Susannah Frankel

Last updated

Susannah Frankel is a British fashion journalist and writer who, since the 1980s, has worked with a number of newspapers and publications. She was the leading journalist chosen by the Fashion Museum, Bath, to choose the defining Dress of the Year of 1999. Since 2001, she has also written and co-written a number of books on fashion designers.

Contents

Career

Frankel studied English at Goldsmiths, University of London, [1] She then joined an art and architecture publishers, Academy Editions, where she was assistant to the editorial director. In the late 1980s she became deputy editor of BLITZ and stayed there until its forced closure in 1991. [1] [2]

From 1996 to 1999, Frankel was fashion editor for The Guardian , and then moved to the same role at The Independent , where she worked until 2012 when she became fashion director for the UK edition of Grazia . [3] [4] She also worked as fashion director for AnOther since its 2001 launch. In November 2015 it was reported that from January 2016, Frankel would be editor-in-chief of AnOther. Frankel has also contributed to Dazed & Confused since 1998. [3] When Alexandra Shulman announced in 2017 that she was stepping down as editor of British Vogue, it was speculated that Frankel might be a contender to succeed her due to her experience and the inclusivity of her vision. [5]

In 1999, Frankel was the fashion journalist selected by the Fashion Museum, Bath, to pick out the most representative look for that year for their Dress of the Year collection. Her choice was an Alexander McQueen lace dress with a moulded leather neck-brace. [6]

Books

Alongside her journalistic work, Frankel has contributed to a number of publications on various designers such as Hussein Chalayan, Peter Jensen, Martin Margiela, Alexander McQueen, Dries van Noten, Viktor & Rolf, and Yohji Yamamoto. [3] Her first book, Visionaries, which was published by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2001, was a collection of her interviews with designers. [3]

Frankel was a close and supportive friend of Alexander McQueen from the beginning of his career. She wrote a lengthy introduction-cum-biography for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's publication for their McQueen retrospective, Savage Beauty . [7] She also wrote about McQueen's formative years as a designer in an essay for the book accompanying the Victoria and Albert Museum's subsequent exhibition on the designer. [8] She also collaborated with the photographer Nick Waplington on a book charting the development of McQueen's Autumn/Winter 2010 collection, The Horn Of Plenty. Titled Alexander Mcqueen: Working Process, the book was published to coincide with an exhibition of Waplington's images of McQueen's work at the Tate Britain in the spring of 2015. [9]

Selected bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexander McQueen</span> British fashion designer (1969–2010)

Lee Alexander McQueen was a British fashion designer and couturier. He founded his own Alexander McQueen label in 1992, and was chief designer at Givenchy from 1996 to 2001. His achievements in fashion earned him four British Designer of the Year awards, as well as the Council of Fashion Designers of America International Designer of the Year award in 2003. McQueen died by suicide in 2010 at the age of 40, at his home in Mayfair, London, shortly after the death of his mother.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nick Knight (photographer)</span> British photographer

Nicholas David Gordon Knight is a British fashion photographer and founder and director of SHOWstudio.com. He is an honorary professor at University of the Arts London and was awarded an honorary Ph.D. by the same university. He has produced books of his work including retrospectives Nicknight (1994) and Nick Knight (2009). In 2016, Knight's 1992 campaign photograph for fashion brand Jil Sander was sold by Phillips auction house at the record-breaking price of HKD 2,360,000.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Suzy Menkes</span> British journalist and fashion critic (born 1943)

Suzy Peta Menkes is a British journalist and fashion critic. Formerly the fashion editor for the International Herald Tribune, Menkes also served as editor, Vogue International, for 25 international editions of Vogue online until October 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Viktor & Rolf</span> Dutch fashion house

Viktor & Rolf is a Dutch avant-garde luxury fashion house founded in 1993 by Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren. For more than twenty years, Viktor & Rolf have sought to challenge preconceptions of fashion and bridge the divide between fashion and art. Viktor & Rolf have designed both haute couture and ready-to-wear collections. The duo is renowned for their avant-garde designs, which rely heavily on theatrical and performative fashion runways.

