January 2007 - Eat French Bread

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Eat French Bread - January 2007

Surprise Milan

January 24th 2007 09:01

My new favourite outfit:

Last year, a group of students from Saint Martin’s School in London conceived Surprise Milan for the design company Lago. A travelling art show that took place during some Milanese design and furniture exhibitions, they dressed as cubes and wondered the city.

I imagine they felt empowered in their anonymous coloured cubes, albeit a little awkward. Being on the streets without a cube sheild one is so exposed and destructable...

“A good picture is equivalent to a good deed”
(Van Gogh)

(images from www.blog.lago.it/surprisemilan)

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Painting shoes is fun!

January 19th 2007 22:20

Boys and girls, today we will be spray-painting shoes.

All you need is shoes and spray-paint, and some masking tape for stencilling if you want.

Cut out shapes with the masking tape and stick them to the shoes before laying out old newspaper and spraying a few light coats of paint.

Fun times! Give the whole family happy feet. Go dancing in the street…

Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth/
"Rip down all hate," I screamed/
Lies that life is black and white/
Spoke from my skull. I dreamed/
Romantic facts of musketeers/
Foundationed deep, somehow/
Ah, but I was so much older then/
I'm younger than that now.

Bob Dylan, "My Back Pages" (1964)

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don’t tell anyone but…

January 10th 2007 02:17

I always wanted a secret when I was a kid; something to divulge in moments of intimacy, something to whisper. I used to make up lame secrets and confide them to whoever would listen. Now I’ve managed to get myself a few real ones that are a bit beefier, and have earned a reputation for being a tight-lipped taciturn. But I think while I may have a few bones of a skeleton in the closet it’s just because I’m hesitant to open the door that people assume there’s an entire graveyard inside.

People love the idea of a secret more than actual secrets themselves. When all is laid out on the table the intrigue is lost, but when a secret is secret it is irresistible. Frank Warren’s website PostSecret publishes 20 new secrets selected from about 10 000 anonymous senders every week, such as the ones reproduced here. It is one of the most visited blogs in the world, with about 3 million hits a month.

Warren has been criticized for opening a Pandora’s box by encouraging troubled individuals to share their innermost demons without the support of trained clinicians, but mostly he is hailed as a “unique global guru,” “the most trusted stranger in America,” “today's media ‘it’ boy” and “father confessor of the world wide web.”

He started PostSecret two years ago as part of a community art project, handing out 3000 self-addressed postcards asking strangers to anonymously confess something they had never shared with anyone before. About 100 of the original postcards came back, but strangely, people around the world began sending him their own handmade, graphically illustrated confessions and within a year he had 10,000. In the US there are currently touring exhibitions of the best cards and the third book is in the pipeline for publication.

The success is accountable to the cocktail of voyeurism, therapy and art, and the basis of anonymity. Secrets are things that are not meant to be known and they only remain so if they are kept secret. The messages on Warren’s cards are still secrets: they are intriguing because readers do not know anything about the senders.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

“How can we expect another to keep our secret if we cannot keep it ourselves?”

(Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld 1613-1680)

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When Fashion Went Out Of Fashion

January 9th 2007 04:07

Vivienne Westwood captured the essence of confrontational anti-fashion long before other designers realised the subversive power of punk. We forget how much a deliberately torn shirt held together by safety pins, for example, would have offended polite society in the early ‘70s. In Westwood’s words: “it wasn’t that I purposely wanted to rebel; I wanted to find out what it had to be done one way and not another.” The foremost anti-fashion fashion icon, she documented a style that electrified how we have presented ourselves since.

Decades after the reign of punk, movements are again springing from a grassroots irreverence for the fascism of ‘style’, that is inevitable in late-capitalist society. Production technologies have sped up manufacturing processes so that trends turn over at an ever-increasing rate. As soon as a model steps of a Paris runway the knock-offs are being shipped out of China. High waists, empire lines, ankle-length dresses, pinafores and bubble skirts were all being plucked off the wire racks of Supre within the same breath as they were photographed at international Fashion Weeks.

And at the same time trends are becoming less relevant. Because they are so instantaneously accessible, they are less appealing. In the words of Jean Cocteau “art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time - fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.” It is ugly as soon as it is universal and to avoid being clones of each other fashionable kids all over the world are refusing ‘fashion’.

