Dress by Faith Garland. Composed of 200 Aquafina bottles and 1,000 staples.
Boston Fashion Week is now fully underway, and dropping in on today’s shows seems to me to have highlighted why Boston is prime finally to become a fashion center (of sorts).
It feels like a collaboration from another century — modern art greats coming together to create a production that pushes the limits in every way. Great designer meets great architect meets great score meets great conductor. The LA Philharmonic’s production of Don Giovanni on May 26 features costumes by Rodarte and stage sets by Frank Gehry. The Mulleavy sisters brought their hair and make-up stylists from the runway to complete the look of the show. Given how hauntingly beautiful their costumes for Black Swan were, the bar has been set pretty high for Kate and Laura Mulleavy when it comes to costume design. From the looks of it, they will not disappoint this time either. You go girls! The sets and costumes are chilling and beautiful on their own. Imagine Mozart playing, and this is one show that shouldn’t be missed. Admittedly, for completely unknown reasons I’ve been feeling rather weepy of late, so that might have something to do with it, but the stills alone are giving me shivers. Since I’m not likely to make it to Los Angeles this weekend, here’s hoping they reconsider the decision not to film this one time production. Let’s start a movement now … maybe we can win them over by Saturday.
Priceless … design with a sense of humor. It’s not everyone who is able to design products or spaces which are both beautiful and playful, make you smile but can also be taken seriously for their aesthetic. When done well, I’m in love. So check these out.
1. The Bird Poop Chandelier by Wyatt Little. As the mother of a five year old boy, if I never heard anyone say the word poop again it would be too soon. But I love this light fixture. I am also partial to all fixtures and accessories that feature birds (yup, that would make thedesign fetishes deer, owls, birds and mushrooms and I’m sure I’m forgetting something – I am generous when it comes to my obsessions). This particular fixture rocks.
So today I finally had to break down and buy a new phone. I had an iPhone 3S. I have no idea when I got it. Years ago. But lately it has decided that it’s not terribly interested in connecting anymore. Anything that doesn’t require an internet connection — great! Making calls — no so great. Texting — good luck. Since the new phone, a 4S, is a different shape from my old phone, buying a new phone meant suddenly needing to buy a new case as well. (In fact, buying a new phone seems to cost at least $100 in hidden fees in top of the $199 it claims it’s going to cost you if you renew your contract, but that’s another conversation altogether.) And buying a new case got me to thinking about how significant a choice that has become. The phone, after all, spends an enormous amount of time hanging out next to your face, so selection of a case represents an important opportunity to make an aesthetic statement about your identity.
We have AT&T — which may have great service in other parts of the country but is really an inexplicably stupid choice in this corner of the northeast since the coverage and service on Verizon are infinitely better, and yet, it’s what we have — so my experience of looking at cases while purchasing the phone itself is specific to the AT&T store. I have no idea what they do or don’t offer, for example, in the Verizon store. But in the AT&T store, any sales person doing the job right will try to sell you a case when you’re buying the phone. The thought of walking out of the AT&T store and dropping that brand new iPhone without a case onto the ground and shattering it before getting around to purchasing Apple Care gives me an anxiety attack. The offerings in the store, however, seem to be very pretty but simple cases in various colors that start at $35, a clear plastic protective sticker for the front and back of the phone for $30 (yeah, $30), or a screen protector for $20. Which, in this day and age, is all just silliness.
There are a lot of truly great covers out there if you want your phone to have some personality, but if you’re less choosy, it really only needs to cost a few dollars on Amazon.com.
Confirming the notion that the most interesting and creative ideas often come from the most unexpected places (yeah, I don’t know if that’s particularly a notion people have, but it sounds like a good truism), Romania is currently home to some of the more intriguing emerging designers on the fashion scene. The end of years of repression, and a capitalist economy in its early stages of growth, provide the perfect breeding ground for a flourishing fashion avant-garde.
Lana Dumitru is one of the more exciting members of this front. “Fashion in Romania is fresh and I can compare it with a newborn — we are starting to discover things and grow,” Dumitru says. “But I can compare it with an old man as well — everything is going really slow.” Marie Claire magazine offers an eloquent profile of the designer:
However, Lana’s success as an innovative designer is anything but sluggish. Even though she’s still a student at the Design Institute of Italy, she has already become internationally recognized for her collections that fuse camouflage, technology, and old-world traditions together. Her graduation collection at the Bucharest Institute of Art tracked the evolution of women, much through the animalistic and technological interpretations of the female body. In many of the pieces, Lana did not settle for the gimmicks of fancy screen-printing: She altered the proportions of the fabric to give a three-dimensional form to the image portrayed.
Read more: Lana Dumitru Interview – Romanian Fashion Designer Lana Dumitru – Marie Claire
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