Making leisure your labor, an elaboration of “working from home,” can be a profound comfort. Collapsing the public and private can mean protection from both realms — stripped of some of the obligations of traditional professionalism, your public life can be more intimate and casual. And when you “be yourself” for a living, your private self can be infused with the armored posturing of a public persona. This elision can also, truly, drive a person crazy.
In 1966, a photographer Cunningham knew gave him an Olympus Pen D half-frame camera. “It cost about thirty-five dollars,” Cunningham wrote. “He said, ‘Here, use it like a notebook.’ And that was the real beginning.”
In a show that saw artworks exploding off the wall to form couture gowns, Viktor and Rolf created garments that exaggerated the balancing acts that lie at the heart of all clothing. On everyday clothing, common pattern shapes are regurgitated so that designers don’t have to deal with pesky things like gravity. However, once materials become harder, heavier or stiffer the ability to shape and control the structure of a garment to form extreme silhouettes becomes more and more important.
When we talk about the 1970s for instance, they think about ABBA as one of the icons of the decade. They don’t know that ABBA at the time was considered to be extremely bad taste – vulgar and completely unfashionable. ABBA was still wearing platform shoes when everyone else had already moved on. What I mean to say is that it’s not always the best versions of the past that live on.
In the same way that some of the Futurist artists used stuttering lines to indicate speed and movement, Japanese label Anrealage was able to give the impression of blurry human movements, seen as though captured through the passing of time for the Autumn-Winter 2012 collection.
At first some of the garments trick the viewer into believing the photos are out of focus, with exaggerated silhouettes enhanced using prints and patterns that blur on the edges. However the effect is created through carefully considered print placements and precise pattern cutting.
Quick shout-out: The Cutting Class is one of my favorite tumblrs. It is a true joy to stumble on writing like this, where someone smart points out things that you’d never notice and makes you aware of a whole other world of smarts that you’d otherwise never know about.
In that sense, TV ads are truly native; the way you consume a TV ad is the same as the way you consume a TV show. Similarly, long copy print ads are native, for the same reason. And the ultimate native ads are the glossy fashion ads in Vogue: in most cases, they’re better than the editorial, and as a result, readers spend as much time with the ads — if not more — as they do with the edit.
Fashion magazines are such a good racket. Love that junk.
Even Westbrook has his limits, of course—Kanye’s infamous leather kilt, for instance. Though in his next breath Russ allows that he’d “be open to it if it were a slimmer fit.”
The NBA has had fashion moments before—Clyde Frazier wearing his wide-brimmed Borsalino on the cover of Esquire, the introduction of the Air Jordan in the mid-‘80s, Allen Iverson bringing cornrows, baggy jeans, and garish jewelry from the hood to the hardwood in the late ’90s—but the sine waves of high fashion and locker-room style have never synced up quite like they do right now.
Shopping for shoes is largely free of body anxiety associated with clothes shopping.
Never thought of that. I remember asking a woman I used to work with about the allure of shoes. Her response, “It’s like a little sculpture. You can put it in your hand and look at it and it’s just perfect.” She’s an artist, so that might be a natural response, but I still think about it years later.
The turtleneck is the most flattering thing a man can wear because it strips a man down to himself—because it forces a man to project himself. The turtleneck does not decorate, like at tie, or augment, like a sport coat, or in any way distract from what my father calls a man’s “presentation”; rather, it fixes a man in sharp relief and puts his face on a pedestal—first literally, then figuratively. It is about isolation, the turtleneck is; it is about essences and first causes; it is about the body and the face, and that’s all it’s about.
It seems odd, but it’s almost like going out there and letting yourself fall in love a little bit every day, letting yourself be seduced a little bit every day.
I also like his idea of the internet as a “digital park bench”, where you can see the entire world passing through your neighborhood.
The NBA’s Most Stylish Players: GQ.
Mark Larson 