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German singer Ute Lemper walks the runway for Max Mara’s resort fashion show . Photograph: Daniele Venturelli/Getty

Publication: The Guardian
Date: 4 Jun 2019
By: Jess Cartner-Morley

Neues museum catwalk show also paid homage to Marlene Dietrich’s gender fluidity

German singer Ute Lemper walks the runway for Max Mara’s resort fashion show . Photograph: Daniele Venturelli/Getty
Women over 40, once invisible in the fashion world, are taking centre stage. The German singer Ute Lemper, 55, and the model and ocean conservation activist Carolyn Murphy, 44, were the stars of a Max Mara catwalk show at the Neues museum in Berlin on Monday evening. They continue a trend for indomitable older women headlining fashion’s most glamorous events, in which Diana Ross, 75, has performed at Christian Dior’s recent gala show and Stevie Nicks, 71, sang with Harry Styles at a Gucci event in Rome last week.

Max Mara, the quiet giant of Italian fashion with an annual turnover of €1.5bn (£1.3bn), has always dressed professional adult women rather than It girls; what has changed is that this identity is no longer a barrier to being a seriously glamorous player in the industry. “Everyone in fashion talks about empowerment now, but in Max Mara’s case it is hardwired in. Max Mara was founded in the 1950s with a clear idea of dressing a new class of women who would be going into the workplace,” the British designer Ian Griffiths said after the show.

But Griffiths, who has helmed the brand for three decades, views the vogue for empowerment as a fashion buzzword as problematic. “I think brands like ours need to be very careful because I’m now realising that the progress that has been made in gender equality is so much more fragile than we thought. So if you say that your clothes are about empowerment, you must produce clothes that genuinely are empowering. The message of these clothes is about a woman who is determined to succeed and to overcome wearing clothes in which she will be taken seriously.”

Muse for this collection was native Berliner Marlene Dietrich, courageous in a gender fluidity that was decades ahead of her time. Dietrich flouted convention, without forfeiting either status or adoration. “She wore a man’s suit in the 1930s, but she was still one of the most highly paid actresses in the world,” said Griffiths. With sharply tailored trouser suits and ice-white satin blouses, the collection also nodded to David Bowie. “As an art school boy in Manchester in the 1980s, Berlin was everything, and when we thought of Berlin, we thought of Bowie.”

The logic for a splashy out-of-season show is that the Max Mara bottom line depends on coats. The collections now shown with great fanfare in May and June, known as “resort” and “cruise”, arrive on shop floors in November. So despite their archaic names, which are anchored in a bygone age of winter holidays, they are perfect for showcasing coats.

The show was the first to be staged in the Neues museum, which stood derelict for 60 years after being bombed in the second world war before being reconstructed by the British architect David Chipperfield.

The camel coats – Max Mara’s signature – were softened to a chalky sandstone to compliment the wide double staircase in the museum’s central hall, which formed the first part of the catwalk. The models all wore flat shoes, to better navigate the stairs with confidence – except Ute Lemper, who at her own insistence wore tall spike heels under her wide-legged trouser suit.

Max Mara made headlines last year when Nancy Pelosi wore a red Max Mara coat, which she had previously worn for Barack Obama’s second inauguration, for a key standoff with President Trump. “I like to think that she chose to wear that coat because it means something to her emotionally,” commented Griffiths. “I hope that it gave her a psychological boost, which is what clothes can do.”

Click here to see the article online, with other amazing MaxMara photos

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Ute Lemper. / EFEPublication: El Correo de Andalucia
Date: 29 May, 2019
By: JUAN JOSÉ ROLDÁN

Ute Lemper salda una deuda pendienteLa sensacional cantante y actriz alemana regresó a Sevilla con un espectáculo centrado en el arte y la vida de Marlene Dietrich (****)

En una secuencia de La vie en rose Edith Piaf, interpretada por Marion Cotillard, deja caer la silla en la que está sentada en un restaurante de Nueva York cuando Marlene Dietrich se acerca a ella para conocerla. Una diosa presentándose y el impulso nervioso obró el incidente. Es una emocionante escena que explica la merecida fascinación que ejercía la protagonista de Marruecos y Arizona en toda persona que la conocía, en la pantalla que la mimaba y en los registros sonoros que también la inmortalizaron…

