Friday, February 13, 2009

Fashion Week Chic, 2009


Gird your loins, kids, Loris Diran has launched, his store is open, and his fashion show is getting rave reviews for the collection.
Loris Diran opened a retail store in the Bowery District and presented a beautifully edited runway show at the Altman Building, all in one week.  And we think we're busy.  
Ellen Christine was honored and excited to be included, via headgear, in his Fall 2009 show: to follow his armour inspiration, we created leather "helmets".  For the boys, although, it's an-anybody-can-wear-it piece, we did a really tailored quilted leather sexy hat.  Loris showed it with the lines of the hat in the vertical , but the cold weather treatment of the hat allows for  a flap-wrap, with buttons, to ward off the winter chill. Thanks to our supreme leather handler, David Menkes, the pieces were done in time for the show.  David's the skin genius we've been working with since we did costumes for rock and roll bands in the 1980's.
Fashion always rushes us along, but theatre training helps ease the way to curtain time here at Ellen Christine. The leather hat was done in a beautiful gunmetal grey, black, and a brown, for balance.  The tonality of the accessories was designed to compliment Loris' tone poem of a collection.  The boy works wonders with depth perception, combining chiffons with tweeds with nary a skip in the beat.

For the ladies, Polly Sweet, our premiere, crafted a perfect curl for the model's hairdo.  Loris and his able assistants trekked off to the Metropolitan Museum for a day of inspiration, shooting the armour collection.  From that series of photographs, the angle and direction of the cocktail hat was born. We decided to do it in the same gunmetal grey as the helmet, with the same quilting, to add continuity.  I designed it to sit perfectly on the crest of the brow, with the curl wrapping into the cheek.  Dinishing on a piece like this has to be meticulous so it caresses the model.  My fingers did the walking on that leather piping, shaping and molding the leather into the curve we wanted.

And so a collection is born. 

Ellen

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