London Urban Space (so many hats)

Presidential Summer Pants

Lyndon Johnson ordering custom-made Joe Haggar Jr. pants (because they provide more room in "the crotch, down where your nuts hang") from the White House in 1964 (right before going to a funeral):

Tourisme d'Antan: Couleurs, Rayures et Ruines

Extraits de la superbe collection Pathé: http://www.britishpathe.com/video/holidays-in-greece/query/delphi

Horses

Horses, Screen-printed on cotton by Saul Steinberg from 1949-52 from the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum

Love: The Medium is the Message

Commodifying "The Riots" Into Bad Fashion Spreads

On August 15th 2011 the New York Times' T published an interactive feature about the fashion of rioters (quote): "What do you wear when protest and mayhem rock your world? Reports from three epicenters of street style: London, Cairo and Tokyo." (already by this point you sense something deep).

The feature was, I'm guessing, an attempt at merging the glossiness of style with the heaviness of a political critic - an equation, that, although with high potential is difficult to pull; often ending by being neither one nor the other. 

In this case the glossy part failed because visually there is no common pattern, recurring theme, resembling aesthetic or conducting feeling: it simply brings together Paris Match-type imagery, celebrity spotting paparazzi pics and street photography with nail art, flag outfits, awkward pedestrians and Japanese women dressed like 17th century Louis the 14th court duchesses. 

And as for the political take, granted these three cities had a rough spring/summer 2011 season with unhappy people and civil unrest - Tokyo with its nuclear, Cairo with its ruler and London with its pissed off youth - but otherwise nothing really links them together. And if there was, it wouldn't be style.

Yet the T tied these violent, unreassuring and tumultuous events together, bundling them with random shots taken (we're guessing) during the 'riots' and by so doing draining all meaning from the motivations that caused them: they commodified the 'riots' into a really bad fashion spread. 

Recently, on the other hand, I discovered Lucifer Youth Film's music video for their song 'Dirt' that does a much better job at using, and in a sense, commodifying images of pissed off people rioting. I'm not sure  where the WU LYF stand with the Egyptians or the British rioters but in their music video at least it doesn't boil down to scarves and weddings celebrations, unlike in the T. 

"At Maxim's in 1968, a model wears a swimsuit from the Mia-Vicky line"

Source: an irrelevant article in the New York Times

The Wonders of Human Associations and The Benefits of Digital Stalking

After the Hipster Dickhead...

It starts off like a car ad, but actually it's another youth sub-category appropriating a derogatory term to ironically stigmatize itself.  And like the dickhead hipster, it's sort of funny:

Wedding Photos

It's Spring, and after Spring comes Summer and all the weddings both seasons imply. To celebrate the beginning of this festive season here are some of the photographs from the McCord Museum's collection on the topic. 

The first image from 1925 is particularly striking: the Church representative is prominent and the bride and groom are native. Compare his shoes to her shoes, the priest's face to the groom's face and to the bride's posture. Seems like the image encompasses the complexities of colonial rule in a nutshell. 

The rest of the images are more flamboyant. The 1930s wedding party on St. Urbain Street is terrific (again notice the bottines of the little boy of the right side of the frame - that very same model is doing a real fashion come back in that same area today). The 1895 bridal party looks like a mash-up of Tommy Hilfiger's happy family meets Grace Coddington's version of a funeral. Finally Miss Ryan's wedding photograph is adorable because of the size of everything: the girls' dresses, the girls' hair (it was after all les années folles - flap girls) and the size of the four protagonists relative to each other.

Vive les mariés!

Wedding, English River, ON, about 1925

Wedding party on St. Martin's Church steps, 730 St. Urbain Street, Montreal, QC, about 1930

Mrs J.E. St. Binney's bridal party and guests, Halifax, NS, about 1895

Miss Ryan's wedding, Montreal, QC, 1921

Prisoner Stripes, Marine Stripes, Referee Stripes, Fashionable Stripes: Nike Soccer Stripes for the French Team

Les marins portent des marinières pour être repérés si ils tombent à l'eau, Coco Chanel l'anticonformiste en avait fait son uniforme, les prisonniers les ont en noir pour être reconnaissables si ils tentent de s'échapper, et les arbitres se soumettent au même modèle pour se différencier des joueurs. Récemment le renouveau des râyures dans la mode de tous les jours a vaguement changé la donne, mais il reste vrai que les râyures sont une manière élégante de se mettre en avant. 

