Archives for the 'Design' Category
What Will You Wear Through the Great Depression of 2009?
Erin Fetherston/ J Mendel
“What was your last job?”
“I worked at Maison Chose in Place Vendome.”
“Oh really, you worked for Chose, did you?” His voice is more respectful, “Were you a receptionist?”
“No,” I say, “I was a mannequin.”
“You worked as a mannequin?” Down and up his eyes go, up and down. “How long ago was this?” he says…
Yes my dear sir, I left. I got bored and I walked out on them. But that was four, nearly five years ago and a lot can happen in five years. I haven’t the slightest intention of walking out on you, I can assure you of that…
“Have you worked anywhere else since then?”
“Well, no. No, I haven’t.”- Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight
Your father lost ten million this week and there’s no more work to be found for a “freelance stylist.” You’re on your own, kid. Time to get a real job. Answering phones at a dentist’s office, substitute teaching, trash collecting. This doesn’t mean you can’t look fabulous, you just gotta turn it down a notch. Buy “investment pieces.” You can’t count the stock market, but a chiffon Blumarine frock is forever.
Temperley London/Donna Karan
When a gel is really lonely and hasn’t got a bean it’s no use asking why she does a thing. – Quartet
What will you wear through the Great Depression of 2009? Ruffles are dead, as are the high waist tops that make you look pregnant. Who can think about having babies or wanting to look like you’ve having a baby during a crisis like this? Pin your hair back. No more of this center-part Olsen twin business. Think of Rosie the Riveter. There’s just no time for blowouts or rollers.
You’re like some gal in a Jean Rhys novella: a retired chorus girl, over-the-hill at 30, composing humiliating letters to old flames asking them to cover next month’s rent at the dusty bedbug-infested motel on the wrong side of the tracks, eating stale bread and rotting grapes for dinner, watching the young ladies in their pretty new frocks with scorn as you walk through Montmartre, mistaken for a prostitue…considering it. Every single one of her books is about money, how fast you can lose it and how hard it was for a lady of that era to acquire it. The heroines can’t go several minutes without calculating what the next move is going to cost.
Sophie Theallet/ Diane von Furstenberg
Saved, rescued, fished-up, half-drowned, out of the deep, dark river, dry clothes, hair shampooed and set. Nobody would know I had ever been in it Good Morning, Midnight
The last Ready-to-wear (prêt-à-porter) 2009 spring collections have gone down the Milan runways (Paris is next week.) These shows and London and New York fashion weeks seemed largely inspired by two eras: the 1930s and the early 90s — times of financial hardship and coupon-clipping. The colors — and Pantone’s just announced spring 09 trends support this — rainy and depressed hues — with frugal shocks of a muted jewel-tones. It’s the look of one who’s hiding indoors away from financial and environmental catastrophe. At least one designer — Tory Burch — says she was influenced by the “staycation” trend and how she and all her friends stay in more instead of going out every night (not sure who wears fedoras inside her own home, but ok. )
You’ll wear dress or jumpsuits: an outfit in one garment. If only dresses and jumpsuits came with shoes attached, that would save you even more expenses. Wraps dresses especially. The kind that look like a single sheet of chiffon or jersey pinned at random around the body. If you have any skill at origami, you can easily recreate the look at home. The draping fabric means you don’t have to worry about wrinkles. Lets face it, this is no time to steam press. And that Prius won’t fix itself. You’ll be wearing this dress five, maybe six days a week. Standing up, sitting down, getting on and off the metro, there’s no way these dresses won’t be getting torn and dirty, eventually.
Alessandro dell Acqua/Monique Lhuillier
“Look here, Norah,” said Julia, “it isn’t that I want to bother you, but I came over without much money. I’ve only got a little over a pound left. I won’t be able to stay much longer.”
Norah opened her eyes widely, and said in a cold voice, “I’ve got eight pounds, and that’s got to last for a month, and the doctor comes nearly every day. Count up for yourself.”
“I know,” said Julia eagerly, “I know. I don’t want you to lend me any money. I know perfectly well you can’t, I simply thought you might let me stay at the flat for a few days, till I get an answer from the man I’ve written to.”
- After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie
But maybe that’s what the outfit needs — some wear. These clothes look like they should have tears and holes as if it’s the one outfit someone saved up for and wears everyday.
Another major trend from the Ready-to-wear collections, Spring 2009: loose drawstring pants — pajama pants. Something to wear while sitting at home on your laptop refreshing Monster.com and eating peanut butter sandwiches, skiping pilates classes.
When I thought about my clothes I was too sad to cry. About clothes, it’s awful. Everyone makes you want pretty clothes like hell. People laugh at girls who are badly dressed…And the shop-windows sneering and smiling in your face. And then you look at your hideous underclothes and you think, “All right, I’ll do anything for good clothes. Anything–anything for clothes.”
- Voyage in the Dark
Rather than embroidery and eyelets, Catherine Maldrino added beautiful spiderweb detail — it’s impossible to keep pristine, but the inevitable snags and tears will give the look further character. Meanwhile, Marni’s bobbles and prints are more relevant than ever. You are dressing in the dark now. Pulling every good piece from your wardrobe to make an outfit, whether it matches or not.
Jil Sander/Derek Lam
Sew pockets on your Little Black Dress to hold a hammer, a screwdriver, and whatever else you’ll need. You’re doing hard labor work now, forget the accessories.
Narciso Rodriguez/ Prada
Another hot trend for next season: the bra top. Signaling if you must stay at home, then you ought to at the very least be having torrid affairs.
“It’s not a time to be ostentatious with clothes,” Bottega Veneta’s Tomas Maier told Style.com. His clothes remind me of Bridget Fonda’s Annie Hall-and-grunge mash-up wardrobe in the horrible, but fascinating fashion-wise: Single White Female.
Marc Jacobs’ American-in-Paris looks had some flannel accents, a nod to the 90s grunge look that first made him famous. Several Aquaschutum items had a butterfly-like effect, in bright royal blue and black.
In London, Christopher Bailey for Burberry Prorsum was inspired by the book Garden People, but these outfits could just as easily transition from tending-the-garden-casual to struggling-in-a-rat-infested-apartment chic:
I love everything by Zero Maria Cornejo: androgynous, with strange stethoscope accesories. Black and white, sometimes accented with bright yellow.
