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Ola hires ex-Jaguar, Aston Martin designer Wayne Burgess

Ola hires ex-Jaguar, Aston Martin designer Wayne Burgess

The Ola app is displayed on a smartphone.

Mint | Hindustan Times | Getty Images

Ola, an Indian competitor to Uber that makes its own electric vehicles, announced Tuesday that it has hired Jaguar Land Rover veteran Wayne Burgess to lead vehicle design.

Burgess, who has worked at Jaguar Land Rover for nearly 20 years on models such as the XF, F-Type, F-Pace SUV and XE, has joined Ola Electric’s electric vehicle business, where he will lead design for the company’s entire EV product Area that includes scooters, bicycles, cars, and other vehicles.

Before Jaguar Land Rover, Burgess worked for premium British automakers such as Aston Martin, Bentley and Rolls Royce. He worked on the Bentley Arnage in 1998 and on the Aston Martin DB9 in the mid-2000s.

Bhavish Aggarwal, Chairman and Group CEO of Ola, said in a statement that Burgess “will bring global appeal and design aesthetics to our electric vehicle transforming industry”. Burgess said he looks forward to leading a team “that will work to create state-of-the-art electric vehicles for the world”.

Ola is the largest hail shipping company in India and competes with Californian heavyweight Uber in several countries around the world.

Headquartered in Bangalore, the company was founded by Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati in 2010 and plans to launch its first electric scooters in the coming months. These vehicles are more like mopeds (motorcycles without a gearbox) than the e-scooters from companies like Bird, Lime, Voi and Tier.

The Ola Scooter is made in the Ola Futurefactory in Tamil Nadu, India, which is still under construction. If Ola is fully functional, it says that 10 million Ola scooters will be manufactured in the facility every year.

Ola spun off its electric vehicle business into a separate entity in February 2019 with a funding volume of $ 56 million. In addition to electric vehicles, charging solutions, electric vehicle batteries and the development of an infrastructure that will enable commercial electric vehicles to operate on a large scale are also being developed.

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Business

Fred Segal, Designer Who Commodified California Cool, Dies at 87

Fred Segal, Designer Who Commodified California Cool, Dies at 87

Fred Segal, whose fashion boutiques became a Los Angeles landmark selling figure-hugging jeans and chambray shirts to Bob Dylan, Farah Fawcett and the Beatles, died Thursday in Santa Monica, California. He was 87 years old.

The cause was complications from a stroke, said a spokeswoman for his family.

Mr. Segal became one of the best-known designers and retailers on the West Coast in the 1960s, shaping the image of Southern California fashion as airy, sexy and relaxed. His ivy-covered shop became a meeting place for fashionistas, Hollywood actors, and well-known artists and musicians. For tourists, it was often a sightseeing tour right next to Grauman’s Chinese theater and the Hollywood sign.

Recognition…Family photo

Mr. Segal opened his first shop in 1960. According to the company’s website, it was a 700-square-foot space on Santa Monica Boulevard that sold jeans, chambray shirts and pants, velvets, and flannels.

In 1961, Mr. Segal and his nephew, Ron Herman, opened a half-size store on Melrose Avenue, selling only jeans that they sold for $ 19.95 a pair – a price they were at the time when they were men was still practically unknown, was practically unknown was wearing suits and jeans that normally sold for $ 3 a pair.

“My concept was that people wanted to be comfortable, casual and sexy, so I thought it would work, and obviously it worked,” Segal said in a 2012 interview with Haute Living magazine.

People flocked to the store to buy the jeans, spurred on by celebrities like Jay Sebring, the barber who was one of the inspirations for Warren Beatty’s character in Shampoo, who wore tight, flared jeans and a fitted shirt he had bought from Mr. Segal. Mr. Segal’s customers soon included the Beatles, Elvis Presley and Diana Ross, as well as members of the Jackson Five and Jefferson Airplane.

“When I first came to LA in the late 1970s, everyone was talking about two things: Gucci bags and Fred Segal,” writer Pleasant Gehman told the New York Times in 2001.