Nick Waplington is a British / American artist and photographer. Many books of Waplington's work have been published, both self-published and through Aperture, Cornerhouse, Mack, Phaidon, and Trolley. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Tate Britain and The Photographers' Gallery in London, at Philadelphia Museum of Art in the USA, and at the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television in Bradford, UK; and in group exhibitions at Venice Biennale, Italy and Brooklyn Museum, New York City. In 1993 he was awarded an Infinity Award for Young Photographer by the International Center of Photography. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Victoria and Albert Museum and Government Art Collection in London, National Gallery of Australia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Royal Library, Denmark.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Giles Deacon</span> British fashion designer

Giles David Deacon is a British fashion designer, Creative Director and Founder of Giles Deacon group, a fashion enterprise. Deacon joined the Paris Fashion Week in 2016. Deacon has been known to challenge the traditional ideas of womenswear and often uses wild prints and pop culture references in his designs. Deacon was employed by the fashion houses Bottega Veneta and Gucci, before founding his own label, GILES, in 2003. He launched his first collection for GILES at the 2004 London Fashion Week and was named "Best New Designer" at the British Fashion Awards.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jim Lee (photographer)</span> British photographer and film director (1945–2023)

James Seymour Lee was a British photographer and film director based in London. A fashion photographer for magazines during the late sixties and seventies, he worked closely with Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour in London and New York on fashion and advertising shoots. He switched to film directing in the late seventies, creating hundreds of television commercials as well as working on several full-length feature films. His earlier photographs form part of the permanent collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, with additional photographs in the archives of The Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow. A book of his life's work entitled Jim Lee / Arrested was launched in May 2012 alongside an exhibition of photographs from the book at Somerset House, London. Lee's work is regularly exhibited at art galleries around the world, and he continued to collaborate on imaginative campaigns, in addition to developing his own creative projects. In September 2015, Lee's autobiographical book LIFE IN B&W was released by Quartet at the Groucho Club in London. In 2016, Lee was a speaker at the Oxford Literary Festival, where he was also interviewed by writer Paul Blezard. In October 2018, Lee's latest book, The BOX, was published by The Box Book Company. In 2019, Lee published My BOX, a version of The BOX for children between the ages of 8-15 years.

Alexander McQueen is a British luxury fashion house founded by the designer Alexander McQueen in 1992. After his death, Sarah Burton was its creative director, from 2010 to 2023. Its current creative director is Seán McGirr.

Sarah Jane Burton is an English fashion designer, who left the Alexander McQueen fashion house in 2023 after 13 years as the creative director. Her most notable design would be the wedding dress of Catherine Middleton for her wedding to Prince William in 2011. In 2012, she was named in Time 100, an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world according to Time.

Bobby Hillson is a London-based fashion illustrator, former designer of children's clothing, and founder of the Saint Martin's School of Art MA Fashion course.

Deborah Milner is a British fashion designer, active since the 1990s. Since 2000, she has focused on ecologically aware design, founding her ecological couture line, Ecoture, in 2005. In the early 2010s, she was head of the Alexander McQueen couture studio.

Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination was the 2018 high fashion art exhibition of the Anna Wintour Costume Center, a wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA) which houses the collection of the Costume Institute.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Armadillo shoe</span> 2010 platform shoe by Alexander McQueen

The armadillo shoe is a high fashion platform shoe created by British fashion designer Alexander McQueen for his final collection, Plato's Atlantis. Only 24 pairs exist: 21 were made during the initial production in 2009, and three were made in 2015 for a charity auction. The shoes are named for their unusual convex curved shape, said to resemble an armadillo. Each pair is approximately 12 inches (30 cm) from top to sole, with a 9-inch (23 cm) stiletto heel; this extreme height caused some models to refuse to walk in the Plato's Atlantis show. American singer Lady Gaga famously wore the shoes in several public appearances, including the music video for her 2009 single "Bad Romance".

<i>The Widows of Culloden</i> Fashion collection by Alexander McQueen

The Widows of Culloden is the twenty-eighth collection by British fashion designer Alexander McQueen, made for the Autumn/Winter 2006 season of his eponymous fashion house. It was inspired by his Scottish ancestry and is regarded as one of his most autobiographical collections. It is named for the widows of the Battle of Culloden (1746), often seen as a major conflict between Scotland and England. Widows makes extensive use of the McQueen family tartan and traditional gamekeeper's tweeds, as well as other elements taken from Highland dress. Historical elements reflected the fashion of the late Victorian era and the 1950s.

<i>Taxi Driver</i> (Alexander McQueen collection) 1993 fashion collection

Taxi Driver is the second collection by the British designer Alexander McQueen for his fashion house, Alexander McQueen. It was named after the 1976 film Taxi Driver, and his father, a London taxicab driver. McQueen developed the collection following his 1992 graduation from Central Saint Martins art school. At the time he was unemployed and seeking a job in the fashion industry; although he was reluctant to launch his own company, he worked on designs to pass the time. The collection included experimental techniques and silhouettes, such as the bumster trouser, whose extremely low waist exposed the top of the intergluteal cleft.