She put the light on and looked at the red marks on her arm, where her teeth had nearly met, “And I haven’t got a dress with long sleeves either.” – Quartet
Alberta Ferretti’s made dreamy tiered skirts and watery fluid dresses in moonlight shimmery colors. Loose in the top and structured at the waist and hip.
Blumarine used a deep grey, almost purple but not the dreaded grandmotherly “periwinkle.’ These something somber about all of these dresses.
All images from Style.com
Previously:
Women’s Office Fashions: From Holloway’s Wiggle Dress to Hillary’s Pantsuit
Rip Mix Stitch: Free Fashion Culture
Mapping Memories
South African artists Stephen Hobbs and Marcus Neustetter interviewed a number of Senegalese immigrants for their 2006 project UrbaNET: Hillbrow/Dakar/Hillbrow. Hillbrow, a poor neighborhood in Johannesburg is home to a number of Dakar expats. The artists asked the Senegalese immigrants to draw maps for them to use during their two-week residency in Dakar. From Rhizome:
Over the course of the residency, the artists documented their journey in photographs and video and even visited friends and relatives of the mapmakers. For the 2007 exhibition of their project at University of Johannesburg, Neustetter and Hobbs conducted a twenty-person walk from the campus, in Auckland Park, to a Congolese nightclub in Hillbrow, where the project was discussed by art-goers, neighborhood residents and the mapmakers. Neustetter and Hobbs’ project thus does not profess to establish any authoritative study of the respective cities it maps, but rather overlays remembrance, map-making, navigation and the documentary image to tell the specific tales of a group of immigrants and a broader story about home, migration and place.
If you Google around, you’ll see memory maps are often assigned in grade schools. I wish my teachers were that creative. There is a Memory Map Flickr pool and last year, Kottke made a list of a projects. Al
Fraken can draw the United States from memory, which makes one wish there 
were a quiz show/pictionary component to political debates.
Veering in a different direction, City of Memory compiles stories and anecdotes marked by contributors on a map of New York City. Next Great Thing suggests with a “mobile component, people could lifecast their past, in a way, letting place serve as a trigger for recollection.”
A great book about recollecting memory is Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. It’s a story about a man awarded millions in compensation after an accident. He constructs buildings and hires actors to act out the parts of a memory he remembers only slight details about, but keeps coming back to mind.
Nothing is more frustrating then realizing a memory isn’t coming back. And there’s not much you can do it about it. The more you revisit a memory the more you damage it. It gets tainted by present events and reanalysis.
Art by Kunie Sugiura.
Women’s Office Fashions: From Holloway’s Wiggle Dress to Hillary’s Pantsuit
To all the men out there who think a female’s obsession with fashion is merely superficial: perhaps you aren’t properly applying your “spatial knowledge.” What do you think happens when a straight pant leg is pulled up over a curved hip? Or a standard dress shirt is buttoned over breasts? That these proportions widely vary from woman to woman creates even more difficulty.
Right now I’m shopping for business meeting appropriate clothing and it’s a bother. Plus, I’m a head taller than the average woman so inseam measurements are just another way could-look-good outfits end up back on the floor. The alternative to looking like Joan Holloway is looking like a linebacker. Unfortunately, I’ll likely need to go with the latter, until I’ve saved enough for a good tailor. (”Getting things tailored,” as women’s magazines are always so quick to suggest, comes at a cost of at least $50 per item. In the end it may be cheaper to fly to Southeast Asia and back for a few bespoke suits.)
I love Mad Men as much as the next blogger, but one aspect of it I haven’t seen discussed is the relationship between Peggy and the rest of the women at Sterling-Cooper. Prior to watching the show, I thought of the women’s struggle in the workforce as a problem perpetuated by male bosses. But Mad Men demonstrates just as much tension comes from the other women, who, either jealous or comfortable with the status quo, don’t want to see Peggy get ahead. Secretaries wield an enormous amount of power in office politics.
I’m probably reading too much into this, but we could think of Peggy’s choice of clothing as a reaction to this dynamic. Dressing in baggy clothes and muted colors, she is not just less attractive to the men at the office, but less competition to the women.
But does Joan Holloway really dress cheap? Or is she just dressing for her figure? Apart from the obvious use of certain undergarments as enhancement, Joan’s outfits are modest. See any of her dresses on a rack and they’d seem appropriate for Sunday’s sermon.
And they were. Women back then wore outfits cut specifically for rounder figures. That’s partly why the argument over Marilyn Monroe’s size is specious. Vanity sizing is real, and even at her heaviest there’s no way she’d be a size 14 by today’s standards. But with that hourglass figure there’s also no way she’d fit in a contemporary size 4. Marilyn Monroe could probably borrow Scarlett Johansson’ bespoke 6/00 hybrid clothes.
Young women are sometimes advised by female mentors to wear sports bras to interviews because studies show leaner women tend to get hired more often in positions in power. So it is unlikely we’ll ever see a return to the Joan Holloway “wiggle dress” in corporate offices. Yet, those dresses cover just as much skin as contemporary A-line skirt and sweater-set coordinates. People continue to conflate a full figure with a sexually available figure. What many office women are doing is exactly what a 13 year old who wears baggy sweatshirts to school does: they are hiding their bodies to disguise their sexuality, and ward off comments. No matter how many manuals and SOPs are drafted, sexual harassment is sadly very common.
The view that Joan looks “slutty” plays into the backward fantasy that a voluptuous figure is built to be played with, and something to be ashamed of if one wants to be taken seriously in the workforce. Now we wouldn’t ask a Kate Moss lookalike to veil her face. And certainly there are those who prefer a straighter figure (whether they are attracted to what a lithe female form signals is a whole other story.) But to look at it as a whole, if the ideal image of a office worker is a man in a man’s suit, than a female employee will never look ideal.
The main issue here is the fit. The comfort level. Clothing that fits a curvy figure also happens to enhance it. Clothing that does not properly fit will hide a woman’s figure. Half a century later, trends in clothing for professional women have borrowed straight lines from menswear, although women’s bodies haven’t evolved that way. Unless a woman has unusually straight proportions, a suit, whether Prada or H+M, won’t ever look quite right. I don’t hate my body in jeans. I don’t hate it in a bikini. But I hate my body in a pantsuit. It’s uncomfortable. I feel like I’m swimming in fabric.
The turning point was in the 80s with Working Girl defining the look. The fashions were Picasso-like in their abstractions of the female form. The shoulders were exaggerated and coats were cut long like dresses. It was confusion masquerading as confidence.
