February 2023: Loewe SS 2023 | Max Mara Spring Summer | Dior Men in the Summer 2023 Garden
/ Anne EnkeFebruary 2023 Brand Posts with Excerpts
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The LOEWE Spring Summer 2023 women's campaign, shot by David Sims [IG], features LOEWE Global Brand Ambassador Taylor Russell posing as a form of acting.
A theme throughout the LOEWE Spring 2023 season, beginning with the late September 30, 2022 fashion show is artifice and provocation.
LOEWE’s enormously-talented creative director Jonathan Anderson took his audience on a modern, almost clinical journey into the natural world, with anthurium flowers as his guide.
Enter the Anthuriums
This ‘non-threatening’majority-view flower is the perfect hospitality gift, even for someone you don’t know well.
These modern flowers look like an erect phallus penetrating a flower that is in fact poisonous. Not only with pets but in the human mouth, you will experience a painful burning sensation with blisters and swelling if you eat an anthurium.
In this LOEWE Spring 2023 Campaign, Taylor Russell wears anthuriums as a breast plate. There’s a lot of human psychology going on here.
‘Euphoria’ star Sydney Sweeney is receiving raves for her role in the film ‘Reality’. Following the film’s premiere at the Berlin Film Festival on February 18, 2023 — and staggeringly positive reviews — HBO has moved to pickup distribution rights.
In 2018 Reality Winner, a former intelligence contractor for NSA, left her National Security Agency contractor’s office at the Fort Gordon army base in Georgia. In hand was a single intelligence report about Russian attempts to meddle in the 2016 presidential election that saw Donald J. Trump beat Hillary Clinton for the White House.
Tina Satter directed the film, based on the story of Reality Winner’s day that the FBI showed up at her door. This press conference video says much about the structure of the FBI investigation and ‘friendly’ confrontation with Winner at her home. The FBI interview is also discussed in the ‘60 Minutes’ video.
Actors Marchant Davis, Josh Hamilton, and Benny Elledge have roles in the film.
Max Mara’s Spring-Summer 2023 campaign has sophisticated swagger. Models trio Adut Akech, Annemary Aderibigbe and Dara Allen step it up to remind us that they are far more than muses or mannequins. Fashion editor Tonne Goodman styles the shoot — a collection of sophisticated essentials with discreet details that she herself would wear — in images photographed by Ethan James Green.
Looking at the images immediately took me back to December 2018, when former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi exited a tough meeting with then president Donald Trump.
The shot of Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer leaving a hard-as-nails meeting with Trump went viral, generating such digital heat that Max Mara creative director Ian Griffiths responded that the coat would be reissued.
AOC has always liked Ian Griffiths because he’s a male designer willing to explore his own contradictions. He does just that in speaking about the 2023 campaign inspired by the French Riviera. Griffiths has not been caught up in trying to make women ‘its’ or ‘theys’, degendering us in such a way that the very concept of women’s rights is no longer necessary. We’re all humans, no need to discuss the failure of mostly — but not exclusively — men to acknowledge women’s inequality.
Dior Men’s Kim Jones once again joined France and England in a celebration of flowers and gardening in his Summer 2023 campaign.
Jones united his beloved, Bloomsbury, free-spirit artists with their equally free-spirit lifestyles on the English side of the channel to Christian Dior’s seaside childhood home in Granville, Normandy.
In choosing the work and life of Duncan Grant, a British post-impressionist, Bloomsbury painter who shares a birthday with Christian Dior, the artistic synergy is further intertwined between England and France.
These campaign images by Rafael Pavarotti [IG] are like fine champagne. The talented photographer is at ease swinging from a highly-stylized, Erdem-inspired, vintage garden with dark undertones campaign to these images that are crisp and modern, imbued with a cleaner and lighter garden vibe.
Louis Vuitton’s Capucine bag heads into its second decade, showcased for Spring/Summer 2023 by maison ambassador Lea Seydoux.
In this moment of so many challenges central to our lives, the Spring 2023 Capucine bag with a handle made using the ancient Japanese Kintsugi technique may be the most special.
Seriously, can the handle of a Louis Vuitton Capucine bag teach us a life lesson?
In an throwaway, one and done, age of mass production and reckless disposal, ‘kintsugi’ is not only focused on repairing our favorite chipped vessels.
Now we learn that ‘kintsugi’ is also a way of crafting — even mending — our lives. It’s very Zen and challenges humans to consider the contemplation of imperfection, as well as the constant flux and impermanence of all things.
Etro unveils ‘Eden of Etropia’, the first campaign for new creative director Marco De Vincenzo celebrating the spring 2023 collection.
Not only is the campaign beautiful on a visceral level. It drives a dagger [literally in the video] into the apple and a search for the truth of women’s identity.
Inspired by the paintings and portraits of the Pre-Raphaelites, Marco De Vincenzo communicates his poetic vision, creating a new paradise centered around the apple, the iconic fruit of the collection and a potent symbol of love, seduction and eternity.
That’s great copy. But the truth is also that the word ‘malus’ besides being Latin for ‘apple’ is also a very negative word associated with bad, evil and wicked. From a religious perspective the apple reference with Eve didn’t even appear in versions of the New Testament until 500 AD.
I wrote about this discovery after watching a PBS show ‘Mysteries of the Garden of Eden’, first released in 2007. The documentary will be purchased before sundown at whatever price.
A fashion industry earthquake happened this week with the appointment of Pharrell Williams as Creative Director at Louis Vuitton Men’s, replacing his close friend Virgil Abloh who passsed in November 2021. The hip hop mogul, business entrepreneur, social activist with a high-volume voice on racial and gender-justice has drawn major criticism from fashion writers who argue that Pharrell’s lack of a formal design education indicates that all that matters to LVMH is his celebrity status.
I don’t mean to sound sassy, but knowing that Louis Vuitton doubled its volume from $10 billion to $20 billion in the last four years suggests that this executive team knows what it’s doing. I’m a maverick to the core and rarely silent on important topics.
But I do show respect to professionals who have just accomplished unimaginable results in business, results that defy logic. Before accusing them of being money-hungry Las Vegas strippers ready to trash the most valuable brand in the luxury world for a few bucks, I dig deeper.
I never praise myself, but I KNEW Pharrell was the perfect human for Louis Vuitton Mens and that LV would see it that way, too.
I’ve asked Louis Vuitton Mens [and Dior — too — both men and women] and Etro this morning to pick up the mantle that few businesses can lead. LVMH is well aware of what I am saying. And they are listening.
This video about Pharrell’s ‘Black Ambition’ organization is only about two years old. Clearly Virgil knew how ill he was, but we see here Virgil and Pharrell really speaking to issues of black success. The convo goes deep into their values as humans.
Felecia Hatcher is very succesful in her own right and she serves as CEO of ‘Black Ambition’.
On Resee.com, Phoebe-era Céline is one of the top-three selling labels. Imagine that fact: Phoebe’s Céline follows Chanel and Hermès.
Phoebe understands us — the woman wearing her fashion — is a constant theme among her devoted. Lynette Nylander, the executive editorial director of Dazed, explained further. Down to the most finite detail “how wide her armholes are, the fact that she always paired things with trainers. This is someone who’s not living a curb-to-cab lifestyle. I’m on the subway, I’m sweating, but I still want to evoke some sense of fantasy. Phoebe was the master of doing that.”
Backed by LVMH, Phoebe Philo will be available to see and buy in September 2023. One assumes this will go well, because for every 20-year-old, who doesn’t even know about Phoebe Philo, there’s a 35-year-old who is thrilled to have her back in business.
Prior to connecting with WSJ Magazine for a recent touchbase, Chloe designer Gabriela Hearst was in Egypt in mid-November 2022 for the COP27 climate conference.
The annual UN Climate Change conference taking place in Sharm El-Sheikh put Hearst on a panel speaking about fusion.
The future is fusion, in the eyes of Gabriela Hearst, who isn’t particularly concerned if we can or cannot read her new passion into the clothes that make up the Spring 2023 Chloe collection.
What is exciting about Hearst’s enthusiasm is that a huge breakthrough in the drive for fusion power happened days after Hearst returned from Egypt.
The Christian Dior Spring 2023 Campaign celebrates femininity, power and grace, as explored through the eye and lens of frequent Dior photographer Brigitte Niedermair [IG].
Models include Carla Pereira, Freja Rothmann, Jen Thomson, Sherry Shi, and Stella Lucia.
Preparing for the season, Chiuri discovered a map of Paris in the Dior archives, one that put Avenue Montaigne at its center, even though the street doesn’t represent the actual center of the city.
In short order, the map became a focal print for the spring 2023 collection — a maverick toile de Jouy print that is a sophisticated addition to Dior’s already rich use of toile de Jouy.
Old World unique artistry and needlework inspire the Dior spring 2023 collection, and raffia is used to maximum advantage. Beautiful raffia coats are decorated with delicate flowers and birds, also in play on the accessories. The embroidery work is spectacular.
It was difficult to miss the equestrian knight motif racing across the new Spring 2023 Burberry Campaign as part of “the first creative expression” shared by Daniel Lee, Burberry’s Chief Creative Officer.
For AOC, our focus was on the faces of the British heritage brand Burberry, the visualization of who wears this brand.
Daniel Lee, with roots in West Yorkshire, England agrees. “Burberry flies the flag for Britishness and for the UK and for culture. So, we have to use our platforms because we have a responsibility to communicate those things,” Lee told ‘Vogue Runway’ in December.
The designer continued:
"I don’t know if this is the right way to say this, but more than surprising people, I really would like them to see the new vision and feel reassured — like, ‘Oh, yeah, this makes sense: This is what Burberry should be.’”
Denim giant Levi Strauss & Co is now sourcing organic cotton directly from farmers in Pakistan as part of its membership of the Organic Cotton Accelerator (OCA) initiative.
Levi's is sourcing the organic cotton through Pakistan-based denim mill Artistic Milliners' Organic programme which involves 2,000 cotton farmers in the Kohlu region of Baluchistan.
The vast majority of cotton farmers and pickers are women, and the focus of Artistic Milliners is female empowerment. Founded in 1949 with a small factory of 22 women, the company now has a workforce of 18,000 employeess.
