Green Foot
Boatman Shoes is trying to lighten our carbon footprint. Plus: Hollywood discovers sustainable fashion, Avedon in Paris, the Barbara Taylor Bradford auction, and more Lenny Kravitz!
Style Notes:
The Studio, the Hollywood comedy series on Apple TV+, had a genius fashion moment this week: During a contentious casting meeting, Continental Studios chief marketing officer Maya Mason (deliciously played by Kathryn Hahn) was dressed in a Marine Serre regenerated denim jacket over a Burberry sports bra. Yes, in LA, this is considered business attire. In addition to being super spiky, the look was, in part, sustainable: Paris-based Serre, who won the LVMH Prize in 2017, uses deadstock fabrics for her designs, which, when you read Fashionopolis, you will learn is very important for the planet.
In 1979, fashion photographer Richard Avedon was commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, to document more than 1,000 miners, herdsmen, salesclerks and transients, many of whom had been severely impacted by then-President Ronald Reagan’s “supply side” economic policies. Forty years after its debut at the Amon Carter Museum, the powerful portfolio is again on show, now at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, through October 12. The exhibition includes the complete set of 103 portraits, on display for the first time in Europe, plus prep Polaroids, annotated test prints, and correspondence between Avedon and his subjects. Abrams has republished the long out-of-print book that accompanied the original exhibition. What makes the show so powerful is that it foretells the Tea Party and MAGA movements. You can see the disillusion in the subjects’ faces, and eyes; they were already getting left behind, and, back then, it was by Republicans. If you are in Paris in the coming months, go see it. Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, 79 rue des Archives, 75003 Paris.
Doyle Auctioneers & Appraisers is having a very chic sale: The Collection of Barbara Taylor Bradford OBE, the British-American author of a bunch of huge-selling novels, beginning with A Woman of Substance. She died last November, at 91. Bradford had extraordinarily good taste in decor and jewelry, as this sale proves. Plus, there are some fun writerly items, like signed first editions of famous friends’ books and her typewriter! The collection is on show this weekend at Doyle New York, 175 East 87th Street. The sale is May 7.
My Lenny Kravitz story for Architectural Digest has been a pretty big hit. As an added service to readers, I’ve put together a Lenny Kravitz Decor Shop where you can find many of the items in the story. Enjoy!
I’ll be speaking at the Todos Santos Writers Workshop in Paris on May 20. A few slots for the workshop are still available, if you want to hone your writing skills.
American Entrepreneur AJ Bowman is Greening Up the Shoe Business
In 2020, then-21-year-old AJ Bowman was working at a paper mill in the Berkshires town of Lee, Massachusetts when he had an epiphany:
“Here we were, using with recycled materials at the paper mill, and the world is going more sustainable, and yet the fashion market was lacking in sustainability so much,” he told me last week.
He liked to wear Sperry deck shoes and wondered if a similar shoe could be made from a more sustainable material than leather, which is usually tanned with toxic chemicals. Perhaps there was a good, sturdy plant-based biomaterial—a rising sector in the sustainable fashion movement, as I wrote in Fashionopolis.
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