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Best Fashion Moments 2011

The Best Fashion Moments in 2011

From super stylish parties in Cannes to ultra-sexy Victoria's Secret models, FashionTV remembers the greatest fashion moments of 2011.

VOTE AND COMMENT NOW FOR BEST OF FTV 2011 !

This year, FashionTV highlights the style moments that took our breath away and transformed beauties, visions, and inspirations into works of art.

Who can forget Adriana Lima, Alessandra Ambrosio, and the other sexy girls of Victoria's Secret as they sashayed down the runway for the 2011 fashion show in stunning superhero costumes and sequined disco numbers?

What about Sarah Burton's rise to the top at Alexander McQueen when FashionTV and the rest of the world learned she designed Prince William's bride Kate Middleton's wedding dress? Just a day later, she was being honored as part of the McQueen label by the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute Gala!

Fashion shows like Marc Jacobs and Anna Sui in New York, Burberry and Vivienne Westwood in London, Dsquared2 and Roberto Cavalli in Milan, and Prada and Balmain in Paris left us clamoring for Fall 2011 and Spring 2012 trends and not just because their front rows were packed withcelebrityandfashion heavyweights.

Which Fashion Week was your favorite?

The dapper duds of Mad Men met high-fashion on the Jean Paul Gaultier Fall 2011 runway at Paris Fashion Week, where pussy bow blouses, pinstripes, and gloves took center stage in the return of 50s sophisticate trends. Hats, gloves, and retro prints were also imitated in major boutiques.

For haute couture, Elie Saab reigned supreme with his clever composition of beautiful embroidered bodices and frothy feminine gowns. Gucci's Milan Fall 2011 collection was so popular it was seen on Tokyo model Ai Tominaga and actress Jennifer Lopez.

With statement-making style like Sports Illustrated model Kate Upton in a

Beach Bunny wedding bikini

and pearls, FashionTV caught sexy swimwear and beautiful beachwear in Miami, Milan, Rio de Janeiro, and Sao Paulo. In Rio and Sao Paulo, models like Isabeli Fontana, Aline Weber, and Caroline Francischini took center stage in vibrant colors and geometric prints.

FashionTV partied around the world with the best of them, hitting up bashes like the Flavio Briatore's Billionaire Club during Formula 1 Grand Prix in Monte Carlo and store openings like the Jean Paul Gaultier concept shop in Ginza, Tokyo, where the designer dressed up as an astronaut. At the celebrity soiree from De Grisogono during the Cannes Film Festival, guests like Bianca Balti, will.i.am from The Black Eyed Peas, and Carine Roitfeld made appearances, and FashionTV had the exclusive!

Campari or Pirelli: Which 2012 calendar is hotter?

FashionTV also featured the best fashion photographs with an inside look at major photoshoots like the sexy 13th edition of the Campari Calendar with Milla Jovovich featuring Milla in many sexy costumes and an “end of the world” theme and a behind-the-scenes peek at the making of the 2012 Pirelli Calendar with models like Joan Smalls, Lara Stone, and Kate Moss posing nude for fashion photographer Mario Sorrenti. Photographer Giuliano Bekor stunned with his photos of model Jessica Perez wearing leopard print for Shape magazine's June 2011 issue.

One of the biggest trends for 2011 was the intertwining of fashion and music. FashionTV honed in on this milieu right away, as models mixed with music stars and celebrities at major events. Duran Duran showcased the top supermodels of the 90s in their Girl Panic video with Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, and Helena Christensen making highly anticipated appearances. The super sultry Etam lingerie show featured models like Monika “Jac” Jagaciak, and Karolina Kurkova, but also Karen Elson, DJ Mark Ronson, Boy George, The Kills, Beth Ditto, and more. The Victoria's Secret fashion show had models Adriana Lima and Chanel Iman swaying their hips alongside musical acts like Nicki Minaj, Kanye West, Jay-Z, and Maroon 5. The

Versace for H&M fashion show

with models like Natasha Poly and Lindsey Wixson featured guests Nicki Minaj and Prince in the audience, who later riled up the crowd with rapturous performances at the Versace for H&M after party.

For fashion, 2011 was full of memorable moments that will last a lifetime. FashionTV wants to relive those moments with you this month!

What’s your favorite fashion moment of 2011?

William S. Burroughs’s Shot Gun Paintings

William S. Burroughs is cemented in the popular imagination as the archetypal literary outlaw, the third part of a holy trinity of Beats; father to Ginsberg’s son and Kerouac’s ghost. Novels including Junkie, Queer and Naked Lunch pioneered a new and uniquely American literary form, shamanistic and paranoid, sanctifying the outsider. But Burroughs’ experiments in form and creative process extended beyond writing into film, sound and the visual arts, and he spent much of his later years in Kansas making paintings. A selection of those works can be seen in All out of time and into space at October Gallery, London.

In advance of the opening I caught up with Kathelin Gray, founder of the Theater of all Possibilities and a close friend of Burroughs, to talk about the man, his paintings, and how the mythology surrounding the most American of artists might impede our appreciation of his work.

Burroughs is best known here as a writer, so I wonder if you could expand on the relationship between his literary and painterly practice.

Burroughs had associated with artists through the forties and fifties, the era of Abstract Expressionism and Action Painting. He was very influenced by process art, recombinant art, by art that incorporated incorporating text into paintings, and he was always concerned with the relationship between word and image. Burroughs thought in images, in symbols, and that’s visible in both his writing and his painting.

How influential was Brion Gysin on Burroughs’ work as a visual artist?

Gysin and Burroughs began to collaborate in Paris in 1959, when they were living together in the Beat Hotel. Gysin had steeped himself in the cabbalistic traditions of North Africa and his work drew heavily on ritual and magic; that influenced Burroughs, who was more scientific in his approach. Gysin introduced Burroughs to the cut up too – he realised one day, when he was cutting through newspaper with an Exacto knife, that the strips could be recombined and the word sequences re-examined.

What was so attractive about the cut up technique to Burroughs?

He saw it as a means of undermining the power structures that govern the behaviour of the populous. Burroughs was constantly trying to get at the way that things are programmed beneath the surface. The cut-up technique was one of the tools by which he did this, but not the only one.

What were the other tools, the other processes? With respect to the paintings I’m thinking of those abstract compositions creating by taking a shotgun to a can of spray paint…

Well I think Burroughs and Gysin met [auto-destructive artist] Gustav Metzger at one of his early lectures at Cambridge. Metzger was fed up with the commodification of art and was trying to get back to the act, the essence of what’s done by the artist in the moment of creation. That was another influence.

But Burroughs didn’t start painting until late in his life?

Burroughs really began painting in 1987, in Kansas, the year after Gysin died. Burroughs was devastated by Gysin’s death – he was the only man he ever truly respected as a man and an artist. You know, Burroughs only really started writing after he killed his wife Joan [in a drunken and famously ill-advised game of William Tell], and I think that taking up painting represented another way of working through trauma.

What of the way that Burroughs is perceived now?

I’m really not keen on the Burroughs stereotype of him with the needle in his arm and the three-piece suit, because that’s not what he was.

You don’t think he deliberately cultivated that iconography?

He cultivated the iconography but not the stereotype. I wouldn’t say that he resented the stereotype – it’s just that it’s counterproductive when it comes to understanding his work.

He was always keen to dissociate himself from the Beat Generation, which hasn’t stopped him being lumped in with them by posterity. How did he consider his work, and that of Gysin, to be different from that of Kerouac, Ginsberg or Gregory Corso?

He was a close friend with Ginsberg, particularly, but he wasn’t like the Beats – he wasn’t a Buddhist, he wasn’t Zen, he didn’t like jazz, he wasn’t cool. Burroughs’ work was about deconstructing the hypnotic effect on human nature of the corporate world, the military-industrial complex, and the military-educational complex. He was extremely concerned by the ecological devastation of the planet, by terrorism, by the militarisation of society, and he deeply wanted to create tools that would allow the individual to think for themselves. That drove everything that he did.

Benjamin Eastham

The Royal Kiss – 1 and 2

Here are the two Royal kisses directly from Buckingham Palace balcony. Just beautiful.
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