Beene-mania

It's hot, and I've been having a hard time sleeping these days.  I'll surely feel the repercussions of my insomnia in the morning, but for now I have decided to do a post on Geoffrey Beene.  I had heard this designer's name before, but had always associated it with the dull licensed menswear that the brand has become.  

However, lately I'm taking a class at FIT (to brush up on my sketching skills) with the amazing fashion illustrator Steven Stipelman, and for our final project, he suggested I choose Beene as my inspiration (we were given a bunch of deceased designers to choose from).  He showed me a book of Beene's work and I was amazed at how current it felt, though the clothes were from decades ago.  So I borrowed a couple of books on Beene from the library and have been researching him, and have been surprised at how relatively little I've heard about him over the past decade or so I have been obsessing about fashion.  Apparently he didn't really pander to the press or pay too much attention to other designers.

His work has a playful spirit to it, and apparently due to his abandoned medical training, his clothes reflect an appreciation for the female form.  I love the shapes and cutouts he uses in his designs, and how his garments cling to the figure.  Here are some images, but you should really try to look at a book of his work to see the scope of it.  

One of the details I liked was his overlay of bras and harnesses over dresses. 

I love this cutout detail over the bust.

This dress is one of my favorites of his.

Towards the end of his career, when supermodels were becoming celebrities in their own right, he started using dancers as models instead.

There is a cool little video that follows a Parsons student who had recently won the CFDA Geoffrey Beene award, with cameos from Doo-ri Chung and Anna Sui on the Geoffrey Beene site:
http://www.geoffreybeene.com/history.html

Chung worked under Beene for several years before starting her own line, and her work reflects the time spent.  Although Chung's signature draping is uniquely her own, there is an appreciation for the three-dimensionality of the figure that comes across in her work, as shown in the images below.  Her work is quite beautiful, and until I studied Beene's, I had no idea how he influenced her.

When my project is finished I will try to scan the images and upload them.  I'm really enjoying my class. Stipelman is a great teacher and I have been learning a lot.  Many of my classmates are college students but there are also others who are my age or even much older, which goes to show that you can always learn something new.

Another great site to look at Beene's clothes is Beenemania, a blog where a woman took photos of many different Beene outfits she wore over the course of a year.