Dressed for Celluloid Success

Christian Bale

from Apparel News
Photography by Getty Images

Who: Costume Designers Guild
What: 10th annual Costume Designers Guild Awards
Where: Beverly Wilshire Hotel

The scene: With Hollywood awards season in full swing, the Costume Designers Guild (CDG) spent the evening recognizing the work of its own and paid tribute to the legacy of the industry’s brightest talent. A potpourri of costume designers, actors, agents and movie-studio executives was seen sipping cocktails and mingling before the awards ceremony began.

The event was hosted by Academy Award–winning actress and longtime supporter Angelica Huston, who wore a red Swarovski crystal–encrusted gown designed by Bob Mackie. Huston gave a poignant speech about the importance of costume design in film as well as the CDG’s efforts to promote artistry, technical expertise and the creative vision of its 700 members. “If costume designers went on strike, then we would all be naked, which might be kind of fun,” Huston said.

More than a dozen statuettes were handed out during the evening. Actress Katie Holmes, who was dressed elegantly in a silver satin gown with jewel-encrusted neckline, presented the “Swarovski President’s Award” to United Artists’ Chief Executive Officer Paula Wagner.

Actor Christian Bale bestowed the “Distinguished Director/Producer Award” to director James Mangold and producing partner Cathy Konrad (“3:10 to Yuma” and “Walk the Line”).

Actress Geena Davis gave the “Lacoste Career Achievement in Film Award” to costume designer Ruth Myers for her body of work, which includes her Oscar-nominated designs for “Emma,” “L.A. Confidential,” “Infamous” and “The Painted Veil.”

Emmy-winning costume designer Ray Aghayan, who lobbied for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences to recognize the contribution of costume designers nearly three decades ago, received the “Career Achievement in Television Award,” which was presented by Bob Mackie.

The following costume designers were recognized for their contributions to films in 2007:

• “Excellence in Contemporary Film” to Julie Weiss for “Blades of Glory”
• “Excellence in Period Film” to Colleen Atwood for “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”
• “Excellence in Fantasy Film” to Ruth Myers for “The Golden Compass”
• “Outstanding Made-for-TV Movie or Mini Series” to Mario Davignon for “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee”
• “Outstanding Contemporary Television Series” to Eduardo Castro for “Ugly Betty”
• “Outstanding Period/Fantasy Television Series” to Robert Blackman for “Pushing Daisies”
• “Excellence in Commercial Costume Design” to Deborah Ferguson for Capital One’s “Princess Kiss.”

—Claudia Schou, Contributing Writer

L.A.'s Melrose Heights: Destination District Aspires to Be More

by Andrew Asch, Retail Editor
Apparel News, January 11 2008

A wave of high-profile boutiques opened shop in Los Angeles’ Melrose Heights neighborhood in December, and to many, it looked like they made the best real estate choice.

The shopping district, located west of Fairfax Avenue, abounds with smartly designed boutiques representing star designers and some of the world’s most popular fashion brands. With a concentration of top-tier stores, the street’s status as a premier retail strip seems assured. But veteran Melrose boutique owner Gordon Morikawa said that even with all of this retail might, Melrose is falling short of its potential.

“[The street’s] landlords might be looking at this place as a new Robertson, but it’s not,” said Morikawa, who has co-owned Xin boutique at 8064 Melrose Ave. since 1999.

While commercial rents have been steadily increasing—some say perhaps tripling—since 2005, the street has yet to make the leap to become a shopping district where groups of shoppers hang out, similar to Robertson Boulevard or Rodeo Drive. Instead, Melrose Heights retailers say they are faced with enticing shoppers to make special trips to their boutiques. Encouraging destination shopping is tough.

The extra effort might make for a sweeter reward, according to Tarina Tarantino, who runs a self-named jewelry and accessories boutique at 7957 Melrose Ave. The destination customer is more likely to make a purchase. Yet Melrose Heights can improve if it becomes more pedestrian friendly by offering more cafés and crosswalks. “It is annoying to have to walk two or three blocks to cross the street,” Tarantino said. Morikawa said he hopes a few street improvements, such as crosswalks and perhaps more trees providing shade, would make shoppers more comfortable walking on the street. To make it a reality, he plans to dust off the moribund Melrose Heights Merchants Association, which has been inactive since 2005.

