Fashion

I hadn't planned on writing about this again today. (How many times have I started a post with that phrase? I forget, but a lot. Sadly, developments frequently make me change my plans about blogging.) Here's what made me change my plans It was a pair of Facebook posts on hip-hop and fashion mogul Russell Simmons' Facebook page. Here's post #1: And here's post #2: This, of course, is the news report regurgitating antivaccine talking points broadcast in Atlanta late last week by Ben Swann, an all-purpose conspiracy theorist and, apparently, now antivaccinationist, who is anchor for the…
A reader, who asks to remain anonymous writes me that her graduate school boyfriend (soon hopefully to be fiance) has decided he wants a farm. He's looking for jobs in rural areas, and wants them to buy land together. The boyfriend grew up in rural Albania and is apparently pretty comfortable in agriculture. My reader, who grew up in suburban Michigan, is not. This is all new to her - she thought she was marrying a plain old potential academic (botany). The thought, as she puts it, that he might look at real plants in the dirt, rather than under a microscope and that said dirt might come…
Scientists aren't known for their fashion sense, but they do have their own unique charm, as you can see in this episode of In The Lab, with Bill Cunningham.
A few months ago, I attended Cyborg Camp in my hometown of Portland, Oregon. Cyborg Camp is an "unconference," basically a room full of cyberpunks, mega-nerds, and aspirational coders that gather in an office building to talk about the "future of the relationship between humans and technology." This event deserves a separate entry, but for now I'd like to recall a particularly evocative thing: that the most heartbreaking thing I saw at Cyborg Camp was an adult man hopelessly tangled in a web of cables. It was his own off-the-shelf wearable computing system, a gordian thing connecting his…
We can babble philosophically about whether or not what we call "red" looks the same from another person's eyes, we can compare the adjectives we use to specify colors--is it maraschino red or cayenne?--but when we're talking to our computers, categorizing flowers, designing objects for mass production, branding a company, or establishing a flag's official colors we have to be able to be specific about which exact shade of red we want. These days we have standard color systems that define colors as specified mixes of red, green, and blue pixels on screen, specific mixtures of pigments in…
I don't usually like to post links from BoingBoing because I imagine everyone has already seen this already, but as it is about some of my favorite things (synthetic biology, biomaterials, and fashion) I couldn't resist! Designer Suzanne Lee makes clothes using cellulose-based fabrics made entirely by cultures of yeast and bacteria. From what I could understand from the ecouterre article, the process is similar to how kombucha is made, using the microbes to ferment a green tea mixture, although I thought that the film that forms on top of the fermenting tea in kombucha is some sort of yeast/…
tags: Story of Stuff, environment, pollution, climate change, global warming, recycling, social commentary, cultural observation, planned obsolescence, perceived obsolescence, fashion, advertizing, social psychology, streaming video From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental…
Two months ago, at the beginning of the summer, I asked Dr. Isis, the goddess of all things domestic and laboratory, for some fashion advice. My problem was one of hot outside-cold inside - which is pretty unappealing when referring to undercooked microwaved food - but also pretty obnoxious when you are talking about frigid offices in sizzling summer weather. Here's part of what I asked Dr. Isis: Please, oh goddess of style, recommend a blazer or sweater that will be versatile enough to see me through summer work sessions in a frigid office and impromptu meetings across campus. Ideally this…
The Bridesmaid 1851 John Everett Millais The Now Smash Of Style for Vogue Italia, via Haute Macabre May 2009 Craig McDean
Jewelry designer Delfina Delettrez is young, a fourth-generation member of the Fendi family, and apparently obsessed with anatomy. Her most intriguing creation is a Skeletor-like carpal gauntlet: The silver hand will cost you about $24K. If you haven't got that much disposable income, she also does smaller pieces: earrings and necklaces inspired by eyes, lips, spiders, cephalopods, frogs, etc. They're pretty, but I keep coming back to that hand and thinking it's so cynically appropriate to put a bony skeleton hand on a fashion model. Found via haute macabre
Oh, linky blogosphere, how I love thee! I was just starting to browse through Atoms Arranged Meaningwise by Rachel McKinney - which I found via Scientiae's blogroll - when her most recent post sent me shooting off to Threadbared. Rachel notes: And I know we're supposed to be good little serious philosophers and clothes aren't supposed to be the sort of thing worth thinking too hard about, but that's just the kind of fucked-up masculinist logic that got us into this mess in the first place, right? I suspect Isis would agree! Then the pitch for Threadbared: Threadbared is a blog by two…
Richard Avedon, The New Yorker, 1995 Via Haute Macabre, an unbelievable fashion editorial created by Richard Avedon for the New Yorker. I have no words. Richard Avedon, The New Yorker, 1995 See the complete editorial at Haute Macabre.