Style and Culture Magazine • Issue 01 • December 2011 • £3.95
LADY GAGA • RALPH LAUREN THE RIVERSIDE MUSEUM IPAD2 REVIEW • ALESSI THE LETTERPRESS
CONTENTS.
Ralph Lauren, nĂŠe Ralph Lifshitz, was born on October 14, 1939
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RALPH LAUREN
I don’t think I created fashion, I don’t know what original means. I think I made a mark, a niche that was a little distinctive for what it is personally. While fashion trends come and go, Ralph has remained true to his original concept: selling not just preppy clothes but a lifestyle. It’s earned him a personal fortune close to $1 billion and a place in design history. Not bad for a kid from the Bronx, New York, who wore tennis sweaters to school when everyone else was slouching around in leather jackets. Ralph Lauren, née Ralph Lifshitz, was born on October 14, 1939. He grew up in a middle-class Jewish household and for a time shared a bedroom with two of his three older brothers. Possessed of an innate fashion sense from birth, he took part time jobs early on to fund his penchant for designer clothes. His chosen course of study, however, was business, although he left the course
at City College in Manhattan before receiving his degree. Unhappy with the design of men’s clothing at the time, Ralph designed his own despite his lack of formal training and had them custom made. “You have to remember this was the late Sixties and everything was three buttons and narrow lapels,” says the fashion maestro. “I had always loved the look of the old English gentleman who dressed in class and style, who knew what he was wearing but acted like he didn’t care. That’s the image I wanted. I loved fashion and wore clothes well, but had no idea I could use that in terms of a career.” After a stint in the army, Ralph was given an opportunity to prove himself when he convinced New York City clothier Beau Brummel to
invest in his wide tie venture. In the first year he notched up sales of half a million dollars. Tailored suits and shirts were added the following year and Polo menswear “tweedy EnglishAmerican look with a French cut,” as he described it was born. The company name was always intended to be evocative of a lifestyle. “Well, what kind of people play polo?” he asks. “Wealthy, cosmopolitan and chic people. I wanted to create a concept for the name.” And he did, ironically (considering his personal reinvention) designing the wardrobe for the film version of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby along the way. Women’s clothing and houseware bearing the Ralph Lauren name followed and in 1997 the firm went
public. Ralph deservedley pocketed $465 million that day. Shortly after leaving the military in 1964, Ralph married Ricky Low Beer. The couple have three children Andrew, Dylan and David. Only David is involved in the family business: his brother and sister have pursued their own interests. Unlike most other fashion houses, Polo and Ralph Lauren are inseparably tied. “A lot of what you see in the clothes and stores comes literally from my father’s life,” says David. The man himself is self-deprecating about his contribution to the 20thcentury fashion scene. “I don’t think I created fashion,” he says. “I don’t know what original means. I think I made a mark, a niche that was a little distinctive for what it is personally.”
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There is a zone of Glasgow so studded with culture and architecture, so richly fertilised with public investment, while also blessed by nature with the noble breadth of the Clyde, that it ought to be a wonder of the world. This zone, once full of shipyards, now contains the work of two Pritzker prize winners – Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid – and a probable Pritzker-winner-in-waiting, David Chipperfield. The Riverside Museum of Transport and Travel, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects has now returned to its native city. It is one of Hadid’s most direct buildings, essentially a big, column-free shed mutated in two ways. First, its roof line is a jagged range of peaks and troughs, like Alps or gables abstracted to a cartoon; second, the
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shed is bent twice in plan, so that it takes the form of Z-shaped tube, whose end cannot be seen from the beginning. The profile of the cartoon Alps/gables is extruded through the length of the Z, as if squeezed from a gothic tube of toothpaste. Its underside forms the pleated ceiling of the shed, with strong horizontal lines leading you through the space. There are big, glass walls at each end: one is the entrance, the other frames a view of the tall ship Glenlee, moored outside. The space is obviously about movement, suggesting the dynamism of which all the once-mobile exhibits are now deprived. There is something of train tracks or tram wires in the overhead lines and of train sheds and hangars in the building as a whole.
It is not, however, a piece of faux industry in the style of many hi-tech science or transport museums around the world; it does not waggle girders and stud itself with rivets in fatuous emulation of trains and ships.
tools. direct for di visito were exper
The Hadid space, unified by a single hue of yellowish-green, is architecture, not equipment, a room, not a machine, in which a cheerful melee of objects can coexist.
The m On th super park s are si more most intent shapin comp retail to its curvin but no
It is a pleasingly old-fashioned museum, confident in the appeal of its exhibits, not interested in forcing narratives and fixed routes on them or burdening them with too much interpretation. It is like stumbling into the attic of the industrial revolution and finding a rich haul of old toys and
. Hadid’s space creates a sense of tion which, paradoxically, allows iffuse displays through which ors can meander. If the building less purposeful, the whole rience would become confusion.
museum is mostly about interior. he outside, it is, typologically, a rmarket, being a big thing in a car seeking to attract you in. There igns that tell you that this is a serious piece of architecture than supermarkets, such as its air of t and the degree of care in ng zinc panels around the plex external shape, but, like a shed, it does not give much surroundings. Great, grey and ng, it has enigma and majesty, ot friendliness. The landscaping
that clings to its flanks currently looks forlorn, although may appear less so once the trees have grown a bit. To be inward-looking might possibly be necessary, given the wilderness in which the museum stands. At a distance is a huddle of credit-crunched flats, and between them and the museum some scrub awaiting transformation into a shopping development. In the other direction, across more empty space, are the Foster and Chipperfield buildings. It is possible that it will do a better job than was done around the Foster conference centre, but there is not yet concrete evidence that it will. What can be seen here now are the successes and failures of the everpopular idea of culturally led
regeneration, the notion that exotic baubles can lead ex-shipyards to a glittering future. The successes are that the museum, conference centre and other institutions are all there and there are some architectural satisfactions to be had, should that be your thing. As the Peel Group is not idiotic, we can expect profitable development to turn up one day. What is lacking is the sense that this is a place or much reason to expect that it will be. The thinking and ambition manifest inside the building are not seen outside. Part of the answer is to do with commercial necessity, but this then raises the question whether culture is being asked to do too much. If a museum has to work so hard at kick-starting and pump-priming, and
if it is supposed to unlock territories many times its own size, it will not succeed at all its tasks. It would be better to say that museums are good things to have in their own right and that they can form the nucleus of new, beautiful, cohesive pieces of city. This is different from saying that they can transform the vast voids of the Clyde’s bank. It is also different from the (not entirely proved) theory that they tow shopping centres in their wake, which I suspect happens mostly for reasons other than the proximity of a museum. If the passion for building singular things on the Clyde had been matched by some energy and thought in the way they went together, it would be a much finer place than it is now.
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Before the invention of the printing press, the reproduction of the written word was the responsibility of the monasteries. Each book had to be written and illustrated by hand. Sur viving books from this era are a m o n g t o d ay ’s m o s t va l u a b l e wo r k s o f a r t . Despite their beauty there was a downside to this method of production, the books we r e s o h o r r e n d o u s ly e x p e n s i ve t o m a k e, that only the ver y rich could afford to own them. This meant that few people ever had the opportunity or the need to learn to read. The printing press changed all that, and in doing so was responsible for the greatest s o c i o - p o l i t i c a l c h a n g e s i n h i s t o r y. Printing from wooden blocks was probably invented in china in the years around the bir th of christ. However each plate had to be hand car ved with each ideog ram i n p o s i t i o n o n t h e p l a t e, w h i c h m e a n t a completely new car ved block for each new page of the book. I n 1 4 5 7 g u t e n b e r g i nve n t e d t h e f i r s t p r i n t i n g p r e s s w i t h m ove a b l e t y p e. T h a t i s e a c h letter was a separate car ving and could be used again and again in different pages on different books. Gutenberg lived in Mainz i n t h e h e a r t o f ge r m a n y ’s w i n e g r ow i n g region and his press was built on the same idea as the presses that are used for pressing t h e j u i c e f r o m g r a p e s t o c r e a t e w i n e. From humble beginnings printing presses s p r e a d ove r e u r o p e, a n d w i t h t h e m a r a p i d increase in the number of people who could read, and the number of people who could a f f o r d t o h ave t h e i r i d e a s r e p r o d u c e d i n b o o k s . I t i s w i d e ly a c k n ow l e d g e t h a t t h e r e f o r m a t i o n w o u l d n o t h ave o c c u r r e d w i t h o u t t h e c a t a ly s t o f t h e p r i n t i n g p r e s s. Printing p r e s s e s a c r o s s e u r o p e r a p i d ly p r o d u c e d c o p i e s of the thoughts of religous figures such as m a r t i n l u t h e r, b e c a u s e m o r e p e o p l e c o u l d r e a d t h e s e, i d e a s s p r e a d mu c h m o r e q u i c k ly t h a n i t wo u l d h ave b e e n possible with more expensive and subsequently time-consuming h a n d - d r aw n b o o k s. T h e i d e a o f h av i n g r a i s e d t y p e, a p p ly i n g ink to it and then squashing it onto paper t o f o r m a n i m a g e, l a t e r b e c a m e k n ow n as letter press printing and was to be the most successful and most common form of p r i n t i n g u n t i l t h e 1 9 5 0 ’s.
AL Alessi is one of those companies which embodies a typical phenomenon of Italian industrial culture, namely that of “Italian Design Factories�.
Since time immemorial, my family has been firmly established on Lake Orta. In this narrow valley in the Italian Alps, close to Switzerland, a long-standing tradition in wood and metal handicraft has survived up to this day.
Within the Alessi company, design in the current sense of the term began
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to gain a foothold under my father Carlo, who drew on his training as an industrial designer in order to develop virtually all of the products which appeared in our catalogues between 1935 and 1945. In the 1950’s, my father replaced my grandfather as corporate general manager, giving up altogether his activity as a designer and increasingly relying on the contributions of freelance designers, in accordance with a practice which was to become typical of all “Italian Design Factories” To this day,
Alessi products are still considered as being handicraft items made with the aid of machines: by this I mean that, even though we rely on using some contemporary and industrial technology and processing equipment, at depth our practice – the one I believe we ought to stick to, our inherent attitude is still rooted in a handicraft culture.
Mission, an activity which has gradually broken away from its original meaning as a simple formal project for an object and has become a sort of “overall philosophy”, a “Weltanschauung”, underlying all of these companies’ operational steps: we believe that our true nature comes closer to a “Research Lab in the Applied Arts” than to an industry in the traditional sense of the term.
expressions of international creative culture on the one hand, and the public’s requirements and dreams on the other. A lab that should be as open, true and dedicated to the world of Creation as possible. The right type of contribution that an industry such as Alessi can make to the civilised development of the consumer society is to be an artistic mediator, attempting to create new objects, introducing a touch of transcendency, helping us decipher our own modernity.
ESS I When speaking about the “Italian Design factories” I am referring to a historical group of companies for whom design is – if I may use a somewhat exaggerated term – a
A Research Lab in the Applied Arts, the role of which is to mediate continually between the worlds most advanced and stimulating
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Born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta to affluent parents in Manhattan, the star-in-the making showed her potential early on – learning to play the piano at the tender age of four, and performing at open mic nights by 14. “I was always an entertainer,” she acknowledges. “I was a ham as a little girl and I’m a ham today.”
“Every day, when Stef came to the studio, instead of saying hello, I would start singing Radio Ga Ga. That was her entrance song,” he explained. “[Lady Gaga] was actually a glitch. I typed ‘Radio Ga Ga’ in a text and it did an auto correct, so somehow ‘Radio’ got changed to ‘Lady’. She texted me back, ‘That’s it.’ After that day, she was Lady Gaga. She’s like,
into a tabloid favourite – her outlandish ensembles generating headlines across the globe. She followed it up with Poker Face, LoveGame, Paparazzi and Bad Romance, chalking up number ones, award nominations and critical acclaim at every turn. In 2010 she picked up two Grammy Awards and three Brit Awards to add to her already overflowing trophy cabinet. Prior to that she had scooped nine Billboard Music Awards, three MTV Video Music Awards and two NME Awards, among others.
LADY GAGA
She attended the same private Catholic girls school as Paris and Nicky Hilton, and credits her schooling as something that helped her stand out from other blonde bombshells in the charts. “I went to a lovely school and I got an incredible education,” she says. “And I actually think that my education is what really sets me apart, ‘cos I’m very smart.”
Though close to parents Joseph and Cynthia, Stefani risked losing their approval when they went to see one of her ‘shock art’ shows, which she started performing aged 18 in downtown New York burlesque clubs. “My father came to see shows when I was in leather thongs and didn’t understand. He couldn’t look at me for a few months,” she admitted.
‘Don’t ever call me Stefani again’.” And so a star was born. While still performing on the New York club scene, the then 19-year-old signed a deal with Sony/ATV, and began writing songs for established acts such as Britney Spears, New Kids
The same year she unveiled Telephone, her eagerly anticipated collaboration with diva Beyonce. The accompanying video, which involved scenes of lesbianism, prison and mass murder, racked up 17 million views on the internet in its first four days alone.