Click here for full review online

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Publication: Reutlinger General-Anzeiger
Date: 25 May, 2019
By: ARMIN KNAUER

Mit Temperament und Stimmgewalt: Ute Lemper gastiert bei der Württembergischen Philharmonie

REUTLINGEN. Ute Lemper bei der Württembergischen Philharmonie: Das ist schon eine Schlagzeile! »Die Lemper«, sie ist eine Legende, sie wird wie eine Diva verehrt, auch wenn ihr das gegen den Strich geht. Eigentlich bräuchte sie sich nur vorne an die Bühnenkante zu stellen, ein bisschen Stimmsamt auszurollen und ansonsten die Aura einer Frau wirken zu lassen, die mit knapp 57 alles erreicht hat im Chanson- und Musicalfach.

Aber Ute Lemper hat ganz anderes vor an diesem Donnerstagabend in der Reutlinger Stadthalle. Sie hat noch keine drei Zeilen von Marguerite Monnots keck neckendem Chanson »Milord« gesungen, da ist klar, das wird hier keine altersweise Weihestunde, da ist eine fest entschlossen, das Bühnentier in sich rauszulassen…

Click here for pdf of full review

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Source: PrideLife (Entertainment News)
Date: May 20, 2019

Thirty-one years ago Marlene Dietrich’s life was all but over, writes Cary Gee. She lived alone, apart from her memories of a life that more than rivalled any film script, in Paris where she saw and spoke to virtually no one. All the more extraordinary then, that she should have reached out to a young Ute Lemper, then playing the role of Lola in the Blue Angel, a role that Marlene had made famous 60 years earlier.

The two women, one whose career had ended, one on the cusp of international stardom, spoke for three hours. Their conversation forms the basis for Lemper’s new one-woman show, in which she spectacularly revives Dietrich’s life and legacy for a generation too young to recall the screen legend’s luminosity.

Such is the connection Lemper shares with Dietrich that at times, Rendezvous with Marlene feels less like a tribute, and more like a séance.

Both women left their “Heimat”, albeit under very different circumstances, to pursue an international career. Both returned to a re-unified Germany, although, in Marlene’s case, not until after her death. The emotional toll Dietrich paid for her estrangement has never been satisfactorily explored until now.

Through the candid recollections of Dietrich, by this time too old to care about the effect her words might have on the living, and Lemper’s masterful interpretation of the songs Dietrich made famous, among them gems by Dietrich’s chief collaborator Frederic Hollaender, including Illusions, Boys in the Backroom and Lola, the many layers of Marlene are peeled back: screen siren (or was she in fact a Hydra?), chanteuse and famed cabaret artiste, but also emigrée, a captain in the US army, humanitarian, and rapacious lover of both men and women.

In an exceptional performance and an outrageous act of necromancy Lemper fully occupies Marlene’s complicated femininity and sexuality. Lemper’s only difficulty, as an exceptionally fine and distinct singer herself, is to fully inhabit Dietrich’s limited contralto on songs more associated with male singers, such as One for my Baby (And One More for the Road).

The show, simply staged among packing cases synonymous with a life lived on the move, and backed by Vana Gierig’s excellent band, opens with Pete Seeger’s Where Have All the Flowers Gone? Such is the directness of Lemper’s lament you suspect only she knows the answer, but is at its most moving when Marlene/ Ute sings in her native German, or in her adopted French.

I suspect there wasn’t a dry eye in the house as Marlene brought the first half of the show to a close, her face to the wall, as she sang Marie, Marie, although with tears in my eyes myself, I’m probably not the most reliable witness.

Throughout, Lemper directly and indirectly reminds us not just of Marlene’s heroism in standing up to the Nazis, but of the internationalism she shared with Lemper and without which neither star could shine quite so brightly.

On no account, says Lemper, must we allow neo-nationalism to turn the sky black. There is so much more to Rendezvous with Marlene than mere storytelling and songs, but if that’s all you desire then what stories, and what songs they are!

Keep an eye open for the return of Rendezvous with Marlene, planned for later this year, and you’ll be certain to find yourself Falling in Love Again.

Astonishing.

Click here to see article online