Pattern, Picture, and Principals

I love finding random artist inspiration trawling on the internet. I came across prints by Japanese artist Shintaro Miyake (such as the one above, Someday, the truth will (2008, Acrylic and pencil on paper), and instantly felt the need to wear this crazily-floral patterned butterfly sleeve minidress, that I found in a topshop bargain sale (£6!!!!) at the beginning of last summer. Miyake, born in uses paintings, sculpture, photography and performance art to create childish and dream-like fairy tale images, with hints of traditional Japanese art. I love all of it! Especially the long tongued Youkai above.

At any rate, I'll return to an old favourite for the design world, and see what I can pull up in terms of inspiration, shall I?

 

Detail of Sea Serpents IV (Klimt)

Since we're going with this, I'll look at Klimt's colourwork shall I? Sex and sexuality is the obvious core of Klimt's work; women his preoccupation. A rather "pudding-faced" man, he nonetheless seemed to be magnetic, having fathered at least seven children despite still living with his mother and spinster sisters. (Must be the same magneism that...well...Lucian Freud). At any rate, his paint work is sensual, his colours vivacious, and the aesthetics inspiring, still as groundbreaking today as in 1897 when Klimt was one of a group of artists wanting to break free of the stuffy, constricted Old Vienna that had formed them. (and, undoubtedly, added to the quality of their work) They established “the Secession” (stylistically allied with Art Nouveau). Soon everything from fashions to furniture changed as the artists experimented their way through. Klimt was the first president of the Secession and led the way in a most sartorial; he favoured long, voluminous indigo smocks with embroidered white epaulets.I'll have a go at tracking down some easy luxury, eh? And while I'm at it, anything indigo that one could move in. For instance, such a jumpsuit (really, I'm not obsessed with jumpsuits. Ok, maybe a little, but it's because I don't own one! yet.)

Costume national Jumpsuit @ Luisaviaroma

I come back to Costume National time and time again... for window licking. Don't you love that the french call window shopping "leche-vitrine"? You can just see les petits enfants du bois with their noses pressed up at the window of the patisserie. Or spying on something particularly interesting...

Anyway, moving on..... (I do tangent, you must forgive me). Perhaps we'll rhyme? I present a look from Society for Rational Dress (Such a brilliant name.) Dazzling. I want to meet this girl and take her out to coffee and talk about Klimt.... yes ok so I know she's 'fictional and infact a model, but anyone this well styled *must* be interesting.

(look! I even got the blues and burnt orange in there. SFRD fall 09, you are a saviour)

It's ironic, as thore clothes would make me behave in a most irrational manner. However, the name is actually a cultural reference, dating back t the Victorian suffragette/women's rights movement (I should muse as to whether I should switch the movement back to "Sister Suffragettes!" from Mary Poppins). The rational dress society was the Eglish equivalent of the bloomer movement and, founded in 1881, it encapsulated its directive  in an article in the Society’s Gazette:

“The Rational Dress Society protests against the introduction of any fashion in dress that either deforms the figure, impedes the movements of the body, or in any way tends to injure the health. It protests against the wearing of tightly-fitting corsets; of high-heeled shoes; of heavily-weighted skirts, as rendering healthy exercise almost impossible; and of all tie down cloaks or other garments impeding on the movements of the arms. It protests against crinolines or crinolettes of any kind as ugly and deforming….[It] requires all to be dressed healthily, comfortably, and beautifully, to seek what conduces to health, comfort and beauty in our dress as a duty to ourselves and each other.”

Nifty historical information, that. Oh, one does like to drop all over the place in this blog.

Now, moving on to his fondness for gold and silver, I would just like to put out there, that everyone's so obsessed with Balmain's jackets that this little beaut has dropped right by them...

Balmain boucle Jacket @ Luisaviaroma 

 Oh, and his Japonisme....

Jean Paul Gaultier @ LuisaViaRoma sale

Patterns patterns. The man knew a good pattern. Talking of patterns, Suno, that Kenyan label I mentioned here? Well, it was founded by Max Osterweis, a filmmaker in his 30s based in New York City. He was was so horrified by the violence that ravaged Kenya's following the messy election run (understatement), that he decided to try and introduce industrial contracts to artisans in the slums, starting Suno. His statements completely match my own ideas regarding the best solutions for africans themselves in the long term, saying "Writing a fat check doesn't always help... I wanted to create long-term employment and also set an example to show that investment in Africa need not be about building more safari lodges." Designed by Erin Beatty, a Parsons New School for Design graduate, the collection uses vintage Kangas and Kenyan-crafted fabrics and designs, but it is not going to be a kitschy "ethic collection; every silhouette had to work first in plain black, wearable to an art opening or the red carpets of NYC.

 According to Time, he's right on trend...

P.s. AONY has now been reincarnated for a full week! 2 posts a day... aren't I nice?

Whaling away at the mission

I am a culinary genius.

I just made the best pasta sauce ever using:
1 onion
1 clove garlic
2 rashers bacon
oregano
Basil
Peppadew pepper things. (around....6?)
seeds of change cherry tomato and parmesan sauce (like...5 tablespoons. Oh I dunno. Until the rest was coated)
Tomato puree (small squirt. shhh. i was improvising)
teaspoon [bitter, homemade] marmalade (!) {it adds a somewhat smoky quality to the sauce. goes well with the bacon}
3/4 teaspoon sugar (have to balance out all that tomato)

Pretty much added it to the olive-oiled skillet in that order. and then water, to let it reduce. And then grated a TONNE of cheddar on top.

Haha. that was more of a mental note to myself, wasn't it? But it really was tasty. I can reccomend it

Anyway. Healthy, happy, 'n well fed. And wearing a whale print dress. My fringe dried strangely this morning. So it looks like I'm n the 60s, somewhat.

Great cut for giving you curves. Not so great for slopey shoulders like mine, when the sleeves have a tendency to slip down...

Excuse the photobooth. Yes, I do have a fairly fun DSLR that I would be larking around with, except I've locked myself in to do revision, and I'm not up to that much contortion at the moment.

Having thoroughly worn myself out with my own latent activism (Just where did YOU come from? Eh?) I now go back to my dire for rampant laziness. I think, in these terms, I would say the Scandinavians do it best.

Wood Wood Sabine Jumpsuit

Having said that, lazy styles aren't exclusive to Scandinavia; not by a long shot. It just seems to help.

Minimarket Dress- 2500 SEK (around £211/$305)

Klicka här för fler/större bilder

Minimarket Box pants @ Mint & Vintage 900kr (£76/$109)

All Mint & Vintage. 270-1900kr. From right, c/w - Edun, Les Petites..., Rutzou, Rules by Mary

We'll try France shall we? I am going to live there, after all. Loose tailoring is the thing he french do well. I mean, there's something just so Garance worthy aabout a woman in men's trousers, in pleats, in great tailoring. Tailoring techniques then? Try it loose...

Paul and joe sister @ Asos

Pleated...

Poleci @ ASOS

Shirred....

Ichi @ ASOS

Gathered....

Totem jumpsuit @ Asos

Trimmed...

Belle & Bunty For ASOS

and, finally (with some tongue in cheek) Ruched...

Sass and bide PVC Blackrats @ ASOS

I'm not sure how, but that turned fairly one-piece intensive somewhere in the middle there. Here, a dress, to balance it out...
(...piped. HA, you thought I would't find a technique, didn't you? I Didn't do textiles for nothing!) Dontcha love the clashing primary florals with the plain black piping? Another thing... I don't actually really like ASOS, I'm not sure why I got stuck on it... laziness, I suppose.


ASOS Zip Front Flower Print Dress

Proving the Brits can pull it off in traditional style, we have Motel(rocks.com)

The 'Kate' dress-motelrocks.com (Bargain £49)

And of course, NY Kings of casual cool, Obesity and speed.


Thus continues my mission to proove that Uggs and looking like Hilary duff is not a requirement of being a slob.
Misfits sweater from Obesity and speed

It's appropriate dammit. It's individuality; I shake my controversy stick.

Oh how I love Sandals. Love love love. Love and envy. Because of course I'm bitter and flat broke at the moment, and saving up for a bike for Paris, and saving up for living in Paris. Because, it would probably be tragic if I became the bag lady with 100 pairs of Marni lucite heels in my bin bags. Actually- shoes make the outfit, so I suppose I would be a styling bin lady. And I could live in one of these.