In 2002, he and other neighborhood merchants formed the association to petition Los Angeles City Hall. First on their shopping list was to give their strip of Melrose Avenue a new name. Melrose Heights might appeal to press and consumers, they thought. The merchants succeeded in getting their new moniker. The same year they enlisted Los Angeles–based public relations company People’s Revolution to spread the word about this new area.

They were successful again, and the street experienced a spike. Later, more brand-name retailers started moving onto the street, beginning with Marc Jacobs in 2004.

The first item on Morikawa’s 2008 “to do” list is to organize meetings with the district’s retailers. The next step might be working with local government to get help with city projects, such as getting more crosswalks on the street. Other projects include planting more trees for shade and better street aesthetics and perhaps posting signs in the area to mark it as a special retail area.

Defining the district

The street’s merchants already have the tools to make their area more than a destination, Morikawa said. He defines Melrose Heights as Melrose Avenue between La Cienega Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. The district does not include Melrose Place, a quiet street behind Melrose Avenue that houses boutiques of iconic designers such as Oscar De La Renta and Carolina Herrera, Morikawa said.

Since 2004, Melrose Heights has blossomed into a Los Angeles address for a wide variety of celebrated streetwear and fashion labels. London-based Paul Smith opened a boutique on the 8200 block of Melrose Avenue in December 2005. At the other end of the fashion spectrum, Los Angeles–based streetwear brand Crooks & Castles opened a store on the 8000 block of Melrose in December 2007.

The attention by the high-profile names has made commercial rents skyrocket. Since 2005, the street’s rents increased from more than $3 per square foot to more than $8 in the past month, according to Jonathan Ahron, managing director of the retail-services group for the Los Angeles office of real estate business Charles Dunn Company.

The good news for the area’s retailers is that the rents may have stabilized.

According to Chuck Dembo, a veteran real estate executive, the street’s rents are settling down to $6 to $7 per square foot. “I don’t expect it to go much higher,” said Dembo, a partner in Beverly Hills–based Dembo & Associates. Rent increases might have plateaued because the economy is slowing down, he said.

If so, that makes Melrose Heights more economical than Robertson—but a step up in price from the nearby shopping district of West Third Street.

Landlords of Robertson’s most popular blocks asked for $15 to $25 per square foot in 2007, according to a study released in November by Beverly Hills–based Sachse Real Estate. Rents for stylish West Third Street ranged from $4 to $7 per square foot.

The other names on west Melrose have the wherewithal to make the thoroughfare into a fashion mecca—albeit a diverse one. In December 2007, streetwear skate brand DC Shoes opened an activewear emporium at 8025 Melrose Ave., and New York fashion label Foley & Corinna opened a 1,000-square-foot store at 8117 Melrose Ave.

For fans of high-profile fashion brands, the street offers flagship stores for labels such as Adidas and Miss Sixty. Art-driven fashion line Betsey Johnson has a store there, as does daring lingerie line Agent Provocateur.

The street offers smart independent shops such as Xin, Creatures of Comfort and Madison. The street also is an address for BCBG Max Azria, as well as the Los Angeles outposts for French brand Diabless. The street’s specialty shops are anchored by Ron Herman at Fred Segal, one of the stores that pioneered Los Angeles’ fashion-boutique scene.

With all of the retail history and spectacular brands on the street, Morikawa said that retail traffic should be more bustling.

While the street enjoys a steady stream of tourists, many of them have been attracted to the area by Fred Segal, Morikawa said. Yet Melrose’s heavy car traffic also may drive pedestrians away.

But the heavy traffic might benefit retailers in other ways, said Charles Dunn’s Ahron.

“[Retailers’ signs] are billboards for the drive-through traffic,” he said.

Morikawa said that the street’s merchants are capable of building more retail traffic on Melrose. “It’s being acknowledged as a great street,” he said. “It’s up to the merchants to make changes.”

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In West L.A., A Homeless ManInspires New Brand

Mr. Jermyn Is Face On Popular $98 'Hoodies'
Sister Fears Exploitation

By JON WEINBACH - The Wall Street Journal Online

November 14, 2007

LOS ANGELES -- The newest sensation at the center of Hollywood's fashion scene isn't a famous designer or starlet. It's a 56-year-old homeless man who spends his days dancing on roller skates.

