Vulture Magazine Issue 00: Genesis

Genesis

Past the future

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NICOLAS SAMORI TORTURED BEAUTY All the real girls What do Chloe Moretz, Tavi Gevinson and Hailee Steinfeld have in common?

Decay & Distortion

NIELS PEERAER Accessories Designer to watch

BODYBOUND BY PLINY CHAMPION DAVID LYNCH SECRET MEDITATION

Beyond 1984, Blade Runner and Neuromancer

No.00 GENESIS ISSUE

VULTURE

C on ten ts 05

article

Past the Present Future

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EDITORIAL

Niburu by Sinsong

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EDITORIAL

Helmut G irls by Alice Rosati

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INTERVIEW

B odybound by Pliny Champion

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article

Niels Peerar

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article

‘Kaz an’ - Mayumi Hosokura

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EDITORIAL

Wanderlust

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BACKSTAGE

B ackstage

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EDITORIAL

Helena B eat

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article

All the Real G irls

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FEATURE

Trend Page

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article

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FEATURE

Dav id Lynch Nicola Samori

VULTURE Magazine, Issue 00 Genesis, July 2012.

Cover Image Works by Skye Tan

Font Treatment

by Skye Tan

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VULTURE welcomes unsolicited contributors, but cannot accept responsibility for any possible loss or damage to the submitted material. The entire content of this publication is protected by copyright. Reproduction of any material within this magazine without the written permission is forbidden. The opinions expressed in VULTURE are that of the respective contributor and are not necessarily shared by the magazine or staff. All rights reserved.

:GENESIS: It is a confusing time that we live in. Crisis grows preponderant as reason becomes increasingly obsolete. Every conceivable territory has been explored, every rock overturned and every physical and psychological landscape trodden down to dust; little is left to the imagination. It appears that our process of self-discovery and the understanding of our very existence is so direly saturated that we orchestrate our demise and prophesize our own ends. Yearning to start anew. In this issue, we invite the readers to embrace a new genesis; start from the very scratch, not from the rubbles of yesterday but with an entirely new dreamscape. As though the sun is rising over us for the very first time, we have the chance to surpass this present day purgatory and breathe life into a braver, brighter new world.

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PAS T T HE PR E S E NT F U TU R E text by SHAWn C

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“Maybe we need new questions instead of new answers. What if our idea of ‘the future’ remains stuck in the past?”

- Charles Aaron

“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon

wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.

But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.

The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.

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This storm is what we call progress.” By Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History Like Benjamin’s Angel, we too are perhaps condemned to gaze forever at the past, blind to the future, as we are irresistibly propelled into the unknown. Yet is this not our experience of time? The contemporary visions of the future are often little

more than bricolages reassembled from the fragmented dreams, and nightmares, of the past. Our imaginations of the future seem relentlessly consigned to inhabiting the past, laying impotent like a dead shark floating in a tank of formaldehyde: it is the Physical Impossibility of the Future in the Mind of Someone Present. Just as Damien Hirst’s infamous installation highlights how death is imagined only as an

appropriation, an extrapolation and a projection of our experiences of living, so is our imagination of the future resolutely grounded in the domain of the present and the past. This may be endemic to the human condition, blind to the future hidden behind us, but each generation has its visionary Cassandras artists, architects, designers, dreamers who function as agent provocateurs, willfully defying the Angel of History and turning its head to cast its gaze towards the future. To relinquish the future from the past, we begin somewhat ironically by going back a century to the Futurists. On 5 February 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the Futurist Manifesto and launched the social, artistic and philosophical movement of Futurism. Instead of a derivative vision of the future, the Futurists sought a radical rejection of the past and embraced a future characterised by speed, machinery, violence and youth. These were the new tenets championed in a vision of the future designed to spur the modernisation and rejuvenation of Italy at the beginning of the 20th century. The Futurists wanted to reinvigorate an enervating intellectual class and city and to aggressively reassert its presence against the threat of overwhelming industrial and technological progress. The Futurist Manifesto was so ahead of its time it contained ideas that could barely be imagined when it was first published. Its last article was a passionate insurrection: “We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons...”

Only in 1917 did some semblance of such a phenomenon emerge with the rise of the Russian Revolutions. The manifesto had anticipated this 8 years ago. By 1926 the movement evolved with the second generation of Futurists taking aerial landscapes experienced during flights as its subject matter. These Aeropainters were excited by the new experience of flight enabled by the technological advancement of aeroplanes. A new manifesto was launched in 1929, entitled Perspectives of Flight in which technological innovation was championed for heralding this radical shift in paradigm: “The changing perspectives of flight constitute an absolutely new reality that has nothing in common with the reality traditionally constituted by a terrestrial perspective.” The familiar tenets of speed, technology and the radical repudiation of the past are inherited from the legacy of the first generation of Futurists who responded to their contexts two decades ago. They inform the character of the movement even the works have changes aesthetically to embrace and keep stride with technological progress. They were searching for new answers to old questions. But by 1944, Futurism as a movement was pronounced extinct with the passing of its leader Marinetti. Their

vision of the ‘future’ had calcified as the future caught up with them, and left them behind.

