Round up 4

• A bunch of posts on Coutorture about value, luxury, and "it" items. And one fun one about how lipsticks are made!

• Susie Bubble reminds me how much I love quilting

• What is visual clutter? [via]

• Mrs. Dean links to an article about Out of body experiences and also about Jan Adriaans, and artist interested in space and materials.

• tee hee, PSFK writes about How Trends Don't Matter in France (or do they?)....

• My favorite blog Things posts a link to photographer Nicholas Whitman, who writes an entry about photography and time.


• The gesture blog! [via]

• Now for my most commercial links: We Are the Market writes about the Vogue Retail Shop and a T-shirt contest for Uniqlo

• Régine conducts an interview with Jessica Findley, a multidisciplinary artist and designer (the best kind!) from Brooklyn.

Masai Barefoot Technology

They call it "physiological footwear". MBTs, as they are known, were invented by Swiss engineer Karl Müller. He found improvement in his back paiin after walking barefoot in the rice paddies of Korea and set out to develop shoes that mimicked walking on soft substances (like the East African savannah).

I would love love love to have a pair of these shoes, but they are so so ugly. If you read the bit on their site about how they work, it's amazing! But look:





And seriously, those are the best I can come up with on the site. I'm sure you can go on there and say, "oh these ones are better than what she picked" but then you will look at what you picked and realize that they are ugly too.

MBT: You could do better than this!! Hire a good designer! I want some awesome shoes that look good AND feel good. (Can you tell I'm taking a footwear seminar right now?)

EDITED to add: Okay, I found some mildly acceptable ones on Zappos, but still not great:

Slow and steady wins the race

from press info

Mary Ping did this great project called Slow and Steady Wins the Race in 2004 that attempted to address the question "How come experimental ideas only exist in the high-priced avant-gardian realm?". Ping promises this collection will be full of high ideas and low cost materials so that the clothes are fiscally accessible. But she limits her production to only 100 pieces of each style. Which seems to me to work against her platform of accessibility. She says, "Slow and Steady Wins the Race intends to slowly open the cap on a more democratic dissemination, promotion and appreciation of clothing." Not gonna happen with such a limited prodution I think. But maybe I am too focused on the physical appreciation of the garments and am not paying enough attention to the ideas.


I think the Men's Issue (No. 9) is the best. It's a perfect little capsule collection (well, maybe if there was a pair of trousers in there). The issue seems to collect the best from the previous issues (except no designer underwear from No. 7!!) and presents them in a cohesive group targeted to a particular audience. It makes me think Ping would do a really great mens collection, not an easy thing in my opinion.

Only the first 9 issues have images of the work. Numbers 10-12 are "coming soon". Ah well, I think maybe soon has come and gone. I would love to see how No. 12 Evening came out.....how did she combine this area of fashion with her mission for the line?


No. 3 Bags got the most press, and I'd bet, sold the best. I also think this issue is important in light of all the talk about copyright issues in the fashion world (also see here and here). Ping's work with these bags highlights why this legislation would be detrimental to fashion work. Ping is working on conceptual ideas that are presented in the form of bags that are part of the design language. If this legislation passed, Ping would have no way to produce work that embodies the ideas she is trying to communicate. There are much better and more thorough writers on this topic in the links above. Or maybe I will devote a whole post to this issue at some point....

Back to SASWTR, I know Ping presented this in diary format for a reason, but I love how these collections feel like exercises. It also seems to me a worthwhile way for Ping to develop her ideas for her mainline, and, more importantly, that she still considers the pieces worth selling and worth wearing. Even more, I wish I had heard about the work when I could have bought some!

Great Eastern Hotel

you make my heart go boom boom, Reception desk at the Great Eastern Hotel


The Great Eastern Hotel near Liverpool Street in London does not have a website of it's own. You can find a desription of it at the Hyatt website, of which chain it is a part. But that information doesn't really do it justice:

LUXURY LONDON HOTEL The five star Great Eastern Hotel, located in The City, London’s financial district, is a quintessential English modern hotel, housed in its historical building adjacent to Liverpool Street railway station. Conveniently located nearby the....blah blah blah blah

The really great thing about the Great Eastern Hotel is the arts projects they support and take part in presenting.




