The new Arcade Fire Album, The Suburbs, is off the chain. Click the links below to hear our favorite tracks:
My newest artist obsession is Anika Smulovitz, an Idaho-based jewelry designer, metalsmith and art professor. Smulovitz’s designs are brilliant both in their beauty and in their inspiration. Her academic study of jewelry’s historical context—the traditions that gave rise to it and how the jewelry, in turn, shaped those traditions—and it’s physical interaction with the wearer gives rise to focused, highly conceptual collections and pieces that are both striking and intellectually engaging. Smulovitz’s most recent collection is a series of specimen bottle-topped rings displaying plants, flowers and seeds from the artist’s garden.
Meant to explore our simultaneous dissociation from nature and our desire to control, preserve and connect with it, some stand as captured moments of beauty and potential, while others evoke a gloomy longing.
Her other collections include “Keys,” a study of the keys, especially as symbols of power, and the acts of locking and unlocking, “White Collar,” which explores the sexual (think Playboy bunny) and authoritative implications of dress shirt collars on women, and “Body in Motion,” which plays with different ways to convey movement.
"Loss and Longing I" and "Echinops/Globe Thistle" from Keys
"White Collar 4" and "White Collar 11"
"Study 3" from Body in Motion
Images via Anika Smulovitz
Gareth Pugh’s 2010 collections have been profoundly softer and more accessible than the severe avant-garde drama on which he made his name. His A/W collection, especially—sleek, 30’s-inspired, very wearable—is a significant departure from past years, when extreme alien collections varied between the bird-like and the geometric. Imagine Darth Vader meets Lady Gaga. Pugh’s current collection is still undeniably Pugh, but the alien is manifested as revisioned retro futurism, the bird-like as the flight-obsessed 30’s revisited and the geometry as art deco. All of this, imbued with a smoky, screen siren glamour, makes for a streamlined sensuality that I absolutely adore.
The highlight of Pugh’s collection? The Fall/Winter ’10 campaign video from SHOW studio, complete with an entrancing, robotic lewdness straight from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.
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Images via Style.com
Video via SHOWstudio
I spent most of my morning enthralled by DIS Magazine, a year-old publication dedicated to deconstructing the norms of art, fashion and beauty. The magazine’s creators, Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, S. Adrian Massey III, Marco Roso, Patrik Sandberg, Nicholas Scholl and David Toro tend to take themselves a bit too seriously, but they introduce seriously creative, clever work into a scene they find uninspired. They certainly know how to laugh at the art world, even if they can’t laugh at themselves, and their fashion editorials are pretty fantastic. With their found-object looks, DIS teaches the überhip a lesson on überhip-dom, while giving the always worthwhile reminder that you don’t have to scour thrift, etsy and vintage stores to be creative—home goods, bodegas and electrical tape work just as well!
1. Hot towel wrap
Flamenco-inspired dress and bag, color block kaftan and cap-sleeve crop top, all from towels.
2. Environmentally friendly
Message tanks from plastic grocery bags. Love the nude!
3. Sharp in sharpie
Posing as a poser with home made iPod, cigarette and tattoos.
4. Whimsical wares
Hats from woven baskets, a skirt from a stool cushion and (my favorite!) a swing top from a sheer curtain.
Images via DIS Magazine
Indian
Minjae Lee is a highly talented 21-year old, self-taught, South Korean artist. Lee captivates a raw, theatrical drama using markers, pens, crayons and acrylics to manifest a dark, dramatic fairytale using ethereal female portraits as his subjects. Lee’s art has a mysterious appeal that instantly draws you in and creates a sense if intimacy and sensuality that reaches you at your core. The human face is his template for his designs and by using abstract movements and textures, bold lines, and vibrant colors, each piece becomes a unique and striking interpretive work of art. He carefully uses color and shapes to work as the perfect synergy with his black and white outlines and intricate patterns.
