Natural Fashion

Showing posts with label Costumes. Show all posts

The spirit of Halloween: Marnie Weber's Costumes Forever

As you all know, Halloween is a holiday of costumes, pumpkins, wishes, ghosts, haunted houses and trick-or-treating. Today, dressing in costume is a very popular way to celebrate the spooky holiday, and the choice ranges from ghost and witch outfits to trendy costumes such as famous characters.

Marnie Weber is an American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work includes photography, sculpture, installations, film, video, and performances.
Much of Weber's visual art revolves around a recurring cast of characters. An animal often found in her work is the bear, which is linked to the Greek goddess Artemis. These characters, among others, are placed in "vividly colorful environment[s]", ornate, Empire style interiors or dark, dense, eerie landscapes. Her work most often focuses on the adventures of women, which sometimes take the form of half-human, half-animal hybrids with bodies cut from magazines, and other times, pale-faced, folksy ghosts known as "Spirit Girls." Working primarily with costumes, masks, and sets, she repurposes artifacts of the movie industry into a type of meta-tableaux vivant, or what she describes as suspended moments on a fabled stage set. "I try to use my costumes as stand-ins for actors [and] the films as stand-ins for landscapes," she says. "The sculptures are like subconscious equivalents of props."

Marnie Weber's most recent art project, Eternity Forever, features a film screening and exhibit of her collages at Mountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum (2300 N Marengo Ave, Altadena, CA 91001).

Photos courtesy Marnie Weber

From Hollywood, back to the future

Just for fun. Here are a series of pictures of movie stars photographed in costume from middle ages or Victorian times holding modern accessories such as a Starbucks latte, an IPhone or other cell phones, an IPad, a water bottle, a plastic cup, a designer tote bag or a bag of chips while filming scenes that take place in the days where none of those things existed.

Orlando Bloom

Milla Jovovich

Hailee Steinfeld

Robert Downey Jr.

Kate Winslet

Simon Begg

Rachel McAdams

Mia Wasikowska

Courtesy Vogue it

Vestiaire de Divas or the Diva's dressing room

Vestiaire de Divas: De Maria Callas a Dalida. The Diva's dressing room: From Maria Callas to Dalida.

The Centre National du Costume de Scene (National Theatrical Costume Center) is paying homage to the Diva, that prima donna endowed with a magnetic aura and exercising fascination over her audience, via an exhibition entitled Vestiaire de Divas (The Diva's dressing room), through December 31, 2010 in Moulins, France.
The Centre National du Costume de Scène(CNCS) was established in 2006 with the mission of preserving and exhibiting costumes from the performing arts in France. The costumes in the permanent collection — donated by the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Comédie-Française, and Paris’s National Opera — span the second half of the 19th century all the way to the early 2000s. In order to protect the fabrics, the collection is not on permanent display, but the CNCS organizes three exhibitions a year.

For Romans, then for Italians, the "Diva" was originally a "goddess". At the dawn of the 20th century, she became mortal in the form of an opera singer whose talent, virtuosity and personality combine to form a truly explosive blend, nurturing unparalleled success and popularity.
Vestiaire de Divas, a beautiful exhibition, displays an array of costumes, dresses, jewelry and accessories from the 19th and 20th century, wore by true myths such as, Maria Callas, Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Piaf, Dalida and Edwige Feuillere among them.