Saturday, June 23, 2007

Number Sixty-Nine

Rakehell’s Revels

The most glamourous, elegant and sophisticatedly wild event of the 21st Century, The Rakehell’s Revels has taken place every Tuesday since 2004.  It is renowned --- notorious, even --- for attracting the best in-the-know society, from Hollywood starlets to scrubbed-up students, to “the most beautiful room in London” (Cecil Beaton) for an intensely heady evening of high sparkling swinging wit, dancing, cocktails, pointed conversation and worse.  In a glorious celebration of the Golden Age of Swing, Style, and Subtle wickedness.

1920’s - 1940’s GLAMOUR
EVERY TUESDAY
THE GRILL ROOM
CAFE ROYAL
68 ROYAL STREET
LONDON W1
10PM—3AM
£5
STRICTLY THE MOST ELEGANT DRESS

More about Rakehell’s Revels here and here.

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RAKEHELL’S COMPILATION

Extending our fight against the vulgarity of the modern world—where beauty doesn’t exist, where glamour is drunken reality nobodies, where going out is sweaty, dark, and antisocial—THE RAKEHELL’S REVELS is launching a compilation of the best of music from the club.  Everyone can now own a little piece of the clubbing sensation and uniquely beautiful experience that until now, only a select few have been allowed to find…

Featuring classics and rarities, foot-stomping swingers and toe-tapping bops, haunting melodies and jumping brilliance from the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s, by the likes of Duke Ellington, Fred Astaire, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, and Louis Jourdan. It’s a dance record—a romantic record—a funny record—and it has 21 incredible tracks.  Any appreciator of music, or anybody swayed by even just the smallest nostalgia, cannot fail to love these superb and exciting songs.

The compilation is available now… look for it!

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Friday, June 22, 2007

Number Sixty-Eight

LaRare Fetish Footwear
An interview with Nathalie Elharrar by Jason Campbell, JC Report.

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Last season when former Thierry Mugler and Lagerfeld Gallery shoe designer Nathalie Elharrar told us in confidence that she was developing a line around the fetish lifestyle, we gave her two thumbs up and demanded an exclusive on the story. We’re all for anything with a sexual angling done up chicly, and that’s Ellharrar’s specialty. Six months later, she has executed her clear-cut concept (slightly watered down in its debut to ease in the audience), and the resulting shoes are sublime, coming close to what Eric Stanton envisioned in his bondage illustrations. It’s haute luxury, titillating, and right on time for a shoe market that’s taking giant steps forward creatively. We met up with Ellharrar during Paris Fashion Week, where she showed her line at Michel Klein’s showroom, to find out the source of her wicked new steps, LaRare.

JC Report:  At what point do fetish and fashion meet, and why did you decide to marry these two disciplines?

Nathalie Elharrar:  Fetish and fashion have been deeply linked for a long time. It’s a part of the culture I got into when I was working for Thierry Mugler and Lagerfeld. We were already taking inspiration from this concept for shoes. I love the works of Araki, Stanton, John Willie (inventor of the first fetish heroine, Gwendoline, and publisher of fetish magazine, Bizarre) and from comics authors like the Italian Guido, Crepax, and her heroine Valentine. I also like the fact that the most respectable people can be so fascinated with high heels. And since I create shoes, I meet people for whom shoes are a part of their intimate dreams — they even have shoe dreams they confide to you.

High-heeled shoes drive you to have an attitude which confronts the question of power, control, and seduction. When you wear a 13cm heel, even with platform, you have to be in control of yourself in a very interesting way, which gives you more insurance, and it’s a constraint exactly like a corset sometimes (but my shoes are a bit more comfortable than corsets).

JCR:  LaRare. Tell us of the double entendre meaning of the brand name.

NE:  My family name is Elharrar. No one is ever able to pronounce it correctly the first time, and I wanted to create a very exclusive luxury brand of shoes, so LARARE came very fast in choosing the brand name.

JCR:  Love the logo, tell us about the mix of woman and saddle.

NE:  I wanted something with a bit of humor, glamour, and provocation. It’s a mix between my love of medieval blazon and an illustration by John Willie showing three women playing a pony story, which then appear in my logo as a horse-like silhouette with sexy female legs. It has been made in collaboration with Alex Gautier, who is the artistic director of Citizen K. To get him started, I sent him a few personal sketches of a double female centaur.

JCR:  Describe the styles in this concise first presentation.

NE:  The short card of colors: flesh, red, purple, and black, with a touch of pale pink gold, and metallic ultraviolet. High boots and “cuissardes” with geometric cut-outs or with eyelets and “lacets” in the back held by a leather garter belt. The whole story is in stretchy leathers (patent or suede), on a round last with double platform, mix of black, nickel, or metal finish and leather. Some pumps and boots come with ankle belts and metal locker with chain, on a short pointy last on a “virgule” shaped 12 cm high heel and platform made of recovered wood. This whole group has a ring of metal screwed under the sole just in the arch of the feet, and in the shoe box you will find a little pretty chain with snap clasp.

JCR:  Is it just for women with an interest in a subversive fetish lifestyle?

NE:  No, it’s not only for that. It’s for women who want a seductive and powerful attitude on high heels, for girls who love sexy chic shoes.

JCR:  How do you envision the collection growing?

NE:  Keeping strong codes as cuissardes in leather stretch, undersoles rings, and boots very [Eric] Stanton, and developing the collection step by step. Expanding the choices of leather to incorporate more exotic skins. Mulling ideas and concepts of a black box with a very private mini-collection...lot of ideas. For the moment, just keeping my feet on the ground to do each thing based in the reality.

JCR:  Do you design for any other brands?

NE:  Yes, I just finished designing the Paule Ka shoes collection and I’ve also designed the last two seasons of Michel Klein’s shoe collection.

JCR:  Who are your dream retailers?

NE:  In Paris, L’eclaireur, Maria Luisa, Bon Marché and Biondini (the most incredible choice of sexy high heels), Bergdorf Goodman, Browns, and of course kinky luxury shops like CoCo De Mer in London and Kiki de Montparnasse in New York.

This interview was conducted by Jason Campbell

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Number Sixty-Seven

Nick Broomfield’s Fetishes. 
A review from The Spinning Image’s Graeme Clark. 

Pioneering British documentary-maker known for both the relentless pursuit of his subjects and his eagerness to put himself in his films. Broomfield’s earliest films were observational documentaries covering such subjects as prostitution (Chicken Ranch), army life (Soldier Girls), and comedienne Lily Tomlin (Lily Tomlin). 1988’s Driving Me Crazy introduced the style of film for which Broomfield would become famous, as he detailed his own failed attempts to film a musical.

Subsequent movies include two studies of serial killer Aileen Wuornos, the Spalding Gray monologue Monster in a Box, controversial Fetishes and a pair of documentaries on musical themes, Kurt & Courtney and the rap-exposé Biggie and Tupac. Broomfield has also made two forays into fictional film-making, with 1989’s woeful thriller Diamond Skulls and 2006’s true life immigration drama Ghosts.

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Documentary maker Nick Broomfield first planned to do a tour of American fetish establishments, but once he found Pandora’s Box, a high priced New York parlour situated on the top floor of an office block, he decided to concentrate on the workers and clients there instead. Most of the clients are high-flying businessmen, lawyers, Wall Street brokers and the like, and Pandora’s Box caters to all kinds of sado-masochistic predilections as Broomfield finds out over a two month investigation. But does he really want to know what makes the place tick, or is he indulging in his own preference: he likes to watch?

Apparently going by the premise that nothing is more interesting than other people’s sexual quirks, Fetishes was a controversial documentary when it was released, but only to the extent that Broomfield had gone to the lengths of filming sessions and holding frank discussions with both dominatrices and their dominated about their habits and the reasons behind the things they get up to behind the closed doors of Pandora’s Box. As far as I can tell, it’s not a brothel and the clients don’t go there for sex, but rather to carry out role play scenarios where they are humiliated in safe surroundings, where what goes on won’t go further than the walls of the rooms. Many of the clients have wives, partners and families who know nothing of their unusual hobbies.

At least until someone recognises them in this film, as Broomfield is typically candid and prying here. He interviews most of the dominatrices, initially about what they do there (and they have other, more regular, jobs as well) as they slyly attempt to entice him into a session, an offer he has no difficulty in refusing. It’s as if they believe every man has a need to be under the high-heeled shoe of a mistress, and seeing the interviews with the clientele it’s not surprising. Some of them are quizzed on camera, usually with their back turned or hidden under the saftey of a rubber mask, but their answers are banal; a childhood incident has set them on the path to S and M, or their job involves ordering people about so they relish the idea of being pushed around themselves - only not in the world outside.

It’s not only men who come to see the mistresses, there is the odd woman too, as we see early on when Broomfield awkwardly talks with a woman who is in the process of being strung up and spanked. You get the impression that she was included for titillation for the male viewers for whom the sight of doughy white men with clamps on their nipples crawling around on all fours is a less than appetising prospect. She’s the exception rather than the rule, in other words, although later on we see another woman, who claims to be a professional masochist, undergoing the full treatment, which makes you wonder how anyone could get off on such studied pain and ill treatment. Some clients even have a suffocation fetish, which entails dressing all in rubber and breathing through a tube, which is periodically blocked.

In fact, a few scenes are downright unsettling; one wrestling afficionado seems to want a real battle with his dominatrix, and storms out when he doesn’t get what he wants. Other clients include Jewish men who wish to act out fantasies of concentration camps or Nazi abasement, or black men who who prefer the slave on the plantation scenario - why would they want to put themselves in that position when there are unsavoury individuals who would want to do that to them in real life? You won’t get an answer here, none of Broomfield’s questions dig very deep, although there are lighter moments, as when he asks a woman if she does her dominatrix’s shopping, or when he interviews a man with his head in a toilet bowl (although the man’s genocidal reveries make you worry). Only enlightening as far as illustration goes, Fetishes is a fairly engaging look at a world many will find hard to understand.

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©