Just a late-night blogging of a beautiful print ad from 1953-54 for Ford Zephyr. Via Vintage Scans, where it’s lovingly presented with the tagline “Ford Zephyr: for the exceptionally well-dressed and positively fucksome bank robber.” Hat and suit by Ronald Paterson, a British fashion designer born in 1917 (and still alive today!) who later served as fashion consultant on such films as The Spy Who Loved Me. Another ad from the same campaign featured an elegant evening gown, also by Paterson (via 20th Century Ads).
Our next and final feature on Late-to-the-Party Sunday is this collection of prosthetics-inspired, insectlike body armor created by recent University of the Arts London graduate Úna Burke, blogged everywhere and recently rediscovered by Haute Macabre. On her site, Burke explains the rationale behind these creations: “This is a conceptual collection of wearable art pieces, depicting a series of eight human gestures associated with the cause, the physical and psychological effect and the healing stages of human trauma…in my research I have referred to the work of artists, photographers and designers such as Hans Bellmer, Anthony Gormley, Alexander McQueen, Erwin Olaf, as well as looking at the casts of the victims of Pompeii. The entire collection made from undyed vegetable tanned leather which is reminiscent of caucasian flesh.”
Burke’s pieces are reminiscent of fellow Londoner Paddy Hartley’s Project Facade in their sensual combination of sculpture and fashion to represent body trauma and the trappings of recovery.
Via Stylecunt & Haute Macabre – the good cop & bad cop of alt fashion – comes the discovery of Marko Mitanovski, a Belgrade-based designer with a penchant for ruffs, asymmetrical corsets, antler-shaped hairstyles and elongated, knife-shaped fingertips. Mitanovski’s recent Renaissance and Elizabethan-inspired collection, entitled Lady Macbeth, was splendidly captured by Coilhouse favorite Peter Ashworth. The richly hued orange-lavender series provides an upbeat look at Mitanovski’s rather somber designs, and can be seen on Ashworth’s site. Expect for Mitanovski’s designs to appear in the next Lady Gaga video in 3… 2…
Tom LaBrie is a man’s man and a ladies man. He’s a man with a form fitting, wide collared shirt and slim, flared pants. He’s a man with a moustache and an unfortunate haircut. Tom LaBrie is also a man on a mission, and that mission is to get you into the squishy embrace of a fabulous new waterbed. Tom LaBrie made his pitch as the host of “Night Comfort Theater” on Sacramento-based UHF station KTXL in the 1970s and ’80s. In soft, sultry tones he hypnotizes the viewer, his words washing over them like warm, honeyed laudanum, enveloping them in their easy chairs, beckoning them to taste the aqueous pleasures his waterbed warehouse has to offer. Like a polyester siren, his song is nigh irresistible to all but the most steadfast insomniac Odysseus.
Harpers Bazaar UK employed Jake and Dinos Chapman who, with the help of photographer Michelangelo di Battista and illustrator Jon Rogers, produced this fantastic set for their November issue, which focuses on the always stunning Claudia Schiffer and features the supermodel in a variety of Grade-A pulp situations such as “Femme Fatale With Gun”, “Sexy Girl Tied Up and Being Threatened by Hand With Whip”, and “Sexy Girl Bound and Gagged Being Threatened by Ghoul”. I have linked the entire series after the jump, in standard, tiny Coilhouse image form but you should go here to see these in all their huge, scanned glory. I love them, but then, I’m a sucker for stuff like this. The pulp fiction thing. Not, you know, the sexy girl bound and gagged thing.
Irving Penn took the above photo of model Evelyn Tripp sixty years ago, in 1949. Penn’s photo below appeared in Siege’s blog earlier this year with the caption “Irving Penn is 91 years old and he still kicks your ass.”
Many informative Irving Penn obituaries have popped up on the web over the past few hours – my favorite is this piece by the New York Times. There were many things I didn’t know about him! I was delighted to learn that, like me, he had the whole Jersey-Philly thing going on. His brother Arthur was the director of the film Bonnie and Clyde. Before falling into photography, he wanted to travel to Mexico with the hopes of forging a career as a painter. He joined the army, and worked as an ambulance driver.
Irving Penn lived an active, creative life, producing new work right up until his death. Let Penn’s legacy inspire us all, for this is the way that life should be lived. It doesn’t matter if you’re 70, 80 or 90: stay curious about the world, never give up your vision, and always continue to strive to do your best.
More inspiring images by Penn taken at various points in the past 60 years, after the jump.
Some excellent detective work by Ghoul Next Door has uncovered the origins of this 101-year-old photo. The stunning image was brought to our attention by guest blogger Angeliska, who writes, “I’ve become totally obsessed with this carte de visite depicting Maria Germanova of the Moscow Arts Theatre, costumed for her role [as the fairy] in Blue Bird. She is my perfect style icon, now and forever.”
Unfortunately, the photographs of the actors are all that remain of this 1908 premiere of Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird, produced by Stanislavsky. A descriptive play-by-play of the performance can be found in the 1920 book The Russian Theater Under the Revolution by Oliver Sayler (thanks, Google book search!), but all other images of this art noveau-inspired production have been lost to time, despite Sayler’s valiant attempts to preserve more for posterity, recounted in the book:
I asked Stanislavsky eagerly for photographs of scenes from “The Blue Bird” or else for the original designs of the scenic artist so that I might have them copied… the photographs, I was told, were not available – except those of the players themselves – for the originals had been made by Fischer, a German, and had been destroyed in the pogrom at the beginning of the war in 1914. And in the difficult times Russia has undergone since then, no others have been made. When I pressed my point and asked about the orignal designs, the firm, square but kindly face of my host carried a passing glance of embarassed modesty and then admitted that there were no designs. He had conceived them himself and had personally directed the artist, V. E. Yevgenoff, in the execution of the settings.
Yep, 1908 is definitely going to the top of my “If I Had a Time Machine” list. Craving more images after discovering Germanova’s fairy, I did a bit of searching on the Russian web and uncovered the images below (from an Ogonyok article about Blue Bird). After the jump, a full-body shot of Germanova looking like a pre-Raphaelite sorceress.
MMMNNGGHPH. Browns, why must you insist upon torturing a grubby, low-rent gal like me with that ridiculous price tag?!
Related anecdote: A snarky acquaintance of mine back in NYC used to enjoy cornering club-going trustifarians who dared to don the “Unknown Pleasures” tee and making them squirm by demanding that they explain the image they were wearing. If their answer wasn’t knowledgeable enough to his liking, he’d trap them against the DJ booth and deliver lengthy lectures on pulsar theory, the film Stroszeck, or cocaine-in-a-condom drug mule death statistics.
We’re SO stoked for Zo today! After a year in aesthetic stasis, her personal website, Biorequiem, has finally relaunched with a gorgeous new look. Our favorite cosmonomad is a busy bee; she barely has time to initiate her patented Zobogrammatronicambient energy battery recharge system, let alone find a spare moment to whip up sexy new design and code, so she enlisted Nubby Twiglet (our awesome Coilhouse Indie Ad Grid designer) and Star St. Germain to help her. And now the proud mama crows “here it is – hussied up, blushing and ready to be sent out center stage with a brisk slap on the ass.” Huzzah.
You’ll find all sorts of goodies at Biorequiem 5.0. Art! Photography! Illustration! Memoirs! Bewbz! Chihuahuas! Anthropomorphic cybercows! Go get some.
We first mentioned photographer Tina Cassati in our homage to ruffs, and since that time she’s created tons of incredible work, which can be seen on her MySpace page if you add her. Cassati continues to use Photoshop more and more to create strange and exaggerated shapes for her models, and the results are sensuously surreal; take, for example, this recent set, titled SwanHälsinnen. In addition to taking the photos, Cassati also fashions the headpieces – sometimes in the form of a post-production collage, other times in real life, recycling old clothing or crafting paper and flowers into sculptural adornments.
More images from this series, after the jump!
Model: Nina de Lianin. Hair, hat, etc: Tina Cassati.
