SHIFT TIMELESS SHEI MAGAZINE’s Monthly Digital Mini | Volume 3 Issue 5 | MARCH 2017
SHIFT EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Aaron Pelo
IN THIS ISSUE
CREATIVE DIRECTOR Courtney Evans FEATURES EDITORS PRINT Lauren Guldan DIGITAL Alexander Rakestraw FASHION EDITORS PRINT Mackenzie Kimball Hannah Wasserman DIGITAL Audrey Klomparens DESIGN EDITORS PRINT Morgan Lovay Xinyi Liu DIGITAL Haley Fox PHOTO EDITORS PRINT Shannon Maiers Becca Rudman DIGITAL Brian Beckwith VIDEO EDITOR Maggie McMillin DIGITAL CONTENT DIRECTOR Elena Odulak
02. masthead 04. contributors 06. from the desk of the editor-in-chief
08. the timeless charles worth: fashion’s first true icon 14. in bloom 20. the history of the white sneaker
PUBLISHER Kassie Wallace ACCOUNTS DIRECTOR Colleen Natzke MARKETING DIRECTOR Maddy Moog ADVERTISING COORDINATOR Hali Levandoski DISTRIBUTION COORDINATOR Amber Lam FINANCE COORDINATOR Lauren Ayers EVENTS COORDINATOR Maggie O’Connor OUTREACH COORDINATOR Carly Dineen-Griffin SOCIAL MEDIA COORDINATOR Sylvia Sankaran
Our mission is to inform, inspire and engage deeply with the University of Michigan ca provide a marketable media platform for students to push the boundaries of what has
Index | Volume 3 Issue 5
24. time to spare
40. little black something
30. menswear: the new classics
ampus community at the intersection of student and professional life within the fashion industry. SHIFT is intended to s traditionally been possible within print without compromising the level of quality associated with the SHEI brand.
SHIFT march contributors
FASHION Cat Marchenko Alana Valko Alexandra Plosch Brianna Wells Aishu Chandra Harsha Kishore Belinda Jiang Liv Verlarde Blake Pittman Lauren Tahari
Kristin Swad Jenny Ruan Ritisha Ghosh Lindsey Medd Meredith Sherbin Susie Meaney Carolia De La Barrera Molly Shulan Cam Stalwart
FEATURES Alex Rakestraw
Phoebe Danaher
PHOTO Jonathon Ye Olivia Keener Benji Bear Mackenzie King Olivia Gardella Becca Rudman
Brian Beckwith Simon Nguyen Kevin Zheng Lorri Rasmussen Ryan McLoughlin Adam Van Osdol
VIDEO Hannah Sybil MacDonald
Paige Wilson
DESIGN Kaitlyn Beukema
Sara Groenke
MODELS Lauren Day Beau Mourer Abby Karol
Elena Howes Steph Harris
TIMELESS changing; remaining
written by Aaron Pelo photographed by Kevin Zheng
Letter from the Editor | Volume 3 Issue 5
T
he fashion industry is fast paced, always evolving. For March, as we slowly shed our winter coats and transition to Spring, we wanted to spend this issue focusing on what’s timeless about fashion. One of the most exciting things for me, as someone who both covers and consumes men’s fashion, is the menswear renaissance that’s developed over the past few years. As you flip through the pages of this month’s SHIFT you’ll see our take on timeless men’s fashion with a modern twist. Also in this issue, we’ve reinterpreted timeless staples like florals and the little black dress, and played into nostalgia with a totally vintage inspired shoot. You’ll also read about the history of the white sneaker, a style of footwear that long predates the recent craze over the Stan Smith and Adidas Superstar. But perhaps the most timeless piece of the fashion industry you’ll encounter in our March issue is Charles Frederick Worth, one of the forefathers
of haute couture and the modern fashion industry. Upon founding the House of Worth in 1858, he dominated the fashion scene in France throughout the second half of the nineteenth century until the house closed in 1956. The house was eventually revived in 1999 by a pair of entrepreneurs and continues a fragrance operation. House of Worth and its historic founder may not be household names to some of our readers the way Gabrielle Chanel, Christian Dior, and Miuccia Prada have become, but the legacy of Charles Worth is over one-hundred and fifty years old and without him the modern fashion industry wouldn’t be what it is today. That’s our definition of timeless. What’s yours? SHIFT with us.
