Victory for Versace as Gaga connection pays off

The world's sexiest label is snuggling up to Lady Gaga. Jess Cartner-Morley reports on Donatella's bid for world domination.
The two headline fashion images of this week are both of glamorous blondes in skintight, gold-studded, stretch black Versace leather. In the new video for Edge of Glory, Lady Gaga is wearing a slashed, medusa-spiked corset from Gianni Versace's last collection; Donatella took a catwalk bow after this week's Versace menswear show in Milan in a skintight, knee-length, studded-and-zipped dress - which, she revealed the following morning, was an early sample from Versace for H&M, which will bring the Versace look to the high street, when it hits stores in November this year.
Versace is having a moment. The label has not been hotter since the salad days of supermodels in sweet-shop brights on the catwalk and Liz Hurley in safety pins on the red carpet. The significance of the Lady Gaga connection is not to be underestimated: after all, last September when the New York Times ran an article about the power struggles, feuds and mind games that determine the seating arrangements at catwalk shows, one editor, Dan Peres of Details, nailed the key issue: "I want to see who gets the seat next to Lady Gaga." Right now, that seat is occupied by Donatella Versace, and the momentum that Gaga has in pop culture makes that a powerful place to be.
The heart of the Versace brand will always be the prowling, tigerish sex appeal that the label stood for in the 80s. Medusa heads, black leather, a very Italian embrace of sunshine colours, a stiletto with everything and always, always make the boobs look good: that's what Versace is, and will always be. By forging a connection with Gaga, Donatella has found a way to make that heart beat again. According to fashion insiders, Donatella wrote Gaga a letter, telling her that she believed her brother Gianni would have wanted to dress her and offering to open the archives, and Gaga responded enthusiastically, wearing vintage Versace at high-profile appearances. She wore a Versace LBD on the cover of the US edition of Harpers Bazaar last month, and has shown a particular fondness for the Miami-bright scarf prints, on leggings and silk blouses. Donatella, in return, has lavished the singer with praise - and one-off Versace archive pieces that guarantee airtime in the fashion blogosphere.

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Fashion influence ... Lady Gaga. Photo: Reuters

Is it just me, or does Gaga bears a strong physical resemblance to a young Donatella, as seen in family photos when she was still only known as Gianni's younger sister? Plenty of fodder for amateur psychologists there. But still, I suspect Donatella's motivation is more about the brand than about her own ego. It is as if she is finally ready to take the Versace brand to the masses. She has in the past been hostile to the concept of high-street collaborations - just three years ago, she was quoted as saying: "I work very hard to put the Versace line in the luxury section. I think to put the Versace line in H&M would confuse the brand."
Her change of heart reflects, in part, the astonishing success of high-street collaborations with designers, which have proved to be - when done well - a winner for both parties. In 2009, when Matthew Williamson designed a range for H&M, he worried about the impact on sales at his boutique - would women still shop there, when they could get the name for a tenth of the price half a mile away? As it turned out, his main line sales figures for the period when the H&M collection was on sale were higher, not lower, than usual.
Interestingly, the press releases from both H&M and Versace emphasise that the range will be a celebration of iconic Versace moments, rather than a diffusion-level version of the current collection. As well as the dress worn by Donatella, the women's range for H&M includes a studded micro-minidress, a black-leather biker jacket, some fabulous spike-heeled shoes, an asymmetric black dress and a bright scarf-print silk dress. It is not a retro look - indeed, the silhouette is sometimes very close to the collections Christopher Kane has designed for Versus over the past two years - but the inclusion of a cushion and bedspread in iconic Versace prints from the Gianni era shows a willingness to embrace and celebrate the camp-to-kitsch end of the Versace spectrum, as well as the sleek little dresses.
Luke Day, fashion director of GQ Style, is by his own admission "obsessed" with Versace, and believes "a Versace resurgence has been bubbling away for a few years now." (Day is the proud owner of a Versace bedspread, which was given by Gianni to Howard Donald. Day, who is Take That's stylist, loved the bedspread so much that Donald gave it to him as a gift.) "All it took was for Donatella to fully embrace the heritage and sexuality of those heady glory years." Sophia Neophitou, editor-in-chief of the influential 10 Magazine, agrees. "Timing is everything in fashion. Donatella knows that; she's so smart. It's all about picking the right moment to bring something back, and making it new and modern." After all, thanks to Twitter and Shane Warne, Liz Hurley's pop cultural stock hasn't been higher since That Dress. A sign, surely, that the time is right for a Versace moment.
Two trends in fashion right now seem to run contrary to each other. On the one hand, the minimalist moment seems to have been overturned in favour of an embrace of flamboyant, taste-be-damned aesthetic: this week's menswear shows featured flame-print jackets (Alexander McQueen) and gold-chain print silk trousers (D&G). On the other, heritage has never been more valuable, with the all-important Asian markets tending to judge the cachet of a brand on its backstory.
There are two brands poised to make this apparent conflict work in their favour. The first is Prada. Miuccia Prada says that she is most inspired by things she hates, and follows up her "bananas" collection with a menswear show based on cheesy golfwear; meanwhile, the "ticker" code for the company's stock market float is 1913, the date the company was founded. The second brand able to embrace off-taste and heritage simultaneously is Versace, a house whose history is as shocking and lurid as it is iconic and extraordinary.
Katie Grand, super-stylist and editor of Love magazine, captures the house in a nutshell. "Versace is about sex, about looking hot, and about rock'n'roll." What's more, she says, it is about fearlessness, and having the guts to really embrace fashion. "Wearing Versace is about not being afraid to let a dress say quite a lot about you. It's not for wallflowers." Six months is a long time in fashion, but it doesn't seem too much of a stretch to predict the look that will dominate the Christmas party season of 2011. And I'm seeing black leather, with gold studs.