Picasso l'avait compris, maintenant Nike le reprend pour l'équipe française de football.

Rien de mieux pour redorer un blason sportif que d'avoir de beaux joueurs à la mode qui courent.

What is Levi's Up to When Simply Reproducing History is so Trendy?

Opening Ceremony is collaborating (again). With Levi's again. 

The video launched for the occasion is touching with a cake and a playful kiss, short skirts and cute accidents all happening in a little white-cube house, but the clothes seem really secondary. I get that Levi's is confused and needs the trendy power of OC to feel hip again, but I think that instead of producing a few pretty unnecessary items to be associated with Opening Ceremony, Levi's should have engaged in a now very common branding maneuver: look back (on its own) to reproduce some of their old collections. Like Mr.Oizo's Sta-Prest or their Twisted (greatest jeans of all time) collection which (unlike their past collaboration with OC which is on sale) would last more than a season:

Opening Ceremony (aw... adorable colour coordination, clothes?):

Sta-Prest (great ad, interesting outfit):

Twisted Collection (weird ad, great pants):

The Smartest Thing - People Watching

This is an amazing 1979 ethnography (by William H. Whyte) with (pre-cellular phone) footage of urban spaces, aka it's a team that spent months people-watching and deconstructing social behavior to think of ways to build 'better' cities. It includes a bird lady, the art of chair ownership, girl watchers, people mimicking people and the power-dynamics of food.

The Phenomenology of White: Trying to Think Differently About Bleached Models and Real Estate

Last week Cathy Horn, fashion writer for the New York Times, argued that the fashion world gets off the idea of pushing boundaries, when actually there aren't any to push (nothing new under the sun, Foucault said similar things about Western sexuality some fifty odd years ago), and uses Givenchy's latest advertisement featuring Stephen Thompson - an albino model - as an example. 

Although he may never have produced melanin ever, seems like overall low melanin secretion isn't a bad thing when it comes to success in fashion. And Miu Miu's winter bleached eyebrows campaign, Lara Stone's pigments or Thompson's apparently just as melanin-less co-model in the ad aren't going against the phenomenon. Which got me into thinking why? What does white have that the other colours don't?

The study of colour value and colour perception is an old one that, with the advent of post-modernity's concerns for societal causes, went out of politically correct and academic style. For centuries this field followed Plato’s distinction between mind and body. Similarly to René Descartes' ideas, it was understood that the world of appearances was one of allusions as opposed to the world of thought in which ideal and universal forms existed. For Descartes accordingly the perception of colour was like any other experience of tangible substance: an automatic process itself worth studying but insignificant in the greater pursuit of selfhood and truth.

While this Cartesian dualism has received severe criticism because equating 'objective' colour seeing to 'physical' measurements (such as the Munsell chart, NeCoSyn or the Swedish Color System) excludes the less tangible implications informed by culture and context (problems of objectivity basically), the opposite end of the purely quantitive pendulum is close to a similar intellectual dead-end. What anthropologist Daniel Miller coined the tyranny of the word - a theoretical stand point in which all material things are studied and understood as projections of something else. As a result white doesn't 'just' exist in itself, it is standing in for something else - the biased aesthetic standard of a European colonizer, or the pre-pubescent innocence of childhood and birth (because of things like the 'universal' colour of breast milk and sperm). In other words these two approaches deny "the emotion and desire, the sensuality and danger and hence the expressive potential that colours possess themselves" (Young: 174). A kind of phenomenology of white.

What are the emotions attached to white? Albinos are killed in Tanzania, white hair is dull in Canada but aristocratic in Guatemala. White also reminds me of wedding dresses and real estate. White wedding dresses appeared under the Victorian era. Real estate because I read an ethnography in which London apartments with white walls sold for more than the ones equivalent in size but with, say, girlie pink walls and green bathroom wallpaper. The author/anthropologist argued that white on the market makes for a better sale because it is easier to identify to something that lacks the presence of past occupants. Which brings us back the wedding dress (remember the whole virginity thing?) - a historical construction.

So I don't know, really, is what it comes down to. Beyond ideologies rooted in biased universalist aspirations or in over-exploited identity politics, is there an agency to white? Something that intrinsically belongs to it that results in low melanin secreting people being more appropriate models (and better sellers of things)?

Benetton "Tribe (Albino)" 1992. Photography: Yves Gellie, Advertising: Oliviero Toscani

Lady Dior's Universalism

Sometimes trying to impact too many markets, even in this globalized economy, isn't that great. Sadly I feel like Dior abused the rather charming concept of their first Lady Dior campaign, turning Marion Cotillard into an impersonal looking model/doll and their bags into cheap commodities.

