The Gap Year

“The conspicuously well dressed man is not a well dressed man at all, but merely a block for displaying the best materials and the latest fashions upon. His clothes and all articles of outward attire cry out their quality, and forcibly draw attention to their very newest cut, set, twist, or turn; and you say “There’s a dressy man if you like! Everything right up to date, including the walking stick.” The really well dressed man attracts no such remark. Of him you are more likely to say, “That man looks very smart - for some reason or another. Wonder what it is!” You may depend upon it that the man of whom that is said is a man not only of fashion, but of something very important besides - namely, good taste, strong individuality, faithfulness to personal style.” — Fashion, August 1899

Just keep making crap so you can close that gap--that disjoint between what you know is good and your actual work. This is very very true. I still don't like any of the things I create, but I just keep doing things and somehow I'm moving forward. 

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

Thought of something very random today. I tend to draw and sketch a lot when I'm working, so I thought I'll officially add it to my workflow.

I got this from Nicole's Facebook page. :-) Awesome stuff. 

Work Schedule, 1932-1933

-Henry Miller Miscellanea

 

COMMANDMENTS

 

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.

2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to "Black Spring". [Black Spring is Miller's second published novel]

3. Don't be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.

4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!

5. When you can't create you can work.

6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.

7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.

8. Don't be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.

9. Discard the Program when you feel like it -but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.

10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.

11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

Yes, it's true. The thinnest people I know are gay, mostly because they watch what they eat, and work out like mad. While Simon Doonan isn't exactly the most politically correct of all writers, don't you just love how he generalizes for laughs? We don't have to take ourselves seriously all the time. 

Simon Doonan via Fashionista

For the unintiated, Simon Doonan is a British window dresser who has since moved to the US to to work as the creative director of Barneys New York. Witty, irreverent, and crazy-funny, he also writes a column on style in Slate Magazine, similar to his column before in The New York Observer. I have two of his books: Eccentric Glamour (which talked about glamorous eccentrics like Tilda Swinton, Dita von Teese, Lucy Liu, Chloe Sevigny, Iman, and my favorite eccentric Isabella Blow) and Wacky Chicks (where he profiles actress Amy Sedaris, Warhol muse Brigid Berlin, the woman who taught Madonna how to vogue: Susanne Bartsch, and so on).

He was on ANTM cycle 2,3, and 5, where he taught models how to style themselves, on Gossip Girl 5, and there was even a comedy based on his life (from his memoir Beautiful People) by BBC.

Out on the streets of New York via NYT

Plus, he's the husband of fashion designer (now dabbling in interior and furniture design) Jonathan Adler! 

Jonathan Adler via Apartment Therapy

In any case, the book will be out on Thursday, so I don't have a copy of this yet. :-) Here are some interesting tidbits from the book and from his interview with the New York Times. 

1. You must be wary of the panini, there's an enormous amount of meat and cheese there.

2. "Gay chips are baked, straight chips are fried."

3. If you want to lose weight, try to eat like a gay man. 

4. The world's culinary options can be reduced to either gay or straight food. A balance of both (bisexual eating LOL) will give you the best of both worlds.

5. Straight food tends to be leaden, full of protein, and thick with fat.

6. Gay food is lighter and brighter, feels art-directed, with attention to aesthetic and dietary detail.

7. "Lesbian" food refers to earthy, healthful foods, mostly of the organic sort.

8. Mexican food is straight, Japanese food is gay.

9. Caesar salad is straight (because of the egg).

10. "I can't believe any red-blooded straight guy can even walk into a macaron shop. If you wanted to ruin a politician's career, just publish a picture of him shopping for macarons."

 

SIMON DOONAN - GAY MEN DON'T GET FAT from Benjamin Morsberger on Vimeo.

I won't be writing a long farewell letter to 2011 because I haven't got the time to dawdle--the party's already starting outside. See you all in 2012!
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld

I'm in the middle of doing three things at the same time--all of which require full and undivided attention. Then again, I'm just about ready to give up on one (an architectural discourse on aesthetics) mostly because the deadline has been missed, but I'm rather excited for the two things I'm doing alternately: a longform story on muses, and the design for a store, both of which are due tomorrow. 

As you may have noticed, it's hard for me to just do one thing, because I tend to become so focused when I'm working that I don't eat, I don't go out of the house, and I don't wash my hair (yuck). So it helps me when I'm working on two things at the same time, mostly because I get to rush myself into making a draft or a scheme, and then just work around to perfecting it. 

