Blog – Mary Jane Denzer

October 31, 2024

*Lisa Dress in black crepe. Photographs courtesy Sabina Belinko.*

Sabina Belinko’s designs possess an enchanting duality – at once dramatic and romantic.

There is a sleek sophistication to the sequined, beaded Bilenko evening gowns and dresses we are featuring at Mary Jane Denzer – fitted silhouettes, angular necklines and drapery, monochromatic colors – mostly black, navy and cream – or color-block effects.

Recreated for the fall, Bilenko’s best-selling Lisa Dress, a strapless midnight blue midi, displays not only intricate beading but an arresting arched neckline that both draws the eye upward and announces a cocktail party alternative to the Little Black Dress.

Similarly, in the Sabina Dress – a full-length Empire creation in black, as seen here, or white – a V-neck, sleeveless, sequined bodice in cream introduces a seamless transition to a smooth, columnar skirt.

*The Sabina dress comes in black and white with the same sequined bodice. Photographs courtesy Sabina Belinko.*

Bilenko’s gift for subtle eye openers can also be seen in a gown that finds a long-sleeved, black, leotard-style top paired with a cool-black sequined skirt characterized by a waist that’s cut on a bias and a slit up the right leg.

Such glamour reflects the quiet luxury of fashion at this moment. But the monochromatic quality of her designs can also make use of bright and deep colors. Teal peblum midi suits and pants suits with plunging, crisscross backs. Long-waisted dresses in seafoam. Russet gowns with shoulder pads and scaly trains that echo 1940s film noir. These speak to the romantic side of the designer, as do the pink, blush and lavender mermaid silhouettes of the Autumn Winter 2024 Couture Collection, with its floral embellished bodices. (Is it any wonder that Bilenko should also have a striking bridal collection?)

As her website states, “the draping is freer, the embroideries more exaggerated and the sculptural touches gentler – as if Mother Nature has taken over the artisan’s hand.”

*Bold lines characterize this slant-waist, slit gown. Photographs courtesy Sabina Belinko.*

Bilenko’s duality was perhaps born of her twinship. She and twin sister Diana, creative director of the brand, grew up in Uzbekistan, the daughters of a woman who collected fashion pieces. At 15, they moved to London to study and eventually earned master’s degrees in luxury management. They began with a baby couture label in 2017, continued with Grace Floral London in 2020 and, working at a kitchen table during the pandemic, moved on to the Sabina Bilenko label.

You can see the twins’ Uzbek traditions in the designs’ use of ornamentation. But as Diana told Vogue Arabia, “Fashion is about personality and confidence, not brands and trends.”

The sisters are committed to Centrepoint, a charity in the United Kingdom that fights youth homelessness, with Prince William as its patron.

Added Sabina: “I believe it takes both strength and kindness to be elegant.”

Tags: Sabina Bilenko, Diana Bilenko, Uzbekistan, Vogue Arabia, Centrepoint, London, Grace Floral London, Prince William, United Kingdom, Mary Jane Denzer,

July 15, 2024

In the quarter-century since her passing on July 16, 1999, interest in Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s life and style has undergone a renaissance, on the internet and in two new books – Elizabeth Beller’s “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy” and Sunita Kumar Nair’s “CBK: Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, A Life in Fashion.” “CBK” copyright Abrams. “Once Upon a Time” jacket design by Claire Sullivan and jacket photograph by Penske Media/Getty Images.

One of today’s most prominent fashion influencers has actually been gone from us 25 years.

Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, a Calvin Klein publicist; her husband, publisher John F. Kennedy Jr.; and her sister, Morgan Stanley executive Lauren Bessette, were just in their 30s when the plane he was piloting crashed off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard on July 16, 1999.

In the years since they slipped beneath the rolling darkness on that hazy July night, there have been annual remembrances and the occasional memoir, including the poignant “What Remains” (Scribner, 2005) by Carole Radziwill, Bessette-Kennedy’s close friend and the wife of JFK Jr.’s cousin and best friend, Anthony Radziwill.

But nothing compares to the explosion of interest in Bessette-Kennedy this year, with two new books – Elizabeth Beller’s laudatory “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy” (Gallery Books, $29.99, 329 pages) and Sunita Kumar Nair’s elegant, elegiac “CBK: Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, A Life in Fashion” (Abrams, $65, 255 pages).

