Style Icon: Tati Cotliar

Up-and-coming Argentine fashion model Tati Cotliar has not only been rocking the runways (voted #2 newcomer of the Fall 2010 season by COACD), but also sporting her amazing personal style on the streets. She has a great sense for creating quirky combinations out of cheap vintage finds – right up my alley.

Style Icon: Camille Bidault Waddington

After posting Ursina Gysi as a Style Icon in April (and admitting I could find almost nothing about her life), I received a comment informing me that Miss Gysi is the assistant to Camille Bidault Waddington. Thank you commenter for this knowledge, and for leading me down the dark hole of the internet into the life of Camille Bidault Waddington, who I will now also add to my list of Style Icons.

Via SHOWstudio.com

Camille Bidault Waddington moved to London from Paris in 1997 where she began her career as a freelance stylist. A continuing relationship with Martine Sitbon and Self Service magazine enabled her to remain part of the Paris fashion industry. Bidault Waddington’s unique style led her to work with photographers Nick Knight, Juergen Teller, Mario Testino, Terry Richardson and Horst Diekgerdes for publications such as Dazed and Confused, The Face, and Pop. Her international reputation has led to her collaboration with designers in London, Paris, Milan and New York. She is currently consulting for Marc by Marc Jacobs, Byblos and Pucci and is Fashion Director at Self Service magazine, as well as contributing to Vogue Italia, Vogue Nippon and Vogue China.

And although I do love Waddington’s personal style, I am truly inspired by her work as a stylist. Trolling through her thread on The Fashion Spot I realized that quite a few pages from Elle magazine that I’ve had taped to my wall in the last year are pulled from the editorials she styled.

US Elle March 2010

US Elle December 2009

US Elle September 2009

See more of Camille Bidault Waddington’s work on Models.com and check out a recent shoot for AnOther Magazine styled by Waddington in which her assistant Ursina Gysi models here.

posted by: Tricia Rock

Style Icon: Anna May Wong

Via Wikipedia:

Anna May Wong (January 3, 1905 – February 2, 1961) was an American actress, the first Chinese American movie star, and the first Asian American to become an international star. Her long and varied career spanned both silent and sound film, television, stage, and radio.

Born near the Chinatown neighborhood of Los Angeles to second-generation Chinese-American parents, Wong became infatuated with the movies and began acting in films at an early age. During the silent film era, she acted in The Toll of the Sea (1922), one of the first movies made in color, and Douglas Fairbanks’ The Thief of Bagdad (1924). Wong became a fashion icon, and by 1924 had achieved international stardom.

Frustrated by the stereotypical supporting roles she reluctantly played in Hollywood, she left for Europe in the late 1920s, where she starred in several notable plays and films, among them Piccadilly (1929).

She spent the first half of the 1930s traveling between the United States and Europe for film and stage work. Wong was featured in films of the early sound era, such as Daughter of the Dragon (1931) and Daughter of Shanghai (1937), and with Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932).

In 1935 Wong was dealt the most severe disappointment of her career, when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer refused to consider her for the leading role in its film version of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, choosing instead the European Luise Rainer to play the leading role in “yellowface”. Wong spent the next year touring China, visiting her family’s ancestral village and studying Chinese culture. In the late 1930s, she starred in several B movies for Paramount Pictures, portraying Chinese-Americans in a positive light. She paid less attention to her film career during World War II, when she devoted her time and money to helping the Chinese cause against Japan. Wong returned to the public eye in the 1950s in several television appearances as well as her own series in 1951, The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong, the first U.S. television show starring an Asian-American. She had been planning to return to film in Flower Drum Song when she died in 1961, at the age of 56.

For decades after her death, Wong was remembered principally for the stereotypical “Dragon Lady” and demure “Butterfly” roles that she was often given. Her life and career were re-evaluated in the years around the centennial of her birth, in three major literary works and film retrospectives. Interest in her life story continues and another biography was published in 2009.

Below is a video from Sexy Beijing featuring Anna May Wong. If you can get past the dorky Sex and the City intro, the episode actually contains an interesting and informative interview with Graham Russel Gao Hodges, author of Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend.

Style Icon: Iris Apfel

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“There’s a sad lack of glamour in the world today,” Apfel mourns. “And there’s absolutely no fantasy.”
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Via The Observer:

Iris Apfel is 88, a “geriatric starlet” (her own description) who has suddenly become a staple of hip New York life – photographed by Bruce Weber, admired by designers such as Isaac Mizrahi and Duro Olowu, featured in Paper magazine, Vogue and the New York Times, blown up beyond life-size in the window of Barneys department store. In the five years since a show of her clothes at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute was a word-of-mouth sensation, she has taken the world of style by storm. Her looks are now so legendary, so otherworldly, that many who first saw the exhibition assumed she was dead. Her nephew made a habit of taking friends to see it, and she gave him strict instructions: “If you hear anyone say I’m dead, tell them: ‘No, she’s very much alive and just walking around to save funeral expenses’”…

“People say: ‘You have inspired me, you’ve given me courage…’ They’ve gone so far as to say you’ve changed my life! And I would come back and say to my husband: ‘I can’t understand it – what kind of poor little life did she have if I had to come and change it?’” Her husband said she should ask. And sure enough, the next time someone said she’d changed her life, the fan was a 70-year-old lady in Florida. Apfel thanked her, then took her aside and said: “Would you mind very much explaining that to me?” So the woman did. She said that she’d never wanted to look just like everybody else, but she wasn’t sure how to do that without looking silly. Once she saw Apfel’s show, she knew, and what’s more, she said, “now that I’ve learned I don’t have to look like everybody else, I don’t have to think like everybody else”….

I suspect Apfel has become a more intriguing proposition with age and white hair, as if she and her clothes have evolved into an entirely new species – a “rare bird of fashion”, as the title of her book has it. And while she has advice to give if you ask for it, she recognises that not everyone can carry off such wonders as have erupted from her mind. “Doing your own thing is very good,” Apfel concludes, “if you have a thing to do.”

Read the full article here

posted by: Tricia Rock

Style Icon: Ursina Gysi

Can’t find out much about this mysterious woman. Images of her in the penguin sweater at Fall 2010 Paris fashion week popped up all over fashion blogs and yesterday Mr. Newton posted the photo on the left. As far as my research has taken me I believe her name is Ursina Gysi and she works as an assistant stylist. So quirky yet so cool.

Feel free to fill me in if you know more.

Update:
Ursina is the assistant to stylist Camille Bidault Waddington.

Check out the image below of Ursina at Spring 2011 Paris fashion week (via The Sartorialist).