James Smith sot by Thomas Lohr for SLEEK MAGAZINE.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Friday, February 18, 2011
Issue No. 47: TONIGHT!
I am showing work at
THE MORPHO GALLERY
5216 N. Damen Ave.
Chicago, IL. 60625
773.878.4255
6 - 10
Wine, beer & light refreshments will be served.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Issue No. 45: aoife
I have a new favorite teen blogger. Her name is aoife. She didn't capitalize it on her blog, so neither will I. Although I am unsure if it a self-imposed grammatical ruling or if it was a choice made appropriate to the aesthetics of context or that particular moment in history. However, ANTEVORTA is a visual treasure trove peppered with sonic delights. aoife has a level of taste and expression far beyond seventeen years of life. She posted this stunning photograph:
Discuss....
Discuss....
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Issue No. 44: Another Response to Tavi Gevinson
Tavi Gevinson of the Style Rookie reviewed Miu Miu's Spring/Summer 2011 Collection on January 21. She said:
At the Miu Miu salon last month, Vogue's Andre Leon Talley declared a scene from Sofia Coppola's Somewhere to be the most accurate depiction of the state of American culture in recent years. The main character, a burnt out Hollywood actor, is sitting in his hotel room bed while a pair of twin strippers perform a pole dancing routine at the foot of it. He stares straight ahead but is clearly removed from the setting. You get the feeling that this lifestyle has been so routine for him that it has lost any chronology or reason and become one big blur.
The scene drags on for so long that the audience may begin to identify, and that was how I felt with Miu Miu's imagery overload for Spring. The exaggerated cowboy graphics, garish 4th of July colors, and abundance of silver and gold were overbearing to the point of it being hard to differentiate the looks from one another, but the more I came back to the collection, the more I recognized its wit. As Miuccia Prada told style.com, the showiness was a reflection of "everybody's obsession with being famous." Flashy stars plastered on printed skirts and leather jackets recalled the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and the placements of other graphics were appropriately perverse. My favorite looks were the long silk dresses printed with illustrations of swans and snakes, representing in my mind some kind of two-dimensional fairytale. It should also be noted that the printed tops have adorable star-shaped buttons that were totally taken from a macaroni and bead picture frame I made in preschool.
Prada wasn't necessarily giving an opinion on this culture of fading Hollywood stars falling asleep to pole dancers in their room at the Chateau Marmont, just shedding some extremely bright spotlights on it. I still go back and forth between finding the boxy jackets distastefully tacky and tackily fun, but that's also how I feel about Jersey Shore, so I guess the idea was conveyed successfully! And, once again: star buttons.
She included these lovely photos:
MY RESPONSE
Everyone seems to be overlooking the obvious references to design motifs taken from the Arts & Crafts, Art Nouveau and Art Deco Movements popular in fashion, decor and virtually all product design from about 1905 - 1925. 1920s style is also reiterated in the cut of the pleated, long-sleeved dresses and tunic-like tops with Deco-esque embellishments and detailing. Not to mention the use of spats in the construction of the shoes. The use of the snake (Biblically symbolizing temptation and evil was being appropriated as a badge of the Libertine before the days of Talkies) and the swan (symbolizing grace, poise and elegance) were both popular images at the vanguard of early 20th. Century fashion and home furnishings. As was symmetry created by reflections in rippling moonlit ponds and pools. Explorations of Occultism, Spiritualism, Jungian theory (dream interpretation, the Anima and NIGHT), agnosticism and atheism, the subconscious mind and the societal acceptability of homosexuality and sex as recreation were ideologically all en vogue. Old Hollywood was causing Bohemian ideas to step across the threshold of marginality for the consideration of Middle America. In cinema, the genre of the Western as moral teachings based on Biblical stories of good vs. evil were silent, box office hits where white-hatted (simple-minded) cowboy protagonists fought for the greater moral good on the Frontier; the prostitute, vice-ridden land outside of law. For me, this is what the iconography appropriated by Miu Miu's Spring 2011 Collection awakens. Perhaps these period references talk more about Hollywood in the pre-Talkie age rather than contemporary celebrity. It leaves me asking, if (pre-Hayes Commission) movie star fame had such an impacting effect on culture, where has all it's power gone?
The silhouettes and lines Miu Miu uses here more than nod to, but unapologetically recreate simple casual and day looks of the 1920s and early 1930s. A more than poignant statement about the global financial hardship and despair which is now seeming more and more like a permanent state. First, I am surprised that no other design houses (other than Cosmic Wonder Light Source and Fabrics Interseason) have drawn upon looks popular during the Great Depression as inspiration for the creation of contemporary clothing. Secondly, I am shocked and somewhat alarmed that no one seems to recognize retrospective movements in fashion that date back farther than the 1970s. The reason for my alarm is in the wondering if this is a symptom of somehow having been separated from an academic history of fashion or living in a collective headspace that fashion becomes too serious - and therefore a turn-off - if thinking about it and analyzing it becomes too complex an endeavor. I wonder if because of the phenomenon of blogging, one can now be a revered fashion expert simply because they have inherited a pile of old magazines from a parent or grandparent.