<i>Irere</i> (Alexander McQueen collection) 2003 fashion collection by Alexander McQueen

Irere was the twenty-first collection by British fashion designer Alexander McQueen for his eponymous fashion house. Irere was inspired by imagery from the Age of Discovery and from the people and animals of the Amazon rainforest. Its title is claimed to mean 'transformation' in an unspecified Indigenous Amazonian language. The collection comprised three distinct concepts presented as a narrative sequence: shipwrecked pirates, menacing conquistadors, and tropical birds. McQueen described the collection as an effort to present a more mature point of view and surprise viewers with bold colours.

<i>Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims</i> 1992 Alexander McQueen fashion collection

Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims is the first collection by British designer Alexander McQueen, produced as the thesis collection for his master's degree in fashion at Central Saint Martins (CSM) art school. The collection's narrative was inspired by the victims of 19th-century London serial killer Jack the Ripper, with aesthetic inspiration from the fashion, erotica, and prostitution practices of the Victorian era. The collection was presented on the runway at London Fashion Week on 16 March 1992, as the second-to-last of the CSM graduate collections. Editor Isabella Blow was fascinated by the runway show and insisted on purchasing the entire collection, later becoming McQueen's friend and muse.

<i>The Hunger</i> (Alexander McQueen collection) 1996 fashion collection by Alexander McQueen

The Hunger is the seventh collection by British designer Alexander McQueen for his eponymous fashion house. The collection was primarily inspired by The Hunger, a 1983 erotic horror film featuring vampires. McQueen had limited financial backing, so the collection was created on a minimal budget. Typically for McQueen in the early stages of his career, the collection centred around sharply tailored garments and emphasised female sexuality. It was McQueen's first collection to include menswear.

<i>The Overlook</i> (Alexander McQueen collection) 1999 British fashion collection

The Overlook was the fourteenth collection by British fashion designer Alexander McQueen for his eponymous fashion house. It was inspired by the Stanley Kubrick horror film The Shining (1980) and named for the fictional Overlook Hotel where much of the film takes place. The collection focused on winter clothing in light and neutral colours, including chunky knitwear, fur and shearling coats, and parkas inspired by Inuit clothing. Notable showpiece items included a bustier made from rock crystal and a corset made from coils of aluminium; the latter provided by jeweller and frequent McQueen collaborator Shaun Leane.

<i>The Girl Who Lived in the Tree</i> Fashion collection by Alexander McQueen

The Girl Who Lived in the Tree is the thirty-second collection by British fashion designer Alexander McQueen, made for the Autumn/Winter 2008 season of his eponymous fashion house. The primary inspirations were British culture and national symbols, particularly the British monarchy, as well as the clothing of India during the British Raj. The collection was presented as a fairy tale about a feral girl who lived in a tree before falling in love with a prince and descending to earth to become a princess, and the runway show was divided into two phases to represent this narrative. In the first phase, the ensembles were all in black and white, with most looks having a slim, tailored silhouette. The clothing from the second half was richly colored, with luxurious materials and embellishments, representing the girl's transformation into a princess.

References

  1. 1 2 "Susannah Frankel". showstudio.com. ShowSTUDIO. Retrieved 3 August 2017.
  2. Best, Kate Nelson (2017). The History of Fashion Journalism. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 208. ISBN   9781847886552.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Conti, Samantha (27 November 2015). "Susannah Frankel Named Editor in Chief of AnOther Magazine". WWD. Retrieved 3 August 2017.
  4. Staff writer (8 August 2012). "Indy fashion editor Susannah Frankel joins Grazia – Press Gazette". www.pressgazette.co.uk. Retrieved 3 August 2017.
  5. "Fran Burns or Katie Grand? Meet the new Ed at British Vogue". Sleek. H&B Publishing GmbH. 25 January 2017. Retrieved 3 August 2017.
  6. Lester, Richard (2013). Dress of the year. Antique Collectors' Club. pp. 149–150. ISBN   9781851497256.
  7. Frankel, Susannah (2011). "Introduction". In Bolton, Andrew (ed.). Alexander McQueen : Savage Beauty (3rd ed.). New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. pp.  17–27. ISBN   9780300169782.
  8. Frankel, Susannah (2015). "The Early Years". In Wilcox, Claire (ed.). Alexander McQueen. Harry N. Abrams. pp. 69–78. ISBN   9781851778270.
  9. "Nick Waplington / Alexander McQueen: Working Process – Exhibition at Tate Britain".