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.

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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. The Hot Box shows us, just like Julia Roberts’s happy trajectory in Pretty Woman, that all ladies deserve their turn on a pedestal. The Hot Box is currently on show in Sydney as part of ‘Connections: Experimental Design’ at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery, University of New South Wales, 5 – 21 July 2007.

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]

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.

If the tear away success of video-sharing portal You Tube has a lesson to impart it is that people – in the name of diversion, in pursuit of entertainment – will watch anything. Speed Painting with Ketchup and French Fries, uploaded by user EclecticAsylum less than a week ago, has already drawn a global audience of 100,0000 unique viewers. A portrait in video of a portrait in sauce and chips, the painted subject is Morgan Spurlock, a documentarian and anti-McDonalds figurehead. Spurlock rose to prominence, and to new calorific heights, with the 2004 feature Super Size Me – a film whose premise might be neatly surmised in the image, widely circulated during the film’s promotional flurry, of a furrow-browed Spurlock, mouth crammed full of Macca’s famous french fries. It is this image to which EclecticAsylum has turned his brush – or rather his individual-serve condiment packets.

A still camera focuses on a blank page from which the contours of Spurlock’s chip-ravaged face begin to emerge. The subject is sketched in outline, the artist daubing ketchup upon the fresh surface with the aid of a solitary fry. The chin is a slender arc of sauce, the nostrils, two jabs of a chip. Spurlock’s hair, helpfully ginger, takes shape with the application of red goop direct from the sauce packet. At 2 minutes 45 seconds, Morgan Spurlock’s saucy visage seems near completion. Hairy forearm reaches to the top left of the frame, transplanting golden rods of potato to the center of his painting, and of Spurlock’s gaping mouth. The likeness is uncanny and unappetizing.

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Sienna Miller’s appearance – sans pant – at the New York premiere of her new Warholian film project, Factory Girl, signaled the surprising return of a wardrobe staple: the scungie. Scungies will be a familiar sight/blight to schoolgirls (and ex-schoolgirls) Australia-wide. Best described as a heartily elasticated woman’s full brief underpant – or sport bloomer – scungies were requisite attire for school sport and ‘physical culture’ (physie). Worn on their own or under a short pleated skirt, the scungie acted as a kind of force-field, repelling the voyeuristic efforts of young schoolboys (those notorious up-skirt dirt merchants). In looking for the source of Sienna’s sartorial revelation, all signs point to fellow Factory Girl cast-mate, ‘Australian’ actor Guy Pearce. Before donning a silly silver wig to take on the role of Andy Warhol, Pearce was a pervy schoolboy in rural Victoria. The actor is on record as being a fan of big knickers.

Like householders the world over, Perth sculptor Christian de Vietri has been spending time in IKEA. Loitering in the Faktum kitchen and between the Billy bookcases, slumped on the Klippan two-seater and filling his pockets with allen keys, de Vietri is assembling something of a different order. For his latest work Configuration 3: Nuclear family fusion, 2006, currently on show at new Sydney gallery space thirtyseven degrees, De Vietri has taken the components of various IKEA products – the wooden structures of a bunk bed, curtain rails, parts of a rotating cupboard, knives, chopping board sets, chairs and tables – and created from them a tool of torture: a 3 x 3 metre ‘Infrafamily Conflict Resolution Unit’. Imagine a whirligig plus prodding stick: a contemporary reinvention of the barbarous medieval pillory, into which offenders were locked by their hands and neck and forced to rotate aimlessly, incessantly. For anyone who has done battle with a DIY assembly kit, it is clear that De Vietri has not so much transformed these IKEA products as pushed them to their cruel and natural conclusion: IKEA – the cycle of production and consumption – here reads as torture, as gross spectacle. It is possible, however, that the artist’s reasons for loitering in the local IKEA are far more mundane. A multi-award winner, having bagged the Art & Australia/ ANZ Private Bank Prize for emerging artists, the QANTAS Spirit of Youth Award, a Nescafe Big Break grant and the honorific title ‘West Australian Citizen of the Year’, Christian de Vietri is a man in dire need of a trophy cabinet.