I remember in the late 1980s, Fashion took a retrospective look at the 1960s led by a few consecutive collections by Martine Sitbon. Suddenly the media was saturated with documentaries about Swinging London, Mods 'n Rockers, the Beatles, Mary Quant ("inventor" of the mini-skirt), Rudi Gernreich and everyone was buying their own VHS copy of Barbarella. My mother gave me a small kaleidascope that could be worn around the neck as a gift. Young queers were discovering the writing of John Rechy. Art school girls were raiding thrift stores for classic, PRE-HIPPIE 60s dresses and covering everything with decals of daisies. Aquanet made a comeback along with Op Art and everyone GOT! the B-52s overnight. Granted the 80s and the 60s were both economically prosperous times and were only a generation apart. But, there seemed to be an open celebration of that spirit of revivalism opposed to how now there seems to be a strong hush-hush air surrounding tracing a stylish look to origins that pre-date 1972 (give or take). Why?
At the Miu Miu salon last month, Vogue's Andre Leon Talley declared a scene from Sofia Coppola's Somewhere to be the most accurate depiction of the state of American culture in recent years. The main character, a burnt out Hollywood actor, is sitting in his hotel room bed while a pair of twin strippers perform a pole dancing routine at the foot of it. He stares straight ahead but is clearly removed from the setting. You get the feeling that this lifestyle has been so routine for him that it has lost any chronology or reason and become one big blur.
The scene drags on for so long that the audience may begin to identify, and that was how I felt with Miu Miu's imagery overload for Spring. The exaggerated cowboy graphics, garish 4th of July colors, and abundance of silver and gold were overbearing to the point of it being hard to differentiate the looks from one another, but the more I came back to the collection, the more I recognized its wit. As Miuccia Prada told style.com, the showiness was a reflection of "everybody's obsession with being famous." Flashy stars plastered on printed skirts and leather jackets recalled the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and the placements of other graphics were appropriately perverse. My favorite looks were the long silk dresses printed with illustrations of swans and snakes, representing in my mind some kind of two-dimensional fairytale. It should also be noted that the printed tops have adorable star-shaped buttons that were totally taken from a macaroni and bead picture frame I made in preschool.
Prada wasn't necessarily giving an opinion on this culture of fading Hollywood stars falling asleep to pole dancers in their room at the Chateau Marmont, just shedding some extremely bright spotlights on it. I still go back and forth between finding the boxy jackets distastefully tacky and tackily fun, but that's also how I feel about Jersey Shore, so I guess the idea was conveyed successfully! And, once again: star buttons.
She included these lovely photos:
MY RESPONSE
Everyone seems to be overlooking the obvious references to design motifs taken from the Arts & Crafts, Art Nouveau and Art Deco Movements popular in fashion, decor and virtually all product design from about 1905 - 1925. 1920s style is also reiterated in the cut of the pleated, long-sleeved dresses and tunic-like tops with Deco-esque embellishments and detailing. Not to mention the use of spats in the construction of the shoes. The use of the snake (Biblically symbolizing temptation and evil was being appropriated as a badge of the Libertine before the days of Talkies) and the swan (symbolizing grace, poise and elegance) were both popular images at the vanguard of early 20th. Century fashion and home furnishings. As was symmetry created by reflections in rippling moonlit ponds and pools. Explorations of Occultism, Spiritualism, Jungian theory (dream interpretation, the Anima and NIGHT), agnosticism and atheism, the subconscious mind and the societal acceptability of homosexuality and sex as recreation were ideologically all en vogue. Old Hollywood was causing Bohemian ideas to step across the threshold of marginality for the consideration of Middle America. In cinema, the genre of the Western as moral teachings based on Biblical stories of good vs. evil were silent, box office hits where white-hatted (simple-minded) cowboy protagonists fought for the greater moral good on the Frontier; the prostitute, vice-ridden land outside of law. For me, this is what the iconography appropriated by Miu Miu's Spring 2011 Collection awakens. Perhaps these period references talk more about Hollywood in the pre-Talkie age rather than contemporary celebrity. It leaves me asking, if (pre-Hayes Commission) movie star fame had such an impacting effect on culture, where has all it's power gone?
The silhouettes and lines Miu Miu uses here more than nod to, but unapologetically recreate simple casual and day looks of the 1920s and early 1930s. A more than poignant statement about the global financial hardship and despair which is now seeming more and more like a permanent state. First, I am surprised that no other design houses (other than Cosmic Wonder Light Source and Fabrics Interseason) have drawn upon looks popular during the Great Depression as inspiration for the creation of contemporary clothing. Secondly, I am shocked and somewhat alarmed that no one seems to recognize retrospective movements in fashion that date back farther than the 1970s. The reason for my alarm is in the wondering if this is a symptom of somehow having been separated from an academic history of fashion or living in a collective headspace that fashion becomes too serious - and therefore a turn-off - if thinking about it and analyzing it becomes too complex an endeavor. I wonder if because of the phenomenon of blogging, one can now be a revered fashion expert simply because they have inherited a pile of old magazines from a parent or grandparent.
I remember in the late 1980s, Fashion took a retrospective look at the 1960s led by a few consecutive collections by Martine Sitbon. Suddenly the media was saturated with documentaries about Swinging London, Mods 'n Rockers, the Beatles, Mary Quant ("inventor" of the mini-skirt), Rudi Gernreich and everyone was buying their own VHS copy of Barbarella. My mother gave me a small kaleidascope that could be worn around the neck as a gift. Young queers were discovering the writing of John Rechy. Art school girls were raiding thrift stores for classic, PRE-HIPPIE 60s dresses and covering everything with decals of daisies. Aquanet made a comeback along with Op Art and everyone GOT! the B-52s overnight. Granted the 80s and the 60s were both economically prosperous times and were only a generation apart. But, there seemed to be an open celebration of that spirit of revivalism opposed to how now there seems to be a strong hush-hush air surrounding tracing a stylish look to origins that pre-date 1972 (give or take). Why?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)