The first project I read about was Adrienne's Room Service by Adrian Howells in June of 2005. The hotel put Adrienne on the room service menu and "A tick in the appropriate box will indicate service with Adrienne included. Adrienne will deliver your order, serve you where required and spend an hour in your company eating or drinking with you." Above image is Adrienne from An Audience With Adrienne.




In 2005 there was also Stay curated by Cherry Smyth. The artists from the show include Giovanna Maria Casetta (image above, and who I adore!), Richard Dedomenici (whose website I can't make sense of to save my life, intrigues me nevertheless), and Emily Cole (who does amazing hot landscapes).




The unusual Cast Party Event took place in 2006. This project intended to make parties and social events more accessible to the visually impaired by going beyond the usual meaning of access (physical barriers) and touch on the difficulties in socializing and networking for the visually impaired. They used mobile phones in an experiment to provide each visually impaired guest their own live, remote commentary of what will be happening at the party.




And Julie Henry's Dyed in the Wool exhibition was on display in May & June of 2006. Henry worked with football supporters to design and knit a cardigan representing their clubs. The show includes team cardigans, photographs and interviews with fans and the outfits, as well as the original knitting patterns. The work references 1970s home-made precursors to the kit fans buy from stores nowadays. I love most this idea that if the kit is homemade it carries more meaning.

I hope the management and staff keep doing this great work as a supporting venue. Personally I love the idea as hotel as venue, it seems so rich with possiblities, and I always have a little inkling in the back of my mind when I develop my own work that maybe something will come together that really belongs at the Great Eastern.

Body Language Book

One of my favorite books is by Marianne Wex. She photographed men's and women's body language and posture. She wrote about the differences between them as well as posed them in reversed poses (men doing feminine postures and vice versa). In many ways it is a very 70s type of feminist book, but for me it is also a book that grants importance to human physicality in a way that's more intellectual than I'd ever encountered before.

The book is called Let's Take Back Our Space: on "Female" and "Male" Body Language and I can find very little information about it online. I've found a bunch articles that reference the work that are good, but don't really talk about it in the way I've found it interesting (in terms of thinking about clothing). Here are a few good links in English (there are loads more in German):

Jo Freeman
Dr. Allen Farber
This one's a bit of a mystery, you have to click through an agreement form....
Daniel Chandler

I believe this is the biblio info from the book I used at the CSM libraries:

Wex, Marianne (1979): ‘Let’s Take Back Our Space’: "Female" and "Male" Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures (trans. Johanna Albert). Berlin: Frauenliteraturverlag Hermine Fees

I didn't write down any of this information myself so I'm not really sure this is correct, but as far as I can tell this is her only book. The pictures on this page are all scans from my photocopies and unfortunately the only pictorial evidence I could find of the Wex's work online or off. If anyone has more information about Marianne Wex and her work I'd love to hear about it!


Woman and man in masculine poses



Woman and man in feminine poses



Woman in masculine poses



Man and two women in feminine poses

piccie round up

Guns & Bugs Wallpaper by Radi Designers
totally reminds me of work from people in my program like Jo Pierce and Rachel Kelly. I don't know where I found this, maybe here?




Another beaut going around. This time by Fiasko Design, via PSFK




Have you seen Aspen Magazine before? I think the first time I saw one was when I was working at the Denver Art Museum. Coudal links. Aside: I am very excited to see the new DAM building this fall (although I've always loved Gio Ponti's North Building very much)! And maybe I will get to see David Adjaye's new MoCA/D too....




Tree
photographs by Myoung Ho Lee

Simple in concept, complex in execution, he makes us look at a tree in its natural surroundings, but separates the tree artificially from nature by presenting it on an immense white ground, as one would see a painting or photograph on a billboard.

Another one via Coudal

Red

A really lovely post about color & dye on Coutorture. I feel like I often just skim through this site (too much "what's hot!" stuff usually), but when there's something good.....

This post was written by Entwinements and she mention a couple of good books: Colors: The Story of Dyes and Pigments and Prehistoric Textiles. First off, Prehistoric Textiles looks amazing! She has also turned me on to the Dyers List which looks like it will be a fabulous resource. And finally, I found her own blog, Entwinements, where you can see her beautiful Shibori work, one of which is the picture here. I also discovered her name is Karen K. Brito.

