Big people, little people, Lilliputiens and stylish chains.

 

In this instant, I wouuldn't mind playing gulliver..... Yookoo 

Called Atanta's "Knitting Wunderkind" by Vice magazine, Yookoo (who is, I believe, pictured) has been chipping away at fantabulary keck-knitwear, at a rate of knots. Too bust to take anyone on, this one woman, one shop set-up has been raking in orders (recession? whowherewhatty?) and, beneath that elfin crops lurks a human-machine that's been churning out oversized chains, Chunky capelets and Giant soopascarves.

 

By Giant, of course I mean 7-8 feet long....

 

No wonder she wakes up with cramps... or, as she so succinctly puts it, "me and my carpal tunnel thank you" [for your orders, presumably). Now having received street level recognition (people stopping her in APC to have a gasp) the knitter is, in fact, resorting to guarding her yarns and patterns fiercely. But, in actuality, she's moving into sewing. The ateliers better watch out...

 

Susie Bubble in Yooko's cambridge chain

 
The Mothership in sweet pea

I would also just like to point out the beautiful photography; lighting, composition, and the creator-model. All makes for a brilliant setting. Check out the colour combinations in that last image!

She also gives etsy the best "Tell us a bit about yourself" answer ever:

I don’t mean to scare anyone here, but, to be honest, I spent a larger part of my childhood preparing for this question. I used to dream of being on Nighttime Talk Shows and having a host lean in and say, “tell everybody about yourself.” My father said that it was the type of question that meant you had finally become someone of note.
Ingrid Bergman was someone of note and would always poise when answering this question. I would poise, too. I would try, but I probably wouldn’t make it far. I would end up jack-laughing throughout the entire first segment. Catching the Giggles. I’d try focusing on the bridge of my nose to keep from laughing. My father said all Nighttime talk show hosts have miniature buttons in their desk to cue commercials when guests weren’t working out so well. I imagine my persona being very button friendly. And it would be pushed.
And there I’d sit. I would have blown it. Now the entire world would join me in knowing that I was not the type of person that entertains such questions. I wasn’t Ingrid Bergman, or Simone De Beauvoir. And I was in nobody’s note. I was Yokoo, and I made scarves, some of which were chunky.

Brilliant.

 

The Bubble again

Also in my etsy favourites at the moment are Portland designers Emily Ryan (very affordable, cool) and Holly Stadler.

Stadler's designs start off as trimmings; literally. These can include "faded velvet ribbons, edwardian lace, the beaded applique of a 1920s dress" and  "aurora borealis rhinestone buttons". Interested in looking at the aging of fragile fabrics, she keeps things modern in the designs themselves, incorporating these raw materials; sustainable production indeed. Basing herself from the Seaplane boutique/lounge/gallery (complete with music and art installations, launching oregons finest on the word) each item she produces is one of a kind, tailor made or limited edition. Now that's special.

 

La Sylphide Capelet

 

 

Another thing? Custom-made-to-order listings. Such as this Gem silk lace dress and antique lace cape....

  

This all goes on While i wile away my time waiting for Kate Towers to post a new item (she has a baby, I suppose it's excusable....)

 

TIP OFF #1:

Check out http://ccwearschanel.blogspot.com/ for her amazing interview with artist Mark shwartz

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?)

Take me higher

Nina Hjorth-Why shouldn't I admire the architectural/structural/aesthetic genius that is Nina Hjorth?

I believe I have height envy. I want to be short. Not 5'10. Short. I want to wear heels. I want to have an excuse to wear heels, and not have to dodge the flaying hands of my best friends, most of whom happen to be around 5'3, and who claim that I'm not allowed because it makes them feel short. oh. Thanks. SO what, I never get to wear pretty shoes that elongate the leg and are the only thing that fit my excessively high arches? (Yes, in a bizarre twist of creation, the mos comfortable shoes for me have the highest heel.) I Want to wear Charlotte Olympia, and rush violets on the street with plum coloured spikes.

Not just that.... I want to wear Nicholas Kirkwoods.

With bleached out two-tone jeans by Siwy @asos

HEll, I want all of SOS's shoes. The ann demeulemeester's. But also these givenchys especially. I mean, her shoe collection warrants contact fom kanye. Oh wait that already happened.

Seaofshoes.typepad.com

At any rate, my snakeskin-print cage sandals are the first step in my pretence that I Am short. By september, and Paris, I shall leave flats in the art room, where they belong. And bike- hah, beat that. You were going to comment on the cobbled streets.

I want to jump into these ripples of petit filous...

ok, yeah, so the lime green pannier isn't exactly blending in, but firstly, it's straight out of robert ryan, seconsly, robert ryan reminds me of birdcages. birdcages remind me of Prague. Prague reminds me of dusky colours. And it's awesome?! The Carrie basket. google it.

When will it be summer? I was reminded by the dusky pink in that last post, coupled with the petit filous pot I'm eating, of Comme des Garcons, and then the sheer amount of antique colours out there on the runways. Brain connections, eh? Although I'm told its the colour of the Sky in Paris, I also believe its the same colour as the mold I found in the Washing machine detergent drawer. Meh. Mould can be so on trend. Actually...think about all those crazy colours and crystalline patterns... *Archives mould as source of inspiration* I should probably point out that noone's been living in this house since december.

thecherryblosomgirl.com

As noted, pastels seem to be everywhere Fall and winter. And of course with pastels in mind, you have to head to the cherry blossom girl. You just do. It's like birdcages and Prague. DO you really need an explanation? Could I even give you one? Answer: Unlikely. Anyway, her photoshop must be on permanant vintage setting as, whilst documenting her life, style and times, everything is bathed in a soft glow. Beyond that, I want her sofa.... Her closet too wouldn't go amiss.

On to greater things. Prada's inspiration for the MiuMiu s/s09? exploring our european heritage. Possibly because there's no unified italian heritage? (Far too revolutionary and divided. Italy's a baby, in constitutional terms). Though fading dusty colours they hark back to a distant time, when the chemicals on photographic paper decayed in such a pretty manner, (Now its more likely that someone's put lined paper in the printer and caused a jam) the silhouettes present are decidedly modern. Architectural, almost. Like old cartography. I want a dress made out of old charts, screw newspaper dresses. (although, as far as they go, I wouldn't mind one of these...

reminds me of Barbara I Gongini A/W09

So, the pastels.

Comme des garcons:



Miu Miu


Prada (DUSKY LEATHER GLADIATOR SKIRT! HOW OFTEN DO YOU GET TO SAY THAT?)



LV


Christopher Kane



Erin Fetherstone

How does she pull off a skinhead????


In conclusion.... I want spring to come so I can whip out these babies....


Peace out. Notice the rosy glow given by poor lighting and photobooth. Not only mould, but industria school lighting too!

I feel alive! Modernists and pirates ahoy.

Once more, for your viewing pleasure, I tackle the mess that is my life and attempt something productive. However, you'll have to bear with me. There's a lot to catch up on. Did I mention I'm moving to Paris come september? Yes, once more I migrate, this time away from the student wasteland that is the city I currently habitate, and off to the 15th arrondissement, 15 Rue letellier, Parsons Paris, to be precise.

....Allow me to feel just a little pleased with myself.


Anyway, so I now push on you Emily Ryan, a designer producing amazing silhouettes out of Portland, Oregon. Someone "continually inspired by 1920's couture, science fiction, and Japanese fashions" is, in my book, someone to definitely keep a note on, especially when she can pleat like THAT. I've never so much wanted to wear all grey. The structuring on her garments is intense, fascinating and makes you wonder; the best kind of structuring to have. It ends up as a strange cross between le corbusier and something frothy and playful, like a couer de pirate video. A definite achievment. Prices range from $78-$700 (And, looking carefully, I would say that's directly related to manpower/time spent making the piece)

Barbarella on birds, origami on a dress, the spinning center of the universe... on a dress

And finally, a "Coeur de Pirate" video: