German television is reporting the battle of the nations, 200 years ago, as if it was happening right now. History made visible. Or not, Leipzig area can be rather foggy this time of year. The Völkerschlacht left teh city of Leipzig in a desolated middle of the gathered armies. It was the great defeat of Napoleon, on his way back from the Russian campaign. Russian scorched earth tactics did their work.
But what a great idea to do this on a day to day / hour to hour basis. Watch the video! Watch the website!
In
der Völkerschlacht bei Leipzig 1813 besiegten die Verbündeten aus
russischen, österreichischen und preußischen Truppen die französische
Armee. Etwa eine halbe Million Soldaten standen sich vor den Toren
Leipzigs gegenüber, mehr als 100.000 verloren dabei ihr Leben. Eine
Vielzahl von Erinnerungsorten in Leipzig und dem Umland zeugen heute
davon. Geht mit uns auf Entdeckungsreise!
I read this column in Another Magazine. anothermag.com And I post this on my favorite fashion reporters birthday. I have always found Suzy Menkes' [24 December 1943] approach to fashion one of the most interesting Well written, no nonsense, deep, yet funny. In short British, I guess.
In this column, Donatien Grau speaks to prominent
thinkers and creatives about fashion and its connections to contemporary
creativity
Suzy MenkesCourtesy
of Getty Images
Suzy Menkes is a legendary voice in fashion criticism. Widely
acknowledged for her unique skills in unveiling new talents and commenting on
every fashion show, she embodies a demanding stance to relevant fashion. The
author of numerous books and essays, most recently on Hussein Chalayan, she
serves as the fashion editor of the International Herald Tribune.
How would
you connect fashion to elegance? I don’t really believe in elegance. Ever
since I first came to France, many years ago, to do the Chambre Syndicale
course, I always felt I was somehow lacking, first of all being British –
obviously a disaster! But I was also puzzled with this idea that you
have to tie your Hermès scarf just right or you can only wear black. I always
felt that this kind of rule should only be made to be broken. So I don’t
really believe in elegance. However, I believe in natural elegance: the way
certain people can put on their clothes and wear them in what looks like an
unstudied way. Jacqueline Kennedy would have been a great example of somebody
who always looked fabulous even with something very simple. When I actually
saw the clothes on display at the Metropolitan Museum, I realised that a lot
of work went into those clothes, and that they didn’t look much until she
peopled them. So I don’t set elegance as a high standard in anything that I
review or anything that I wear myself.
What is
the role of history and art history in your conception of fashion? I’m fascinated about how fashion is so
often a bell-weather for what is happening in the world, although you don’t
see it at the time. I’ve now lived through quite a lot of generations and I
think that even I would have realised in the 1920s that, as women cut off
their hair and wore short skirts for the first time in recorded history,
something was happening in the world. Other things are much more subtle:
certainly the sexual freedom of the 1960s was perhaps fairly obvious, but the
broad shoulders, I think I only connected with them afterwards, after we’d
seen them on television and people actually started to wear them. It was only
then that I connected them with the idea of women trying to take place into a
man’s world, trying to break the glass ceiling.
"The
way that people dress makes them part of an army, dressed in their own
uniform, determined to do something"
Would
you describe fashion as a language and a discourse, as Barthes did it? Fashion is a language, particularly now,
when nothing is forced on anyone, people, male and female, want to express
themselves through what they wear. The whole subject of people who go to art
galleries is particularly relevant in that sense: they certainly dress in a
slightly bohemian way in order to fit in with the surroundings, in order to
send out in their language the idea that they are part of a certain club.
The word
"intellectual" was coined in a time of great political distress.
Does fashion have a political role? And in which way? There’s the obvious way that fashion is
political in the way people dress in a political context: there is this
immense farce in France about somebody turning up in a flowered dress to a
meeting at the Elysée, and of course, in England, endless discussions about
what people wear, what women wear, more than men, but that also comes into the
equation. I certainly think that fashion can be a political statement, which
is much more important. The way that people dress makes them part of an army,
dressed in their own uniform, determined to do something.
Would
you relate the idea of 'fashion' to the one of 'style'? I don’t really know how these different
names work. They go in and out of fashion, that’s the truth. The whole idea
that “fashion is for now, style is forever”, is a bit cliché. It is obviously
true, but it is also obviously not true: fashion can be extraordinarily
stylish, and it can tell us an enormous amount, it can be beautifully crafted,
and done with amazing materials. So to me these sentences become cliché. It’s
just like “luxury”: it’s now a word people spit over, except perhaps in
different countries, where they haven’t seen so much of it. Now they say they
need to invent a new word... Now they want a new word for “fashion” too,
because fashion seems to be too connected with “fast fashion”, in other words
something frivolous, something that you throw away immediately, something that
doesn’t have any lasting value.
What
does fashion have to do with intellectuality? I think there’s too much mixing fashion
and intellect. Fashion ultimately is designed to cover the human body, to give
you joy, to make you feel better. I don’t think it has to have a great
intellectual meaning. Yes, you can see meaning in it afterwards, because
fashion history so often comes ahead of what happens in the world, so it is a
precursor. But to intellectualise fashion too much, to me, is just going the
wrong way.
"Fashion
ultimately is designed to cover the human body, to give you joy, to make you
feel better. I don’t think it has to have a great intellectual meaning"
You are
a leading fashion critic. Where does fashion criticism stand in relation to art
criticism and literary criticism? It’s very hard for publications that
print fashion criticism really to take it very seriously. Not solemnly,
because I never think that criticism should be solemn, but in my own paper,
the International Herald Tribune, I have the chance, because of our own
history, to be able to look at fashion as other critics in our paper might
look at fine arts. It’s not true in most places. I was just looking at one of
the Rizzoli books that came out, and I noticed that it is absolutely
wonderfully produced, wonderful pictures, and all the type is in white on
light grey. It is impossible to read. That sets out the fact that it’s hard to
be a fashion critic in an arena where the image means so much more to so many
people.
As you
are someone widely acknowledged for your unique eye, what leads to recognise
novelty in fashion? Novelty is another of those words that
is out of fashion: it is another of those words that is light-weight,
something that isn’t going to last. The whole idea of what is new is
fascinating in art and in fashion. I believe you could know it instinctively
and emotionally. However much I strive, when I sit in front of a collection,
because I like the designer, because I want it to be a great epiphany moment,
if it doesn’t happen, the emotion is not there. On the other hand, it is quite
hard these days, because so much criticism and so much journalism is based on
the I-factor. I was trained as journalist never to use the word “I”, never to
put my own opinion there. In fact, if you had a dollar or a euro for every
time I use the word “I”, you would be a poor person. But this is not true in
general. I like the idea of being able to stand away and make a judgement.