Swap Meat

I participated in Coudal's Swap Meat this summer (you can too until 8/31!). I sent the above out in May (top, color-changing hanky from this project and bottom, 2001 book which I don't have online anymore....jeez neither of these scans do my work any justice) and today I received these in return:



Both pieces are thrift store finds from Kim G. at Pulp-It. The first piece is several layers of board cut out in progressively smaller shapes. The second is a hand tooled photo album/scrapbook. She wrote a lovely little story about the scrapbook:

I like to imagine that Sam tooled this piece for the photos of his & Rosa's wedding and then she dumped him before the ceremony.

When I first got the package all I could think about was I wonder who got my pieces! But now I suspect that there is a Kim I. out there with my book and a fading handkerchief. I will def. be googling around to see if I can find it....

oldies

Not to repost the same question all over the place already, but I recently saw this post on Mental Floss about what the oldest thing you own is. Liza, who posed the question originally, listed her page from an illuminated manuscript c. 1450. Chris Higgins, who posed the question again on the Mental Floss blog, noted the oldest thing he owned was a wprint probably from the 1950s....but even more he realized most of his belongings were no older than the 90s. This is the part that I think is most interesting. He also questions what is the oldest thing you own that you use regularly! I think a lot of people have old stuff chucked somewhere, but not really in use. He thought probably his apartment was truly the oldest thing he used regularly (1917).

The one thing I don't think either of them have touched on that interests me is how have the old things you own and use changed since you got them? I wonder if the more they change the more attached you become to them. See also Khoi Vinh and my post on patina.

I think the oldest things I own must be a children's book (Wizard of Oz or Waterbabies perhaps) or a piece of furniture, but I don't have dates on any of that stuff handy, or at all on furniture, and I've never been really bothered to find out. Definitely no books from 1450 in my collection!

we feel fine

Via PSFK I have been looking at We Feel Fine a website that I can only describe by copying and pasting a blurb from their website (much as PSFK has done) and slap up a few screenshots. It's impossible not to spend hours on this site once you start to dig around.....

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.)....The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day.

So fun to get caught up in sorting and searching for where feelings happen and when. It feels like such a well of delicious raw data. I hope swimming around in it will be inspirational.

The mess of feelings:


The top three feelings are 1. Better, 2. Bad, and 3. Good!


A few about feelings and clothing came up while I was on:


I've also been on the Learning to Love You More website today, which is another sort of repository of raw emotion. The project is all assignments for other people to complete and the results are displayed on the website. The assignments are still listed on the website and you can still participate. Some of my favorites:

I wish I had the guts to do this one!


I would love to do a whole collection like this...


I wonder what my family's responses to this one would be...ha ha!

Link round up 3

• I'm going to be doing some footwear design this fall, so of course I'm devouring First Pullover

• How to tie the perfect tie

• Susie Bubble's Look at me, Don't look at me post.

• PSFK reports on Matt Hoyle's new work. Also a good post on the slowing of fast fashion.

• Miranda July does The Thing.

• Did I mention this already? Mental Floss posts about this book.

• DIY Shrinky Dinks!!

• Signs a bit like the idea behind my thermochromatic embroidered bonnets

• Why fashion copyright is stupid (my words, not the title of the article!)

• Just discovered Mrs. Deane!

• I'm listening to Henri Salvador right now.

• Someone else hates McQueen's luggage for Samsonite as much as I do.

Cloth

Much like every other person who sews, I have loads of cloth. But I also have a special stash that I have saved since I was a little girl. Most of it the pieces are too small to make anything with, but I hang on to it just the same. Above is a sampling.

Top left: a sleeve pattern piece that my mother cut out in order to make a smock top for herself, but never actually made. I loved this fabric when I was little and it's one of the first pieces of fabric I ever coveted. When I inherited my mother's notion and sewing tools I took these few scraps too. Turns out she started to sew the top, but the bobbin thread kept snarling and so she put it away, I assume to sort out later. I took out the big snarly threads myself many years later.

Top right: a piece of my parents old comforter. I had the comforter myself for many years after my parents divorced, but eventually it was worn out. So I took off the top piece you see here and kept it to make something out of. I made a sweet unstructured jacket during my MA when I was thinking about our emotional attachments to clothes. I'll try to post a picture of the jacket itself one of these days.

