#Paris Fashion Doll Festival 2000

[magazinescans]

Andreas Vogel’s “New Look” - Photos by Tom Pischel Beauty of the Jungle

Barbie® Bazaar - August 2000

[viraluxe-collection]

Check out this listing I just added to my Poshmark closet: REVAMPED Hot Pink Short Sleeve Bodycon Fitted Stretch T Dress, Size Small NWT.

[transparenttriumphzombie]

Lili Elbe (born December 28, 1882 in Vejle , Denmark as Einar Mogens Andreas Wegener [1] ; † September 12, 1931 in Dresden , Germany ) was a Danish painter . She was probably one of the first intersex people to undergo gender reassignment surgery in 1930/31 . Lili Elbe had operations first in Berlin and then three more times in Dresden. 

The writer Niels Hoyer writes in his book A Man Changes His Sex: A Life Confession that Lili Elbe was born with both male and female organs. 

Gerda Wegener

: Lili Elbe, ca.1928

Lili Elbe and Gerda Gottlieb met as students at the Royal Danish Academy of Art in Copenhagen and married in 1904. Elbe specialized in landscape and architectural painting, while Gottlieb opted for illustration and fashion graphics. In order to expand their sphere of activity, they moved to Paris in 1912 , where Gerda could also live out her lesbian orientation and Lili could live out her female identity more freely.

Around 1913 it became known that the model for Gerda's fashionable figurines was a phenotypic man who called himself Lili Elbe. Only the closest friends knew that Lili Elbe was identical to Einar Wegener; Gerda Wegener introduced Lili to strangers as her husband's sister. In 1930 Lili Elbe decided to finally make the physical adjustment to the perceived gender . In February 1930 she followed Kurt Warnekros' instructions and went to Berlin. The Institute of Sexology of Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin led the gender reassignment surgeryby. The first operation took place in a practice in Berlin. Then Elbe went to the Dresden women's clinic. On May 26, 1930, Kurt Warnekros performed a second operation.

As a result of the sex reassignment operations, the marriage was annulled by the Danish king; Elbe received papers in its new name.

A few months after the fourth operation in 1931, complications arose, probably due to transplant rejection , from which Lili Elbe died. [4] [5] She was buried on the Dresden Trinity Cemetery in Dresden-Johannstadt in the IIC field.

New tombstone 2016. Lili Elbe's grave, which was leveled in the 1960s, was restored in 2016. The new tombstone was funded by Focus Features , the production company for The Danish Girl . 

Lili Elbe's life story Fra mand til kvinde (From man to woman) first appeared in Danish in 1931, was translated into German, published in Dresden in 1932 and then in London in 1933 in English in a translation from the German version . In 1953 a second unabridged edition was published in New York; the most recent edition in English is from 2004. The book by Niels Hoyer (d. i. Ernst Harthern ) was published in German in 1954 by the Tauchnitz-Verlag under the title "Change - a life confession" 

For Jan Morris , the book she discovered in a bookstore in Ludlow was "the first confirmation that there were other people in the world who were in exactly the same position as me." 

In 2000 David Ebershoff wrote a novel about Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener (in the book as American painter Greta Waud) with the title The Danish Girl (original title The Danish Girl ). It has been translated into a dozen languages ​​and has been an international bestseller.

The film adaptation of the same name by Tom Hooper premiered on September 5, 2015 at the Venice International Film Festival . Eddie Redmayne plays Lili and Alicia Vikander plays Gerda. At the 2016 Academy Awards , Redmayne was nominated for Best Actor , and Vikander was named Best Supporting Actress.

In November 2013 the Lili Elbe Archive was founded in Berlin as an "independent place for the transmission of one's own history of non-normative gender"; worn by an association of the same name. 

Fra mand til kvinde , 1931

A person changes his gender: a life confession, edited from papers left behind by Niels Hoyer . Translated from the Danish original Fra Mand til Kvinde by Ernst Narthern-Jacobson. DNB entry Reissner, Dresden 1932

Man into woman: the first sex change, a portrait of Lili Elbe: the true and remarkable transformation of the painter Einar Wegener / edited by Niels Hoyer , translated from the German by HJ Stenning. 1933

Man into woman: An authentic record of a change of sex; The true story of the Danish painter Einar Wegener (Andreas Sparre) / [Lili Elbe] , edited by Niels Hoyer, from the German version A man changes his gender into English translated by HJ Stenning. Popular Library, New York 1953 (2nd unabridged edition)

Change - a life confession , edited by Niels Hoyer, Tauchnitz Stuttgart 1954.

Man into woman: the first sex change, a portrait of Lili Elbe: the true and remarkable transformation of the painter Einar Wegener . Blue Boat Books, London 2004, ISBN 978-0-9547072-0-0 .

David Ebershoff (2000): The Danish Girl , Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 2000, German: The Danish Girl , Goldmann, Munich 2000, ISBN 978-3-442-30843-9 .

Literature [ Edit | Edit source ]

Susanne Kailitz (2012): The Experiment. In 1930 the Dresden gynecologist Kurt Warnekros carried out one of the world's first sex reassignments. Now this is the material for a feature film - with Nicole Kidman . In: Die Zeit , January 12, 2012.

Sabine Meyer (2010): With the doll's pram into normative femininity. Lili Elbe and the journalistic staging of transsexuality in Denmark . In: Northern Europe Forum . 20 (2010: 1-2), pp. 33-61.

Rainer Herrn (2005): Patterns of the sex. Transvestism and Transsexuality in Early Sexology . Psychosozial Verlag, Gießen (Lahn) 2005, ISBN 3-89806-463-8 , page 204 ff.

Harald Neckelmann : The story of Lili Elbe. A person changes his gender. Bebra Verlag, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-89809-163-3

 - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Biography of Lili Elbe at the Federal Magnus Hirschfeld Foundation

Gerda Wegener - a photo album ( Memento from October 5, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (in English)

Article about Gerda Wegener and Lili Elbe in the New York Times (in English)

Einar Wegener on artnet

Review of the English version of Lili Elbe's autobiography , oiiaustralia.com , April 17, 2009 (in English)

Lili Elbe (Einar Wegener) 1882–1931 , danmarkshistorien.dk (in Danish)

[lincolnonline]

[HERMAN TØMMERAAS, CIS MALE, HE/HIM] who’s that? oh it’s LINCOLN CLARINGTON-SMYTHE. i hear they’re TWENTY and are known as THE NARCISSIST around NEW YORK CITY. they're also a SELF-EMPLOYED FILM MAKER, have a voice like COLTON RYAN. they’re known to be CONFIDENT & EASY-GOING and PETTY & IMPULSIVE. some people say they remind them of CAMPY HORROR MOVIES, RUNNING FOR THE BUS IN YOUR HIGHEST STILETTOS, FAKE BLOOD STAINS ALL OVER YOUR CALVIN KLEIN & DANCING IN YOUR UNDERWEAR TO YOUR FAVORITE SONGS. only one way to find out! [facie, 21, she/her, aest]

BASICS

Full Name: Lincoln Antonio Clarington-Smythe

Nickname: Link.

Birthday: 12th of March

Age: Twenty

Zodiac Sign: Pisces

Hometown: Westerville, Ohio.

Residing: New York City.

Sexuality: Homosexual

Occupation / Activities: Self-employed.

LIKES/DISLIKES

LIKES: horror movies, trashy early 2000’s clothes & music, wearing copious amounts of strawberry lip gloss before kissing someone, starting twitter drama, reading people their horoscopes from teen magazines, running for the bus in his heels just to prove he can, archery, kpop girl groups.

DISLIKES: coffee, fake-deep music, desaturated colors, snitches, boring romantic period pieces, family members who buy him watches and cologne when they know very well he wants more monster high dolls to add to his collection, critics who don’t get his movies, his stupid ex-boyfriend pierre. fuck you pierre!

TL;DR BIO

The son of Sebastian & Hunter Clarington-Smythe and the most expensive ( and conventionally good looking ) surrogate they could find, Lincoln is always doing his best to both represent his family and break the mold. In high school, Link was known for causing trouble and being promiscuous, and now that he’s out in the world....nothing has changed. With his dads paying for his every whim and a half-decent apartment to call his own, Link is preparing to create bigger & more ambitious film projects and has found himself in New York in order to gain inspiration.

READ ABOUT LINK’S ADVENTURES UP TO THIS POINT HERE!

BUT FOLLOWING ALL THAT...

