Backstage at Costume National in Paris the American actor Gary Dourdan, best known for his role as Warrick Brown in CSI Las Vegas comments on the fashion show a few moments after its completion and talks to us of his strong interest and link with the fashion world.
Seated in the front row of Costume National’s fashion parade are the American actor Gary Dourdan, Stefania Rocca, Carolina Crescentini, the blogger il blogger Yvan Rodic and the acress Pom Klementieff.
Gabriele Muccino insisted on Italian pop star Jovanotti’s poetry and music for the sound track of his latest film “Baciami Ancora – Kiss me again. ” A romantic pop ballad about love, life and the dreams of many. In the video that foreshadows the film the Italian singer wears CoSTUME NATIONAL HOMME clothes.
Los Angeles is a crossroads of musical trends, a meeting point for artists and the place for the cross-contamination of emerging styles from world music’s current cauldron.
LA is the starting point for those who have music in their DNA.
Like Costume National.
It’s a musical laboratory in continuous ferment to which sounds flow in from both East and West sides.
We had a date at the Red Room in Bar Lubitsch – undeniably the most musical venue in the city. It gets its name from the dim red lighting employed to illuminate the passionate and strong sonorous experiences on hand.
At the microphone Holly Marilyn and her band “The Child” are dominating the scene: sinuous, psychedelic music with a sophisticated indie-rock flavour.
Straight in from the airport we drive deep into the Californian night – headed for Sunset Boulevard, Melrose, Beverly Hills and West Hollywood.
Crowding into the hall at the Lubitsch Bar at the club are producers, musicians, international DJs and people from the movie industry as well as a clutch of VIPs the music majors industries.
Ennio Capasa is onstage to present Holly prior to her performance and after a few moments there she is winning over the audience with her charisma, her voice and strong stage presence; she’s garbed in a seductive rock-star dress. Just right.
A Costume National creation of course.
We wish The Child lots of luck for the launch and release of their first recording.
“The Child’s raw, psychedelic, yet carefully crafted rock-n-roll has the same edgy-chic energy and soul of Costume National”. Ennio Capasa, Designer
On November 12th, Ennio Capasa will host an evening presenting “The Child”, an emerging rock and roll band. The concert will take place at Bar Lubitsch’s Red Room, Los Angeles.
The Child is a Los Angeles based band consisting of Holly Marilyn, singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist and Norm Block, drummer, percussionist and producer. Also playing and recording with them are Gianni Garafolo and Christian Stone.
The band will release their first album in 2010 and is currently performing in and around Los Angeles.
A conversation between Ennio Capasa and Fabio Novembre about fashion and design
The cross-contaminations of fashion, design and the web: how do they influence each other, how do they evolve and how are markets and brand positions changing? How do you emerge in the internet age, what different kinds of training and backgrounds are best these days and what new scenarios does the net offer? All these topics and more came under the spotlight at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy in Rimini, Italy (part of Bologna University) in the company of top stylist Ennio Capasa and designer Fabio Novembre. Both were guests of fashion journalist Gianluca Lo Vetro. The two creatives spoke a lot about a new phenomenon known as Mod-esign – the juxtaposition of two quite similar worlds notwithstanding decidedly different time-scales: fashionwear gets planned fast and evolves rapidly as it changes direction every six months while design is made to last years.
Ennio Capasa, Gianluca Lo Vetro, Fabio Novembre
So are designers and fashion stylists so different? According to Capasa a creative works to breathe life into an icon making it a strongidentifiable viewpoint imbued with sign and language.
And this holds good whether the medium is fashiondesign architecture or interior decoration. So Stark’s lemon squeezer Chanel’s clothes and the Costume National style maintain the same intensity and force year after year.
Instead the real difference is in seduction. “Design has a less violent and erotic form of seduction than fashion which by definition has to go out and shake people as it touches an almost hormonal part of us. That’s also why
people continue to buy it” says Capasa.
Ennio Capasa, Gianluca Lo Vetro
However if design is thought of as being non-sensual we need to be careful
not to over-generalise.
In this sense Novembre’s works open up an interesting debate.
Often called the most erotic of designers by the presshe declares: “Creating is a process
that starts from nudity through to dressing with the designer enjoying each
phase in a kind of strip-tease. Probably till today products have not been particularly evocative because the designers interpreting them weren’t sexy enough! I feed off eroticism and my way of designing is drenched in it!”
Fabio Novembre
One main theme of the debate is the relationship fashion and design have
with the web. Ennio Capasa is a leading beacon in the fashion world – also because of his relationship with the web.
He explains that thanks to the internet it’s increasingly the final user rather than the journalist who is responsible for giving the final judgement on a fashion product – even if the system is still excessively drugged by advertising investments for this statement to be completely true. “Today we’re in a new era in which the economy is evolving to the detriment of general products and to the benefit of true ideas and experiments.
There’s a yearning for newinnovative products with soul and identity”.
Ennio Capasa
Costume National indeed has to thank the internet for overtaking a colussus such as Chanel in the number of i-phone application downloads (CN is now positioned third in the segment for world fashion) and for winning second place in the New York Webby Awards – the Internet Oscars – with its cnc-costumenational.com website.
There’s an analogous process is the world of design which is seeking informationnews and inspiration from the net and above all from blogs: the real source of information today in which everyone can make their own voice heard.
Michele Casarotto, a creative from the agency NewTarget Web that handles Costume’s profile on the internet
There are opposing views when it comes to the subject of teaching and the distinction between subjects and disciplines. Novembre who has a more liberal approach to teaching and training says today’s universities are useless and that their true power is found in the opportunity they give young people to compare and confront themselves with others – impossible to do with facebook! He says he prefers people to have a single direction in his own field: “If you work as a designer you have to go on doing that to have the same force of ideas and communication.”Capasa sees it differently. He says university is more important than ever for raising the population’s general level of culture. He ends by imparting some words of advice to all students: “Be sure to favour an interdisciplinary approach over American-style hyper-specialization – in other words feel free to move and create between fashiondesigngraphics and architecture so that you can again take possession of that special characteristic of Italian genius that coloured the Renaissance.”
costumenational.com