bemusement park

i haven't been on here in a little while, but life has been painfully busy. i also didn't want to post for the sake of purely adding meaningless clutter, and i've had a bit of an uninspired and uneventful streak, so i have prefered to instead wait until a time when i actually felt the desire to create a post.

here are some quite belated iphone images from the launch evening of the QUT Fleet Store. the store will actually be closing in mid-September, so if emerging designers are your sort of thing, be sure to head down to D Block in the QUT Gardens Point campus in the city for a snoop and possibly even a purchase or two. i was genuinely and supremely impressed by the pieces and jewellery on offer.

on the mauve

upon running into an old / new friend at the QUT Fleet Store launch recently, i realised that perhaps i shouldn't have been so lazy and should have also posted on here that i am actually no longer stocking my own pieces in the store.
in a nutshell, it came mostly down to money / time / my current skill level - all of which were not in as much of an abundance as i would have hoped. but, no regrets! i'm so glad that i worked up until the sampling / quality control point, i feel as though i have learned so much about myself and about the whole process.
also, i know that my teachers (/ lecturers ? i don't know what to call them for my close-knit studio subject) are constantly harping on about the fact that in this particular course, much more is learned out of class than in..but it is so true. being able to bounce ideas of the other gentlemen and gentlewomen while cooped up in the studio late at night has been such a great opportunity, and as i'm largely self-taught, it is great seeing the actual norms of creating certain seams and finishings. i'm so new to the whole process but it's all very exciting.

anyway, this is a little blurb i posted on my facebook page and also my instagram a little while ago, my apologies for not popping it up on here as well -


+ i'm extremely glad that i didn't end up needing my swing tags for the Fleet project after all. i received an email on the 20th of last month saying that they will arrive within 5-7 business days, or 2 weeks in very very extreme circumstances. they took almost 4 weeks to arrive, and the sew-in (back of neck) labels were a naff iron-on type (the sort that i remember sporting on my primary school uniforms with my name and possibly even phone number - thanks, Mum) rather than woven. so scary to think that i would have needed those asap.
i'm reasonably happy with the swing tags though.. about a 7 out of 10 on the happiness scale. and i suppose they were kind of inexpensive, so i probably paid for what i got. the Times New Roman worked much better in my head though - less DIY.


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'en route they stopped at a motel so Anna could change out of office outfit into something a bit more alluring, a miniskirt of micro proportions. later, Liberman would say of Anna, 'i was absolutely enchanged with her,' though Mrs Liberman, a sexy woman in her day, was put off by the tiny skirt and the fact that Anna had chosen to bring zinnias as an offering rather than roses or a plant. as usual, Anna had seduced the man and put off the woman.'
- p205
'after years of her husband's womanising along with their other problems, she had come to despise marriage. Anna, though, had a different, more positive view of the state of matrimony, at least one that she had begun expressing to colleagues in London during her editorship at British Vogue - a time when she and her husband talked daily by phone but were lucky if they saw each other and spent time together with the baby once or twice a month.
'Anna was going on and on like she was on a soapbox about marriage and how she felt it identifies you,' recalls on of her colleagues. 'she said she thought marriage was a very important thing. she said, 'marriage says who you are.' she said people should be committed enough to say who they are. of course, she never used her married name. i got the feeling she felt it was more bold to be married than not married. i thought it was David talking through her.
she said, 'right now, i think he's wonderful.' she left it kind of like it might not be forever.''
- p236
''power's Annas's aphrodisiac. i mean, Vogue's just a fashion magazine, a catalogue to sell clothes, for God's sake. and people had to be tormented so she could get a pat on the bum from Liberman and Newhouse, and get Grace Mirabella's job.'
Anna trusted only a few, such as Andre Leon Talley, whose presence came as a shock to her subordinates because of his flamboyant manner and dress: patent leather pumps, striped stretch pants, red snakeskin backpacks, faux-fur muffs all superimposed on this gentle black giant who, in another world, could have been playing for the New York Knicks with his six-foot-seven frame.'
- p238
'despite all of Shaffer's love and support over the years, Anna is said to have gotten bored with the marriage, just as she got bored with the length of skirts, or photographers who had served their purpose, or assistants who didn't act slavish, or designers who no longer turned on her fashion juices.'
- p334
- Front Row: Anna Wintour, Jerry Oppenheimer

worst traffic en histoire

'Instagram, Barbour, vinyl records, artisanal butchers, moustaches, and the biography of your potatoes lovingly detailed on chalkboard signs at Whole Foods. what is wrong with this picture? as London-based writer and entrepreneur Russell M Davies puts it, 'most of Shoreditch would be wandering around in a leather apron if it could. with pipe and beard and rickets. every new coffee shop and organic foodery seems to be the same. wood, brushed metal, bits of knackered toys on shelves. and blackboards. everywhere there’s blackboards.'

