Tamara Cincik

From Everyday to Everyman, from Stardust to Space Oddity: The David Bowie is Exhibition at The V&A. By Tamara Cincik.

The Press Opening of the David Bowie is Exhibition at The V&A.  The first international retropective of David Bowie’s career.

I think a lot of us hold David Bowie dear to our hearts: like a precious friend who has seen us through so many versions of ourselves. We’ve grown up with him looking back at us across album sleeves and TV performances.  Depending on our age, perhaps we were there right from the start: watching his personas shift from cute quiffed boy next door to asexual alien, from rakish matinee idol, to troubadour.  There is something somehow both avant-garde, yet comforting; if David can do it, so can we.  If he can push himself to change, be creative, let go of success, of characters, identities, in search of new challenges, then so can we.  We don’t have to accept anything less from ourselves, we don’t have to settle for second best.  We can reinvent ourselves.

When I was starting to style, I was confronted by the fact that the work I was doing, was less than I wanted it to be, than how I dressed myself.  I’d been perfectly confident working as a fashion assistant to some amazing fashion editors, but once it was my name on the page, I felt nervous of being brave, or stepping out of line, of creating stories which were as rich as my imagination.  All of which was obviously frustrating.  One afternoon, I I bought a secondhand copy of ‘Hunkydory’ from Record and Tape Exchange on Camden High Street, where I lived and played it incessently on my record player.  The album would catch and I would have to nudge it over the jump, and the sound was both stereo and scratchy in that way that only records can be.  One song became my repeat play mantra, ‘Quicksand’ and it was these lyrics which pushed me to be braver, to reveal more of myself in my work, to dare to rise to my potential:

I’m not a prophet
or a stone age man
Just a mortal
with the potential of a superman
I’m living on
I’m tethered to the logic
of Homo Sapien
Can’t take my eyes
from the great salvation
Of bullshit faith
If I don’t explain what you ought to know
You can tell me all about it
On, the next Bardo
I’m sinking in the quicksand
of my thought
And I ain’t got the power anymore

I loved the way this ballad spoke of magic and dreams, of self belief and stripping away the bullshit.  That someone from Bromley could work hard, plug away and never give up on his creativity, spurred me on to try to be as good as that song.  I wrote a list to inspire myself with my aspirations and top of the page was: ‘To be as good a stylist as Quicksand is a song.’  Whether I have achieved that is open to debate, but what I do know is, I tried.  I tried really hard.  I let go of the fear.  Can you say the same?

I was looking forward to the press opening for weeks, would it live up to my hopes, I had a feeling it would, as The V&A consistently holds well curated exhibitions and to take on the popular culture god that is David Bowie, well you have to be brave and you have to have done your research.

I got a great sense of his collaborations, such as how at an early stage in his career learning dance and mime with Lindsay Kemp informed his performance personas, from Ziggy through to Ashes to Ashes, via a fascinating video of a long haired Bowie visiting Warhol at the Factory and nervously miming opening up his chest to pump his heart to camera.

Similarly the clothes, the collaborations with fashion and set designers to create radical stage personas; these are not simple set builds or indeed costume changes.  If I learnt anything, it was how fully engaged he is with all levels of image control, from the mock-ups of album artwork he drew in coloured pen, to cardboard stage sets.

By the end of the exhibition, I actually felt very moved.  I really appreciated that this is a man, who like me, perhaps like many of us, has felt like an outsider.  Perhaps this is his appeal?  The normal boy from the suburbs, quite a shy boy, it seems judging from the interviews at the exhibition, who was drawn to keep trying, plugging away at being a singer, reading avant-garde novels on his way into work at an advertising agency, and for a time, 10 years in fact, nothing much happened.  And then when he created his first alter-ego in Ziggy, he was able to act, to manifest a stage identity to launch a messianic Martian: part space Odysseus, part Clockwork Orange anti-hero, somehow it struck a chord, a chord of the alien outsider, the leader from the everyday world made supergod from outerspace.

David Bowie is 23rd March – 11August 2013

www.vam.ac.uk

By Tamara Cincik.

PS If you read this David, the curators said please could you come to see the exhibition.  If you do, I hope you like it.  I did x.

My Hot Tip As One To Watch: Zeynep Tosun's AW13 Show.