His designs were characterized by fits that were unusual for the time. The trousers were cut for men to drop low on the hips, for example, and his stores also sold fitted French T-shirts and Danskin jerseys.

In addition to his designs, Mr. Segal was part of a small group of retailers at the time – others included Tommy Perse, Linda Dresner, and Joan Weinstein – who pioneered the concept of working closely with designers and matching the designers’ clothes in their stores sell, said Ikram Goldman, the owner of Chicago boutique Ikram.

“You had an exquisite eye,” said Ms. Goldman. “These are the people who discovered talent and brought it to light in ways that – before Instagram, before social media, before the news hit you – introduced collections you hadn’t seen before.”

In 2006, a New York Times reporter described Mr. Segal as “the outfitter of those Hollywood fantasies, selling uniforms of expensive shirts and impossibly thoughtful blue jeans and kitten heels to the city’s wealthy residents and celebrities.”

Frederick Mandel Segal was born in Chicago on August 16, 1933. His parents, David and Helen Segal, had multiple jobs, according to the family spokeswoman, and Mr. Segal grew up poor.

Mr. Segal never went to fashion school. He worked as a traveling shoe salesman and shone in Venice Beach – two jobs where he could watch people and develop a sense of what buyers wanted.

Tired of traveling, he decided to open his first shop in 1960.

Mr. Segal owed his early success to his ability to be honest with customers.

“I learned at a very young age that the non-competitive space has integrity,” Segal told Haute Living. “When I was selling to my customers in my store and they came to buy this or that, when they put on an outfit and asked for my advice, I would sometimes say, ‘Take this off, don’t even buy this, it would be ridiculous , you don’t even look good in it. ‘That is really deep honesty. You don’t find that in the store, you know? “

After all, there were Fred Segal stores in Taiwan and in Bern, the capital of Switzerland. In 2015, the brand opened a store in Tokyo that also included an on-site food truck selling Mexican street corn, shrimp on a roll, and hot dogs along with Coca-Cola and Corona.

The name Fred Segal became so popular that it was mentioned casually in films such as “Clueless” and “Legally Blonde”.

Mr. Segal is survived by his wife Tina; five children, Michael, Judy, Sharon, Nina, and Annie; 10 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Mike Ives contributed to the coverage and Jack Begg contributed to the research.

Categories
Business

Pierre Cardin, ground-breaking designer, dies

Pierre Cardin, ground-breaking fashion designer, dies

Designer Pierre Cardin poses during the launch of the new Haute Couture collection by Pierre Cardin Paris at Maxim on November 26, 2013 in Paris.

Richard Bord | Getty Images

Pierre Cardin, who in his more than seven decades in fashion brought geometric shapes to haute couture and named everything from clothing to furniture and perfume to pens, died Tuesday. He was 98 years old.

“It is with great sadness that the members of the Academy of Fine Arts announce the death of their colleague Pierre Cardin,” tweeted the French Academy of Fine Arts.

Cardin died in a hospital in Neuilly, west of Paris, his family told Agence France-Presse.

Cardin switched from the world of bespoke high fashion for private customers to ready-to-wear designs for the masses.

“You said Pret-a-Porter would kill your name and it saved me,” Cardin once said.

Cardin was born on July 2, 1922, the son of a wealthy wine merchant near Venice. When he was two years old, he and his family moved from fascist Italy to France.

Cardin was only 14 years old when he started as an apprentice tailor. At the age of 23 he moved to Paris, studied architecture and worked at the Paquin fashion house and later at Elsa Schiaparelli. In the French capital he met the film director Jean Cocteau and helped design masks and costumes for the 1946 film “La Belle et La Bete”.

He switched to Christian Dior in 1946 and worked as a pattern tailor on the female “New Look” fashion of the post-war period. Four years later he opened his own fashion house and designed costumes for the theater.