After getting kicked out of Dalton his junior year, Link truly found himself at McKinley. And while he wasn’t a huge fan of dealing with the slushing and stupid Glee club drama, he stuck with the club until his graduation. Or lack off. During this time, Link was also working on his first feature film and that unfortunately meant that Link skipped a lot of classes. Then, of course, there was the surprise his dads dropped on him that he would heading out to France as an exchange student for a few months. While in Paris, Link spent all his time drinking wine, ignoring his school work, and making out with his sexy Parisian boyfriend, Pierre. By the time Link headed back to Ohio, he brought with him a fuck-ton of berets and an insanely fake French accent.

Once he graduated ( with his heart broken, no thanks to fucking Pierre) , Link took his first edit of ‘Conversion Camp Slaughterhouse Blood-Bath Blitz Part 1: Lights Out At Eight’ and a bag to New York city and entered it to as many film festivals he could. While reception was...mixed in terms of the theme and the painfully long title, Link knew it was only the beginning and begged his dads for the chance to make the move up to the city of lights. After some bargaining and some empty promises on Link’s part about getting a job, Link found himself with a half-decent apartment, some nice film equipment and a new found love of kpop girl groups ( they were bad ass bitches! what could he say! ) and was ready to take on the world.

Saying that, life in NYC hasn’t been all sunshine. In Ohio, Link was a big, slutty fish in a small, ugly pond but in New York, there seems to be another fashionable gay for every drop of rain. And while he’d never say he missed Lima, he did miss his family and his sister & his niece. Still, he knew it would be worth it once he finally was able to get studio backing and get his movies onto a mainstream streaming platform and into the zeitgeist. Link was going to be the new frontier of film-making, he knew it would happen soon.

[aleatoryalarmalligator]

categorized and generalized all the types of tumblr aesthetics i have come across.

I have been going through archives for the last five years on tumblr now, and i can’t help but notice that a lot of blogs are the same. There seems to be a pattern in the sorts of aesthetics i run up against. So, in my exhaustion, i tried coming up with all the different aesthetics, and i tried to put them into certain categories. Obviously, some of these categories��are mixed with others.

PORN TUMBLR

-general porn

-lesbian/gay general

-kinky stuff

-daddy dom stuff - tied up boobies

-bears

-just unrealistic nudes

-just realistic nudes

-vintage porn, and occasionally porn that is so old that it was drawn by someone in the 1800′s

- hentai and erotic animal people cartoon characters going at it

-person who took about five pictures of themselves naked five years ago who has not come back

RICH KID TUMBLR

-super modelesque kids in their super rich cool kid clothes and fashion in Starbucks taking pictures of their food and their trips to Europe in 1st class

- incredibly expensive looking sunglasses

-rich kid travel blogs with hundreds of thousands of notes of pictures from rich people buildings

-quotes that say 'be happy' or stuff about saying anyone can just travel anywhere at any time, just the general advice you might get from someone who doesn't know how the other half lives

- cats

VINTAGE TUMBLR

-the greatest generation stuff, forgotten early hollywood actors/actresses, very old movie gifs, Theda Bara, Clara Bow, Carol Lombard, early Joan Crawford, Gone with the Wind ect..

-50's, 60's and 70's, Nancy Sinatra, Brigitte Bardot, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn – generally a lot of Audrey Hepburn

-Posts old advertisements and old cars, sometimes old toys, a few pinups, vintage comics, kinda weird

- vintage toy blogs - just toys, named and dated

-sometimes retrospace stuff

-sometimes just old comic book stuff

FEMINIST/ GENDER STUDIES TUMBLR

-intersectional feminists who post mostly text and back and forth writings, sometimes they fight 

-radfems and turfs, unpopular minority of angry at the intersectional feminists

- Fat Acceptance movement, chubby bunnies

-other girl's selfies, lots of girl power related drawings of gender symbols and the like, Grimes, being a witch, Courtney Love, sailor moon, and so forth, sometimes bleeds into soft grunge

-topics on transgender, gender fluid and others that have informative 

- asexual community

BLACK LIVES MATTER TUMBLR

-black lives matter awareness, police brutality, pointing out flaws in legal system

-lovely stylish selfies

-call outs of racism, lots of dialogue, and the extension of twitter

80's + 90's GIF TUMBLR

-like gifs of scratched up VCR obscure film openings, and repetitious obscure 80's gifs in general, everything is fuzzy and looks like it came from an 80' infomercial, kinda makes you feel scared

