I am not going to talk about the NA any more! But still, this is pretty cool from a big fash brand - I presume if they’re making animated GIFs it’s Tumblr-specific marketing.

Not exactly the imagery I’d expect from Givenchy, who have lately been exploring a gothic couture direction. This is a glitchy techno gothic - with the boots, a fraction Balenciaga. Can’t quite map it against their autumn 2012 collection. But let’s see.

(via parisnightsfashionlights)

Fashion + the New Aesthetic (2.1)

Extended edit of my piece for BusinessOfFashion.com now up on JayOh.net - more pictures, more words, more of an attempt to ask if a New Aesthetic fashion exists in the conscious work of designers themselves, or alternatively if it’s implicit in the wider industry and processes around them.

image credit: Reed/Rader

(via H&M Bikini Posters Get Nicely Adbusted By Street Artist)

Following Barthes, fashion theory often positions fashion as a system of signs. However, cultural studies theorists have criticized sign-based approaches to the body as “disembodying,” or leaving out the lived, embodied experience of fashion as an “event.” Can a fashioned body itself embody this critique in its representation? In other words, can a body, through fashion, take subversion one step past subverting normative codes of race, class, and gender, and subvert the enactment of code-reading vision itself? If so, how would it do so?

Beginning with a critique of “vision-as-reading” (optical) used in the semiotic and social constructionist approaches to fashion, this piece invites fashion theorists to consider fashion as not only an abstract code of meanings and signs but as an embodied event, or “vision-as-feeling.” Adapting concepts of vision from film studies, this article outlines a new visual methodology for studying fashion by using Deleuze’s contrasting concepts of “optical visuality” and “haptic visuality” in order to account for a lived experience of the sensuous and affective dimensions of fashion.

Optical vision, as Laura Marks elaborates it, is the dominant vision of reading the fashioned body, viewing bodies as whole objects and subjects with clear boundaries. It takes a distance from its objects so as to navigate space visually, while haptic vision, a vision in which the “eyes themselves function as organs of touch” is a more fluid, tactile vision that “depends on limited visibility and the and the viewer’s lack of mastery over the image” and “renders intersubjective borders blurry.” Thus, to look at fashion through haptic vision can not only link vision and tactility, thereby undoing the abstract disembodiment of a semiotic approach, but also blurring not merely social categories, but also the subjective borders of self and other that the optical relies on. […]

To explore the haptic image’s potential and enactment, the author undertook a five-year long autoethnographic study, which involved wearing the same hat every day in an academic community and watching this article of clothing gather affective intensity

From ‘Fashion: Exploring Critical Issues’, a conference in Oxford in September 2009.
Kim Cunningham’s draft conference paper here.

No comment on the hat experiment…

ohhh but I am good. question is when the 90s fashion revival really picked up steam - doc martens in 2009 yes, cropped t-shirts 2010 I think, and buffalo trainers are just starting to creep in over the last six months…

Killing TIme series by Lucia GIacani for Vogue.it

This is the Lanvin Fall 2011 campaign video:

1. Models can’t dance
2. This makes it better
3. Considerably aided by the System of a Down (?) soundtrack
4. Found via Style Bubble

from fashionabecedaire, ace blog with the tagline “IT’S OK FOR INTELLECTUAL FEMINISTS TO LIKE FASHION”:

For a monarch constitutionally obliged to be apolitical, Queen Elizabeth II made a very strong political statement yesterday, in a most inconspicuous manner: fashion. Her Majesty welcomed Najib Tun Razak, Prime Minister of Malaysia, wearing a yellow ensemble. The colour is one of the sovereign’s favourite and was her hue of choice for her grand-son’s wedding. Her decision however was surprising since the Prime Minister had banned his citizens from wearing yellow because of recent protests rallying around the colour.

The political context: Malaysia braces for pro-democracy street protests in Kuala Lumpur “Tensions mount as hundreds of thousands of activists expected in capital for Arab spring-style rally against ‘dirty politics’. “

As Haute Pop I am of course a fan of haute couture - this is from a collection by Amato, a Dubai couture house, photographed by Tina Patni. Click through for the whole photoset, it’s stunning.