John Wesley Jermyn has been a fixture in West Los Angeles for more than 20 years. Nicknamed "The Crazy Robertson" and "The Robertson Dancer," he is a constant presence on a stretch of Robertson Boulevard that has become the city's trendiest shopping corridor and a prime strolling spot for tourists and movie stars. Among locals and online, there's much speculation about Mr. Jermyn's personal history, including one oft-repeated rumor that he's a secretive millionaire.

In a plot twist worthy of Tinseltown, Mr. Jermyn now has a clothing label named after him. Since it was introduced last month, "The Crazy Robertson" brand of T-shirts and sweatshirts, created by a trio of 23-year-olds, has flown off the shelves at Kitson, a haunt of tabloid stars like Paris Hilton. The clothes feature stylized images of Mr. Jermyn, including one design -- available on a $98 hoodie -- that has a graphic of him dancing and the phrase "No Money, No Problems" on the back. At the largest of Kitson's three boutiques on Robertson, shirts bearing Mr. Jermyn's likeness are sold alongside $290 "Victoria Beckham" jeans and $50 baby shoes designed by pop star Gwen Stefani.

The label's owners, who grew up in Beverly Hills, have created a MySpace page for Mr. Jermyn. It doubles as an ad for the clothing brand and their nightclub-promotion venture, which is also named "The Crazy Robertson." The young entrepreneurs spent months trying to forge a relationship with Mr. Jermyn -- who now goes by the name John Jermien -- before gaining his approval. They have consulted him on design decisions and had a photographer shoot him for publicity images.

In May, Mr. Jermyn agreed to a deal that entitles him to 5% of "net profit" from clothing sales, according to a copy of the contract seen by The Wall Street Journal. He signed the contract, without speaking to an attorney or family members. But so far he has refused to accept much cash, preferring to be paid in food, liquor and paper for his art projects, according to Teddy Hirsh, one of the label's founders. "He tries not to involve money in his daily life," says Mr. Hirsh, who says he is Mr. Jermyn's agent and manager for future endeavors. Mr. Hirsh says Mr. Jermyn has already received several small payments, even though the company hasn't "made much profit" so far. "We haven't collected anything for ourselves," says Mr. Hirsh.

Videos of Mr. Jermyn skating and dancing are among a number of recordings of him posted on YouTube.Mr. Jermyn's slide into homelessness is a painful subject for his sister Beverly. And so is the clothing deal. She believes "The Crazy Robertson" founders are exploiting her brother's condition to build their brand. "I think these guys saw an opportunity and they took it," she says. "I am not happy with the arrangement."

Ms. Jermyn, who lives close to the alley where Mr. Jermyn sleeps, says her brother has a form of schizophrenia. He refuses to take medication, she says, despite suffering from fits of shouting and cursing. In the years since his condition began deteriorating in the late 1970s, "he slipped through my fingers like sand," says Ms. Jermyn, 64, who manages facilities for Oracle Corp.

In the late 1980s she testified in court in a proceeding to force her brother to seek help, but psychological evaluators found him "lucid and gracious," according to Ms. Jermyn. She has made countless attempts to provide him with shelter and therapy, and she still visits him twice a week with food. She also pays for his cellphone and collects his Social Security checks on his behalf.

The repackaging of Mr. Jermyn as a fashion front man comes at a time of increased fascination with homelessness. The producers of "Bumfights" -- a collection of videotaped street battles between vagrants -- claim to have sold more than 300,000 DVDs since 2002, and a British TV series called "Filthy Rich and Homeless" made headlines this year for its depiction of real-life millionaires posing as London beggars.

Across the U.S., a growing number of homeless people have gained attention through the Internet. More than 17,500 videos on YouTube are tagged with the word "homeless." Leslie Cochran, a street resident in Austin, Texas, who has twice run for mayor, has 10,775 "friends" on his MySpace page. In Boston, the profile of Harold Madison Jr. -- a homeless man better known as "Mr. Butch" -- rose through online clips and a Web site made in his honor.

Mr. Jermyn was raised in Hancock Park, a historic L.A. neighborhood that's home to some of the city's wealthiest families. His father managed one of L.A.'s largest Chevrolet dealerships. A star athlete in high school, Mr. Jermyn was selected by the Kansas City Royals in the 1969 Major League Baseball draft. He attended Pepperdine University and played a season for a Los Angeles Dodgers' minor-league team in Bellingham, Wash. (He hit just .205 and made 12 errors in 63 games, according to the Society for American Baseball Research.)