Oh Tyra. oh the insensitivity. Loves it.

My sandal envy is rather insane though. it's getting out of hand.

Sea of Shoes' Jane's beloved Ann Demeulemeesters

Louis Vuitton sandals- Amber Rose on Jak and Jil

I do realise that we are in the midst of dire economic (..environmental, socio-political, culture-changing) circumstances at the moment. But, one still finds the eye drawn to vanity and fripperies and very nicely made shoes. And anyone who says they aren't to anything, that is to art, or literature, or nice pots and pans, perhaps rugs, curtains, boat gadgets, music; I believe that those people are one o two things. And that would be 1) liars, or 2)robots.

Why else, in the middle of the blitz, would people painstakingly dye their legs with tea and then attempt to draw seams up the back, to make it look like they were wearing silk stockings? Why was there even a black market in silk stockings? Naturally, darlings, it is because people always want to be able to identify themselves. It's a basic human instinct. In the age of internet, you see people trying to "unique-ify" themselves in every which way. Joining forums about collecting tea-cozies, tracking down obscure 20s speakeasy singers and idolizing them- its all the search to be independant. In our parents time, they didn't have this. There were 4 television channels, everyone had the rubix cube, the yoyo. These phases. They still had them, sort of, in the 90s. But not touching everyone. Not to the same extent as say, 60s/70s.

My mother remarked the other day, when she went to look around Chelsea (the art school), that what was odd, was that everyone was trying so hard to look different; all these teenage girls (and boys) trying to hard to be unique, that they all looked the same. Like gossip girl characters or something. That made me laugh. We're all the same, aren't we, this generation. Some succeed; look at susie bubble. But then, they will invariably have copycats. (Sienna miller, Cory Kennedy, we've seen it all before....)

Yes, OUR trend is individalism. Rather, its not a new trend, but its one that the age of multiculturalism and technology has liberated. It's always been there, this impulse. This strange psychology and wish to make a mark on society.

Ah, sweet individuality. How wickedly you evade us.

One of the reasons that my (veryshortlived) filler-in blog was called red lipstick and macaroons? I shall share a story with you. Putting on lipstick is something I rarely do. More than lipgloss, I'll give you that, but still. Rare. But there's something about lipstick that reminds me, even amid waxiness and clown-like smudges, that I am a girl (Albeit not one good at putting it on herself. Other people's makeup? I'm fairly whizzy. Mine? Oh dear god someone call an ambulance, a clown escaped). But anyway, reminds me that I am a woman. Female. There's something romantic about good old-fashioned red lipstick. My grandmother, my mother, my maternal grandmother whom I never met. They all wore it. Perhaps I have a crazy great great uncle somewhere who did too? But reading this, I guarantee, to any female, it's the lipstick that hits you. I can't put myself in these women's shoes, but the lipstick? The soap? Yeah. It gives a connection. A point of empathy. I present an extract, in fact, from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who was amongst the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen Concentration camp in 1945...

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywher, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen.

It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing could save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference.

Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated.

It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for those internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

Heartbreaking. No?

This will sound heartless and, in actuality, it suppose really is. (But not out of any malicious intent, Lord no.)
But normally, I have to stop listening when people start talking about these things. It's a form of self-protection I suppose; you can never really comprehend the magnitude of such horror. In history lessons and the like, it's quite common to detach, to talk about these things in abstract terms and euphemisms that couch the travesties that have passed so that they are not quite so soul destroying. Selfish, Human nature, isn't it? And it becomes so that few situations could actually put the horrific tragedy of Holocaust in scope because we're so used to hearing about it in numbers, statistics and euphemism. It's only when you see those shoes piled up at the Holocaust Museum, when you see something so mundane, but in such numbers, that the soul crushing comes to me. Because that makes these people from generations past, well...human to me. That sounds disgusting. But that's what made it hit home. So, this lipstick story really stuck with me. I realised just how important and integral a sense of individuality is to us, and from that, design, self expression. These women had been living as numbers. And that was my little ode to them. To their individuality.

The macaroons part was less emotional. Really, it was because I really, really, really like macaroons. Yummy, huh?

So I challenge you to say that our appearance is meaningless. Frippery. It's not. Not to us. This credit crunch is certainly changing the Fashion Industry, giving it a 'conscience' as it were. But it will survive. We need it to. Change? Certainly. Years of inflation have, well, inflated the ego. But now we have adaption. Global fashion executives (e.g. MaxMara) are forging ties with artisans in East Africa, trying to provide an upswing in employment in the Nairobi slums; and the ethical conscience is costing them; credit lines don't work in Kenya, where interest is so high that its standard to pay in cash, and the slum women are to savvy to accept a deal which says "I'll pay you when I get paid". Look to other brands like Suno for up and coming fashion grads partnering with local development projects in Kenya.

Suno Graphic print dress.

They don't want pity-buying. They're proving themselves, these artisans. They're showing that with training, they can match any country in the world for quality. They're working their own way. Isn't that the best kind of help we can give then? Because I know that I want that dress no matter where on god's green (turning brown and blue) earth it was made.

So yes. I will lust over my shoes (Or, rather, not my shoes, Jane's shoes.) And I will continue to do so, way down the line, till the point where I'm corrupting my small granddaughters to love ruby red shoes, and the young boys to steal grandpa's cane.

I will do so, whatever the weather. Unless, of course, the world explodes. Famine, overpopulation, overfishing, war, climate change. I would say 50/50 we survive the end of the century? Aparently, Martin Rees - Lord Rees - President of the Royal Society and Astronomer Royal, agrees with me. (or I with him?)

Adding fuel to the fire.... Or taking it away, I suppose

(Click to zoom) Clockwise from top left: Electra Amsterdam Alexander Girard "tree of life" edt. TV spread, Snake Bike lock-Fred flare, 3G Bikes Flamingo, Pinup-ridingpretty, The ditty Bops album cover, bicyclecape-cyclechic, Ann demeulemeester scarf, Carrie bike basket, Pin up image-ridingpretty, Cyclechic cherry blossom pannier, man on a bike, ann demeulemeester talon-heeled boots, Cyclechic tartan box bag and helmet, Yellow electra amsterdam tulip, red electra amsterdam Alexander Girard, Cyclodelic brabad (for handlebars).

Bikes are so hot right now, they on FIAH. I'm waiting to see Kanye pedal on the ltd. edt. Chanel bike, perhaps Gucci, perhaps early tiffany.It doesn't take a genius to work out that recessionistas (I shudder at the term) and eco-warriors (Another shudder) Have made bikes very visible in recent months, but wouldn't you say that they're just doing something that most people should be doing anyway? Not that I don't admire them for their advocacy, but rather, I marvel that they're even considered abnormal. Surely it's just logic? Bikes are pretty, fun, practical and a cheap way of getting around, but I'm not going to preach. Instead, I take the view of Copenhagen Cycle Chic, who claim that rather than there being a large number of cyclists in copenhagen, there are simply alot of people in copenhagen who cycle; in their heels, in their suits. Normal, everyday people. Not crazy warriors. And you don't have to kit out in lycra, nor know who made your brakes. (Just how to tell if they've been cut)

Check out Riding Pretty, who makes helmet covers, like so...
Even better with a matching cape...wouldn't you say?
At any rate, very Karl lagerfeld

She has been known to rock a sherlock homes look...

But, with cyclodelic opening at topshop, with agyness dejn and her bike popping up every which way I turn, and with my plans for transport in paris very cyclo-centric, I can't very well just ignore it. I am, after all, trying to choose a bike.

MAYBE ONE OF THESE?:

All holytaco.com/celebrities-riding-invisible-bicycles

Ok, enough humour. The bikes:

The electra Amsterdam "Girard tree of life" or

The Electra Amsterdam "Girard madonna" or

The Electra Gypsy or

The Electra Amsterdam Tulip or

THe electra Ladies Nexus or

The PAshley Princess sovereign (old skool) But in regency Green
or

Pashley poppy or

Velorbis Victoria Ladies Classic or

3G flamingo

or. get this. 3g bike with rocket lights:

I should probably stop before I persuade myself into swomething like this that clashes with a) holiday b) Orientation week. I could probably fit in the july one, but raising £1,300 by july would be...tricky, what with exams and all. Who knows?