View the Collection here.

Luisa Casati was not born to infamy. The daughter of a rich Italian nobleman, her parents died when she was young, leaving the 15-year-old as one the country’s richest heiresses. In 1900, aged 19, she married Count Camillo Casati Stampa di Soncino and had a child, Cristina. And so it was that, up until this point, Marchesa Luisa Casati fulfilled the expectations laid out before her, living the typical life of a rich European aristocrat. It was whilst on the aristo circuit, however, that she met the Italian poet and lothario Gabriele d’Annunzio. The two became lovers, with the notoriously debauched Gabriele introducing his new muse to a whole new world, one of decadent parties and artist filled salons, of outrage, intrigue and scandalous behavior. The Marchesa never looked back.

Over the course of the next 30 years, she dedicated herself to decadence. She cultivated a dramatic look – her tall, skinny frame topped with bright red dyed hair, bleached skin, red lips and kohl rimmed eyes. She was photographed by Beaton, painted by Augustus John and Giovanni Boldini and sculpted by Jacob Epstein. A patron of the Ballet Russes, she held court at her outrageous soirées in Grecian Fortuny or a sheer sheath dress worn with nothing underneath, whilst her guests were waited on by countless servants – themselves often naked and gilded in gold leaf. Her jewels were by Lalique (she is said to have inspired Cartier’s Panther designs,) her pets were cheetahs and boa constrictors (the snake once escaped during a stay at the Ritz in Paris,) and the stories could not have been more scandalous.

This life of excess was lived out across Europe as the Marchesa flitted from Rome to Venice, Paris to London. For a while during the 1920’s, she took up residence in Capri, and it was here that we came across her, resplendent in all her eccentricity at the cliff top Villa San Michele, once the island’s most famous villa and now a much-visited museum. At KOTUR we have taken inspiration from the island in all its glittering, sun-drenched glory for our Spring Collection, and, for a time in her life, the Marchesa did too. She rented it from its owner Axel Munthe, installing herself in spite of her landlord’s frequent attempts to evict her. With its sweeping views of the town, the whitewashed villa and its lush gardens full of ancient Roman and Egyptian artifacts was the perfect spot for a woman who dealt in drama – the villa’s Egyptian granite Sphinx was a particular favorite of hers. During her time there, she transformed the place, arriving with her own band of servants and redressing the rooms to her taste. She covered the mosaic floors in animal skins and black carpets, the walls with golden curtains and dark velvet drapes. One guest was the writer Montgomery Compton Mackenzie, who recounted of a visit, “There was a golden gazelle on each side of the heavy door that was opened by a servant, clad in blue velvet tails and breeches. The Cisisbeo fluttered around the entrance hall to announce that the Marchesa was ready to receive me; we shortly would be having tea in the pergola. I continued to the drawing room and went in. Surprise is not the right word for my reaction when I saw my hostess lying on the large bearskin rug in front of the fireplace without a stitch of clothing.”

 All this excess ended up getting the better of the Marchesa in the end, who, having made her way through her fortune, died penniless in London in 1957. She was buried alongside her taxidermied Pekingese, wearing one of her beloved leopard print creations and a pair of her famously distinctive false eyelashes. Her epitaph was taken from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, reading, “’Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.‘ Her legend more than lives on. 

A Man Ray portrait of Casati dressed as Elisabeth of Austria, 1935 (Man Ray Trust by SIAE 2014)

The swirling artistic mystery of Van Gogh’s moonlit skies gave rise to magical saturated prints in rich, deep colors with an otherworldly feel, this time imagined in luxurious brocades. Paul Verlaine’s famous poem “Clair de Lune” provides inspiration, while Astrological motifs are found hand embroidered onto Espeys using hand worked techniques in India with images featuring starry skies.

Using the ancient technique of Cloisonné, we have literally scattered our Perspex Merricks in star dust to give a vision of a dreamlike galaxy on a background of deep, midnight blue.

A colour palette rich in olive, cobalt, fuchsia, red and purple tones, some imagined in embossed leather on our Baileys and Espeys, conspires to bring something of the night to a collection all about the romance to be found in our skies.Dreamy, celestial, exotic and more than a little otherworldly, these are bags to transport you somewhere else.