It is not necessary for one to reject past to keep pace with the future. On the contrary, one would argue that perhaps all innovation and all visions of possible futures are inevitably rooted in the past and the present. There are no ideas without a tradition; whether they are rejecting or reinforcing it, they are still in dialogue with things past. The problem then lies not in the inception but in the afterlife of those visions of the future. If the visions of the future are not born from new questions that engage the contemporary realities, it threatens to calcify and stagnate. New answers would not suffice as they would only seem superficially innovative if not derivative and more fundamentally they respond to a ‘future’ that is stuck in the past, until we find that the future is no longer ahead but behind us.

Japan, with its highly advanced technology and exotic distance, has always represented for the West but also for the itself, a laboratory for experimenting visions of the future. It is often the chosen site of dystopic imaginations of the future in popular culture, such that the prefecture of Chiba was featured as the setting of William Gibson’s cyberpunk classic Neuromancer, and Tokyo informed the aesthetics of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi film Blade Runner. Tokyo has also experienced extensive damage during the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and the air raids during World War II, leaving no buildings more than a hundred years in its wake. The destruction experienced during the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was also firmly lodged in the social imaginary of the Japanese. Yet in the aftermath, these disasters not only gave birth to dystopic kaiju genre films, in which Tokyo is routinely destroyed by giant monsters like Godzilla, but they also became the fertile grounds for re-imagining the future.

This re-imagination of the future took its form in the group of architects called the Metabolists led by Kenzo Tange in the late 1950s.

Frustrated with the traditional ideas of fixed form and function in architecture they felt were obsolete, the Metabolists had grand visions of the future characterized by flexible, expandable and organic structures designed to accommodate large scale masses. They proposed megastructures that floated in the sea, as in Kikutake’s Marine City and buildings that spiraled into the air, as in Isozaki’s “City in the Air.” In 2011, half a decade after the establishment of the Metabolists, a large scale exhibition of the movement was held at the Mori Art Museum entitled “Metabolism: The City of the Future” and subtitled “Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present-day Japan.” The topic of reconstruction, or fukko in Japanese, is a recurrent theme that has swelled several times in this century, follow-

ing large-scale catastrophes that demanded an urgent response. This exhibition then came at an uncannily timely moment following the 3.11 catastrophe. The 2011 Tohoku earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis delivered a devastating blow to Japan. Aside from the physical destruction experienced at the immediate impact of the disaster, the Japanese are quagmired by the crisis of nuclear power and growing disillusionment with the government’s lack of transparency in the proceedings. A grand narrative has collapsed, and people are still struggling to negotiate new narratives in an uncertain future post-3.11.

Certainly the topic of reconstruction becomes an important buzzword once more, but ‘reconstruction’ itself has taken on dramatically different characters in each generation. The exhibition becomes especially poignant as people looked to the past for visions of the future, but it is a future projected fifty years ago and it is a future behind us now. We now living in dramatically different times, and face a different set of challenges. The surviving Metabolists themselves do not seek to imitate the strategies half a decade ago, and the architectural community as well as the Japanese community at large are still anticipating new movements and directions in the wake of the disaster. Isozaki remarked in a recent forum that it is precisely through these breaks in narratives that something new may be born. These extraordinary events prompt us to ask new questions in a changing reality.

The anthropologist Margaret Mead analyses the problem of generation gaps in the monograph Culture and Commitment, first published in 1970. She describes the tensions between biological generations and cultural generations and asserts that while cultural generations once extended much longer beyond biological generations, the acceleration of technological progress and cultural change has meant that a generation today would have to go through the evolution of multiple cultural generations in one’s lifetime. The past was closer to that of a ‘post-figurative culture’, where adults could teacher their traditions to children who would in turn repeat the past. While this model was previously sufficient, the pace of change in the world today would quickly render old traditions irrelevant to modern needs. She thus characterizes late 20th century societies, and beyond, as one that was distinctly a ‘pre-figurative culture’ in which children must help adults learn about experiences they have never had. We have ourselves become immigrants in time and it is no longer sufficient to simply orientate ourselves according to old frameworks and old questions of the past, but we must cast ourselves into the unknown, ‘prefigured’ future, ready to ask new questions to an unfamiliar future that lay before us.

SIN SONG

NIburu Photography Xi Sinsong Make Up & Hair Styling Misha Shahzada using Make Up Forever Model Samantha Ruggiero

NIBURU

SIN SONG

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HELMUT GIRL

PHOTOGRAPHHY ALICE ROSATI Photography ALICE ROSATI Styling JEROME ANDRE Hair ALEXANDRY COSTA Makeup Fann SOFIA BERMUDEZ Model LAUREN BIGELOW @ NEXT

B o dy b o u n d

“There’s nothing masculine about being reserved; menswear needs to be dazzling again,” Kim Choong-Wilkins of Bodybound said. Indeed, after seasons of typically crafted and mostly predictable menswear, Kim Choong-Wilkins and his new design partner Pliny Champion are a breath of fresh air.

