The Post-Materialist | Fashion Grows Up

93 year-old Mimi Weddell in the documentary Hats Off, and a snap by Mister Mort on the Advanced Style blog, launched in August.

A report from our Berlin correspondent on design and society.

One of the more interesting trends in fashion this year has been a vogue for older models. The theme seems to have started in March, with the New York premiere of Hats Off, a documentary about the 93 year-old actress and model Mimi Weddell. As the New York Times reported when it interviewed the effervescent Ms Weddell, her motto is “Rise above it!”, which implies not just the ability to transcend small anxieties, but also the idea that higher things — even ages — are better things.

Now Screening | ‘Dance of the Golden Axe’

Agyness Deyn: platinum-haired pixie, Kate Moss scion, voodoo goddess? Now, thanks to Gordon Hull, a director and contemporary bricoleur of sorts, the fashion model Deyn can add a new credit to her résumé: Erzulie, goddess of love. In our latest T-commissioned film, Hull, founder of the SoHo-based global creative collective Surface to Air, appropriates elements of Afro-Caribbean culture. What emerges is an atmospheric portrait of a pine grove, and a group of soldier-initiates entranced by an ursine coyote who are pushed to perform what the director terms “the desperate act” — all it takes it one puff of Deyn’s (errr, Erzulie’s) magic dust. We’ll have what they’re having.

The High Low | American Eagle Waffle T-shirt, $14.95, and Long Johns, $11.95

What: American Eagle Waffle T-shirt, $14.95, and Long Johns, $11.95 (on sale)
How much: $14.95 (top) and $11.95 (bottoms) at American Eagle Outfitters.
Who: Melissa Ventosa Martin, T Magazine’s Women’s Fashion Associate

If you’re lucky, by the end of the week you might be packing your bags for a snowy holiday getaway. I always try to throw in some cozy pieces that not only work for the annual Christmas-morning candid photo session — straight out of bed of course, gotta love those even in your late 20s — but also for any number of regularly scheduled outdoor winter activities. These American Eagle long johns are pretty festive with their candy-cane stripes. The henley layers nicely under a ski sweater, and I just might be able to squeeze the bottoms under my grandmother’s bright blue Bogner ski pants from 1957!

Read previous posts of The High Low.

What Gives | Gifting the Fashionista

 

 

The editors of T Magazine present What Gives, a guide to holiday gifting.

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Baum and Pferdgarten’s fox fur hat from Denmark is less high-maintenance than a puppy and just as cozy. Less high-maintenance still, is Giorgio Armani’s limited-edition Powder Puff. The powder is self-contained.

Baum and Pferdgarten’s fox fur hat, about $340. Available at YouHeShe.
Limited-edition black shimmer puff, $55. Available at Giorgio Armani Beauty.

Need more gift ideas? Read previous posts of What Gives.

London Trawling | Katie Grand’s Treasure Hunt

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Katie Grand, the stylist’s stylist and editor of the eagerly anticipated new magazine called Love, is all about her friends. So when she decided to hold a tea and treasure hunt, she turned to David Waddington, a co-owner of London’s pop-up restaurant FLASH, for the site. Waddington is also a close friend of Grand’s best friend and fellow attendee Giles Deacon — all three were college pals. This is how Grand rolls. And in typical Grand style, the treasure hunt — M.C.’d by the gender-bending performance artist Jonny Woo — featured finds by Marc Jacobs, YSL, Burberry and Prada.

Go for Broke | Gucci Tattoo Heart Joy Boston Bag, $695

Go for Broke is a column about big purchases worth rationalizing.

What: Tattoo Heart Joy Boston bag
How much: $695 at Gucci
Who: Anne Christensen, T Magazine’s women’s fashion director

Thankfully, some people out there still feel the urge to go shopping and still have some money to spend. To these people I say, “Instead of wearing your heart on your sleeve, wear birds on your handbag!” This Gucci bag, decked with a swallow tattoo motif, not only conveys wealth, but it actually gives some, too!