Portia at Pop PR urged me to come along to this show and I am delighted that I did.  A brilliantly focused collection, coherent in it’s autumnal palette and rich fabrics: from gleaming leathers, to embossed over the knee boots, from jet beaded chiffons, to Elizabethan ruffs; this was a fantastically confident show by a new designer, who I am sure we shall hear more about very soon.  Much as I love attending those large spectacle shows and am particularly looking forward to the epic experience that is the Chanel show in Paris, there is something rather wonderful about seeing fresh talent, especially when you see something rare, alchemical and brilliant, which you know will be a big name very soon.  A definite ace card.

www.zeyneptosun.com

Black Cat, White Cat.

The mafia overlord from one of my top ten films: Emir Kusturica’s Black Cat, White Cat.

I come back to this image, as this is similarly how my life feels right now: colorful and absurd…

Chedi Hotel Muscat Oman

This week I have been to Oman with Vogue to style the H&M May supplement.

We stayed at the uber-luxe Chedi hotel, my fate is to visit honeymoon hotels for work, admiring the secluded pools of glamour and enjoying the Princess-appropriate bed with my work teams, not my husband…

The teams from Vogue and H&M are so nice: super-helpful and a delight to work with, and we had a fab hair and make-up duo in Frederico and Marco.  I honestly had the best of times, from the beginning to end.  We were the first people to ever shoot at an amazing location outside Muscat, which while perfect for a shoot, would we agreed be amazing for a party!  Filled with rooms, amazing shot options and breath-taking views.

Outside The Fort.

My first time working with the lovely Koray Birand, I am sure not the last.

Hope you like the shoot when it comes out in the May issue of Vogue.

Meryl Streep as The French Lieutenant's Woman.

I have always had a base line love for Victorian literature.  It was one of my favourite periods of literature for my degree.  I loved how interior worlds, passions and sentiment were replicated and revealed.  As we imploded as an Empire, the strict structures of the form gave way via World War One to Modernism and a fractured universe where nothing was as clear as the coded revelations of a generation before – except that these in their way had hinted at this very discrepancy – gathering momentum.  Last week I read ‘Elijah’s Mermaid by Essie Fox, a latter-day proponent of what has become known as ‘Vic-Lit’, perhaps somewhat disparagingly, since the format favours the female.  A modern mind interpreting the 19th century obsessions with mental health, female subjugation, Pre-Raphaelite aspirations and back-door brothels.  The thread of the Thames, water, mermaids neatly interplays these motifs, as we dive through the novel, with the clarity of our seemingly more evolved empirical methodologies, our world of equal pay, equal rights, oh yes and page three…

Circling the masterpiece of ‘Vic-Lit’ I decided to enter the mother-ship, the maestro of the format, and this week am reading ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’, by John Fowles.  Having seen the film and loved the intertwined stories, I was surprised to find this was a Harold Pinter script invention, clever man, to highlight Fowles’ knowing narration, his pitch-point moments of standing back into the present day.

“Charles did not know it, but in those brief poised seconds above the waiting sea, in that luminous evening silence broken only by the waves’ quiet wash, the whole Victorian Age was lost.  And I do not mean he had taken the wrong path.”

Genius, and as I try to break the deadlock of writer’s block for my weekly writing class, I yet again bow down to another technician’s searing talent…

Meanwhile, rather tritely, back on Planet Fashion, as I prep for my shoot next week, off to Oman for Vogue, I flick through style.com and notice that likewise of course there is always room for an epic cape, especially at couture, and especially when worn by a friend, in attendance of budding couturier Ulyana Sergeenko, whose universe like mine seems like a Russian epic filled with romantic swansongs and pre-revolutionary text.

Yesterday I spent a glorious few hours at The Victoria and Albert Museum.  My husband had cleverly taken the hint of a year’s membership as a Christmas gift, which means you don’t queue and can see any exhibition for free, as many times as you like, whenever you like.  Genius!  I loathe queuing…

I went to the Phyllis Dalton retrospective last month with friends, having been spellbound by her costumes for Dr Zhivago since I was a child, it was heaven to hear Omar Sharif scold her for only working with him twice.  ’What have you done to me Phyllis?  You ruined me.’  Deborah Nadoolman Landis, who curated this exhibition, hosted the evening and yet again I pondered the dilemma of how I shuffle stage left from my career as a fashion stylist and wake up a film costume designer.

The exhibition is very popular, it was pretty hectic in the darkened rooms, and given this membership, I shall definitely utilise it to go at another non-holiday time.  The dialogues between directors and fashion designers were fascinating: rather like those between photographer and stylist, really delving into the translation of character through costume.  There were so many of the bravest and the best designs displayed, but the one which stuck out the most for me was this gorgeous bias cut red sequinned dress and cape, which Joan Crawford wore in The Bride Wore Red, a film I am now desperate to see.

