Month: June 2005

Fa fa fa fa fashion…

As we told you yesterday, (06.06.05 NEWS: DAVID AND IMAN IN NEW YORK WITH KATE MOSS TONIGHT) David and Iman spent the evening together at the CDFA Fashion awards ceremony at the New York Public Library last night. You can view online accounts of the evening here and there. But, why bother when you can read an exclusive first-hand account from David Bowie himself, complete with a lovely new haircut, bound to melt the hearts of spiky Bowie hairstyle lovers everywhere…

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The evening moved along at a fair crack and the whole thing was over by 10.30 so that all the designers could get a good nights sleep to wake chirpy, cheerful and brimming full of terrific design ideas for us all.

Kate Moss was tip top company and seems very much in love with you-know-who. Aw, bless. Sean Diddy spent most of the evening cruising tables and making friends. Seal was his usual gentlemanly self, a very nice fellah that one, pity he has to live in L.A.

The wife and I were back home by 11 and, after a mug of Ovaltine, settled in to watch Letterman. I shall write a song tomorrow.

‘beep beep’ – DB

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Thanx for that David…I’m sure I can speak for the whole of BowieNet when I say we’re looking forward to the fruit of tomorrow’s labour.

As last night was a fashion awards ceremony, you’re probably all interested to know what David and Iman were actually wearing. Well, they both had on Dior, David’s clobber being designed by one of his very favourites, Hedi Slimane. I guess you all know that Hedi is Dior’s top designer for men. He made the suits for the 2002 Heathen shows and he now makes all the clothes for Franz Ferdinand, and lots of other bands. Apparently his big influence was TJ Newton‘s clothes in The Man Who Fell To Earth, which I guess kind of shows.

Another fan of all things Bowie is the man on the far right in the shot above. Following on from past performances of both Life On Mars? and Quicksand, Seal is covering Let Me Sleep Beside You on his current tour.

Tomorrow’s Daily Express in the UK is as impressed as the rest of us with just how good David and Iman are looking right now, with a front-page blurb and a full-page shot from last night inside.

I’ll leave you with a lovely pic of David and Iman during a very public display of affection proving that after thirteen years of marriage they are clearly still very much in love…don’t they make a beautiful shape?

BowieNetters can view a few more larger format pictures by clicking on any of those above. As ever, thanx to Dimitrios Kambouris and WireImage.com for their kind permission to use these pictures.

New York’s in love…

On the day of the thirteenth anniversary of the ceremony in which they renewed their wedding vows at St James Episcopal Church, Florence, Italy, David and Iman plan to spend the evening together at the CDFA Fashion awards in New York, having actually had their celebration dinner earlier in the week.

David will be stepping up for John Galliano to present the Award for Fashion Influence to his friend Kate Moss at this evening’s ceremony at the New York Public Library. Congratulations are due to Kate for the award which is presented to “an individual whose signature style has had a profound influence on fashion”.

Galliano stepped down from the presentation after suffering cuts from broken glass in Paris this week. Iman will also be a presenter at the event tonight.

I’m sure you’ll all want to join me in wishing David and Iman a wonderful day and, indeed, a successful and fun evening. Traditional 13th wedding anniversary gifts have a theme of lace.

You can read more about the CDFA Fashion awards by clciking on the beautiful people above, of whom we’ll hopefully have some brand new pictures tomorrow.

It’s about to be writ again…

Despite announcing back in February that David Bowie does not plan any live dates for 2005, (02.02.2005 NEWS: NO BOWIE LIVE DATES PLANNED FOR 2005) there are still some that seem intent on raising the hopes of Bowie fans by spreading daft rumours.

There really are no intentions for any live work this year, and that includes no “small surprise gig in London this Summer”.

Even though it’s less than a year ago that David was still on the road with his massively successful A Reality Tour, (Holmdel was exactly one year ago today) it is understandable that people would still want more, having been spoiled with live shows for the majority of the last ten years.

However, let’s just cross our fingers that DB will be producing something for our consumption in the near future, and that the live break won’t be anything like the four years away from the stage between the 78 and 83 world tours…Take it from an old soldier, that was a toughie!

Times may change me…

Saturday’s Times in the UK has a nice three-page preview of the David Bowie: Pin Up exhibition I’ve been going on about, (See yesterday’s news for the BowieNet day winners) including one of those beautiful previously-unpublished Ken Pitt colour shots I mentioned before.