Kim Choong-Wilkins, a Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design graduate, founded Bodybound in 2009 soon after his internship at Alexander McQueen and Ermenegildo Zegna. A striking first collection catapulted Bodybound into the limelight as the UK brand to watch.

When Singapore Men’s Fashion Week 2012 rolled around and Bodybound was set to show their Autumn/Winter 2012 collection (for the second time), we grabbed the chance to speak to charming Brit Pliny Champion.

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pILNY CHAMPION text by michelle n.

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Hi Pliny! Maybe you can start off by telling us bit about yourself.

(Laughs) Well, I am a photographer. I did mostly commercial photography and sometimes fashion photography but I do think I’m quite the visual person. I got to know Kim about… five years ago, I think? We became friends and this year, we decided to work together to expand and broaden the Bodybound label.

Now that you’re on board, what does this mean for Bodybound?

I’m part of this Autumn/Winter collection, which I feel has quite a different feel. In the past, the

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collections were very knitwear-orientated. Of course, that is Kim’s strength and what people recognize the brand for, but it has gradually evolved since it first started.

This collection is slightly more graphic and has more print elements because of my photography background. Knitwear definitely still comes through but in a way, I feel that this plays on both our strengths. Hopefully it’s a nice marriage between the two.

This collection is titled “Dystopia”. Tell us, what’s the fascination with Dystopia?

Every collection starts with a lot of research. Our main reference for this collection is Brand New World by Aldous Huxley. It’s like utopia… but it’s not. What’s fascinating is the idea of everyone being the same, everyone looking the same and very artificially cloned. It’s about people being very divorced from what it is to be human, to be an individual.

The argyle patterns represented by rivets are symbols of conservative.

There are herringbones as well. The knits are all very traditional and for Kim and me, these things are symbolic of a conformist way of living. For example, when you think of argyle, you think of people playing golf after work or during the weekends but for us, we can’t think of a worst way to spend our time!

Three words to describe the collection?

Hmm… metallic because of all the trademark studs. Subtle, in a way. And traditional, I think.

Bodybound is known to be quite the anti-establishment, rebellious in the least. Where does this stem from?

We are? Wow. (Laughs) You see, we’re really just starting out and it’s interesting, as designers, to see how people response to the brand.

But now that you’ve mentioned it, yes, I suppose we’re quite antiestablishment. Probably because we deal with all these traditional patterns. I mean they are so common, so awful and mediocre. When you think of knitwear, you might think of argyle jumpers. And so we reference argyle and herringbone patterns because people can relate to them. But we’re using it ironically and projecting it into the future.

There’s something distinctively British in your designs. What do you say that is exactly?

Kim and I both grew up in London so we can’t get away from capturing what London is about and what being a designer in London is about.

We’re completely immersed in the culture and what we’re doing is very much a reaction to what we know. We do have some British influences in our designs like the Prince of Wales checks and cables referencing to really old cable jumpers, which people consider to be very British.That said, we’re not doing what other British menswear brands are doing.

Neither do we necessarily think ourselves as British designers. That’s something quite different about us and about our brand.

Who are you ultimately designing for?

We don’t design for someone in mind. Bodybound is more like a proposal for how men should dress generally. Also, the brand is quite showy; it might not be acceptable to everyone. We don’t design just for men who are interested in fashion. But if the brand is challenging the boundaries of men’s fashion or pushing it in a different direction then it’s a good sign, I guess!

Let us in on a little secret about Kim and yourself.

We like to garden! Which is definitely not what you would think of us when you look at the collection. I can say we’re quite the homebodies because we spend so much time working in our home studios. We basically spend all our time there!

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niels peeraer text by melanie c.

in t e r v i e w

Designer Niels Peeraer has been singled out by the Vogue editorial team as the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp undergraduate to watch. He was selected as a finalist for ITS#9 (International Talent Support, Italy). His graduate collection won five awards, not least of which was his first personal gallery exhibition with the 2011 MoMu Award. His 3rd year Bachelor collection 'Kizokusyakai no Dorei, geisha n째58-65' was granted the 'Innovation Award' by Anne Chapelle, the leading woman as CEO and owner behind Ann Deumeulemeester and Haider Ackerman.

...Fresh from his anointed graduation, Niels Peeraer promises tales to bend and warp.

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“While his penchant appears for creating twist-of-the-universe worlds, the juice lies in their truthfulness

And who is this designer under the lush praise?

Born in Antwerp, Belgium, twenty-three year old designer Niels Peeraer was and went to an artschool when he was 14 to study fine arts. Afterwhich, he studied at the Fashion Department, Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and graduated in 2011.

