Vogue’s Oil Spill Fashion Spread
The centerpiece of this month’s Vogue Italia is a 24-page fashion spread dedicated to the Gulf oil spill — that is, featuring models mimicking dying, oil-covered, beached animals. Nice as it is to see the fashion world engaging in real issues, spending thousands of dollars on a spread to sell luxury items to the rich may not be the most sensitive way of doing so. Via Refinery29:
There’s no denying that these images from the oil spill editorial in Vogue Italia’s August 2010 issue are beautiful. The 24 pages of Kristen McMenamy, shot by Steven Meisel, are realistic interpretations of images of injured, oiled animals that have inundated the news media since the Deepwater Horizon explosion in April. As beautiful and provocative as they are, we can’t help but feel uneasy. Creating beauty and glamour out of tragedy seems quite fucked up to us, not to mention wasteful and hypocritical, seeing as…
Douglas Coupland’s Generation X Clothing Line
Douglas Coupland has written dozens of books, but will probably always be best known for his classic novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. He’s come so far back into the mainstream now that he’s designed a clothing line for Roots, the Canadian company that designed those awful berets for the USA Winter Olympic team a few years back. They don’t have a site yet but this page has a promo video, and this is the press release:
TORONTO, June 14 – Clothing retailer Roots is launching a collaboration with prominent writer & visual artist Douglas Coupland on a limited-edition clothing and accessory collection debuting July 8th and available for sale in the United States at www.roots.com/douglascoupland.
The ROOTS X DOUGLAS COUPLAND collection includes apparel for women/men/children, accessories, leather goods, design items, furniture and art. This is the first time Douglas Coupland has designed fashion wearables. He is best known as the…
Michael Jordan’s Hitler ‘Stache Raising A Fuhrer (Video)
David Griner writes on AdFreak:
That new Michael Jordan campaign for Hanes, really does have people buzzing, though it’s not Jordan’s “lie-flat collar” that they’re fixated on. Viewers instead seem to be stupefied by his attempt to bring back the “Hitler mustache,” which has pretty soundly been out of fashion since, you know, Hitler.
Technically called a “toothbrush mustache,” this facial styling was actually quite popular in the 1920s, and still makes the occasional appearance on the faces of foul-tempered tyrants like Robert Mugabe and J. Jonah Jameson. Maybe Jordan feels he simply transcends the clear cultural need to avoid looking like history’s most vile psychopath. Maybe he’s on a quest to reclaim a symbolic styling of the industrial working class, and a mediocre underwear ad seemed like the right forum.
Or maybe the copywriters simply loved the irony of mocking some poor guy’s “bacon neck” while the star of the ad blatantly sports a damn Hitler ’stache.
