Biorhythm

When I was growing up, my dad and I sometimes went on road trips. To visit family mostly, which meant going to or through New Jersey. And there was one rest stop we would always brake for. This rest stop had a machine that read your Biorhythms! You would put in a quarter or 50 cents, enter your information, and you would get a printout like the one above. The science of Biorhythms actually goes back to the turn of the 20th century, and was of great interest to Freud while he was developing his psychoanalytic concepts. The back of the card explained how to read your Bio-chart. I wish I could find a snapshot of the machine itself. When it was calculationg your Bio-chart it made this great bleepy calculate-y noise. Sometime in my late teens, maybe when we were visiting colleges, the machine was no longer at our regular pit stop. I found this Biorhythm while I was cleaning out my closet to bring out the winter clothes....

There's a beautiful book explaining Biorhythms here:



Or you can get your own Biorythm readout by downloading a program for your PC (note: it's Windows only so I haven't tried it and I can't vouch for it's worth or if it even works at all). You can also try entering your data on this one for a quick readout.

The saddest objects

A Mental Floss post mentioned the book Owl at Home, by Arnold Lobel who:

sets out to brew a pot of “tear-water tea”–and, naturally, in order to do so he must imagine and then dwell upon the saddest objects possible

This reminded me of a game Justin & I sometimes play with his brother Cory, called the "Sad Game". It started out one night before Thanksgiving when we were all driving up to a cabin in the mountains for a long weekend with family and, as we were zooming down the highway, we all caught a glimpse of a man sitting alone in a fast food restaurant. Justin said he bet the man was divorced, and I followed he probably wasn't allowed to spend time with his kids unsupervised. Cory quietly added that he was also an only child whose adoptive parents had passed away in a car accident. When he was a teenager, Justin finished. And so the "Sad Game" was born. Sad theories grow and grow until the listeners can't bear it anymore and beg for the game to end. I don't think any of have even read Owl at Home.

Fiesta in Pamplona

Last night I rewatched the movie Talk to Her and it reminded me of this book about Pamplona that Justin picked up in a charity shop. The book and the movie are just full of great images of the clothes and the ritual that surrounds clothes in bullfighting.



The beautiful fabrics and rigid silhouettes affect the form of the bullfighter... and the state of mind as well, I'd bet.



And look at this guy! Just the regular Joe-about-town at the Fiesta.


The book, Fiesta in Pamplona has a cover of a Picasso drawing/engraving. The photographs are all by Inge Morath.

phonics illustrations

Yes, it's been a busy day (outerwear! design card deadline!), but I've had these illustrations in my visual journal for ages. They are from my phonics book in elementary school. I loved to think up all kinds of narratives for the bottom picture...who lived in which building, whether the man on the raft was the woman under the umbrella, who would join the girl swinging (or who left her to swing alone), why no one was on the bus....more deep thoughts throughout the week, I'm sure.

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

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.

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?