PITCH. BOOK. DONE.

party time.

happy new year kids.

PITCH BOOK = HELL

i thought this would only take me a couple of days but i keep finding more and more things to add (not having internet at home doesn't help either). i have to submit this by tomorrow morning otherwise the book won't arrive in time = FAIL.

coffeeeeeee...

LANVIN MEN SS10

MASTABA

Christo and Jeanne-Claude

THE MASTABA

Project for The United Arab Emirates

The Mastaba will be a work of art made of approximately 410,000 horizontally stacked oil barrels. The grandeur and vastness of the land will be reflected in the dimensions of the Mastaba, which will be:

• 150 meters (492 feet) high

• 225 meters (738 feet) deep

• 300 meters (984 feet) wide

This project has been ongoing since initial sketches in 1977. I'm always a bit worried when I read things like this because considering the UAE only gained independence in 1971 it seems like a mad rush to solidify its identity.

I remember first seeing 'The Gates' in Central Park when I visited New York a few years ago and that was pretty phenomenal. RIP Jeanne-Claude.

oskar.

grooming  ::  sung hee park

special thanks to mathias @ nisch // more of this to follow

I LOVE TECHNOLOGY

only when it works though. the 'screen share' option on skype is amazing and comes in handy when doing an edit and not all your team is in the same place...

FINAL MAJOR PROJECT :: TUTORIAL 2 // PARALYSIS

as much as Leila frustrates me sometimes with her arson of generalized advice (ie. you should test // get together with friends and discuss ideas // research your concept) she does occasionally offer gold nuggets of constructive critique however acid-coated they appear at first.

the major project is coming along nicely but i'm being held back by too much attention to surface detail; in her words my work has been "paralyzed by aesthetics". i've got enough to deal with theoretically but i'm finding it hard to integrate it visually into my project which is actually quite a general problem for me i think. i need to wrestle with the subject i'm trying to portray instead of just re-affirming it. i'm too afraid of making mistakes and for this project (and my work) to carry any weight i've just got to step outside my comfort zone and find a way of basically injecting some life into my pictures. by not being so precious with them.

to be honest it wasn't something i wanted to hear but i needed to hear it.

watch this space.

brian shimansky @ m&p // styling :: raphael hirsch // hair&makeup :: sung hee park

SEBASTIAN

sebastian sauve @ premier // styling :: raphael hirsch // hair&makeup :: sung hee park

DISSERTATION :: TUTORIAL 2

all that was said really was that i've got to keep my focus on representation and fashion imagery rather than keeping it too abstract and venturing too far into economics. instead of discussing representation as a singular topic within a separate section it should be integrated into all the others in the literature review so when it comes to discussing my case studies the images and their analyses make much more sense. as for the dissertation as a whole the angle is steadily fixing itself as 'a western dissection of an outward-looking chinese identity formed within China, being sold to the west - the identity itself having been affected by western ideologies'

also i shouldn't discuss GQ China as that would be a separate dissertation topic covering the representation of chinese men within China. too introsepective and obviously i don't have enough knowledge of chinese history and culture to be able to properly explore that topic...

OSKAR IN LONDON

DUANE NASIS...

...needs to be up in three hours. introduction to literature review draft abandoned. goodnight.

updated at 05:58

TEST :: BRIAN & SEBASTIAN

hair/makeup :: sung hee park

THIS MADE ME SAD

THE DECADENCE OF DACADE-ISM

by Glenn O'Brien

(from 10 MEN no.20, winter/spring 10)

"...And where are we now, in this nameless decade? What is the zero-zero look? There is no dominant fashion direction but a competing spectrum of retro looks. We now choose which past decade we want to live in...It's as if the 20th century's whole life is flashing in front of its eyes.

What is the future of fashion in this next century?

The futuristic future has been out of fashion since 1982, when director Ridley Scott imagined a failed future, a postmodern future dominated by the ruins of progressive modernist ambitions. And when the twin towers fell in 2001, it was a devastating symbol of the failure of monolithic futurism. The towers were about hubris and the assumption that the future would always be bigger and brighter. The towers were ugly, arrogant and unrealistic and, as conspiracy theorists will tell you, these buildings that stood for only 30 years were completely obsolete. But now, after decades of pessimistic or at least cynical postmodernism, at this moment of hesitant transition, we seem to have a nostalgia for futurism. Cynicism isn't working any more. We want to look back at the time when the future was bright and progressive..."

this article really struck a chord with me. not least because caffeine and solitude tend to make me emotionally hypersensitive and i'd had a considerable amount of both by the time i came across this.

growing up where i did in such a transitory environment in all senses of the word - cultural, political, historical, physical - our generation wasn't really made aware of or at least feel involved with any form of history that wasn't just on a superficial level. it was as if we had spent 16 years in a waiting room with nothing but a few back-issues of Vogue/Hello/TV Guide and maybe a few Disney films and the latest Hollywood historical/war epics (all on VHS) to inform us of a world and a future that lay outside of our bubble.

(note: a world and a future that lay in the west)

so the past wasn't something that we could particularly grasp conceptually, or at least those of us diaspora that never returned regularly to our homelands. all we knew was a weird kind of present/future that was never fixed, or that was unfolding right before our eyes. our outlook was bright, it was modernist and it was extremely progressive, but like the twin towers after 30 years is now seemingly obsolete. postmodernism was an exciting enough actuality but as i think about how it has run its course coupled with the obsolescence of my former 'futurist modernism' outlook it leaves me with nothing left to grasp idealistically.

I was reading something for my tutorial on thursday by Louis Althusser about subjects being created by and existing within their own ideologies so i guess what i'm saying is that as my own ideologies are apparently succumbing to obsolescence i myself am too. and the part that really gets me is that it's not even my fault but because of how poorly equipped i was in 'the waiting room'.

the future has just been made that much more cloudy for me. i know i'm letting this one guy's opinion get to me too much but it's made me so aware of my own need to change and to evolve if i want to continue doing what i'm doing and survive.

(photo :: Duane Michals / The Illuminated Man)

DUANE!!!

FASHION ST 20091201

TEST :: ORNELLA

ornella @ elite // styling :: raphael hirsch // hair&makeup :: sung hee park