Socks & Sandals zine / my new tumblr account

the upcoming launch of the Socks & Sandals zine is a project that i've been silently working on (and still continue to) with a group of other young creatives / students in Brisbane since the end of last year.
it is due to launch in October (the exact event details is not yet finalised) and will be distributed and available for free through a number of CBD locations in the final months of 2012.
the zine will focus on fashion / beauty / lifestyle equally, including articles and photoshoots as contributed by our team of writers, photographers and directors for each department.

a facebook page and website have been recently established to allow the public to keep up with our latest news regarding the publication, its contents and contributors, as well as the launch party.
they look a little like this:






i will also be posting new information regarding S&S on here as it happens.

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in other news, after much deliberating i've decided to set up a tumblr. i realise that i'm waaaaay behind the general population on this, but there are a number of personal and borrowed images that i feel don't have much of a suitable home on here or in more private locations like my facebook page. archived images from this blog may also make the odd appearance here and there.
i'm hoping to keep it largely personal..

http://rachelofcharles.tumblr.com

not everything needs a point! like circles, they don’t

a shirt i've been working on, and its accidental evolution as a result of multiple samples:



after the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness
you think it is nice that a box
of matches is purple and brown and is called
Le Petite and comes from Sweden
for they are words that you know and that
is all you know words not their feelings
or what they mean and you write because
you know them not because you understand them
because you don’t you are stupid and lazy
and will never be great but you do
what you know because what else is there?
- Frank O’Hara - As Planned

the Winn Lane 'yard sale':



a photoshoot for promotional material that i was lucky enough to attend, for the impending QUT Fleet Store:




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‘you smell of soot,’ their father said to their mother.
‘and cabbage and milk.’
‘and you smell of failure,’ their mother said.
their mother used to smell of all kinds of interesting things, paint and turpentine and tobacco.
- p20
he couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be educated in a school like this. his primary school had been an underfunded, overpopulated sinkhole, where social Darwinism applied at every turn. survival of the fittest. and that was the good part of his education. his proper education, where he had actually sat in a classroom and learned something, had been provided courtesy of the army.
- p34
Reggie liked the way Richard Branson had made ‘Virgin’ into a huge global brand name, the way the Catholics had done with Jesus’ mother. it was good to see the word out there.
- p?
Reggie, on the other hand, heard every train. that gave her an odd feeling in the pit of her stomach where she heard them approaching, something fearful and primitice (atavistic!) and she wondered if her Stone Age brain thought the train was a woolly mammoth or a sabre-toothed tiger or whatever other creatures sent her ancestors running to the back of the cave because Dr Hunter said that ‘after all’ we still had the DNA of Palaeolithic hunter-gatheres and as far as she could see we hadn’t evolved biologically and emotionally and we were all still Stone Age people with ‘a thin veneer of culture and sophistication on top. strip that off and we’re back into basics, Reggie – love, hate, food, survival. although not necessarily in that order.’
- p?
‘who made you the voice of wisdom?’ Louise said, but only in her head because the love of a good man wasn’t something to be thrown away like a piece of paper, even Louise wasn’t so blunt-headed that she couldn’t see that.
- p164
it was funny how sometimes you could realise you were all alone in a roomful of people. well, four people, one of whom was you. stranger in a strange land.
- p178
Neil Hunter looked rough, although still on the good side of haggard.
- p217
when his daughter was first learning to talk her first word was ‘cat’. she used it for everything – ducks, milk, buggy – anything of interest in her life, everything was ‘cat’. a one-word world. it made life much simpler.
- p235, Kate Atkinson – When Will There Be Good News?

