SHOWnews: Luella Bartley with Wayne McGregor, Courrèges with Mark Borthwick, Nude Sisters and More

Luella Bartley Paints Wayne McGregor

Creative polymath Luella Bartley presents Passenger at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery in Berlin. Bartley’s latest solo exhibition is a series of character studies. Her life drawings are more than anatomy songs. Bartley details delicate, athletic movements that came to life in rehearsal sittings led by Sir Wayne McGregor. She illustrates an elegant crescendo of modern dance as her renderings pulsate with bold physicality.

‘To me, this idea of fragility and power, the effort that goes into creating something that appears so seamless seemed like a metaphor for the clash between how we deal with things internally and how we appear externally, how we can contain and experience all these different, seemingly opposite feelings in one single moment.’

- Luella Bartley

Luella Bartley’s bodies appear as bulbous muscles. They leap, twist, contort and contract in an elegant look behind the grittier side of modern dance rehearsals, where tensions can be wound a bit tightly. Her watercolour and crayon canvases encapsulate a vital component of modern dance, which is the fluid unification of a group. There are no one-person shows with Company Wayne McGregor. Bartley’s studies appear to have picked up this centrality to allow her figures to gesticulate or release to be carried, to give into a seamless covenant of movement. Bartley titled the exhibition ‘Passenger’ after a song from Iggy Pop’s (himself a great dance character study) classic 1977 album. In gratitude for her empathetic ruminations on movement, Luella Bartley embodies the album’s title — Lust For Life.

Luella Bartley - Passenger, runs from 13 September to 10 October, 2024 at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery

A Courrèges Waltz With Mark Borthwick

Like-minded collaboration underpins the Courrèges A/W 24 campaign. The ‘Carré Magique’ is a term coined by creative director Nicolas Di Felice to explain the ‘magic square’ resting at the centre of his A/W 24 womenswear. This geometric trick fostered new results as fabric moved fluidly from tops that were neither shirts nor bustiers. They were square anchors. In any case, revered photographer Mark Borthwick shot the images. Next, Borthwick with Di Felice and scene designer Rémy Brière, rendered the ‘Carré Magique’ into a giant Bauhaus monument. Veteran Courrèges models Natasa Vojnovic and Mona Tougaard are staged with a chic imperiousness necessary for trends to chase after.

Nicolas Di Felice and Mark Borthwick have lots in common. Borthwick began a career as a DJ in 1980s Paris, going to nightclubs and getting into devil knows what. Once the 90s arrived Borthwick, then a choreography photographer, shot campaigns for Martin Margiela. He wanted to collaborate with singular voices, usually individuals on the fringe (Chalayan, Bless) where you can shout stylistically into the void. Borthwick enjoyed collaborating with Margiela from a shared interest in the anonymous. This type of individuality shapes trends to influence fashion followers, i.e. Courrèges A/W 24. Similarly, Courrèges creative director Nicolas Di Felice — a fellow Belgian designer like Margiela — discovered his fashion aesthetic in a nightclubbing intersection of disco, cold wave and the social culture of rave. Collaboration is the heartbeat of his ‘Courrèges Club’, harmonizing soundscapes with close friend, the Paris artist Erwan Sene. So too is the draw of Andre Courrèges’ experiments with motion and modernism. Courrèges under Di Felice is your closet where nightlife and music coalesce into a daily existence on the bound. If choreography is a fundamental meeting between performers and the composer, so goes the dance of Courrèges’ fall campaign between Di Felice and Borthwick.

Brianna and Her Sisters

This week, photographer Brianna Capozzi introduces her new photography book called Sisters, about well, sisters. Capozzi spent six years in start-stop procrastination, wading her way through a spontaneous, semi-guided idea of capturing sisters in varied states of intimacy. Her outcome assembles 140 pages of artificial and natural beauty in degrees of undress.

Capozzi’s through line ensured that each shot linked a sisterly DNA. You certainly wonder if any compositions came together in forced, bitchy competition with one sister forcing the other (or three, or five others) to push through for family posterity. Yet what resonates from Capozzi is an intimate brutality you only get when your vulva is on display, grazing your older sister’s good velour comforter while she can’t do a thing about it. Capozzi fostered a collective closeness easily by removing fashion considerations from the equation. Reducing the fashion to certain bare essentials — makeup, perhaps a wig, a single black balloon — puts the sisters’ primal closeness on display. Nothing looks premeditated, only hyperreal, which one can expect from the hazy fantasy cascading over images. Amassing contrasting hair lengths, fake eyelashes, pregnancies and Capozzi’s own sister, Sisters is an IDEA publication not to be missed.

Sisters by Brianna Capozzi is out now.

Balmain Beauty Is A Sphinx Of Scents

Balmain and its creative director Olivier Rousteing scorch the earth with their beauty iteration dubbed ‘Les Éternels de Balmain.’ Inspired by past and present house notions of bold feminine concepts, Rouseting modernises fragrance propositions with eight eaux de parfum selections for all gender identities. Over twelve years, that Rousteing has confidently coalesced his sensibilities into Balmain’s lavish womenswear theatricality, galvanises this beauty announcement with an instant understanding of spectral beauty vivacity.

‘Balmain Beauty gives you the freedom to live your truth, be free and powerful. Beauty is about being yourself and having the confidence to embrace who you are. Beauty is part of your silhouette, of who you are, just like the way you dress. I want to represent all the beauties of the world and welcome everyone without exception.’

- Olivier Rousteing

Balmain Beauty and Olivier Rousteing engender an olfactory family across eight fragrances bound with the magic of dualities. Rousteing resuscitated four legacy scents to balance four carefully crafted new fragrances. Mutable qualities are to be indulged — Gemini or not — with rich musk and carbon elements emitting your varied instincts depending on the day. Amber illuminates serenity, Floral intoxicates with a Balmain journey through time, while Bronze Wood symbolises rebirth and reimagination. Olivier Rousteing extracts the future from Balmain past and present notions of luxury to diffuse a multisensorial approach to beauty, gender and positivity.

Uncover more at www.balmainbeauty.com

It’s About F*cking Time Stella McCartney!

Stella McCartney’s A/W 24 collection continues a two-year trend of self-referencing her past. This is welcome news to obsessed Chloé fans from her 3-year tenure. It means we get more Chloé ideas. This latest update is the boomerang of love t-shirt that read ‘About F*cking Time!’ The original white t-shirt was worn by Stella in 1999, when her father Sir Paul McCartney was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Then Sir Paul wore the same thing when Stella won the VH1/Vogue Fashion Award for Designer of the Year, for Chloé, in 2000 (David Bowie wore YSL Rive Gauche ‘Black Tie’ collection by Hedi Simane). McCartney decided to recontextualise the message in her A/W 24 catwalk manifesto — that glamour should not destroy our planet — expressed in full profanity by actors Helen Mirren and Olivia Colman. Whether you’re an eco-warrior or a Chloé by Stella superfan, the shirt is a Y2K thirst trap done right. And it’s about fu…well, you get the picture.

Loverboy Screen Tests Shoes For A Campaign Performance

Charles Jeffrey LOVERBOY incorporates three distinctive characters from the LOVERBOY universe into a series of screen tests for an A/W 24 footwear campaign. Jeffrey directs three characters, whose identities offer up eclectic eccentricity with a camp flair that subverts subcultural dogmas. A playful turn from overly serious, earnest statements about punk should mean this or industrial codes enforce that are appropriate vibes to fill LOVERBOY shoes. The collection includes the Sheathed Boot Moggies in black moto-meets-wellies style, leopard printed Mary Jane Moggies and the popular Moggies with claws. Shoes with character require people with character, after all.

Vivienne Westwood Revisits Art Inclusivity With Revere The Residence

Vivienne Westwood's Revere the Residence partnership reflects a history of ongoing engagement with political and social issues. Connecting once again with the Hackney-based social enterprise, who work with neurodivergent artists, Westwood and Revere announce ‘Artists For Hire.’ Beth Beaumont-Epstein, Piper Revere and Sabrina Maalow each created unique prints across Westwood’s A/W 24 collection. Beaumont-Epstein printed technicolour florals on a classic VW corset. Revere, an East London artist who is autistic and deaf, used a felt tip pen to render gradient squiggles across a Westwood tee-shirt displaying the graphic ‘More Will Be No More’ above the waves. Maalow, a London-based artist with Down Syndrome, turned the Westwood Orb into an anti-waste message featured across an organic cotton jersey t-shirt, felt beret and accessories. By creating a supportive and inclusive environment for learning disabled individuals, the enterprise offers a space where artists can explore their creativity that also promotes social impact, a main driver for Westwood and Revere the Residence.

Vivienne Westwood’s ‘Revere the Residence’ collection is available at Vivienne Westwood boutiques in London, the UK, Paris, Milan and here.