After Marion Cotillard clutching to her life (read her black Lady Dior bag in Paris) on the Eiffel Tower, Marion Cotillard singing with Franz Ferdinand and strolling with nostalgia (read her red Lady Dior in NYC) along the Hudson River and Marion Cotillard in Shanghai dealing with drama (read her blue Lady Dior), here is the video version of Marion Cotillard with her grey Lady Dior too photoshoped to look not like herself in London's Eye.

Dior presents Marion Cotillard as a cabaret star/muse/healer/saint and proud owner of the grey Lady Dior as well as Dior pens and Dior flasks in London and all in grey.

Porselli Ballerinas: Authentic, Timeless and Decay, How to Insure the Consumer Will Consume Again

These ballerinas are the result of a collaboration between Collection Privée and Porselli, the equivalent of Italy's France's Repetto. The Italians are a little late on the whole ballerina come-back collaboration thing - an on-going trend spearheaded by Repetto owner (and ex-Reebok VP) Jean-Marc Gaucher. Gaucher is smart and banked right into a now common branding strategy: he stressed Repetto's authenticity (we have been making dance shoes since the 1930s) and gave it edge with exclusive collaborations. In 1999, when Gaucher bought Repetto, the company was near bankruptcy but his séries limitées and exclusive deals with Comme des Garçons, Vanessa Beecroft, Colette, Opening Ceremony or Rodarte have led the company to record 27 million euros in profit in 2008. Not bad in a decade when the rest of the European industry survived by offshoring.

Needless to say not offshoring is in many ways a very good thing. I am also a victim of Gaucher's and Bardot's charm and believe ballerinas (and Mary Janes) to be the next best thing to come out of the 50s for women after de Beauvoir. But the reason for Repetto's survival is part of a current within contemporary consumption patterns that isn't as charming. 

Today's consumers reward products linked to notions of authenticity ("the piece has a history"), quality ("this is a lasting") and timelessness ("the is a classic piece") or at least products with the image of being such. Paradoxically however today's fashion makers find money and fashion buyers find meaning from trends that are as short-lived as possible. The shorter the better - apparently more trends means more sales and more outfits means more identity. While I'm suspect of such logic it's obvious that if Repetto stops producing new collaborations to increase sales and stay hip, the consumer will in all likelihood forget about the timeless qualities of the Repetto and rapidly adorn its feet with Porselli such as these:  a pair that is (illustration) totally banking on its 'timeless' credentials by literally accelerating the time process (aka decaying) the shoes.

Buying new decayed shoes means that if they haven't been replaced by another collaboration resulting in an other authentic timeless and quality pair, the consumer will have no other option but to replace the pair because of its uselessness (read - unwalkable). Brands are so scared (as if they should) that their marketing and trend producing devices wouldn't sellout their next season that they preemptively ruin their creations so that consumers to HAVE to buy new. And shoes aren't the only pieces affected by this trend - the torn tights, the ragged jeans, the bobby-pinned jackets, the see-thru cotton aged t-shirts, and the list goes on.

In present day fashion, time, its value and its look, seem to be a very convoluted dialectic - the look of decay is in because it rings authentic, although authenticity is only a manufactured concept originating in our present, and repairs might be the most timeless activity there is in costume yet it is overrated because our time is directed by an endless appetite for consumption from fear of our future's lack (of money, of identity). 

Time for a new model (and I'm not talking about ending anorexia)?
Brigitte Bardot, originally a dancer, allegedly asked Rose Repetto in 1956 to conceive shoes as light and comfortable as her chausson de dance but sexier. Rose added the heel and voilà the Cendrillon was born:

Before Skateboarding Gets Cool Again, Replacing Fixies and Demonstrating Yet Again How Generic Cool-looking People Are

In New York City cool men have skateboards. Gliding from Williamsburg's bike lanes to Soho's tarmac, New York City skateboarders are not trashy teenagers with a lot of teenage angst, they are cool creative minds wearing Barbour jackets and Yuketen boots. It's a slow but emerging trend and I predict that in five years time skateboards will have replaced fixies. 