Meanwhile, on the internet, Bessette-Kennedy has been reborn as a quiet-luxury icon for the digital age. The classic minimalism of Calvin Klein and of her own style helped – white shirts, black pants, beige corduroys, a variety of LBDs (little black dresses). (Her simple, scoop-necked, sleeveless sheath of a wedding dress by designer-friend Narciso Rodriquez is captured in “CBK” by Denis Reggie’s famed photograph of the groom gallantly kissing the bride’s hand as they left the church but also in two sparkling pastel and white paintings by Mark Tennant.)

The Bessette-Kennedy aesthetic was also part of a minimalist fashion strategy: Buy few pieces but buy expensive. If you can’t have expensive, wear black. Choose other neutral colors as well – gray, navy and white. Favor texture over prints. Save pops of color for coats and Vineyard sarongs. Keep accessories, hair and makeup simple.

It was an approach to fashion that was not without its irony, and perhaps its disingenuousness, for Bessette-Kennedy honed “her uniform,” as Beller writes, so that she wouldn’t stand out in the glare of the detested paparazzi. Far from making her recede, however, it would brand her in the spotlight – then and now.

Bessette-Kennedy’s fashion sensibility would also crystallize the gulf between the way the press and public saw her and the way she apparently was. She was portrayed as an ice princess. But Beller describes the White Plains-born Bessette-Kennedy, who grew up in Greenwich, as a lively girl in an Italian-French Canadian family that had a strong work ethic. She went to Catholic school; liked people, particularly those who were vulnerable in some way; and always seemed to have a job. (One of the jokes was that while JFK Jr. and Anthony Radziwill were paling around on Aristotle Onassis’ Scorpios as teens, their future wives were working in Caldor’s discount department store – something JFK Jr. always marveled at.)

After St. Mary’s High School in Greenwich, Bessette-Kennedy studied education at Boston University but wound up working as a saleswoman at a Calvin Klein boutique in Beantown, where she was discovered, came to Calvin Klein in Manhattan – working with high-profile clients and rising to director of show productions – and met JFK Jr. “CBK” captures those heady, sunset days in images of the couple at events or strolling the streets of a pre-9/11 New York in what should’ve been theirs and the city’s happily ever after.

We know what happened. The world moved on to obsess over other luminaries. But an icon never dies. She just acquires a new meaning. So, too, Bessette-Kennedy, whose style has become an understated beacon for a new generation searching for a look to hold onto in uncertain times.

Tags: Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, John F. Kennedy Jr., Lauren Bessette, Calvin Klein, Morgan Stanley, Greenwich, White Plains, St. Mary’s High School, New York City, the 1990s, Denis Reggie, Narciso Rodriguez, Carole Radziwill, Anthony Radziwill, Caldor, “What Remains,” Elizabeth Beller, “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy,” Sunita Kumar Nair, “CBK: Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, A Life in Fashion”

June 17, 2024

Robe à la française, British, 1740s. Photograph © Nick Knight, 2024. Images courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“Sleeping Beauties: Fashion Reawakening,” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute through Sept. 2, is an exhibit with two, often competing themes. The first is the fragility of fashion, seen through garments that lie in state like the fairy-tale princess and are designed to be reawakened through the sensory experiences the exhibit provides.

The second, related theme is the influence of the garden on fashion, with the cyclical nature of the garden as a metaphor for the vulnerability of clothing, culture and indeed all life. (That aspect of the show – along with The Met Gala held on the first Monday in May, as The Costume Institute Gala always is – was inspired by J.G. Ballard’s short story “The Garden of Time.”)

Hat, Jasper Conran and Philip Treacy, 1992. Photograph © Nick Knight, 2024. Images courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The viewer wanders through crowded, serpentine, one-way galleries, straining to look at objects, listen to related narration, sniff walls with tubes that contain the scents of garment molecules and touch fabric samples – the only scent not involved is taste – all while trying to read label copy that for the most part is confined to the bottom of display cases. So exhibitgoers will be entirely forgiven for abandoning the layered upon layered Sleeping Beauty theme and instead feasting on historical designs that capture the lush history of the garden in fashion, beginning with an elegant, florally embroidered 17^th-century British waistcoat and equally elegant, florally embroidered 18^th-century robes à la française and à la anglaise.