The Stones, as chronicled in the Saatchi Gallery’s EXHIBITIONISM, presents a highly entertaining, more Interview than ArtForum, exhibition reflecting the band’s history through film, artifacts/paraphernalia/junk (depending on the eye of the beholder), and stage sets which include a recreation of their first Chelsea flat, which was, coincidentally, adjacent to my first London flat 25 years later….

Best of all, EXHIBITIONISM displays, in full-frontal fashion, the band’s unforgettable (and at times, unforgivable)  stage costumes worn through the years.  Some are iconic, but all reflect the showmanship and character which define that rock star attitude we salute…
in our collection, and in ourselves.

The show ends this weekend in London, but travels to New York November 12th. 

Inspired by their starry and scene stealing approach to both their music and their very individual aesthetics, we sought to capture their rocking, rebellious and party ready vibe in our collection. Working with a pared back but bold color palette of black, white, silver and gold with touches of red and blue, graphic motifs in inlaid Perspex, glitter and gold embossed designs and smatterings of Swarovski crystals and star motifs all hark back to the decadence of their kind of vibe.

Gold plated brass Baileys in embossed croc and woven metallic finishes, foil printed satin bags adorned with vivid galaxies and glittery cloisonné designs on shiny Perspex Merricks all conspire to bring a bit of punk’s most glamorous iteration into our own wardrobes this season. Think David Bowie, majestic and attention grabbing in his incarnation as Ziggy Stardust or Debbie Harry so cool, so chic and so ready to party in cobalt shimmery leggings (worn with a simple white tee) and you begin to get the gist.

Album covers from the period proved a wonderful place to look for more decorative inspiration. Sharp lines play a major part, influenced by the in your face attitude of statements such as Grace Jones’s inimitable and bestselling Nightclubbing album cover. Bowie’s stars and Blondie’s monochromatic stripes both give standout shapes and motifs that lend themselves brilliantly to bags.  Be it through glittery graphics, shimmering stars or metallic brights, this is a season that comes together to encapsulate an attitude and approach that was as experimental and rebellious as it was bold and really rather beautiful.

]]> http://www.koturltd.com/blog/2016/08/pre-fall-2016-inspiration/feed/ 0 http://www.koturltd.com/blog/2016/07/dames-in-their-drawing-rooms-georgia-okeeffe/ http://www.koturltd.com/blog/2016/07/dames-in-their-drawing-rooms-georgia-okeeffe/#comments Wed, 13 Jul 2016 07:27:19 +0000 admin http://www.koturltd.com/blog/?p=25105 ]]> Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, in 1887, the second of seven children to her dairy farmer parents, Georgia Totto O’Keeffe started out life in just the sort of big plains country that would later define many of her most famous works.  Often called the ‘Mother of American Modernism,’ her prolific career saw her produce some of the most famous artworks of her century, pieces that defined the American art movement at the time, blazed a trail for female artists and cemented her forever in the annals of her country’s cultural history. At KOTUR, her pioneering spirit has given us inspiration in so many ways over the years.

O’Keeffe knew she wanted to be an artist from the age of 10. Her official artistic education took place at the Art Institute of Chicago and then the Art Students League in New York, where she was taught in the school of traditional, realist painting. On leaving, however, she soon branched out. Her first exhibition, held in New York, 1916, was of a series of abstract charcoal drawings, and it changed her life. Not only did it mark her card as an artist at the heart of American modernism, but the gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz, though 23 years her senior and married at the time, would soon become her husband. By the mid 1920’s O’Keeffe was one of America’s most well known artists, her large-scale flowers and New York cityscapes already commanding huge commercial value. It is, however, her love affair with New Mexico that she’s probably best known for – both professionally and personally.

O’Keeffe discovered her beloved Santa Fe in 1929. Keen to escape the summers she’d been spending with her husband and his family on Lake George, she first visited that year and never really looked back, endlessly inspired by its raw, desert landscapes, indigenous art and distinctive local adobe architecture. Although Stieglitz would never join her there, she spent months each year touring the country before moving permanently after his death. In 1940, she put her roots down, purchasing the Ghost Ranch, followed by a second house in the village of Abiquiu in 1945. She would live between the two until 1984, when she moved back to Santa Fe where she died in 1986 at the age of 98.

Both houses display the sort of style that has become synonymous with O’Keeffe. Known for what Vogue described as her ‘monastic simplicity by way of the Southwest,’ she was a minimalist and her homes were the same. She fell in love with The Ghost Ranch, a low, unassuming house in the middle of nowhere on a dude ranch, at first sight, saying “as soon as I saw it, I knew I must have it.” For her, the place’s appeal lay in its oneness with nature. As she wrote to the painter Arthur Dove in 1942, “I wish you could see what I see out the window—the earth pink and yellow cliffs to the north—the full pale moon about to go down in an early morning lavender sky . . . pink and purple hills in front and the scrubby fine dull green cedars—and a feeling of much space—It is a very beautiful world.”

That beautiful world was as much a part of the house as it was its setting. Remote in the extreme, powered only by generator and miles from anyone else, it was a place of solace and for solitary living for O’Keeffe. Her corner bedroom featured two glass walls looking out onto the vast expanse of the hills around her and her own ‘private mountain,’ the Cerro Pedernal, although often, she would sleep up on the roof under the stars, before heading out in her Mark 2 Ford for a day painting outside. By night, she would retreat home to her simple, whitewashed walls, basic kitchen and sparse but carefully chosen furniture. Today, it is all kept much the same by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and Cultural Centre, who have restored both of her houses to their former glory. Visitors to them can’t help but notice the extraordinary, zen-like yet earthy quality they exude. They are struck by their dreaminess and their otherworldly calm, by a sense that makes them feel at once overawed by and totally at peace with the dramatic countryside they sit in. You could say exactly the same for O’Keeffe’s body of work.

 Photo Courtesy of Getty Images, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

Andre’s exhibition set out to celebrate Oscar and his impact on both American style and American women. My sister, Alexandra Kotur, was one of those women directly affected by de la Renta, being lucky enough to know him and wear his designs. She loaned two of them to the exhibition.  “Fashion is about dressing according to what’s fashionable. Style is more about being yourself” de la Renta once said. And it was this very personal perspective as well as his personal relationship with the women he dressed that the exhibition sought to reflect. It all added a new dimension to things, showing the totally unique and modest grace de la Renta imbued in anyone who wore his creations.

The more than 130 looks shown as part of the exhibit were chosen from museum archives, the designer’s personal collection, and private lenders  by André Leon Talley,  from his own memories and recollections, and each represented a highly personal de la Renta moment for the curator, who travelled across the country (and through some wardrobes) gathering them together for this show and his book, Oscar De La Renta, His Legendary World of Style.

Born in the Dominican Republic in 1934, de la Renta moved to Madrid at 19 to study art before becoming an apprentice under Cristóbal Balenciaga and then a designer under Antonio Castillo at Lanvin. He had learnt the ropes of Haute Couture before launching his own eponymous label in 1965 – and it was this fusion of the beautifully and artistically made with an innate sense of appropriate elegance that marked his work out for the rest of his five decade long career.

“Andre and Oscar, both creative geniuses, understood each other. And Oscar, just like Andre, loved women and could create the highest level of chic for women that Andre completely related to” Alexandra recalled with affection.

That André and Oscar were incredibly good friends only serves to highlight the personal in this book. They met in the 1970’s, when André was a young accessories editor at WWD and Oscar and his first wife Françoise de Langlade were what Andre himself described in an interview with Vogue as, ‘the Social Lions of New York.’ They were firm friends from then onwards. More than that, we also see them as two men who have always celebrated the individual in fashion, men for whom women as diverse as Hillary Clinton, Diana Vreeland and Oprah qualify in terms of true icons – of style or anything else. In the book he has written, André looks at Oscar’s work through individual dresses made for individual clients – giving a glimpse at the fascinating stories behind each one’s creation. In doing so, he brings not only Oscar’s wonderful dresses but also the women who wore them to life.

Photo Courtesy of Huffington Post, drewaltizer.com, de Young, leighannemarie.com, borneobulletin.com.bn, wwd.com, vogue.com, wmagazine.com

Loren’s life wasn’t always dripping in glitz and glamor. Born in 1934, she came into the world on a charity ward for unwed mothers (her engineer father refused to marry her piano teacher mother in a scandalous move for the time.) Taunted for being an illegitimate child, wartime Italy proved a brutal place to grow up, with Loren and her family suffering terrible poverty amidst the constant danger of bombings. Living with several relatives in a small apartment and brought up on strict rations, Sophia was so skinny she was known as Sophia Stuzzicadenti (Sophia toothpick) at school. Her mother Romilda, however, was a great beauty, stopped often in the street for her resemblance to Greta Garbo, and as the young Sophia grew up it became clear her looks were also far from ordinary. Her family encouraged her to enter a beauty contest aged 15, which she did, wearing a dress made by her Grandmother from their living room curtains – and the rest is Italian film history.

We took a tour around the Mediterranean, stopping off at fabulous island destinations such as Capri, Mykonos and Ibiza on our way. We were inspired by the laid back yet extremely polished glamour of the party side of island life. It’s a collection that goes back to nature in various ways, yet always retains a particular sort of elegance.

What sort of feeling are you trying to evoke?

Countess Jacqueline de Ribes, the subject of this year’s Costume Institute Exhibition at the Met, falls firmly in this camp. Along with other fashion luminaries and all round standout dames such as Diana Vreeland and Iris Apfel, she is one of a rare breed of woman that we at Kotur look to time and time again, one of those who manages to make their own individual style statements with strength and often a small smirk, stopping us all in our tracks and setting new notions of beauty as they go.

Working in her studio, 1985.

The daughter of a count and wife of Edouard, Vicomte de Ribes, Jacqueline is a French aristocrat known for her striking beauty and trailblazing approach to glamour. Now a Great Grandmother of three, she cannot however be pigeonholed simply as an impeccably dressed Countess. Long fascinated by the world of fashion and creativity she found at her fingertips growing up in Paris, she rolled her sleeves up and immersed herself in it wherever she could – and at a time when others like her did not do the same. “I was always looking for a way to escape the cage,” she told Harpers recently. She has turned her hand to everything from television production to interior design and even wrote an anonymous column for French Marie Claire on ‘how to be chic on 2 francs,’ for a while, as well as managing the Marquis de Cuevas’s International Ballet and finally launching her own fashion label in 1982, running it until 1995.

      All this has been done against a backdrop of a life lived making the very most of the fashion on offer to her – which, it turned out, was the best of the best – as found in full evidence at the Met. For her months long skiing adventures, de Ribes had huge fox fur hats dyed to match each jacket, for the parties there was the most beautiful couture courtesy of the likes of Yves Saint Laurent, Valentino or Marc Bohan of Dior and for the real epitomy of dressing up, the fancy dress balls she frequented, there were extraordinary concoctions of dresses, each made up of customized outfits created to cause the ultimate effect.

De Ribes at Baron Alexis de Rédé’s Bal Oriental in Paris, 1969.

Of one particular occasion, when she went to dinner with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor before Baron Alexis de Redé’s “Bal Oriental in 1969, Oscar de la Renta, a fellow guest, told Vanity Fair in 2010, “The first course, the second course, the third course, and finally dessert arrived, and still Jacqueline de Ribes had not appeared. The Duke was furious! Suddenly the dining-room doors opened, and in glided the Vicomtesse de Ribes. An exotic vision, the aristocratic beauty was swaddled from the pinnacle of her tasseled hat to the tips of her pointed slippers in a fantastically opulent Turkish disguise, ingeniously cobbled together by the Vicomtesse herself from three of her old haute couture dresses; organza lamé from a remnant market; and a sable cape, acquired from an impoverished ballerina. It was a show. And she was the star. No one knew like Jacqueline the power of an entrance.”

De Ribes with Diana Vreeland

Jacqueline de Ribes, dress by Yves Saint Laurent, Paris, July 31, 1962

De Ribes credits that other doyenne of individual chic and general KOTUR heroine Diana Vreeland as being the person who encouraged her to be brave enough to blaze her own trail. She was shot by Richard Avedon for Harpers Bazaar in 1955, and told the magazine last year that, “At that time I was not so secure. Diana did help me. She told me, ‘Jacqueline, don’t be afraid. Whatever you do, just remember: Follow your instincts and you’ll never be wrong.” And, from the huge fox fur hats to the customized couture, the baby pink ruffles to the exquisitely draped Grecian Dior, and even to the feathered headdresses, she wasn’t. There’s a style lesson in we at KOTUR love to celebrate – and that’s well worth learning.

Photo courtesy of the Met Museum, Getty Images, AP Images, AGIP/Rue des Archives/Granger, NYC, Richard Avedon, David Lees/The Life Images Collection