Doing Something Different
An interview with the co-founder of Lazlo, Christian Birky written by Alex Rakestraw, photographed by Courtney Evans, modeled by Ben Sonnega
The Timeless Charles Worth: Fashion’s First True Icon
T
o talk about any designer, one must first pay homage to Charles Frederick Worth. As atypical as it seems, the story of European designer fashion begins with a fancy old white dude. In fact, if you’ve ever purchased a piece of RTW fashion, especially that under a designer label, you have enjoyed the legacy of our man Charles. You might expect the man who made Paris the couture capital of the world to be French, but Charles Frederick Worth was in fact born in Lincolnshire, England. Worth became a textile merchant’s apprentice at a young age to supplement his family’s meager income, yet soon discovered both his skill and his passion for clothing design. His particular interest was historical fashion, an absorption that eventually led him to Paris. After moving there in 1845, the twenty-year-old Worth
Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Empress Eugénie, ca. 1852, oil on canvas, 240 x155 cm, Dress by Charles-Frederick Worth
started work at Gagelin, a company that sold wholesale cloth, simple fabrics shawls, and most importantly of all, readymade clothing. He soon became Gagelin’s leading salesman, and even opened the company’s dressmaking department. In 1858, Worth left Gagelin and started his own company, the House of Worth. His iconic “House of” naming convention continues in use today. The house found quick success, as its opening conveniently coincided with Emperor Napoleon III’s modernization effort of Paris. With the city’s new attitude towards design and the help of a thriving economy, French demand for luxury goods reached pre-Revolution heights, and Worth reaped the benefits. He brought back the gigot sleeve, which had been popular during Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, and made his dresses known for their superior tailoring and rich
fabric. With the help of his wife Marie, who was not only a walking advertisement for his dresses but an advertising genius, he found his way into the French elite through Princess von Metternich, the wife of the Austrian ambassador to Paris. She was the close friend of Empress Eugénie, who was at the time perhaps the most influential dresser in France, if not all of Europe. She was so influential that, in 1868, she and Worth conspired to kill a fashion trend once and for all. Even more impressive? Their effort succeeded. The duo’s target was the crinoline, the infamous metal framework worn under dresses of the time to accentuate their shape and volume. This kind of stiff structure underneath a dress originated as a farthingale, which was popular in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The style continued on and off since then, eventually becoming the gigantic Versaillesera crinoline. For obvious reasons, four centuries of wearing a steel cage every day was beginning to grate on Eugénie and many other women. However, given the highly prescriptive rules of fashion in the nineteenth century, putting an end to the crinoline’s Reign of Terror was not so easy as simply not wearing one. So, when Empress Eugénie asked Worth to help her put a stop to the steel cage, she was making a daring move. Fortunately, the replacement for the crinoline, the bustle, was a smash hit and took over the fashion world. The bustle only protruded from the back of the dress, and could be rested to the sitter’s side or even collapsed on the chair seat. This development was the first in a series of fashion innovations centered on helping
Charles-Frederick Worth, in Gazette Bon Ton, No. 6, La Belle Dame Sans Merci - Evening Dress, 1921, illustration by Georges Barbier
women move, and set off a chain of events that killed the corset, long skirts and fulllength underwear. While his distinctly-nineteenth century dress designs don’t have much of an impact on what we wear today, Worth’s revolutionary approach to advertising and distribution were as influential then as online shopping is now. Worth was the first to show entire collections ahead of time, laying the framework for the fashion calendar as we know it. Even more amazingly, he was also the first to sell ready-to-wear dresses and patterns to the public, making his name through bespoke work with Parisian elites while offering his same expert touch to the public at large. Worth’s rationale for his unprecedented ready-to-wear offerings: because his designs were so popular and the demand was so high, someone was
bound to copy them. His approach wasn’t just successful – it made him perhaps the most popular dressmaker in Europe. Of course, others still mimicked his work, yet Worth’s original designs would go on to spur decades-long fashion movements, as evidenced the bustle until the turn of the twentieth century. While the bustle eventually died just like the crinoline before it, Charles Frederick Worth’s many advertising and distribution achievements had an eternally-lasting effect on the fashion world. Worth invented the fashion house, the couture calendar, the designer label, the celebrity client, and above it all, the market-wide distribution system that brought his name and designs everywhere from the atelier to the streets of Paris. Without him, the fashion world would look very different.
