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Karen Elson
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seshiru

By seshiru
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ElysianRaven

ElysianRaven

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NY Times T Magazine

'Lost in a Daydream'

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Photograph by David Armstrong. Fashion editor: Ethel Park. Hair by Gavin Harwin for Redken/Cutler Salon At Art Department. Makeup by Romy Soleimani for NARS Cosmetics At Management Artists.

Nina Ricci top, $1,290, and skirt, $1,490. Go to neimanmarcus.com. Karen Elson for Nine West Vintage America Collection shoes, $149, bag, $99, and bracelet, $32. Go to ninewest.com/vintageamericacollection.

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Elson: David Armstrong. Still lifes: Jens Mortensen.

At left, Karen Elson for Nine West Vintage America Collection bag, $99, and boots, $269. On Elson: Marni dress, $1,330. Karen Elson for Nine West Vintage America Collection boots, $189, and necklace, $36. At right, a bracelet, $32, and necklace, $44, from Elson�€™s Nine West collection.

Once there was this English showgirl and she used to take the stage right before Archie Rice came on, but now she is old and can barely get up from her rocking chair — but there is a trunkful of her tattered dance shoes up in the attic. And maybe she was your grandma and you just discovered them. Or maybe your granny (great-granny?) was a weathered-but-gorgeous sharecropper, a Dust Bowl refugee in frayed frock and battered boots, only — wait! — what if those boots were splattered with glitter?

This welter of odd references, this battered basket of inspirations, is the driving force behind Karen Elson’s new line for Nine West, a collection that also contains a bracelet that Elson was somehow able to persuade Nine West honchos to engrave on its underside “The truth is in the dirt.” “Thank God they were game,” Elson says with a laugh.

“I am obsessed with the Great Depression and with former showgirls — and the Victorians — the idea of wistful, dark romance,” she says, albeit in a very sunny voice.

Elson, a haunting singer (she’s working on her second album) and cover girl, manages, through her plain-spokenness, her matter-of-fact mien and offhanded way, to be at once a supermodel and an antimodel. Her vision for this limited-edition collection was so accurately reflected, she says, that “the only thing missing is the dust. I love things that are falling apart, but the magic is still there.”

At first she only meant to do an abbreviated capsule collection. “It started with a couple of bags and some shoes — very wearable, nothing overly done or complicated,” she says. “I was very tentative. But then I added jewelry. I couldn’t help myself!” Now the collection ranges from velvet platform T-strap wedges to framed handbags to burnished lock-and-key necklaces.

Though she was born and raised near Manchester, England, Elson lives in Nashville, where she once co-owned a vintage store and was married to the musician Jack White. She’s been in love with America, or at least a highly colored view of hardscrabble America, since she was a schoolgirl, listening to Gram Parsons and Bill Monroe and reading “The Grapes of Wrath”: “I loved Steinbeck. I will never forget being so bewitched by his description of the landscape. Even though I have lived in the States since I was 18, in my head I am still very British, and I do have this romance for towns in Middle America that nobody gets to see.”

To her credit, she acknowledges that there is a bleak side to her reveries: the has-been dance-hall girl wallowing in memory and the true character of the Dust Bowl, which she concedes was “a tragic, horrible time, not a hopeful time.”

But such are the ways of fashion that a down-and-out era can give rise to an authentic aesthetic sensibility. “The interesting thing with fashion is that it’s really a massive daydream,” Elson says.

Elson herself has been in possession of this Arcadia made real, in the form of an advance pair of short rough boots that she’s been wearing so solidly for the past couple of months that the soles, she proudly admits, have almost worn through. (When it is pointed out that this is perhaps not the best endorsement for a shoe line, she insists that their soles are in extremis only because she loves them so much and they are heaven to wear. She adds, “If a model is going to make some shoes, she’s going to make them comfortable.”)

Does she have plans to expand this professional endeavor? She would never call herself a designer, she says, but two seconds later she isn’t ready to rule out the idea of another collaboration. Because, after all, “which girl doesn’t want to make some dresses?”

source: post-45473-0-1445989634-20687_thumb.gif & T Magazine Blog NY Times

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