New fashion trends consultancy Editd is (finally) bringing big data, crowdsourcing and quantitative rigour to the hitherto very expert-driven world of fashion forecasting.

Pretty amused that this is in the same week I’m working on a pilot trend forecasting project at Face, seeing if social media buzz can be used to predict what’ll be the key looks at Glastonbury this weekend. Our monitoring tool Pulsar uses same range of social media datasources as Editd - Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums, Tumblr and all the rest - bringing them all together on a bespoke dashboard designed for research rather than PR use.

But Editd are using a few extra datasources too - included the Top 20 most Liked garments on ASOS (and elsewhere?) to produce a really strong indicator of current trend buzz (this week: cut-outs). I wasn’t aware that ASOS had an API to pull this data from - and I’d love to know where they’re getting retailers’ sales figures for individual items too - but this mash-up of datasources is the future of business intelligence and it would be the future of market research, except it’s pretty clear this won’t be happening in market research companies per se.

Having these different stages of purchase intent - from general social media buzz, to what people have been browsing and Liking, to actual sales figures - should allow it to be a very powerful prediction tool, capturing different stages of the decision-making process to probably do some pretty prescient stuff.

With a bit of expert curation on top, Editd looks really exciting - follow at @EDITDtweets to see what’s next.

That said, ASOS have half this stuff in-house already: at least all the Likes and all the purchase data, and I’d be very surprised if they’re behind on the social media monitoring… Wonder what we’ll see develop there too?

wherever cereal crops were grown, the underlying legend still remained: it was thought that the Corn Spirit retreated before the oncoming reapers at harvest time, taking refuge in the last of the standing corn. These last few stalks would be fashioned into a Corn Dolly, a receptacle in which the Spirit could rest during the winter. In the spring, the Corn Dolly, together with its incumbent Corn Spirit, would be returned to the fields with the new planting. By giving the Corn Spirit a home during the dark and cold winter months, it was hoped to ensure that the forthcoming crop would be a bounteous one. [Guild of Straw Craftsmen]

A couple of months after Alexander McQueen’s suicide, his assistant Sarah Burton presented this dress in her first Spring 2011 collection for the label at London Fashion Week.

There are a thousand things to say about English heritage, and tradition/progression/continuity, and the masterful transition from McQueen’s bloodsoaked historical queen to this, to all the same themes but now something sunlit and straw-smelling - the symbolism much more macabre than it first looks and yet now with a wholeness, a feeling the wound is no longer fatal. Nature as healer but also as reaper; seasons turning; a harvest, and a sunset.

But mostly it just makes me cry, the craftsmanship, so absolutely beautiful and absolutely sad.

(Inspired by the very very good editorial photoshoot about British folklore in British Vogue, July 2011)

Over at FACE we’re exploring social media monitoring as a prediction tool - does what people say they’re going to do indicate future behaviour?

The test arena: Glastonbury 2011, and what people are going to wear. Are the style blogger “influencers” really influential, or do mass mentions have greater predictive power?

ASOS may be talking about sheer maxi skirts and £240 Prada sunnies, but we’re staking our money on gloss black Hunter wellies and short shorts - or the attack of the furries with Kigu-style full-body animal suits looking strong.

Though it’s now looking like we may be on for a re-run of Glasto 2007, in which case it’s mud head-to-toe for everyone. Let’s see what happens!

Image by @marionren

OMG I need her hair.

(This is Katie Shillingford of Dazed & Confused, and I’m wondering whether her colour is by Bleach at Wah Nails as they seem to be owning the gradient thing at the mo. Oh look, just read the article - yes it is, colourist Alex Brownsell.)

Retrofuturist fashion shoot by Stephan Giftthaler

In a phone interview over three years ago I was asked, “What do you think of Asian women who bleach or dye their hair; do you think they’re trying to be white?”

That day my hair was chin-length, a faded green. I said, “No.”

Read the whole article for a really great personal-is-political take on gender, race and sexuality as seen through the medium of buzz cuts and blue hairdye.