murakami madness

In case you are curious, the Murakami exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum is wonderful. Of course there is a Louis Vuitton shop stuck in the middle of the thing. In addition to the marketable psychedlic mushrooms and bears, there are some controversial surprises that will make the most wanton character blush. Pictures were strictly prohibited so I don't have any of the interesting ones to show.




ooh, take a look: http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=97318d8fc5523d7c512e8daf608b357a884ac908

elfin chic

Joanna Newsom. It only goes to show that playing with archetypes can have a powerful effect on your appearance. There are so many choices but very few people dress in "costume"--the result here is otherworldliness. Instead of waking up putting together an outfit with a magazine for inspiration, use an illustrated fairytale book instead.

homebody

In a recent interview with We Make Money Not Art, Kate James described her strained relationship with fashion fed by her love of dance and architecture. She is a second year graduate student in the Visual Arts Program at MIT. She studied dance/kinesthesia and architectural history at Brown University, did a Masters of Architecture at MIT and later transferred into the Visual Arts program.

All of the photos here are atHABITat costumes.

They are about a contemporary vision of the woman in the home, and a need to multi-task and overlap the upkeep habits of the body and the home. They are costumes worn to augment the household maintenance task, transforming it into an iso-kinetic exercise. Each costume records and accentuates the ergonomics of the activity.

In one, resistance band connects the vacuum wand to the wearer, intensifying the sweeping motion of the vacuuming. The 'putting away dishes' costume attaches a similar resistance band between the dishwasher and the wearer's vinyl gloves. In the 'serving food' costume, bands run through an oven mitt corset piece to accentuate the tension in the serving motion.

And, lastly, Kate James on her relationship with fashion:

As an artist, I certainly engage with fashion. By this I mean that I think closely about how the body is clad, and how clothing can inform the body and vice-versa. Fashion becomes a key interface in the investigation of the body in the environment.

In terms of performance and the impact of costuming, fashion offers a fantastic bank of codified aesthetics, which can be drawn from for conceptual and phenomenal meaning.

this is news to me

photo from egotastic

Color me surprised. Devendra Barnhart's music is wonderful but I can't imagine such a level headed gal (yes, that's Natalie Portman pictured above) being in a relationship with an acid trip (see interview below music video).

the long and the short and the in between of it

Hey guys, lets not leave out the cropped pants in this whole "hurrah, it's spring, lets shout it from the roof tops and dance in the rain in stiletto sandals" business. The shoes are amazing, please don't think anything less of me for shifting the spotlight a little heaven-ward to the pants that these women are wearing. There is something so fresh, structurally interesting and just plain beautiful about the tulip pants in the photos above. I've seen them in a few shops: a wonderful dark grey pair at anthropologie several months back and a black pair at H&M now. They are just the thing, with a ballet slipper, to put a spring (eh, eh, get it?) in my step on regular days--not the stiletto ones (which are few and far between nowadays).