-90's gifs of Pee Wee Herman, Catdog, Clarissa Explains it All, Chucky Cheese, Fruit by the Foot, Beavus and Butthead, Bart Simpson, and so on

HIPPIE TUMBLR

-just like the rich kidz, only they have white kid dreads and post a lot of vanlife stuff, lots of festivals

-mostly psychedelic gifs, with occasional trippy art, Foster the People is their favorite band

-real hippies, who post pictures of communes and people making tyed dye things, nonsexual nudes with hairy women, Grateful Dead stuff

-Buddhist and Hindu quotes, sometimes lilies

SOFT GRUNGE TUMBLR

purple and pink skies, water, windows with lace

girls with pale skin and perfect make up, and chokers, bruises, sparkly skin

mermaid texture, mermaid hair colors

Lana Del Rey

kind of like 90's only more melty and pink

quotes about good vibes

Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless mind reference

moon print

dream pop bands from the early 90's

GROWN UP SOFT GRUNGE TUMBLR

picture of Uma Thurman overdosing in Pulp Fiction

lots and lots of flowers

lots of sensual pictures of pale skin under certain lighting

albino people

albino animals

pictures of sunrises

Reykjavic

kind of like the Soft Grunge, but just a little bit more subtle and film tumblry

ART BLOG TUMBLR

old roman art

chinese, japanese and korean art from long ago

renaissance and medieval art with religious context

just like medieval art of specifically torture

18th and 19th century portrait paintings

Scenic paintings of hills, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet

Dada, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Adolph Wolfie

Modern art that is squiggly, slimy, and bizzare, breaks art rules but looks good, David Shrigley

Modern Surrealists

ARTIST BLOG TUMBLR

posts really great homemade gifs that nobody knows about infrequently

blogs that only have the artwork of the blog owner – generally post infrequently and not given enough credit ever, except maybe one of there works has a whole bunch of notes

person who keeps painting the same thing over and over again and does it a lot for years at a time, 0 notes usually – who are you??

collage artists that mix 50's scenes with hyperspace backdrops

FILM BLOG TUMBLR

-Stanley Kubrick, Jean Cocteau, lots of black and white french films

-that movie where the two people are sitting on the ledge of a building and the other one jumps off

Clockwork Orange

-Paris, Texas

David Lynch

Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks (gets stolen by other kinds of blogs frequently)

Wim Wenders,

Rare film art from Poland in the 70's

Jans Svankmajer

Man Ray, Max Ernst,

cool quotes by philosopher, artist, psychologist, or film director

Amelie

sometimes Wes Anderson

PHOTOGRAPHY TUMBLR

abandoned places, gas stations, archaic cafes, falling apart amusement parks

uses too much dark fade out in the background pictures of fields and stuff, overused filtering – posted a ton three years ago and then left

just photostock

girl who takes pictures of herself in costume

Nature pictures, animal pictures ect..

person who just takes pictures of textures and minimalist buildings – usually colorful

person who's personal Instagram picture just automatically post to tumblr also, probably never checks up, usually pictures of them with friends as a pub

Indigenous pictures from around the world, some of them from books, some from National Geographic, some from other places

Super old pictures from old newspapers, the great depression, WW2 – generally black and white

MUSIC TUMBLR

Really likes Led Zeppelin, The Doors and The Who, sometimes mixed with other vintage, often posts the same pictures and songs for years – you feel bad because no new music will be coming out from these artists

super cheesy Van Halen, Kiss, Styx, Ozzy person, Big Hair, likes 80's pin ups and skulls, sometimes into martial arts

super cheesy death metal fan, lots of pinups, corny black and white pictures of skulls and such

REALLY likes British Invasion, The Zombies, The Kinks, The Hollies, The Animals, will occasionally post Detroit girl groups from the 60's, some Velvet Underground, pictures of the Beatles girlfriends

Just David Bowie, Lou Reed, Patti Smith and Iggy Pop. Maybe some New York Dolls

Old Blues and Jazz, Etta James, Son House, Nina Simone, pictures of Leadbelly and Howlin' Wolf and especially Miles Davis

really into post punk, Nick Cave, Siouxsie, Bauhaus, The Cure, Einsturzende Neubauten, Lydia Lunch, PJ Harvey and Rowland S. Howard, sometimes Morrissey. also generally mixes film and art blog stuff in with occasional feminist things

Just Morrissey, they call him Moz.

Fan clubs for specific bands that are newer and popular like Arctic Monkeys or Fallout Boy, but also ones blogs that really like emo lyrics from early 2000's and such – scene kids that are still scenin' it up

loves Jens Lekman, Belle and Sebastian, The Magnetic Fields and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Cigarettes After Sex. Usually posts really cute modern art, and uses tumblr mostly for writing, has the cutest hair cut and can pull off overalls, never posts too little or too much, extremely twee

HISTORY TUMBLR

ancient mesopotamia, greek and Egyptian history and relics

Blogs that are specifically about one place in one era - Ancient Russia, Ireland before it was taken over, precolonial India and so on

Samurai, Geisha, and scrolls

Swords, knights, castles, kings of Europe in general

Specific Wars, examples: 7 Years War, Revolutionary War, WW1 + 2

France from before the revolution – pictures of wigged men, Napoleon, Marie Antoinette

Jane Austen time era anything 18th and 19th century, slight excuse to post lots of Pride and Prejudice gifs with Keira Knightly and that Mr. Darcy in the rain

Outfits – just outfits that are really old

person who is obsessed with the Nazis and seems to like Hitler

Flappers and earlier 20th – often an excuse to post gifs of Downton Abbey

Vintage books, often children books, but sometimes others

DESIGN TUMBLR

really fucked up pictures of the Simpsons melting and stuff

gradient graphic art with symbols or words meant to convey a product that I don't understand for an obscure magazine subscription

graphic squiggles without form, minimalist graphic pictures of beach balls, tennis bats, and sneakers

bizarre smiley faces made from smaller smiley faces

80's inspired design

odd looking models with undercuts and no eyebrows

cartoon dogs and cats

just static and glitches. Nothing more, nothing less

either they make their own graphic designs and they rarely post, or they compile reblogs of everyone else's and they post all the time

WEIRDO TUMBLR

insane family pictures of family who all has mullet dressed as bumble bees

Lots of Robert Crumb, some vintage stuff, but nothing remotely main stream

Some of the modern art, but only the weirdest of it

claymation masks

Comix

Moebius

art from early Power Point

100 piece sculptures with melted toys

paintings of monsters

Steve Brule

children's fan art of Smokey the Bear – looks disturbing

Items that are too kitschy to be accepted by your average vintage indie blog

sometimes a specific blog centered around some kind of crazy event where everyone dresses completely insane

POLITICAL TUMBLR

the communists and Marxists

a mixture of BLM and LGBTQ stuff

the libertarians, anarchocapitalists, Ayn rand folk

the left wing anarchists, freegans, graffiti punks, garden punks, possums

informative left wing news that explains to us everyday how the GOP is fucking us

alt. right creeps who are simply here to be trolls and upset everyone else – anti SJW, that stupid frog, nationalists, trump supporters and such – irrelevant poorly thought memes

I miss Obama memes

Bernie Sanders forever and always folk

RAINBOW TUMBLR

pictures of rainbow candies, toys, designs, clothing and so forth all of it rainbow

people who post one color at a time, so when you go through their archive it's all gradient and neat looking – usually the pictures are a little stock photoish though

HALLOWEEN TUMBLR

Betty Page

The Cramps. Reverend Horton Heat

Psychobilly pin ups, old cars, burning skulls, vintage B horror movies, The Swamp Thing

Legitimately obsessed with the activities of Halloween – posts witches, devils, trick or treat candy, Bella Lugosi, The Monster Mash, Halloween decoration - and doesn't ever forget how many days away Halloween is

Jack the Skeleton

Freddy Krueger

FANCLUB TUMBLR

Superwholock

Hannigram

American Horror Story

K Pop and J Pop + Korean Drama

boy bands in general

Hamilton

My Little Ponies

Ghibli Studios

Various anime shows

fat Disney princesses

Super heroes

Pokemon

Big Bang Theory

Mighty Boosh

Monty Python

Phantom of the Opera

Labyrinth

Vampire Chronicles

Orange is the New Black

Breaking Bad

Alice in Wonderland

Harry Potter

Star Wars

Steven Universe

Adventure Time

Game of Thrones and Walking Dead

any television show really

Furry cartoons

lots of spacy quick anime chibi versions of characters who are hooking up and wouldn't normally in the show

scenes from movies with subtext that comes from a different movie or show

probably countless others i am not thinking of.

