Lover
Australian fashion brand Lover, founded by Susien Chong and Nic Briand in 2001, arouses a particular type of devotion. Like the fashionable muses that inspire Lover’s strong and feminine collections – Patty Hearst for the ‘Black Rose Army’ (Spring/Summer 06/07); Rolling Stones groupies and biker babes for ‘Altamont’ (Winter 07) – fans of Lover know all about yearning, obsession … and waiting lists. Get in the swim and place your pre-orders for Lover’s newly launched Spring/Summer line, ‘One Plus One’, which includes the label’s first foray into swimming cossies.
Also by KATRINA SCHWARZ
Hot Box, by Barcelona-based Ana Mir and Emili Padros — for Emiliana Design Studio — is a design object with a different type of consumer in mind. If most highfalutin design firms pitch their sleek wares at Prada-clad architects and inner-city aspirants, the envisaged audience for the Emiliana Hot Box is another breed entirely: the chilly sex worker. A translucent structure that emerges from the ground, the Hot Box was created with the notion of providing warmth and light for those who spend a long time waiting on the street — namely prostitutes. Read more
In the 1985 movie Weird Science, a pair of happy misfits use tip-top technology and nerdy know-how to create something truly beautiful: in the form of ‘real life’ woman and sexed up diva Kellie Le Brock. The Australian fashion label Romance Was Born have created something equally beguiling with their Spring/Summer 07/08 collection, also called Weird Science. Sending coke-bottle spectacles, high-waisted acid wash and even a DNA inspired headdress down the runway at Rosemount Fashion Week, a real highlight of the collection is the label’s collaboration with hot Sydney artist Del Kathryn Barton. Del Kathryn Barton, who has previously collaborated on the label’s Regional Australia collection, will once again provide a unique fabric print that will be reproduced across a range of garments. Romance’s own misfit duo, Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales, know nerds get their revenge in the end. [see also Del Kathryn Barton]
Urs Fischer at Cockatoo Island
Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour has a fascinating – if checkered – history. A former convict prison, a shipyard and a reformatory for wayward girls, the island also has a fascinating present as the site of a new installation by Swiss artist Urs Fischer. Fischer visited Sydney under the auspices of Kaldor Art Projects, whose previous projects have included Christo & Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Coast – One Million Square Feet (1969) and Jeff Koons’s floral Puppy (1995). Visit Cockatoo Island between now and June 3 to view Fischer’s artfully clunky and wonderfully gritty works – a skeleton climbs into/escapes from a packing case; impossibly contorted forearms are suspended from the ceiling and in the installation’s central piece, a huge knobbly structure, recalling both tree branches and disembodied limbs, spans the island’s central forecourt. A ghoulish spectacle.
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Spelling Change was developed by a group of creative professionals to spread awareness and passion about the Obama campaign. Its goal is to encourage one-to-one communication by creating tools that help people get out the word on issues that are important to them. Artists and designers were asked to create a letter of the alphabet inspired by the Obama campaign. These letters were then printed on t-shirts and distributed to photographers, who shot Obama supporters from all walks of life wearing them. The result is a living alphabet that shows the incredible breadth of Obama’s appeal and a widespread desire for real change in Washington. Read more
The coolest band in Indonesia? I think so. White Shoes & The Couples Company describe themselves as a small band that is ‘influenced by Indonesian movie soundtracks from the 70s and inspired by the acoustic spirit of 1930’s classic jazz musicians’. But I like to think of them as carrying the torch for artists like Benny Goodman, Tahiti 80, and The Cardigans, all at the same time.
Listen to their track, Super Reuni.
I awoke the other morning from the sleep of the damned, a fitful spell of tossing and turning courtesy of a mild dose of the flu and the constant rattle of the JMZ trains as they hurtle across the tracks outside my window. Read more
FFFFOUND! is a fun website that allows you to bookmark your favorite images from the Internet and share them with fellow users, sort of like a del.icio.us specifically for pictures. The site is still in private beta and not currently supported on Mac, but as its collection of images expands, it’s likely to become much more widely available.
I don’t get Flight of The Concords. I just don’t find it funny. I also don’t get most comedy these days. It’s so derivative and clichéd. Everyone wants the same laughs. I like comedy that pushes the boundaries in strange ways. Fonejack is one underground unit that have had me rolling around on the floor with their real life skits. Read more
Located on West Houston, Alphaville is my favorite gift store in Manhattan. It offers a great selection of vintage objects, from Nixon’s campaign buttons, to Sesame Street 80s mobiles, 50s greeting cards and the original Mr. Potato Head and his friends. It’s one of those places I walk into just to look but always end up buying something.
One of Cyberoptix most popular designs is now on some amazing hand-woven, Fair Trade silk scarves. As always, they handscreen them all in their Detroit studio. Read more
WE'RE POSTING / SOME OF THE BEST
Guido Daniele’s amazing hand painted animals
Italian artist Guido Daniele creates the most surreally brilliant portraits of wild animals using little more than body paint and a hyper-realistic imagination. Read more
Argentine illustrator Poly Bernatene miraculously creates many of his beautifully textured, painterly images in Photoshop. Despite his twenty-first century method, his illustrations achieve a sort of timelessness that is bound to mesmerize children for years to come. Read more
Japanese designers Keiichi Muramatsu and Noriko Seki founded the Tokyo-based fashion label, Everlasting Sprout, in 2005, based on their mutual interest in knit design. Each intricate creation in their Spring/Summer 2009 range took up to a week for them to construct. Read more
Design collectives can often be a mess, only bound together by a splash page and a few lines of text. Lie-ins and Tigers are without a doubt one of the most unified collectives and one of my favourites. Sam Kerr, Walter Newton and Russell Weekes may all have their own sites and services, but in collaboration, the humour and design intention remains remarkably unified. Read more
The work of Chicago artist Nigel Evan Dennis is emphatically modern and sparse, with textures and clean geometric shapes dominating the frame. I get the feeling I could really relax and breathe deeply with one of these beautiful images hanging on the wall. Read more
Legendary pop culture artist and Agit Pop founder Ron English will be a guest compiler of an upcoming issue of our email newsletter, writing about his favorite cultural discoveries. To read Ron’s edition of Lost At E Minor, simply sign up to our weekly newsletter. It’s free, you win!
Golden Half is one of the world’s most popular toy cameras. It’s compact in size and each click of the shutter uses half of the standard 135mm frame. This means a 36-exposure roll of film will return around 72 images. It’s available for US$100. Read more
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