The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz
The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz |
| Vogue’s vast archives make online leap from paper Posted: 26 Dec 2011 07:49 AM PST
Two years in the making, an online Vogue Archive is being pitched to fashion designers, photographers and stylists for whom rummaging through musty back issues for inspiration is an everyday part of the job. "That's about 400,000 pages. It's everything," said Matt Dellinger, a writer and multimedia producer who directed the digital project for Vogue's publisher Conde Nast. "When you're looking at this, you're looking at the actual pages of the magazine ... exactly as they appeared." At US$1,575 (RM4,969) a year, or the price of a Dolce and Gabbana lace and satin bustier dress at Net-a-Porter, enjoying instant access to nearly 120 years of a single magazine title doesn't come cheap. "If you live in a New York City apartment, and were thinking of getting a subscription to Vogue's newly-launched archive site, how does not paying your rent for a month sound?" quipped the Fashion Bomb Daily style blog. But in a telephone interview from New York, Dellinger said the archive's real value lies in how every photograph, every advertisement and — so far from October 1988 — every garment has been assigned a "tag" or search label. "Most of our work was creating an index so that you can find (a particular) ad or a photo," he said. "That's kind of the special sauce here" because, with most online archives, only the text is searchable, if at all. So someone looking for, say, a pleated dress by Balenciaga from an era when pleats were all the rage — will be swept back to the September 15, 1939 issue and an otherwise hard-to-find crisp line drawing of a black number from the Spanish couturier. Other searches reveal that over the years, Vogue has carried 12,406 references to "Chanel," 8,970 to "Dior," and 6,136 to "Yves Saint Laurent" unless you search for "YSL," in which case that number goes up to 7,381. Graphs at the foot of the website reflect the ebb and flow of a particular trend. "Corduroy," for instance, literally goes off the charts in the 1910s, then subsides before its notorious comeback in the 1970s. Calling up the very first Vogue ("a weekly magazine of fashion and society") finds the first cover girl to be an anonymous New York debutante. From London, a correspondent reported: "Dogs are the fashionable fad at the moment." The word "supermodel" first appeared in the August 15, 1972 issue to describe the African-American model Naomi Sims. (Vogue was a weekly until 1912, then a biweekly, going monthly in 1973.) But nothing's perfect: a search for "we don't wake up for less than US$10,000 a day" manages to miss the October 1990 feature in which Linda Evangelista first uttered the infamous phrase. Karin Bohleke, director of Shippensburg University's fashion collection in Pennsylvania, one of the biggest in the United States, said rummaging through back issues of fashion magazines is a key part of the creative process. "You get the context. You see the evolution and development, you see parallels, things like that," Bohleke, author of a study of 19th century American and French women's magazines, told AFP. Vogue's archrival Harper's Bazaar did not respond when asked if it might put its own back issues online, and there are no plans for similar digital archives of the British, French, Italian, Japanese or other editions of Vogue. But a spokeswoman for Conde Nast in London said in an email that the publisher was monitoring the American Vogue project "with interest." — AFP/Relaxnews Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
| Spielberg seeks ‘old-fashioned’ spectacle in war film Posted: 26 Dec 2011 07:40 AM PST
The movie, which got a Golden Globe nomination this month ahead of its Christmas Day release in the United States, is even made on good old celluloid in a snub to the digital revolution. "I think that movies like that don't get made much any more, you know the kind of epic sweeping historical drama that were used to be made quite a bit 30, 40 years ago," producer Kathleen Kennedy told AFP. "It's what makes the movie a little old-fashioned but at the same time modern," she added. The movie tells the story of Joey, a horse raised in a bucolic English countryside who is torn away from his home — and stable lad Albert — and sent to France to the battlefields of World War I. To a soundtrack heavy on violins, the moviegoer is swept into the epic struggle Albert has in finding his equine partner amid the blood, mud and misery of the Great War. "World War I was the last hurrah for the horse (in) warfare," three-times Oscar winner Spielberg — who also has his 3D "Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn" out for the holidays — told industry daily Variety. "It was a time when the technological revolution, mainly in the implementation of new technologies to kill more efficiently and more cruelly, were supplanting the usefulness of the horse, which had brought terror into the hearts of standing armies for centuries," Spielberg said. "And after World War I, that was over and the horse went back to a more bucolic and sane way of life. So it's really more of a story about courage and connections and less of a story about combat." "War Horse," which is on the shortlist for the best dramatic film Golden Globe, is based on a 1982 children's book of the same name by British writer Michael Morpurgo, and the play adapted for the stage by Nick Stafford. Almost two years ago, Kennedy was on vacation in London and went see the stage version of the story with her daughters. "When I got home I talked to Steven (Spielberg) about it and told him what the play was about and he said 'Wow, that sounds like a story, it would make a wonderful movie'," she told AFP. The most difficult thing, said the producer — who worked with Spielberg on classic movies including "E.T," "Indiana Jones" and "Schindler's List," was the use of "so many animals," she said. "Whenever you are using animals in a movie you have to take extraordinary care, I mean, you do that to the people as well, but when you have innocent animals, it requires that everybody involved being specially careful." Joey, the real hero of the movie, was played by around a dozen horses from all from around the world, notably Spain. Stable boy Albert is played by 21-year-old British actor Jeremy Irvine, who had previously only worked in TV. "Steven felt that he wanted to make a discovery, he wanted to bring a young actor to the role who hadn't necessarily done a lot of things in the movies," said Kennedy. Most critics so far have been broadly positive, although some have questioned Spielberg's approach, like the Guardian's newspaper critic Andrew Pulver, who said the director "can't seem to snap out of a now-habitual mode of vitality-erasing, dewy-eyed affectation." Todd McCarthy of the Hollywood Reporter said the film "possesses a simplicity that is both its greatest strength and an ultimate liability. "Whatever its missteps, this is a film that kids, middle-aged adults and grandparents can all see — together or separately — and get something out of in their own ways," he wrote. "There are precious few films that fit this description today, and hats off to Spielberg for making one." — Reuters Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
WASHINGTON, Dec 26 — Bookshelves groaning under the weight of every issue of American Vogue ever published since December 17, 1892, and there have been about 2,800 of them, can now heave a sigh of relief.
LOS ANGELES, Dec 26 — Steven Spielberg's new film "War Horse" is almost deliberately old-fashioned, pitting noble beast against the horrors of war, with sweeping, emotional set pieces — and dividing critics as Hollywood's awards season looms.| You are subscribed to email updates from The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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