But contemporary women’s office dress didn’t change much once the shoulder pads were removed. If anything changed at all it was the introduction of rainbow colors, like the pantone chart that is Hillary Clinton’s pantsuit collection.
For her presidential campaign, Clinton needed to signal her authority “while conforming to an electably conservative presentation of gender,” as Kerry Howley explained in Reason last year. “Clinton’s struggle to find an aesthetic language and a politically amenable identity can come across as inauthentic—fashion flip-flopping. Witness the easter egg-colored pantsuit, a crude attempt to splice male fashion with non-threatening female hues.”
What is needed is more innovation from designers. My favorite blazers are silk and linen fabrics with stretch. But unfortunately most women’s suits are 
made with stiff and heavy material that is very unforgiving. Cape-like (really don’t cringe) blazers like that in the the 1968 Yves Saint Laurent Safari-inspired collection, are remarkably flattering and something I very much wish would take off. And how about this look Scarlett’s rocking with the bunchy blouse and open jacket? Alternatives are out there, but we need an Yves Saint Laurent fashion genius to introduce them to the mainstream.
And fashion trends have a longer life cycle than ever before. Yeah, gauchos and furry boots came and went, but for the most part your wardrobe doesn’t look much different than it did ten years ago. In comparison, it took only five years to go from Mad Men’s “New Look” style to the Summer of Love. Fashion designers are clearly inspired by the show, and many fall collections were attempts to modernize these looks. Michael Kors is so taken with it, he is giving away the first season DVD collection with any purchase. Even if more relaxed, feminine looks are introduced as office attire, it will take a while (and twice that if you live in Boston or DC) to enter the mainstream. But I’m patient and optimistic.
Previously:
Rip Mix Stitch: Free Fashion Culture
Related links:
- Juergen Teller quote relevant to all of this
- Hot girls make great clothes, Sociological Images
- Vintage Blues, a great website about fashion history
- What We Wore, Fortune, 1999, a history of menswear
- What Would Joan Do?
- The Slut Machine of 1962, Vidiot Tumble
- Princess Sparkle Pony
- Fashion’s Yves, NYT with picture of 1962 3-piece suit.
- YSL Le Smoking Tuxedo Suit.
- The Retro Women of Mad Men are the Most Interesting on TV, Jezebel
- Behind the Madness | Costume Designer Janie Bryant, NYT The Moment
- Slacking Hillary, Lenore Skenazy
Suburban Ruins and The Ethics of House Flipping
People turn to the past because they are looking for something that they don’t find in the present — comfort and well-being… Only the wealthy or the very poor can live in the past; only the former do so by choice.
- Witold Rybczynski, Home
Although her home has been on the market for several years now, my aunt (by marriage) isn’t stalling because buyers are asking too low. She’s hesitating due to emotional attachment to the property — it’s the house her father designed and built, and the home she grew up in. I lived there briefly myself when I was going to college nearby. Recently, she was to close on a deal with a young married couple, but then she looked up the wife on the internet and discovered the woman is well known as an area “house flipper.”
This neighborhood eschews miles and miles of Washington, DC suburban sprawl with its vestiges of pedestrian life: it is a 10 minute walk to the West Falls Church metro, and 5 minutes to a main street with a coffee shop, dry cleaner, TJ Maxx, a good balance of chains and small businesses. A bike trail is nearby.
Because of its conveniences and location, the land is pricey. Buyers willing to pay for West Falls Church real estate generally want several bedrooms and five baths. Over the years, my aunt has complained about the trasformation of modest homes — 70s-style “post-and-beam extravaganzas” as this article in Residential Architect puts it — into regurgitated palatial fantasies. Soon hers will be the only non McMansion on the block.
And gross remodeling may be its inevitable second life. For now, she’s still waiting for someone who will respect the design of the place. This isn’t some kind of a penance — the house is really beautiful. There are few places I’ve felt quite as cozy in, as I have reading a book on the back porch looking out at the garden. The use of the space, the way the windows are shaped, so much of my idea of a perfect house comes from living there that year in 2003.
A few years ago, I was guiltily obsessed with A&E and TLC house flipping programs and marveled at how often the flipper blatantly conned people out of their property. The worst of them was Armando Montelongo, a San Antonio flipper who is half as likeable as Roger Clemens, just a little less weird than that plastic surgeon on Dr 90210, an internet scam artist, and known for habitually neglecting to pay his contractors.
“Mondo” does a lot of objectionable things on the show, from piggish to illegal. He once had his wife and sister-in-law dress in beekeeper costumes to exterminate a colony of bees, so he could save $300 on a professional beekeeper. He watched them from a lawnchair, beer in hand. Then there’s something about him hiring children of illegal aliens for a demolition project. Now he’s dealing with several lawsuits — facing jailtime — not paying one contractor, owing backtaxes, and the 20 or so properties of his that went into foreclosure. The guy is a crook and A&E should have known better.
But I most despised him when he’d make false promises to whomever he’s buying the house from: that he’d never strip the Victorian wallpaper. That he likes the bar in the kitchen their father made. That he’ll keep the structure the same way, but just clean it up a little bit. A widow or widower passes, and the descendants can’t afford to keep up the house. All they want is to know someone is enjoying the home as grandpa made it. Money isn’t a main issue at a time like that. So he pretend to agrees, taking the bargain, and soon after breaks his word — neglecting the family’s wishes on TV! It’s not just knucklehead-ed behavior, it’s usually aesthetically disappointing: ironing out everything that made the home unique in order to appeal to the most buyers. A hardwood floor and granite countertop sacrificial rape of a property.
Now, my politics are more freemarket than most: I don’t believe in rent control for the reason of economic scarcity, but sale of a home has so much more at stake than most financial transactions. A price that is agreed to with the understanding the buyer will preserve without excessively altering the property, can be a binding agreement. But does this ever happen? I’m right now trying to find examples of this in real estate cases. I guess this is more of a post I’m writing as I’m thinking about it, rather than a clear statement of any kind. And any books readers might recommend on the subject are much appreciated.
Like with the Neutra Kaufmann House house that just sold in Christie’s auction. Is it only a tacit understanding that the buyer isn’t going to tear down a wing to build a gnome garden?
