Tag: contemporary

Katie Eary created a new breed of vampire on yesterday's runway. Models emerged with fangs, slicked back hair and wearing bold prints - all to a heavy soundtrack of A$AP ROCKY. Yet this season Eary looked to the past to create her contemporary vision of undead beauty. “I started by looking at eighteenth century paintings of banquets,” she explains; a reference that manifested itself in her use of hypnotic pink floral prints and blue lobster designs, which were taken from the compositions and rich colours of these paintings. These bold tones stood in contrast with her more muted garments. Particularly a series of inky blue and midnight black tailored jackets – something that could have been taken from a contemporary Dracula film. With horror in mind, we caught up with Eary backstage to talk slasher movies and how the collection came about:

“Horror is something I am constantly obsessed with. I love the 90s Scream movies. We all had sleepovers and watched Scream movies and loved it. I started by looking at eighteenth century paintings of banquets. I was looking at the food actually and then I thought what if there were bodies amongst it – this idea of eighteenth century gore. The prints came about as they were always covered in flowers and with lobsters – because that was the food of the rich. In terms of tailoring, I wanted to show that I can do it. I gave it my own twist. London can be quite slack and everyone gets on their high horse and thinks they are a tailor. Actually it is really not that difficult.”

The Contemporary Wardrobe is a resource in the address book of every London stylist who gives a damn about their craft, its proprietor Roger Burton archiving an exhaustive collection of 20th century style and streetwear on packed floor-to-ceiling rails.

Now, as part of vintage clothing website Byronesque, Burton has shared previously unseen footage of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren in conversation, the only time they were ever filmed together discussing their legacy, at punk exhibition Burton opened in 1993.

Westwood and McLaren's contrary contribution to youth culture in the 70s can't be overstated, their World's End shop Sex/Seditionaries changing the course of fashion through pieces seen here like the Anarchy shirt and Chicken Bones t-shirt – as relevant a cultural document of their time as anything you'll find in a glass case at a museum, these clothes are emblems of fashion at its most arrogant and ambitious.

Here, we run an extract from the footage of Westwood talking about punk rock and ideas.

"The real word, I mean apart from the word anarchy, of the punk rocks was this idea of 'destroy' and I think it was the most heroic attempt as an exercise to see if rock and roll really could live up to what rock and roll was supposed to be about. Malcolm once said to me 'rock and roll is the jungle beat that threatens the white civilisation.' And like I was saying at its sweetest, it's like 'see you later daddy and don't be square and everything.' But it is supposedly, according to people like Patti Smith who used to go 'peace and love, rock and roll,' if you're getting off on rock and roll, it's going to change the world in some sort of way.

Now looking back on it, I would say that someone like Sid Vicious was very intelligent, because he was saying 'I'm brain damaged, I don't have anything to say or to put in its place but I do want to destroy.' And what he did was an attack at the older generation to say 'we don't accept anything that you have to tell us, we don't accept any of your advice, we don't accept any of your taboos and we are going to put Swastikas on; you've mismanaged the world horrifically. And alright, maybe we can't do any better.'

...I don't have to say it in that way but it was like, you know, 'you've tried to put all your hypocrisy under the carpet but we're going to wear your hypocrisy on our back.'

...And I do say that the only subversion lies in ideas. Not even in ideas but in unpopular ideas, because popular culture is a contradiction in terms. If you think about it there wouldn't be any art if you had to go along with popular ideas, it's only the fact that art was unpopular that it ever was supported by an avant-garde and very few people that constitute something we call civilisation. Something the Greeks discovered really. You know it's a sceptical point of view, that I mentioned before, 'establishment' in inverted commas. What I mean is that the establishment is not a word written in stone. In fact establishment is something that uses the energy of the token rebels and, so it's something that changes according to how much it wants to soak up. And I myself prefer to ignore it and to sort of concern myself with the cultural crisis that we have. I mean everyone knows we're in the middle of an ecological disaster and I don't think that you can disassociate the cultural one from that.

I mean Hitler burnt books, but you don't need to do that anymore today, most people don't read them anyway. The only ideas are in books. You can't have a conversation with someone that hasn't read something, cause that's where ideas are."

ClickHEREto see the film of Westwood and McLaren in its entirety.

So, Dazed is launching a photography competition with D&AD Student Awards 2013 and inviting you to create a portrait of contemporary youth.

Find a single iconic image that will remain as viscerally relevant in a decade as it was when it was shot. Shoot your friends, your peers. Shoot reality, fantasy, people with interesting stories and great ideas. Speak your own visual language, and say it loud. We can't wait to see what you show us!

The deadline is wednesday 20 March 2013, click here to enter, and use the hashtag #studentawards. Good luck!