Does the return of gloves this season require us to reconsider what “lady like” means?

On July 1, 2011, Daphne Guinness – whose visionary and eccentric style has captured the imagination of the fashion world – staged a mock funeral wake to debut her much-anticipated design, a glove made in white gold chain mail. Handmade to fit her arm completely, it features intricately articulated fingers and more than 5,000 diamonds creating decorative birds along the arm.

Posing in an Alexander McQueen bodysuit, Guinness lay motionless at a mock funeral with the armored glove revealing the essence of her style.

Named Contra Mundum (or Against The World), Guinness explains, “It’s sort of us against the world. It’s about wanting to watch, but not wanting to be seen. I feel it’s a pact, if that makes any sense.” The glove is at once an incredible testament to the handmade – considered to be one of the most technologically advanced pieces in the world it’s worth an estimated $1.76 million dollars – and reveals the core message of Guinness’ style iconry – the concept of fashion as a form of armor, protection for a delicate soul.

With winter’s icy temperatures chilling our extremities, you may be pulling on a (more affordable) pair yourself this month. But beyond their functionality, gloves have long been understood as an accessory able to translate the cultural expectations of women.

It’s the subtle interpretation and manipulation of what gloves can mean, that make them such fascinating fashion watching.

From their early history, gloves were emblems of status and power, worn by royalty and the aristocracy. Taking on a symbolic importance in the chivalrous middle ages, they were used as a form of guarantee, thrown down as a challenge and given as a token of affection from a lady to a suitor.

Have you ever tried to do anything with gloves on? It’s difficult. But women then found a way around the problem by slipping their hands out of the finger-part, and popping them out the opening. To this day they are a cultural signifier that remains shorthand for class. And it’s the subtle interpretation and manipulation of what that can mean, that makes them such fascinating fashion watching.

The last interest in gloves was in the middle of last century, their power cleverly manipulated by actress Grace Kelly.

Grace Kelly, the ice princess ideal of 50s womanhood was famous for her white gloves. Even then – at a time where rebellion hellions such as Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and Elvis Presley were emerging –  the “lady like” gloves appeared to be a throwback to an earlier time. But in an era where many female star’s careers were manhandled by big studio bosses – Kelly’s cleverly calculated image of austerity and steely resolve unnerved her MGM bosses and secured her freedom from roles that required her to “wear thirty-five different costumes and look pretty and frightened.”

Gloves in fashion now. Models in Christian Dior opera gloves. Harper’s Bazaar Spain, December edition.

It was a glove affair on Fall’s 2011 runways. Designers including Alber Elbaz, Frida Giannini at Gucci, Miuccia Prada, Jean Paul Gaultier and Donna Karan ushered in a season of forties glamour revolving around a new on-the knee skirt length replete with conservative pearls, shrugs and gloves. The mid-length opera gloves seen at Lanvin had a surprising modern look, conveying power and strength – the “lady like” characteristics now essential for life as a woman in the 21^st century.

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The post Now & Then: The History of Ladylike Gloves appeared first on EcoSalon.

We want more fashion and jewelry in museums. Whether it’s because interest in fashion designers is more a part of mainstream culture now or because clothing seems more accessible to us than a Picasso or a Julian Schnabel. Either way, our appetites were whetted by the MET’s game-changing Alexander McQueen show and museum programming committees across the country have taken note.

With some fantastic new and ongoing exhibitions on view, and some exciting ones slated for 2012, a visit makes for a great low impact fashion experience. And here’s another green idea – let the creativity you see inspire yours. With thrift stores teaming with clothing and old sewing machines headed for landfill, interpret an idea that inspires you and recreate it to quell that need we all have for newness in our wardrobes. Here are four don’t-miss exhibitions to check out.

While she may not be eating much for a while, style icon and Guinness heiress Daphne Guinness has had the energy to put together the new exhibition Daphne Guinness at the museum at FIT, which opened last Friday and will run through January 7. If you enjoyed the MET exhibit, head over to see her extraordinary wardrobe that features plenty more McQueen’s. As a close friend of the late designer and as the owner of McQueen muse Isabella Blow’s entire clothing collection, the exhibition will include more than two dozen McQueen garments which have never been displayed. An unlikely voice against copious consumption, she famously said, “We need better things, not more. We should not pollute the world with meaningless, unused things when we can make and support things of rare and precious beauty.”

In every clothing collector’s paragon of rare finds is an original Giorgio di Sant Angelo. The enigmatic designer’s first fashion retrospective opened over the weekend at Arizona’s Phoenix Art Museum. Running through Feb, 12, the long-overdue show features more than 40 ensembles and accessories, along with sketches and collection books that span the designer’s career from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. Known for his ability to drape a unique look on the spot, his signature kaleidoscope prints, flowing fabrics, Native American touches, fringing and piled-on color and clashing textures are influences recently seen in Rodarte, Proenza Schouler and Isabel Marant’s collections. Underscoring the way the industry reinvents and revisits its history as well as the thrill of costume history, the show could not be more timely.

Don’t miss the last week of Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts exhibit Helmut Newton: White Women, Sleepless Nights, Big Nudes. The first large-scale U.S. exhibition of Newton’s work, it features the entire contents from his first three groundbreaking books: White Women (1976), Sleepless Nights (1978), and Big Nudes (1981). Whether you agree or not about his highly-charged, sexual take on modern female identity, his influence on the fashion industry is undisputed with designer Karl Lagerfeld and Vogue editor Anna Wintour contributing to the new exhibition catalogue.

For those that enjoy the pure fantasy escape from everyday lives that fashion can offer, put the October 22^nd opening of Charles James: Genius Deconstructed at the Chicago History Museum on your calendars. The museum boasts the second largest collection of James pieces in the world among its 50,000-piece costume collection. The show explores the history of couture fashion designer Charles James and why nearly 40 years after his death, the engineered perfection of his complex and unique constructions still inspire today’s designers and fashion lovers.

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