Here’s an example of preservation gone to an unpleasant extreme:
Richard Lucas has been trying to win permission to cut through his elderly, infirm parents’ front porch so they can get from their living quarters onto the street without climbing stairs. And for more than a year, the D.C. historic preservation authorities have found reasons to say no to a ramp.
After all, as the city’s architectural historian put it, “repeating porches of similar height and depth create a notable pattern and rhythm” along the Lucas family’s Mount Pleasant street, and the District wouldn’t want to let that rhythm be broken just to accommodate a couple of old folks who have lived in their house for 47 years.
Houses in communities respond to the changes in houses all around them, which is why I fear my aunt’s beautiful house will eventually go all Stepford. Even if they did find buyers to fall in love with it, there is the risk that given time they might give in to the status-conscious vibe of the neighborhood and build additions.
One of the best articles, one of the most linked-to essays this year, The Next Slum? by Christopher B Leinberger for The Atlantic, so immediately struck at the hearts of most of us, the unfortunate truth that the wealthy really are taking over our cities. Sure crime is down, but you try to live in Brooklyn on an artist’s salary.
One vacant home, means the depreciation of an entire neighborhood. And down like dominos the foreclosure crisis, which may likely “stay with us well into the next decade,” as Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com says in Bloomberg, puts pressure on all the neighboring homes until they too eventually tip.
It’s easier to erect a new house than it is to change an entire landscape. Recently, I learned there’s a “ghost cloverleaf” in Canton, MA, just several miles from me. Eventually I’ll check it out and post about it, until then, here’s this write up on Xconomy:
[It] was constructed between 1962 and 1968, and is the northern half of what was originally intended to be a fully working interchange between I-95, aka the Southwest Expressway, and I-93, aka Route 128, aka the Yankee Division Highway.
From here, the state’s highway blueprints called for the Southwest Expressway to continue about 10 miles north into Boston. It would have barreled through farmland and residential neighborhoods in Milton and joined up with the American Legion Highway, which would have been converted into an expressway running along the eastern edge of Franklin Park. From there, the expressway would have turned Blue Hill Avenue into a six-lane gash through Roxbury and Dorchester, eventually connecting with I-695 near the present-day intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Southampton Street (which happens to be about four blocks from where I live in the South End).
Never heard of I-695? That’s because it was never built, either. Also called the Inner Belt, it was part of a scheme laid out in 1948 to help interstate drivers and truckers avoid the congestion in downtown Boston by circling through outer Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, and Somerville. Perhaps it was a good idea at one time. But had this 7-mile loop been constructed, the Boston cityscape would be immeasurably different today.
“We do not pine for period cuisine,” Rybczynski wrote, paraphrasing Adolf Loos’ point that nostalgia is absent in most other aspects of our everyday lives. And most houses, just out of practicality due to changes in energy usage, really should be remodeled. But there are reasons we might value those floors that no matter how many times you sweep, will never seem clean. Reviewing Flipping Out, the only remaining house flipping TV show on the air today, Heather Havrilesky cleverly compares two of her neighborhood cafes. One where “tables are the wrong height for the chairs, the chairs are uncomfortable, the walls are covered in bad art, the bad stereo system blares the worst of Journey and Lionel Richie, the breakfast sandwich features over-buttered bread and that fake-smoke-flavor ham, the room is too hot or freezing cold, the teenage cashiers are friendly but inattentive, and a herd of middle-of-the-room flies circles endlessly in the sparsely populated dining area,” another a, “more corporate place nearby where everything is right. The tables and chairs are made of smooth wood and are perfectly placed, the menu is tastefully designed, the lighting makes everyone look like models at a photo shoot, classical music soothes patrons from a safe distance, cool breezes blow in the open French doors, and the small cup of gazpacho they serve has little slices of melon and a dab of pesto in it. Delightful! But it’s always crowded with people who have expensive haircuts and alarmingly nice shoes.”
As repellent and deeply wrong as the local cafe is, the overpriced, meticulously designed corporate eatery seems certain to transform you, slowly but surely, into the kind of person who pays too much for haircuts and shoes, the kind of person who experiences gazpacho that doesn’t have a little dab of pesto in it the way the rest of us experience a herd of middle-of-the-room flies. And therein lies the paradox of American upward mobility: The higher you climb, the thinner the air gets, until you can barely breathe.
Nostalgic or not, my aunt’s house as a standing protest against the McMansion-ization of suburban DC, and a call for the better days. If anyone is looking for such a property, please get in touch.
Images by William Eggleston.
Previously:
Collection or Clutter: Do You Toss or Save Grampa’s Old Paintings?
Rules for an American Fantasy Road Trip
A Hundred Chances: White Lies Post Facebook
The World’s Strangest Housing Communities
Related links:
- Home by Witold Rybczynski
- Do Hard-to-get Mortgages mean Better Cities? Treehugger
- The Broken Angel on Wikipedia
- Flip This Lawsuit
- Flipping Houses Ethics: Any Place for a Weasel?
- They Needed to Talk Some More, Smithsonian Magazine explaining William Eggleston’s most famous image
- The Stepford Wives of Worcester Park, Adrian Short
The Best Fireworks Display is Seen From a Plane Flying into LAX Sometime Between 9 – 10pm
Independence day is my favorite holiday. Partly because it’s not in the winter, so there’s no seasonal affective disorder. Another reason is you don’t need to celebrate it with your family. It is the first guaranteed easy day of summer. Plus it means my birthday is just a few weeks away.
Last year to the day tomorrow, I was flying into Los Angeles. The cheapest flight I could get was on the 4th in the evening. I thought I would be missing the parties, but what I got was so much more.
From my window I looked at the beautiful infinite motherboard of lights that is the city as seen from the air. And just above it, little ripples of hundreds more colored lights. The firework explosions were all so tiny, and yet I could see them go off above every city subdivision. And all of it was happening at once.
There was the Glendale fireworks and the Long Beach celebration over there. You could see another firework show above Malibu and Culver City, and Westwood, and everywhere else. A firework show for every neighborhood, and from my vantage point, I could see them all at once. It was one of the most beautiful and amazing things I’ve seen in my life; made even more special by that fact so few people will have the chance to experience it.
If this were a short story or a better crafted essay I might have played up my disappointement in missing all the Independence Day barbeques, or emphasize that the day has some sentimental significance to me besides what I’ve already written. But it is just a blog post so I’ll state the point here more directly, and even use a tired cliche to finish this post: the best things come when you least expect them.
Enjoy your holiday!