Joan Crawford: The Bride Wore Red.

Artwork for The Bride Wore Red.

The reason I think this costume is so utterly successful, is from it’s cut, colour and cloth, you get an entirely encapsulated sense of what the film is about, as well as era.  There is something both radical and sensual and brilliantly of it’s time, as well as urging you to believe in the glamour of cinema.  It is not a million miles away from the Tom Ford white dress and cape, albeit with a longer cape, which Gwyneth Paltrow wore to the Oscars 2012, which has garnered her best dressed listings.  Both are well-versed in the power of costume, perhaps Tom Ford even used this look as a silhouette reference.

Gwyneth Paltrow at the Oscars 2012 in Tom Ford.

Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro are also interviewed: my favourite quote was when Meryl Streep said that when playing Mrs Thatcher for The Iron Lady, it was vital for her character development that she learnt what Mrs T carried in her handbag.  ’I needed to know, and now I do.’

The Iron Lady - Meryl Streep - Hollywood Costume Exhibition.

Mrs Thatcher With Her Trusty Handbag Outside Number 10.

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/exhibition-hollywood-costume/

Click on the link to see:- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6F2jDxQjw0

www.hungertv.com

Love The Edwardiana Psychedelia Of This Trouser Suit: this is how I imagine shopping at Granny Takes A Trip Would Have Been, Swoon...

For more images from this shoot, please check out my website, or this issue of Haute Muse, out now at all discerning magazine shops!

Hope you like this shoot; I was inspired by the psychedelic revelry of AW 12′s collections, combined with the folkloric glamour of The Ballet Russes.

Reason 1: CR Book.

Reason 1: I am very excited about the new magazine/book by Carine Roitfeld ‘CR Book’.

I love her foreword which relays both a vision for her new venture and an appreciation of fashion’s fertile possibilities, plus the sheer joy of motherhood, familial love and abundance.  At the Crillon last July, upon an introduction she sweetly pronounced me ‘the chic girl’ and I was swooning for hours!  New talent combined with visionary leading luminaries, reborn; how exciting: I am sure it will be wondrous.

http://crfashionbook.com

Reason 2: Bowie Exhibition at The V&A Next Spring.

It was listening to the song Quicksand which transformed my career.  After working as an assistant, it took nerves and bravado to launch out as a fledgling stylist on my own.  My lovely former boss, Anna Cockburn in a ‘phone chat/mentoring conversation, did ponder why it took me so long, but I found it scary and when you want something it always feels utterly daunting, like the chance not to reach the stars is incomprehensibly devastating.  After a few tests and even some commissions, I knew I hadn’t quite found my ‘voice’: I dressed more colourfully than the work I was producing.  One day, I chanced upon a secondhand beaten up LP copy of Hunky Dory and listening through the crackles came to ‘Quicksand’.  In a synaesthesian epiphany this was it: the poetic humility soaring with revelations quite casually relayed was my moment of understanding how brave, how open and how resolved I could be…

“I’m not a prophet
or a stone age man
Just a mortal
with the potential of a superman
I’m living on
I’m tethered to the logic
of Homo Sapien
Can’t take my eyes
from the great salvation
Of bullshit faith
If I don’t explain what you ought to know
You can tell me all about it
On, the next Bardo
I’m sinking in the quicksand
of my thought
And I ain’t got the power anymore ”

This patchwork springboard of colours, dreams, textures and harmonics burst my heart wide open with the playful possibilities and the hope to dare.

News of the upcoming exhibition at my favourite of museums, The V&A fills my heart with love today…

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/david-bowie-is/

Reason 3: The Diana Vreeland Documentary, 'The Eye Has To Travel' Coming To The Curzon Soon.

Famous for her idiomatic quips, Diana Vreeland was someone I would have loved to have met, let alone worked with.  I am sure her breadth of vision, her encyclopaedic all-encompassing openness to the opportunity for style to inform content would have been the best fashion education ever.  Social merging with art; fashion taking surreal steps into quixotic visual revolutions; how I wish she had been my editor, even if only for a sitting.

Taking The At Home Shot To Another Level...

The documentary ‘The Eye Has To Travel’ which ties in with the book of the same name is due at The Curzon later this month.

http://www.curzoncinemas.com/events/details/1367/premierediana-vreeland-the-eye-has-to-travel-qa-lisa-vreeland/