Innholdsfortegnelse for Art Spring - Fashion - Art - Design i L'OFFICIEL USA

Kleaver CRUZ WRITER “Legends Deserve Flowers” “Celebration is better late than never, but it is imperative to nurture and support us Black artists throughout our lives in order for us to be able to fully stop and smell the roses.” Alexi LUBOMIRSKI PHOTOGRAPHER “Growing Up Andra Day” “Andra Day was incredible! We shot in and around an old Hollywood hotel, mixing high fashion with more relaxed looks. She was so relaxed, so beautiful, and so much fun… We spent most of the day laughing.” Tina BARNEY PHOTOGRAPHER “Twin Set” “This story was like a candy store! Too many delicious looks to choose from.” Donatien GRAU WRITER “Life as a Sitcom” “We have all lived with sitcoms, whether we know it or not.” Gwen THOMPKINS WRITER “Growing Up Andra Day” “Andra Day has a knack for…

For this issue, which marks more than one full year of the COVID-19 pandemic, we wanted to focus on the concept of The Family: Something that we all confront and reflect upon day after day. In the weeks and months of lockdowns across the globe, we all found comfort and love in family—whether those related to us by blood or by election, by DNA or by free choice—with whom we shared our deepest thoughts and emotions. The importance of family came into crystal clear focus when our collective mortality faced a new threat; the ties that bind us became a refuge against an unknowable enemy. In considering The Family, we asked contemporary artists and photographers to offer their personal contributions and thoughts on the significance of family in their own…

Fashion and art both sit at the heart of Frenchness, and sculpture has influenced much of French fashion across generations. The columnar silhouettes of antiquity may predate the birth of L’OFFICIEL, but Paul Poiret, one of the magazine’s first star designers, brought it back into the French imagination in the 1920s, although another French fashion hero—Coco Chanel—would like to take the credit. Th roughout the 20th century, silhouettes inspired by the three-dimensional works of the country’s greatest artists, and marvelled at by Paris’ chicest women, prevailed. Schiaparelli’s surrealist shapes mimicked the art of statuary: shoulder pads and cinched lines transformed the body into art deserving of a museum. As L’OFFICIEL became consecrated as the official voice of French fashion and la Parisienne, the publication confidently drew lines connecting silhouette and…

Before Phoebe Bridgers was smashing guitars in custom Gucci on Saturday Night Live and collaborating with indie legends like Conor Oberst, she played bass in Sloppy Jane, the alt-rock outfit fronted by her high school best friend, Haley Dahl. Though Dahl has since expanded the band to include 11 members—often taking the stage herself wearing nothing but blue paint—the two musicians spent their formative years in a state of constant experimentation, eventually finding a sound and performance style all their own. Growing up in Los Angeles, the pair had their own remedies for fighting teenage boredom and suburban ennui. “We would ditch class and do absolutely nothing,” says Dahl. “We never actually did anything cool; one time we just sat in Phoebe’s car and ate a tub of cookies.” Bridgers…

Andra Day is not Billie Holiday, except when she wants to be. And lately, she’s wanted to be. Her leading role in Lee Daniels’ film The United States vs. Billie Holiday has kept her channeling the jazz singer all the way through awards season. Her song “Tigress & Tweed” was inspired by Holiday’s favorite perfumes. Her stage name is even borrowed from Holiday’s own nickname, Lady Day. She can sing like Holiday, bling like Holiday, and mouth off like her, too. And when she walks, as it were, in Holiday’s shoes, she makes Billie’s end seem a lot less blue. I WAS ALWAYS TRYING to GET AWAY with EVERYTHING… I HAD THIS PERIOD IN my LIFE WHEN I WOULD steal MY MOTHER’S CAR and JOYRIDE AROUND. Yet most of the…

Definition is the first problem when one is to comment on sitcoms. What is a sitcom? Where do the boundaries lie? If we are to say that Friends is the absolute sitcom, one is left to wonder whether it constitutes a genre of its own. The etymology of the word may explain its meaning. Sitcom is short for “situation comedy.” Therefore, a comic system related to a situation. The word “situation” is a difficult one to explain: it may be described as a display of things and people within a location. As such, the sitcom would be the comic display of things and people within a specific location. The term “location” also offers its challenges: is the location a specific set, one that never changes—as was the case in the…

Some of us are born to be bridges—connections between what came before us and the futures we are destined to create. James Barnor is one of the most important bridges of our time. He is a living archive, a link between the birth of photography in West Africa and the development of the discipline for the modern era. In the almost 92 years Barnor has spent on this planet—living mostly between Ghana and the UK—he has captured aspects of African and Black life that are meaningful to the people who live it, and often may not have been recorded otherwise: everyday moments such as merchant women selling wares in the market, people getting on and off the bus, teenagers hanging out together, early images of Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana’s first President),…

In the November 1973 issue of Esquire, a car built by the artist Pippa Garner muscles along California’s highways, across the Golden Gate Bridge, and through the surrounding suburbs. The car, a ’59 Chevy, is designed to look as if it were about to crash into oncoming traffic when, in fact, it is safely moving with the flow. The secret is that the seats, steering wheel, dashboard—the whole interior—faces the rear of the car. The driver, Garner herself, is literally sitting comfortably within the paradox of absurdism: something that follows the letter of the law, but gleefully antagonizes the spirit of the law. Garner, a trans artist who lives in Los Angeles, describes herself as an “introvert” and an “outsider.” There’s a kind of record-skip cringe moment that happens when…

Some may reject the notion that an object meant to be consumed could be considered art. However, there is no denying that a beautifully constructed garment created by the hands of a couturier can elicit the same response as that from a master work of art. In the space of the French fashion magazine, which holds the identity of la Parisienne so close to its heart, we often imagine fashion and art as one. Founded in Paris in 1921, L’OFFICIEL emerged at a significant moment in fashion history. The artification of the designer and the influence of art movements on fashion were becoming increasingly prevalent through the work of couturiers like Paul Poiret and Elsa Schiaparelli. Originally defining itself as an industry-specific publication, L’OFFICIEL increasingly began including features on artists…

The exhibition Italy: the New Domestic Landscape, which debuted at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1972, was one of the most seminal shows in the field of design. Conceived by curator Emilio Ambasz, it introduced a group of Italian thinkers, designers, and architects to the American intelligentsia that would later be assembled under the moniker Radical Design. Among the best-known creatives featured in the show were Gae Aulenti, Ettore Sottsass, Archizoom, Superstudio, and Gaetano Pesce; all of whom were united in disavowing Modernist ideals as well as questioning the possibility of utopian thinking through design. A quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s novella The Little Prince introduced the exhibition’s catalogue, hinting that utopia had to be rethought from the domestic cell by transforming the social institution most…