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. ©

Monday, June 04, 2007

Number Sixty-Six

P R E T T Y T H I N G S
The HBO Interview with Liz Goldwyn

Liz Goldwyn has worked in fashion, art, and photography since the age of sixteen. She has produced major fashion shows and art installations, helped establish the fashion department at Sotheby’s New York, and was a global consultant for Shiseido America. Liz has written feature articles for international publications including French Vogue,The Financial Times and Hantasubaki. In 2001 Liz launched an eponymous line of jewelry which is sold in the US and internationally. Her documentary film on burlesque queens, Pretty Things, premiered in July 2005 on HBO. Liz’s first book Pretty Things: The Last Generation of American Burlesque Queens was published in October 2006 by Regan/HarperCollins.

Drawing from ten years of close friendships and correspondences with many of her surviving idols, documentary filmmaker and writer Liz Goldwyn invites us to step back into an era when the hourglass figure was in vogue and striptease was a true art form. Among the stars we meet in Pretty Things are Betty Rowland, “The Ball of Fire,” her sister Dian Rowland, “Society’s Sweetheart,” June St. Clair, “The Platinum Princess,” Lois de Fee, “The Amazon of Burlesque,” and last but not least, Zorita, whose daring and sexually explicit performances earned her legendary status.

Goldwyn draws back the curtain to reveal the personal, often surprising, journeys of yesteryear’s icons of female sexuality, restoring their legacy to an age that has all but forgotten them. Pulling together hundreds of archival photographs, costume sketches, and memorabilia, Goldwyn celebrates the collaborative vision and talent that went into creating the burlesque act—from the all-important, exquisitely designed costumes to staging and choreography, to each star’s highly individual style. Pretty Things is at once a gorgeous visual feast and a lovingly documented tale of self-discovery and fleeting stardom.

The spectacularly illustrated book complementing Goldwyn’s HBO documentary of the same name focuses on the early--twentieth-century heyday of burlesque in America, especially its stars. The granddaughter of Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn rationalizes that although “raised in the wake of women’s lib, schooled to be independent and to downplay sexuality[,] . . . many women [feel] a strong attraction to the burlesque queen persona of self-aware sexuality,” and photos of her in vintage stripper costumes bespeak her own attraction. But she sees “burlesque queens as artists and their costumes as examples of great craftsmanship.” Book and documentary call attention to the era and the performers “so that their role in entertainment history can be reexamined and ‘legitimized.’” Including details on such vital matters as costume construction for the sake of quick, easy divestment; a wealth of pertinent illustrations; great stories of such stars as Betty Rowland, Zorita, and June St. Clair; and snippets on the likes of Gypsy Rose Lee and Mai Ling, this package gives said reexamination a jump start. --Mike Tribby, American Library Association. 

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HBO
So according to the HBO press release, this film is “one young woman’s obsession with the long lost art of burlesque.”

LIZ GOLDWYN
[LAUGHS]

HBO
How did you get into all of this?

LIZ GOLDWYN
Well, I’ve always been a costume collector. And I started working with Sotheby’s, helping to found their Fashion Department. And working there gave me a real view on my own costume collecting. I realized that I actually had some very valuable things, and I learned how to take care of them properly and document their provenance. So I learned how to protect my costumes, write about my costumes, talk about my costumes.

At the same time I was going to art school and doing my thesis in photography. And I was working on a self-portrait series. And I found these two burlesque costumes at a flea market, and then photographed myself in them for my class. And I became really obsessed with these costumes. So I started trying to find any other burlesque costumes. And because I was at Sotheby’s I was connected to this global group of museums and dealers and historians.

And I realized that there was nobody else collecting burlesque costumes, and that the Metropolitan Museum of Art had maybe one Erte costume. But it was in a terrible state of disrepair and it was probably never going to be shown because they didn’t have enough costumes to constitute a show.

And by relating the costumes back to the couture gowns I was studying, I saw a connection that these costumes were as well made as the work of the French couturiers.

And obviously they had been worn for performance, multiple times per day. But they were still so sturdy and so beautiful on the inside and the out. So I became very interested in why hadn’t there been anything done. I said, I’ve gotta start collecting everything so that there can be a show, so that people can see what kind of art this was, this burlesque costuming.

And through collecting the costumes I started finding the women who wore them. And all the sort of historians and dealers in museums I was connected to through Sotheby’s because they knew I was doing this. Any time something would come up in a newspaper, you know, a burlesque queen had died and there was an estate sale, they would call me.

HBO
Lucky you-

LIZ GOLDWYN
I sort of had this real inside track, and I had gone back and researched Berlin cabaret era, and transvestitism in burlesque. And I had researched the Belle Époque in Paris and the English music halls. And I realized that when burlesque died, which in America was post-World War II, really, there had been nothing really written about the burlesque queens, and these people were dying and that it was possible to get first person interviews because I was simultaneously talking to these women about their burlesque costumes.

So, really, the whole project grew out of a need, or a lack of education into the world of burlesque costuming and burlesque queens. And it sort of grew into a more personal movie from there.

HBO
There seems to be a world of difference between the subtlety of the burlesque queens in your film who teased the audience, and the “nude, lewd and screwed” attitudes of today.

LIZ GOLDWYN
At the same time as when I started to collect these costumes, I had also been looking at a lot of burlesque and strip tease as portrayed in movies. And it was interesting to me that Theda Bara in Salome wore so much less on screen than a burlesque queen of the same period would have worn onstage.

Yet she was somehow accepted by polite society and the burlesque queens were not. I mean, especially in the case of Lilly St. Cyr, it was all about the subtlety of the tease. It wasn’t, Here it is, do you want it? It was, Here’s a little peek of my shoulder. Wouldn’t you like to have it? But you can’t.

A lot of people today don’t realize these women wore full-length gowns that looked like something you’d wear to the opera. They don’t realize they were on a stage, that they were akin to the performer in the theatre. There was a division between the audience and the dancers. Men might have been in the audience fantasizing about them, but they still had that separation.

So I think you’re right. It’s incredibly subtle and the women who were successful in their acts perfected their craft to such a point that it was all about the subtlety.

HBO
Were these women aware that they were legends when you began to approach them?

LIZ GOLDWYN
[CHUCKLES] That’s an interesting question-

HBO
Or do you feel like you re-discovered them?

LIZ GOLDWYN
A little. I wouldn’t give myself that much credit. They were definitely not talking about their careers. A lot of them were not even known in their community as having been these huge stars. It took a long time, pen pals and letters for two years before I met most of them in person. There’s a lot of trust to be gained.

I sent my own self-portraits and costumes so there was a friendship that developed before I even met them in person. And I think there was a fear because they had been out of the public eye for so long, and what would it be like now to be on camera, to revisit a time in their life where most of them did not have fond memories.

I was approaching it from the angle of, You’re so inspirational to me. I see you as such an icon. But they didn’t see themselves that way. So right away there was this huge discrepancy between my vision of their lives and their own memories. This was a subject that some of them had not spoken about. So it was interesting having to draw out the information.

HBO
So they were dealing with a much different reality in terms of how were they viewed in their day as opposed to how you were coming at it?

LIZ GOLDWYN
It was more that they’d never gotten the respect that I personally feel they were due. They had spent the last thirty to forty years in obscurity and whereas their male counterparts in burlesque had gone on to fame like Burt Lahr and Abbott and Costello.

They had been relegated to obscurity because there was just no room for strippers on TV or in movies. So I think that they were dealing with the fact that society saw them as being somehow illegitimate. I mean they used the term a lot—legitimate versus illegitimate theater.

Sherry Britton said to me in the movie, You can’t go back and erase it. They all have stories about interactions when people found out they were strippers in the seventies, eighties, the 1990s, it was still something that was considered, oh she was a stripper?

These were larger than life figures on stage, living, breathing female specimens that men couldn’t get at but who were sort of their first peek and flash and thrill of the female form.

So I think it depends on what generation you talk to, but definitely I would say that the women felt that they had not been respected.

HBO
At the same time there’s a sense that they have a tremendous amount of power, and that they’re not victims.

LIZ GOLDWYN
I think that’s probably what subconsciously attracted me to these women, when I put on these costumes. I always believed in the power of costume to transform character, but I didn’t feel that confidence that I saw these women radiating in the old 8x10 photos, and I wanted that in some way I guess. You know. I was attracted to that. How do you achieve that kind of power?

I think it’s a really interesting idea what you’re saying, and it’s one that I definitely have been dealing with. Because some of them in their private life did have bad childhoods, did have sexual abuse. And there is that aspect of being both disrespected and defiled by men in the audience who were essentially masturbating to their performance.

But at the same time that wasn’t their intention. I feel that they kind of owned it, especially someone like Serrita who stripped for men but loved women so it was even more so that you can’t have it. She was in control. She talked very openly about her strategies for money making. And she retired pretty well in Florida in the sun, on an estate that she purchased from money from stocks she received as a gift, just for dinner.

HBO
Wow.

LIZ GOLDWYN
But the most important thing for me is for them to be able to see that they have inspired a whole new generation of people, of men and women and that people do see them as icons. And even though they don’t think you can erase the past, I think you can reevaluate it.

HBO
Now you also put yourself in the film. How did that happen?

LIZ GOLDWYN
I didn’t commit to that really until the rough cut stage. I feel like I’m more of an everywoman character than me, Liz Goldwyn with my own specific personality. I see my role in this film as someone that anyone can relate to because it’s filmed when I was eighteen, so it’s sort of a coming of age in a way, but it’s also being up against these women who have done this for years, it’s second nature. I feel I look foolish attempting to do what they did.

HBO
Which is gutsy that you allow yourself to be awkward and striving to grab some of the essence of what made these women so great. It’s very endearing.

LIZ GOLDWYN
Well there would be no story if I didn’t, there would be no point really. But it was definitely something that I was incredibly reluctant to do. But there were many people who pushed me in terms of involving myself in the story at an early point.

And I’m very close to these women so they saw a lot of rough footage and saw that that aspect of the story made it relatable to a new generation, to really understand how hard what they did was. It was not getting on stage and taking your clothes off. It was a craft that had to be perfected. It involved costume designers and choreographers and sets. And the orchestra, and it was difficult. It was very difficult. It was very hard physically for me to create that persona. I cracked my coccyx, I had sciatica. I was face down in bed for literally four months because I just went so crazy into creating this character, I somehow felt that if I could perfect the dance number that I would be able to erase all the negative aspects of their life.

HBO
That’s incredible. So what do you hope audiences will take away from the movie?

LIZ GOLDWYN
Well for me I guess the hypothesis that I had in the beginning was of these romantic creatures and putting them on a pedestal as these glamorous figures, these glamorous icons of power and female sexuality. And you know after really knowing what went on in their lives and the flaws, in my own perception I guess my question was, can you still dream? Can you still perceive them as these glamorous figures even though you know the serious aspects of their reality? So that was one aspect.

And I guess the other was really giving a balanced view of how they saw themselves so that it’s really up to the viewer to decide what they want to walk away with. Because no matter how many times they would argue with me and tell me that they weren’t glamorous, that they weren’t icons, that they weren’t inspirations, the proof is in the pudding, you know

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