[Right now, I need to rest my eyes and my brain, without falling asleep. Right now, there are two dinner drinking parties I should have attended, but can't, given the fact that I'm in deadly deadline danger. Right now, I wish I could split myself up and work on these three things without feeling fatigued.] 

To alleviate my pain, I decided to look at pretty things, like this library I found in a design blog:

Via Apartment 412

I'm looking at books because I read through 5 of them just this week. I'm on a reading ban now, until I finish all these things I have to do. 

I've been working on a new project recently so I'm currently obsessed with French interior designer Andrée Putman. Much of my life has been inspired by creative yet very eccentric women (like Coco Chanel, Diana Vreeland, Simone de Beauvoir, Isabella Blow, etc) but Andrée has been a recent discovery--I just chanced upon her work when I was looking through images of the Madeleine Vionnet exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris a few years back. 

Very chic lola: Andrée Putman

(checkyourparis.wordpress.com)

Love her style! (toocutemagazine.com)

In any case, it's hard for me to separate creative work from biography--I've always seen traces in the biography that aid in understanding work, so much so that sometimes, artists and designers act out in real life when they're working on a creative project. (I have a tendency of doing this method-creation as well, like how I'd pretend to be a bride-to-be when I'm working on a wedding gown story, or that time with A, when I pretended to be a foreign exchange student from China as we were taking illegal photographs of the Peninsula.) 

Andrée's signature monochrome graphics at Morgans Hotel (www.wallpaper.com)

Anyway, this girl is really cool. She began work in the 1960s as a journalist for design magazine L'oeil and had a brief career as a marketing consultant in fashion for . But before that, her mother wanted her to become a concert pianist, until her professor told her it would take them ten years to know whether she'll be a great composer. Growing up in a very artistic family, she married the art critic and publisher Jacques Putman, and was known to have been influenced by artist friends like Pierre Alechinsky, Yves Klein, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Alberto Giacommetti. 

She also contributed to street furniture design, as seen in this Elephant bench designed in the 1980s (www.wallpaper.com)

She first worked for private residences and boutiques of friends like Karl Lagerfeld and Thierry Mugler, before putting up Écart, a store selling one-of-a-kind and rare objects as well as prototypes featuring under the radar designers like Eileen Gray, Mallet-Stevens, Pierre Chareau, Mariano Fortuny, Rene Herbst, and Jean-Michel Frank. 

 

As her studio grew, she moved on designing shops for Azzedine Alaia, Cartier, Ebel, Guerlain, mannequins for Barneys, interiors for the Concorde of Air France, and even the early boutique hotels--The Morgan in New York, Wasserturm in Cologne, and Pershing Hall Hotel in Paris. 

Guerlain boutique in Paris  (www.wallpaper.com)

Azzedine Alaia boutique in Paris (www.designboom.com and www.aestheteblog.com)

Interiors of the Concorde (www.wallpaper.com)

Pershing Hall Hotel in Paris www.parisdailyphoto.com)">(www.parisdailyphoto.com)

Morgans Hotel in New York (www.aestheteblog.com)

She also tried her hand at designing film sets, like that of Peter Greenaway's movie The Pillow Book, as well as the Bordeaux Museum of Contemporary Art.

Set design for Peter Greenway's The Pillow Book starring Ewan McGregor and Vivian Wu (justunderthesurface.wordpress.com)

I love how she mixes the different influences--the arts, fashion, interior design, and product design--to create a different design narrative that seems to have transcended time. Anyway, if you want to know more about her, she has a book published by Assouline. 

 

I'm in Beijing and we don't have twitter or Facebook access. How horrible! I feel so out in the loop, but at the same time, I'm enjoying the disjoint. It turns out that it's easier to hear your thoughts when it's very very quiet. :-)

My editor who just arrived from Paris lent me her Vogue Paris Collections FW 2012 book, and the experience changed my perception of new EIC Emmanuelle Alt completely. I always thought her presence in Vogue was just a means for continuity, that she was there to just continue what Carine's legacy but at the same time conform to what publishers felt was appropriate for the growing title. I felt that she wasn't a strong enough editor unlike Carine Roitfeld (who was a fantastic stylist) or Alexandra Shulman (whose strength wasn't in fashion but was a great curator and overall manager) or Anna Wintour (who had great influence and taste) until I read her editor's letter. I always liked how Carine's style mixed sex and femininity, but reading Emmanuelle's made me respect her as an editor. 