The Dream
Her Face
Each piece of art reveals a haunting emotion that is brought to life using his aggressive stroke and use of vibrant colors, which displays his evocative imagery and cleaver juxtaposition of fragile beauty and disturbed insanity, that is guaranteed to leave you wanting more.
“I like to capture the woman’s face, because they are so emotional.
My work needs to express a strong feeling. You need to feel the love, pain or excitement. I present those feelings with lots of colors.”
~ Minjae Lee~
Images via: DeviantArt
Once I have fallen in love with a piece of art, one of my favorite things to do is trace the inspiration behind it, especially across mediums—Friedrich Nietzsche’s influence on Otto Dix, William Faulkner and his best friend’s plantation records. Naturally, upon reading about designers’ inspiration for the Paris Couture collections, I searched for images with clear correlations to my favorite looks. Here’s what I found—enjoy!
1. Valentino and Jean Varon
2. Chanel and traditional Tartar embroidery
3. Christian Dior and Irving Penn
4. John Paul Gaultier and Elsa Schiaparelli
5. Givenchy and El Dia de los Muertos
Images via Style.com, The Fashion Museum, The Textile Blog, Pace/MacGill Gallery, All You Need is Illkid, ThaneEnya
The most common theme in this year’s fall couture shows was exaggerated shapes—sharp shoulders, ruffled hips, sky-high hats, plunging V’s, overstuffed skirts. Every runway rocked with severity or sumptuousness. Designers developed last year’s trends into more extreme, luxurious versions of shoulder pads, one-shouldered, underwear as outerwear and color-blocked body-con. Our 5 top looks…
1. Sculpted Shoulders
John Paul Gaultier, Christian Dior, Chanel
Shoulder pads and epaulettes are bigger than ever and have morphed into an array of pads, puffs and points. All shoulder treatments are a go for 2010.
2. One-Sided Story
Alexandre Vauthier, Elie Saab, Stephane Rolland
Like shoulder treatments, the one-shoulder look has grown up for 2010 into romantic asymmetric lines and embellished bodices.
3. Laced Up
Givenchy, Alexis Mabille, Valentino
Whether the look is demure, romantic or scintillating, trompe d’oeil lace dresses were to die for on the runway.
4. Shapely
Stephane Rolland, Rabih Kayrouz, Stephane Rolland
Designers used texture and structure—not color—to highlight hourglass figures.
5. Suit Power—Power Suits?
Sculpted Shoulders (Armani Prive), One-Sided Story (Christian Dior), Laced Up (Zuhair Murad), Shapely (John Paul Gaultier)
Last but definitely not least, nearly every collection featured a skirt suit this year. They varied widely in function and design to the point where there was a skirt suit to reflect every other trend presented in the couture shows. Case in point, here are suits for each of the trends mentioned above.
Stay tuned for Paris couture review part II—favorites and their inspiration.
Images via Style.com and Women’s Wear Daily
The world is full of nice, ordinary little people who live in nice, ordinary little houses on the ground. But didn’t you ever dream of a house up on a tree top?
How about atop the largest museum in Manhattan? Big Bambú, an installation by twins Doug and Mike Starns, dominates the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art this summer. The structure has been described as an “instinctual piece,” evolving, as though it has a life of its own. Construction began back in April, but the bamboo apparatus will continue to grow through the fall as the artists and rock climbers behind the project exemplify their motto You Can’t, You Don’t, You Won’t Stop.
The artists’ beginnings as nature photographers are evident in the work as the 5,000 bamboo poles have been shaped to resemble the crest of a wave. The hope is for the viewer to perceive that he or she is a small part of something “much more vast than we could ever have dreamed of before.” For your own awakening, and the best view in town, climb 40 feet above the museum into the insane jungle gym of shoots and string.
This is the 13th consecutive summer for rooftop art at the Met, each single-artist exhibit inviting something new and exciting to the classic art institution. The roof garden is a breath of fresh air, a space for museum visitors to loosen up a bit after perusing 5,000 years of art history.
Get there early for your timed ticket (and be sure to wear closed toed shoes!)
Images via the Met