“May” ball gown, Christian Dior for House of Dior, spring/summer 1953. Photograph © Nick Knight, 2024. Images courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Some 200 years later, Christian Dior would introduce the postwar New Look, feminine and flirty and well-represented in the show by the strapless, cinch-waist, belted “May” ball gown, with its cascading purplish red clovers and greenery, from the designer’s spring/summer 1953 “Tulipe” line. It’s one of many swoon-worthy objects in a show that includes the “Irises” jacket from Yves Saint Laurent’s spring/summer 1988 collection, inspired by an 1889 Vincent van Gogh painting; a light red, glazed silk chiffon 1992 Jasper Conran/Philip Tracy hat with black coq feathers, burned and stripped into the form of a poppy; and a pair of 1955 Charles James butterfly gowns, form-fitting, strapless affairs with trains, made of cream silk satin overlaid with brown silk chiffon and light brown nylon tulle, brown silk satin and polychrome nylon tulle.

The exhibit ends with its showstopper – the 1930 gown designed by Callot Soeurs for New York socialite Natalie Potter’s wedding to financier William Conkling Ladd. The sleek gown – made of a blend of silk and cellulose acetate, an inexpensive alternative to silk – had an over-blouse that originally had a cluster of white artificial carnations falling over the left hip.

“Butterfly” ball gown, Charles James, circa 1955. Photograph © Nick Knight, 2024. Images courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Like the Broadway shows and movies of the period, the gown flew in the face of the Great Depression, with a theatrical, cathedral-length train featuring interlocking scallops that evoked ocean waves and the concentric circles of seashells. In the exhibit, that train fans out down a staircase.

In such moments, “Sleeping Beauties” truly reawakens.

Tags: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Costume Institute, Natalie Potter, William Conkling Ladd, Callot Soeurs, Charles James, Jasper Conran, Philip Tracy, J.G. Ballard, “The Garden of Time,” Christian Dior, robe à la anglaise, robe à la française,

May 20, 2024

*On March 8, 2015, Iris Apfel appeared at O Cinema Miami Beach to present “Iris,” Albert Maysles’ documentary about her. https://www.flickr.com/photos/55155430@N03/16733360409/*

She’s been the subject of an exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute and a documentary film, the inspiration for a Barbie and a character in “The Incredibles” film series.

Designer Iris Apfel, who died March 1 at her home in Palm Beach at age 102, was, to borrow the name of her jewelry collection and the Costume Institute retrospective, a Rara Avis (rare bird) indeed – a maximalist among minimalists, an individual in a world a conformity, a woman of style where others sought to be merely fashionable.

“Why would you want to look like everyone else when there’s such a big choice of things today?” she told Harper’s Bazaar in 2018. “It’s hard to give blanket advice, but I just think that if everybody tries to be as self-respecting and interesting as they can, it would be a better world. Use your head and think about other people and look in a mirror once in a while.”

The mirror came naturally to the native New Yorker, whose family owned a glass and mirror business and whose mother had a fashion boutique. As a youth, Apfel scoured antique shops and drew style compliments from a Brooklyn department store. Even during the Depression, she and her crafts-minded family stayed stylish on a budget. Apfel studied art history at New York University and art at the University of Wisconsin, then honed her eye working for Women’s Wear Daily, interior designer Elinor Johnson and illustrator Robert Goodman.

But it was her longtime professional and personal partnership with Carl Apfel that propelled her onto the world stage. In 1950, they started the textile business Old World Weavers, which reproduced 17^th through 19^th century fabrics. Among their clients – nine U.S. presidents, from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan inclusive and Bill Clinton.

Sourcing fabrics from around the world, Apfel also began buying artisanal clothes in bright colors and bold textures and patterns that she would pair with her statement jewelry pieces and wear at parties. Add her oversize glasses, red lipstick and, as time went on, shock of white hair, and you had the makings of a global style icon.

As the urban legend goes, an exhibit at the Costume Institute fell through, and “Rara Avis: Selections From the Iris Apfel Collection” soared in 2005, marking the Costume Institute’s first show about someone who was not a fashion designer. What followed was a media blitz – a touring exhibit, two documentaries (“Iris” and “If You’re Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast”), a book (“Iris Apfel, Accidental Icon”), a Barbie that was not for sale, plus two “Styled by Iris Apfel” Barbies that were, and a modeling contract. (The Museum of Lifestyle & Fashion History in Boynton Beach, Florida, is designing a building with a gallery to house Apfel’s clothes, accessories,and furnishings.)

