Showing posts with label fashion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fashion. Show all posts

Little pictures



Bob Georgeson, Untitled Mini Series, 2005?, Photomontage

These earlier ones were done in reaction to a curator telling me I should work 'big'. My (very predictable) response was to go in the other direction. Not quite postage stamp size, but you get the general idea...

Patently pumping

Baron Adolph de Meyer, Fashion picture, Date ?, Photograph

One of the Baron's lesser known pics. Nice shoes, nice stockings, nice length on the outfit, nice pose, nice chair, nice parquetry floor, just nice...

The Nuptial Contract

Bob Georgeson, The Nuptial Contract, 200?, Photomontage

An early one that has never seen the light of day before. Was one of the precursors of 'The Brides of Christ' series when I was 'doing a job' on bridal couture magazines. I don't think it requires any further explanation...

Crime of Passion

Bob Georgeson, Crime of Passion, 2007, Photomontage

An earlier one where I was playing around with some cruciform shaped cut ups...also relates to recent post 'Crime Scene' in sentiment...

Crime Scene

anonymous waves, Crime Scene, 2013, photomontage

I have always liked alleyways. The paradox of escape or entrapment. What secrets do they hold? This work began with some snapshots taken while walking along the 'avenue of consumerism' that is the main street of Burleigh Heads on Australia's Gold Coast. A young skater weaving down the street with mobile phone glued to his ear was the inspiration for the poem 'APPology' a few posts back...

The street is largely made up of cafes and boutiques, the cafe clientele often looking as if they had stepped straight out of the shop windows as they order their flat whites. The second paradox: the unadorned alleyways intersecting with the manicured world of display and desire.

But there is an even more sinister side to this work that was prompted by the publicity surrounding the Jill Meagher tragedy (for my overseas readers a young woman on her way home from a work 'do' was dragged into an alleyway, raped and murdered. Her attacker, a serial offender, in hindsight should never have been walking the streets).

It struck me that the desire to be something other than ourselves that is at the heart of the cliched world of fashion marketing, and the implied objectification of women ultimately creates the environment that breeds the kind of person who knows the difference between right and wrong, but simply doesn't care. Fashion victim? Dressed to kill? She was asking for it? Think about it next time you pass a boutique, or an alleyway...

Norma Shearer




I don't know a whole lot about Norma Shearer, who made films from the early Twenties through to the early Forties. A bit before my time I am glad to say! But I came across a book on her in a local Op Shop thinking one day I might be able to use bits of it in a montage. A couple of images, the first a very contrived studio publicity shot from 1925, and two stills from the 1924 film Empty Hands. It would appear from the book that this was about as sexy as Norma was ever going to get, but I wanted to share with you a few lines from a review written about this film by Morduant Hall in the New York Times the same year the film was released:

"Miss Shearer's eyes are really beautiful, and, as her hair is not curled according to movie fashion, she is quite pleasing in this film. She seems to be a good swimmer when in the water and is evidently conscious that her ankles are by no means ungainly. Her eyebrows deserved at least two words of praise".

Good on you Mordy! They don't review like that any more...but remember that the 'talkies' didn't start til 1927, so we can allow some latitude here (maybe)...

Lips

Another older work, can't even remember when...

Bob Georgeson, Lips, Photomontage, Private collection.

Marilyn Monroe by Cecil Beaton

To commemorate Marilyn's birthday 1 June 1926. A truly great photograph shot at that split second where reality intersects with glamour. 

Marilyn Monroe by Cecil Beaton, New York, 1956

Fashion victim

OK, enough of the wholesome 'girl next door' stuff, time to get back to what we are really interested in...

Bob Georgeson, tighter baby tighter, 2009, Photomontage

How come so much of women's fashion is about constriction? A curious feminist contradiction: fashion as erotic weapon or victims of a cruel joke? Who knows...but it even pervades the wedding ensemble...

Grace Kelly


In Bendigo at the moment it is hard to avoid Grace peering at us over her shoulder. She is everywhere, and the exhibition Grace Kelly Style Icon at the Bendigo Art Gallery has been packed out since it opened. It seems her popularity never wanes, and yet who is, or who was, Grace Kelly? I have no idea...and the show reveals as little of her personality as her wardrobe reveals of her flesh. It is an interesting fashion journey from the tailored, almost matronly suits of the Fifties through to some attempts at modernity in the Seventies, and as such reflects the moral standards of the passing decades, but nowhere do we get any indication of what Grace thought or what her motivations were. Famous yet anonymous, and one wonders in today's tabloid and Murdoched world whether such a feat would be possible.

However we do get to see the great fashion designers at work for what must have been their most prestigious clothes horse. Yves St Laurent's tent dress inspired by the painting of Piet Mondrian is pure perfect Sixties, thankfully he didn't use Picasso as a point of departure! Edith Head's little black number from Rear Window is probably the closest we ever get to sexy, and Cartier's jewellery comes from a period when a rock looked like a rock...

Personally Grace is not my kind of gal, but I don't mind this photo that captures the undeniably classic beauty with the untouchable virginal princess...

Photo by Howell Conant