Sexy secret's out of the bag

The Grates's John Patterson and Patience Hodgson relocated to Brooklyn to craft Secret Rituals.

The Grates's third album delivers a more mature sound for the duo.
RECENTLY, Brisbane alternative-pop duo the Grates spent the day in Melbourne visiting radio stations and meeting journalists. By mid-afternoon they could see the narrative taking shape: writers were inquiring about the group's sojourn in New York to write and record their third album Secret Rituals, while radio DJs were suggestively praising the record's streamlined first single, Turn Me On.
''Every time we go into a radio station, everyone's like, 'Turn Me On is so sexy, how did you feel writing such a sexy song?''' vocalist Patience Hodgson says, slipping into a DJ's honeyed tone before rolling her eyes.
Despite the Grates's casual Queensland demeanour and the high-energy yen for communication carried on their first two albums, observers often misjudge the successful group. Sex, both as a form of pleasure and an emotional weapon, was often a subject on 2006's Gravity Won't Get You High and 2008's Teeth Lost, Hearts Won but few noticed because of Hodgson, guitarist John Patterson and former drummer Alana Skyring's predilection for raucous live performances and an eccentric, handmade aesthetic.

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Now that their outlook has matured, it's become a belated and incorrect assumption. ''To me, Turn Me On was a plea to be stimulated creatively and to feel the rush of writing songs that I'm in love [with], rather than songs I'm familiar with,'' Hodgson says, sitting alongside Patterson in their record label's office.
That desire for change underpinned the Grates's move to Brooklyn.
Originally, they fetched up there in July 2009, when they were still touring North America and Europe as a trio. But by the end of the year, when they were due back home for Christmas in Brisbane, they understood Hodgson and Patterson would return in 2010 but Skyring was leaving the band. The drummer, whose departure was only revealed - somewhat clumsily - in recent months, spent a year studying at a culinary school before getting back to playing with Neil Finn's new side project, the Pajama Club. Without their high-school friend, the remaining two returned to Brooklyn to conceive and record an album that would short-circuit their career so far.
''We needed to make a change,'' Patterson stresses. ''We started writing songs in Australia and it just wasn't going anywhere, which was becoming stressful. It was like a nice clean start with no distractions.''
Hodgson adds: ''For me, the biggest thing was to get out of my comfort zone and do something different. When you put yourself out there like that you'll have something to say at the end of the day that you just don't get when you're back in your house in Brisbane.''
The two shared an apartment around the intersection of 23rd Street and 6th Avenue in Brooklyn, where their un-Brisbane-like urban surrounds included an electricity substation, a boarded-up, derelict building and a cemetery. It looked scarier beforehand on Google Street View than it did in person, Patterson says. They joined a food co-operative, bought bikes and got used to the perpetual street noise at night. In a rehearsal room 10 minutes' bike ride away, they would work together five or six days a week, persisting even when little initially eventuated. They were there from January 2010 until March this year. Jamming as a way to start songs proved to be a different matter when there were two people at work as opposed to three.
''There was a directness and honesty that came out when it was just the two of us in the room,'' Hodgson says. ''John could hear what I was saying straightaway. Smashing drums had been a security blanket because, although we worked quicker in the past, for me, lyrically, I knew I had time because no one could hear me in the rehearsal room.''
At one point they invited a bass player to jam with them and she ended up asking Patterson if he could turn his guitar up. As well as Turn Me On, other new tunes, such as Change, document the back-and-forth of the band's creative process.
''We did get a little obsessed with the creative process because we've never thought about it in the past,'' Hodgson says. ''This time around, getting over the fact that we could hear everything made me want to be more honest.''
Their first two albums captured the freedom, offset by confusion, that marks the period between finishing your schooling and venturing into the trappings of adulthood, such as a career or marriage. The Grates, while still exuberant, have moved on. Professionalism has taken hold.
When recording for Secret Rituals finished earlier this year, Hodgson and Patterson returned to Brisbane. Mission accomplished. ''It was time to go home,'' Hodgson says.
The Grates launch Secret Rituals Saturday, June 25 at the Corner Hotel, Swan Street, Richmond. For details, see cornerhotel.com.

Helicopter parents under attack

helicopter

Adults' cruelty to children knows no bounds. Two unrelated events brought this dark knowledge to the fore this week. A group of former child "migrants" from Britain is bringing a class action suit alleging physical and sexual abuse at the Fairbridge Farm School in Molong in central NSW in earlier decades. And 11 Australians were arrested in connection with accessing child pornography on the internet.
As well as these graphic instances of child exploitation and abuse, parents commit terrible sins of cruelty and neglect every day, resulting in rocketing numbers of children being removed from their care.
Yet in the midst of so much cruelty and neglect of children, it is the "helicopter" parent, the so-called hovering, over-involved, and watchful parent, that is frequently depicted as the new threat to today's children's well-being.

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From Time magazine to the high-brow The Atlantic magazine, from women's rags to broadsheet newspapers, everyone wants to beat up on those parents who are seen as overly sensitive to their children's needs. The new parenting mantra is failure is good for children, and so is a little suffering.
In the last year an avalanche of rebuke has rained down on the heads of parents who spend "too much" time on the soccer sidelines, or ferry their children to "too many" activities, or offer "too much" help with homework". Worst of all are those who commit the unpardonable sin of boosting their child's self-esteem by praising work that may not be first-class.
Jean Twenge, of San Diego State University, who published a much quoted study recently that claimed to show young people in their 20s were "quitters" with inflated egos, castigated parents for having created such a lost and useless generation. Parents had given them too much help, robbed them of independence, and told them too often they were special when, in fact, they weren't.
It has been open season on parents ever since; Wikipedia has an extensive listing on the phenomenon of helicopter parenting, also known as over-parenting, though it notes the phenomenon has not been subject to much academic research.
The latest attack comes in the current edition of The Atlantic by writer turned clinical psychologist Lori Gottlieb who comments on a puzzling phenomenon.
While bad parents have been the bread and butter of therapists, with patients quick to blame their mum and dad for their neuroses, and therapists quick to agree with them, the new flock of patients is different, Gottlieb says. The patients say their parents have been wonderful, kind, supportive. But still the patients feel "empty''.
Despite the patients liking their parents and praising them, it turns out the parents are to blame any way. Broadly speaking, you guessed it, they've been too caring, too quick to smooth the way, and spare their children anxiety and disappointment, according to the phalanx of experts Gottlieb consults.
Doubtless there are smothering parents who inflict deep psychological wounds on their children by robbing them of initiative and independence.
But in the pantheon of parenting sinners, the arrows are being targeted at the wrong people. Parents who are harsh and inflexible in dealing with their children, lack warmth, are inconsistent in their discipline, fail to supervise properly, and are not involved much in their children's lives are much more likely to be a risk to their children's well-being and to create young adults with serious behaviour and psychological problems.
A major 2008 research paper, Parenting and Families in Australia, released by the team behind the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, highlights these parenting styles as the problematic ones.
It is common to sneer at parents who ferry their children to sport and ballet, and other activities. But little is ever said of the parent who prefers to sleep in on the weekend or doesn't care enough to ensure their children participate in sport with their friends.
And while the parent who helps "too much" with the homework is frowned upon, the parent who leaves a child to flounder in confusion and to fall behind escapes public disapproval in the new backlash against over-parenting. The uninvolved parent is teaching their child independence, and what failure feels in order to prepare them for the harsh realities of life.
Yes on the continuum of parenting styles, there are bad examples at either end. But most parents muddle through, doing their best. Minor parenting flaws will not condemn children to a lifetime of neuroses.
Most try to socialise their children into acceptable behaviour, try not to spoil them, and understand the difference between being a friend to their child and being a parent. Most parents know that children like and need limits and boundaries, however much they protest.
But in a world where so much cruelty is still dished out to children by parents and other adults, it is surely better to err on the side of kindness than harshness, on the side of involvement than of absence.
If the progeny of these maligned parents eventually end up in a psychologist's room, complaining of feeling "empty", well, it's their problem. Compared to the offspring of cold, angry, uninvolved or chaotic parents, they stand a better chance of working it out.

Jerusalem artichoke broth with truffle dumplings: recipe

Sean Keating's Jerusalem artichoke broth with truffle dumplings.

Sean Keating is the chef at The Terrace restaurant in Launceston. Here he shares one of his vegan recipes.
The first two parts of this recipe can be made the day before.

Thyme stock
750ml of filtered water
Two thirds of a bunch of thyme
2 sticks of celery, 2cm dice
1 celeriac, peeled and diced to 2cm
1 lemon, diced
3 baby onions, peeled and left whole
6 fennel seeds
3 fenugreek seeds

Place all ingredients except thyme in a non-reactive pot and bring to the boil. Reduce to a simmer and let it tumble for 30 minutes. Remove from heat and drop in your thyme. Allow to steep for 30 minutes
Strain and set aside.

Jerusalem artichoke broth
500g of Jerusalem artichoke, peeled and sliced
3 tbspns hazelnut oil
3 cloves of organic garlic, peeled and sliced fine
One third of a bunch of thyme, leaves only
Maldon smoked salt to taste (critical in this recipe that this is the only salt used for flavouring)
Rice milk
Thyme stock
1 tablespoon of Nuttelex

Gently saute garlic and thyme in hazelnut oil. When garlic has softened add Jerusalem artichoke. Now add rice milk so it sits about 1cm under the line of Jerusalem artichoke. Top up with thyme stock.
Gently bring to the boil and reduce heat to tumble. Add Nuttelex and cook to softened texture but do not let the artichokes go mushy. Blitz with a stick blender and strain through a fine sieve.
Set aside, it’s a great job to get out the way the day before

On the DAY

Truffle dumplings
300g of Sebago potatoes
100g of plain flour
50 g of Nuttelex
20 g of fine chopped truffle
Maldon smoked salt to taste (you must grind this before it goes into you dumpling mix)
Ground green peppercorns
Rock salt

Set an oven to 160C. Place Sebago potatoes on bed of rock salt and bake till tender. Remove from oven and split potatoes in half and scoop out flesh. Press this through a ricer or fine sieve; ensure there are no lumpy bits.

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Sift the flour twice. Place it, the Nuttelex, a grind of green peppercorns and the truffle on a bench, forming a well in the centre. Add the warm potato and knead this gently into a dough. Now you may need a little more flour but try to be gentle with the dough and keep the kneading to a minimum.  Place in a piping bag and pipe onto a lightly floured benchtop. Cut the mixture into 2cm lengths and roll into balls.
Refrigerate.

Mushroom mixture
150 g diced saffron milk caps
1 lemon, juiced
4 tblspns of hazelnut oil
Smoked Maldon salt

Heat the oil and saute the diced milk caps gently. You need to be careful with hazelnut oil so don’t over heat it, just let it warm for a gentle fry. Finish with a little salt and a good squeeze of lemon.

PLATING UP
Get a pot of water going to cook your dumplings.  Treat them as you would gnocchi.
Place your creamy Jerusalem artichoke broth on to re-heat.
Do a final taste with your smoked salt.
Once the water is boiling, drop your dumplings in and when they begin to rise to the top they are done. Remove from the water and set aside.
In the centre of a bowl place a pile of sauteed mushrooms. Place four or five truffle dumplings around the bowl.  Pour in your broth and finish with a little truffle oil.

Courtney Love burnt in fire

Injured ... Courtney Love suffers burns in house fire.

Courtney Love has been injured in a house fire in New York.
Firefighters called to the rocker's West Village home believe the blaze was sparked by a candle which ignited curtains in the bedroom of the property on Thursday morning.
Love reportedly tried to put the fire out and burned herself in the process.

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By the time emergency service officials arrived on the scene the fire had been extinguished.
The Hole singer was treated for burns on her hands at the scene. She wasn't hospitalised.
Police are investigating the cause of the fire but have ruled out suspicious circumstances.
Love has been renting the luxury town house on West 10th Street since February. Outfitted with five bathrooms, three bedrooms and six fireplaces, the historic Manhattan home is said to leased to the musician for $US27,000 ($25,600) per month.