Bottom left: the first fabric I ever made. I found a random haiku generator online, ran some of my journal entries through it, loved the haikus so I laid them out in a great font called Cholla and printed them onto heat transfer paper to put on this crappy beige broadcloth. I made quite a few early fabrics this way and I have several scraps from my favorites (one I made a great book cover out of!).

Bottom right: an old sheet from the house I grew up in. I recently took this home from my dad because all of the rest of the set finally disappeared. I made a one piece sort of poncho dress out of it. I guess I should put up a pic of that one too.

Japanese Illustrations

When I was working in London one of the pattern cutters I worked with brought in some of her textbooks from when she was in school in Japan. Of course, I couldn't read any of the instructions, but the books were surprisingly informative. They were also full of some interesting fashion illustrations. Unfortunately I never got any name or author info about the books, but here are a few scans from my photocopies:






I love the girl in the tie, and of course the tiny-headed women, they are so 80s French! The girls with the tiny heads and giant arms frighten me a bit, but somehow they have a certain goodness to them (perhaps that jolie-laide Susie Bubble was talking about yesterday?) Lovely, no?

vvork

I love the work on vvork. The site is a bit of a mystery to me, I've emailed mail@vvork.com and I clicked on the links in the links sidebar and looked around, but I'm still not exactly sure who does all the work to find all this magical stuff. But it's really varied and really really great. Some of my favorites:


Shoes by Galogaza


Construction wallpaper by Antoine & Manuel


Abandoned suitcase sculptures by Piek!


Picture People by Kristofer Paetau (all kinds of cool photo projects & you can sign up for a mailing list)


Digital Cocks by Matthias Herrmann

Iqons faves

Every now and then I have time to tool around Iqons, the fashion industry's answer to MySpace, and I always find someone or something new and interesting. Unfortunately, even when I invite someone into my (ill-named) Entourage I still don't feel like I really get a chance to "meet" them....maybe the guestbook feature is just not used enough yet on Iqons. Or maybe I'd better just start using it myself!


Emma McCorquodale


Stacey Tester
(okay, not the best picture.....but I kind of like it!)


Carla Fernandez
(also here)


Tekla Knaust
(also here)


Lindipoo! Lindipoo has almost no info on her page but I find her so compelling! Maybe because she invited me into her "Entourage" first...maybe it's also here name: oh Lindipoo!


Wendy & Jim
(also here)


Eley Kishimoto
(also here)

link round up 2

• See Style Bubble's piece about a really lovely competition from Boxfresh (I have two of there jackets that I LOVE (and surprisingly bought in a charity shop in London)) called Cut and Paste. Nice, right?

• B612 Magazine: New magazine from Amsterdam on my list to order the premier issue....looks interesting

• MissBehave magazine: Actually not sure this is a magazine for me, but I don't think I can resist a magazine run by a girl who subscribed to the Weekly World News!

• Emily Davidow: New on my RSS feed....

• Fantasy & Clothes Go Together: "Personally, I have to admit that I almost exclusively buy clothing that is non function for my regular life to the point of absurdity." Me too!

• I receive the Draper's Newsletter (I can only link to their blog of similar content), and in the July 31st issue they had a great reprint of an article about menswear from 1902, an excerpt:

What is worn? For the most part, grey. A great quietude seems to have overtaken fashionable London

• Evil Knievel talking about re-enactments.....oh man, I WISH I could go to this!

Patina Power

Marriage Shirt (just a few weeks in)

A great post about Designed Deterioration on designer Khoi Vinh's site Subtraction. Very excellent comments as well that mention Wabi Sabi (and a recommended book about it), Isaac Asimov, and Nazis....

TAXI Magazine

I was looking through my bookshelves last night and I started flipping through my old stash of Taxi Magazines. Oh how I loved this mag! It helped form all of my early tastes, and I couldn't find anything about it online. Well, okay, one picture, a few ebay sales, and lots of mentions in online resumes.