SPECIALTY TUMBLR

serial killer blogs

unexplained mysteries, ghosts, ufo's

pictures of galaxies with information (not sparkly silly ones with no context)

sewing and yarn

precious stones

cars

just gardening

just cats

religious blogs, either Islam, Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Buddhist

specific animal blogs, snake, spiders, wild cats and such

science blogs about technology and stuff

NATURE TUMBLR

stock photoish pictures of camp grounds and misty mountains – often taken by the hippies

angelic looking deer, and occasional animal burials with flowers'

person who takes pictures of flowers all the time

granola type fellow who loves juicing and backpacking – doesn't get on tumblr much

BLACK AND WHITE GOTH TUMBLR

slenderman fan art, actually just about anything creepypasta related

you have to turn off the music when you visit their page because it's just too much

fan art of black eyed children

slit wrists

pictures that were turned into Gifs because they shake

taxidermy

screamo lyrics

Alice in wonderland with X's for eyes

gothic models

occasional serial killer

skulls and references to Edgar Allan Poe

GIF MEME TUMBLR

just a sea of Gifs and memes relating to anything about life ever – almost shitposting but not quite

eventually one of the gifs got 100,000 notes for it's relatability so they get a lot of traffic

lots of pictures and circumstances from The Office, Parks and Rec, and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Nihilist memes

SOFTY TUMBLR

kind of a little girl dom thing going on

Kawai and lots of Japanese girls

cute colorful make up

plushies and toys

references to fantasy cartoons from the 80's, the last unicorn, or that one with the girls in that band

Polly Pockets, Furbies, trolls

gifs of stars and hearts

Sailor Moon

pink bedroom

baby animals

occasionally more on the vintage kitschy side

WICCA TUMBLR

ravens, bats, candles

pentacles and other symbols

crystals

sometimes there is dreads

occasionally, it is a serious practicing Wicca who posts spells and gives witch advice

lots of personal reflections

boobs

GROSS TUMBLR

Tim and Eric, Steve Brule centered blog that are mostly in the act to make you feel queezy

like, people eating cheerios with ketchup and people wearing shoes with the soles cut out, people putting their feet in spagetti, bad tattoos on foreheads

snails, beetles, bird doing mean things to people

mostly moldy things, moss, strange dolls

things that look like they came from the dark crystal,

delapitating bedrooms that once belonged to a little girl, torn wall paper, old porcelain dolls that are slightly upsetting

Clowns

occasionally a blog so gross you will be ruined for having seen it – Two Girls one Cup sort of thing

NERD TUMBLR

old video game start up pages

Super Mario Bros.

Other video game characters

chibis of video game characters interacting with one another

Final Fantasy references

randomly doesn't post for a year

SELF HELP TUMBLR

blog that gives dumb advice that only works if you were already happy anyway

either semi fake or oversimplified 'psyche facts'

blogs from people who suffer from addiction or mental illness and want help and use their blog to vent

blogs ran by people who enjoy crystal meth and don’t give a fuck.

worthy of mentioning, blogs that nobody ever posted a single thing or just one thing, like, really cryptic blogs that nobody could ever understand, blogs that were taken over by some kind of virus and they are trying to sell you male pattern baldness remedies, or they are now call absurdly pornographic things because the virus took over and now they are like blonde cumfuck creampie or something of that nature, and blogs were the person was basically saying they have found a girlfriend/boyfriend now and don’t need tumblr anymore so goodbye

and in my experience ...

anybody can post pictures of jiggly boobs

anybody can post Grace Jones

anybody can post a Bjork song

these seem to be universal truths that defy limitations

[johngallianotheking]

John Galliano found success at the tender age of 24, when his degree collection “Les Incroyables”, inspired by the fashion of the French revolution, was snapped up by the owner of Brown’s, a London boutique. His designs were flamboyantly theatrical, inspired by his student job as a dresser at the National Theatre. “It helped shape my view of drama, of theatre and costume”, he said. Galliano’s work was widely admired by the fashion industry and in 1996, when he was 35, he was appointed chief designer at Givenchy, becoming the first British designer to head a French fashion house. A year later, he was appointed creative director of Christian Dior. He continued to produce two collections a year for his own brand, John Galliano, for which he saved his most whimsical and outlandish ideas.

