The Tenement Museum is now offering a new program, called “Foods of the Lower East Side” which will occur on Thursday evenings 6:30-8:30pm.
The tour will include exploring the immigrant experience and some of the ways immigrant foods have shaped American food. You will virtually meet some of the shopkeepers and store owners who tell their stories of living and working on the Lower East Side. Taste dumplings, fried plantains, creams and more. More info: http://tenement.org/specevents.php
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So, I went to my first real New York fashion related event today with The Fashion Potential.
*mild applause*
Thank you. It was very eye-opening. I’ve always been the one touting the wonders of art for art’s sake, but the speaker, Samantha Patterson, was quite direct on the subject of the life of a designer peddling their own label. She went from concept and history of her line to production and the everyday business in under two hours. And while it took her two hours to tell us her story she stressed the actual time if really takes her to accomplish what must be done.
She said that 90% of her time is business and only 10% creating, and she interjected that she is an artist. She went to school to sew and make clothes for the art, but if she doesn’t build up a good business model then no one is going to take her seriously and no one is going to buy her clothes. Well, they might, but it would be sporadic.
She creates the designs and patterns then sends those off to be cut and stitched by others according to her specifications. Now she does prefer American companies (Fair Trade! Woot-woot!), but beyond that she lets a production manager handle the fabric supplier, the cutters, seamsters, packaging, etc. Not all producers will do all of those things, but she needs hers to because even with that management she still has to make calls every day to these service providers to ensure that her designs are coming out as she envisioned them.
Now with myself coming from documentaries about old Paris fashion houses where everything was done in house, it is almost startling to hear about this new form of production. And because I am interested so in couture and the art I was worried for my own future in fashion. Samantha did assure me however that I could still do couture and put my hand to machine to create garments, but to ask for an appropriate price from customers after. And we talked about creating a couture and pret-a-porter line which is where I would want to start and where she is hoping to arrive soon.
Ah, so much information, but I am glad I received it. In moving forward with this knowledge I can decide better which professional routes I will take!
Samantha also praised me for being a Fashion Historian and made me realize that a skill like that would be useful to modern designers. So even if I do not become an independent designer I could always offer my services in developing modern twists on older styles! Or why not do both and have the best of both worlds? ;-)
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» Coursera Blog: Congrats to the First Students to Earn Verified Certificates with Signature Track & A Chat with The Coursera Team!
We’d like to offer a big congratulations to the first group of Courserians to earn a Verified Certificate! We recently awarded more than 700 Verified Certificate for students in Nutrition for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention from UCSF and over 200 for each of the following courses: …
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Eshu, Alexander McQueen F/W 2000
This was McQueen’s first collection that was shown in Paris (instead of London). It was inspired by the pre-colonial Yoruba tribe of West Africa, mixing tribal details with luxurious fabrics to emphasize the raw power of clothes. The models wore heavy steel piercings and their hairlines were dusted with yellow powder. The clothes were mud-spattered, glass-beaded and shredded, the materials being a variety of leathers, horsehair, and cotton.
Actually it was largely mixing tribal fabric techniques and luxurious fabrics to emphasize the juxtaposition of a culture’s historical sacredness with other privileged culture’s impression of it and theft of it through history. McQueen was all about taking part in cultural appropriation but in a way that he was heavily critiquing it, often visualizing how strange it was to try and take one culture out of one part of the world and make it into a typical Western luxurious fantasy. He wanted to bring out the beauty in other cultures that had been mistreated (often by Western civilization) by fusing the bizarre body constraints, body sexualization, and ladies garments of the Western world with the artistic, natural, savage beauty that he related to and found in the very cultures which we repressed and trivialized. Keep in mind that cultural appropriation was not yet a conversational topic when McQueen was doing this. Before him, there was foreign-inspired fashion, “oriental” and “ethnic” collections. There was no fusion of a political conversation speaking out against the problems with this in the fashion world before McQueen. And you thought it was all just frivolous fashion.
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Apollo and Daphne, Marble
Bernini
Inspired from the Greek myth as found in Ovide’s Metamorphosis
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John William Waterhouse: Apollo and Daphne (1908)
“Even now Phoebus embraces the lovely tree
Whose heart he felt still beating in its side;
He stroked its branches, kissed the sprouting bark,
And as the tree still seemed to sway, to shudder
At his touch, Apollo whispered, ‘Daphne,
Who cannot be my wife must be the seal,
The sign of all I own, immortal leaf
Twined in my hair as hers, and by this sign
My constant love, my honour shall be shown.”The Metamorphoses, Ovid
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Gian Lorenzo Bernini, “Apollo and Daphne,” 1622-1625
This is a brilliant method of utilizing every angle of a sculpture to tell a story.
Apollo mocked Eros for using a bow, a weapon of war, when Eros didn’t seem capable of fighting with it. Eros, in response, shot a golden arrow at Apollo, causing him to fall madly in love with Daphne, a Nymph and the daughter of a river god. He then shot Daphne with a lead arrow, causing her to hate Apollo.
Apollo chased her relentlessly until Eros gave in and let him catch up to her. Seeing that she could no longer outrun him, she called out to her father, Peneus, to stop Apollo and to change her body, which had brought such ruin upon her.
Peneus obliged, and turned her into a laurel tree just as Apollo reached her. This sculpture depicts that moment, as Apollo reaches out to her and touches branches instead. Bernini has brilliantly depicted this moment such that as the viewer walks around the statue, she appears to turn into a tree and back again. This video does a decent job of showing this change.
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Stone/flesh
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Apollo and daphne
I’m considering a fashion illustration version of Daphne for a project I’m working on. Interesting choice of materials here…
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Our Lady of Ice at the Charleston Fashion Week After Party.
I won’t be seeing the show tonight… So no breakdown blog.
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Charleston Fashion Week Day 6: We’ve got this!
So sorry for the late blogging. A friend came into town last night and we stayed up late, yadda-yadda, but let me tell you about the events prior to his arrival…
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Charleston Fashion Week Day 5: I Got All Access, What!?
I hit ground zero and the first thing my bosses tell me to do is to hand make some credentials for myself. I know all the team leaders anyway and they would be okay with me being wherever I need to be because I WORK and I GET THINGS TAKEN CARE OF. I actually really enjoy management and production, and I’m not afraid to get dirty with the rest of my team, I wouldn’t want to work for someone who thought a job was beneath them and delegated it to me so I don’t want to be that person myself.
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E is for Elisa Nalin
The Paris-based stylist and brand consultant who doesn’t let a little thing like weather stop her from wearing vibrant colors and prints.
