This week I received the Clarisonic Skincare system. It's not my favorite, I have to say. The brush doesn't rotate really, it vibrates and I can get just as good a result with a good exfoliator and mitt.The Red card attached said:
Dear Leslie,
You’ve been selected by Vogue to discover Brahmin, a luxury handbag company known for its timeless, sophisticated styles.
It also goes on to tell me that the Anytime Tote will not be available in stores until May. It will however, be available on April 15 on Brahmin.com and in the Brahmin Boutiques.
What a nice surprise!
Japan Fashion Now
From September 16, 2010, to January 8, 2011
Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology
Seventh Avenue at 27 Street
New York City 10001-5992
Emerging from an economic and industrial boom in Japan in the 1960s, Japanese artists, designers, and architects found inspiration in the fusion between American pop culture and Japan's explosive consumer technologies. Placing great emphasis on an admiration for traditional Japanese art as well as the forms and ideologies of modernism via channels of fiber technology, visual imagery, and three-dimensional sculpture, Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo, and Yohji Yamamoto can be credited with the creation of the Japanese aesthetic in global fashion.
While these designers each have a unique perspective on cloth construction, they share a love for artistic collaboration in the development of their collections, marketing, and image. A distinct manufactured aesthetic is exaggerated, even hyperbolic, in the contemporary Japanese fashion house. This is particularly evident in the careers of Miyake and Kawakubo—the former has recruited a variety of textile and sculptural artists such as Yasumasa Morimura, Cai Guoqiang, painter Tadanori Yokoo, and architect Tadao Ando, and the latter partnered with Takao Kawasaki, an architect who conceived the majority of the designer's early Comme des Garçons boutique.
Kawakubo's empire combines an industrially inspired socialist work ethic with a nearly fanatical desire to purvey clothing as an ever-changing product of its sociocultural environment, citing both Neo-Realism and Futurism in runway collections and advertising. Miyake forms garments that celebrate the vitality and movement of the human body, particularly referencing Sudanese, Japanese, and American modes and overlaying them with the dictates of couture tailoring to communicate a liberated global aesthetic. Yamamoto exhibits the most loyalty to Japanese cloth traditions, famed for his 1990s kimono-inspired trenchcoats and shirts. Though clearly influenced by the pure geometric forms of such indigenous garments, Yamamoto finds methods of incorporating contemporary sportswear constructions and finishing details into his designs to evoke a postmodern street chic, imbued with functions of protection and durability.
Tools of Design
An interest in the evolution of fiber technology and a devotion to tonal and textural eclecticism prompts these designers to repeatedly emphasize the importance of their raw materials. Aspirations of continual movement in both fabric and structure governed the conception of the iconic pleat-setting of Miyake's "Pleats Please" series, the enigmatic twisting, piecing, and drapery of Yamamoto's designs, and the planar manipulation of Kawakubo's shrouding, texturing, and layering techniques. While Miyake has consistently employed various heat-embossing and synthetic coating textile processes to effect more modern sculptural forms, Kawakubo nods to the romantic subtleties of historic fashion, yet champions cold synthetic fibers in her executions. Most emblematic of this tendency toward ironic juxtaposition, the "lace" sweaters of the famed Comme des Garçons fall/winter 1982–83 collection featured black wool knits distressed with gaping holes to invoke the composition of lace. While Yamamoto often experiments with innovations in technical textiles and new synthetics, he also fondly executes his designs with unconventional natural materials. A vest and skirt ensemble made entirely of hinged wood slats from his fall/winter 1991 collection demonstrates a dedication to communicating the raw visual distinctions of planar form.
The New Traditions of Japanese Fashion
Miyake, Kawakubo, and Yamamoto have all contributed to the rise of Japanese fashion by communicating its aesthetic to the global market, thereby fostering an awareness of peer and successive generations of avant-garde Japanese creators such as Junya Watanabe, Junko Koshino, and Junichi Arai. Each is celebrated for fusing age-old couture tailoring with Japanese design ethos. Though the respective collections of these designers are often inextricably linked to their derivations of or deviations from Western fashion, each has used Japan's rich visual heritage as a foundation for aesthetic, social, and sometimes political collages of cultures worldwide. Much like the costumes of theJapanese Noh, the runway designs of Miyake, Kawakubo, and Yamamoto strive toward theatricality, visual splendor, and organic movement.
VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheMuseumatFIT?feature=mhum
Source:Miyake, Kawakubo, and Yamamoto: Japanese Fashion in the Twentieth Century | Thematic Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art
For more info: http://fitnyc.edu/8726.asp
“Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.”Coco Chanel was so enchanted with pockets that this would prove to be the main focus of her designs in handbags for women!
For Chanel, design started as a hobby.
Chanel started her career by designing hats which later became popular among the aristocratic Parisians within her friends' social circles. At first, they were for her friends who were the high-class call girls of the time, and she soon made a name for herself among the bourgoisie.
From Hosiery to high fashion:
Coco Chanel used to work as a clerk in a small hosiery shop. Her sister was the real seamstress and got Coco a job with her in a shop sewing hosiery, among other things. It was hosiery that revolutionized her fashion world, taking her boyfriends' wool jersey long johns and turning them into warm wool dresses. Her boyfriend of the time was a coal broker and knew that WWI would change the world and told her to make warm clothes for women. Though she designed prior to WWI, she took his advice and produced knit dresses for women, under which they couldn't wear corsets. This was considered risque at the time, but she literally revolutionized women from the corset!
Coco made the sun tan fashionable!
It was Coco Chanel who made a tan seem fashionable when she got burnt by sun's rays in 1923 on a cruise towards Cannes! It soon became associated with those who had time to "leisure" on the beach!
Coco wanted to be an actress, and even auditioned on the stage.
Coco was her "stage name." Her real name was Gabrielle. She thought she could sing and dance, however, never really made it past the vaudeville stage and clubs. These clubs did turn out to be quite lucrative, introducing her to some powerful Parisians who helped launch her career.
Hotel Ritz was her home, with her first shop on the Rue de Cambon.
For more than 30 years Coco Chanel made the mighty hotel Ritz in Paris her home! It was rumored that German officer Dincklage (with whom she was having an affair) made arrangements for her to stay in the hotel.
She opened her first salon on the Rue de Cambon. The salon was modest, with living quarters above. It soon became the showroom and the exclusive location for her fashion showings for her private clientele. She would position herself on the top of the stairs, down which the models would walk wearing her latest creations.
“There are people who have money and people who are rich.” ~ Coco Chanel
5 was her favorite number
She believed there was something special in the number 5 - enough that Chanel No. 5 was introduced on 5th May 1921!
Coco Chanel might have dated and had affairs with plenty of men but she never married.
According to Fiona Jenvey, CEO of Mpdclick, Beirut today is a mecca for artists and creatives.
'Arabicity' - the recent exhibition of contemporary art from the Arab world reveals Beirut's creative ambition. The exhibition documents the city in a state midway between collapse and rebirth.
A beaten-up red Mercedes serves as the centrepiece for 'Arabicity'; rusted and dented, the car nearly creaks under the weight of a towering stack of household belongings piled high onto its roof. There are bedrolls, suitcases, plastic buckets, kitchen appliances, tables, chairs, a ladder, a toolbox, a bicycle, and lumps of even more stuff bundled into bright floral fabrics - all of which bring to mind a sadly ordinary sight, particularly in South Lebanon, of a family fleeing some known or unknown calamity. On top of this comical and exaggerated assemblage, there is a painting, held in a crude wooden frame, of a young boy with eyes full of sorrow, possibly fear. And then, the whole thing starts to spin: the car sits on a platform ringed in neon that rotates at regular intervals, periodically turning on its axis a few times before coming back to rest.
This exhibition featured works from Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Buthayna Ali, Chant Avedissian, Ayman Baalbaki, Hassan Hajjaj, Fathi Hassan, Susan Hefuna and Raeda Saadeh.
Arabicity reveals a conflicted relationship between creative endeavour and corporate ambition for a city which is in the middle of cultural rebirth. The exhibition’s glossy professionalism also signals a bright future for the city's creative culture.
Image source: de1000colores.files.wordpress.com
The event is being held on the Delta College Campus
from 3:00 - 5:00 pm
in Danner Hall
on Friday, October 2, 2009
THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
ENJOY GOURMET REFRESHMENTS AND NETWORKING OPPORTUNITIES
WHILE YOU LEARN ABOUT THE INDUSTRY FROM THE EXPERTS!