Since then, it’s been tails on fire. In the collection mindbendingly titled “Guess technology isn’t ready for pancake teleportation”, the feminine in utilitarian form drowns gloriously in imagination.

If you think it resembles a curious breed of the Asian male, it is. Peeraer was inspired by an Asian male friend and his softer appearance. Of course, that trajectory only goes out of this world in this tale about a boy who prepares himself every day to marry his imaginary boyfriend Androgyny has been done to death. Peeraer is not reductive however; his men brim in a multiplicious selfhood. Neither is he pedantic.

The handmade collection offer immediate flight into fantasies, all the way down to the pastel Hermes wings on Japanese clogs and Chanel-inspired rompers. “I simply don’t have the hunger to create clothes for men who are 6-foot-2 tall, with a sixpack,” says the designer.

Grandma couture tweeds and gold studded armour. Cupcakes and forlorn love, on a hetero male. Peeraer’s eye is for the mix and unmatch.

While his penchant appears for creating twist-of-the-universe worlds, the juice lies in their truthfulness. The soft male seems less of an anomaly, and in “Kizokusyakai no Dorei”, the elite class owning personal geishas is a dark parallel to our own world’s increasing divisiveness.

His Fall/Winter 2012 collection also alludes to status and possession. “The lotus and the snake, the curse of the white fox” is about a girl and a boy trying to protect their family crest and traditions. The accessory collection uses vegetable tanned bridle leather with brass fittings. Naturally treated, the complex shapes sit in the same minimalistic design.

K A Z A N MAYUMI HOSOKURA TEXT BY melanie c.

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I wanted to delete the reality, but I realised I was fascinated by nature. The Japanese believe every single object has a soul. a tree has a soul, a rock has a soul. I could understand a feeling like that.

KA Z A N

Mayumi Hosokura induces enigma. Her photography offers a deep poeticism that ebbs seduction. Yet instead of the usual accoutrements associated with both, she keeps her subjects bare. In the dream-like photographic series Kazan, literally so. Hosokura explains, “In the first step, I wanted to get rid of the (common) reality caught up in placing ‘where this is’, ’who he or she is’, ‘when it is’. So I chose situations that are not man-made, and where the people in my pictures are almost naked.”

Kazan was released as a book by Artbeat Publishers in March this year.

This comes after being shortlisted for the Hitotsubo award in 2004 and 2005, one of the most prestigious photography awards in Japan. Last year, she was also recently selected for Foam magazine’s annual Talent issue.

Dropping all artifice is the first insight into the brutal determination behind the delicate visage. Hosokura does away with distraction.

Without props of place or personality, one would be hard pressed to place even the era. No where to fall but in, Kazan calls for the self to experience empathy and connection, as well as more than a disturbing touch of seduction. “I am glad of that,” she says simply.

Born in Kyoto in 1979, Mayumi Hosokura grew up surrounded by books.

She especially loved the Japanese Romanticism from the 1890s. Naming her giants of this literature movement Ogai Mori, Kyoka Izumi, and Doppo Kunikido, dubbed the inventor of Japanese naturalism, she also recalls manga’s influence. “My father loved both (literature and manga).

I read many kinds of manga, but it was Garo, an underground comic magazine that influenced me greatly.”

Yoshiharu Tsuge, Garo’s most important comic author famed for his surrealist style, provided her with a creative shock. “His comic style was completely different from the other commercial comic authors in those days. His is so poetic, literary, individual. It was not entertainment, but it made me excited, as if I was touching his inner mind.”

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Those early influences led Hosokura to think about what creation is.

Kazan is a four-year culmination on exactly that. Kazan, meaning volcano in Japanese, pulls together ephemerality and permanence. “I started with this point of view about the relationship. For example, the beauty of youth can be seen as an ephemeral thing; and the minerals as a permanent thing. But I don’t think these are opposite.”

Now, nature has often been treated as muse or refuge among photographers. But Hosokura does not stop there. “I wanted to delete the reality, but I realised I was fascinated by nature. The Japanese believe every single object has a soul…a tree has a soul, a rock has a soul. I could understand a feeling like that. In my pictures, I could say, nature is a metaphor of us; a portrait of our mind.”

“I set nature to act as an intermediary halfway between the two properties”. Kazan, or volcano, has various conditions it can be, for example active, or dormant, or extinct. A volcano is constructed by inorganic stuff but actually it seems very much organic.”

These main motifs create an exquisite tension that is fast a hallmark of Hosokura’s humanism. The impressive thing is that Kazan accomplishes a reversal of duality that could ring true either direction. The warmth of the flesh is given coldness by her lens; trees, leaves, and rough bark take on an emotive life.

Hosokura’s next project will place her in Taiwan for an artist residency this summer. She enthuses about examining the cultural differences, history, and relationship between Japan and Taiwan. She talks about expressing the “beauty of Asia” through portraits. The warmth comes through now in her great sensitivity, as in her work, continually tracing the connections between observation and experience, sensation and imagination. There is no detachment in her work, and it allows us none.

She is now represented by G/P Gallery. KAZAN is now available at LN-CC.

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wander lust

PHOTOGRAPHY CLIFFORD LOH STYLING MELISSA GAN MAKE-UP ANDREA CLAIRE USING BEN NYE, TOM FORD, DERMALOGICA & FACE ATELIER Model Indiamara D (AVE) Photography Assistant Alvin Tan

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Top max.tan Pants Etro

(Left) Hood max.tan Vest ZARA Dress Amen

Don’t ask me when but ask me why Don’t ask me how but ask me where There is a road, there is a way There is a place, there is a place.

Shoes The Editor’s Market Shirt Versus Outerwear Blackheart

Top max.tan Pants ZARA Bag Givenchy shoeS stylist’s own

Shirt Versus Dress Blackheart

Dress max.tan Fringe Topshop Outwear CNC Bag Hermes Shoes Stylist’s Own

helena beat Photography Fadli Rahman Styling Nathanael Ng Hair Kazu Makeup Fann Loo using M.A.C. Cosmetics Model Catherine Tina Walsen (Upfront)

Dresss & Top Versus Necklace St Erasmus Headpiece Piers Atkinson

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Shirt Vintage Oscar De la Renta Dress Saloni Rathor Jacket James Long Clutch Amshii Glasses Model’s Own Genesis

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Top Kae Hana Dress Versus Shoes Miu Miu Bag Prada Socks Stylist’s Own Ring Bimba & Lola Bracelet St Erasmus Belt Granny’s Day Out

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Top Bimba & Lola Pants D&G Neckbrace KTZ

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Blazer Blugirl Shirt Joyrich Tee Lalalove Pants Roberto Cavalli Heels Miu Miu Socks Stylist’s own Ring Bimba & Lola Clutch Celine Hair Barette Granny’s Day Out

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Shirt Granny’s Day Out Top Katie Eary Shoes Jeffrey Campbell Stockings RI by Carrie

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Shirt MILS Dress Saloni Rathor Bowtie Carrie K Bag Celine Scarf Stylist’s Own Shoes Stylist’s Own Hat Vivian Sheriff

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ALL THE REAL GIRLS TEXT BY JILL T.

Every generation has had its teen icons. Growing up, I wanted to dress like Clarissa (she who Explains It All) and coveted Cher Horowitz’s funky (and computer-itemized) wardrobe in Clueless. Notably, though, the fashion industry has never seemed eager to heap praise upon teen starlets like Molly Ringwald or Lindsay Lohan the way the entertainment industry did. Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen of The Row might seem to be an exception now. Yet at fifteen, mini-moguls though they were, their red carpet style was never quite lauded.

Fast forward to the 2010s, as we witness rise of the under-16s in fashion. We have Elle Fanning featured in the A/W’11 campaign, and Hailee Steinfeld starring in Miu Miu A/W’11. In the evolving sphere of fashion blogging, we have Tavi Gevinson as a front row fixture at fashion shows. Are our models of aesthetics getting younger, or is this phenomenon speaking to something else? Specifically, that our models for aesthetics, i.e. who has a say, are beginning to transcend traditional notions of age and authority. In the cultural zeitgeist, I think fashion does something a little different from what celebrity culture does. Fashion is not just a reflection of what society valorizes in terms of standards of physical beauty (as I would argue celebrity culture largely is), but a directive of aesthetic beauty and expression. ar t i c l e

That the girls in the lens of fashion are getting younger and younger is true. However, conventions of beauty being tied to youth and the desire to be forever young are certainly not new. As such, we must ask ourselves if something else is the driving force behind this focus. Call me an idealist, but I like to think that it’s because we are moving towards a more ageless and egalitarian power dynamic in fashion. We are starting to see covetable style as not just belonging to a certain strata, equally possessed by 90-year-old Iris Apfel and 15-year-old Chloe Moretz.

A recalibration of what ‘good taste’ is, and who can have it, is a welcome development. By paying as much attention to how the Fanning sisters, Hailee Steinfeld and Chloe Moretz dress as we do to the sartorial choices of Cate Blanchett or Tilda Swinton, we are moving away from the idea that good taste can only come with age, or that it refers to a particular style synonymous with sophistication. This dictum was one that held true to me when I started getting interested in fashion at age fifteen, following the realisation that wearing board shorts everywhere when a beach was nowhere in sight was maybe a little ridiculous. Somewhere between getting decked out in tutus for regular family gatherings and then, I had forgotten the joys of dressing up.

