Uncertain Times: clothing

Showing posts with label clothing. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Chrystl Rijkeboer

The reason I work with human hair is that hair has symbolic significance: beauty, strength, health, attraction, etc. The moment it is separated from the human all these factors turn around, hair is considered dirty, unsavoury and dead.

Hair is also an important indicator of our life, as well in the past as in the present...

via bright stupid confetti

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Staring Wigs

Bless me Ladies Is this I or My Brother. Mezzotint published by H. Bryer, typical of the many prints ridiculing Staring Wigs worn by Macaroni 1764–72

Legal Habits: A Brief Sartorial History of Wig, Robe and Gown (pdf):

As with all fashion trends, styles of wig-coiffure tended, during the 150 years of their vogue, to oscillate between extremes. Just as Fullbottoms had ballooned to waist-length at the end of the seventeenth century, only to be superseded by shorter, more stylised wigs in the 1710s; so in the mid-1760s, as the trimmer buckle-style of wig became standard, a group of young men took to wearing exaggeratedly large wigs, called Staring Wigs, together with tightly fitting, multi-coloured clothes and spying glasses. They became known as Macaroni after the club they formed in London in 1764 devoted to Italianate designs of food and fashion, which lasted till 1772. The powdered wigs they wore accentuated the effect of the Toupet Wigs of the 1730s, and were brushed up from the forehead into a single great peak, with an immense folded knot of hair worn behind. Within a generation, however, the fashion had once again reversed, this time terminally.

(prev)

thanks to gimcrack hospital

Monday, December 22, 2008

Air Bush

‘Bush Shoe’ flies off the shelves:

One week later, Zaidi-mania shows no sign of slowing down. The Turkish company that makes the shoe Muntadar al-Zaidi threw at President Bush has seen demand for the think-soled model explode:

Baydan has received orders for 300,000 pairs of the shoes since the attack, more than four times the number his company sold each year since the model was introduced in 1999. The company plans to employ 100 more staff to meet demand, he said.

“Model 271” is exported to markets including Iraq, Iran, Syria and Egypt. Customers in Iraq ordered 120,000 pairs this week and some Iraqis offered to set up distribution companies for the shoe, Baydan said.

They also claim to be in talks with a U.S. distributor.

photo: Ilker Akgungor/Getty Images

Saturday, October 11, 2008

African Textiles

“The Nightingale” (2003) by Grace Ndiritu

In a video at the Grey, Grace Ndiritu tweaks the seductive role of textiles in Matisse’s paintings: allowing her bare limbs to peek out from behind curtains, or posing as a mummified Olympia.

African Art, Modern and Traditional: Seductive Patterns From a Rich Palette

hat tip to C-MONSTER.net

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

stray bullets

'Intelligent' computers put to the test No machine has yet passed the test devised by Turing, who helped to crack German military codes during the Second World War. But at 9am next Sunday, six computer programs - "artificial conversational entities" - will answer questions posed by human volunteers at the University of Reading in a bid to become the first recognised "thinking" machine.

Blake Pontchartrain on Zulu coconuts Everybody wanted a Zulu coconut, but when you shouted 'Hey, Mister, throw me something," and what you got was a coconut thrown at you, you ducked or suffered the consequences. Believe it or not, lawsuits resulted; lots of them. When Mardi Gras of 1987 rolled around, the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club was unable to get insurance, so it was a parade without coconuts. One year, back in the day, I had the honor of painting a dozen or so Zulu coconuts.

costume detail: Stripes "The Medieval eye found any surface in which a background could not be distinguished from the foreground disturbing. Thus striped clothing was relegated to those on the margins or outside the social order - jugglers and prostitutes for example - and in medieval paintings the devil himself is often seen wearing stripes." The Devil's Cloth by Michel Pastoreau (via)

The Avant Garde Project is a series of recordings of 20th-century classical-experimental-electroacoustic music digitized from LPs whose music has in most cases never been released on CD, and so is effectively inaccessible to the vast majority of music listeners today. (via)

also:
How to Photograph the Stars (via)
Original Locations of 15 Mega-Chains (via)
Death becomes him: Kevorkian’s artwork on display at Armenian Library (via)
Another rare Serra interview (via)
Best of History Web Sites (via)
Dickens' London Map (via)
Fight Spam With A Direct Message To Twitter (via)

viddy:
Buckminster Fuller profiled on PBS's SundayArts
Ladislaw Starewicz - Cameraman's Revenge (proto-stop-animation)
Scratching With Tape Decks (cassette and reel-to-reel)
Vinyl Record Manufacturing Explained
Smashing Glass To The Anvil Chorus (via)

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

stray bullets

Right Thing to Wear at the Wrong End of a Gun There are bulletproof leather jackets and bulletproof polo shirts. Armored guayabera shirts hang next to protective windbreakers, parkas and even white ruffled tuxedo shirts. Every member of the sales staff has had to take a turn being shot while wearing one of the products, which range from a few hundred dollars to as much as $7,000, so they can attest to the efficacy of the secret fabric.

also:
Was Life on Mars Extinguished Prematurely by a Huge Impact? (via)
Man of steel (rare Richard Serra interview)
Liveblogging a pending asteroid strike

Futility Closet - Allied Reptiles In February 1945, the British 14th Army had surrounded a mass of fleeing Japanese in a mangrove swamp in southern Burma. In the swamp were thousands of saltwater crocodiles, averaging 15 feet long, but the Japanese refused to surrender...

viddy:
Kraftwerk - Radioactivity (live)
Video Inside the Chernobyl Sarcophagus
Jack Kerouac reads from Doctor Sax in 1961
The Weather Underground (feature length doc)