What Gives | Gifting the Fashionista

The editors of T Magazine present What Gives, a guide to holiday gifting.

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Looking for a gift that gives back? Recycled rubber bracelets from Made With Love (and made by women in Djenne, Mali) benefit L’Empire des Enfants, a school for homeless children in Dakar, Senegal. And they go well with a Marni T-shirt. The designer Consuelo Castiglioni asked children from Brazil, Colombia, Tibet and other countries to paint themselves in a imaginary world. Proceeds will benefit various educational projects.

Made With Love bracelets, $35, available at Nicole Miller SoHo (77 Greene Street) and Nicole Miller Madison (780 Madison Avenue).
Marni T-shirt, $135, available at Marni (161 Mercer Street; 212-343-3912) and other Marni boutiques.

Need more gift ideas? Read previous posts of What Gives.

Now Screening | Suzy Menkes on Giuseppe Zanotti

Pragmatic: it’s probably not the first adjective you would use to describe fashion’s ubiquitous shoes-on-steroids, so overwrought that sometimes even veteran models can’t operate them. As Suzy Menkes points out in a new IHT video interview with the shoe designer Giuseppe Zanotti, some of the latest designs are “on that borderline between something you’d find in a sex shop and something you’d find in a shoe shop.” But for Zanotti, who apparently has 800 styles in his spring collection, it’s not about the fetish — it’s about striking a balance.

Required Viewing | ‘Reversal of Fortune’

Glenn Close and Jeremy Irons in the 1990 film “Reversal of Fortune.” (Everett Collection)

Educational Value: Neurotic, old-money glamour in the vulgar 1980s; a sensationalist take on the tragic life of Sunny von Bulow, who died on Saturday.
Synopsis: While Sunny von Bulow lies in a persistent vegetative state, the voluble attorney Alan Dershowitz appeals the attempted murder conviction of von Bulow’s oily second husband, Claus.

Lionized in 1990 for Jeremy Irons’s tour de force performance as the opportunistic euro-sleaze Claus von Bulow, the longer-lasting impact of “Reversal of Fortune” lies in its gothic depiction of how the other 1% lives. (Mostly through a boozy, pharmaceutical haze, if the film is to be believed.) Though the narrative of Barbet Schroeder’s legal thriller is framed by Claus von Bulow’s decision in 1982 to hire Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard professor, to overturn the unjust conviction for the attempted murder of his wife, the meat of the movie comes in the frequent flashbacks to the von Bulows’ dysfunctional marriage and family life. There, Sunny’s lacquered bouffant and ballgowns perversely accent her not-so-perfect horror within, and Glenn Close’s depiction of slurry WASP schizophrenia, always one ice cream sundae and a bottle of scotch away from total collapse, makes Newport brocades and privately owned old masters titillating again.

Boutique Beat | Four Top New Stores

Brooklyn’s new Smith + Butler boutique sells clothing and vintage motorcycle appurtenances.

A roundup by The Moment’s retail enthusiast, Christene Barberich.

Smith + Butler (men’s wear, women’s wear, gifts) | Brooklyn, N.Y.
Smith Street has plenty of solid boutiques, but the latest Carroll Gardens addition isn’t quite your typical clothing store. Marylynn Piotrowski and her partner, the in-house motorcycle expert Jay Alaimo, have created a rustic space featuring all things open-road-worthy — from iconic American outerwear to vintage Triumph motorcycles. It offers a mix of stock for motorbike enthusiasts (bikes and vintage helmets) as well as connoisseurs of classic fashion (brands range from A.P.C. to Woolrich and Wrangler). “This store is special because it’s a reflection of what’s classic and long lived, much like Brooklyn,” Piotrowski says. “And hopefully it reflects the feel of a modern kind of Mom-and-Pop shop.”
225 Smith Street; (718) 855-4295