Images by Yoon Lee.
A Trip to the Zoo
The eyes of an animal when they consider a man are attentive and wary. The same animal may well look at other species the same way. He does not reserve a special look for man. But by no other species except man will the animal’s look be recognized as familiar. Other animals are held by the look. Man becomes aware of himself returning the look….
The relation may become clearer by comparing the look of an animal with the look of another man. Between two men the two abysses are, in principle, bridged by language. Even if the encounter is hostile and no words are used (even if the two speak different languages), the existence of language allows that at least one of them, if not mutually, is confirmed by the other. Language allows men to reckon with each other as with themselves. (In the confirmation made possible by language, human ignorance and fear may also be confirmed. Whereas in animals fear is a response to signal, in men it is endemic.) … No animal confirms man, either positively or negatively…The first metaphor was animal, it was because the essential relationship between man and animal was metaphoric. Within that relation what the two terms — man and animal — shared in common revealed what differentiated them. And vice versa.
-John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” About Looking.
So maybe dolphins didn’t really commit mass suicide, and maybe elephants can’t really paint self-portraits, and maybe a parrot never served as key witness in a murder trial, and maybe monkeys don’t have real conversations– animals are a lot smarter than you think. 
To the left is my dog’s favorite toy, to the right is a coffee cup that scares the bejeebus out of her (it’s also a picture of her doppleganger.) Another example of how uncanny valley creeps out animals too.
The other day, I was in a shopping mall and for whatever reason stopped by the pet store. It was a typical mall pet store, the size of a closet, at the far corner where all the cheap and badly maintained stores are located. Seeing a dozen or so puppies in their cages gave me a terrible sense of guilt. Like I should take them all — pay for them — and save them from further torture. But that would only encourage the store to breed more puppies in even worse conditions.
The Sundance Channel’s Big Ideas for a Small Planet “animals” special is the best episode in an already great series. They highlighted an animal shelter in Dallas doing its best to provide safe, friendly, spacious (green) conditions for its inhabitants. The structural changes indirectly raised a practical question: who is going to go to the pound if you are only going to experience that guilty feeling that you need to save them all?
Another segment was on the maintenance of the Bronx zoo, where they emphasize that conservation is their major goal. It got me thinking about how much has changed since John Berger wrote “Why Look at Animals?” in 1977. Berger’s essay talks about the way zoos at once seek the distinction given to museums, although they are taking subjects out of the natural environment in order to display. So what you have is an animal with a “frame around it.”
Visitors visit the zoo to look at animals. They proceed from cage to cage, not unlike the visitors in an art gallery who stop in front of one painting, and then more on to the next or the one after next… When you look at these animals, even if the animal is up against the bars, less than a foot from you, looking outwards in the public direction, you are looking at something that has been rendered absolutely marginal; and the concentration you can muster will never be enough to render it…
The space in which they inhabit is artificial. Hence their tendency to bundle towards the edge of it. (Beyond the edges there may be real space.) In some cages the light is equally artificial. In all cases the environment is illusory.
Now zoo architects are working toward building less artificial environments(and cages are no longer acceptable in metropolitan zoos.) Still, the just open Norman Foster elephant house for the Copenhagen Zoo, and news surrounding it, shows the debate whether a zoo should exist at all never went away.
A design critic at The Guardian says, in an otherwise an enthusiastic post about the zoo addition, “How can any architect even begin to match the subtlety of a spider’s web or recreate the landscapes and forests elephants call home? Zoo architecture is, at best, an art, or beast, of uneasy and uncertain compromise.”
Images by Sarah Moon. Brightcove video and more about the artist.
The World’s Strangest Housing Communities
“People at Eden-Olympia have no time for getting drunk together, for infidelities or rows with the girlfriends, no time for adulterous affairs or coveting their neighbor’s wives, no time ever for friends,” Wilder Penrose says in J. G. Ballard’s Super Cannes. The “great defect is that there is no need for personal morality. Thousands of people live and work here without making a single decision about right and wrong. The moral order is engineered into their lives along with the speed limits and the security systems.”
Many of Ballard’s later novels investigate the coven-like nature of suburbia — gated communities, high rises. The architecture and technologies designed to save us time and make our lives easier, only dull our senses. Or, as Gang of Four put it, “The problem with leisure, is what to do for pleasure.”
Penrose, the psychiatrist in Ballard’s fictional French business park, believes there’s a science to it: “Part of the mind atrophies. A moral calculus that took thousands of years to develop starts to wither from neglect. Once you dispense with morality the important decisions become a matter of aesthetics. You’ve entered an adolescent world where you define yourself by the kind of trainers you wear.”
Ballard isn’t the only writer to explore these themes. Jingoism at the backyard level is the target in TC Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain. Neal Stephanson wrote about “burbclaves,” lots of franchised nations in suburbia. Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower takes place in a walled Los Angeles suburb. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino sees housing communities optimistically as chocolate boxes. Then again, every example comes from the main character’s imagination. Here are several examples stranger than fiction:
The Dystopia: Alphaville, Sao Paulo, Brazil
A housing community has to be equal parts elitist and oblivious to take its name from a dystopic film. I first read about this on Ballardian, appropriately as Ballard has long championed Godard’s film. This Alphaville is a walled city in the world’s fourth-largest metropolis. Hundreds of residents helicopter in and out over electric fences. Over a thousand security guards are employed. Residents watch “TV Alphaville,” a twenty -four hour monitor of people entering and exiting the premises. The reason for Alphaville’s militarized facility is clear: income disparity. From a 2002 Washington Post article: “the richest 10 percent of the population controlling more than 50 percent of the wealth, while the poorest 10 percent control less than 1 percent.” The article also explains Brazil’s $2 billion-a-year security industry. “Brazilians are armoring and bulletproofing an estimated 4,000 cars a year, twice as many as in Colombia, which is in the midst of a 38-year-old civil war.”
The Rumor: Wedderburn, “Midgetville,” Vienna, Virginia
Spend time in Northern Virginia and you’ll eventually hear of a community of little people in little houses…but no one ever knows how to get there. Given Fairfax County is a clown car of suburban landscaping — between two main drags three blocks apart, the tract housing seems to go on for miles — it’s entirely believable.
Wedderburn was built in the 1930s, in a wood along the W&OD Railroad. These cottages –some the size of small sheds — could be seen from the train, leading many to wonder if they were home to retired circus performers. That neighboring town Bailey’s Crossroads is connected to the Ringling Brothers collaborator made it believable.