In 1953 he presented his first women’s collection and the following year he opened his first women’s boutique, Eve, and unveiled the Bubble dress. The garment, a loose fitting dress that gathers at the waist and hem and balloons on the thighs, has been recognized internationally. Soon his fashion was worn by such bold names as Eva Peron, Rita Hayworth, Elizabeth Taylor, Brigitte Bardot, Jeanne Moreau, Mia Farrow and Jacqueline Kennedy.

Pierre Cardin at the opening of the Musee Pierre Cardin on November 13, 2014 in Paris.

Pascal Le Segretain | Getty Images

In 1957 he traveled to Japan and was one of the first European designers to explore Asian influences. He later pioneered China to break out of its drab, militaristic Mao Zedong look.

Also in 1957, he opened another Parisian boutique, this time for men by the name of Adam, with colorful ties and printed shirts. He later made the iconic collarless suits for the Beatles and helped attract clients like Gregory Peck. Rex Harrison and Mick Jagger.

“Before me, no designer made clothes for men, only tailors,” Cardin said in an interview with Agence France-Presse in 2009. “Today, the image of designers is more focused on men than women, right or wrong. So I was right 40 or 50 years ago. “

In 1959, he shocked the fashion world by presenting a ready-to-wear show at a department store, Printemps in Paris. After the show, he was expelled from the Elite Chambre Syndicale, the French association of haute couture designers. (He was later reinstated.)

The French fashion designer Pierre Cardin opened his own fashion house in 1950.

Reg Lancaster | Getty Images

Over-the-top fashion from out of this world

With the advent of the US-Russia space race in the late 1950s and 1960s, he launched the “Cosmocorps” collection – exaggerated unisex fashions from around the world. His space age look included helmets, google, tunics and over-the-knee boots.

“My favorite piece of clothing is what I invent for a life that doesn’t yet exist, the world of tomorrow,” he said.

Or as he put it in an interview with AFP 2009: “Fashion and design are not the same. Fashion can be worn. Design can be uncomfortable and unpopular, but it’s creative. So design is the real value.”

He pioneered branding in the 1970s, giving his name to virtually everything, including automobiles – Cardin AMX Javelin from American Motors Corp. from 1971 – perfume, pens, cigarettes and even sardines. He has been called a “Branding Visionary” by the New York Times. A 2002 article found that around 800 products bearing his name were sold in more than 140 countries for $ 1 billion in annual sales.

In 1981, he bought one of Paris’ most iconic names, Maxim’s Restaurant, for more than $ 20 million.

“I’ve done everything! I even have my own water! I make perfumes, sardines. Why not? During the war, I would have rather smelled the scent of sardines than perfume. If someone had asked me to make toilet paper, I would do it. Why not? ”he said in a 2002 interview with The Times.

He loved using geometric and strange designs. He developed a fabric, cardine, to emboss abstract shapes on garments. One of his residences was the Palais Bulles (Bubble Palace), a bizarre collection of circular structures – a la “The Flintstones” meets “The Jetsons” – overlooking the Mediterranean Sea near Cannes.

In May 2003, Pierre Cardin celebrated his 80th birthday and 50 years of fashion design in his Palais Bulles.

Alain Benainous | Getty Images

He also owned and restored the castle of the Marquis de Sade in Provence, where he held concerts and opera performances. “Cardin has a perfect angle,” said Architectural Digest in a 2007 story of the restoration of the castle, which was originally built in the 15th century.

Although Cardin was gay, he had a five-year affair with Moreau, “the queen of French new wave cinema”. During the affair, according to The Hollywood Reporter, he had a relationship with longtime artistic director and life partner Andre Oliver. Oliver died in 1993.

Cardin’s fascination with space led him to NASA, where he tried on an Apollo 11 spacesuit in 1971, two years after the first moon landing. In 2019, 50 years after the first moon landing, the Brooklyn Museum hosted a Cardin retrospective. In the catalog he was asked about his vision of fashion half a century in the future:

“In 2069 we will all be walking on the moon or Mars with my ‘Cosmocorps’ ensembles. Women will wear plexiglass bell hats and tube clothing. Men will wear elliptical pants and kinetic tunics.”

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