What’s Zo Wearing? is syndicated with permission.
A confession: I might have exaggerated about the toga thing last week. While I’m still feeling the draped thing, some amount of clean lines will always appeal to me. Here’s an almost entirely Japan-acquired Z-standard outfit. The price isn’t exactly Z-standard this time but I was on vacation, dammit. On to the super-villain gear, comrades!
Model: Dita. Designer: Gaultier. Photographer: Perou.
I love lace! I love it so much. I believe that people who wear lace tell less lies, cars with airbrushed lace patterns on them are less likely to break down, and that the first nation to put a lace pattern on its flag will come to rule the world. Here are my five favorite lace things du jour:
Oh, this face, this voice…
Grace Jones, “I’ve Seen That Face Before”
As far as I’m concerned, Grace Jones was the It Girl of the 80s. Her partnerships with Jean-Paul Goude and Keith Haring yielded some of the most iconic, otherworldly images of the decade.
photo by Jean-Paul Goude
She was valorous, donning multiple personas that confronted racial and sexual stereotypes, her “jungle cat” performances lampooning primitivist readings of the black female body in much the same way Josephine Baker‘s send-ups in banana/tusk skirts had half a century earlier. She played a mean accordion, rocked a buzz cut like no other, was witty and elegant, but did not hesitate to smack a bitch when the occasion called for it.
Let the countdown begin!
Model: Licky Roxxx
Photographer: Rockee Lixxx
Children, you already know what eating too much candy does to your teeth, but do you know what snorting it does to your brain? It turns you into a fan of Jeffree Star’s music! So stay away from the stuff. It’s lethal. Try snorting peas and carrots instead.
Well, hello! While we’re all waiting for the next installment of What’s Zo Wearing to appear here on Coilhouse, I thought I’d treat you to some fashion tips coming from a real pro: Brenda Dickson, whose claim to fame is starring in the soap opera “The Young and the Restless”. If you watch this video, then you too can be beautiful, glamorous and stylish like her. So let’s “teleport” into her closet and take a look!
Feeling fab yet? Here’s Part 2, dubbed over with fucking Dada raunch genius by Deven Green. “I just tattooed this cat this morning. Look at the good I do. Get the hell out of here. I’m a pirate.”
“The mask serves the double function of displaying and concealing; it is at once surface and depth.”- Francette Patceau, The Symptom of Beauty
This image and the ones after the cut come from the book “Torture Garden: From Bodyshocks to Cybersex,” edited by Dave TG. This book, a frozen moment of 90s fetish club culture, mixes party photos with formal studio shots to showcase the personalities and fetishes of TG’s clubgoes, along with inspirational and well-researched fetish-related quotations.
What strikes me about Alan Sivroni’s portraits in the book is that not one person in his images appears to be insecure or uncomfortable. There are images of old and young people of every ethnicity and body type, and the one thing they have in common is that they all project total ownership and control. That’s not what I see when I look at fetish portraits today. It makes me wonder: was the fetish scene really more confident then than it is now, or is it just careful editing?
And while we’re on the topic of self-transformation – a photo of a Navaho tribesman in a fur and leather mask, taken in 1904 by Edward S. Curtis. The Navaho typically made these masks specifically for dancing – inspiring, especially when one to feels too lazy to dress up, before a club for instance!
We previously blogged about Paddy Hartley’s Project Facade, cialis a uniform-sculpture exploration of wartime trauma and facial reconstruction. But before Hartley became known for Project Facade, ambulance he received international acclaim for another project – a series of face corsets focused on exploring attitudes towards plastic surgery and ideals of facial beauty.
The bioglass and cinching invoke Botox, collagen, implants and other techniques that stretch and compress our faces into their ideal shape – but only temporarily. Hartley elaborates on these ideas and more in an excellent interview over at We Make Money not Art.
Any man who puts pictures like this of himself on the internet in order to make an artistic point has our respect forever.
More face corsets after the jump!
What’s Zo Wearing? is syndicated with permission.
Fall! Autumn!! Sort of. While I go to sleep each night wishing to wake up freezing, it hasn’t really hit LA yet. In any case, I’m dressing the part. More black, grays, browns, olive, deep purple and dark cherry tones – all on my radar when selecting dailywear stuffs. I’ve dyed my hair a deeper violet-blue, even.
Of late I’m especially fond of loosely draped items combined with fitted ones, and various combinations thereof. To be honest, half the time I just feel like wearing boots, a sheet of fabric pinned creatively, topping it off with a ridiculously priced jacket and calling it a day. I imagine popular fashion’s retro currents haven’t reached the days of alterna-togas just yet, and you’d all roast me. So here is a facsimile! Just know I’d rather be wearing a sheet.
I work as a photography coordinator and photographer at suicidegirls.com. The fashion merecenaries among you might know I have a mostly-weekly fashion feature there called What’s Zo Wearing? [so named by a former lead editor]. I say “feature” instead of “column” because the amount of writing I do varies week to week. Occasionally I get verbose, but, more often WZW is a collection of outfit photos and tips on where to get these or similar items.
There are some hits and there certainly are some unfortunate moments, especially in retrospect of over a year, but hopefully there is something for all to dig. Coilhouse will be syndicating What’s Zo Wearing? every Sunday, 2 am Pacific.
To give you an idea of what to fear each Sunday I’ve included some of my favorite outfits behind the jump, and a few more in our Flickr stream.