for the last few years, the stylistic purview of much of the creative class in places like Shoreditch in London, the borough of Brooklyn in New York, and Berlin’s Mitte district has been curiously backward-looking. perhaps this retreat into retro nostalgia is a reaction to economic uncertainty and technological change. maybe it’s a craving for what we imagine were simpler times or a search for authenticity in a world that is increasingly artificial. whatever the reason, the backward-looking trend extends to fashion, as well. in fact, perhaps more than any other design discipline, fashion is engaged in an intense dialogue with the past.
'there’s so little innovation in fashion in its current state,' Susanna Lau, widely known as Susie Bubble, told BoF. and indeed, from Belstaff to Moynat to Schiaparelli, reviving dusty heritage brands is undoubtedly the business model du jour.

but over the past year, a loose group of creatives in London’s East End have given birth to a counter-narrative to the growing tide of heritage and nostalgia, examining the reality of our increasingly artificial and technology-mediated world head-on. known as 'The New Aesthetic,' the movement was born last May with a blog post by London-based writer and technologist James Bridle, who began collecting found images at new-aesthetic.tumblr.com that dealt with the 'eruption of the digital into the physical world' and the idea of 'seeing like a machine' in an attempt to capture and communicate the possibilities for a more contemporary visual culture. subjects included everything from glitches in Google Maps to photographs from military drones in Afghanistan and the techno-organic forms of contemporary architecture that betray traces of the computer-aided design (CAD) programmes used to create them.

in fashion, a growing number of designers have embraced the digital prints revolution. but which designers, imagemakers and fashion editorial outlets are actually producing 'New Aesthetic' work that actively engages and deals with our digitally-mediated world?
low-resolution pixilation is a major New Aesthetic theme and was perhaps most elegantly used in Preen’s Spring-Summer 2012 collection, which features romantic floral prints processed by a computer.
both Gareth Pugh and United Nude have borrowed from videogames, producing blocky geometries that reference 'voxels,' volumetric pixels once used in constructing videogame environments. and Arnhem-based Dutch designer Iris van Herpen has made what is surely fashion’s most beautiful and radical use of digital imaging technology with her Photoshop-designed, 3D-printed polymer dresses, which play with the tension between digital and organic forms.

the moment when technology reveals itself through digital glitches and errors is another major theme in New Aesthetic imagery and something that has appeared in the work of Australian fashion designer Josh Goot who has made particularly striking use of digital prints that tend towards noise and distortion. while Goot’s process is carefully controlled by the designer, Philip Stearns’ Glitch Textiles project uses short-circuited cameras to auto-generate colour patterns that are then woven into blankets, with hypnotic and beautiful results.

perhaps fashion’s most overtly 'New Aesthetic; magazine is DIS, edited by Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso, Nick Scholl and David Toro. in a landmark example of New Aesthetic work in fashion, the magazine recently collaborated with Adam Harvey to create a radical beauty story based on CV Dazzle — styling techniques that use asymmetric make-up, hair and accessories to disrupt facial recognition algorithms — entitled 'How to Hide from Machines: the perilous glamour of life under surveillance.'
'we need to see the technologies we actually have with a new wonder,' wrote James Bridle in his first essay on the New Aesthetic. digital methods of image research, image editing and production have quickly become embedded in the fashion industry, but the possibilities for digital creativity have yet to be fully explored.

as a term, 'The New Aesthetic' may be short-lived. surprising many, James Bridle shut down the New Aesthetic Tumblr ten days ago, exactly one year after it was launched. but if the 'New Aesthetic' movement is already dead, this is surely only the beginning of digital technologies impacting the way fashion creatives think, see and design. indeed, the generation of students just starting to arrive in fashion schools have only ever known a world that’s mediated by digital technology and learnt to process visual culture through a ceaseless digital stream of appropriated and juxtaposed images.
long live the New Aesthetic.'
- Is Fashion Ready for a New Aesthetic? - Jay Owens, The Business of Fashion