Quote of Note | Crimes of Fashion
Posted in: Uncategorized
“With similar lighting, poses, branding (the casting agency here replacing the police department name), and meticulous record of bodily measurements and photographic sitting dates, casting images share much in common with criminal mug shots. Iconic and instantly readable, both are documentary portraits used to fix identities motivated by the specter or promise of transformation: in the case of the casting image, the glamour of the fashion photograph; for the mug shot, the future recidivist in disguise. Both are images of potential, overwhelmingly charged by association.”
-University of Cincinnati cultural anthropologist Stephanie Sadre-Orafai in “Mug Shot/Headshot – Danger, Beauty, and the Temporal Politics of Booking Photography,” a chapter in the forthcoming book Fashion Crimes: Dressing for Deviance (I.B. Tauris)
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
“Shortly after I met Glenda Bailey at Iman‘s birthday party, I became the new creative director of Harper’s Bazaar. It happened that fast. The press described it as ‘the unexpected Bailey-Gan cocktail,’ and I remember thinking how appropriate that we met at a party, and whether delicious or lethal, who doesn’t love a cocktail?
“On when we’re off, screen savers are both hallucinatory napscapes and work-site facades. Though customizable, like icons and wallpapers, and comparable to other cubicle brighteners (potted plants, fluorescent stickies), they possess a distinct poetics. As boxed, watchable decor, where a fireplace or window might once have sufficed, they tend to emulate the mesmeric morphing and gelatinous luminosity of fish tanks, lava lamps, self-tilting wave tanks. (Cognate forms might include digital picture frames, dance-club visuals, the trompe l’oeil of Yule-log DVDs.) Whether ribbons of light that streak and fold, frantic zooms through a brick maze, or an inexorable volley into the Milky Way, the screen saver’s most insistent optical illusion is infinitude. Reaching beyond dead opaque surface and deadpan document glare—as if receding behind, sinking into the depths of true aliveness those occlude—its generous spaciousness seems to redeem work’s merely serial endlessness. The screen saver is comfort food for thought the way pop chaos theory is: it lets us believe we are more linked by the serendipities of a butterfly’s wings than by finance capitalism. As tasks await amid cascading windows or avalanching paper, the screen saver’s immersive depths unfurl the cosmic picture that keeps the job in perspective, outsourcing gripes to karma, converting tedium into trance. It acknowledges, and briefly gratifies, one’s drowsy desire for not-work.”
“I think brands are going to become even more entrenched in our lives. But because there are so many brands and there’s so much choice, there’s a potential for brands to become part of the wallpaper and devolve back to product status versus ‘brand story’ status. So now more than ever, the strategy of being simple, sensory, and optimistic, and maniacally focused on the mandate—is critical. I would encourage corporations to act like visionaries, and brand stewards to act like a Steve Jobs or an 
“[Alessandro] Mendini provides a spine through the whole show. That chair is a really fantastic thing. This is him working with Studio Alchimia, which is just before Memphis starts—it’s a more avant-garde, nihilistic design collective than Memphis, but provides some of the inspiration for it. And that particular chair is typical of his practice at this time. Mendini called it “redesign”—he was making new objects from quoted material from lots of different sources. It’s a wood-frame chair with white upholstery, and Mendini projected a slide onto it and painted it to match. The title is a reference to this idea of memory—Baroque furniture, pointillism. It’s very layered and quite witty but not particularly functional.”
“I am a black-and-white person. Some grays, some dirty pinks, not flashy pinks. I have never been obsessed with color, I cannot explain why. I wanted to become an illustrator as a child. Black-and-white always looks modern, whatever that word means.”
“Peter Saville‘s album covers for Manchester’s Factory Records in the ’80s and ’90s were a true revelation to me, especially his work for 
“Guinness was very close to her grandmother [Diana Mitford], although she was appalled by her politics, and was with her when she died, in Paris, in 2003. She remains dismayed that Diana never publicly recanted her admiration for Hitler, whom Diana had got to know in the thirties after travelling to Germany to visit her sister Unity, who had become part of der Fuhrer’s inner circle. ‘My grandmother had grown up in the countryside, and she hadn’t been to school, and then she goes to Germany, and Unity is there, and then she becomes very, very friendly with him,’ Guinness said. ‘I can’t imagine he was charming—he’s the most uncharming person I’ve ever seen, Hitler.’ She recalled discussing the matter with Diana. ‘I said, “Granny, it just can’t be right,” and she just said, “He didn’t photograph well.” She said he was very, very funny.’ When the war broke out, Diana spent three years in London’s Holloway prison. ‘She told me she read a lot of Racine,’ Guinness said. Meanwhile, when Britain declared war on Germany, Unity Mitford shot herself in the head. ‘Why didn’t Unity shoot Hitler instead of herself?’ Guinness said. ‘Then we’d be descended from heroes instead of villains.’”
“There is this print, which is the central theme of the collection, that I spent more than six months working on. It took lot of research and trial and error. The end result is something I am very proud of. There is this jacket in this print, and from afar it looks like any other blazer. But if you look at it closely every seam, every print matches to a T. I never thought it was humanly possible for me to achieve this—and call me dramatic if you will—but when I saw it finished I was in tears.”