Latest news with #CultureShift
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Together Group Acquires ‘Experiential' Agency Obo
Together Group, a London-based collective of marketing, communications, digital and events agencies, has acquired Obo, which has produced fashion spectacles for Victoria's Secret, L'Oréal Paris, Elie Saab and many others. Financial terms were not disclosed. More from WWD Helen Mirren on Cannes, Culture Shift and the Power of Visibility Viola Davis, Jane Fonda Spotlight Emerging Directors at L'Oréal's Lights on Women's Worth Award Lancôme's Françoise Lehmann Is Stepping Down René Célestin, who cofounded Obo 25 years ago in New York, later opening offices in London and Paris, is to remain its chief executive officer, while benefiting from the broader Together ecosystem, which includes PR firm Purple. 'Obo is the creative agency and supervising producer trusted by leading brands and destinations for their brand-defining experiential moments,' Christian Kurtzke, CEO of Together Group, said in a statement shared with WWD. He lauded Obo's 'exceptional blend of creativity and cultural insight, enhanced by a range of digital tools — including real-time digital rendering technologies that have been part of their process since 2015 — allows them to craft immersive, emotionally resonant storytelling experiences across both live and digital environments.' Founded in 2017, Together also recently added Dubai-based communications agency Frame Publicity to its portfolio. Obo's client roster includes Ami, Giorgio Armani, Bulgari, Celine, The Row, Saint Laurent, Toteme and Zimmermann. It is also one of the founding partners of Paname 24, which produced opening ceremonies for the 2024 Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games. Célestin said he spied operational and strategic opportunities as part of Together's collective, which includes digital animation studios Imerza and Visualization One. Indeed, Kurtzke sees Obo as an integral part of Together's 'tech-powered immersive experiential platform to transform luxury for the experience economy.' According to Célestin, 'when it comes to fashion shows as well as to wider brand storytelling across all customer touch points and campaigns, luxury brands need to think in ways that overcome segmentation and beyond the past, in order to meaningfully engage next-generation audiences. 'Our mission is to further revolutionize guest experiences by weaving entertainment and cultural references seamlessly into every project,' he added. For example, Elie Saab's 45th anniversary show in Riyadh last November fused fashion, entertainment, choreography and a high-profile lineup of female musical talent woven together under a loose '1,001 Arabian Nights' storyline. Best of WWD Model and Hip Hop Fashion Pioneer Kimora Lee Simmons' Runway Career Through the Years [PHOTOS] Salma Hayek's Fashion Evolution Through the Years: A Red Carpet Journey [PHOTOS] How Christian Dior Revolutionized Fashion With His New Look: A History and Timeline Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Spectator
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
What was so great about the 1990s?
'They're selling hippie wigs in Woolworths, man… the greatest decade in the history of mankind is over,' laments Danny the Dealer of the 1960s at the end of Withnail and I. These days, given the apparently insatiable appetite for all things 1990s, you could be forgiven for assuming that they've pinched that title. Nineties fashion and music are back: Pulp have just released their first album in 24 years, while Oasis are reforming for a series of mega gigs. There's even been a Labour landslide. The Face magazine, which launched the career of the ultimate 1990s supermodel, Kate Moss, is currently pulling in the crowds with its Culture Shift exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, while former Vogue editor Edward Enninful is curating The 90s, which will explore 'a decade characterised by its bold creativity and rebellious spirit', for Tate Britain next year.
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Cannes' Show Goes on With Dior, Prada and Chanel at Closing Ceremony
CANNES, France — As they say in the movie business, 'the show must go on.' And so it did. The Cannes Film Festival continued its closing ceremony despite a region-wide power outage that crippled the town for much of the day. The Palais des Festivals is equipped with generators and kept the festivities on track. More from WWD Italian Fashion Associations Sign Protocol to Combat Worker Exploitation in Supply Chain Riviera Reels Helen Mirren on Cannes, Culture Shift and the Power of Visibility 'The Palais des Festivals has switched to an independent power supply, allowing all scheduled events and screenings, including the closing ceremony, to proceed as planned and under normal conditions,' the festival said in a statement. Power had gone out around 10 a.m. and resumed around 3:30 p.m. local time. The closing ceremony was scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m. local time, and started without a hitch. During the power outage luxury boutiques and stores across the city were closed, and restaurants would accept cash only, throwing much of the last day of the film festival into disarray as locals and festival goers alike piled into the streets. Internet and telephone connections were down. The Hôtel Martinez, where many celebrities get ready for the event, had a generator for the first floor and the elevators, but upper floors were dark. Stylists reported using phone flashlights to see during the dressing process. But you couldn't dim the lights for the stars on the red carpet. Jury president Juliette Binoche departed from her Dior looks with a sporty custom Prada outfit of a full-length midnight blue skirt with beading at the waist and a coordinated truncated bomber jacket that she zhuzhed up at the sleeves. Both pieces were from the Re-Nylon collection. Binoche cinched the skirt at the waist and added a casual twist with a white T-shirt with a red collar. She finished the look with Chopard hoops. But Dior had a trio of Binoche's fellow jurors on its roster, with Alba Rohrwacher, in a bubblegum pink full-length pouf skirt gown; Leila Slimani, in a gray and gold lace dress, and Halle Berry in a column dress with lace sleeves embroidered and accented with gray wick wool curlers from the spring 2025 couture collection. Berry and Rohrwacher both topped their Dior looks with Chopard jewels. Fellow juror Jeremy Strong, who has been on a Loro Piana streak this festival, closed Cannes in a custom smoky blue tuxedo by new Lanvin creative director Peter Copping. The look was inspired by a piece from the designer's fall 2025 collection presented in January. Elle Fanning wore a custom Chanel dress in a pale blue silke crepe with a sweeping tulle skirt cinched with a black bow at the waist, completed with Cartier jewels. The skirt was embellished with embroidered braids that took 400 hours to complete. Cate Blanchett, who was on hand to present the Palme d'Or top prize, wore a custom Louis Vuitton dress and high jewelry from the house. The top prize went to Iranian director Jafar Panahi's 'It Was Just An Accident.' The film follows a man, his pregnant wife and their young daughter as they get into a car accident that creates a chain of events. It's the director's first film since his release from prison and house arrest, and marks his return to Cannes after a seven year absence. The second place Grand Prize went to Danish-Norweigan filmmaker Joachim Trier's 'Sentimental Value,' starring Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, and Elle Fanning. The film follows Skarsgård's fading film star as he tries to revive his career, and the toll it takes on his family. The third place Jury Prize was a tie between French-Spanish filmmaker Oliver Laxe's near-future apocalyptic tale that follows a group of ravers travelling the desert looking for one last party, and German director Mascha Schilinksi's 'The Sound of Falling,' which follows the lives of four women across time who are connected by living on the same farm over generations. View Gallery Launch Gallery: Cannes Film Festival 2025 Red Carpet Fashion: Viola Davis, Elle Fanning and More Photos, Live Updates Best of WWD Model and Hip Hop Fashion Pioneer Kimora Lee Simmons' Runway Career Through the Years [PHOTOS] Salma Hayek's Fashion Evolution Through the Years: A Red Carpet Journey [PHOTOS] How Christian Dior Revolutionized Fashion With His New Look: A History and Timeline
The Guardian
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on 1980s counterculture: back to the future
