April 2012
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Moved to http://vvires.com/
Moved to new site: http://vvires.com/ Please share and change your bookmarks.
February 2012
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Fashion bloggers: mini celebrities who have to...
Photograph: Voitek Pendrak
I haven’t done an outfit post in a while. Where other fashionistas have a gaga of clothes to play with, I have a small wardrobe. I’d also have to get arrested often to have someone take pictures of me. Besides, there are lots of bloggers, many under twenty, who post their style experiments regularly so I’ll leave it to the pros. On the topic of younger upstarts, before...
January 2012
2 posts
1 tag
Vegas
World Market Center, Las Vegas (CC)
Las Vegas was God’s test of your self-control crammed into a couple of blocks. It was everything to excess and if you haven’t managed to kill yourself, you could return to normal life. Though you may wish you were dead to avoid paying off your debts. The big hotels were all replicas of historied cities from Venice to Paris. While the facsimiles was...
1 tag
Los Angeles
Pathway leading to the Hollywood Bowl (CC)
From high above, LA’s illusion of glamor holds, with rows and rows of cars reflecting the sun, resembling crystals. On the ground, poorer areas surround pockets of wealth. In one neighbourhood, Jewish and Middle Eastern stores stood side by side, a model for peaceful coexistence. Then again, good food can rise above anything, even ethnic...
November 2011
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Hello, goodbye
We demonize runaway consumption because it’s the need for new and more at its most obvious. But this greed pervades all aspects of life. We all always seeking new people, experiences, etc. It’s good to expand our horizons but pursuing novelty can get addictive because like taking a drug, something we never tried before is always glorious the first, second and perhaps third time. The process of...
August 2011
2 posts
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Jingle, jangle, jumple
Jumple
The shows of local acts tend to be more intimate because they aren’t able to fill stadiums yet, pricing you out to a seat three rows from the back. I discovered JUMPLE randomly, whose members’ outsize personalities match their upbeat East European folk music. Eugene Lantsman, the leader singer is smooth at drawing in crowds and pumping them up, who would be bouncing off the walls if they...
2 tags
Necking
Proenza Schouler Resort 2012, Proenza Schouler Spring/Summer 2011
Accessories are often the last items people put on but as book covers, some merely contain the contents and others say a thousand words about them. Proenza Schouler’s accessories, like patterns from a kaleidoscope, are examples of the paradox it takes twice the careful planning to come off random. For Resort 2012, Alex & Lee,...
June 2011
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Talent is timeless
Delvaux - Brillant MM
There are two types of art that stand out. There’s art that forges a new style to closely capture new prevailing moods. Then there’s art that transcends time because it reflects some aspect of nature - seeing it every day and everywhere, it forms our tastes. Fashion does trendy, timeless and everything in between. The problem is, while many artists from other genres set...
May 2011
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Great leap forward
Guo Pei - Fall/Winter 2010/2011
China is known for clothes you wear one day, then salvage the scraps to keep your pet warm the next. So a Beijing couturier who regularly goes overbudget to chase her flights of fancy? Refreshing. Guo Pei makes the giant leap forward from proletarian drab garb to dresses with elaborate beading and embroidery. Pei’s porcelain dress take its folds from origami and...
April 2011
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Prints, please
Cerruti - Spring/Summer 2011
High-tech digital printing has allowed fashion designers to go from creating art out of fabric to pasting art on it. While some prints interact with the angles and curves of the body, many others are standalone pieces that simply need to hang off something to keep it upright. However, the body is not a blank canvas. It’s a canvas that already comes with work whoever...
February 2011
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Light loving
Pablo - tube light, Claudio Saccon - Roma table light
Shopping around for table lamps, I encountered many with stacked gourds. So you could break off their tops to use as anal beads in the heat of passion? The Claudio Sacoon lamp caught my eye. A shard of glass carrying a glow, it symbolizes what a home is, a cosy hideaway from the sometimes cold world. However, it wasn’t as striking in person...
January 2011
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Halloween
(CC)
For Halloween, I dressed up as a flower while the wind bended trees to remind me I was one season behind my life cycle. I got the organza ruffle top long ago and its a popup storybook of a chest helps me deflect human contact, others fearing they’d flatten the detail. As for the capri, whether I responded to its colors or to the tropical getaway I had one more outfit for, was one...
November 2010
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Deconstructing distressed
MTWTFSS Weekday - Fall/Winter 2010/11
Spurning signs of conspicuous consumption, distressed looks are increasingly preferred to spanking new getups. The less out of place an item would be at an archaeological dig, the more character it has. The allure of both ruins and modern architecture explain the trend of ripped jeans, shredded t-shirts and so on. The new shows how far we’ve come and the old...
June 2010
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Somarta
Junko Kimura - Spring/Summer 2009, Esteem PR Management - Skin + Bone Chair at Triennale Design Museum
Ever since Tamae Hirokawa launched the fashion label SOMARTA in 2006, she has used the latest in textile technology to create what macro lens capture, amazing details. Her skintight bodysuits allow the bold to go beyond expressing themselves through clothes that hang off their bodies, to wear...
March 2010
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Drying the cleaned
(CC)
Does anyone else use uncommon methods to dry their clothes? Water turned the pleats on this shirt from knife edges to cellulite so I used paperclips to restore their shape. To prevent wrinkles from forming after washing a garment, I separate the front of it from its back a couple times so they don’t stick. Unless the shape and/or material of an item won’t hold up in water, I hand wash my...
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Alain Quilici
Luisaviaroma, Public Image PR - Spring/Summer 2010
Drawing from Japanese anime and the tension between man and machine, Alain Quilici created his first shoe collection in 2007. For Spring 2010, Quilici attached architectural wedges to simple shoes, a relief from footwear sloppier than loaded plates in a buffet. The cutouts in the first shoe recall tree trunks but cut and treated for human use....
October 2009
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Acute angles
(CC)
I’ve been eying Missoni knits for a while but most of their zigzags, as fashion and as stock market reports, did not jibe well. On top of that, some Missioni colors could’ve been repurposed as military camouflage. I got an Autumn Cashmere cardigan instead, layering it into a waterfall for this look. The outfit played many angles off each other, a crash course in trigonometry. I...