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A brilliant idea from the past. What balance you would need to have to navigate on water…
…as in life.
via Black and WTF
Related posts: wearing clothes backwards
fab hairdo with balloons, via myeongbeom kim
hair as apparel, identity, art (man ray)
vision break: a dress that makes music…
what a plastic bag can become…
The other day, we stumbled on Dargelos, an online store with stylish, thoughtfully-designed products for bicycle riders (some are great for NON bikers as well). We originally went to the site to check out their Lighting Vest, a hand-netted safety vest made from a specially-developed reflective 3M material that will make you highly visible to motorists (i.e. safe.) It is lightweight, can fit in your pocket and layer over just about anything you want to wear. It’s so great looking, we could imagine wearing it just for the hell of it.
While on Dargelos’ site, we discovered many other cool things… read more…
Over at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, we found a how-to for a swell group Halloween costume: a traveling exhibition of modern art… Here, Mark Rothko, Piet Mondrian, and Jackson Pollock are represented because…
“… the best choices are iconic artists whose distinctive styles may be recognizable even in third-rate attempts (like ours) to mimic their styles.”
The only tweak we’d make to the concept is to wear some sort of face mask, which is much of the pleasure of Halloween: being anonymous…or someone/something other than yourself.
They suggest other alternatives to making a copy of a painting on a piece of canvas. Our favorite: “Have everyone dress up with a blank canvas and carry colored ink squirt guns.”
COLORED INK SQUIRT GUNS?!!!
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has a trove of Halloween d-i-y costume, decor, and fun, including bat wings made from broken umbrellas…
Related posts: happy halloween!!!!! (2010)
happy halloween!!! (2009)
halloween inspiration: cardboard box as the empire state building
This photo entitled simply “Curious Photo” (from the George Eastman House collection), reminded us of the many possibilities for wearing clothes backwards. We remembered a chic woman we knew that used to wear ordinary cardigans backwards, turning them into a something ELSE…
…then we thought: Ohhh, THAT’S what we can try with an Issy Miyake shirt out made out of unbelievable fabric that doesn’t seem to work as a button-down anymore. We put in on backwards, and voila: a strangely beautiful drape to the collar now worn in front.
Wearing clothes backwards can be something to try before getting rid of a piece of clothing that no longer seems to fit. It’s a reason we love Rick Owen’s clothes; sweaters are meant to be worn backwards, frontwards, upside down…a strange liberation.
We went on the hunt for some images. Our favorite: read more…
Our friend Linnae recently introduced us to Pat Ludwig, a “self-taught quilter” who blogs all of her projects so you can see the full process of making a quilt start-to-finish. Patwig’s quilts are made exclusively from old fabric scraps, including khaki and denim pants, childhood dresses, curtains, neckties, bedsheets, and even seat cushions.
Her two most recent quilts are particularly interesting. They started out as 35+ button-down men’s shirts, given to Ludwig by a woman whose husband had passed away years before. She wanted her grandchildren to have a piece of the grandfather they had never met and commissioned Patwig to turn his shirts into the Nine Patch and Log Cabin quilts.
We love everything about this, from repurposing old materials into fantastic and functional art projects, to the very idea of a memory quilt. Quilts and blankets are attached to so many comforting and visceral childhood memories; having one made of materials that remind you of family or friends strikes us as a powerful way to remain connected to someone’s presence (even in their absence).
(Video link here.) We wish we could put that wondrous bell dress on right now and make music while we dance. What a way that would be to start the day!
Related posts: inside björk’s house (we’re back!)
a non-ipad glimpse of bjork’s biophilia
inspired makeshift: a year of personal fashion
beth ditto is a big relief
(Video link here) The fashion industry is not kind to those who it doesn’t consider its target audience. Having spent the last couple of years on the plus-size end of the spectrum I know a lot about walking into stores or flipping through magazines and feeling defeated. But I’ve also found a lot of joy in recognizing the subtle (and not so subtle) acts of resistance around me. Take for example the subjects of Ari Seth Cohen’s blog, Advanced Style: older women who prove, without a doubt, that style is not just a young person’s game. read more…
From 2the walls, our new favorite odd tumblr find: some Ikea hacks that sent our heads spinning. We never thought of turning furnishings into clothes.
(We really do want those hats). read more…
This winter, after a few weeks of feeling pretty down, my spirits were lifted in the oddest place—a diner bathroom in Burlington, Vermont. The walls were decorated with quotes, and on the side of the stall I happened to enter was this from Eleanor Roosevelt: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
Just that simple reminder did me a ton of good. You can almost imagine Eleanor saying it with a bit of sternness in her voice; but only because she knows you are capable picking yourself up and dusting yourself off. I remember thinking how lovely it would be to find messages like those more often, which is why I was so pleased to come across Miami-based artist Augustina Woodgate, who sews little poems into the tags of thriftstore clothes, at work in the video, above. (Video link here.) read more…
Robert Picault
We have long loved to draw and write notes on our hands, but only occasionally have imagined the possibilities for drawing on the rest of our bodies. Then we found these two unattributed pictures from Under the Sun and really GOT IT, first with a charming Picasso-esque image (It IS Picasso) and then the wildly-liberated pint-sized artist’s scribblings below read more…
robstephaustralia via Flickr
As we’ve been struggling to modify hack Omnifocus,our overly complicated task management software and tailor it to our needs, we came across this fab to-do list tattoo. Just fill it out with a pen daily and wash it off at night. It reminded us of our more primitive – and less permanent – solution: of making notes right on our hands, which we’ve posted about quite a bit. Our favorite: writing power words or symbols in the palm of our hand to straighten out our heads with a glance. You can find out about nontoxic markers here to make your own UNpermanent to-do list tattoo. overdue underdone has a trove on Flickr of his notepad tattoo… read more…
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We stumbled on this image of the great architect Le Corbusier painting a fresco in the nude. in Le Corbusier: A Life. He was staying at legendary architect Eileen Gray‘s Villa E-1027 in St. Tropez, in 1927. You can almost feel the Mediterranean breezes.
To us, it is a reminder of “flow”, of following ideas spontaneously and just doing them, in whatever state you are in, in the moment, and enjoying its pleasures…
….jump out of bed and start working, dressed in a tee shirt or…nothing if the situation allows…
via Under the Sun
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…from MondoBlogo‘s great Man Ray riff: Dada-ist Man Ray shaved his cool “tonsure” in 1921. One hundred years later, shaving designs are the rage. read more…
Marco Longari / AFP / Getty Images
We clipped a few excerpts from the compelling Letter from Cairo: On the Square by Wendell Steavenson in a recent New Yorker, describing improvisations devised by protestors in Tahrir Square during the recent revolutionary actions:
“At Friday prayer, ranks of men laid out improvised prayer mats: kaffiyehs, newspapers, an Egyptian flag, slogan placards. They wiped their hands in the dust of the destroyed paving stones, to clean them, because the Koran says that if there is no water and you are in the desert you can use sand to clean your hands before you pray.”
…As the standoff continued, the protesters became entrenched and emboldened. People made a tent city out of concrete reinforcing rods and plastic sheeting; venders set up braziers for tea and hooked up yards of electrical cable to charge dozens of cell phones at a time; people rearranged the stockpiled stones to spell out anti-Mubarak slogans; new blankets were passed out…
…At one point, the Army tried to push a line of tanks farther into the square, near the Egyptian Museum. But the protesters staged a sit-in under the tanks…
…On the Internet, Shaath and other activists gathered ideas for countering riot police. He enumerated a few improvised tactics: ‘How to use vinegar and onions against tear gas. Things like, Don’t use water, use Coke to wipe your eyes.’
The sustained courage and ingenuity of the protesters knocked us out. Then we stumbled on an amazing slideshow at Time of makeshift headgear devised by demonstrators as protection…(some are strangely chic)… read more…