People often talk about how Mirabella & Sassy Magazines were so influential, but for me Taxi brought a real intellectual aesthetic to a girl in a small town. Taxi brought me Last Exit to Brooklyn (which I asked for and received as a Christmas present to my embarrassment after I'd read it), Jean-Paul Gaultier, Yohji Yamamoto, coquilles St. Jacques (for which I made my father hunt down real scallop shells!), endive, Tarot cards, and belly dancing...



I would still wear these today!


Even looking back, the editorial team at Taxi had spot on taste for things that were truly quality and stand the test of time. I so want that wicker chair on the lower left, and with the one above it you can see how current furniture design relates.



Even the spot illustrations are great!



And of course, the advertising is easy to appreciate!

Hi + Low

An new addiction: Hi + Low by art director Abby Clawson Low. First, let me say I love her categories! Simple and useful where my labels feel messy and I'm still not sure how helpful they will ever be to me.

Some of my favorite posts so far:


ART


DESIGN


HI


LOW


NEW


OLD

veils

A post about veils. I don't really know anything about the website that inspired this post, but last year I was really interested in veils throughout culture and history beyond their religious use. The juxtaposition between the hidden and the displayed, public and private, and precious versus plebian makes the veil a powerful tool, if you ask me.

Other veil sites:
• Wikipedia

• The Painted Veil with Greta Garbo
• How to make a veil
• The Chap on veils (pic at top from The Chap)
• Hats and veils in general.

Audience participation

Photo by J.J. Tiziou

In art magazine Esopus I read about a dance performance called CELL put on by the Headlong Dance Theater. It attempts to create a performance for one audience member at a time. The piece asks some really interesting questions like 'Who is part of the performance? Why is everyone always on their phone? Am I being watched?' The performance culminates with the audience member engulfed in a private dance that is all their own. The piece premiered at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival in 2006. There were 200 audience members overall (which means the piece was performed 200 times!).

I think there are a lot more interesting questions that this piece addresses like: Why is the connection between maker and audience so important?
Why is this group trying to heighten or change that connection?
Where is the line between performer and voyeur (presumably the audience of one is still watching to some degree although s/he is also participating)?

link round up

so. many.

When I started writing online, I thought I would post something everyday that inspired me, or was relevant to my interests (that I would normally just bookmark and never look at again). But I'm finding that there are dozens of sites and links and posts every week that I want to remember and I can't do justice to. There's no time to properly write about them all. I think every Friday will have to be a link round up of all the other pages I'd like to write more about but have just run out of time. Because there will be a whole new crop next week....



Máquina desempolvadora
Adriana Salazar interviewed by Régine Debatty (lovelovelove)

...a girl who creates delicate and elegant (but slightly ludicrous) machines that smoke, tie shoes, pull thread through the hole of a needle, relentlessly measure walls, switch the light on and off, on and off, on and off, dust walls, cry while another one dries its tears....

I am a rabid convert to Style Bubble!






• Acne (here)
• Sruli Recht (here)
• Nova Magazine
• Couture Lab (here)
• I'm not sure I agree with her definititon of label-ista (I would say it's someone who cares only for labels because of their cache not because of any meaning a label carries)
• This one reminds me of my own wardrobe documentation for my MA research
• I love the way she talks about this jacket & memory


I've been reading PSFK a lot lately too. They post a lot, and while it's not always stuff interesting to me, when it's good it's very good!
• The WHY (my personal favorite...)
• Objects that age (my personal fave....no really!)
• Why looks matter
• Kate Betts on how fashion trickles up
• Smart Fabric




Just pretty from Kako Ueda via Phantasmaphile



The beauty of scale

Coroflot

A perfect ending to my thesis posts, I think, a link to a new profile of my work in Coroflot Magazine. You'll have to click the download button on the lower right of this page to access Issue Two, I'm afraid. Coroflot is a great job search site that has grown from a tiny ID group to expand across all design areas in the last few years. The magazine is supposed to be bi-monthly but this is only the second issue....I hope it takes off, it's a lovely idea. And the art director Andrea Paustenbaugh seems capable of great work.

Two other artists I loved in this issue with me are Mihoko Ouchi and Wouter Widdershoven, both industrial designers, Ouchi in NYC and Widdershoven in Eindhoven, NL.


Ouchi's Knit Lamp


Widdershoven's Daniël table

Actually, I do have a few thoughts about posting my thesis. I'll post those tomorrow and then I will move on to others' work!