In 1980, 19-year-old Leigh Bowery arrived in London from the Melbourne suburb of Sunshine. He found a bedsit and a job in Burger King, while waiting to take on the capital's club and fashion scenes. That same year, the former New Musical Express and Smash Hits editor Nick Logan launched the magazine the Face on a shoestring from a basement on Carnaby Street. Bowery became one of the most influential avant garde figures of the era, the Face the 'style bible' for a generation. Now these countercultural icons are being celebrated in shows at Tate Modern and the National Portrait Gallery. It doesn't get more mainstream. Over at Tate Britain, meanwhile, there is a sombre, largely black and white photographic retrospective of the decade. Outlaws, focusing on Bowery and his circle, is currently at London's Fashion and Textile Museum; later this year the Design Museum will showcase the pop culture magazine Blitz, also founded in 1980. The 80s are having a moment. Documenting the decade's collisions of fashion, art and music, Leigh Bowery! at Tate Modern and The Face Magazine: Culture Shift at the NPG are luridly colourful explosions set against a bleak backdrop of Thatcherite austerity, racism and homophobia. One film montage shows Bowery and friends doing poppers superimposed on footage of the Brixton and Toxteth riots and headlines about Aids. They are partying while the world burns. Post-punk and before the Young British Artists of the 1990s, Bowery and the Face were in opposition to the conservatism – and Conservatism – then dominating the country. Both set up their own clubs: Bowery literally with Taboo in the West End of London in 1985, the Face in its pages. Anyone could belong, regardless of class, race or sexuality, so long as they looked awesome. Taboo's mantra was 'dress as though your life depends on it, or don't bother'. A photograph of Bowery – painted blue – appears in the exhibition about the Face. Constantly shapeshifting, Bowery strode through artistic milieux in sparkly platform boots. 'If you label me, you negate me,' he liked to say. In 1988 he put on a five-day solo performance, spotlit behind a two-way mirror, striking poses in a variety of his signature 'looks'. Later, he became a muse to Lucian Freud. Bowery's reinvention and exhibitionism anticipates the narcissism and voyeurism of social media. His whole life was a selfie. In some ways, it was a better time to be young and an artist. Squats, council flats and even Margaret Thatcher's Enterprise Allowance Scheme (everyone at the Face in its early days was on it, apparently) meant vibrant artistic communities could flourish in the capital. Despite the debauchery, there was an innocence and spontaneity to this underground scene and its make-do-and-mend aesthetic – although some of their most provocative stunts now seem dated at best. As the critic Adrian Searle puts it: 'Wherever Bowery went, he went too far.' Bowery died of an Aids-related illness in 1994 and, although the Face would continue for another decade, it was the last hurrah for British youth magazines. Pop culture was about to become globally homogenised by the internet. The party had to end. There are economic, political and social parallels between the 1980s and today. Bowery and the Face showed that creativity could grow out of grim times. With their emphasis on gender fluidity, diversity and experimentalism, they were trailblazers. They deserve entry to the UK's most prestigious galleries – and they still look awesome.
The Independent
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
How The Face magazine turned style into an art form
A dizzying barrage of video images of late 20th-century Britain opens this celebration of one of the most influential and controversial publications of the age: The Face . Margaret Thatcher, Boy George, The Spice Girls, Oasis, Damien Hirst, you name them, are all there in Culture Shift , all set to a gleefully tacky synth-pop soundtrack that takes us straight to the moment of the magazine's launch at the dawn of the Eighties. That most scorned of decades is suddenly everywhere in art. And if Tate Britain's exhibition The 80s: Photographing Britain wants to rub our noses in the grim and gritty side of the Thatcher era, this show wants to put a big celebratory smile on our faces when we're barely through the door. And in the early stages of the exhibition, at least, it's almost impossible not to succumb. Say what you like about the UK's original music, fashion and culture magazine – and it's had many detractors – it defined the brash, high gloss, unashamedly aspirational aesthetic of the early boom-and-bust era. And before just about anyone, likely even Margaret Thatcher herself, had realised there was going to be a boom-and-bust