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I was completely floored as to how to proceed, apart from the vague sense that I wanted to pay more attention to how I was dressing. Flipping through the pages of teen magazines like Seventeen, it became increasingly apparent that the blandly bubblegum aesthetic aimed at girls my age was not for me. So, I set out in search of a more suitable style bible. An unabashed book nerd, my first recourse was the bookstore, where I chanced upon Camilla Morton’s How To Walk In High Heels almost immediately. Pitched as “The Girl’s Guide to Everything” in its subtitle, it contained tips on where to buy the perfect white tee (Petit Bateau) and blue jeans (Chloe). I was convinced that the key to sophistication was to build a wardrobe of these staples, never mind that I was probably ten years under the intended audience for this manual on how to achieve Vogueette perfection. It was easy to see how I had bought into the idea that the fashion bylaws dictated that I looked like a 30-something sophisticate. Looking at how my favourite teen stars were dressing on the red carpet, all maxi gowns and complicated up-dos, they were practically indistinguishable from other celebrities twice their age. I could never see myself dressing the way they did.

I reckon the process would be rather different if I was going through the same phase of figuring out how to approach fashion today. This is due in no small part to the fact that the fashion industry has wholeheartedly embraced the sartorial forays of women who do not fit into the traditional idea of the fashion elite. When Chloe Moretz wears Proenza Schouler, she decontextualizes it from the runway and makes it her own. This takes us out of the mode of thinking that these are just little girls wearing mommy’s high heels and playing dress up. They are young women who make legitimate, interesting sartorial choices, and I’m glad more people are sitting up and taking notice. Teenagers and grown women alike find Moretz’s style fresh and appealing, while Elle Fanning’s ethereal, girlish look seems to have enthralled fans of all ages. It would have been near unthinkable to see Lindsay Lohan on a best-dressed list during her Freaky Friday days. Now, Moretz and Fanning are featured regularly in those very same columns.

It would also have helped tremendously if I had grown up in this age which has witnessed the rise of fashion blogging. Seeing blogger Tavi Gevinson draw on Twin Peaks and Harold and Maude to inform how she dresses, and her collaborations with brands from Rodarte to Wren, I might have been inspired by the fashion forays this creative young girl rather than industry contributors like Morton. If nitpickers argue that the aforementioned young Hollywood actresses are probably being styled, that Gevinson’s style is entirely her own is undisputable. Gevinson sitting next to Anna Wintour at the Band of Outsiders F/W’12 show is a perfect illustration of how fashion is no a longer top-down enterprise with magazine editors at the top. Moreover, youth and inexperience are no longer seen as disadvantages to having “good taste”.

Fashion is not just a reflection of what society valorizes in terms of standards of physical beauty, but a directive of aesthetic beauty and expression.

Gevinson, made famous by her debut as the flower child in grandma glasses and grey hair when she was fourteen, might easily be pigeonholed as an anti-industry authority. But I find it simplistic to say that any departure from fashion’s age-old hierarchy is inherently tied to subversion. Indeed, it annoys me when people assume that my ever-changing dip dyed locks or penchant for origami dresses are intended to make an unvarying statement of quirk, possibly ending with an exclamation mark. The pressure to be “quirky” and “anti-trend” is an odd one given that conformity has been our cue for so long, but Gevinson wrote articulately about how wanting to be attractive is something that she had to come to terms with, both in terms of a new aesthetic and a new sense of self-image. Standards of beauty and expression go both ways – just as we must guard against being slaves to unrealistic standards and conventions, it is not the task of the new guard of fashion to steadfastly uphold the mantle of being subversive all the time. As one who sometimes feels the need to put on mint green lipstick to counterbalance the prettiness of a floral tea dress, I am certainly guilty of this compulsion myself. Unpretty should not be the new standard once we’ve done away with mandating pretty.

Finally, I am stricken by the interesting play on agelessness that that look which made Gevinson famous presents. Gevinson was, I believe, simply dressing as she pleased and didn’t mean it as any sort of social commen-

tary, but I found it striking for quite another reason as I was writing this column. It pairs extraordinarily well with the women featured on the blog Advanced Style, which subverts every expectation of how women are supposed to dress at an advanced age. Key words like “dignified”, “knee-length” and “muted colours” coming to mind. Instead, this website features women with rainbow coloured hair, in Prada butterfly glasses, dresses in riots of colour, and head-pieces to rival Gaga’s. I want to be just like them when I grow up. But then, I kind of want to be like Hailee Steinfeld in that fantastic orange and raspberry striped Prada S/S’11 dress at the 2011 Academy Awards as well. Fabulous as the fashion elite like Morton or Plum Sykes might be, I am glad that we are now at a juncture when anyone from age 16 to age 60 can provide the inspiration for my adventures in fashion.