Here's a sample of Carine's letter:

C'est la robe en capitales. Éphémère et éternelle. Celle que l'on ne prote qu'un journ, et pour toujours inoubliable. Blanche mais pas forcément, longue mais pas fatalement, romantique éviderment, et pourquoi pas excentrique, décalée, transparente, théâtrale, audacieuse, voire insolente. 

(This is the dress in [the forefront]. Ephemeral and eternal. [One we travel with], and forever memorable. But not necessariy while, not fatally long, and evidently romantic. So why not [have one that's] eccentric, transparent, theatrical, audacious, or insolent?) --Do forgive my French, all I have is a Larousse dictionary and a bit of knowledge on construction and grammar. 

 From the Vogue Paris wedding issue

Photography: NY Mag

And Carine's goodbye letter:

 From @LiveFashionWeek

--

Anyhow, here's what Emmanuelle had to say in this issue of Vogue collections:

Quand i fait froid, on se couvre. Du bon sens? Oui, et que la majorité des cráteurs semble avoir pris au mot tant il est vra que le climat général des nouvelles collections se veut protecteur, symbolisé en particulier par une fronde de fourrure--vrai ou fausse--prête à repousser les assauts de l'hiver, ou encoue par la cape, nouvelle star de la garde-robe. pour autant, et c'est là le paradoxe, pas question d'atmosphère particuliérement chaleureuse: rigoureuse, pudique, teintée les plus souvent de nuances sombres, l'allure joue les armures, rythmée par un masculin-féminin souvent strict, attachée à ne rien dévoiler ou presque, à part ça et là un bras ou une jambe. Après les excès d'éclat et autres flous fluos de l'eté, la raison du plus fou laisse donc de nouveau place à la raison du plus fort. Ce qui, concrètenement, se traduit par une silhouette nette, une démarche directe, assurée, un espirt tailleur dont le pouvoir de conviction est au moins aussi évident que celui de séduction. Reste que la monde, aussi austère soit-elle, tient quant même et toujours à se faire remarquer, et y parvient cette fois par de jeux et effets de surfaces, déployant à loisir toute la gamme de apparences, de plus mates et feutrées aux plus vernies, chatoyantes, brillantes. En l'occurence, textures en touchers, atteignent des sommets de subtilité et de reflects. Une autre manière d'attirer la lumière. Et l'attention. 

When the weather turns cold, dress up warmly. It makes perfect sense, doesn't it? Of course it does, and on the whole designers seem to have done just that this season, for the overall feel of the latest collections is about protecting the wearer from the elements. Nowehre is this more apparent than in the use of fur--both fake and genuine--at the ready to fend off the freezing winter onslaught; and capes, which are the rising star in every woman's must-have wardrobe. And yet, oddly enough, the general mood isn't that cosy. Silhouettes are uncluttered and prim, largely in a colour palette of sombre shads. Looks play the armour game, taking turns with a strictly-tailored masculine-feminine aesthetic for the most part, the idea being to reveal nothing or very little, apart from an arm or a leg here and there. In contrast to last summer's abundance of neons and pizzazz, the bring-is-right credto has given way to a more of a "might-is-right" approach. The result is a sleek, rigorous line, with a a self-confident stride, and a preference for suits, whose powers of persuasion are ascetic, is matched only by their powers of sedution. That said, fashion, even at its most ascetic, is always about getting noticed, and the way to get noticed this season is by mixing myriad finishes and effects to run the gamut of styles, from matt and soft, to a glossier, more iridescent shimmer. For Autumn/Winter 2011-12, the texture and feel of the materials have reached new heights of refinement and subtle lustre. Which is a different way of attracting light... and attention.

 From stockholmstreetstyle.feber.se

 From garbagelapsap.wordpress.com

 ©2009 Condé Nast. All Rights Reserved. 

 --

She's spot on with her summary of how the A/W clothes are! And how collection change from season to season, year to year, yet they all seem to look the same. The fur+texture+ascetism has been a combo I've been trying to use all season, I like mixing fabrics especially the furry ones. On one end, I'm also very much attracted to the Louis Vuitton S&M aesthetic, but in a rock chick sense instead of erotic as it suggests. 

Well, bye for now! Back to writing my trend reports.

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