BACK IN TIME: LADY GAGA IN LILY ATTWOOD, CLEA BROAD, WINDE RIENSTRA & LUKE BROOKS
On our ride down memory lane today, we’re going to take a better look at one of my all time favourite ‘ARTPOP’ looks. On Halloween 2013, Lady Gaga stepped out of her hotel in London dressed as a ghostly pale Geisha. Her look comprised four young fashion talents I can’t wait to introduce to you.
Looking amaaazing, she donned a structured, velvet-trimmed camouflage dress by Lily Attwood, graduate of the Fashion Print Course at Central Saint Martins!
Gaga’s pink paper origami corsage is by British milliner and florist Clea Broad...
...while her Lego heels with grey pom-poms belong to Winde Rienstra’s Spring/Summer 2013 “Ithaka” runway.
The wedges are made of actual white LEGO bricks, fastened together and fixed with knitted laces. The choice for the bricks was because Winde was “looking for a new, extreme and fun way of creating”.
The bespoke Shellbrella, she was carrying, was custom made especially for her by young London-based designer, Luke Brooks. I took my virtual private jet last night and a paid a brief visit to Luke’s design studio, he’s been working on developing since his graduation from the Central Saint Martins MA Fashion course in 2012.
The Shellbrella is a “simple idea which was executed quite straightforwardly, albeit with a serendipitous twist in the form of the handle, which was originally an artisanally-crafted walking stick”.
Luke used relatively few materials: “polyurethane foam (the ordinary kind, which is used to fill gaps in buildings), the aforementioned section of walking-stick-wood, which has seen something like honeysuckle or ivy grow around it to produce that spiral effect, and a few different kinds of paints (n.b. the inside of the Shellbrella has a subtly pearlescent finish)”.
“The Shellbrella was really developed as the final form itself was being made; as the shape was carved from the foam, and as the resulting structure was looked at and held in relation to a body and the space in which it happened”, Luke told me: “In that sense, perhaps it is not so much of a “designed” item, but rather it reflects something of the organic growing process of that which it emulates”.
I was also interested about the whole experience behind the bespoke piece:
“Early on in the making, we traveled for a couple of hours in the car to meet a shell seller who was offering a “foxhead” shell, which was very reminiscent of the one in the original idea image. He also had a couple of other slightly different but visually-related shells which we used alongside the foxhead to inform us on shape, proportion and texture. It was a surprisingly magical experience to see and hold all the different kinds of shells. I previously had no idea that there are oysters in existence which are the size of dinner plates, for example!”
