Learn Your Supermodels: Kylie Bax

Kylie Bax is an interesting story. In the nineties she was a popular and well respected fashion model. She was known as the long term face of Escada, also appearing in campaigns for Armani, Ann Taylor, Vuitton and a series of ads for Clinique ‘Happy’. With her signature sleek blond bob, she was a figure of chic American-style sophistication. For anyone following fashion during that time, she will be associated with the glamorous minimalism of the mid-decade. Then she made a very surprising change. She got breast implants, appeared in Playboy, and now looks very very trashy. She’s remade herself as a glossy, baby-oiled Maxim babe, finding a second career in soft-core semi-pornography, as well as bad movies.

Clockwise from top center: Kylie Bax, Christina Kruse, Guinevere Van Seenus, Kirsten Owen, Carolyn Murphy, unknown, Stella Tennant, Georgina Grenville, Danita Angell & Sunniva Stordahl.

with Chandra North and Kiara Kabukuru

 

Deadbeat Club

The B-52′s have earned the tagline of ‘best party band.’ They’re silly and fun and nearly everyone likes them. But besides high-test party music, I think they offered a very real and serious lifestyle ethos. They created and popularized their own thriftstore hipster aesthetic, which a lot of people did and still do strongly relate to. Their style was a both a pastiche and celebration of sixties kitsch. It did fit into the loud and exuberant design ethic of the 80′s, with its taste for eye-popping colors, big shapes and general over-the-top-ness. (They’ve become associated with the 80′s even though they’ve been in action since as early as 1976.)  It was also in a way an antithesis of mainstream glamor, a rejection of the vulgar excesses of disco/new romantic style in favor of the equally excessive but charmingly retrograde look of early sixties mod. I think Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson deserve more credit than they get as fashion icons. They wore vintage clothing and self-consciously adopted outmoded styles, making a fresh statement in the process. Traditionally, of course, wearing out-of-mode fashions and secondhand clothing has been stigmatized, the negative association being that if you’re wearing such things you must be too poor to do otherwise. Freely choosing to wear old, unfashionable thrift store clothing effectively undermines class expectations. Today mixing high and low, old and new, is itself highly fashionable. Wilson and Pierson were icons for young women who wanted to embrace the style of earlier generations. Now it’s very trendy for girls to seek out the clothes of their mothers’ youth and find vintage pieces in thrift stores. This has helped erase the conventions of ageism, making the idea of  ’dressing your age’ passé. It’s a big change in attitude, away from the old convention of wearing a a particular ‘uniform’ as one passes the different stages of life. That’s a lot of heavy credit to give to a couple of high-pitched pop singers, but there it is. Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson were part of a cultural change in the way women dress – which is, as ever, about more than mere items of clothing but about self-presentation, identity, choice and freedom of expression.