Interesting NYT articlee about Eric Gaskins, fashion designer and scathing blogger.

His first post was about Lars Nilsson, a designer who had received a lot of support from magazines even though he kept getting fired from plum houses. “Why are they pushing talent with a résumé that should say after every job, reason for leaving: Fired,” Mr. Gaskins wrote.

and

His first posts were about designers whose careers he thought had been unduly advanced by the support of fashion’s power brokers, rather than evidence of hard work. Thom Browne, the men’s wear designer, was spanked for his shrunken aesthetic, and Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte for going on a diet at the suggestion of Vogue.

He complained about the favoritism that seems to determine the nominees for the Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards and about which designers are selected for top jobs. He railed on the canonization of Michelle Obama as the savior of American fashion. And he laid blame on a fashion press that, he wrote, “must be nourished by specks of dust.”

And you might have read about the CFDA town meeting.

“Could someone lead a committee that would make ground rules for retailers of when the discounting starts, and then all the retailers can agree to it?” Ms. Wintour suggested.

“That’s illegal!” Ms. von Furstenberg said with some horror.

“Is that something we can change?” Ms. Wintour said. “We have friends in the White House now!”

Also,

The Web changed everything, Ms. von Furstenberg stated. Consumers want looks straight off the runway immediately; designers dress celebrities in clothes not yet available to the public; clothes arrive in stores too soon only to be discounted by the time they are actually in season; there is too much supply and not enough demand; everyone loses money; and the average consumer, well, she’s just so confused!

I was just discussing with someone the relevance of the runway shows yesterday.

And Anna Wintour. Alarming, isn't she?

Another Kindle Tale

Very wordy, very long. Some parts enjoyable, other parts I skipped.

But I love this bit:

“It’s because books are so good,” according to Bezos. And they’re good, he explained, because they disappear when you read them: “You go into this flow state.”

From The New Yorker.

Nicola Percorini, director of photography for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, on a conversation between him and Heath Ledger:

"We talked about Johnny Depp's episode on Pirates of the Caribbean. The very first day, Johnny showed up with 40 gold teeth. [Producer Jerry] Bruckheimer wanted to get rid of him. Finally, they said, 'O.K., keep six.' And that's what he wanted, six."

The August issue of Vanity Fair sold itself with the following lead story coverlines:

The Untold Story
of His Breakup with Michelle Williams,
His Emotional Struggles,
His Death, and the Mad Scramble
to Complete His Last Film

Heath Ledger's Final Days by Peter Biskind P. 82

In fancy font, of course. Plus a great shot of Heath Ledger, taken in 2000 for VF, looking happy.

The coverlines reek of tabloid-style sensationalising and the story tried too hard to push it in that direction but it wasn't really convincing.

Still, it's Heath Ledger so I read it. I look forward to Doctor Parnassus.

In the meantime, please watch 10 Things I Hate About You, Candy and Brokeback Mountain.

Strangely, I like these

Martin Margiela windshield sunglasses.

Via Highsnobiety.

A place I'd love to visit

Saw this on emmas designblogg and had two immediate thoughts.

I want to go!

Tell the SG government about this! Do it, but not in a tourist trap manner!

According to her, Skansen on Djurgården is "the oldest open-air museum in the world" and has a tiny town that looks and functions like how it used to.

Check out the rest of her Stockholm guide as well. Must visit that part of the world.

I always stop in my tracks when I see wooden pencils

This photo's about the pottery (by Peter Shire), but the cupful of pencils had me at hello.

From excavation by spoonfuls.

supercool

Going through the stuff that I bookmarked the past few months and found this: a series of polaroids named Geometries by Grant Hamilton. Cool stuff.

I like taking pictures of patterned walls and floors. Sometimes the design is intended by humans. sometimes it's made by nature but it's always nice to discover patterns just by looking up, down and sideways more often.

(booooooom.com. I was annoyed by the number of 'o's till I saw the logo which goes:

boo
ooo
oom

And so when I type it I say in my head:

boo
ooo
oom.

Sorry. Just tickled my fancy. Heh.)

Cathy Horyn speaks to Louise Wilson, course director of the M.A. program at Central Saint Martins. I read it almost two weeks ago and I'm still thinking about the writeup and what Wilson said.

Excerpts:

There are immensely talented people around but I feel huge vortexes of them are sucked into this mediocre world where nobody criticizes and it’s all terribly politically correct. Even journalists are the same. You now hardly get a bad a review. In their mind the journalists are supporting the industry, so they don’t want to dish it.

and

I think the problem is that fashion has become too fashionable. For years, fashion wasn’t fashionable. Today fashion is so fashionable that it’s almost embarrassing to say you’re part of fashion. All the parodies of it. All the dreadful magazines. That has destroyed it as well, because everybody thinks fashion is attainable.

Horyn's post in its entirety here.

definitely going back

what the...

8storeytree has these tantalisingly cute camera pouches! for lc-a! i like the brown and red ones!

All done up and cheery

I feel like going around to do a National Day special.

posers

Gorgeous skies and the LC-A+. Here are the second and third shots I took with the camera.

Can I persuade you to click on this photo to look at the enlarged version?

I was walking out of my office and couldn't whip out the camera fast enough.

Moments later, on an overhead bridge.

This song.



I've been listening to Tizzy Bac on loop forever. Different tracks strike a chord with me at different times. This is today.

fuck, my heart skipped a beat

so near (online shop, local) yet so far (spending freeze).

Brilliant read from Times about why Vogue is still the most powerful magazine title in fashion. I laughed out loud several times cos of the wicked writing.

Excerpt:

If fashion, as has often been observed, is a religion — and it has the famines, the tablets, the ominous edicts in questionable syntax delivered by someone wearing something floaty and slightly mad — then it needs its Bible, Torah, Koran and Tom Cruise, its Armani-sponsored, Swarovski-studded, pop-up pamplet. Why not one with full-colour illustrations by Mario Testino?

and

Atheists, agnostics and empiricists will argue that this blind allegiance to an outmoded belief system, unsupported by any kind of science, is precisely what’s wrong with organised religion. Strictly speaking, it’s true: the numbers don’t stack up. French Vogue’s circulation, at 133,000 a month, is minuscule compared with that of the fortnightly French Elle. American Vogue, at 1.2 million a month, is outsold by the brasher, even breathier and more celebrity encrusted American InStyle (1.7 million). Italian Vogue sells about seven copies, once you discount all the fashion journalists and buyers who get it on expenses.

But faith works according to mysterious laws, chief among which is that it categorically shouldn’t have to withstand close scrutiny, or where’s the faith bit of the equation? It can’t be reduced to something as simplistic as a set of figures of Man’s own devising, otherwise we’d all be running around saying, “Ooh, have you seen what OK! (circulation: 508,000) has to say about The Balmain Shoulder?” Whereas in reality no one gives a stuff what OK! says about anything.