Since I have found fixies to be a ridiculous embarrassment to the human race (humans = lambs), before I get just as upset about how trendy skateboards are about to be, here is a touching mini-doc on a young Charity in Afghanistan called Skateistan:

Could Gucci be Going Metaphysical? Attending a Gucci Marketing Brainstorming Session

I was reading October British Vogue (dedicated to stars, stardust, stardom, astrology and sparks it ironically took ten long pages to describe their cover girl Emma Watson as a laid-back easy-going not-bitchy celebrity normal 20 year old) last night when I discovered this.

This is the Gucci Cruise 2011 Ad Campaign.

As one can see there is a subtle Gucci self-reference: you are looking at a Gucci ad in which another Gucci ad is placed. Both ads have the same two models  (Raquel Zimmermann and Nikola Jovanovic), the same GUCCI white font, the same blue sky, the same weird stares and the (subjective  judgement) poorly acted out 'act as a model' stances.

So is Gucci being witty, critical, ironic? Clearly the slightly clunky Baudrillardian hyper-reality argument whereby reproductions of the real are more real than reality, is well illustrated here. However I'm pretty sure this overwhelmingness of tackiness in a frame was simply the result of big egos, lack of imagination and yet again a simple rehashing of old ideologies and aesthetics. Like the Althussar argument that the capitalist state apparatus ideology hails us into desiring things - the Gucci team must have figured that if they had two 'hailing apparatuses' they could double the chances of doubling their profits. And John Berger's insight that all these advertising images promote better ways of living suggests that the Gucci Cruise 2011 Brainstorming session went something like this:

- Nic: so guys what are we going to do this time? key words - empowerment,  urban vibe, ultraglamorous, military uniforms
- Jennifer: oh my God Raquel is still so empowered, urban and ultraglamorous, we totally need to use her again. But where?
(silent contemplation at Gucci's old ads archived under empowerment, urban vibe, ultraglamorous and military uniforms)
- Jasper: well like John Berger said advertising images create desire like real reality can't. Real reality can't compare to the ads we've been creating for Gucci in other words. So using our own amazing past work as backgrounds would actually be more efficient at convincing people to buy a Gucci bag than real reality...
- Alison: ... oh my god so let's use our own amazing billboards as backgrounds with Raquel so urban and so ultraglam in front!
- Nic: wow, that's totally genius. We're totally amazing guys.

PS note the use was the "Château Marmont" sign at the bottom right corner.

Ways of Seeing by John Berger (1972) - Authenticity, Images, Advertising, Reproductions and Happiness

I just discovered these 1972 television treasures by John Berger.

Till now I only knew of the end result - the wonderful book "Ways of Seeing." A semi-cult read in cultural/visual studies, in it he rethinks what seeing is - what advertising does, what art means, how reproductions affect the act of seeing and the way which visibility is a subjective process. The originality is that he does this by using images, reproductions and collages as much as words and text. Similarly in the televised version of "Ways of Seeing" he uses editing techniques (as if switching channels) and particular frames (filming the film crew filming him) as much as his voice-over to get his questions across.

Here is a wonderful articulation of the absurd adoration western culture has for authenticity:

In this particular extract Berger looks at (pun intended) ideas of hyperreality and consumption in the world of advertising. At times a little simplistic (forty years have gone giving the issue a bunch of new ways to think about it) but his questions are still just as relevant today as they were 40 years ago:

A Talk in Brooklyn - Tall Tales of the Totem Pole: The Intercultural Biography of an Icon

This is a 400$ dress made by NYC based designer Lindsey Thornburg.

More importantly Aaron Glass will be giving a talk on the history of the Totem Pole as an iconic object next Sunday. Since the first European contact the totem has progressively come to symbolize Native American culture as a whole - as if it had preserved all the qualities of a culture and tradition lost. Problematizing the issue Glass will touch upon the changes the totem underwent since early colonialism and the reasons for its now cult status (in theme parks, in fashion - see image - or within more serious repatriation and heritage issues).

Glass is an anthropologist teaching material culture at the Bard Graduate Center in NYC, where he is also a museum fellow.

The talk will be given October 24th at the Observatory Room at 543 Union Street (near Nevins) in Gowanus, Brooklyn.

It's 5$ (800 times less than the dress) and will convince you how stupid the dress is too.


... Afterthoughts: Totem and Taboo

Among the many things I gathered at last night's talk: 1913 Freud publishes "Totem and Taboo", Totemism in 1960s scholarship, more totem poles went up between 1970 and 2000 than from 1870 and 1900, the white man's fur trade in the late 18th century brought new more efficient tools and glues and better brighter paints, 1937 Disney comes out with Snow White: