Part of the charm of the European summer music festival circuit is how it can create some strange bedfellows on a given bill. Case in point: the
Lowlands Festival in
The Netherlands this weekend, which featured two people I could listen to and watch for hours, even if they're just reading the phone book:
Snoop (right) and
Grace Jones (below right).
Along with a lot of other people, I happen to think that today's young female celebrities pushing hard (or hardly pushing?) that "edgy" vibe would be wandering around far more clueless if not for the path trailed by Grace (And
the kids--good enough to dress ya but not good enough for you to publicly support
their rights, eh? But that's a whooole other blog post.). I could go on but I'm not in much of a soapbox mood today (Ha!), except to say that
Gertrude Stein's profound, simple modifier about there being "
no there there" has never resonated more than when I think about the style underpinnings of today's current crop of female pop stars. Now, as my man to the right would say,
back to the lecture at hand...
Fashion is as much about function as it is about form. While I love Grace's wild getups (especially this one at left), pretty much only her and
Strangé can get away with them. More than the "oh ish!" quality of her outfits, what's engaging about her style is that it seems driven authenticallyby the force of her personality: powerful, vulnerable (Surprised at that one? It's there in spades if you've read
one of her interviews.), and her plain and simple bollocks to just not give a eff and let her artistic light blind us, handlers and "people" be damned.
You can recreate the vitality of Grace's pieces by incorporating
powerful geometric silhouettes,
fiery flashes of color, and
elegantly offbeat accessories. For references, think of
Issey Miyake,
classic Gaultier and Thierry Mugler (Grace used to
wear Mugler jumpsuits to attend her son's school meetings. Mustn't that have been about a
Mom Jeans bitch for all the other playground mummies?), and
Philip Treacy, Grace's long-time pal and preferred milliner.
Capture the incomparable Grace's energy and joi-de-vivre with any of these
Stylesaver picks:
Image Credits: WireImage, Eubie Panache
When the Tweets started dropping about how Liza Minnelli was belting out numbers at PAPER Magazine's 25th Anniversary party last night, I had the urge to do something I normally shy away from for fear of having it imprinted in people's heads for ages to come: party crashing. Few things will force me to even consider it but Judy's daughter is one of 'em.
