“Harajuku girls are the new Geisha” is the name of this Flickr set belonging to photographer Ajpscs . I’m only completely in love with the image above - usually heavy photoshopping is a huge turnoff or me, but here is makes a kind of strange sense.
In the context of Geisha, whose snow-white face paint amplified Japan’s desire for artificial, impossible beauty, the Harajuku denizens’ makeup echoes the same. The over-saturation and airbrushing almost highlight the flaws in application, damaged hair and imperfect skin, making these images all the more human.
Many of you will have already heard tell of the Edison Lounge, a new nightclub built around the remnants of an Edwardian era power plant in downtown Los Angeles. Located in the basement of the 1906 Higgins Building, this 10,000 square foot industrial space lay under several feet of flood water for decades, until owner/designer Andrew Meieran (along with business partner Marc Smith) undertook the Herculean task of resuscitating it.
From its art deco-decked cabaret space The Lab, to the Generator Lounge and Boiler Room (literally an enormous brick-lined boiler, carved out to create a cozy, candlelit cave), to its delicious Tesla Fries and absinthe drinks, the Edison is thematic aesthetic perfection.
Unsurprisingly, it’s been Coilhouse staff meeting headquarters since the very beginning. I’ve often gotten chills just imagining Rachel Brice, Jill Tracy or the Lucent Dossier troupe in that dreamy environment. Picture my joy when I discovered that Lucent Dossier actually has been performing there!
“Reminiscent of Paris and Berlin of the ’20’s, Wednesday nights the venue is transformed into an exploration of the past - a peek into the decadent, sensuous underbelly of historic LA.”
These people are almost unbearably beautiful, both inside and out, and they put on a great show. If you happen to be in the neighborhood tomorrow night, you won’t want to miss what’s sure to be a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle.* Nadya, Zoetica and I will all be there to document the event, so check back to see some photos from Incandescence very soon.
Vaudevillian aerialist troupe Lucent Dossier, performing at the Edison tomorrow night!
More images of the Edison and Lucent Dossier after the jump.
The muses of fashion sing again as we enter spring here in Angel City. To celebrate the turning of the tides agent Yoon and I had ourselves a little roadside picnic near the ever-fragrant LA River.
For this momentous occasion I picked a simple knit dress, leggings and high heels with steel-plated toes - a sensible choice should one need to escape the local packs of roaming hobos on foot. In daylight hours these [equally fragrant] folks keep to dark shelters under bridges, with only glowing eyes indicating their whereabouts. Still, one can never be too careful when choosing footwear.
Eyes: my usual cobalt eyebrows in a Ben Nye shadow, a hint of drugstore iridescent green shadow on the eyelids to echo the shoes, liquid liner, Urban Decay “Heavy Metal” glitter highlights Skin: Pür mineral powder Lips: Nyx coral lip gloss Nails: NYC enamel in Times Square Tangerine Creme Dress: Final Touch $30 at Angel on Melrose Ave Leggings: H&M Bag: shop near Asakuza Temple, Tokyo Gloves: Harajuku, Tokyo Shoes: Naughty Monkey $30 on Amazon
Too many good things going on in this picture not to post! A tea-colored composition of all my favorite fashion things: ruffs, rosettes, oriental-style hair, intricate sleeves and medical crosses, drawn by Christine. Hot! I must say that I’m not crazy about the striped stockings here. Maybe if they were transluscent and had that same tea color as the rest of the outfit, it would work better. As of now, they look like they were bought on Ebay, if that’s possible to tell from a drawing. Overall I find this picture delicious to look at, even though it might not be Christiane’s best work from a technical standpoint.
I would love to see the same fashion concepts executed as straight-up linework with a more fluid composition, along the lines of this amputastic masterpiece that Christiane completed in 2005:
Two images by photographer Janieta Eyre, featured at [FAT]
If you’re in Toronto, check out [FAT], or Toronto Alternative Arts & Fashion Week. The annual festival, which takes place from April 8 to April 11 this year, combines art, fashion, photography and performance. From their website:
Toronto Alternative Arts & Fashion Week is a multi-arts festival with a mandate of showcasing artistic disciplines rooted in fashion, and their exploration of the human body in today’s time. The festival aims to emphasize this mandate through the artistic disciplines of fashion design, photography, installation, video, performance, music and dance, in an effort to push forward and redefine our perception of the fashion phenomenon. When presented jointly, the underestimated social force of fashion is showcased, redefining its role in contemporary Canadian society as not only an economic colossus, but also as an engineer of social practices and vehicle for personal expression. The Toronto Alternative Arts & Fashion Week intends to introduce a broader audience to these related creative fields, building public interest while simultaneously creating a forum where artists can learn from and collaborated with each other.
Venus Wept: “Justice is blind and, apparently, naked.”
Antiseptic is relatively new, and over the past year I’ve watched their designs get more and more complex. Their riveted leather corsets look aggressive by themselves, but when coupled with Venus Wept Photography’s hyper lighting, the augmented sharp edges and textures show you something even more dangerous and pleasurably painful-to-wear. A stylistic joyride that weaves through 80s dystopia chic, medieval armor, medical fan lacing and many other real and imaginary places from different times, the designs owe a debt to alt-fashion predecessors AMF and Mother of London, with Antiseptic’s designers on a fast track to a voice that’s completely their own.
The San Francisco-based duo behind Antiseptic doesn’t seem to be interested in commercial manufacture, and focuses on showing off their designs on runways and in elaborate fashion shoots. Most recently, they staged a fashion show the San Francisco Fetish Ball that brought together some of my favorite models for the first time.
As a brief follow up to this recent post regarding Miss Jackson’s freakatude, let us ruminate on the April cover of BackBook magazine. Here she’s caged and dressed in latex by Polymorphe, House of Harlot, and Syren. Inside she’s snarling from behind some Very Serious headgear.
The BlackBook article describes this Matthew Rolston shoot and tells of “codpieces, feather ticklers, steel pelvic thrusters relieved of their phallic attachments, barbed cowhide whips are fanned out alongside some kind of automaton skull with a full set of human teeth and gums” here. Oh Janet.
“The gentleman who has the pleasure of tying the final bow owns you.”
- Mr. Pearl, interview
What strikes me about fetish legend/corsetier Mr. Pearl’s images is how much he looks like a true English gentleman - and how, magically, his 18-inch corseted waist works to enhance that image, the opposite of what one might expect it to do.
Mr. Pearl grew up in South Africa and moved to London at the earliest chance after completing his military service. He spent three years in New York in the early 90s, where he did his most intimate published interview, of which there are few. Already a renowned tightlacer by this time, Pearl treated corsetry with such reverence that he insisted on precision in every aspect of his involvement with it; when his New York interviewer described him as a corsetier, he interrupted. “Forgive me,” he said. “I am a designer who employs the corset and lacings into his designs. I am not a corsetier - I have not attained that specialized knowledge. There are only about five left in the whole world now, who possess that art. I hope one day to be amongst them.”
Fast-forward to the 2000s: Mr. Pearl is a successful corsetier, commissioned by Mugler, Lacroix, Galliano and Gaultier when they need a master to produce their corset designs for the runway. Clients include Dita, Kylie Minogue and Jerry Hall. He lives in Paris, and works out an atelier behind the Notre Dame.
Despite his success, Pearl doesn’t have a flashy website. There’s no web store to offer plastic-boned corsets that bear only his name, no MySpace page and no blog. He’s known for his aversion to modern technology, and his only web interview was handwritten and transmitted by fax.
One of my problems with runway shows is that they’re often too sterile; there’s not enough of a story being told. You know what to expect; some dance music, some walking, some turning, some clapping. I wish that runway shows were structured more like plays; heroes and villains, gags and surprises. So I commend the fashion world’s recent efforts to incorporate more technology and atmosphere into their runways, like McQueen’s famous Kate Moss ghost two years ago and more recently, Diesel’s flying jellyfish fashion show.
L: McQueen’s famous McQueen “hologram”. R: Target’s ghost bride.
Even though the prolific “holographic technology” fashion spectacles of the past two years actually rely on a technique that’s been around for almost 150 years, the effect is still as fragile and ethereal as ever. The great potential of combining this type of projection with CGI effects is already apparent. I’d love to see some of those techniques used for something more interesting than Target’s goofy effort, however. Can you imagine what Torture Garden would do? I’d also love to see this effect in concert. I’d do anything to see a transparent Liz belt out Song to the Siren in this manner.
Nothing can top the excesses of royal 17th century France. The fashion, the banquets, the art - everything radiated king Louis XIV’s obsession with opulence. This grandiosity is captured in Vatel, Roland Joffré’s film starring Gerard Depardieu and Uma Thurman. Julian Sands plays Louis XIV with Tim Roth is his impeccably sleazy right hand man Marquis de Lauzun. Vatel tells the true story of a famed master chef ordered to feed, entertain and impress the capricious Sun King over a weekend at Chateau de Chantilly.
The costumes are, naturally, spectacular. To draw parallels between today’s rock stars and 17th century royalty, when choosing the materials for all the magnificent gowns and frocks Joffré took the costume designer to a Parisian shop specializing in dressing famous musicians. He also advised that the actors listen to rock music in their dressing rooms to get them in the proper mood. The cast is excellent as is the acting, there is intrigue, fireworks and brazen displays of food throughout. The set are appropriately pompous and droolworthy. For all these reasons I dub Vatel required viewing.
Though the film ultimately denounces the corruption and arrogance of the nobility, I find myself shamefully enchanted by the lavish design, best showcased in the clip below the jump [enigmatically in Spanish].