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Leaf Print Dress Neverblack Lace Cuffs Blak Luxe

Cardigan Starfish Skirt Pardon My French Shoes Chaos & Harmony

Bodysuit Starfish Shorts Blak Luxe Leather Collar Juliette Hogan

Photography David K. Shields Styling Chris Lorimer Hair stylist Nikki Paton-Carradine at Angels Nest using KMS & Living Nature Model Shanna Jackway @ Red 11

LANVIN

BACKSTAGE our favourite moments from the F/W 2012 shows

GUCci

RICK OWENS

PRADa

PRADa

Jean PAUL GAULTIER

Jean PAUL GAULTIER

chloE

All the real girls

From Tavi to Hailee Steinfeld, teenage girls from the obscurities of Middle America are making their mark. Think pastoral beauty, precious silhouettes and fragile innocence. Like these girls, the clothes are dynamic, taking inspiration from the classic Victorian long coats and subverting it to a youthful deliciously striped below-the-knee number such as in Rodarte. While it is seemingly decent and full of propriety, there is an unmistakably dangerous sexuality that lurks underneath.

CYBER PRINCESS

Virtual princesses landed on the runways of Peter Pilotto and Mary Katrantzou this season. They come in their protective suits, neo-sportswear and psychedelic prints. Take cue from Prada’s Neuromancer-inspired gradient hair extensions in electric colours and the vivid streaks on their eyes. Silhouettes are firm, sturdy and almost extraterrestrial. This power-wielding princess grooves to Daft Punk and Yuksek as she reigns over this New Age.

ASIAN INVASION

Revisiting the old charm of Chinoiserie, circa 1930s to coincide with the rise of the East, Fall/Winter 12 saw many designers employing traditional Asian motifs. From the obvious Chinese theme at Jason Wu to the more subtle touches of deconstructed Asian paintings at Dries van Noten, the oriental trend has never been more pronounced.

MAD HOUSE

There is method in the madness. Perhaps it’s the ripples of impact from Louis Vuitton’s collaboration with Yayoi Kusama, but it is not an illusion of the mind that designers are foregoing reason and sending full-fledged ‘Dada’ down the runway - from Vivienne Westwood’s eccentric models to unimaginable proportions at Comme Des Garcons. Many of the designs echo a morose sense of humour like in Devastee or the quirky escapism of ‘Cat In the Hat’ at Marc Jacobs. Given the current hard times, could all this madness be explained away as a form of heroic surrender?

D avid L ynch look who’s meditating text by MELANIE C

ar t i c l e

Everyone knows David Lynch as cult filmmaker.

He has turned the banal into the absurd, like inception, except more deliberate and without the distracting grace of chic wear and end-well car chases—as would be falling into dream worlds.

They necessarily comes bundled with words such as surreal, disturbing, and dark, usually literally.

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‘2012: Time for Change’ stands out rather obstrusively in his lineup. Fans might be slightly boggled to find his name linked with something so—for lack of a better term--positive. The documentary highlights the multi-dimensional crisis and calls for a “design revolution”. Lynch’s involvement in the film is alongside luminaries such as futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard, Brazilian music legend and politician Gilberto Gill, and ecochampion Sting.

Filmic eco warriors are by now not unexpected; Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth brought the line into mainstream consciousness, if not popularity, in 2006. Studded with Oscar nominations and heralding the beginnings of green consumerism, it has since spread into a rising tide calling for change in everything from the state of the earth, to food (Earthlings, 2005; Food Inc, 2008) to the economy (almost everything Michael Moore, from Fahrenheit 9/11, 2004 to Capitalism: A Love Story, 2009), to Hollywood (This Film Is Not Yet Rated, 2006) and fishing practices off Japan (The Cove, 2009). Let’s not forget the controversial ‘Zeitgeist’ in 2007, which systematically deconstructed religion, the politics behind 9/11, and the banking empire.

Humanitarianism has also become the celebrity raison d’etre for the the likes of Angelina Jolie. It gives a golden gild to the rock-style excess of Sting and Bono. Regardless of the fairy dust Hollywood enjoys deploying, the subjects that basically had once been a comic hippie concern are now the frontline of an urgent tide of rising social awareness.

Still, it is hard to imagine Lynch as part of anything trendy. Lynch’s recent projects include a music album and an art exhibition.

“Crazy Clown Time” released late last year is brooding electronic blues with his highly processed vocals, created in his home studio with the engineer Dean Hurley. He even wrote a song ‘Pinky’s Dream’ with the very cutting edge Karen O. The art show in New York featured ambiguous dreamscapes that could be pulled from his films—his first since 1989.

His last major project was the series Rabbits in 2002, which could lead the cynic to wonder if these are in fact attempts at reinvention.

However, he was making noises as early as Eraserhead with Alan Splet. And has done soundtrack work in nearly every movie he has directed. You might even know the airy makeout albums by singer Julee Cruise in the 1980s and 1990s. Lynch wrote the lyrics. Before he was a filmmaker, he was an artist.

Before ‘2012: Time for Change’, he had set up the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. All the above were diverse, but stamped with the Lynch mark similar to a Stephen King horrorific. It is slightly harder to imagine Lynch as corporate extraordinaire. But to get this, you have to understand he has been an avid meditator for over three decades.

He created the foundation in 2005 to help implement meditation programs for both at-risk students and veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

A technique that prescribes two 15- to 20-minute sessions a day of silently repeating a one-to-three syllable mantra, practitioners can access a state of what is known as transcen-

dental consciousness. John Hagelin, Ph.D., world-renowned quantum physicist (“What The Bleep Do We Know!?” and “The Secret”) and recipient of the coveted Kilby Award in physics, describes it as “a systematic means to turn the attention powerfully within, to experience and explore deeper levels of mind, quieter levels of human awareness, a state of rest for the body deeper than sleep, where deep-seated stress is dissolved, providing an effective prevention and treatment for stressrelated illness.”

Trascendental meditation first rocked Hollywood’s shores in the late 1960s. Mia Farrow, after her divorce from Frank Sinatra, had joined the the Beatles in the Maharishi’s ashram in Rishikesh, India. This was also when George Lucas began meditation, coinciding with the creation of Yoda character in Star Wars. Lynch was still a newbie director, just before his breakout hit Easerhead in 1989. His sister, Martha, persuaded him to try meditation, amidst his marital difficulties.

“I had it made. I was in the middle of my first feature film, Eraser. But there was a thing missing. There’s fear in this business. Anxiety, and doubt. All this start lifting away.”

Celebrity endorsement, and along with it the enrollment numbers, has since quietened down. The zen wave receded in the face of the economic boomtime of the shoulder-padded 80s and 90s; audiences were entranced by psychic underbelly exposed by The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), Twin Peaks (1990-1991), Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2002).

The fall of the Twin Towers in 2001 was the first jolt of the gravy train, and shaken public complacency began to notice cracks in the system. The practice of TM could not have come at a better time. It has since recaptured the public eye. Even the eternally scruffy and manically irreverent UK comic Russell Brand credits the technique for getting him sober. As does Singer Moby, “I used to think that TM was for weird old hippies,” he said. “But then I heard that David Lynch was involved, and that made me curious.”

Lynch himself takes off the religious veils, “I thought it was a fad. I thought you had to eat nuts and raisins, and I didn’t want any part of it.”

While bags chirp ‘I am not a plastic bag’, and organic becomes tasty again, such intangible lifestyle precriptions can still come across as new-age hokum. Until you realise Lynch had dreamt up his most admired films during such sessions.

“It’s like a key that opens the door to the treasury within,” he said. “Here’s an experience — poooft! — total brain coherence. It’s what’s missing from life today: unbounded intelligence, creativity, bliss, love, energy,

peace. Things like tension, anxieties, traumatic stress, sorrow, depression, hate, rage, need for revenge, fear — poooft! — all this starts to lift away. You see life getting better and better and better. Give the people that experience and — poooft. Man, it’s beautiful.”

His films in fact speak his beliefs. Time and boundaries bend, forms meld, everything done or thought becomes a part of a collective consciousness. In case of that reality then Lynch has been feeding plenty of dark mess.

While his work might make him out to be the brooding sort, but his work comes from a happy place. Suffering is a romantic idea to get girls, but it’s an enemy to creativity.”

With an earnest voice and a grey hedge of hair, and his trademark dark jacket, Lynch always returns to ideas, and ideas come only from a place of posivity. Time and again Lync holds up the mirror to the self. Lynch says, “It doesn’t help to say what it means for you. It’s up to everyone to figure out for themselves. Dreams-yearning-- what is going to drive people to unfold their full potential.”

Interestingly, highways and roads feature heavily in his films. Remember the haunting drive down Mulholland Drive? If we are what we think, and tend to do as we think, his investment in ideas fits: “Seeds, they are filled with electricity. One moment they’re not there, and the next, you see them completely… If you don’t write it down, the next day you could want to blow your brains out.”

UK newspaper The Guardian called him the world’s most important filmmaker of our era, “providing a portal into the collective subconscious”. Doesn’t that sound like a guru pointing the spiritual ways of our times?

N I C O L a sAM O R I

Ogni estasi è indecente 2011/2012 oil on copper 100 x 100 cm courtesy Ana Cristea Gallery, New York

N I C O LA sAM O R I

School of Pan 2011 oil on linen 300 x 200 cm courtesy Christian Ehrentraut Gallery, Berlin

N I C O LA sAM O R I

N I C O LA sAM O R I

Paesaggio con cani 2011 oil on linen 150 x 200 cm courtesy Christian Ehrentraut Gallery, Berlin

N I C O LA sAM O R I

Shrine 2012 oil on linen 200 x 300 cm courtesy Ana Cristea Gallery, New York

O LA sAM N IN C IOCLA S AM O ROI R I

Effusus 2011 oil on wood cm 27 x 19 courtesy Ana Cristea Gallery, New York

N I C O LA sAM O R I

School of Pan 2011 oil on linen 300 x 200 cm courtesy Christian Ehrentraut Gallery, Berlin

N I C O LA sAM O R I

Origine dell’Innesto 2010 oil on linen 200 x 150 cm

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