Because she is a genius.
Her work is utterly breathtaking, and her vision is boundless. Consider her recent contribution to Vogue's June issue: Grace frocked her doppelganger/muse Karen Elson in vintage-inspired John Galliano, Rochas, Nina Ricci, Ralph Lauren, and Marc Jacobs for an ethereal spread that simultaneously recalled the Garden of Eden, classical art, eighteenth-century France, 1920s, 30s and 40s America...and ninetees grunge. Pages later she's on Broadway with Green Day, the reincarnation of Andrew Jackson, and the cast of Fela!.
I challenge you to find another editor who can weave such an eclectic array of themes into a single, focused aesthetic. You'll certainly find others who try, but no one executes quite like Grace. Flipping through her June 2010 spread over my toast and coffee this morning, I started wondering about her artistic formula. How does she leap between continents, genres, and centuries in the same spread, and still somehow manage to tell a story? Her creative home, she'll tell you, is the narrative, although the plot is rarely obvious and often elusive. "I like fairy tales, and I like dreaming. I try to weave reality into a dream," she told TIME Magazine in 2003. So it seems I was asking the wrong question, or at least using the wrong verb. Rather than aimlessly leaping forward in time and back again, she is rocking her audience between cultures and years with the hope of taking her audience someplace beautiful.
Grace is the most influential stylist in the world, but her impact transcends the clothes. She has revolutionized the fashion spread, almost single-handedly turning it into a truly legitimate artform. Where fashion used to represent superficiality, it's now recognized for its artistic and historical relevance - and Grace is largely to thank for the change.
Creatives rejoice.
Click here for a taste.
Here, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment