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kottke.org posts about fashion
Draft Sully for Secretary of Transportation
Now available for sale on CafePress in men’s and women’s sizes:
The mayor gave Sully the key to the city for landing the airplane safely into the Hudson River but surely he deserves more…like a job in the Obama administration as the Secretary of Transportation (no offense to Mr. LaHood).
Bill Cunningham and Greta Garbo
Here are a pair of articles from 2002 on street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, who currently plys his trade for the NY Times. (I love Cunningham’s On the Street dispatches.) The first is Bill on Bill, where the photographer recalls how he got interested in fashion and photography.
As a kid, I photographed people at ski resorts — you know, when you got on the snow train and went up to New Hampshire. And I did parties. I worked as a stock boy at Bonwit Teller in Boston, where my family lived, and there was a very interesting woman, an executive, at Bonwit’s. She was sensitive and aware, and she said, “I see you outside at lunchtime watching people.” And I said, “Oh, yeah, that’s my hobby.” She said, “If you think what they’re wearing is wrong, why don’t you redo them in your mind’s eye.” That was really the first professional direction I received.
The second article is a collection of recollections of Cunningham from some of the people he has photographed.
He taught me how to tell a story with pictures and that it didn’t always involve the best image. I’d say to him, “But isn’t this a better photo?” And he’d say, “Yes, child, but this photo tells the story better.” For him, it wasn’t about the aesthetics of photography. It was about storytelling.
Both articles mention that Cunningham got his first street photography into the Times when he shot a photo of the famously reclusive Greta Garbo walking on Fifth Avenue. I couldn’t find Cunningham’s Garbo photo anywhere online so I tracked down the Times article and found only this poor scan:
Here’s another shot Cunningham made that same day which didn’t end up in the paper (Garbo’s got her hand over her face). Interestingly, street photos of Garbo were not particularly rare. Here are a selection from the 1980s, including several that feature Garbo in similar clothing. Many of them were taken by creepy paparazzo Ted Leyson, who stalked Garbo for more than 10 years in NYC. Leyson took what is believed to be the last photo of Garbo before she died in 1990.
More bush (not George W.)
In these tight times, more women are scaling back their pubic topiary activities and opting for a more natural look.
An unlikely baseball record
The number of pinstripes on a Yankees jersey varies with the size of the player…the bigger the man, the more pinstripes on the jersey. With the Yankees’ recent signing of CC Sabathia, a rather large gentleman, ESPN’s Paul Lukas wonders: will Sabathia have the most Yankee pinstripes in history?
You’re embarking on a new field of study here, so we have to make up our own rules and standards as we go,” he said. “For example, depending on how a jersey is tailored, the number of pinstripes at the top and at the bottom aren’t necessarily the same. Also, the space between the pinstripes has changed a bit over the years, and the pinstripes themselves are thinner today than in the old days.
(thx, djacobs)
What should Michelle Obama wear?
Some sketches from various fashion designers of what Michelle Obama should wear for her husband’s inauguration festivities. These are fascinating to look at. (thx, david)
Air Giulianis, NYC prison sneakers
From an article about a collection of businesses located near Riker’s Island, this tidbit: the inmates refer to the prison-issued orange sneakers as Air Giulianis. Also:
The food truck man, Mr. Samolis, said he often gives free food to inmates who are released from Rikers with no money.
“They get released at 6 in the morning with nothing but a $2 MetroCard the jail gives them,” he said. “So I’ll give them a coffee and an egg sandwich, on credit. I know they’re never going to pay it back, but I feel bad for them.”
(thx, jake)
A fashion model for the ages
Vogue Paris has an editorial in the November 2008 issue which features a 20-year-old model photographed as if she were 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 years old. The hands betray her true age in the 40, 50, and 60 shots but the 10-year-old photo is a little bit of brilliance…just the right angle and lighting. (via the year in pictures)
The Olsen twins
I don’t know if you’ll enjoy reading a NY Times profile of the Olsen Twins, but I was oddly fascinated.
Mary-Kate’s contribution to the enterprise is a collector’s knowledge. She has been buying vintage Lanvin and Givenchy, among other classic labels of the mid-20th century, for a number of years. (Unlike Ashley, Mary-Kate continues to act, having played, with a perfect semblance of haze and obfuscation, a born-again Christian drug dealer on the third season of “Weeds.” This year she appeared opposite Ben Kingsley in the film “The Wackness.”) Ashley is the more entrepreneurial, the one who will tell you how much she admires Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
Flickr image pilfered for $235 Paul Smith t-shirt
Noted Processing practitioner Robert Hodgin had one of his designs lifted from Flickr and it found its way onto a $235 Paul Smith t-shirt.
I put the shirt on and it fit fine. I couldn’t stop smiling. The whole thing was so damned surreal. Here I am in a Paul Smith changing room trying on a shirt that features a design element stolen from my Flickr site!
“It fits perfectly,” I told the salesman. “It’s like I made it myself,” I joked and smiled at Lance.
“You did make it yourself,” the man replied, oblivious to the inside joke but wanting to play along.
Lance asked the salesman if he knew anything about the print on the shirt. He said something about hobos and the passing of knowledge or something. I was too distracted to pay attention. I said I will take it and he led us to the cashier. $235 later, I was walking out of the store with my very own personalized Paul Smith shirt.
Distressed jeans factory
David Friedman of the excellent Ironic Sans blog took some photos of a Kentucky denim factory that distresses jeans for high-end designers.
I used to scoff at paying a premium for jeans that come with holes in them already. Then I saw just how much work goes into distressing jeans, and I realized that these people are artists. You can’t just have any loose threads, you have to have the right loose threads. They can’t just be faded. They have to be the right color. A lot of work goes into making these jeans look just right.
Fashion models transformed
Several photo series of fashion models transforming into different outfits. It’s amazing how different they can look with changes in makeup, hair, and clothes.
Michael Kors’ Mad Men influence
Fashion designer Michael Kors based his 2008 fall collection in part on Mad Men. The maturity of dress on the show is part of what attracted him:
Aren’t we ready for that again? For some maturity? I have to tell you, I am sick and tired of hair down to there and crotch-high hemlines. It’s so obvious. For Fall I was really trying to bring back buttoned-up sexy — think Grace Kelly. So cool, so poised. She never reveals a thing and you can’t take your eyes off of her. I mean, watch “Rear Window.” That’s smart sexy; it’s interesting sexy. And it’s grown-up sexy. You want a tip on looking hot? Wear reading glasses and a fitted dress. Simple.
He’s right about Grace Kelly. I watched Rear Window recently and she’s something else in it.
Fashion Week review
Molly Young of n+1 takes in some shows at New York Fashion Week.
You can tell who is destined for the tents by their appearance. It’s not that fashion people dress the same or even splashily, but rather that every one of them possesses an uncanny sartorial self-awareness. You get the sense that they have arrived at their outfits and hairstyles after painstaking analysis of personal flaws and assets cross-indexed with current trends.
(via 3qd)
How to bull your shoes
Video on how to bull your shoes (bull = put a really nice polish on them).
1000 circles! From the same series: checkmate in four moves. (via acl)
Fashion for the seasonally depressed
Two t-shirts for those afflicted with seasonal affective disorder: s.a.d. t-shirt 01 and s.a.d. t-shirt 02. Both shirts feature inks that reveal hidden elements when worn in the sun or warm weather. (Psst, Hypercolor shirts are back and, yes, I’m a bit OMGWMCC about it. What, it’s not possible to buy your childhood back?) (Psst, oh my God, where’s my credit card?)
Update: For whatever reason, the site featuring those tshirts has been taken down. today and tomorrow grabbed some of the pics though.
Marc Jacobs profile
Nice profile of fashion designer Marc Jacobs, creative head of Louis Vuitton, in the New Yorker this week. Jacobs used to be a chunky unfashionable pasty-white kind of guy but has recently started dressing the part and now looks like he could model for one of LV’s magazine ads.
Jacobs walked outside to the back garden, to take in the evening amid the boxwood. “I like the fact that people are sort of commenting on my appearance,” he said. “I work on these things! So to have them recognized, even if sometimes I don’t like the way they’re recognized, I like that they are, and I feel good that I can admit that, instead of being ashamed.” He paused. “I’m going to get a ‘shameless’ tattoo next,” he said, the Eiffel Tower sparkling behind him in the night sky. “That’s what I think everyone should aspire to in life: being shameless.”
Juergen Teller, photographer, isn’t sexy
I found this New York magazine profile of fashion photographer Juergen Teller pretty fascinating. For one thing, none of Teller’s photos are retouched.
But perhaps most rare for fashion photography, Teller’s pictures are absolutely never retouched. “I’m interested in the person I photograph,” he says. “The world is so beautiful as it is, there’s so much going on which is sort of interesting. It’s just so crazy, so why do I have to put some retouching on it? It’s just pointless to me.”
And then there’s this anecdote. After a bad encounter with a subject who didn’t like how old she looked in Teller’s photographs, he went to see his friend Charlotte Rampling.
Despondent, Teller called his friend Rampling, who offered to cook him dinner. They talked about how it feels to be photographed, and how it feels to age. “I just thought, Fuck this, I’m going to photograph myself,” he says. And then there the two of them were, in the Louis XV suite of the Hotel de Crillon, with Teller way too fat to fit into any of the Marc Jacobs samples save one terribly shiny pair of silver shorts.
“I thought, Fuck,” Teller says, “I don’t even fucking fit into these clothes. I’m really fucking stuck now.”
So he pulled on the shorts in the bathroom. “I came out and I had my socks on and I had these shorts on and no top, and I just said, ‘Ta-da!’ And she said, ‘Oh my God. What are we going to do?’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. But really, honestly’-and I could hardly bring it out of my mouth-I said, ‘I just want to kiss you and fondle your breasts.’ And she didn’t say a word. She just leaned back in her armchair and went into her handbag and got a cigarillo out and lit it and the air was thick and I was mortified. And then she sort of dragged on her cigarette and said, ‘Okay. Let’s start. I’ll tell you when to stop.’”
Here are some of the images that resulted from that shoot (NSFW).
Fake Louis Vuitton products
A collection of photos of custom and counterfeit Louis Vuitton products. Big omission: David LaChapelle’s photo of an LV’d Lil’ Kim. (via quips)
Black is back (to the end of the line)
James Danziger notes that the issue of Vogue Italia following the acclaimed issue featuring only black models has zero black models in it.
How absolutely great, but now the August issue is out — themed around a faux funeral photo tribute to Yves Saint Laurent — and there’s apparently not one black model to be found. This is especially ironic given the fact that Yves Saint Laurent was one of the first major designers to regularly feature black models in his runway shows. You would have thought they could have found room to at least fit Naomi Campbell in somewhere. Wouldn’t she look chic in widow’s weeds? This kind of tokenism ultimately seems a step backwards to me.
Old expensive pants
A pair of Levi’s from the 1890s are up on eBay.
This old pair of LEVI’S were found in a mine in the Rand Mining District, on the Mojave Desert,. California. They are covered in candlewax from the candle’s the miner was using to light the tunnel he was working in. They were found with and old paper bag with the name of a mercantile store which operated between 1895 and 1898 in the town or Randsburg. Their was also a gunny sack with the initials A.P.K. and Randsburg marked on it. A.P.K. is through to be Adam P. Kuffel who was a partner in the mercantile store.
These pants have the cloth label vice the leather label. The label (pictured) indicates that they are size W34 x L33, They are copper riveted with the rivets marked L.S. & Co. S.F. They are buckle back (pictured) with suspender buttons. Buttons are silver in color and are all marked LEVI STRAUSS & CO. S.F.CAL. Tthe pants were made with just one back pocket on the right hand side.
With 2 days to go, the current high bid stands at $7300. (via reference library)
Update: Another seller is contemplating listing another old pair of pants.
The jeans were uncovered in an old miners cabin here in montana and have been dated between 1890 and 1901 by the rivets on the jeans. There was gold in the watch pocket of the blue jeans and has been saved in a vial, do you think we should include it in the auction? there is also the miners diaries and a couple of shaker boxes too.
Hobble skirt
The history of the hobble skirt.
The term ‘hobble skirt’ came into popular use in the early 1910s, when a European fashion trend started by French designer Paul Poiret introduced long skirts that were narrow at the hem, thus ‘hobbling’ the wearer. Some attribute one of Poiret’s inspiration to Mrs. Hart Berg, the first American woman to join the Wright Brothers in air. To keep her skirts from flying out of control while airborne, she tied a rope around them below the knees (Katherine Wright, sister of the flight innovators the Wright brothers, also did the same shortly afterwards).
For a short while, the tighter the skirt, the more fashionable it was. This also brought about accessories such as the hobble garter (you can see one in tbe PBS series The Manor House) designed to limit the wearer’s stride so that she would not cause the skirt to rip. This trend died shortly afterwards due to the impracticality of such a garment, particularly with the introduction of cars (the skirts making getting in and out of one a bit of an adventure).
Bill Cunningham casually mentioned the hobble skirt in a recent On the Street feature about pencil skirts.
Bill Cunningham’s street photos
I’ve not been paying enough attention to Bill Cunningham’s street fashion photography slideshows. Each week, Cunningham goes out on the streets of NYC to find out what people are wearing. Even better than the photos are his enthusiastic descriptions of what he’s found.
This week he looks at women’s handbags, which he calls “the engine carrying the fashion world”. Cunningham finds that bags are growing almost “cartoonishly large” and discovers a unique glove/bag combo. Last week, he looked at the glittery belts that some men are wearing with their saggy jeans. If this was the type of fashion that filled the pages of Vogue, I would subscribe in a second. (thx, alaina)
Update: Cunningham’s video journals are now available on YouTube for easy watching/embedding.
Black models in Vogue Italia
For its July 2008 issue, Vogue Italia is featuring only black models and feature articles about black women in arts and entertainment.
Having worked at one time with nearly all the models he chose for the black issue — Iman, [Naomi] Campbell, Tyra Banks, Jourdan Dunn, [Liya] Kebede, [Alek] Wek, Pat Cleveland, Karen Alexander — [photographer Steven] Meisel had his own feelings. “I thought, it’s ridiculous, this discrimination,” said Mr. Meisel, speaking by phone from his home in Los Angeles. “It’s so crazy to live in such a narrow, narrow place. Age, weight, sexuality, race — every kind of prejudice.”
Here’s a slideshow of some of the images from the magazine. As I’ve said before, Vogue Italia is doing some interesting things with the editorial nature of the magazine’s photography (see State of Emergency and Super Mods Enter Rehab, both by Steven Meisel).
100 Thing Challenge
Time reports on a group of folks who are trying to whittle down their possessions to 100 items.
Bruno keeps a running tally on his blog, guynameddave.com of what he has decided to hold on to and what he is preparing to sell or donate. For instance, as of early June, he was down to five dress shirts and one necktie but uncertain about parting with one of his three pairs of jeans. “Are two pairs of jeans enough?!,” he asked in a recent posting.
That’s not the only dilemma faced by this new wave of goal-oriented minimalists. One of the trickier questions is what counts as an item. Bruno considers a pair of shoes to be a single entity, which seems sensible but still pretty hard-core when you’re trying to jettison all but 100 personal possessions. Cait Simmons, 27, a waitress in Chicago, takes a different approach. Although she has pared down her footwear collection from 35 to 20 pairs, she says, “All my shoes count as one item.”
Bruno’s site is currently inaccessible…here’s the Google cache for his 100 Thing Challenge page.
HD makeup
A company called Cargo Cosmetics makes a line of makeup called blu_ray for use by people appearing on high-definition TV or film.
Developed in response to the needs of makeup artists shooting in high definition, these specialized products work for high-def and are ideal for perfecting the skin while still giving a natural look.
Available at Sephora. Has anyone used this? Does it work? Email me. (thx, doug)
Pajamas as outerwear
Photos of pajamas as outerwear in Shanghai.
The prevalence of pyjamas, Guariglia explained to me, was due to both the extreme summer heat and the lack of plumbing. Most Shanghaians share outdoor communal toilets and thus the boundaries of what was considered one’s home have expanded past people’s houses to the public bathrooms. Once that relaxation of the dress code became acceptable (starting around the 1980s) the perimeter for p.j.-wear just kept expanding until many people were wearing them day in day out.
Like the Rolling Stones
Fantastic collection of photos by James Mollison of music fans who tend to dress like their idols. A book featuring the photos is due out in October.
Over a three-year period, James Mollison attended pop concerts across Europe and the United States with a mobile photography studio, inviting fans of each music star or band to pose for a portrait on their way into the concert. The result is The Disciples, an original and highly entertaining series of fifty-seven panoramic images, each featuring eight to ten music fans mimicking the manners and dress of their particular heroes. Featuring fans of Dolly Parton, Iggy Pop, Madonna, Marilyn Manson, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Snoop Dogg, and Motorhead, among many others, The Disciples is a surprising, sharp, and hilarious take on popular culture.
(via waxy)
The Brannock Foot-Measuring Device
Michael Bierut celebrates the elegantly simple design of the Brannock Foot-Measuring Device.
Charles F. Brannock only invented one thing in his life, and this was it. The son of a Syracuse, New York, shoe magnate, Brannock became interested in improving the primitive wooden measuring sticks that he saw around his father’s store. He patented his first prototype in 1926, based on models he had made from Erector Set parts. As the Park-Brannock Shoe Store became legendary for fitting feet with absolute accuracy, the demand for the device grew, and in 1927 Brannock opened a factory to mass produce it. The Brannock Device Co., Inc., is still in business today. Refreshingly, it still only makes this one thing. They have sold over a million, a remarkable number when one considers that each of them lasts up to 15 years, when the numbers wear off.
Bierut also notes that Tibor Kalman was a big fan of the Brannock Device, once saying:
It showed incredible ingenuity and no one has ever been able to beat it. I doubt if anyone ever will, even if we ever get to the stars, or find out everything there is to find out about black holes.
The humble shoe horn is another well designed shoe-related device that may never be bettered.
Secondhand clothes in Haiti
An interview with the makers of a film about secondhand clothing in Haiti.
Shell says Haitians sometimes dress better than Americans because they are used to tailoring their secondhand clothes to fit. While the pepe market makes it difficult for Haitian tailors to sell their own designs or traditional fashions; the cheap cost means, as one woman in the documentary explains, they can “adopt the look that is on television without much effort.”
Most of the clothes come from the United States.
Update: Secondhand clothing imports to Zambia killed the clothing industry there:
Mark O’Donnell, spokesperson for Zambian Manufacturers, explains that in 1991, when the country’s markets were opened to free trade, container load after container load of used clothing began to arrive in Zambia, undercutting the cost of the domestic manufacturers and putting them out of business. The skills, the infrastructure and the capital of an entire industry are now virtually extinct, with not a single clothing manufacturer left in the country today.
(thx, tj)
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