Fashion/Style – LFM: Libertas Film Magazine

LFM’s Govindini Murty & Jason Apuzzo at The Huffington Post: A Conversation With Fashion Icon Ozwald Boateng on Style, Africa, and His New Film A Man’s Story

[Editor’s Note: the article below appears today at The Huffington Post.]

By Govindini Murty & Jason Apuzzo. During his meteoric career, Ozwald Boateng’s been called the coolest man on Earth, and the fashion world’s best-kept secret. Yet the candid new documentary A Man’s Story, opening this weekend in New York and Los Angeles, makes certain that the British fashion designer and style icon no longer remains a secret.

In a career already spanning two decades, the 45 year-old Boateng has outfitted celebrities from Will Smith to Russell Crowe, from Jamie Foxx to Mick Jagger. At age 28, he became the youngest tailor – and the first of African descent – to open a store on London’s legendary Savile Row. Boateng’s also designed menswear for Givenchy and bespoke costumes for films like The Matrix and Ocean’s Thirteen, and he’s even been the subject of his own Sundance Channel TV series, House of Boateng. He’s also the recipient of an OBE (Order of the British Empire) for his contributions to the clothing industry.

Throughout all this, however, Boateng’s private side – such as his quiet struggles in the rarified world of British fashion, or his efforts to foster entrepreneurial investment in Africa – have taken a back seat in public to his style innovations.

Director Varon Bonicos’ new documentary, A Man’s Story – for which Bonicos filmed Boateng from 1998 through 2010 – reveals much about Boateng’s personal life: from the challenges of growing up as a young man of African descent in London of the ’70s and ’80s, to the abiding influence of his father on his life and career. The result is a warm and often poignant film that humanizes Boateng, while doing full justice to the glamorous place he occupies in the world of men’s fashion.

We spoke with Ozwald Boateng and Varon Bonicos in Los Angeles, where they are promoting A Man’s Story. The interview has been edited for length.

GM: What is your passion for film – and in particular, how are you inspired by the intersection of film and fashion?

OB: Film has always been a really good tool for me to communicate emotion about why I create a collection. I’m probably one of the first designers to make short films. The first time I did it was back in 1994. The invite for my first fashion show was a VHS cassette. And it kind of became part of the language of my designing collections – I was always putting together short films.

Apart from that, I think fashion designers are directors anyway. We spend a year designing a collection for a fashion show that lasts maybe fifteen minutes. We have to design the look of the catwalk, cast the model for each look, work up the sound, the lighting – it’s a lot of work that goes into that fifteen minutes.

JA: Film has been so important in terms of influencing men’s style, men’s self-perceptions. I was curious whether there were film icons, movie stars who have influenced your sense of style?

OB: Sean Connery, of course, since I was a kid – you know, James Bond. Or The Thomas Crown Affair – you can’t beat those three piece suits. The Italian Job with Michael Caine – again the suits. If you’re a designer, there’s got to be some films that you’ve seen that have inspired you creatively. There’s no escaping that. Film is such a very good tool for communicating emotions, and all designers and creative people look to inspire an emotional response.

JA: You mention Connery and Bond, and he was so crucial in selling the Savile Row style here in the States.

OB: Absolutely.

JA: You yourself have become an icon on behalf of that style. Was that something you planned from the outset as a designer – to be so out front selling the look yourself?

OB: No, actually, I tried to stay out of it. In the early years, it was because I was a very young guy working in a very old discipline – so really, that’s tough to begin with. And then I was trying to do it in a very modern way – so again, that’s tough. Add me, visually, into the mix of all that, and that just complicates things. So for the first few years, I didn’t let anyone take any pictures of me. Basically, a lot of people had no idea what I looked like. And because my name did not necessarily sound African, a lot of people … just thought I was some kind of middle aged white guy [laughs]. So no-one actually knew what I looked like, and that was the best thing – because it allowed everyone to focus on the work. Continue reading LFM’s Govindini Murty & Jason Apuzzo at The Huffington Post: A Conversation With Fashion Icon Ozwald Boateng on Style, Africa, and His New Film A Man’s Story

LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Supermodels and True Beauty: A Conversation with Timothy Greenfield-Sanders of HBO’s About Face

AE25TVFACE — The supermodel sorority from "About Face."

[Editor’s Note: the post below appears today on the front page of The Huffington Post.]

By Govindini Murty. They’re among the most iconic faces of the second half of the twentieth century. Isabella Rossellini, Beverly Johnson, Paulina Porizkova, and their supermodel sorority helped to shape public perceptions of beauty and womanhood at a time of rapid expansion in the mass media. Their faces graced thousands of magazine covers and they were role models to millions of young women.

But was the rise of the supermodel a sign of female empowerment, or of female objectification?

About Face: Supermodels Then and Now, an insightful new documentary by director and photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders available on HBO on-demand through September 3 and HBO Go through 2013, interviews sixteen of these supermodels about the true nature of beauty in an age of consumerism and mass media.

As alluded to in About Face, the irony that underlies the modeling profession is that it should lead to both the empowerment and objectification of women. On the one hand, the mass distribution of images of female models through fashion magazines, ads, and other media in the past century has led to women becoming quite literally more visible in today’s world – with that visibility being an affirmation of their femininity and right to exist as women in the public sphere. In contrast to this, from the Puritans to the Taliban, misogynistic societies through history have restricted sensual or beautiful images of women as a prelude to denying their basic right to participate in public life, citing women’s beauty as a “corrupting” influence on social morality. The predominance of beautiful images of women in Western culture has thus affirmed the broader right of women to exist in public as feminine and not as neutered beings.

On the other hand, modeling has also had the effect of objectifying women by focusing on external surfaces, and at times unnatural standards of beauty. In About Face, Isabella Rossellini asks of the pressure for women to undergo plastic surgery: “Is this the new foot-binding? It’s misogyny to say that older women are unattractive.” Objectification can also lead to racism by dehumanizing people and imposing narrow standards of ‘beauty’ or ‘normalcy.’ Model and agent Bethann Hardison describes in About Face trying to book African-American models for runway shows in the ’70s and ’80s, only to be told by the casting agents that such models weren’t their “aesthetic.” As Hardison explains “‘Aesthetic’ is borderline for racist.”

I spoke with director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders about some of these issues at the LA Film Festival’s screening of About Face. The interview has been edited for length.

GM: What drew you to these ladies? I know you met them initially at a party in New York, but what did you find so magical about them?

TGS: I think when I met them at that party … I immediately got a sense of how smart they were. You know, the cliché is that you either have brains or beauty, but you don’t have both. Well, they seemed to have both. It really makes it an interesting film. And I thought that people weren’t aware of that. I have two young daughters who knew who they were. But many young people today who are so interested in fashion, they don’t know the history of it and of these iconic women.

GM: What has changed about modeling? You mentioned in the screening that these models were so unique, whereas today the models and their careers seem more transient. Why is there this disparity today versus back then?

TGS: I think that it was a smaller world then. I think there was a warmer relationship between the models and the designers and even the businesspeople involved. It was not so cut-throat and not so corporate. And I think today it’s just big business and big money, and I don’t think the human relationship is there as much. I think it’s very changed.

GM: Do you think a big part of that is the issue of covers – that the actresses are taking over magazine covers?

TGS: Yes.

GM: It’s such a striking change. What has that done to the morale of the models? Does it make a big difference behind the scenes?

TGS: I’m not sure I can answer that because it’s not my world, exactly. But I know certainly it was huge in those days to have covers, because covers were the definition of success. And the cover of Vogue was the ultimate success. So when Beverly Johnson got on the cover of Vogue – the first black woman to do so [in August, 1974], that was a big deal. And today – that doesn’t happen for models.

2012-08-31-PaulinaPorizkovapaulinaporizkova13818261454559.jpg — Model Paulina Porizkova.

GM: I thought it was very interesting what Dayle Haddon said that it wasn’t just that she thought she was the prettiest – in fact she didn’t quite fit into the physical type that was popular at the time, but that she brought something else to the picture.

TGS: She brought something else. And Dayle Haddon had to struggle because she wasn’t the look of the moment. She was a very smart woman and she figured out a way to add something more to the picture.

GM: Do you think the reason that those models from that era were so powerful – we’re talking the ’70s and ’80s, was because they were often muses for the designers they were working with?

TGS: Yes, exactly.

GM: I think of Yves St. Laurent and models like Khadija Adams, or even Catherine Deneuve in the ’60s who was dressed by St. Laurent for Belle de Jour. I think of Calvin Klein and Brooke Shields, they were so intimately tied together. Continue reading LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Supermodels and True Beauty: A Conversation with Timothy Greenfield-Sanders of HBO’s About Face

The Sartorialist: Feeding the Visual Sense

By Govindini Murty. In honor of Fashion Month, I thought it would be fun to introduce Libertas readers to one of my favorite fashion/street-photography sites, The Sartorialist. Founded in 2005 by Scott Schuman, The Sartorialist is one of the most visually-inspiring sites out there. Schuman has been doing an exceptional job recently covering the New York, London, Milan, and Paris fashion shows. I’ve included a favorite look he captured from the Gucci show here, and other striking shows he’s covered include the Marc Jacobs show and the Altuzarra show in New York. Back in January Schuman also covered the men’s collections in Florence (where Luca Rubinacci epitomized the Italian style) and Milan, where the most elegant presentation was the Bottega Veneta show.

Of course, Schuman covers a lot more than runway shows – his main talent is as a street-style photographer – but we’ll get to that in a moment.

Gucci3Web — The 2011 Gucci Fall/Winter collection, shot by Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist.

Jason and I often speak about the importance of feeding the visual sense. As filmmakers and creative people, it’s extremely important to think about the image as much as about words, dialogue, and ideological meaning. That is why we here at Libertas make the effort to provide you with a site that is as appealing to look at as it is thought-provoking to read.

I found out about The Sartorialist about a year and a half ago from an article in British Vogue. Scott Schuman started the site in 2005 by posting photos he had taken of the quirky and chic people he encountered on the streets of Manhattan. The Sartorialist attracted more and more admirers, including many fashion industry professionals who turned to the site to see what was happening on the street-level in fashion. Within just a few years Schuman has become a fashion force to be reckoned with. The Sartorialist now receives more than two million unique visitors a month and Schuman’s photos are on the inspiration boards of major fashion houses around the world. Schuman has also been named one of Time Magazine’s Top 100 Design Influencers and he has been profiled in numerous fashion magazines and newspapers (read an LA Times profile here and an article in The London Times). In 2009 Schuman also published a terrific book of his street-style photography. Continue reading The Sartorialist: Feeding the Visual Sense

LFM is Almost Here!

The new Libertas Film Magazine (LFM) is almost here! LFM is a new on-line film magazine focusing on the idea of freedom as expressed in movies and popular culture.

LFM celebrates the democratizing of film. Talented, free-thinking artists from America and around the world are currently using digital technology to make films that celebrate freedom and the individual. LFM will feature the best of these independent and foreign films – and occasionally even Hollywood films – that promote the ideas and values vital to the future of democratic civilization.

Stayed tuned for the launch of LFM on May 19th, 2010! The independent film world will never be the same. LFM is the new voice for freedom in movies and popular culture. Join us each day … and free your mind.