written by Phoebe Danaher
Charles-Frederick Worth, Day Dress, ca. 1889
IN BLOOM
DIRECTORS Cat Marchenko, Alana Valko STYLISTS Kristin Swad, Jenny Ruan, Ritisha Ghosh, Lindsey M MODEL Lauren Day LAYOUT Sara Groenke PHOTOGRAPHERS Jonathon Ye, Olivia Keener, Brian Beckwith
M
Medd h, Adam Van Osdol
THE HISTORY OF TH
L
eather jackets. Blue jeans. Cool, collected confidence. In the realm of style, there are but few truly timeless icons. As trend cycles twist and turn, even wardrobe staples as traditional as aviator sunglasses may find themselves suddenly out of favor. However, while fickle fashions ebb and flow, one single piece of footwear has outlasted all others: the white low-top tennis shoe. For spring, summer, and fall, this single shoe represents a modern-day Triple Crown of footwear: it is lightweight, refined, and versatile to a tee. Yet, with a legacy spanning centuries, the world’s first modern “sneaker” also represents both living history and ageless style. One hundred years ago, Einstein had only published his first paper and the Ottoman Empire wasn’t just a clever name for a furniture store. With our world changing so dramatically in the century since its
creation, how did the white low-top sneaker turn out so… right? To truly understand what makes the low-top tennis shoe so iconic, we have to start at the beginning. In 1870’s England, a revolutionary canvas/rubber shoe that looked like a boat’s hull was starting to make waves. These “plimsolls” (a nickname gained from their rubber toecap’s resemblance to the “Plimsoll line” on a boat), as they were called, represented a crude solution to a pervasive problem: while traditional leather-soled sports derbies did fine in ideal conditions, the vulcanized rubber soles introduced by Charles Goodyear beginning in the 1830’s were both cheaper and more adaptable for nearly every manner of sports. Gluing a cheap canvas upper to a vulcanized rubber sole, then, represented a simple, cost-effective athletic shoe for all ages – what early plimsolls lacked in refinement, they redoubled in pure economic sense.
HE WHITE SNEAKER The first true improvements to the plimsoll came with the addition of cross-hatching to the shoes’ rubber sole, providing extra grip for no additional cost. As a result, these early canvas-and-carved-rubber plimsolls began to gain favor with sportsmen for their comfort and reliability during highmovement sports like tennis. You can probably guess where this is going. By the early 1890’s, examples of British sporting “sneakers” (so named because their rubber bottoms made them quieter than lugged boot outsoles) had gained enough popularity in the United States to encourage the very first American sneaker production. However, it wouldn’t be until 1916 – exactly one hundred years ago – that the first mass-market canvas sneaker (the Keds Champion) would hit stores. While the interwar years brought about few major advances in the shoes themselves,
a newfound focus on international cooperation provided a wholly new arena for these early canvas sneakers to be seen: the Olympics. Even though Tennis disappeared from the Olympic program in 1924, enough sneakers were in circulation to make them the footwear of choice amongst the entire athletic field. This international notoriety (and omnipresent spotlight, from the playing field to the medal stand) made lowtop white sneakers both cultural symbol and sportswear signal. As Jordans are to society today, early sneakers were to interwar America: then, wearing low-top white sneakers meant you were athletic – or, at least, dressed like it. Before the end of the 1930’s, sneakers had transformed from curiosity to gold standard. The rising popularity of American basketball encouraged new technological developments, yet, it was the humble
white low-top that remained the “sneaker,” distilled. In 1936, the now-defunct French brand Spring Court would introduce the first canvas tennis shoe with built-in “ventilation channels,” keeping the unadorned allwhite silhouette that had by then become court dress code (see: Wimbledon) while innovating in the name of comfort and performance. The white low-top’s handsome exterior remained ageless, even as the gears of progress turned steadily under the hood. For the next decade or so, sneaker development took a backseat to more pressing industrial needs. You can probably guess why. However, after World War II, the beginnings of an American economic boom afforded both young parents and Baby Boom children alike unprecedented opportunities for leisure, often in the form of sports and games. All across society, dress codes relaxed, and the beginnings of a style we now call “athleisure” – sneakers, t-shirts, and clothes made for comfort and movement – began to take form. Yet, throughout this period of great change, the white low-top tennis shoe remained relatively the same. At the same time, sneakers were more popular than ever, boosting the iconic, decades-old silhouette to never-before-seen heights. That is, until the Boom. In the 1960’s, America’s first mass-market sporting fad took hold. The “Tennis Boom,” as it would later be known, was equal parts enthusiasm and hysteria: suddenly, millions nationwide wanted to hit the courts. But, before they did, every single one of them needed the proper attire. Ergo, sales of tennis shoes (especially the then-iconic “white low-top” variety) boomed in addition. Canvas tennis shoes were the yoga pants of their day – standard-issue performance sporting turned into cultural membership.