How cool does the pretty young mod look in that shot? Ten years before Paul Weller with ten times the style. Difference being that, for Bowie, (rather than hang on to something that suited him for decade after decade) it was another fleeting look, honed to absolute perfection, before moving on to the next equally convincing one ahead of everybody else…He makes me feel sick!

There’s a nice wordy piece by Michael Bracewell to accompany the pix in the Times piece, which you can read online by clicking on the mod. (If you get an error, simply search for Bowie and click on Ch-ch-ch-changes 04 Jun 2005) I’ll leave you with the opening paragraph from that very feature:

“If Dylan, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were the principal figures in pop and rock to invent the mythic identity of the 1960s, then David Bowie did much the same for the 1970s, then post-punk and beyond ? only single-handedly. As a new exhibition of photographs shows, Bowie was the perky suburban mod who went on to fuse hippy bohemia with Warholesque decadence, sci-fi melodrama, beat occultism, black American soul chic and Weimar elegance; in so doing he not only reinvented himself as a succession of era-defining personas, but also inspired a whole generational cult of self-reinvention.”

I keep a photograph, It burns my wall with time…

Due to the overwhelming interest in our BowieNet-only view on Saturday June 25th, Redferns, the organiser of the David Bowie: Pin Up photographic retrospective, has kindly agreed to increase the capacity to accommodate 60 BowieNet members.

Below is the lucky list of sixty randomly-selected BNetters who have promised to be there on the day. If this has changed for any of you and you can now no longer attend, please let me know ASAP so that somebody else can take your place.

Meanwhile, the exhibition is picking up more publicity all the time with double page spreads in the July issues of both UNCUT (above left) and Mojo (above right) with the promise of more to come from the weekend heavies.

It’s worth relating some of the text from aforementioned features before I move on to the winners…

First up, Andy Kent‘s April 1976 shot of The Thin White Duke in Helsinki standing by his Mercedes 600D with driver Tony Mascia in the background, himself (relatively) fresh from his role as TJ Newton‘s driver, Arthur, in The Man Who Fell To Earth. Over to Andy:

“David, Iggy Pop, David’s manager, his assistant Coco Schwab and I had just got back from taking a train through Russia. We were just arriving back at the hotel in Helsinki for a press conference. David was the best person I ever shot. He was the kind of person that, if there was a light in a room, he’d position himself under it so he’d look perfect. He had that style and sense about him all the time. He just took so many good pictures, but it was never in a posed way.”

Eight years earlier, one Ray Stevenson was still waiting for the punk rock explosion in the UK that would make his work famous, but meanwhile he was taking lots of brilliant pictures of some of England’s fledgling superstars, such as Marc Bolan and David Bowie. Here’s what Ray had to say in MOJO about the second of the two pictures above, in which: “Bowie rehearses with his short-lived folk/mime outfit Turquoise at his then-girlfriend Hermione Farthingale‘s house, 1968.”

“This was in Clareville Grove, which is at the back of Gloucester Road. Hermione’s family was quite moneyed and she was a very beautiful woman. David had more or less moved in. The other hand belongs to Tony Hill; I think Bowie’s looking at him and taking cues. I’m aware that his teeth have changed since then. The photograph wasn’t for anything in particular; we were friends and I was just taking snapshots. I didn’t realise until much later the depth of his ambition.”

Great stuff. UNCUT and MOJO are on the shelves now. Imagine what a different planet it might have been had Turquoise taken the world by storm…hard to understand why a folk/mime outfit weren’t huge really. Anyway, on to those winners…

aad
ajaneinsane
Aladdinsane6969
andrewa
angelbabe
adi
Babzzarella
bianca
big-bob
blueblue
Bowiebabe
bowiemaniajp
breakingglass
charly
chihiro-k
CleoFMace
codaqueen
creepy
Crispy32
cyrinda
debs
gaz
gilliangraham
gilbert
hataeno
ikehatabin
jungtheforeman
kimble
kina
ledge
lizcoop
lodger
lowe
madammim
martinhucker
maxine.hillson
mickdangle
mika
Miwa
ned
nicklakey
oldsalt
quantumleap
redbull
Richeille
rob2themaxx
rochelle
Scarletbowie
scissorkick
seven7
shashkova
stevesmith
susans
tonyday
vick
visupo
wsmedley
yonemano
zardoz
ziggizowie

I’ll be contacting the winners with further details regarding the day shortly. As I say, if you can’t now make it for whatever reason please let me know now, as there is a standby list and there is still plenty of time for somebody to take your place.