The recently launched Sydney magazine, Duke, draws on a spirit of irreverence for trends, fashion and ‘lifestyle’. An absurd art and thrift fashion journal, it goes against dictatorial aesthetics and celebrates a more playful approach to self-expression. It is reminiscent of the cult London and New York based anti-fashion publication Cheap Date, launched in 2004 by the fashionista thrift-store enthusiasts Bay Garnett and Kira Jolliffe. It purported to go against ‘cool’ and all that goes with it (with involvement from an uber-cool bunch of kids including Anita Pallenburg, Karen Elson, Chloe Sevigny, Liv Tyler, Debbie Harry and Sophie Dahl).

The Cheap Date Fashion Strike promoted badges with messages like ‘To Hell With Chanel’; ‘Content Is The New Style’; and ‘I Will Not Be Told,’ and prompted readers to write to Anna Wintour, infamous editor of US Vogue, the following statement: “I consider contemporary fashion and obsession with it to be life-diminishing. In the interest of humanity I ask that you observe the Fashion Strike and cease trading from 14th May 2004.”

In our high-consumerist climate it is inevitable that people begin to question establishment fashion and realise how it stifles creativity and the flow of ideas. We are currently saturated with information and aesthetics from infinite historical and cultural contexts, so there is no defining style besides hodge-podged eclecticism. In the last decade pastiched retro looks have inspired catwalks more and more. The op-shop boom and new reverence for wearing second-hand clothes is not an indication that the frivolous are turning to philanthropy so much as one that originality is now the most vital thing for being cool. Ironic-chic has a greater place for the fashion-forward than big brand names or ‘hot-off-the-runway’ looks.

Andrew Duckmanton of Grandma Takes A Trip, which has two second-hand clothing stores in Sydney, has watched vintage fashion seep further into the mainstream over the last few years. With a background in advertising, he sees the rejection of high-end fashion as mainly economically driven: “It doesn’t even have to be big design houses - even a Morrissey or Witchery dress will set you back a few hundred dollars, which is basically the average weekly wage,” he says. “Vintage gives you the exact opposite of those mass-production chains – a good price for something unique that you can wear in your own way.”

There’s nothing wrong with spending $800 on a dress if you love it, but it means you have to take it seriously. You’re not going to cut it up or personalise it or play in the mud with it or

do anything fun in it at all. “And if you can’t have fun with fashion,” says Duckmanton, “there’s a problem. There are actually a few Australian designers doing some interesting stuff but their prices are at a level that takes the fun away.” He believes that seasonal trends survive on manipulation and are there to make bucks. The culture risks becoming even more conformist, he says, because of the increasing concentration of media ownership in Australia; the permeating evil malls taking over independent shopping areas and dictating what people should wear; and the fact that we only have two department stores, both very large and both very dull. “If we didn’t have independent areas like Crown Street and King Street,” he says, “we would have no hope at all.”

Fashion should be fun; not dictatorial, and the more homogenised we become the more we value personalisation. Punk had to come out of a reaction to a highly regimented culture because change always comes from changelessness. Similarly, the street style in Tokyo’s Harajuku today could only be born of the highly conservative and conformist culture of much of Japan. With firm beliefs in trends and high-fashion, the Japanese consume over one third of the world’s luxury goods. But within their countercultures it seems they are truly pushing the boundaries and having more fun with it than anywhere else in the world.

Of course, in seeking to sabotage fashion, they end up creating it. In the 1920s the Dadas established a whole new art movement in their pursuits to destroy art (Duchamp’s said “I threw a bottle rack and urinal in their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty”). Then in the 70s the punks sought to fuck the system, but created one simultaneously - designer safter pins could be purchased mail-order before the Sex Pistols even split up and the stripped-down instrumentals and nihilistic lyrics were quickly appropriated by record labels and sold back to the youth as packaged rebellion.

In the same way, today’s anti-fashion kids are creating and following another stylistic category. Anti-fashion is fashion. It is still a competition of cool and a way to distinguish identity. And what better way to show you ‘get it’ than to ironically revel in bad taste; recognising it for what it is and saying fuck fashion, let’s dance.

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