Sakoku

One of today's most innovative and conceptual designer, Hussein Chalayan's Spring 2011 RTW collection was my personal highlight of the season.









Chalayan showcased his work in a short film, Sakoku, inspired by the Japanese foreign relations policy of the same name. This policy stated that no person could enter or leave the country under penalty of death. Chalayan was fascinated by this period in Japanese history, and based his collection not on Japanese clothing but the concept of abstract isolation, as exhibited in his stunning range of black and white pieces, as well as the gorgeous colour-blocking in lime, fuschia and gold.


Chalayan has created many exceptional pieces throughout his career, including:

1) The Bubble Dress - SS07




2) The Transformer Dress - SS07


Chalayan created six pieces with designer Moritz Waldemeyer which reconfigured themselves on the runway. See them in action below - the final piece disappearing into the model's hat, leaving her completely naked. Amaze.




3) The Laser Dress - in collaboration with Swarovski - 2008



- M.

In significant lives

Ingrid Sanfey is a London based artist whose last exhibition, "In Significant Lives", centered around death masks she had knitted for the dead mice and birds her cat would bring her. He work is utterly fantastic, primarily done on but not limited to watercolour on paper.





Some of her older works include:






-Rebecca

C.U.N.T.'s First Birthday

Despair

Alex Prager is one of the four artists featured in MOMA's exhibiton of New Photography for 2010. A self-taught photographer from Los Angeles, Prager is known for her fabulously kitsch and deliciously cinematic portraits, and this selection of highly-saturated photos from her 2008 series 'A Big Valley' are no exception.







Also, have a look at her wonderful short film Despair, starring the beautiful Bryce Dallas Howard:

She's Got A Thing For Bodily Fluids

www.sandykim.com

Sandy Kim is a pretty new American photographer with major talent. She enjoys photographing her friends in San Francisco and New York and pissing out windows with her boyfriend Colby of the band Girls.

She's also got an awesome blog: http://lovebryan.com/sandy/
-M



PS: I'm obsessed with this atm:

John Kenn's post-it drawings.

John Kenn is a Danish artist who writes and directs children's tv shows. In his spare time he draws monsters on post it notes and blogs them here. These drawings are really, really good.







-Rebecca

Last Night In Pictures.

GI Joe Wounded in Flames and Fleeing the Giant Nude Monster

A very, very long time ago, we started this blog as a dashboard for good shit we liked, and I am really into this guy so I simply must share him with you.

Les Krims is an American conceptualist photographer who, tragically, has largely been considered a failure, but he did some fucking good stuff back in the 70s and 80s, before getting caught up in a whole load of political nonsense. Have a look at some of the pictures from his 1975 series Fictocryptokrimsographs:





Krims’ work caused a fair bit of scandal at the time too, such as his series The Incredible Case of the Stack O’ Wheat Murders (1972), which parodied forensic photography. Each picture featured a stack of pancakes and blood was simulated using chocolate syrup. Krims originally included a can of Hershey’s chocolate syrup with the original print portfolio, as well as "enough pancake mix to make one complete Stack O' Wheats". A particular anti-rape activist, Nikki Craft, was so outraged by Krims’ exhibit that she tore up a bunch of his photos and poured chocolate syrup over the remains.



Also, in 1971, a young boy was kidnapped in Memphis, Tennessee, and the kidnappers demanded Krims’ photographs currently on exhibit in Memphis be removed before the boy is returned. The pictures were taken down and the boy was released, unharmed. Holy moly.




Here’s a song I like a lot right now.
- M