After winning the i-D Styling and Maria Luisa awards at 2007’s International Talent Support (a.k.a. ITS) – an annual event in Trieste supporting young fashion designers and photographers - a shell-shocked Justin Smith threw himself into celebrations. Smith, born in 1978, is the millinery world’s new rising star. His MA show at London’s Royal College of Art was extremely well received. ‘The concept for my show was based all around the performative hat’, he says. ‘I started with the models, found out what they performed with and worked back from there. For example, the burlesque fan dancer wore the fans on her head as part of the hat, and took them off and performed on the catwalk with them. So the main themes were the performative hat inspired by circus, performance and an East End Victorian funeral’. His graduate collection is bound to take your breath away. So how did this ambitious and hardworking milliner go from training as a chef to hairdressing to millinery? ‘It has been an organic process on following my creativity’, he explains. ‘The story is too long for a better explanation!’ While Justin labours in his studio on private commissions and collaborates with designers for fashion week, he continues to be a hairdresser three days a week. But with such obvioustalent, he’ll be far too busy making hats to hold down the part-time job for long.
Also by KAREN LEONG
‘I overdosed on art, psycho-analytic theory and philosophy, and that clogged up my creativity’, says London-based Gordon Cheung of his artistic state in 2001 after graduating from the Royal College of Art. A six-week residency in Pakistan in 2003 changed all that. ‘The combination of being away, seeing some amazingly kitsch decorated trucks, and meeting some very interesting artists, had a huge impact on me’, he says. Read more
Elizabeth McGrath’s art is like something out of An American Werewolf in London or a Tim Burton production. Part-gothic, part-whimsical, Elizabeth draws inspiration from roadside attractions, decaying cities, nature, fashion, architecture, interior design, churches of all kinds, movies, good magazines, folklore, music, literature and poetry. Read more
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I fell in love with Anthony Goicolea’s wonderful drawings and photographs a few years ago when I stumbled upon his show at Postmasters Gallery in New York. His world is both arousing and disturbing, as visions of childhood nostalgia and innocence intermingle with darker more abusive subject matter. Read more
If you like what we do at Lost At E Minor — and the talented, creative people that we give props to — then we’d love to hear how you can help us get the word out to more people about the site. Read more
Australian designer Mic Eaton has created an innovative line called Material Boy which specializes in over-sized shirts and funky trackpants. Read more
DJ Spooky — That Subliminal Kid — is just about the deepest crate digger around, trawling the barrels of long-lost record stores for choice vinyl to spin in his wickedly dubby sets. He gave us the inside word last week on his eight favourite songs right now via our sister website, My Secret Playlist. This is what he had to say about Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s Panic in Babylon: ‘If there’s anything that the twenty-first century has told us, it’s that dub is the real original hip-hop. Lee Scratch even had to make it clear in 1965 by adding “Scratch” to his middle name. Take that, Grandmaster Flash!’ Read the rest of DJ Spooky’s Secret Playlist.
Sydney indie heroes (in the nicest possible way), The Paper Scissors (TPS to those that know the secret handshake) have made a video for their new single, The Bandit. And it’s good. Damn good.
We featured red hot Brooklyn band Yeasayer on Lost At E Minor a few months back, so we thought it was time we checked in with keyboardist-sampler, Chris Keating. Read more
Jean-Julien Pous’ Seeking You is an animated love letter to the city of Hong Kong. It presses all the same buttons as Blade Runner and In the Mood for Love, with a touch of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s gothic style, and though it’s really amazing eye candy, it also smacks of creepy, orientalist expat. Here, an entire Asian city is exoticized, fetishized, and finally anthropomorphized in a rather unsubtle way. Why are so many creepy old European dudes so lecherous when it comes to Asia?
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Sam Weber on his favourite emerging artists
We asked illustrator Sam Weber to give us the inside word on some of the young artists who have caught his eye recently: ‘Francis Vallejo, Yoko Furusho [above], and David Jien [below]. For up-and-comers, they are a few with some really amazing work’. Read more
The Japanese sure know how to think outside the box. The country that brought us Takeshi’s Castle has come with this equally genius take on modern sport, and it’s absolutely hilarious.
Lightspeed Champion performs The Kids unhinged
We met Lightspeed Champion (Londoner and former Test Icicles member Dev Hynes) backstage at Oxford Arts Factory at precisely 4.15pm. Read more
National Geographic Best Wild Animal Photos of 2008
National Geographic just announced the Best Wild Animal Photos of 2008. They’re all stunning, but I’m particularly fond of the one of a frog refusing to become lunch for a snake. It looks like they’re eating each other. My number two is the black-crested macaque hanging out on a beach. Read more
Alison Malone on her Daughters of Job photos
A couple of weeks back we featured the work of New York-based photographer Alison Malone, who went into the secretive environment of the Job’s Daughters to photograph the girls who are direct blood relatives of the Master Masons. This is the second part of that interview. Read more
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
Woohoo! We have five copies of the new Faint album, Fascination [Inertia], to give away to randomly selected Australian-based Lost At E Minor subscribers who leave a message under this post telling us about the last time they, ummm, Fainted.
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