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"I’d been watching [Alexander McQueen’s] career from the beginning, so we knew each other pretty well. He was a brilliant intellectual statesman. A beautiful man. And we had birthdays two days apart, so we always had that bond. We were both Pisces, fishes swimming in two different directions, kind of confused but sensitive souls"
— Fashion Television hostess-with-the-mostest Jeanne Beker remembers Alexander McQueen, among other, lesser things, in my interview with her for Eye Weekly: City Style.
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THESE ARE MY FAVOURITE THINGS IN THE WORLD until next Sunday.
1. “Act Da Fool,” Harmony Korine’s short film for Proenza Schouler. This showed up on NOWNESS a while ago, and I ‘loved’ it, and then today I went beer-gardening and book shopping with Alejandro (Alejandro!) the art guy for Proenza, and we were talking about how raaaad this is. Almost nothing in fashion is surprising anymore, but this is so eerie-pretty and so great, the way it totally flips off the Proenza Schouler customer base, i.e. cool, entitled, vaguely arty white girls.
2. “Devotion” by Hurts, with Kylie Minogue. I can’t believe Kylie gets to live my dream threesome. This song is unstoppable.
3. The damaged dreams of old Czech photographer Miroslav Tichy. Good, right? So I was in Dashwood Books, one of my very very favourite New York places, with Evanne and Evanne’s boy and Kelley. They didn’t have the Deborah Turbeville book I looong for, or anything with Francesca Woodman. I considered the Paolo Roversi and then realized I could order it for less. But the woman there said oh, I know your taste now (and that’s how to sell anybody anything, by implying that they have taste, that they are special and singularly knowable) and pointed me to this Tichy book. It was $75 and I didn’t buy it but I did look up lots of his work. I like it, but not as much as like Turbeville, whom I found all on my own. I think?
The second- or third-worst thing that happened to us happened on this night. On it I wrote:
Night swimmers, tonight. The happiest I have felt in so long. He says, how much will you give me if I take off my trunks? I say I’ll pay him $20. Later I’ll go naked, free. Under water with no temperature he’s slippery and hard as ever to hold. I watch with tenderness the flash of ass, the lazy, thrashing way he swims. I know this is love. The barest flicker of wind. Rippling water’s surface turns white lamplight into the loose ends of birthday streamers.
We did not go back to the swimming lake for over a year. The other night it was just so hot and for other reasons, too, we needed to… Everything was exactly as I had chosen to remember it, everything the dead quiet same, only I was naked this time and also not the happiest. I sat still in the temperatureless water and thought about the inevitability of various things and about that night, which was so traumatic you can’t imagine, and I can’t tell you. How had we weathered that storm and all the others that ensued and how is it that I find myself now unable to weather the calm? Out of the water, we sat and talked about how good it was that we were doing this, how perfect, and we didn’t talk about that night last year. We went home and I stayed up, waiting desperately for nothing to happen.
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"I do think there is a lack of modernity at the moment—and I don’t even like that word, modernity, anymore. There aren’t enough designers today anyway—there are more stylists. And then there are certain people who hang onto nostalgia and I wish they wouldn’t. I wish the young beautiful actresses and other people—I wish they would not hark back to clothes that look more like they’ve dressed in their mother’s clothes."
— Polly Mellen to Interview. This is how I feel, too, about Vanity Fair’s Young-but-really-Old Hollywood shoots and NY Mag’s Katie O. cover and everyone’s Mad Men Madness. Women. Those were not the good old days and honestly, they weren’t even good-looking so much as they weren’t in bad taste. We can do better. Breasts are one thing; corsets are another. Retro one thing; reinvention another. Understand?