Apfel did it all, and she did it her way. At a time when everyone began discarding everything Marie Kondo style, Apfel layered her looks and her dwellings. She was the living embodiment of the Mae West saying: “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”

Tags: Iris Apfel, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Costume Institute, Palm Beach, New York University, Harper’s Bazaar, Mae West, Carl Apfel, Old World Weavers, Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barbie, “Rara Avis (Rare Bird): The Irreverent Irish Apfel,” “If You’re Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast,” Elinor Johnson, Robert Goodman, University of Wisconsin, Women’s Wear Daily, Albert Maysles, O Cinema Miami Beach, Miami Film Festival,

March 5, 2024

British designer Erdem Moralıoğlu tapped the spirit of the elegant Greek soprano Maria Callas, seen here in 1958 on the CBS program “Small World,” for the Erdem fashion house’s Fall Collection.

Florals are very much in the DNA of British designer Erdem Moralıoğlu. And that makes his designs a wonderful resource here at Mary Jane Denzer for the spring season and all that we associate with it — bridal showers, rehearsal dinners and weddings, particularly the still-trending barn wedding.

It’s not only the prints, however, but Erdem’s textured use of materials that makes his dresses and gowns so engaging. A linen dress is overlayed with floral organza. A cream satin is presented ruched and off-the-shoulder. A floral chiffon is offset with sleek pleats.

Erdem linen dress with floral organza overlay.

Floral dresses and gowns – draped and layered asymmetrically or presented as two pieces with a flowing skirt and a plunging bodice, at once concealing and revealing the sinuousness, and sensuousness, of the female form – were on display Feb. 17 at the British Museum in London as the Erdem fashion house presented its Autumn-Winter 2024 Collection.

But this was the yin to the Erdem show’s yang. Coats with broad, bold collars in soft colors – gray, celadon and marigold – announced the confidence that is also part of womanhood.

Erdem ruched, satin, off-the-shoulder, cream floral dress.

That confidence and floral beauty served as homage to the striking, fiery New York City-born Greek soprano Maria Callas, especially her role in “Medea,” with runway models sporting kohl-rimmed eyes and shoes festooned with feathers and roses to channel their inner diva. (The British Museum location was not without its controversy– amid marbles from the Parthenon in Athens, known as the Elgin Marbles – a source of contention between the British and Greek governments.)

But Callas – whose birth centenary fans celebrated last year – was herself a controversial singer and cultural figure, her remains repatriated to Greece in 1977 after her final years of isolation in Paris.

“I wanted to show in this space that epitomized her Greek-ness,” Moralıoğlu said at the time of the show, adding, “I was interested in the idea of someone starting off somewhere and ending up somewhere else.”

And just as “Medea,” the ancient Greek play by Euripides and the 18^th-century opera by Luigi Cherubini, became metaphors for Callas as a woman scorned by shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis once he married widowed first lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy – although depending on the sources, Onassis continued to see Callas ,and Kennedy was fine with that – Vogue suggests Callas has become a metaphor for the multicultural Moralıoğlu, who was born in Montreal to an English mother and Turkish father and grew up there and in Birmingham, England.

His education reflects that transatlantic upbringing. Moralıoğlu graduated from Marianopolis College in Quebec, received a Bachelor of Arts from Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto, interned for Vivienne Westwood and moved to London in 2000 to study fashion at the Royal Academy of Art on a Chevening Scholarship, funded by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He was then off to New York but relocated to London to establish his own label in 2005.

In 2018, he designed the costumes for Christopher Wheeldon’s ancient Greek-flavored ballet, “Corybantic Games.” Four years later, he expanded into menswear.

Moralioglu’s expansive creativity has led to various honors – including the British Fashion Council’s Women’s Wear Designer of the Year (2014), the International Canadian Designer of the Year at the Canadian Arts & Fashion Awards (2017) and a Member of the Order of the British Empire, or MBE, (2020) – as his designs continue to be embraced on both sides of the Atlantic.

Photographs courtesy Erdem.

Tags: Erdem, Erdem Moralıoğlu, Maria Callas, Elgin Marbles, Erdem’s Fall 2024 Collection, Montreal, Quebec, Birmingham, England, New York, Greece, H&M, Royal Academy of Art, Christopher Wheeldon, Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, spring, barn weddings, Mary Jane Denzer

Sabina Belinko’s twin use of drama and romance

Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy – a style icon then and now

The garden in fashion comes to life in The Met Costume Institute show

Iris Apfel, the not-so-accidental icon

Welcoming spring with Erdem