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1 week ago | 
theguardian.com | Veronica Horwell
Belinda Bellville, a designer of special occasion clothes for her own wealthy, well-connected social group, was pregnant in 1958 and in urgent need of a temporary assistant in her London atelier. She found David Sassoon, a Royal College of Art student, and offered him a job after seeing his degree show. Bellville was old-style class, Sassoon was the new meritocracy, and what became their joint firm, Bellville Sassoon, succeeded for over half a century.
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2 months ago | 
theguardian.com | Veronica Horwell
Phyllis Dalton won her first Oscar in 1966 for designing – also abrading, staining, tattering and otherwise making more real – the 5,000-plus costumes of David Lean’s epic movie of Doctor Zhivago. She clad Tsarist socialites and post-revolutionary masses, and talked extras out of shedding their Russian army greatcoats on location shooting in a hot Spanish summer. The star Julie Christie was uncomfortable in a sultry red satin gown vital to the story.
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Jan 20, 2025 | 
theguardian.com | Veronica Horwell
The art direction and photographs of Oliviero Toscani were provocative not for what they showed – real life, he said, complex and contradictory – but where they were seen. The images, subjects ranging from a bloodied newborn baby to the condemned of death row, would have been unremarkable on the editorial pages of a classic photo-reportage publication such as Life or Paris Match.
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Jan 5, 2025 | 
theguardian.com | Veronica Horwell
Rosita Missoni, who has died aged 93, came out of the historic heartland of Italian textiles in northern Lombardy, and though she travelled worldwide for decades and the Missoni fashion and decor brand became famous globally, she remained devoted to her native terroir. All the artistic, artisanal, and ever-inventive technological skills that sustained the company’s success over 70 years were as much part of the locality as its mountains and lakes.
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Nov 28, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | Veronica Horwell
Television period drama now has its own history of more than 60 years of series and serials, with many thousands of costumes recreated to evoke eras from ancient Rome to the day before yesterday. But those designed by Stephanie Collie for the first six episodes of Peaky Blinders, shown on BBC Two in 2013, had all the shock of the new, despite that initial series being set in 1919.
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Nov 10, 2024 | 
msn.com | Veronica Horwell
Microsoft Cares About Your PrivacyMicrosoft and our third-party vendors use cookies to store and access information such as unique IDs to deliver, maintain and improve our services and ads. If you agree, MSN and Microsoft Bing will personalise the content and ads that you see. You can select ‘I Accept’ to consent to these uses or click on ‘Manage preferences’ to review your options and exercise your right to object to Legitimate Interest where used.
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Nov 10, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | Veronica Horwell
After Vidal Sassoon changed the look of women’s hair with his radical geometric cuts in the early 1960s, variants of his original shapes prevailed. Short cuts kept close to a head’s profile, longer bobs swung in movement but dropped straight as a curtain at rest. Then in 1974, Sassoon’s young artistic director, Trevor Sorbie, saw how a model’s locks fell full and chunky as he pulled a brush through them, and, impromptu, cut that shape into her hair. This was 3D geometry.
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Oct 20, 2024 | 
msn.com | Veronica Horwell
Microsoft Cares About Your PrivacyMicrosoft and our third-party vendors use cookies to store and access information such as unique IDs to deliver, maintain and improve our services and ads. If you agree, MSN and Microsoft Bing will personalise the content and ads that you see. You can select ‘I Accept’ to consent to these uses or click on ‘Manage preferences’ to review your options and exercise your right to object to Legitimate Interest where used.
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Oct 20, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | Veronica Horwell
The actor and singer Mitzi Gaynor, best remembered as the star of the 1958 film musical South Pacific, began her showbiz career as an ingenue – the young, pretty female stock character whose marriage ends old-style comedies: the audience never gets to see her grow into a woman. And a bubbly ingenue Gaynor remained throughout a long performing life, still working her adorability when she made her Manhattan cabaret debut at Feinstein’s in 2010 at 78. Gaynor, who has died aged 93, had talent.
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Sep 6, 2024 | 
msn.com | Veronica Horwell
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