Over the years, the rumors tended toward the sensationalistic. People said the “midgets” would attack your car if you drove near it. In 2004, after deciding to sell to a land developer, Wedderburn’s true identity was revealed. George Wedderburn’s relatives, who lived in some of the cottages and rented the others, said they were sick of teenage “midget hunters” vandalizing their property. See Nathan Rustlethwaite’s Flickr set for more. Sadly, it was torn down in March of 2008.
Update: From the comments on Hit and Run, I learned there’s a similar rumor about a neighborhood in New Jersey. Wikipedia says those small houses have no occupants, but does not give any history of its construction. There’s another community of “midget houses”in Oakdale, Long Island, New York. And this website claims there are a number of real gated midget communities in Kentucky, California, Ohio, and elsewhere. Maybe.
The Utopia: Auroville, Tamil Nadu, India
“Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole,” Mirra Alfassa, “The Mother” said, announcing the city’s incorporation in 1968. Most forms of private property are forbidden. Residents use electronic cards, rather than paper or coin currency, although visitors can pay in cash. The enormous golden golf ball is Matrimandir (”Temple of the Mother,”) the “soul of the city.” It is located in a large open area called “Peace.” If this is sounding like Jonestown or the Heaven’s Gate community, it might surprise you to learn religion too is banned. “The Mother” said, “The failure of religions is… because they were divided. They wanted people to be religious to the exclusion of other religions, and every branch of knowledge has been a failure because it has been exclusive. What the new consciousness wants (it is on this that it insists) is: no more divisions. To be able to understand the spiritual extreme, the material extreme, and to find the meeting point, the point where that becomes a real force.” Among the community’s other quirk’s — public drinking fountains have “dynamised” water, water that has “listened” to Bach and Mozart.
BBC recently investigated claims that some Aurovillians sexually abuse the children who live in poverty outside the city. The reporter called it a “brazen” practice, made worse by Auroville’s absent rule of law.
The Ruins: San Zhi, “Desolation Row,” Taipai, Taiwan
This pod city might have been a holiday destination for those who dream of living in a futuristic fairytale. But from what little is written about San Zhi in English, it appears construction was abandoned as the project was just weeks from completion.
There seems to be nothing wrong with the structure architecturally. Apart from the fabulous design, it seems a functional concept. Some speculate it was designed to build more pods vertically, if demand increased. Apparently, construction was halted as a number of fatal accidents plagued construction. Ghost stories abound, (but then again, there are bloggers who still believe in Midgetville.) The buildings have since been left to rot.
The web has its fill of ghost towns and urban ruins photography, but the obvious science fiction influence and its perplexing lack of use (I’ve heard more than several people say they’d love to spend the night there) make this the strangest example of an abandoned space yet. Google Sightseeing has a feature, and Craig Ferguson’s photographs are extraordinary. (More photos here.)
The Counterfeit: Orange County, China
China doesn’t just manufacture fake Louis Vuitton bags. They also copy United States gated communities. This Orange County is miles from the Beijing airport, and 45 minutes from the Forbidden City.
California McMansions developers were flown in to develop a replica of The OC, even taking its name. Ten miles from the Beijing Olympics facilities, when the New York Times reported on it in 2003, the six-lane highways were brand new and most of the land surround the OC had yet to be developed. It seems likely that space is under construction right now.
It would be unfair to criticize them just for ignoring their own culture. After all American architecture is just a pastiche of other traditions, and plenty of replicas like the windmills in Japan, are charming enough. Good magazine notes an “entire cottage industry has sprung up in academia to tar the development with the latest post-modern jargon…Other critics, with far bigger megaphones, see the development as emblematic of China’s burgeoning car culture and its wholehearted embrace of environmentally destructive growth.”
Rather Orange County, China is a mistake largely because it was built after suburbia’s failure was widely understood. Rather than embracing Jan Gehl and Jane Jacobs’ principles of urban planning, they implemented poor land use. If there’s anywhere China should be replicating, it’s Melbourne.
China, by the way, is home to another community living in the past: Nanjie Village, a re-collectivized land, nostalgic for the days of Mao Zedong.
Elsewhere
I considered including the proposal for Paulville to this list. It is an upcoming gated community for Ron Paul supporters. But I really doubt it will come to fruition. Previously, there was the Free State project, and New Hampshire still isn’t a major libertarian mecca. The same people who value individual choice, are unlikely to move specifically to join a community. It’s just not that high a priority to one’s personal interests
Other examples I thought of, like Celebration, Florida, Disney’s suburb, which opened its gate in 1997, are not so strange once one looks at the details. The people and the secrets may be unique, but the development itself differs not much from another planned community halfway across the globe.
Planned communities always hint at mob rule in its extremes — lynchings or what happened to Kitty Genovese. You may not agree with the Super Cannes character who believes that “places like Eden-Olympia are fertile grounds for an messiah with a grudge. The Adolph Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won’t walk out of the desert. They’ll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks.” But it’s something to think about before signing up for a colony on Mars.
Related links:
- Fortress America, Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder
- “Enemies Within, Gated Communities Unhinged” by Sarah Blandy
- ‘Gated Communities’ For the War-Ravaged, WP
- Most Expensive Gated Communities, Forbes
- Walls of Incompetence, Erasmus
A Hundred Chances: White Lies Post-Facebook
If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards, in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hamsphire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not “studying a profession,” for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance, 1814
Growing up I wanted to be a Hitchcock blonde. Not only because they were witty and beautiful and were dressed by Edith Head, but because they would happen upon a vault of cash, stuff it in a bag, drive off in a Cadillac convertible to
start an entirely new life — or try to.
I don’t advocate breaking the law, yet the possibility of reinventing one’s self seems a dying art. Human resources checks all your references and degree credentials. And the Internet means all your lies will be exposed provided someone cares enough to learn the truth about you. Only professionals — con men — can really get away with it.
Last month, NBC aired a Dateline episode on con artist 2.0, Gemase Simmons. The extent of his reality tv charade is almost unbelievable. Pretending to be a former model (his height and appearance alone contradict his claimed experience in the industry,) he recruited a dozen people to appear on the so-called television model search using Craigslist and Myspace. Services were provided free in exchange for advertising when the show was to air. A full crew was hired (they left after a few weeks, when they didn’t get paid,) so all of his bizarre antics are caught on tape. He had them stay at a campground, and made them go through the kinds of optical course challenges reality tv is known for. People grew suspicious even before he made sexual advances on the participants — male and female — when the cameras weren’t rolling.