era. Founded by former NME editor Nick Logan, The Face launched as a glossy music-centred lifestyle magazine, a sort of Vogue from the street, an idea that seemed almost unimaginable at the time. Where 'rock photography' had previously been defined by gritty documentary reportage, invariably black and white, Logan put an emphasis on colour and sumptuous large format photography. This shift in production values brought about an immediate sea change in pop image-making, judging by the stunning, and hugely evocative images in the first room. Adam Ant looks positively Pre-Raphaelite clutching a rose in a 1980 image by Jill Furmanovsky. A very young Boy George looking like he's barely holding it together is captured by Derek Ridgers, while John Lydon glowers manically in a tartan suit for Sheila Rock. If Lydon had famously sneered at Sid Vicious, 'you're not a fashion model when you're a Sex Pistol', The Face effectively turned all its subjects into models, even before its shift from a glammed-up music mag to a principally fashion-focused publication. Sade on the cover of 'The Face' in 1984, as photographed by Jamie Morgan (Jamie Morgan) In 1983, Logan introduced a new wave of fashion photographers, including Robert Erdman, Mario Testino and Jamie Morgan, used to working with stylists who turned mere images into 'narratives'. 'Buffalo style', devised by Morgan and stylist Ray Petri, from a Jamaican term for 'attitude', introduced a new kind of hyper-masculine homoeroticism, with well-muscled models – both Black and white – standing foursquare to the camera in leather skirts, kilts and the shortest of shorts. The best way of promoting Black and gay emancipation, such images implied, was by demonstrating it was already happening. While The Face aimed to respond to – and lead – what was happening on the Street, the effect, from Eddie Monsoon's ecstatically zinging Neneh Cherry (1988) to Janette Beckman's wonderful snap of Run-DMC on their home street in Queens, was like looking in on some endless über-cool party. And if you felt you weren't invited, it was because you weren't working hard enough on your 'style', that great Eighties buzzword that The Face did so much to popularise. The images in the second part of the show, on the 1990s, are generally even bigger and more technically ambitious, but feel less extraordinary, perhaps because the rest of the world had caught up with The Face 's distinctive hyper style. Kurt Cobain in a dress and Beckham's six-pack dripping blood don't feel as edgy as they're intended to be. Corinne Day's England's Dreaming depicts a young woman in tight black vinyl trousers sprawled on a sofa surrounded by fag butts, tea cups and beer cans. The shot represents a Face -pioneered trend in anti-fashion photography – sometimes dubbed 'heroin chic' – yet it is still patently a fashion photograph. The arrival of digital photography around the mid-Nineties made everything possible but left the viewer feeling that nothing was that surprising. Inez & Vinoodh's For Your Pleasure (1994), which photoshops one of the duo's quirkily provocative fashion tableaux onto an existing slide of a rocket launch is without doubt technically remarkable. Yet while the wall texts describe it as 'surreal and ambiguous', it lacks the bite and edge of real Surrealism. 'Girls on Bikes (Sarf Coastin')' by Elaine Constantine from December 1997, as featured in 'The Face: Culture Shift' (Elaine Constantine) There's barely an image here that isn't brilliant on its own terms. The level of visual invention is stunning, yet the relentless pursuit of page-turning wow factor becomes monotonous. The Face set out to emancipate the reader by reviving the Sixties Mod idea of 'the face', the working class guy who is better dressed and infinitely more stylish than the city gent. Yet by identifying itself so closely with the self-regarding world of fashion, it didn't shift the culture quite as much as it could or should have done. The Face shrank from being too closely associated with the early 21st-century convergence of instant celebrities and supermodels – arguably putting itself out of business in the process. Yet its Eighties ideal of classless aspiration enabled a new kind of everyday mega-personality, typified by the Beckhams, Naomi Campbell and Harry Styles, all of whom feature in the exhibition. And at the end of the day, however much The Face tried to convince us we could all achieve street-level stardom by taking on 'style', they're all actual superstars, while the rest of us are still in the proverbial gutter, however much cool stuff we buy. 'The Face: Culture Shift' is at the National Portrait Gallery from 20 February until 18 May