Joel John Roberts, chief executive of People Assisting the Homeless, which provides shelters for L.A.'s street residents, says the branding of Mr. Jermyn is "like designing a line of clothing patterned after Iraqi refugees fleeing the war."

Mr. Hirsh and Vic Ackerman, one of the other founders of the clothing line, are sensitive to Ms. Jermyn's concerns about her brother, but say Mr. Jermyn "specifically asked" them not to contact her about the clothing line or the contract. They view Mr. Jermyn as a "business partner" and say they make sure he's aware of how his image is being used.

"He knows everything that's going on," says Mr. Ackerman, noting that Mr. Jermyn nixed a set of promotional photos because he didn't like his outfit and thought he "looked a little puffy." In conversation, Mr. Jermyn speaks softly and mixes short, lucid sentences with longer, less coherent remarks. He has been arrested more than a dozen times since 1986 for violations such as trespassing and jaywalking, according to court records. Most of his skating and curb-side dancing now takes place near Robertson Boulevard, but in the past he roamed throughout Beverly Hills and West L.A., often cradling a boombox and shimmying to loud music. "He was always an extraordinary dancer," says Jim Horne, a classmate of Mr. Jermyn's at Los Angeles Baptist High School.

In addition to his sister, Mr. Jermyn speaks regularly with Ginny Berliner, a 64-year-old woman who befriended him when she owned an antique shop on Robertson. Mrs. Berliner, who now lives in Maryland, used to pay for Mr. Jermyn to sleep in a motel and covered his monthly coffee bill at Michel Richard, the well-known patisserie. "He wants notoriety and glory, but he can't accept money," she says.

On a recent afternoon, clad in his trademark black leggings and visor, Mr. Jermyn said he is "a facilitator" for the brand, and hopes it will expand into music or film. He has become a one-man marketing team, plastering company stickers and pictures of himself on a wall that faces pedestrians on Robertson.

At Kitson's boutiques and on its Web site, the first shipment of "Crazy Robertson" women's clothes -- about 35 items -- sold out in three days, and the store immediately ordered about 90 more pieces, according to owner Fraser Ross. Many of the online buyers were not from Los Angeles and presumably not familiar with Mr. Jermyn, he says. The brand may have appeal beyond L.A., says Mr. Ross, because its name includes "Robertson," which like Rodeo Drive is a destination associated with glamorous shopping.

Mr. Hirsh says the success at Kitson has already generated interest from other retailers. He calls Mr. Jermyn "our Michael Jordan" and is looking into a trademark for "the Crazy Robertson" name and logo. Ms. Jermyn, meanwhile, has different hopes. "I don't want to see my brother get hurt," she says. "They're taking advantage of someone who is very vulnerable and very trusting."

WATCH MR. JERMYN

Videos of Mr. Jermyn skating and dancing
are among a number of recordings of him posted on YouTube.

BCBG

BCBG
Bon Chic, Bon Genre

BCBG Max Azria

from nymag.com

The Label

In the last sixteen years, Max Azria has added fifteen brands—including BCBGirls, To The Max, and Hervé Léger, which he acquired in 1999—to his BCBG empire (named by his wife, Lubova, for the French phrase bon chic, bon genre—Parisian slang for “good style, good attitude"). And just this year he showed his first collection under his name alone. Although the “exclusive” new Max Azria Collection is carried in only a small fraction of his 340 worldwide boutiques, its undone linens, ruffled faille, and loosey-goosey shirt dresses received a tepid reception compared to the more familiar (and playful) embroidered linen frocks and slinky silk dresses in the spring 2007 BCBG line.

The Look

A master of distilling everything cute and wearable in seasonal trends—be it wistful baby-doll dresses in 1989, suede and layered tulle skirts in 2000, or origami-treated pieces in his past two collections—Azria puts out nearly 4,000 styles per year.

The Designer

Born in Tunisia in 1948, Azria moved to Paris as a teenager to study acting but ended up designing womenswear. Upon moving to the States, he started a concept store called Jess, selling his own affordable French fashions to Hollywood starlets before launching BCBG in 1989, which has expanded into shoes, handbags, sunglasses, swimwear, a line of fragrance, and menswear.

Circadian Studios

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