Then, the dead cows got involved. With the Tennis Boom in full swing, athletic shoe makers finally had the public demand necessary to seek out innovation. In a highly-agile sport like tennis, canvas shoes provided little responsiveness to players cutting around the court: the cloth upper was just too flimsy for all that lateral force. The shoes were altogether light and flexible, but north of the outsole, your standard white low-top was, well, 70 years old. Queue the cows. In the late 1960’s, the first-ever leather tennis shoe, the adidas Stan Smith, was introduced. Just like that, the sports world changed overnight. The Stan Smith kept all of the same aesthetics of the classic “plimsolls,” but rendered the white low-top design in supple-yet-durable leather, keeping the athlete’s foot locked in and providing a better backstop for any quick movements on court. It was a simple materials change that would prove a groundbreaking innovation. Another bonus of the new leather upper? It looked phenomenal. By the late 1970’s, white leather lowtops were a cultural style staple, for both men and women alike. Later advances in materials technology may have benched the white leather low-top from its sporting duty, but the combination of a handsome, sturdy upper with a streamlined silhouette shaped by decades on the court remains the gold medal in style. While nearly every major footwear brand adds their own take to the silhouette, no heel tab or logo could ever overshadow this iconic shoe’s championship DNA. Lightweight, refined, and versatile to a tee: even after a century’s worth of match play, the timeless white low-top sneaker remains a Grand Slam.
written by Alex Rakestraw
The Politics of Fashion, SHEI Fall 2016 now available at at our online store
Culture. Lifestyle. Michigan.
SHEI Magazine
time to spare DIRECTORS Alexandra Plosch Aishu Chandra STYLISTS Brianna Wells Meredith Sherbin PHOTOGRAPHERS Simon Nguyen Benji Bear Mackenzie King VIDEOGRAPHER Paige Wilson MODELS Elena Howes
MENSWEAR the new classics
DIRECTORS Harsha Kishore Susie Meaney STYLISTS Carolina De La Barrera Belinda Jiang PHOTOGRAPHERS Olivia Gardella Kevin Zheng Lori Rasmussen VIDEOGRAPHER Hannah Sybil MacDonald MODEL Beau Mourer LAYOUT Kaitlyn Beukema
Denim Fringed Jeans - Salvation Army Black Military Boots - Doc Martens
Beige Hooded Sweatshirt - Urban Outfitters Denim Jacket with Patches - Salvation Army
Blush Bomber Jacket - Zara London Eyewear - SEE
Green Corduroy Pants - Urban Outfitters Tan Floral Shirt - Urban Outfitters
Camel Trench Coat - London Fog Black & White Checkered Turtleneck - Salvation Army Pink Denim Pants - Urban Outfitters
LITTLE BLACK SOMETHING
STYLISTS Liv Verlarde, Blake Pittman, Molly Shulan, Cam Stalwart, Lauren Tahari PHOTOGRAPHERS Becca Rudman, Brian Beckwith, Ryan McLoughlin MODELS Abby Karol, Steph Harris
Abby is seen wearing a WDPL tulle skirt, a velvet and fringe bralette by Love Mar. In her second outfit, she is wearing Madewell black demin overalls and a FreePeople chain choker. Steph is seen wearing an Ecote black midi velvet skirt and Sam&Libby silver metallic heels. In her second outfit, she is wearing B&W Doc Martens, Out From Under slip dress and sheer long sleeve. In her third outfit, she is wearing knee-high boots from Nine West and a Staring at Stars black sheer dress with velvet detailing.
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