Simmons has spent his life reinventing himself. He wasn’t just a “model/actor” but a political consultant, a writer, an R+B producer –with ten outstanding arrest warrants, (a mugshot showed him with a Catholic priest’s collar.) This guy was born to lie, and dreamt big enough to get away with it (And he would have, if MSNBC hadn’t heard of him — the only reason they did is one of the cameramen he hired had a connection to the news program.) Simmons, by the way, denies every charge.
Compare that to story of Hope Ballantyne, recently profiled in Radiolab’s “Deception” episode. She’d move in a new place, write a bad check and move again. She conned dozens of Bay Area residents out of thousands of dollars. From a 2000 article in the San Francisco Examiner:
[A former roommate] led the search for Hope after finding spiral notebooks scrawled with names and phone numbers amid the woman’s left-behind bags of designer clothes and make-up.When Nuccio began contacting the people listed, she learned that complaints about Hope stretched back at least three years to Los Angeles – giving a frightening context to her own rental rip-off…
“What’s frustrating about the whole thing is that she continues to screw people,” said Mara Soucie, 30, who works in production management at cable music channel VH1 in Los Angeles. “She seems so normal, a bright girl. Always could think on her feet.”
I don’t think Ballantyne could get away with those things in today’s San Francisco. A few blog and Facebook posts could prevent her from ever striking again. But that there’s no further news on Ballantyne, following an arrest in 2004, doesn’t mean she’s changed her ways so much as that she may be using another name.
For the rest of us, lying just doesn’t pay off. Even with the best intentions — say your boss is a sexist pig and fired you for some arbitrary reason — you can’t explain it in a resume, and you can’t lie without the risk of getting caught (Your former boss, on the other hand, is entirely welcome to lie to a human resources manager about your work ethic and skill set.) It’s only going to get harder, as web presence becomes a necessity. The white lie is dead.
The hoax, of course, persists, but with many complications. “Myth-busting” is such a popular blog sport, that truths to the tales are thrown out with the falsities. Barack Obama isn’t a Muslim… but his father was. Similarly, Guillermo Vargas Habakkuk, who I even posted about earlier with some confusion, isn’t entirely a hoax. The trouble with that meme starts with his name: it’s written both Guillermo Vargas Habakkuk or Guillermo “Habacuc” Vargas, or some variation of either, so googling with quotation marks only gives you a sample of the results. There’s a petition to ban him from Bienal Centroamericana Honduras 2008, which doesn’t appear to exist. Or is it the Central American Biennale? Google suggests, “Central American Biennial.” Lesson one: don’t trust sources in translation.
There is a Central American Biennale and there is an artist named Guillermo ___ Vargas, but the dog didn’t die (the most likely sources say.) What’s missing in the cries of “hoax” is that he did starve a dog in an art show (or maybe he did?) He did it, apparently, to drum up exactly the kind of protest he’s receiving now: to show that people will care about an animal dying in a gallery, but not the billions dying in the streets. World Society for the Protection of Animals has some updates on it.
And I wonder how the Internet is impacting espionage. One of the best episodes in Errol Morris’ First Person — The Little Gray Man — is about Antonio Mendez, former spy. He talks about being an invisible man, the kind of guy you just never look at — if you’re used to the checkout lady noticing the person behind you in line before you, then you’d be a great spy. He’s written two books, and his life story is soon to be a movie. Twenty years from now, when even middle aged office employees are in social networks — will we still be able to create false identities for CIA operatives?
Related link:
- Doublethink on The Runner: A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastic Adventures of the Ivy League Imposter James Hogue.
Previously: Science Fiction is for the Renaissance Men
Rip Mix Stitch: Free Fashion Culture
What would happen if the Gossip Girl cast were to design an ARG? It might turn out like middlebrow-luxury handbag house Coach’s college outreach campaign. It starts with a fictional girl who lost her Coach bag, complete with a fake myspace page, fake facebook, and fake blog!
Visitors to the blog (encounterheidi.blogspot. com), which drew more than 15,000 hits after the posters went up, learned that the bag was a gift from an ex-boyfriend serving in Iraq.
One day, Cee blogged that another student had returned the bag. A day later, she wrote that on closer inspection, the bag was a fake and she had been scammed for the reward.
Outraged (”EFFING COUNTERFEIT!” she wrote), Cee blogged that she was researching the world of counterfeit goods. She discovered, she wrote, that they’re linked to criminal activity, child labor and terrorism. She even posted a video to YouTube about counterfeiting, “Break the Chain,” and organized an anti-counterfeiting event on campus that drew a crowd with free food and T-shirts.
But here’s the thing about Cee: She’s fake, too. A public relations class at Hunter invented her last spring. The course was funded by a $10,000 grant from Coach and was part of a college outreach campaign by the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition (IACC), a trade group that includes Coach and other brands like Apple, Levi Strauss & Co., Louis Vuitton and Rolex.
But it gets dirtier. This is the work of a teacher and class at Hunter College.
A well-known sculptor in the 90s painted fast food containers with the Louis Vuitton monogram. I can’t remember who it was but if I could, this right here would be an insightful paragraph comparing his art with Takashi Murakami’s Louis Vuitton store at the Brooklyn Museum, with some added remarks on how and why the times have changed.
Since then, Adbusters and street artists have expanded on the concept. Now Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles (via) has a solo show for Peter Gronquist with designer labels on everything from chainsaws to electric chairs:
A writer from Jezebel once sewed designer labels in lower-priced clothes and asked for offers from consignment shops.
The Final Tally:
- H&M dress (original price, $39.99) masquerading as Isaac Mizrahi: 2 for 3, with highest offers of $130 and $190.
- Club Monaco jacket (original price, $199) masquerading as Richard Tyler: 2 for 3, with offers of $90 and $110.
- Club Monaco skirt ($129) masquerading as Donna Karan: 2 for 3, with offers of $78 and $135.
- Club Monaco sweater ($99) masquerading as Calvin Klein: 1 for 3, with offer of $50.
Ours is the first generation that truly defines itself by brands, as Rob Walker’s new book “Buying In” explains. But reputation alone doesn’t explain it, nor does personal identification with the product marketing. When it comes to luxury goods, there has to be some added magic to the product. That’s why no matter how many counterfeits flood the market, Louis Vuitton can command a high price.
