into 35 Spring collections. Until this year she'd never modeled before.
CA: "What's strange is that some people say to you that you're great, but you don't understand because you're just being you. You want to know what is it that they like, is it my hair, my personality? It's strange."

A college student, her first gig was Gaultier six months ago. Covers and magazine spreads quickly followed.
Jean Paul Gaultier: " She has a beautiful face, and strong with it. I'm not surprised at all that she's working more and more."
Eric Wright Lagerfeld Design Asssistant : "Why do we use her? It's the colour of her eyes, the colour of her skin and the way her hair is. With models you don't sense why it is that they are good and why they're not good. They have a special image, it's a a feeling for me inside."
KL: "She's not aggressive. There is something poetic about her. It's her hair. The colour of her eyes. She's very elegant."

Betsey Johnson

All we get on this edition of Fashion TV from Betsey Johnson was one measly quote. Still, the pictures speak for themselves.

Betsey Johnson: " I think it's my best collection ever. Because it's the way I like to dress. It's all mixed up, no fashion message here whatsoever."

Tribal Street Styles

From the hipsters of the early Forties to the cyberpunks of the Nineties, the street style exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum takes a look at the sub-cultures that have taken to the streets in the last half of the century.
Ted Polhelmus Co-curator of street style exhibition : "I studied anthropology, and what I was always interested in was how clothing and body art is used to show tribal membership. And I was looking at this in terms of the Amazon or Africa. Then I thought, this is the same thing that we have here. This is what street style is and this is what distinguishes it from fashion. Here at the exhibition we have 58 tribes."
Catherine Dingwall Dress Curator : "When we were researching for the exhibition, we wanted to look into tribes to see if we could define style. But we also had to have an ideology that went with it. And that the people had something in common not just in their clothing. In their music, ideology, and similar lifestyles, all of it would go together to make a tribe."
TP: "Fashion is taking style and leaving the substance. This stuff has to grow from the beginning. Goth all originated from the punks. They said do it yourself. All the people that we see at the exhibition today did it themselves. Whether they be Teds, Rockers, Goth, Mods, Technos, they said "I'll have a bit of this and this. I'll do my hair this way". Everyone today is a stylist, and if you're not, you're out of it."

Ralph Lauren

Last year, Ralph Lauren products generated 3.7 million dollars in sales. He's been called the "Quintessential American Designer".
This time around, it was a very unadventurous (read boring) Lauren collection. Rather remiscent of the Stepford Wives.

Ralph Lauren: "Women want to wear beautiful clothes, they want to look good and they want to wear sexy clothes at the right time."
Loucas: "It was as American as apple pie. The whole show was."
Kal Ruttenstein Bloomingdales : "This was one of the best shows either side of the Atlantic."
RL: "You're always regenerating yourself. I see boys and girls, men and women and I decide to see what I can do. And that's what I do. If you're a writer you can write it, I'm a designer so I can design it."

David Lauren Takes on the Publishing World

Ralph's 23 year old son is the founder of the magazine 'Swing' (which has recently been launched nationally). He created the magazine in 1990 while still a student at Duke University.
David Lauren Editor/Publisher Swing Magazine : "Basically, the world in history has been led by people in their twenties. 'Swing' is about people in their twenties, and the spirit of being in your twenties. It could have been published in the Fifties or 2050. I think that's what keeps us from being passé, setting in with in any trends. There's an appeal to it that's really about growing up and establishing oneself in the world.
There were some great twenty somethings in American history. We picked Al Capone for the cover of our second issue because he was in his twenties when he corrupted the world. Not that we're praising him - it's just interesting that one so young could accomplish so much, even though it was through crime."
This is a magazine put together by myself and my peers and we're all in our twenties. That's one of the things I'm most proud of.
What we wanted to do was create something that was clean, simple, very American, and had quality with a traditional feel. No-one has ever done anything that is targeted at this age group.
My parents did a very good job of showing us that there's another world out there besides fashion. You try to do your own thing, and I'm trying to reach an audience in a different way than my father. And I think that if I've inherited my parents' flair for life and business, I'm lucky. And that's great."