Robert Fairer, a photographer for Vogue, began taking photographs at Galliano’s shows in the mid-1990s. He documented the evolution of his style over 30 collections until 2011, when Galliano was sacked from both Christian Dior and his own label after he was filmed making an anti-Semitic rant at a Paris bar. Galliano apologised, blaming his actions on barbiturate poisoning and alcoholism, and spent a while in rehab before relaunching his career as creative director of Maison Margiela, a French fashion house, in 2014. His collections have been successful and his designs are still otherworldly, but looking at Fairer’s images, which have been elegantly compiled by Thames and Hudson in a lavish book, you can’t help being nostalgic for the Galliano of old. As the shows become increasingly elaborate, you get a sense of why Galliano burnt out: he could only operate at this high-octane level for so long.

A highlight is the “Welcome to Our Playground” collection from autum/winter 2000, where freckle-faced models with feathered eyebrows hold teddy bears and wear sheer tent dresses and tutus over trousers. Another is the autumn/winter 2004 collection, called “Mapping the World”, which was inspired by the idea of colliding cultures. Galliano imagined Victorian travellers arriving in Yemen: his models had cans of Coca-Cola sewn into their large woollen wigs, were wrapped in Russian headscarves and wore fur gloves. His shows were as theatrical as his clothes: once he sent a dozen sword-swinging Shaolin monks down the catwalk, having flown them to Paris from China.

Fairer was drawn to what was happening behind the scenes, and you can see why. It must have been like going backstage at a bizarre play, watching costumes flung off between scenes and actors pace up and down learning their lines. Galliano was a showman who saw his models as performers rather than mannequins, and here we get to watch them rehearse. Fairer specialises in juxtapositions of the ordinary and the extraordinary. Models dressed in full costume grin and pose in a lift, and a girl smiles regally in an extravagant white gown amid messily strewn clothes and makeup. It’s in these in-between moments, where the clothes transcend their mundane surroundings, that the magic of Galliano’s work really speaks.

For Galliano, hair and make-up mattered just as much as the clothes. It helped his models get into character. For his autumn/winter 2003 show, where he said he wanted a “granny from hell” look, the make-up artist Pat Mcgrath stuck eyebrows made from black card above flurries of false eye-lashes and applied generous amounts of pink blusher and beauty-marks the size of a 50-pence piece. The exaggerated, doll-like result echoed the flirtatious mood of the 1940s-inspired clothes, which included bustiers, corsets and cherry-patterned silk dresses.

Stephen Jones (pictured, right) worked closely with Galliano, making many of the hats for his shows. For Galliano’s “Esquimaux” collection (autumn/winter 2002) he created large tasselled headdresses, turbans and fur-lined pillows that were strapped to the models’ heads. Scottish tartans were mixed with Peruvian pom-poms and Chinese dragon motifs. Before the models strode out, Galliano gave them the following instructions: “Eskimo and Mongolian hotties! Keep the fur flying!”

Galliano had originally intended to call his spring/summer 2006 collection “Freaks”, after Tod Browning’s infamous film from 1932 about carnival performers. After a change of heart, he changed the title to “Everyone is Beautiful”. The collection, worn by models of all ages and sizes, featured snakeskin prints, wooden canes, beaded dresses and top hats. There were fur-clad elderly women, sets of twins that held hands as they walked down the runway, a bearded wizard and a sailor. Here, Fairer can be seen in the mirror photographing a creepy trinket from the set.

All of Galliano’s shows were cheeky and playful. For his “Too Rich Too [sic] Walk” collection (spring/summer 2005), models carried large cartoon balloons, wore inflatable pink lips as hats and walked to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. The idea behind the show, said Galliano, was “sixty billion-dollar heiresses take Glastonbury festival by storm”. While he had the extravagant Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton in mind, the models evoked a noughties Paris Hilton, posing and preening in ruffles and violent hues of pink. Yet this image, where a model sits quietly among the chaos, perhaps best captures Galliano’s sugar-coated world at its peak: glamorous but lonely.

John Galliano Unseen by Robert Fairer is published by Thames and Hudson