FASH |
Eye Weekly, OBJECT OF DESIRE: Audrey Cantwell’s Navajo cloak, $160USD on Etsy.com. It’s fascinating to watch Etsy become the self-publishing software of the fashion world. Look how well Angie Johnson’s done with Norwegian Wood, for one. Audrey too is a Montreal girl; I met her once, her and her boyfriend, both pale pretty drapey Rad Hourani interns. Good that she’s not too high-fashion-minded to sell her stuff. Her pieces are all young and cool and lissome and l’air du temps, which is typical of emerging female designers today, but the prices are young, too, which is not. [to read actual post, click the link]
Julian Schnabel, the fucking amazing filmmaker and also painter, talks about Jane Birkin #2 at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Show’s on now. As a visual artist, Schnabel is vastly indulgent, which I don’t mean really as a criticism, especially because what do I know? I do know that, if I saw them at an OCAD thesis show, I would point and scoff at those black-and-whites of Marlon Brando sprayed slapdash with neon stripes—those consitute an entire, if tiny, room. But then there’s Portrait of Andy Warhol with all the paint imbedded like shrapnel in black velvet; sweet fuck. I looked at that the longest. I also like the Birkin he’s talking about here, which has an excuse for being too big: it was made from a sail mast. Mostly I just like him talking. Schnabel is a massive piece of work himself and one worth knowing. So see the show. Nothing hangs together, really, but everything in it feels like something he just had to get out of his system; maybe that’s why it’s shit, if you think it’s shit.
Plays: 30
I decline to accept the end of summer. I say that. But. It’s hotter than ever today, and sticky; feels like I’m sealed inside a blister. I’m wearing suede. Biking, if only for the artificial wind. Dripping. Soon it will burst. It’ll seem colder than ever, then. The weather has become so weird these years, so not even temperamental, but cranky and explosively so. The weather’s an old man on the porch with a bazooka. People say can you look at the weather? But sometimes I can’t. I’m afraid. I can’t help feeling despite my best wishes that it will all be over soon, that when I say it will burst I mean everything will burst. Every season another disaster: tsunami, hurricane, flood, heat wave, hurricane. I’ve always believed in weather. Not in God but in the acts of him, as insurance people say. That old man could kick the bucket any day. One night last month some of us were talking about the year 2012 and the crazies on reality shows who believe in that shit but fuck, it’s weird outside and it feels like the second-last summer on earth.
Eye Weekly, City Style: Fall 2010 Fads v. Trends. At the beginning of this year, I explained the frustratingly ignored difference between “fads” (the most-blogged look of the season, usually) and “trends” (more of a long-form story, playing out over several seasons, not just a fashion week or two). In a reprise of the spring forecast, I’m picking three of this fall’s top fads and trends, and telling you what’s what. Or, at least, what I hope is what. Uhh, what? [to read and disagree, click the link]
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THESE ARE MY FAVOURITE THINGS IN THE WORLD until next Sunday.
1. Blah, blah, I’m obsessed with this hair colour. It’s a wig though on Maripol, shown here with Basquiat. The infamous Madonna-maker has a book out soon; it’s called Little Red Riding Hood.
2. Love Spell by Victoria’s Secret: the spirit of my teenageness! Can you believe it smells the same after all these years (eight)? To read the whole story go to Eye Weekly.
3. Cindy Sherman in Chanel. What! This is why we (me + bff) think POP > LOVE.
4. A music video for the band Awesome New Republic by my new favourite (umm… well, only favourite, what do I know about these things) music video director, Jamie Harley. I found him through his videos for How to Dress Well, or as I like to call that basement-bedroom-r-and-b outfit, How to Undress Well. Most of what Harley does has this incredibly romantic home video quality, all misty and crystalline, and makes you feel as though you’ve taken a significant quantity of soothing prescription drugs. But this one’s my favourite. The song is “The Endless Field of Mercury” and the setting is a “Young American Miss” pageant, so if you feel like you’re in some other girl’s dream, well, you are.
5. MiuMiu Fall ‘10 print ads. I didn’t know how much I liked these until I watched the video version directed by Madonna. It’s so tacky and fatally cute and not ironic at all, just like why?
Eye Weekly, CASTING CALL: Kealan Sullivan. Everyone’s fave vintage proprietor puts her mouth where her money is.