In “Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster,” Dana Thomas reports 40 percent of all Japanese own a Louis Vuitton-monogramed item. Her book is nostalgic for the days when high-end good meant quality, patiently crafted items that might last a lifetime. As LVMH changed hands, their standards declined. Meanwhile, expensive seemed attainable to those without qualms carrying credit card debt. Veronica Horwell writes in a review, “significant percentages of the global population have caught, or been taught, the mad idea that they can acquire the signifier of modernity, immunity, celebrity, identity – Thomas can’t or won’t define what the fantasy they’re after is – for the price of a Prada bag, or failing that, a Gucci wallet.”
Notice no one really pokes fun at Hermès, as they do Gucci, Prada, and LV. Although they charge twice more than Gucci and Louis Vuitton combined ($38,000,) there is no branding and no advertising to the masses. Unless you are in a select tax-bracket, a Birkin bag is understood to be impossibly out of reach. Writes Globe and mail’s Leah McLaren:
Earlier this year, I had my first-ever celebrity-bag sighting. I was eating lunch alone at an overpriced hotel when a cosmetically altered matron of indeterminate years pulled up a stool beside me, ordered a $22 glass of champagne and placed her black crocodile Birkin bag on the bar for all to see.
I couldn’t help staring and she didn’t seem to mind. No one spends $40,000 on a purse to hide it, after all. Sure, I’d clamped eyes on a few Birkins before (in the window of Hermès, on the arms of fashion editors at the shows in Milan and Paris), but this was my first sighting in the wild.
She’s reviewing Michael Tonello’s new book about getting rich off of buying and returning Birkin bags. How is that possible? you might wonder. Well, you can get some pocket change, as I have in the past, buying broken designer bags, taking them to tailors, and selling them. Ebay facilities so many new ways of commerce.
One Ebay, you can even buy a fake “vintage” bag. A few years ago, I came across the sort of deal one can only find via internet auction. Stuffed in a trunk “lot” full of some now-deceased grandmother’s treasures, was a vintage Gucci handbag, unmarked in the title by the seller, worth about $200. So I placed a bid for far less than that, planning to resell it and make a tiny profit. When the bag arrived and looked like it couldn’t be older than the age of the sweatshop workers in whichever third-world country it came from. I donated it to salvation army.
The irony is my fake is in far better condition than a real vintage would be. It has no scratches or damages; but feels dead in my hands. Why do I like vintage in the first place but for the totemism; the feeling that I am participating in the history of an object. The other irony is that Gucci’s quality has declined over the years. The material they use is easy to replicate, they have long since abandoned the sturdy canvas that made their items lovely. Yet, the prices are still the same.
For sale at the Brooklyn Museum.
Right now monogram-bag makers fight counterfeits for trademark infringement or dilution. But the Design Piracy Prohibition Act (pending in the Senate) offers stricter standards. Designers may register their clothes with the U.S. Copyright Office for about $100 each. The law would protect the patterns for three years.
“Fashion will become very boring if this legislation passes,” Omid Moradi of sometimes knockoff-er Faviana, tells Fortune, “All this will do is create a backlog of lawsuits – the only ones who will win are the lawyers.”
“[Pattern marking is] a craft, not an art. There is only so much you can do with a silhouette, a collar, a drape.” Ilse Metchek, executive director of the California Fashion Association, told the LA Times. “This act is a double-edge sword, because designers think they’re going to be able to protect themselves from knock-off artists, but they are going to have to make absolutely sure there is pure, unadulterated originality in everything they do…Wouldn’t anyone run afoul of things eventually?” says Ivan Arnold, co-owner of LA-based Tokitoki.
It is a particularly dumb move by one industry that is still doing well in this economy. Tech Dirt explains fashion thrives because of lack of IP protection.:
Fashion is a trend industry. You need a trend to make something popular and the only real way to get a trend is when designers are copying each other. Without that ability trends don’t show up, and the demand for the latest “trend” dries up. On top of that, having copycat designs on the lower end actually act as a “signal” that a high-end designer is on to something. It helps prop up the price of those name-brand designs, while making similar copycat designs more affordable to a lower end of the market that would never buy the high end designers. It’s both a way of establishing a larger market and doing price discrimination.
For another example of this read Daniel Pink’s cover story in Wired a few months back about the fan market for Manga.
Currently designers have the option of filing for patents, but there are ways of outwitting copycats without getting lawyers involved:
Meanwhile, some labels are trying to outmaneuver the pirates. Copycat designs often show up in stores within weeks of a fashion show, while the authentic clothes don’t arrive for months. Halston, which is owned by movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, is one of those pushing to make its catwalk fashions available right away, on the online retail site Net-a-Porter.com, in hopes that shoppers will choose immediate gratification over price savings.Weitzman and others are making some of their couture designs a little more haute so pirates can’t rip them off at all. For his spring collection, Weitzman created unusually shaped heels for a $299 shoe called the Bowden-Wedge. He is also experimenting with materials such as titanium and steel, which he says are too expensive for the knockoff artists. If they try something cheaper, like painted wood, the heels will snap. “I used to make whimsical and outrageous shoes for display only,” Weitzman says. “For the first time, they’re becoming part of sellable footwear.”
But why stop at fashion? Might Marianne Faithful come along and request I grow my bangs out? Maybe Nicole Kidman could protect plastic surgeons from copying her most-requested nose. For all the talk of our celebrity (and spawn)-obsessed culture, I am delighted to see Baby Jolie isn’t even first page Google result for “shiloh”. Nevertheless, her babymama (unsuccessfully) sued a perfumer for using a name that happened to be the same as her child’s.
Previously:
Related links:
- Counterfeit Chic
- The Piracy Paradox, The New Yorker
- “Bag Man,” The New Yorker
- Louis Vuitton Sues Darfur Fundraiser for Copyright Infringement, Techdirt
- “Put a Patent on that Pleat” BusinessWeek
- Louis Vuitton Malletier S.A. v. Haute Diggity Dog (Chewy Vuitton) Law.com
- Diddo Velema’s Gucci gas masks
- “Buying in” by Rob Walker
- “Deluxe” by Dana Thomas
- Bringing Home The Birkin: My Life in Pursuit of the World’s Most Coveted Handbag by Michael Tanello
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