Rei Kawakubo: Like Mona Lisa, Ever So Veiled

'let’s consider her latest collection, shown in March in Paris. not only were the brightly colored felt garments of a fun-house scale, but they were also completely flat. a dress had a front and a back, and the two pieces were joined at the sides. the simplicity was such that a clever child, using a cookie cutter, tracing paper and the photocopying services of Kinko’s, could produce the basic pattern. the wool felt was a good technical choice for the floating two-dimensional shapes, but the design, more than being merely simple, seemed to disclaim design.

reaction during the show was immediate.
editors smiled and nudged one another as the silly tents came down the bare plywood runway. gradually, though, their gooey looks of delight turned to serious interest and finally to pleasure, the deep pleasure of seeing something rare and fully resolved and resistant to syllogisms.

was Ms. Kawakubo commenting on the flattening of the world by the internet? was the lady, by fabricating such harmonious volumes without padding or other means, calling out lazy and weak-minded designers who tout couture techniques and don’t create anything new? even the industry’s craze for bold color combinations and archival prints seemed to land in her cross hairs, and, not surprisingly, her choices were marked by intensity.

if Karl Lagerfeld is the leading talk artist of fashion, Ms. Kawakubo is the Mona Lisa. she makes no effort to reveal her meanings, though at times she explains her methods. that day in Paris, standing backstage, she greeted each guest with a brisk ceremonial nod. small, nearly 70, she wore a black cotton jacket buttoned to the neck, black dhoti shorts and sunglasses that seemed a mischievous touch of celebrity — and that she has. no living designer with the exception of Azzedine Alaïa is held in higher esteem by her peers, and none has enriched our spirit in so many original and confounding ways.

in addition to managing Comme des Garçons Parfums and many day-to-day matters, Mr. Joffe serves as his wife’s interpreter (he is fluent in several languages). it is Mr. Joffe who provides journalists with a brief, prepared explanation after every show. in March it was: 'the future in two dimensions.'

she is not an artist, and she doesn’t consider herself to be one, per se, though her work over the last 30 years, since she assaulted people’s consciousness with a collection called Destroy, has impelled serious consideration far beyond fashion. (Ms. Kawakubo, who is the sole owner of Comme des Garçons, a small, $200 million conglomerate with a number of brands, including Junya Watanabe, once said that if she is anything, it’s a businesswoman, and then added, 'well, i’m an artist-businesswoman.')

in 1996, Ms. Kawakubo presented a collection called Dress Meets Body Meets Dress, which featured disfiguring lumps of cotton wadding covered with cheerful gingham. she was criticised for being 'antiwoman,' yet a closer look at her silhouette revealed that she was probably neutral on the subject of gender, and instead had done something of more profound meaning: she had recreated a reality of the late 20th century — that of the individual seemingly joined to her burdens, like a backpack.

since then, Ms. Kawakubo’s work has grown in clarity and wisdom. last October, a collection titled White Drama referred to ceremonial occasions, like a wedding, and was assumed by many to relate to her widely admired Broken Bride show, in 2005.
Ms. Kawakubo, however, insists that she is not a feminist, and that her work has nothing to do with being a woman. 'i was never interested in any movement as such,' she said a few years back. her position is at best ambiguous; early in her career she embraced such ideas. it may also be true that as her work has matured, she has reached wholly different conclusions about what nourishes the creative process.

journalists often find it hard to take her at her word: that she lives a relatively normal life, in Tokyo. 'can’t rational people create mad work?' she once asked a writer.

'my design process never starts or finishes. i am always hoping to find something through the mere act of living my daily life. i do not work from a desk, and do not have an exact starting point for any collection. there is never a mood board, i do not go through fabric swatches, i do not sketch, there is no eureka moment, there is no end to the search for something new. as i live my normal life, i hope to find something that click starts a thought, and then something totally unrelated would arise, and then maybe a third unconnected element would come from nowhere. often in each collection, there are three or so seeds of things that come together accidentally to form what appears to everyone else as a final product, but for me it is never ending. there is never a moment when i think, ‘this is working, this is clear.’ if for one second i think something is finished, the next thing would be impossible to do.

'often the elements are completely disassociated in time and dimension. one might be an emotion, the next thing a pattern image, the third thing an object or a picture i have seen somewhere. i can never remember when and from where the elements come together in my head. i trust synergy and change.'
- Cathy Horyn, The New York Times

you can tell how smart people are by what they laugh at

some dream pieces:

1

2

3
- all from LN-CC

But You Chose To Do This, and other helpful magazine titles for parents

some pages out of a portfolio i had to hand in for a 'drawing for fashion' subject recently.. hopefully the presentation came across as 'rustic', or something.. :/



















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'i am not a graceful person. i am not a Sunday morning or a Friday sunset. i am a Tuesday 2am, i am gunshots muffled by a few city blocks, i am a broken window during February. my bones crack on a nightly basis. i fall from elegance with a dull thud, and i apologise for my awkward sadness. i sometimes believe that i don't belong around people, that i belong to all the leap days that didn't happen. the way light and darkness mix under my skin has become a storm. you don't see the lightning, but you hear the echoes.'
- Unknown

can ethical fashion really be fashionable?

'fashion is driven by desire. but ethical fashion has been driven by — well, what exactly? a wish to semaphore that one is a caring kind of person while walking through life in pleather shoes? there are, of course, style-setters so chic they can rock a hand-loomed yak hair poncho, being good while looking great. the writer is not one of those people.

the writer is, however, a veteran of more than 25 years on the front lines of fashion, possessed of a deep hatred of waste which jars, somewhat, with a love of glamour. thus, when 'green' fashion started to attract attention, i admired the effort but the results just didn’t chime. ditto those 'pity purchase' ranges, created by supermodels, to which i was often allergic because the products weren’t super enough.

this is not to suggest that all supermodel endeavours are empty. Lily Cole and Liya Kibede spring to mind as two whose deep commitment is tangible.

but overall, i am yet to meet the woman who opens her wardrobe in the morning and declares with glee, 'today i want to look ethical.' most of us, let’s be honest, just want to look as good as we can, add accessories and get out of the house.

is the tote i’m slinging my laptop into made with fair labour? is the black t-shirt i have on under my jacket organic cotton? have all environmental concerns been checked? nope, not going to happen at 8am. what about getting up to speed at point of purchase instead? no again. a bristling of swing tags, trumpeting good deeds, can be really annoying when they catch in your underwear in the fitting room.

it is my absolute belief that ethical goods have to appeal, even if you don’t know the back story, but, on the flip side, that the fashion goods we desire should be made in the most ethical way possible. why not? why shouldn’t sustainability be as central to style as silhouette? why should it be hard to stride forth in the confidence that you are doing no harm to people or planet?

maybe the answer lies in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programmes, if only we could be bothered to read those documents companies typically post online. actually, i do bother. but i find that despite all the moody images of spring leaves and footprints in the sand, CSR brochures tend to muddy the pure blue water — not with what is written, but what is left out. the 'light industry' that is fashion can be far from transparent.

so here’s some good news: a rather unusual bunch of bright people are about to get together to grapple with making fashion better. at the end of next week, on June 17th, just before presidents, prime ministers and other world leaders meet in Rio de Janeiro to agree on a way forward for sustainable development, the United Nations Global Compact will host the Rio+20 Corporate Sustainability Forum. within more than 60 sessions focused on key sustainability issues, there is one that, perhaps, you would not normally expect: 'Good Business Models for a Sustainable Future' organised by the International Trade Centre’s Ethical Fashion Initiative. its focus? clothes, bags, shoes.

speakers at this fashion session will include an immaculately dressed Brazilian theologian, Leonardo Boff and a Fendi with an obsession for plastic carrier bags — or, more accurately, an obsession with how to reduce the mountains of them leaching carcinogenic dioxins into hotchpotch neighbourhoods of the world’s poorest people.
the session aims to demonstrate that it is, indeed, very possible to do good while making profits.
but the purpose of all this goes beyond letting some people with good accessories vent for an afternoon. the stated aim of the session is to produce a 'roadmap' — free to use — to help big global fashion business become more fair, more green, more inclusive yet never less chic.

Cipriani’s instruction was to conceive a major initiative that would contribute towards two key priorities of the UN: eradicating extreme poverty and empowering women.
he could have said, 'let’s open a factory to make tractors.' instead he said, 'i must call Vivienne Westwood.'

we are in Kenya, mid afternoon.
the matriarch appears first, having donned her finery, adding a towering beaded headdress to her usual daywear collars and cuffs. Vivienne Westwood also dresses for the occasion, ducking into a goat-pen to slip on sky-high rocking horse shoes. thus do two stylish women utterly 'get' one another, then get down to business.

while the fashion world typically thrives on last minute change, this system must be planned in recognition that overtime is not possible in places where, to be safe, women must be home before nightfall. there are also crops to tend, which means that workers might only work three months of the year.

'in all buying, consider first, what condition of existence you cause in the production of what you buy; secondly, whether the sum you have paid is just to the producer and in due proportion lodged in his hand.' so said John Ruskin (1819-1900). but while his words ring true today, a Victorian gent who behaved very oddly towards his wife perhaps isn’t the fashion model we seek. so let’s update and call this 'Hermès economics' for not only is the craftsman who makes your Birkin getting a proper pay packet and a hot lunch, but the water downstream of the tannery must be cleaner than the water found upstream.

it’s a myth, in my experience, that fashion people are silly people. many of us are bright and thoughtful but we’d appreciate some guidance. hopefully next week’s think tank in Rio will provide that.'
- Marion Hume, The Business of Fashion

#just slayin

some inspiring textures from Beyonce's tumblr / Sass & Bides' instagram:

don't politicians run for the government, not from it?

'the park is now empty and bare, with an abandoned shame about it. the jungle gym, the slide and the wing have rusted together. they're all so terribly alone now. where did all the children go? didn't they know that the park needed them? a child's intelligent heart can fathom the depths of many dark places. but can it fathom the delicate moment of its own detachment?'
+
'how are you to imagine anything if the images are always provided for you? doublethink. to deliberately believe in lies while knowing they're false. examples of this in every day life: oh, i need to be pretty to be happy. i need surgery to be pretty. i need to be thin / famous / fashionable. our young men today are being told that women are whores / bitches / things to be screwed / beaten / shit on / and shamed.
this is a marketing holocaust. twenty four hours a day. for the rest of our lives, the powers that be are hard at work dumbing us to death.
so, to defend ourselves, and fight against assimilating this dullness into our thought processes, we must learn to read. to stimulate our own imagination. to cultivate our own consciousness. our own belief systems. we all need these skills to defend, to preserve our own minds.'
- Detachment film

some rugging up that took place in the last few weeks of uni:


+ i've made a facebook page for some of my upcoming creative endeavours - particularly to share some of the pieces that i'll be stocking (fingers crossed) in the QUT Fleet Store in August. please feel free to check back every so often for my latest news:

shirt design assignment

some parts of my rushed journal work from a recent assignment.. we were asked to design six shirts, from which we would theoretically make one.


we had to research two time periods. i dabbled with the 1920s and the minimalist streak of the 1990s. i also looked into Moroccan traditional dress.
for all three, i looked at the opposite + equal reaction / push + pull of the excess + restraint that was going on in each theme. for eg., the 1990s was quite stripped back, but had come out of the excessive 1980s. the 1920s, on the other hand, had come out of the post-war depression era and into frivolity and financial play. Moroccan dress also has a number of quite sack-like garments, but then (and you can especially see this in the hilarious Vogue interpretations) there is all of the clashing prints and layer upon layer of jewells.
i also looked at the pscyhology behind the layering that took place in each theme.. the 1990s had Grunge, amongst other ideas, the 1920s had Pierot's lampshade skirts and a lot of sheer layers over harem pants and floor-length skirts, while the Moroccans are wont to layer at any chance. in the most basic form, this includes headdress and at least one coat-like layer over pieces resembling robes / kaftans.
we also had to look into the history of the 'shirt'.