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.
The men’s care industry killed metrosexuality by co-opting metrosexuals’ grooming habits and repackaging them as masculine and paternal. Same goes for the renaissance of old-school men’s shops, where conditioning skin and softening hair is neither “metro” nor “narcissistic,” but “classic,” and “quality.”
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.
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 body, too, should stay firmly composed, and not fling itself about either in motion or at rest. Just as the mind displays qualities in the face, keeping it intelligent and attractive, something similar should be required of the whole body. But all this should be secured without making an obvious point of it.
Perhaps you should consider consuming less, but consuming something special. Prioritizing something that pays a person who is creating a product that approaches art, rather than approaching widget.
If everyone had good manners we wouldn’t need laws. I think that’s the great hope of civility, that we can control society through cultural means rather than through lawyers.
The NBA’s Most Stylish Players: GQ.
Mark Larson 