While her career and persona drew comparisons to that of queen of pop Madonna, by 2010 it seemed the singer’s relentless work schedule had left her exhausted and fragile. “I always wanted to be a star,” she’s said. “It’s in the marrow of my bones, how I feel about music and art. I sacrifice, bleed and am sleepless for my craft in a shameless and loving way.”
“I don’t wanna be one song. I wanna be the next 25 years of pop music”
Her father inspired the song Speechless, which she wrote as a plea for him to have vital heart surgery. Now he loves her work. “When [he] saw me getting better, [he] saw that my ideas were getting stronger. Now my father cries,” she says.
So where did the strange Lady Gaga moniker come from? Producer Rob Fusari, who in 2010 launched legal proceedings against the star for alleged non-payment of merchandise and song royalties, claims to have helped Stefani strike upon the now-legendary stage name.
On The Block and The Pussycat Dolls. Meanwhile, she was working on her own debut album The Fame, moving to Los Angeles and setting up the Haus of Gaga, the group that creates her eccentric costumes, performances and stage sets. She launched her assault on the charts in April 2008 with single Just Dance. It shot to number one in six countries, including the US and the UK, and transformed Lady Gaga
That statement rang true when she collapsed on stage in New Zealand, removing part of her costume and lying flat on the stage to complete the show. She later blamed the breakdown on jet lag, but it left her adoring fans concerned for her wellbeing. She’s the most downloaded artist in Internet history and in March 2010 sold out three concerts at Madison Square Garden in under an hour. “I don’t wanna be one song. I wanna be the next 25 years of pop music,” she’s said.
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iPad2 Review
Apple has earned a reputation as the maker of some of the most elegant and user-friendly computers, music players and smartphones in the business. Yet the Apple iPad may be the most impressive piece of Apple hardware we’ve handled. It’s bigger than an iPhone, of course, but much lighter than a laptop. The front is almost entirely glass, save for a thin aluminium frame. The back is a gently curved plate of anodised aluminium. The iPad is designed to be held, and it couldn’t feel more solid. This is not a delicate piece of technology to be coddled, but a rugged slate for toting wherever you go. The 9.7in glass touchscreen packs in 1024x768 pixels, resulting in the 4:3 aspect found on older TVs, as opposed to the predominant 16:9 ratio of today. At 132 pixels per inch (ppi), it’s down on the 163ppi of the iPhone. A 19mm bezel may look superfluous, but it’s actually essential for your thumbs when holding the iPad, making a solid grip that doesn’t trigger commands to the sensitive capacitive touchscreen. This screen, based on superlative in-plane switching (IPS) technology, is bright and vibrantly colourful, with a wide viewing angle. It collects fingerprints but it’s got the same oil-repellant coating as the iPhone 3GS; one quick wipe and they’re gone. The screen space means you can put lots of fingers (and both hands) on the iPad, to type or interact with onscreen objects. People who disparage the iPad as merely a hyper-thyroidal iPhone are failing to see the bigger picture. For full pricing, and details of how to buy an Apple iPad see our Apple iPad FAQs. Apple iPad: Specs and speeds The iPad is available with either 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of flash storage. In due course we’ll see models of the same capacity with built-in 3G in addition to 802.11n Wi-Fi. The processor inside the iPad is proudly billed as a ‘1GHz Apple A4 custom-designed system-on-a-chip’, and appears to be based on a single-core ARM Cortex-A8. Graphics may be courtesy of the same PowerVR SGX 535 used in the iPhone 3GS. Whichever chip is in there, the Apple iPad flies. It was fast at almost everything we threw at it: games played smoothly with gorgeous graphics, and there’s no lag when panning and zooming around large images. Any touch-based device stands or falls on how smoothly things on the screen can react to the movement of your fingers. The iPad breezes that test masterfully. We tried the SunSpider JavaScript test on iPad’s Safari browser. In September we ran this test on every iPhone OS device made – the fastest (iPhone 3GS) took 15.5 secs, while the original iPhone took 36 secs. The iPad completed it in 10.4 secs. The battery is a 24.8Wh lithium-polymer pack, over five times the size of the iPhone 3GS’s unit. While Apple boasts a battery life of 10hrs, early reports suggest that real-world figures may be even longer. Charge overnight and you’re set for the day.In short: the Apple iPad is fast and the battery lasts.
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EYEWEAR FROM TOM FORD • WWW.TOMFORD.COM