Word: swanking
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...Hudson's Bay blankets from L.L. Bean are trimmed with satin and turned into evening coats; a snazzy sequined evening dress is shaped and decorated like a football jersey. Vintage cartoon characters such as Felix the Cat and the Little King undercut and complement the high seriousness of a swank evening gown. The revelation of the show, which combines work from his first collection to his very latest, is its restless response to convention, its adventurousness about shape. "I love standards," says the designer, 61, "but I don't mind breaking rules. The only standard that finally matters is taste...
...decadence, high fashion and subterranean sex. That has caused him to be dismissed at times as a vendor of deluxe fantasy. But if his work has sometimes been complicit with the indulgences of the day, it was never fully in service to them. He never aimed for the lugubrious swank of Helmut Newton, whose corseted women can look like sale goods in a fancy furniture store. He never settled for the sexual salesmanship of Bruce Weber, whose boys live in a world made of equal parts Ralph Lauren and Leni Riefenstahl...
...Remember when I sent you on the bread-and-water bit?" Hogan's ice-blue eyes glisten as he reinforces himself with a Guinness and recalls the caper: "I was a proper bum, with mud on me, crummy clothes, tacky shoes. In East Hampton ((N.Y.)), I went to a swank estate, and the maid pulled a gun on me the size of a howitzer." Balfour adds, "The White House turned him away. Gracie Mansion told him they didn't give out bread and water." Hogan whispers, "Only Burt Reynolds' dad, in Jupiter ((Fla.)), gave me a meal." Then there...
...Swank," the old Washington Evening Star called it. Forty years ago, Mayfair Mansions in Washington was one of the nation's most desirable housing developments for middle-class blacks. Today it looks more like a wartime concentration camp, with nondescript red barracks buildings and desolate open areas of dirt and patchy grass...
...discovered by slumming music critic, goes on to pen smash biblical epic Jesus Christ Superstar and monster hit Evita, splits with pal, has megatriumphs with Cats and Starlight Express, then comes up with extra-hot spook, The Phantom of the Opera. Along the way swaps bell-bottoms for swank Belgravia flat, 1,350-acre English country estate, choice property on the French Riviera, $6 million apartment in Manhattan, private jet, beautiful second wife and a worldwide musical empire that, conservatively, rings his personal cash register to the tune of $12 million a year...